Socialist Alliance

Programme and the misreading of history

Unfortunately, but revealingly, the Socialist Workers Party failed to send a representative to the first meeting of the Socialist Alliance's programme commission. While the CPGB, Workers Power, the Revolutionary Democratic Group and the International Socialist Group were all eager to present their ideas, the SWP still exhibits a pronounced aversion to serious discussions about programme.

This weakness - and it is a profound one - has its origins in the personality of Tony Cliff. Until his death in April 2000 the comrade exercised an overarching influence on the SWP's theory and practice. Evidently even as a disembodied ghost he continues to hover over events and exert a material hold.

For Cliff, the fact that the SWP - and before it the International Socialists and the Socialist Review Group - had no programme was a positive advantage. Absence of programme was perceived to serve the interests of 'party' building. The final aim is nothing; the 'party' everything. Unencumbered by an elaborated longterm strategic roadmap and a democratically agreed set of binding principles, the SWP leadership could perform the most sudden about-turns. Practice has been about swimming with what was perceived as the most fertile tide.

Without a programme and a democratic internal life the rank and file cannot judge or control the leadership. Nor can it be held to account. Not surprisingly then, since the SWP came into existence as a trend its history has been one of zigzags - adopting a neutral stance during the Korean War; giving fulsome backing to the NLF in Vietnam; providing an alibi for the regime of Slobodan Milosevic over Kosova; turning to 'electoralism' after decades of automatically leaving parliament to Labour; preaching against the popular fronts of the 1930s and attempting to cement one in the Anti-Nazi League during the 1970s; mocking the fight for a general strike in the 1984-85 miners' Great Strike, while demanding that a craven TUC 'get off its knees' and call 'the' general strike in 1992, etc.

A current example of this get-rich-quick 'method' is the courting of green MEPs, aligning with Jubilee 2000 charity-mongers and cheerleading the antics of anarchists in the anti-capitalist movement. Virtually any line can be adopted as long as it goes to build the 'party' - usually measured arithmetically in crude membership figures.

1. Programming Bolshevism

Needless to say, such an approach is contrary to the spirit and example of the Bolsheviks which Cliff and his successors claim as their model for the SWP - at least since the turn from 'Luxemburgism' in the late 1960s. Lenin's party, it should be emphasised, united around and fought on the basis of a minimum-maximum programme first presented to the 2^nd Congress back in 1903 (the minimum revolutionary programme sets out the aims and demands to be fought for under existing socio-economic conditions and provides a bridge towards the maximum programme, which concerns socialism and the transition to the higher stage of communism).

It is surely no exaggeration to say that without the revolutionary programme there would have been no revolutionary party or successful revolutionary movement in Russia. Tactical flexibility is, of course, essential for any serious working class party or organisation. The Bolsheviks indeed showed a commendable ability to manoeuvre. Underground committee work gave way to mass agitation, street combat to a semi-legal press and parliamentary activity, etc.

Even when it comes to programmatic strategy and principles there must be room to question and change in the light of new opportunities. This the Bolsheviks did - for example over the land question in 1917, when they 'stole' the agrarian programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries. There was also modification of the programme due to new circumstances: e.g., the fall of tsarism and dual power in 1917. But such changes only came about after serious, often exhaustive, debate and a democratic vote.

The programme was considered of cardinal importance by the Bolsheviks. That is why attempts to compromise or water it down met with the fiercest hostility. Lenin savaged legal Marxists, anti-theory strikists or economists, and leftist boycottists alike in countless open polemics.

Around the programme the Bolsheviks were able to organise the workers not merely in defence of their own economic terms and conditions, but as the hegemon or vanguard of the democratic revolution. The tiny working class was empowered by the scientific rigour and scope of the programme - it summed up the Marxist analysis of Russia, the attitude of the workers to the state and the various classes, put Russia's revolution in the context of the world revolution and outlined the practice that flowed from it. As a result the workers came to master, or take a lead, in all political questions - national self-determination, fighting anti-semitism, war and peace, women's equality, etc - and crucially were able to put themselves at the head of the broad peasant masses in the fight to overthrow tsarism.

2. Economism

The SWP's 'Action programme' would seem to represent a break with the past. After first being published in September 1998 it was not only reproduced as a glossy brochure, but there was an effort to get labour movement bodies to adopt it as their own and finance propaganda around it. Sad to say, what we actually had was another zigzag, not a conversion to Bolshevism.

As we will show next week, the 'Action programme' is based on a fundamentally incorrect analysis of the period and, for all the revolutionary verbiage employed to sell it, the contents amount to little more than a repackaging of economism - a widely misused term which must be properly defined.

Naturally economists define economism in a particularly jejune fashion. That way, in their own minds at least, they have to be found completely innocent of the ugly charge. Hence the plaintive cry: 'I can't understand why you in the CPGB call us economists.' If we have heard it once, we have heard it a thousand times.

Here, below, are four specially selected, but representative, examples of economism; it is a many-headed Hydra. Let us begin with Cliff's decoy of a definition: "Socialists should limit their agitation to purely economic issues, first to the industrial plant, then to inter-plant demands, and so on. Secondly, from the narrow economic agitation the workers would learn, through experience of the struggle itself, the need for politics, without the need for socialists to carry out agitation on the general political and social issues facing the Russian people as a whole" (T Cliff Lenin Vol. 1, London 1975, p59).

Next an 'official communist' dictionary definition: "Its proponents wanted to limit the tasks of the working class movement to economic struggle (improving labour conditions, higher wages, etc). They held that political struggle should be waged by the liberal bourgeoisie alone" (I Frolov [ed.] Dictionary of philosophy Moscow 1984, p118).

The ISG's Bob Jenkins can speak as the mouthpiece of orthodox Trotskyism: economism is "orientating to daily trade union struggles" and this "leads them to underestimate the important new political issues and movements unless they are to be found in the unions" (Socialist Outlook January 2001).

Finally we turn to the AWL's Pete Radcliff, for a definition from unorthodox Trotskyism: "Economism was the term Lenin used to describe the politics and approach of revolutionaries who exclude themselves from the political struggle ... and merely concentrated on trade union agitation" (Weekly Worker January 11 2001).

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Even against the "old economism" of 1894-1902 Lenin fielded the term in the "broad sense" (VI Lenin CW Vol. 5, Moscow 1977, p317). The principal feature of economism is lagging behind the spontaneous movement and a general tendency to downplay the centrality of consistent and extreme democracy. That is why in 1916 Lenin attacked those Bolsheviks who, citing decadent capitalism's inability to grant meaningful reforms, dismissed the demand for national self-determination. He branded this trend "imperialist economism" (VI Lenin CW Vol. 23, Moscow 1977, p13).

Countless other manifestations of economism could be cited - e.g., atheist economism which dismisses the need to combat religious superstition, or Trotskyite economism which equates the former USSR with some kind of a workers' state due to property forms. Be that as it may, economism remains economism.

Hence not all economists concentrate, or limit, their agitation to trade union or workerist perspectives. E.g., in banal rightist form: leave issues like Scottish and Welsh devolution to Blair, we will fight for higher pay and build opposition to the anti-trade union laws. E.g., in leftist form: forget the struggle for a republic within capitalism - "Instead of a political revolution, a general strike for socialist revolution" (VI Lenin CW Vol. 23, Moscow 1977, p13).

Besides this particular, narrow, form, many economists willingly, even enthusiastically follow all manner of existing causes or demands - petty bourgeois greenism, feminism and black separatism, CND pacifism, Scottish nationalism, auto-Labourism, etc. So economists do not, by any means, shun politics. Rather economism veers away from the Marxist conception of politics. Crucially economism eschews taking the lead on democratic questions and uniting all democratic demands into a single working class-led assault on the existing state.

Take the ISG's Dave Packer. With the support of the SWP he successfully opposed the Socialist Alliance conducting a "militant" campaign against the monarchy - as proposed by the CPGB and the London Socialist Alliance. Perfectly in line with that craven desire to tone down and restrict the political scope of the Socialist Alliance, the same organisation wants us to trail behind George Monbiot. He recently made the deep green call "for a complete ban on the use of fossil fuels in five years time" (Socialist Outlook January 2001). Our ISG ally supports this daft idea ... but refuses to put a time limit on implementation.

We find the same essential approach in the SWP's 'Action programme'. Instead of a fully rounded and comprehensive alternative to Blair's constitutional revolution from above - i.e., a revolutionary minimum, or immediate, political programme from below - the SWP leadership concentrates entirely on minimal questions of pay, hours and union recognition. The workers are to be left as an economic class of slaves, not elevated to a political class of self-activating revolutionaries.

When it does make an appearance in the 'Action programme', politics is entirely within the frame of militant trade unionism. Reducing the arms bill, curbing financial speculations, etc. Leave aside the elementary principle of 'not a penny, not a person' for the capitalist military machine, this one-sided approach is completely inadequate. How our rulers rule through the UK's constitutional monarchy system is entirely absent. No mention of crucial political questions like abolishing the UK monarchy system and the second chamber, or fighting for an annual parliament and recallability of MPs, or the fight for self-determination for Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In short, no struggle for a "more generous democracy" under capitalism which would facilitate the organisation of the workers as a class, thereby enabling it to take command of all democratic questions and issues.

The SWP leadership effectively leaves such matters to Blair. In other words the SWP remains programme-less. More accurately it has an unofficial, or unconscious, minimalist programme - another name for which is economism or opportunism.

This, it should be stressed, is no internal matter that concerns the SWP alone. At the moment the SWP is the largest all-Britain left organisation. More to the point, it is the dominating force in the Socialist Alliance, and is likely to use its majority to 'arm' us with something like its 'Action programme' for the forthcoming general election and the foreseeable period beyond.

3. Cliff on Lenin's programme

The SWP's economism and associated anti-programmism has, I believe, two main theoretical sources.

The first lies in Cliff's unconventional but relatively perceptive reading of Trotsky's Transitional programme in the light of developments following World War II. Whereas orthodox Trotskyites such as Ernest Mandel (comrade E Germain) dogmatically refused to acknowledge an unprecedented economic boom and awaited the predicted imminent slump, Cliff to his credit bravely made the attempt to come to terms with reality (e.g., see the September 1947 essay, 'All that glitters is not gold', in T Cliff Neither Washington nor Moscow London 1982, pp24-39). The other source of Cliff's economism and anti-programmism is his conventional but misplaced Trotskyite rejection of pre-1917 Bolshevism and its minimum-maximum programme.

Let us discuss these two sources, beginning logically, not least in terms of chronology, with Cliff on the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution. We find his ideas on this subject most fully articulated in the first two of his four-volume study of Lenin. And, as can be seen in Chris Bambery's recent article on Leninism, this work remains the paradigm for the current leader of the SWP as the SWP (see Socialist Review January 2001).

Cliff quite correctly characterised the attitude of the Mensheviks as tailist. According to their evolutionist schema the overthrow of tsarism had to be followed by the class rule, with a western-style parliamentary government, of the bourgeoisie. Tsarism was viewed as an antiquated and semi-feudal obstruction on the linear ladder of progress. Russia was certainly not ripe for socialism - socialism being the first stage of communism. Before socialism and working class power could arrive on the historical stage the bourgeoisie would have to carry through its preordained tasks.

The historical job of the bourgeoisie was to develop capitalist production under conditions of bourgeois democracy - the bourgeoisie and democracy were wrongly but invariably seen as inseparable. Alongside capitalist relations of production and reproduction, a mass working class inexorably rises. Eventually this class would eclipse and then replace the peasantry in population terms. Only then was socialism feasible. If the forthcoming revolution against tsarism was bourgeois, reasoned the Mensheviks in a conference resolution of April-May 1905, then the working class and its party "must not aim at seizing or sharing power in the provisional government, but must remain the party of the extreme revolutionary opposition" (quoted in T Cliff Lenin Vol. 1, London 1975, p197).

So, for mainstream Menshevik thinking, the role of the working class was at most to critically push the reluctant bourgeois parties forward into their predetermined position as leaders of the revolution. Taking power, or participating as coalition partners in a revolutionary government, had to be avoided. Why? Because if the working class party seized power it would not be able to satisfy the needs of the masses; immediately establishing socialism was an illusion entertained only by non-Marxists such as the Socialist Revolutionaries. Like Pol Pot, their socialism was peasant-based. Moreover if the working class aggressively pursued its own short-term interests or succumbed to the temptation of power, this would lead the bourgeoisie to "recoil from the revolution and diminish its sweep" (quoted in ibid.).

Lenin held to a similar evolutionary schema to that which informed the Mensheviks. However as a revolutionary Lenin never let a bad theory get in the way of making revolution. His theory was rich and dialectical and therefore soared above the parched categories insisted upon by the Menshevik wing of the party. Russia might not have been ready for socialism, if by that one means leaving behind commodity production while retaining what Marx called "bourgeois right" - i.e., equal pay for equal work, as opposed to the higher communist principle of 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need'. The existing social and economic material limits explain why Lenin and the Bolsheviks described the coming revolution as bourgeois.

Against the Mensheviks, Lenin insisted that to make such a revolution one had to aim to take power. To fulfil the party's minimum programme - overthrowing the tsarist monarchy, establishing a democratic republic, arming the people, separation of church and state, full democratic liberty, decisive economic reforms such as an eight-hour day, etc - it was necessary to establish a revolutionary government which embodied the democratic rule of the mass of the population. Lenin summed this up in the following famous algebraic formulation: the democratic dictatorship (i.e., in Marxist terms, rule) of the proletariat and peasantry.

Such a regime would not bring full liberation for the working class. Economically Russia would develop as a capitalist country - albeit one under the armed rule of the working class and peasant masses. Indeed the Bolsheviks envisaged a stage of controlled development of capitalist production and economic relations. Without that the working class could not grow in numbers, organisation and consciousness. Lenin argued that this last named subjective factor was bound up with objective conditions.

The Bolsheviks knew that the class balance of a revolutionary government of the proletariat and peasantry could not be determined in advance. The struggle itself would decide. Needless to say, the Bolsheviks planned in their minimum programme and fought in practice for working class leadership. In other words, a workers' state supported by the peasant majority. Something that relied not primarily on forces internal to Russia' but on sparking the external socialist revolution in the west. Without that conflagration, a working class-led regime in Russia was bound to be short-lived.

The bourgeoisie was both cowardly and counterrevolutionary. The bourgeois parties wanted a compromise deal with tsarism, not its overthrow through a people's revolution. Russia had no Cromwell or Milton, no Washington or Jefferson, no Marat, St Just or Robespierre.

The only force capable of gaining a decisive victory over tsarism, overcoming bourgeois counterrevolution and ensuring the full sweep of the revolution was the proletariat in alliance with the peasant mass. Russia, it hardly needs saying, was overwhelmingly rural. Naturally the proletarian party laid great stress on its agrarian programme. Landlord power would be smashed and land nationalised and democratically distributed to the peasants without any redemption payments. This was not a socialist measure for Lenin. It would, though, help clear away the Asiatic features of traditional Russian society and allow capitalist relations to develop along an "American path".

How long was this stage - of working class rule combined with controlled capitalist development - to last? According to Cliff, up to 1917 Lenin "anticipated that a whole period would elapse between the coming bourgeois revolution and the proletarian socialist revolution" (T Cliff Lenin Vol. 1, London 1975, p200).

Here in Cliff we have a devious formulation. After all, how long is "a whole period"? It also leaves unanswered what Cliff means by socialism and whether the October Revolution of 1917 actually ushered in not a working class-led state, but socialist relations of production and exchange. I have argued that the post-October 1917 regime was a proletarian-peasant alliance - albeit with bureaucratic deformations and a Communist Party substituting for the active role of proletariat - till the 1928 counterrevolution within the revolution. The idea that the USSR was socialist represented a Stalinite conceit that was still to come. Only in the mid-1930s did Stalin announce that the Soviet Union had fully completed the transition to socialism.

4. Zero programming

Cliff cynically sets Lenin up as an advocate of the "theory of stages" - by definition a cardinal sin for any self-respecting Trotskyite. First stage, the anti-tsarist revolution. Though it could not be led by the bourgeoisie, it could not go beyond bourgeois norms. A democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would, for a "whole period", witness and encourage capitalist development, of course under democratic conditions. Only after such a "whole period" could the working class think about putting forward its own class agenda and preparing for the second, socialist, revolution.

Actually, as we have illustrated, the real theory of artificial stages in Russia was advocated by the Mensheviks. Their analysis flowed from vulgar evolutionism and was thus very superficial.

The long and the short of it was that, in the event that a popular revolution proved successful in Russia, the proletariat would put the bourgeois in power. Obeying the 'laws of history', it would then patiently wait in the wings, as a "party of extreme opposition", until capitalism had been fully developed and the conditions created for socialism. For Mensheviks then, there would have to be two revolutions in Russia. One bourgeois, with a bourgeois state. The other, coming a long time after, would be socialist, with a socialist state. The two are separated by a definite historical stage, or a "whole period", and crucially by distinct and antagonistically opposed regimes.

Yet, as we have seen, Lenin explicitly rejected this mechanical schema. Lenin considered the bourgeoisie in Russia counterrevolutionary. As a class it could not even begin the 'bourgeois revolution'. The workers would have to take the initiative in overthrowing tsarism at the "head of the whole people, and particularly the peasantry". The main underlying political slogans of the Bolsheviks were 'abolish the monarchy' and 'for a democratic republic'.

If their popular uprising proved successful - and remained under proletarian hegemony - the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would not meekly make way for the bourgeoisie. Yes, capitalism would be "strengthened": i.e., allowed to develop. But there would be strict limitations. Not only an eight-hour day, full trade union rights and complete political liberty, but an "armed proletariat" in possession of state power. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would wage a "relentless struggle against all counterrevolutionary attempts", not least from the bourgeoisie.

Such a hybrid regime could not survive in isolation. It would, and must, act to "rouse" the European socialist revolution. The proletariat of socialist Europe would in turn help Russia move to socialism (which requires definite material conditions in terms of the development of the productive forces). Inevitably there would, with the course of economic progress, be a differentiation between the proletariat and the peasantry. But not necessarily a specifically socialist revolution: i.e., the violent overthrow of the state in Russia.

Put another way, there would not be a democratic, or bourgeois, stage and then a socialist stage at the level of regime. Democratic and socialist tasks are distinct and premised on different material, social and political conditions. But particular elements interweave.

The revolution could, given the right internal and external conditions, proceed uninterruptedly from democratic to socialist tasks through the proletariat fighting not only from below, but from above: i.e., from the salient of state power. The revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry could thereby peacefully grow over into the dictatorship of the proletariat, assuming internal proletarian hegemony and external proletarian aid from a socialist Europe. Here is Lenin's theory as elaborated in his 1905 pamphlet Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution (see VI Lenin CW Vol. 9, Moscow 1977, pp15-130).

So, in truth, Lenin employed entirely elastic formulations concerning the "whole period" of capitalist development under the democratic rule of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin's "whole period", spoken of by the ventriloquist Cliff, could therefore theoretically be reduced to zero in terms of time.

In other words, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had a programme of permanent revolution of the sort Marx and Engels developed in Germany during and after the great revolutionary wave of 1848. So why does Cliff mischievously present Lenin's theory as no more than a variation on a Menshevik schema?

In our next article we shall begin with an examination of the supposed differences between Lenin and Trotsky prior to 1917, see how the Bolshevik programme withstood the test of two revolutions and explain why, as a school of thought, Trotskyism - Cliff included - degenerates Leninism and espouses economism. Of necessity that means a critique of Trotsky's Transitional programme and of the SWP's "return to Trotsky" in September 1988.