I can't say for sure to what extent the UK Weekly Worker and its background group CPGB(PCC) have been influencing this debate, but at least several people around Cosmonaut Magazine have been influenced by CPGB's Mike Macnair's 2008 book 'Revolutionary Strategy', which argues for a Kautskyist "strategy of patience" against what he sees as rightist and leftist shortcuts, i.e. making coalitions with liberal bourgeois parties on the one hand, and storming into power by means of a revolutionary uprising (mass strike etc.), on the other. https://archive.org/details/revolutionary-strategy/page/n1/mode/2up
Cosmonaut even made an audiobook version of the book: https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/09/audio-book-of-mike-macnairs-revolutionary-strategy/ The starting point: "To put the matter bluntly. Once the gamble on the European revolution had failed by 1921, the outcome which actually materialised - the bureaucratic dictatorship, itself irreversibly on the road back to capitalism, and standing as a road-block against the working class taking power in the central capitalist countries - was by a long way the most probable outcome of the Bolsheviks’ decision to attempt to hold on to political power. "Once we recognise that this is true, we can no longer treat the strategy of Bolshevism, *as it was laid out in the documents of the early Comintern*, as presumptively true; nor can we treat the several arguments made against the Bolsheviks’ course of action by Kautsky, Martov, and Luxemburg (among others) as presumptively false.9 I stress *presumptively*. In relation to each and every element of Bolshevik strategy there may be independent reasons to accept it; in relation to each and every argument of Kautsky, etc, there may be independent reasons to reject it. But the ‘victory of the Russian revolution’ on its own, or the course of the revolution after late 1917- early 1918, can no longer be taken as evidence for Bolshevik strategy as a package. What it led to was not a strategic gain for the world working class, but a 60-year impasse of the global workers’ movement and the severe weakness of this movement at the present date." (p. 14) [...] The alternatives: "[T]he core of the ‘problem of strategy’ began to be addressed in the debates [in the II International] between the right wing of the movement, the Kautskyan centre, and the leftist advocates of a ‘strategy of the general strike’. [...] "The underlying common idea of the right wing of the movement was that the practical task of the movement was to fight for reforms in the interests of the working class. In order to win these reforms, it was necessary to make coalitions with other tendencies which were willing to ally with the workers’ movement. And in order to make coalitions, it was necessary in the first place to be willing to take governmental office: it was by creating a coalition government that the possibility really arose of legislating in the interests of the working class, as well as of administrative measures (creating social security systems, etc). "Secondly, it was necessary to be willing to make substantial political compromises. [...] The largest compromise - but, from the point of view of the right, the smallest - would be for the workers’ party to abandon its illusory and futile revolutionism" (p. 39) [...] "The proposal of the left was that the International could take the political initiative by extending the use of the strike weapon in support of the demands of the minimum programme. As the working class was increasingly able to win victories by this weapon, its confidence and political self-assertiveness would grow, culminating (perhaps) in a general strike which challenged for power - either demanding the transfer of political power to the working class or (in the most Bakuninist form) immediately beginning the creation of the new society out of the free cooperation begun in the strike movement. [...] The negative claim was that the method of electoral struggle and coalitions - or even the effort to build permanent mass workers’ organisations, as opposed to ad hoc organisations of mass struggle like strike committees - necessarily led to corruption of the workers’ representatives and organisations and the evolution of these organisations into mere forms of capitalist control of the working class. The positive claim was that the method of the strike struggle could be extended and generalised." (p. 44-45) [...] "It is certainly true of the policy of reform through coalition governments [...] On the experience of the 20th century, it appears to be *also* true of the ‘Leninist party’, which claimed to escape it. [...] The trouble is that if the left’s negative claim is taken seriously to [be] simply true, it is self-defeating. If any effort to organise outside strikes leads to corruption, nothing can be done until the masses move into a mass strike wave, because to organise in any other situation would imply the struggle for reforms, including electoral activity, coalitions, and organisational forms which turn out to be corrupt. [...] What I have just said is, in fact, no novelty. It is the substance of Marx and Engels’ objection to the Bakuninists’ general strike strategy, expressed (among other places) in Engels’ *The Bakuninists at work* (1873)." [...] "Let us imagine for a moment a general strike which is both truly general (everyone who works for a wage withdraws their labour) and indefinite, to continue until certain demands are met, happening in a fully capitalist country like Britain. [...] It should at once be apparent that this cannot continue for more than a few days. If the result is not to be general catastrophe, the workers need not simply to withdraw their labour, but to organise positively to take over the capitalists’ facilities and run them in the interests of the working class. [...] In other words, it poses the question of political power. "Now, of course, what the advocates of the mass strike strategy were calling for was not such a truly all-out indefinite general strike called by the political party. The reality of mass strike movements is something a great deal more messy [...] But a movement of this sort still poses the question of political power, and for exactly the same reasons. A mass strike wave disrupts normal supply chains. [...] if the workers’ movement does not offer an alternative form of authority - alternative means of decision-making which are capable of running the economy - the existing social structures of authority are necessarily reaffirmed. [...] "Lenin in 1917 believed that the Russian working class had found in the soviets - workers’ councils - the solution to the strategic problem of authority posed by the mass strike movement. [...] In fact, [...] as soon as the Bolsheviks had taken power, they were forced to move from a militia to a regular army, and with it came logistics and the need for a state bureaucracy. The soviets and militia could not perform the core social function of the state, defending the society against external attack. The problem of authority over the state bureaucracy was unsolved. Lenin and the Bolsheviks fell back on the forms of authority in their party and, as these proved a problem in the civil war, almost unthinkingly militarised their party and created a corrupt bureaucratic regime. "But ‘All power to the soviets’ was also illusory in another sense. Even before they withered away into mere fronts for the Russian Communist Party, the soviets did not function like parliaments or governments - or even the Paris Commune - in continuous session. They met discontinuously, with executive committees managing their affairs [...] It was Sovnarkom, the government formed by the Bolsheviks and initially including some of their allies, and its ability to reach out through the Bolshevik Party as a national organisation, which ‘solved’ the crisis of authority affecting Russia in 1917. (p. 45-49) [...] "The centre tendency did not, of course, identify itself as such. It self-identified as the continuators and defenders of ‘orthodox Marxism’ against ‘anarchists’ (to its left, but not in the centre’s view) and ‘revisionists’ to its right. [...] For the centre tendency, the strength of the proletariat and its revolutionary capacity flows, not from the employed workers’ power to withdraw their labour, but from the power of the proletariat as a class to *organise*. It is organisation that makes the difference between a spontaneous expression of rage and rebellion, like a riot, and a strike as a definite action for definite and potentially winnable goals. [...] "The second central feature of the strategic understandings of the centre tendency was that the socialist revolution is necessarily the act of the majority. [...] The centre tendency drew two conclusions from this understanding - against the left, and against the right. The first was rejection of the mass strike strategy. On this issue, the centre presented the anarcho-syndicalists and the left with a version of Morton’s Fork. The first limb of the fork was that a true general strike would depend on the workers’ party having majority support if it was to win. But if the workers’ party already had majority support, where was the need for the general strike? [...] The second limb of the fork was that the strategy of the working class coming to power through a strike wave presupposed that the workers’ party had not won a majority. In these circumstances, for the workers’ party to reach for power would be a matter of ‘conning the working class into taking power’. [...] "The argument against the right was also an argument against minority action - but minority action of a different kind. The right argued that the workers’ party, while still a minority, should be willing to enter coalition governments with middle class parties in order to win reforms. The centre argued that this policy was illusory, primarily because the interests of the middle classes and those of the proletariat were opposed. [...] "The centre’s strategic line was, then, a strategy of patience as opposed to the two forms of impatience; those of the right’s coalition policy and the left’s mass strike strategy. [...] This strategic line can be summed up as follows. Until we have won a majority (identifiable by our votes in election results) the workers’ party will remain in opposition and not in government. While in opposition we will, of course, make every effort to win partial gains through strikes, single issue campaigns, etc, including partial agreements with other parties not amounting to government coalitions, and not involving the workers’ party expressing confidence in these parties. "When we have a majority, we will form a government and implement the whole minimum programme; if necessary, the possession of a majority will give us legitimacy to coerce the capitalist/ pro-capitalist and petty bourgeois minority. Implementing the whole minimum programme will prevent the state in the future serving as an instrument of the capitalist class and allow the class struggle to progress on terrain more favourable to the working class." (p. 52-59) JL On Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 10:11:41PM -0700, Marv Gandall wrote: > In recent years, a new tendency has emerged which, looking back at > Soviet history, agrees with Karl Kautsky that the state established by > the Bolsheviks had little in common with what Marx and Engels and the > classical Marxist view of a proletarian democracy which even Lenin > himself had earlier expressed in his State and Revolution. The [...] > emerged from the Corbyn movement and is sympathetic to the views of > Lars Lih and Eric Blanc. [...] > The recent debate that has broken out over the legacy of Karl Kautsky > signals a very welcome return to fundamental questions of socialist > strategy today – part of a wider reassessment of classic arguments on > matters of reform and revolution that have acquired a new currency and > sense of relevance in the context of the resurgence of left wing > politics especially in Britain and the US. > > As so often, this debate really shakes down into a confrontation > between those arguing for a (pro-Kautsky) strategic orientation that > seeks to combine electoral and parliamentary activity on the one hand, > with extra-parliamentary mobilisation on the other, versus a > (pro-Lenin) strategy that hinges on the need for the insurrectionary > overthrow of the existing parliamentary state and to place all power > into the hands of soviets (workers’ councils). -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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