Response to Ed Rooksby
Originally published as Letter in Socialist Review , June 2013.
I would
like to make two points in response to Ed Rooksby’s article on realignment of
the left (Socialist Review, May 2013).
First, having experienced the rise and fall of
both Respect in England and the United Left Alliance in Ireland, it is clear
that the process of creating a ‘united’ left,
though desirable, is by no means
simple. This is particularly the case since, of necessity, the project
involves people with different political perspectives, notably left reformists
and revolutionaries, working together. If, in either instance, the SWP had dissolved
its organisation, as it is suggested
they should do by some on the left, it would have been not just a tactical
error but a strategic disaster.
The second
is that the way Rooksby proposes transcending the division between reformism
and revolutionary Marxism in favour of ‘revolutionary reformism’ is in no way
new. It is what Lenin and Trotsky, as far back as 1919, called ‘centrism’ and
vigorously polemicised against..
Rooksby
counterposes ‘the reformist approach’ of ‘smooth, piecemeal change’ to ‘the
defining feature of revolutionary socialism… that socialists must remain strictly independent of the capitalist state
rather than seek to work within it’. This is a mistaken formulation.
Revolutionaries do not, and cannot, operate strictly independent of the
capitalist state; we work within it, including taking part in elections, but in
order to smash it. Left reformists aim
to take over and use the capitalist
state for socialist purposes. This distinction was the central theme of Lenin’s
great work The State and Revolution.
Rooksby
refers to Boris Kagarlistsky’s strategy of reforms being based on the demands
at the end of the Communist Manifesto
of 1848 but this misses the crucial
amendment made to the Manifesto by Marx on the basis of the Paris Commune of
1871, namely that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made
state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’. This quotation is a
cornerstone of The State and Revolution.
Significantly
Rooksby fails to deal with the state at all, referring only to ‘the intense
hostility of capital’ but the point made by Marx and Lenin remains valid. The
capitalist state, with its ‘bodies of armed men’, its armed forces and police,
its secret services, judges and top bureaucrats, will not sit idly we by and
permit a permit a ‘left’ government to roll out its revolutionary reforms in
Britain, Greece or anywhere else.
It remains
only to add that history provides many examples of ‘left governments’ (France
and Spain in 1936, Chile in 1970-3, Labour in 1945 and many others) but not one
has opened the way to socialism. The only exception is the ‘left government’ in
Russia in 1917 (headed by the ‘socialist’ Kerensky)
which was overthrown from the left with the aid of a revolutionary party.
FOOTNOTE: On Richard Seymour
and reformism.
Richard
Seymour has posted on Facebook an interview he gave in Zagreb on 17 May, entitled ‘In practical
terms, today we are all reformists’. The title is a direct quote from the
interview and he quips that is bound ‘to wind up the right people’. I suppose I
qualify as one of these ‘right people’, however, this formulation is both
revealing and false: it needs to be challenged.
It is false
because it implies that ‘we’ (socialists, Marxists etc.) can only really be
revolutionaries in revolutionary situations, when there exist ‘agencies of
revolution’, by which I assume he means a mass revolutionary working class.
Speaking at Marx’s grave side Engels said that Marx ‘was above all a
revolutionist’. He clearly did not believe that Marx was a revolutionist in
1848 but not in 1858 or 1867 when he published Volume 1 of Capital. Trotsky in
his Testament wrote, ‘For forty-three years of my conscious life I have
remained a revolutionist…I shall die a proletarian revolutionist’. Obviously
Trotsky was not a revolutionary only in 1905 or 1917.
The difference between reformists and revolutionaries
doesn’t at all lie in whether or not we call for reforms. Every serious
revolutionary, who is not a completely passive ultra-left, urges and fights for
reforms all the time. The difference lies in HOW we fight for reforms (by
emphasizing the self-activity and combativity of the working class) and with
what perspective (with the perspective of preparing for revolution).
This is ABC. (It’s in the Communist Manifesto and in
Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution). In a
sense Richard Seymour MUST know it, so why the lousy formulation?
There are two clues in the interview. In explaining his
formulation he writes that ‘we’ (the left?) ‘advocate reforms that would
strengthen the agencies that would be capable of being mobilized in a
revolutionary situation’. This puts the emphasis on the beneficial effects of achieving
the reforms rather than of the struggle for them. It may seem a small point but
there is a slide there towards the notion of a ‘left government’ opening the
way to socialism which is a classic left reformist idea.
The second clue is where he says, ‘most of the time these
dichotomies [reformism and revolution] are used in a sectarian and moralizing
way’. Now whether the number of times these dichotomies are used in a
‘sectarian and moralizing way’ exceeds the times they are used in a scientific
and political way is hard to calculate but I think this is a rhetorical device
to preempt the demand for political clarity on this question.
Where this argument really matters most is in relation to
building the revolutionary party. One of the main lessons drawn by Trotsky (and
Cliff, Harman etc.) from the victory of the Russian Revolution and the failure
in Germany, Italy,
Hungary etc. was the need to build the party in advance of the revolution. This is the point Seymour’s
formulations seek to avoid and deflect.
John
Molyneux
Dublin