Dave thinks:
>This discussion is a load of shit.
Not really, it's part of the struggle for the leadership of the working
class, which at the moment is in the hands of the Social-Democrats and is
being mainly contended for by equally worthless ex-Stalinists, sceptical
New Lefters (often one and the same) or Greens (worthless from the point of
view of will to actually carry out a revolutionary transformation of the
property relations in society).
>Bolsheviks are not sectarian because they stand with the class in
>all of its struggles.
Need to qualify this: true, revolutionary Bolsheviks -- there's a lot of
fakes around, causing problems until a clear and trustworthy international
leadership crystallizes. This will come by interaction between groups and
people who come from very different organizational backgrounds.
>SDs are sectarian because they substitute
>themselves for the proletariat, betray it, and generally shit on it as
>unable, incapable, unprepared etc for the holy state of SD
>enlightenment.
Bureaucratic, moralizing and intolerant are words that spring to mind to
describe the disorganizing activities of the Social-Democrats. And the
bureaucrats (of whatever school) can always be told by the vitriol they
spray on the working class for being "unable, incapable and unprepared".
>The most recent name for this enlightenment
>seems to be 'market socialism' - well actually that has been
>overtaken by 'radical democracy'.
My favourite is the "New Realism" of the British Labour Movement.
Marvellous phrases they think up to cover their capitulation to capitalist
exploitation. You see, they never ever consider the capitalist system as
one based on exploitation. It's always a question of some unusual and
aberrant minor injustice here or there that can be remedied by a little
good will and some minor reform -- or where something real takes place,
like the introduction of the welfare state or the nationalization of
industries like steel, electricity, coal or the railways, it's always as a
survival substitute for real revolution and always done in such a way as to
be of more use to the bourgeoisie than the working class -- and it's always
done in such a way as to ensure it can be undone again any time the
bourgeoisie thinks it can get away with it.
>SDs are separated from Bolsheviks by method, theory and the
>barricade.
True. Look at the history of 1917 and the huge gap that opened up between
the Mensheviks (SDs) and the Bolsheviks (revolutionary Marxists). Many,
perhaps most, Mensheviks (certainly of the leaders) ended up fighting
against the transfer of property to the working class and out of the hands
of the bourgeoisie.
>SDs and Bolshelviks can bloc in defence of workers
>democratic rights, but as soon as a pre-revolutionary situation
>emerges, SDs sellout, witness Luxemburg and Liebknecht.
So the struggle for the leadership of the mass working class is central,
and therefore also the discussion with the views that hold sway in the
working class by virtue of being the views of its leadership.
I don't think Rob, for instance, is really very aware of the similarities
between some of his own principles and the principles of the leaders he
understands to be betraying the historical needs of the class.
Even if these views are petty-bourgeois or even just plain bourgeois, they
are being put forward in the class and in parties of the class, and arguing
against them is historically necessary. It's not the same as tackling the
*same* arguments if they're put forward by pure bourgeois political forces.
Marx dealt with such arguments in detail in inner-party discussions (Value,
Price and Profit, or Critique of the Gotha Programme) not because they were
valid or proletarian, but because even though they were bourgeois in origin
they had taken root in the consciousness of the working class.
>Bolsheviks can claim responsibility for the only socialist revolution
>in history.
Needs qualifying -- "consciously revolutionary Marxist" revolution in
history. In my view there's no way we can deny the "socialist" label to the
Chinese, Yugoslav, Vietnamese or even Cuban revolutions, given that they
actually took power (except in Cuba) through a working-class (even though
degenerate) leadership heading a mass popular army and proceeded to
expropriate the bourgeoisie.
>SDs can claim responsiblity for stopping many more.
So can the Stalinists -- all the above revolutions happened despite hostile
(and often downright suicidal) advice and punitive actions from Moscow
trying to stop them. The betrayal of the Stalinists is in fact greater on
this front -- just look at the fate of France, Italy and Greece at the end
of the war! And recently we've had the debacles of Iran, Nicaragua and
South Africa, all following a mixture of Stalinist and petty-bourgeois
strategies.
>Cut the shit and get down to some serious politics.
Serious politics requires contact with the shit -- that's part of the price
to be paid.
When Rob writes:
>> And the world's workers (well, the
>> ones I know about - the 'western' working class) do not, as a whole, aspire
>> to communist revolution just now, feel positively yoked to the system in
>> train, and are split every which way but loose. Times can change quickly,
>> but they haven't, in this respect, for a very long time.
he's not arming himself against the shit, though. Cos what he writes here
is largely irrelevant. The subjective consciousness of the working class is
not what determines a scientific view of how society works or what needs to
be changed to make it better. Hiding behind distorted mass consciousness is
apologizing for the shit.
But obviously to make serious progress in politics, these distorted
elements of working-class consciousness have to be taken into account -- as
is made very clear in the outline of the transitional method in the
Transitional Programme. The transitional method is the interface between
the masses with their distorted consciousness (instilled in them by the
miseducation system and their treacherous mass leaders, naturally) and the
objective scientific requirements of a real socialist revolution.
>> And at such a historical moment, there's nothing necessarily mutually
>> exclusive about the positions of (genuine) socdems and a plethora of other
>> leftish positions.
The thing is what actions are agreed on, not what the elements of a front
each think in their own group. It's also a question of how the mobilization
and struggle for these actions can develop a less distorted consciousness
of the political needs of the class. The positions themselves can in fact
be mutually exclusive if seen in an abstract fashion, but if the people who
support them fight together for certain goals, then the possibility of
future and more general joint action becomes much more real.
>> The tasks at hand are about the defence of workers,
>> finding the public ear, and constructing lines of alliance and cohesion
>> across borders and between tendencies. And I reckon I'm not Robinson
>> Crusoe in thinking that.
Here I agree with Dave's criticism. What Rob writes about is the way it
will appear at first in the struggle. The problem is to develop the
struggle beyond this for political solutions that will be able to solve the
deepest problems of the working class, in other words that will lead to the
abolition of wage-slavery. Hence the need for a transitional method, taking
the situation as is with the minimum defensive and collaborational
positions Rob mentions (as if they were the only ones) and developing
consciousness in the mobilizations so that more radical and more
confrontational steps can be taken that challenge the root problem of
bourgeois control of society.
Cheers,
Hugh
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