In 1915, the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, defying the wave of nationalism that had swept Germany at the outbreak of the war, recognised that this European-wide conflict had opened up a new epoch in the history of capitalism, an epoch when the ruthless competition built into the system was now posing humanity with the choice between socialism and barbarism. This war, she wrote, with its massacre of human beings on an industrial scale, was a precise definition of what barbarism means.
But World War One was only the beginning and the barbarity of capitalism soon reached new levels. The war was ended by the resistance of the working class in Russia, Germany and elsewhere, through the mutinies, strikes, and insurrections that, for a brief moment, threatened the very existence of the world capitalist order. But these movements were isolated and crushed; and with the defeat of the working class, which is the only real obstacle to capitalism’s drive to war, the horror of imperialist conflict took on a new quality.
The first imperialist war was still, like the wars of the 19th century, fought mainly on the battlefields. The scale of the killing, proportionate to the dizzying development of technology in the decades leading up to the war, was a shock even to the politicians and military chiefs who had gambled on a short, sharp conflict, “over by Christmas”. But in the wars that succeeded it, the principal victims of warfare would no longer be soldiers in uniform, but the civilian population. The bombing, by German and Italian aircraft, of Guernica in Spain, an event immortalised by Picasso’s tortured figures of women and children, set the tone. At first, the deliberate targeting of civilians from the air was a new shock, something unprecedented, and surely only something the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini could contemplate. But the war in Spain was a rehearsal for a second world war which trebled the death toll of the first and in which the vast majority of its victims would be civilians. Both sides used the tactic of ‘carpet’ bombing to flatten cities, destroy infrastructure, demoralise the population, and – because the bourgeoisie still feared the possibility of a working class uprising against the war – smash the proletarian danger. Increasingly, such tactics were no longer denounced as crimes but defended as the best means to end the conflict and prevent further slaughter – above all by the ‘democratic’ camp. The incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the newly-invented atomic bomb was justified in exactly these terms.
Today, when the leaders of the ‘democratic’ world condemn the Assad regime in Syria and its Russian backers for their relentless, systematic massacre of the civilian population of Aleppo and other cities, we should not forget that they are carrying on what is now an established tradition of capitalist warfare. The deliberate destruction of hospitals and other key infrastructure such as the water supply, the blocking and even bombing of aid convoys: this is modern siege warfare, military tactics learned not only from previous generations of ‘dictators’, but from also from democratic militarists like ‘Bomber’ Harris and Winston Churchill.
That is not to say there is nothing exceptional in what is happening in Aleppo. The ‘civil war’ in Syria began as part of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 – with a revolt by a population exasperated by the brutality of the Assad regime. But Assad had learned from the fall of his fellow dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, and responded to the demonstrations with murderous firepower. The determination of the regime to survive and perpetuate its privileges has proved to be unbounded. Assad is prepared to lay waste to entire cities, murder or expel millions of his own citizens, to remain in power. There is here an element of the tyrant’s revenge against those who dare to reject his rule, a plunge into a spiral of destruction which will leave the rulers with little or nothing to rule over. In this sense, the coldly rational calculation behind the terror bombing of Syria’s ‘rebel’ cities has become a new symbol of the growing irrationality of capitalist war.
But the insanity of this war is not limited to Syria. Following the mass shootings of unarmed demonstrators, splits in the Syrian army gave rise to an armed bourgeois opposition, and this rapidly transformed the initial revolt into a military conflict between capitalist camps; this in turn provided the opportunity for a whole number of local and global imperialist powers to intervene for their own squalid reasons. The ethnic and religious divisions that aggravated the conflict inside Syria were exploited by regional powers with their own agendas. Iran, which claims to be the leader of the world’s Shiite Muslims, supports Assad’s ‘Alawite’ regime and backs the direct intervention of the Hezbollah militias from Lebanon. Sunni Muslim states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have armed the numerous Islamist gangs which aimed to supplant the ‘moderate’ rebels, including Islamic State itself. Turkey, often on the pretext of striking back against IS, has used the war to step up its onslaught on the Kurdish forces who have made considerable gains in northern Syria.
But in this three, four, even five sided conflict, the world’s major powers have also been playing their role. The US and Britain have called for Assad to step down and have indirectly supported the armed opposition, both the ‘moderates’ and, via Saudi and Qatar, the Islamists. When IS began, like al Qaida in the previous decade, to bite the hand that feeds it and set itself up as a new and uncontrolled power in Syria and Iraq, a number of western politicians have reconsidered their position, arguing that Assad is actually a ‘lesser evil’ compared to IS. Earlier in the conflict, Obama threatened the Assad regime with military intervention, declaring that the use of chemical weapons against civilians was a line that could not be crossed. But this threat proved empty, and subsequently, the debates in Washington and Westminster have been how to intervene against IS, thus indirectly boosting Assad.
The indecisive US response to the situation in Syria is the product of a long process of decline in its world hegemony, summarised above all by its disastrous interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The ‘War on Terror’ unleashed by the Bush administration has only served to foment chaos in the Middle East and has made Islamist terrorism an even greater force than it was before the Twin Towers fell. The war in Iraq proved particularly unpopular in the US and even the gun-toting Trump now proclaims it to have been a disaster. The USA is thus extremely reluctant to get drawn into a new quagmire in the Middle East.
Imperialism abhors a vacuum, and the hesitations of the US provided a resurgent Russia with the chance to reassert itself in a region from which it had been largely expelled by the end of the Cold War. Syria is the last place in the Middle East where Russia hung on to its military bases, and its support for the Assad regime has been constant. But after embarking on a policy – via the wars in Georgia and the Ukraine – of regaining its lost empire in the region of the former USSR, Putin’s Russia is now gambling on increasing its status as a world power by directly intervening in the Syrian conflict. The initial pretext was the need to hit back at IS which was gaining ground in Iraq and Syria, even threatening Russia’s only remaining outlet to the Mediterranean, the naval base at Tartus. To the extent that it was posed as a response to IS, Russian intervention was quietly supported by the US. Following IS atrocities in Paris, France even carried out some joint operations with Russian forces in Syria. But Russian imperialism has shown little interest in attacking IS bases and every interest in propping up an Assad regime that was showing serious signs of collapse. By the simple trick of branding the entire opposition to Assad as terrorists, it has become a major force in Assad’s assault on rebel strongholds, effectively turning the tide of war in favour of Assad. Russian imperialism’s answer to the conflict in Syria is a simple one, entirely in accord with Assad’s methods, and already applied without mercy in Grozny in 1990-2000 in response to the Chechen nationalist movement: reduce the city to rubble and the problem of rebellion is solved.
Russian imperialism makes no secret of its ambitions in the Middle East. “Over the weekend, marking the first anniversary of Russia’s intervention in Syria, state media was full of bold statements such as ‘Russia proved that it’s nonetheless a superpower’ and ‘Russia has become the main player in this region … The United States, on the other hand, lost its status as first fiddle’.”[1]
The assault on Aleppo, which was raised to new levels following the rapid collapse of the latest cease-fire brokered by the US, has visibly sharpened tensions between Russia and the USA. Reacting to the charge that it is carrying out war crimes in Syria – which is undoubtedly true – Russia has pulled out of peace negotiations over Syria and also from a process aimed at reducing US and Russian stockpiles of plutonium, with Putin placing the most far-reaching conditions on a resumption of talks, including the dropping of sanctions against Russia and substantial reduction of NATO troop concentrations in eastern Europe.
Faced with the increasingly brutal policies of the Putin regime at home and abroad, with its retrograde nationalist ideology and crudely lying propaganda, the ‘democratic’ powers in the west do not find it difficult to take the moral high ground. But we have already seen that Russia’s use of terror bombing in Syria has a long pedigree in the west. And the hypocrisy of the democratic states applies equally to their recent and current behaviour. America’s condemnation of Russia for destroying Aleppo and other cities cannot efface the memory of the bombardment of Baghdad in 2003 or the siege of Fallujah in 2004, which also led to thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, even if US bombs and missiles are supposedly ‘smarter’ than their Russian equivalents and thus more focused on purely military targets. Neither should it obscure what Britain has been doing on the quiet in Yemen – supplying the Saudis with weapons in its intervention in a bloody ‘civil war’. A recent report in The Guardian showed that over a million children in Yemen face starvation as a direct result of Saudi blockades and bombing of areas held by Houthi rebels[2].
But western hypocrisy reaches its highest pitch when it comes to the millions of Syrians who have been forced to flee for their lives, and who now suffer from severe malnutrition in ill-equipped refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan or Lebanon; or, if they try to reach the ‘haven’ of western Europe, they fall into the hands of ruthless human traffickers who push them into perilous crossings of the Mediterranean in unseaworthy boats. The European Union has shown itself incapable of dealing with what Cameron once referred to as the “swarm” of refugees from Syria and other conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. While some governments, like the German, brandish their ‘welcoming’ policy to those whose labour power they need to exploit, the walls and barbed wire fences have gone up all over Europe. More and more European governments and parties are adapting to or openly espousing the politics of exclusion and scapegoating promulgated by the populist currents. We are witnessing sinister echoes of the massacre of the Jews in the 1930s and 40s, when the democracies wrung their hands over the Nazi persecutions and murders, but did everything they could to close their borders to the victims, taking in no more than a symbolic number of Jewish refugees[3].
Double-talk and hypocrisy over Syria is not limited to the governing parties. The majority of parties of the ‘left’ have a long history of supporting Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and the Baathist regime in Syria, alleging that these are, for all their faults, ‘fighting imperialism’, by which they mean the imperialism of the US, Israel or other western states. The ‘Stop the War’ coalition in the UK, for example (in which Jeremy Corbyn has played a leading role for many years) will organise massive demonstrations against Israel’s military incursions into Lebanon and Gaza, under slogans such as ‘We are all Hezbollah’. You will never see them organising an equivalent demonstration against the actions of Assad and the Russians in Syria, which are not only a mirror image of Israeli militarism, but have far surpassed it in levels of death and destruction.
Other activist organisations opt for supporting military action by the USA and the west. The Avaaz group, which specialises in massive online campaigns and petitions, and which opposed the US invasion of Iraq, now argues that the only way to protect the children of Aleppo is to call on Obama, Erdogan, Hollande and May to enforce a no-fly zone in Northern Syria[4].
Either way, we are asked to support one side or the other in what has become a global imperialist conflict.
For revolutionaries, it is essential to defend the principle of internationalism against every case of imperialist butchery. That means maintaining political independence from all states and proto-state militias, and supporting the struggle of the exploited in all countries against their own bourgeoisies. This principle is not dependent on whether or not the exploited are engaged in open struggle. It is a signpost for the future which must never be lost. In 1914, the internationalists who opposed the war were a very small minority, but stubbornly holding onto class positions, while so many former comrades were rallying to the war effort of their own bourgeoisies, was absolutely essential to the emergence of a massive proletarian struggle against the war two or three years later.
In Syria, there is no doubt that the proletariat is absent from the scene. This is a reflection of the political and numerical weakness of the Syrian working class, which has been unable to stand up against the Assad regime and its various bourgeois opponents. But we can say that the fate of Syria and of the ‘Arab spring’ as a whole sums up the historic situation facing the world working class. Capitalism is in an advanced state of decay and has no future to offer humanity other than repression and war. This has been the response of the ruling class to the various revolts that swept through North Africa and the Middle East in 2011. But this has only been possible because the working class was unable to take the lead in these revolts, unable to propose a different aim and perspective than the democratic illusions which dominated the social movements. And this was a failure not merely of the working class of North Africa and the Middle East, but of the working class in the central countries of capitalism, which has more deeply implanted revolutionary traditions and a long experience in confronting the obstacle of bourgeois democracy.
It is these battalions of the class who are best placed to revive the perspective of proletarian revolution, which remains the only hope for a human future. This is not just wishing for the best. The Arab spring also served as an inspiration to struggles in the central countries, most notably the Indignados revolt in Spain, which went furthest of all the movements of 2011 in posing serious questions about the future of world capitalism and in developing the means of struggle against it. But this was just a glimpse of the possible, a small indication that, despite the steady advance of capitalist barbarism, the proletarian alternative is still alive.
Amos, 8.9.16
[3]. This is not to denigrate the sincere efforts of many thousands of volunteers in Europe who have tried to offer aid to the refugees, or indeed the truly heroic work of doctors, nurses and rescue workers struggling to save lives in the most appalling conditions in Aleppo and other besieged cities. Very often these efforts begin as spontaneous initiatives which governments and other official forces then try to take under their own control.
Politicians of left and right have condemned the increased xenophobic abuse and physical attacks on immigrants since the referendum, and indeed do not want the tensions in society to explode in ways that disrupt the exploitation of the working class. They may also recognise the role of referendum propaganda in encouraging the increase in these attacks. But they will never acknowledge the extent to which their capitalist system and their state are responsible for the very attitudes which feed xenophobic and racist populism. It is the nation state that defines who is a citizen, or subject, and who is an outsider, an illegal, or to be accepted on sufferance provided their work is needed and sent away afterwards, which encourages immigration when labour is scare, and turns away refugees when it is not wanted.
Home secretary Amber “don’t call me a racist” Rudd’s announcements at the Tory Party conference are an illustration: on the one hand a work permit scheme for EU citizens who get jobs here, so that capital can bring in the workers it needs, including seasonal fruit pickers; but on the other hand definitely no out of work benefits or social housing, and businesses to be ‘named and shamed’ if they do not make efforts to recruit and train British workers. This is, of course, in continuity with Cameron’s promise to limit net migration, with restrictions on student visas – which upset the universities - and with Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” policy. However it goes further in making concessions to populism in attacking business for employing immigrants when there is unemployment at home, taking up its anti-elitist rhetoric. If holding the referendum was already a sop to populist sentiment, the May government is taking this further by hinting at a hard Brexit and Article 50 by the end of March, even if no details have been given yet. It seems to have rattled some in UKIP with Steven Woolfe, one of its leadership candidates, getting into an altercation with a fellow member after it emerged that he had held talks with the Tory Party.
Even more dangerous for would-be refugees and migrants are the agreements made by the EU to send refugees who arrive in Greece illegally by boat back to Turkey; and in 2014 there was the EU-Horn of Africa Migration Rout Initiative (or the Khartoum process). The latter provides brutally repressive regimes such as Sudan with equipment to police its borders – in the name of humanitarian concern for the victims of people traffickers the desperate are prevented from attempting to flee to safety.
At the end of July, Byron Burgers set up a fake training session (some employees were told it was on health and safety, other that it was on a new burger recipe) to assist immigration authorities in arresting 35 suspected illegal immigrants, and deporting at least 25 including separating some from the families they have in this country. The employer’s excuse for this deception was the 2016 Immigration Act which makes parts of civil society (in this case, employers and landlords) responsible for checking the immigration status of employees and tenants, and so policing immigration controls. This sort of blatant, and mandatory, snitching is currently of limited extent and this piece of legislation only specifies the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, not the working class (although individual workers must undoubtedly be required to carry out some of the tasks involved, whether aware of the motivation behind them or not). It seems likely that the highly publicised application of this Act at Byron Burgers a month after the referendum was an attempt to use the populist mood to get us used to this sort of behaviour, or at least test its acceptability. The state will no doubt have watched carefully not just those expressing indignation about the action of Byron Burgers (there were a number of small demonstrations outside their restaurants), but also those who took the contrary, conformist view that all means are appropriate in arresting illegal immigrants.
Since the vote in favour of Brexit there has been an increase in reports of “hate crimes” – 57% in the 4 days following the vote and 42% in the last 2 weeks of June, with incidents continuing at over 3,300 in the last 2 weeks of July, which is a 40% increase on the previous year. While most have involved verbal abuse or racist graffiti, in Harlow a 40 year old worker from Poland was killed, in Milton Keynes a pregnant Muslim woman was kicked in the stomach, losing her baby, and in Plymouth a Polish family whose shed was set on fire found a note threatening it would be the family next. This should be no surprise given the nature of the campaign around the referendum which lent heavily on the question of immigration, including UKIP’s infamous poster showing hundreds of refugees in Southern Europe. Nigel Farage’s “I want my country back” slogan was very useful in using, and encouraging, a mood of discontent and xenophobia. It is as though some people think they had just won a referendum to rid the country of all ‘immigrants’, no matter whether they came from the EU and no matter how many years - or generations - they had been here.
These attacks show the dark and dangerous nature of the populist upsurge that contributed to Cameron feeling the need to promise a referendum on Brexit, and to the result going against the wishes of all the central factions of the ruling class in the UK, Europe and the USA. It is not hard to understand the reasons for the discontent that feeds populism. The financial crisis of 2007/8 hit people’s savings. Decades of economic crisis and decline have left old industrial areas completely run down with no prospects. This has all been presided over by alternating Tory and Labour governments since Heath and Wilson in the 60s and 70s, all of which have imposed versions of austerity, and thus eroding confidence, and participation, in elections as a way of ameliorating the situation. ‘Elites’ and ‘experts’ are rejected. Meanwhile the perspective of the working class seems absent. Not only are strikes at a historic low, there is even a feeling that the working class no longer exists, particularly when it is seen not as the class of wage or salaried workers, but only as those who do blue collar, manual jobs and live on a council estate. Migrants are not seen for what they are, fellow victims of the same capitalist system, forced to flee war or move to seek work, but as dangerous competitors for dwindling resources. As put forward in the contribution ‘On the question of populism’ “... when an alternative – which can only be that of the proletariat – is missing, parts of the population start to protest and even revolt against their ruling elite, not with the goal of challenging their rule, but in order to oblige them to protect their own ‘law-abiding’ citizens against ‘outsiders’. These layers of society experience the crisis of capitalism as a conflict between its two underlying principles: between the market and violence. Populism is the option for violence to solve the problems the market cannot solve, and even to solve the problems of the market itself. For instance, if the world labour market threatens to flood the labour market of the old capitalist countries with a wave of have-nots, the solution is to put up fences and police at the frontier and shoot whoever tries to cross it without permission.”[1] However, while these xenophobic attacks show us the reality that lies behind populism, it is important to understand that they are the actions of a tiny minority, even of those seduced by the illusion of getting their country back, or by the idea that cutting immigration will solve any of the problems of housing, education or health services. There have been many expressions of indignation and solidarity with those attacked, even if these have also been drawn into demonstrations in favour of the democratic state. The fact is that even though the working class alternative appears absent, the class has not been defeated, and overt racists do not have a free hand to run amok and physically attack those they scapegoat for the problems in society.
With the Tories as well as UKIP making xenophobic speeches about limiting immigration, blaming migrants for all sorts of problems, and the increased verbal and physical attacks on them, how do we answer all this xenophobia and racism, how do we show solidarity? The Greens and the Corbyn faction of the Labour Party appear to be standing against the xenophobic mood, or at least refusing to join in. Corbyn was notably criticised for not taking up immigration in his conference speech and instead proposing financial aid to areas with high levels of immigration. Can we, in other words, oppose the populism of the Brexiters and xenophobes with a sort of left alternative, such as the huge influx of new members of the Labour Party supporting Corbyn, or his supporters in Momentum? Or internationally with the likes of Podemos, Syriza or Bernie Sanders? While it is beyond the scope of this article to analyse these forces (see article on the Labour Party in this issue) there are a few things we can say.
These political forces take the view that they should not try to make concessions to populism, not even at the level of propaganda, but oppose it. But they do this on a totally bourgeois basis. Their programmes are all fundamentally based on fighting elections and seeking government office; and where they have a large extra-parliamentary activity this is also based on pressurising or influencing some part of government policy. In other words they base their politics on the nation state and the national interest which they share with all bourgeois forces, however much they disagree on how to defend that national interest. No wonder such parties can completely change policy when they get into office. For instance, the Labour Party has often had a leftwing leader, often considered unelectable, in opposition, but in power it carries on the same old policies. When it comes to demonising migrants we only have to look back to the Blair government and its talk of “bogus asylum seekers” and even “bogus” gypsies[2]. Similarly, in Greece, Syriza in government found itself carrying out the very austerity it had denounced in opposition; and its positive promises to improve things for immigrants didn’t stop it aligning with the right wing, anti-immigrant ANEL (Independent Greeks).
The only way we can oppose the populist idea that keeping immigrants out will protect the citizens at home from the chaos of the world today is to understand that we are all victims of the same capitalist system. It is the same capitalist crisis that has caused unemployment in old industrial areas in the advanced countries, that lies behind imperialist wars in the Middle East sending thousands of refugees fleeing for their lives, and that causes the unemployment and poverty leading to economic migration. That means to see things internationally which is the viewpoint of the working class, which is concretised in the practical unity between immigrant and ‘native’ workers that develops in their struggles, as in the strike at Deliveroo recently. It is the apparent absence of this working class perspective that has allowed populism to develop as a product of capitalism’s decay. But it is only the working class that can provide a perspective to resist capital’s attacks, unmask its rotten ideology, and offer humanity the prospect of a world without states and borders.
Alex, 7.10.16
[2]. In fact the Corbyn led Labour Party has had its own problems with anti-semitism, particularly among his followers, see https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201605/13931/labour-left-and-j... [7]
In response to the austerity demanded by the capitalist crisis, the proliferation of imperialist wars, terrorism on the streets, and the dismal prospects offered by the continuation of capitalism, there is much dissatisfaction. This discontent can be expressed in many ways, not embracing any solutions but expressing unhappiness with a reality that’s not understood.
In the UK Referendum on membership of the European Union millions voted to leave without any clear idea of what the consequences might be. Some were concerned about immigration, some were worried about a distant EU bureaucracy having control over their lives, some believed the propaganda about the economic prospects for the UK, and some were just expressing a negativity about the existing state of things. Elsewhere people have been attracted by other expressions of populism, like Trump in the US, Le Pen in France or the ‘Alternative for Germany’.
But it’s not just right-wing populism that people have turned to. Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Bernie Sanders in the US have all offered a ‘new radicalism’ on the Left. It’s in this context that we can begin to appreciate the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party.
For the Left Corbyn is a hero. For the SWP (Socialist Worker 27/9/16) “His success is a clear sign of the feeling against austerity, racism and war. His victory can be a launchpad for increased resistance in the workplaces and on the streets.
We look forward to continuing to work with Corbyn and his supporters against the disastrous Tory policies that threaten to destroy key public services, deepen poverty, whip up racism and plunge British armed forces into more imperialist wars.”
And yet in the same salute they show how Syriza also “sent hope across the world” before “implementing a worse round of austerity than those imposed by its … predecessors.” They present Corbyn as something positive, but when you read the small print the SWP says (International Socialism 152) “the detail of his economic programme is standard post-crash social democratic fare—a £500 billion programme of infrastructure investment, an industrial strategy overseen by a new National Investment Bank, support for cooperatives, a National Education Service…” And when you see the policies of deficit reduction and borrowing for investment in infrastructure McDonnell lines up with his Labour predecessors with much talk of “fiscal credibility” and “discipline”.
For the Right Corbyn is an ‘extremist’ who, with allies such as McDonnell and Abbott, will raise taxation, increase debt, reinforce state intervention in the economy, be soft on terrorists, undermine defence by not renewing Trident and stifle the ‘initiative’ of private enterprise.
For a typical right-wing take on Corbyn try the Daily Mail’s (29/9/16) report of his speech to the Labour. “Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to spend more than £100billion a year creating a socialist state was condemned yesterday as a blueprint to bankrupt the nation.” He apparently plans to “spend more on everything from education to housing.” There would be investment to increase employment, build homes, keep down rents, ban zero hours contracts, ease the pressure through immigration on public services, provide free education, move to a low carbon economy, renationalise railways, and increase taxes. There would be a “new National Investment Bank to spend cash on better broadband, railways and energy infrastructure.”
The Express (26/9/16) was a bit less hysterical. Mr McDonnell was reported as promising to work with the “wealth creators in the private sector”…He said: “We think we can get the economy growing very quickly and it will then pay for itself.” As the SWP would say, this is ‘standard social democratic fare’ – promises to increase the role of the state when the tendency towards growing state capitalism is one of the dominant trends of the last hundred years, an expression of capitalism’s economic crisis, not a solution to it.
So, while the Corbyn/Sanders/Syriza left –wing version of capitalism has no capacity to improve the quality of people’s lives, any more than the right-wing plans of Trump or UKIP, it has a big appeal to some workers.
In the history of the workers’ movement there have always been currents that emphasise that the emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself, that the self-organisation of the working class is not only a strength of the struggle, but the basis of a future society based on relations of solidarity, a society where the state has become an anachronism. However, in the period leading up to the First World War the idea grew in social democracy that the capitalist state could provide social order, could eliminate the excesses of capitalist competition, and could guarantee social welfare. In fact this had as much to do with socialism as Louis XIV’s centralised state or Bismarck’s ‘state socialism’.
Today, despite the experience of a century of state capitalism in all its political forms – social democratic, Stalinist or fascist - the idea that the state can somehow be neutral still has enormous appeal. The ‘enemies’ of ‘ordinary people’ are typically deemed to be bankers, hedge fund managers, tax avoiders, multinational corporations, ruthless companies, exploitative bosses, and all the rest. Against this, the state is portrayed as being a force above classes that can curtail malevolent greedy individuals who are trying to rip off the rest of us. This personalisation, which in the past would dwell on a bloated capitalist in a bowler hat, now focuses on those who, behind closed doors, make decisions that affect the jobs, lives and living conditions of millions.
So, the Labour Party in the UK, while doing badly in opinion polls, is still putting forward the sort of ideas that others have to imitate. When Theresa May became Prime Minister she indicated her intentions: “The Government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few but by you. We won’t entrench advantages of the fortunate few. We will do everything to help you go as far as your talents can take you. We must fight the burning injustices. We must make Britain a country that works for everyone” (Daily Telegraph, 13.7.16).
The parties are united in their opposition to privilege and injustice, but, in practice, the Labour Party is seen as being more authentic. In research published in August 2016 by the House of Commons Library, figures were given for membership of political parties. It suggested that the Labour Party’s 515,000 members were more than all other political parties in the UK put together. And Labour members are far more likely to be committed activists than the members of other parties. They think they have identified what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done. A conservative, by definition, wants to preserve those things which they think have proved their value over time. But for the Labour activists, whatever their initial motivations, the solution to society’s problems lies in the explicit intervention of the state.
The role of Corbyn’s Labour Party is to present an alternative plan for the management of capitalism. At present there is no particular call for Labour to be introduced into government; the Conservatives will do their best to try to navigate Britain out of the EU with as little damage to the national capital as possible. The differences in the Labour Party, in particular between Corbynists and the heirs of Blair and Brown, are genuine and we can envisage continued and deepening conflict in its ranks. This in itself will make demands on the energies of activists as different factions try to ‘save the Labour Party’. The bottom line for workers to remember is that Corbyn’s programme, far from being a fresh innovation, is a programme for the running of capitalism, not its destruction.
Car, 8.10.16
One of the fears about workers in very precarious casual jobs, with a large proportion of immigrants among them, is that they will not be able to struggle, and so will be nothing but a competitive pressure to lower wages. Firms such as Uber and Deliveroo like to claim their workers are self-employed (so not getting minimum wage, holiday or sick leave). The recent strike at Deliveroo, which spread to UberEats drivers, has answered both questions. They are most definitely part of the working class, and most definitely able to struggle to defend themselves.
Threatened with a new contract that would change from hourly pay plus a bonus for each delivery (£7 and £1) with pay only for each delivery, despite their apparent isolation from each other and their precarious circumstances, Deliveroo delivery workers organised meetings to run their struggle, a protest moped and cycle ride through the streets in London, and a 6 day strike. They insisted on collective negotiation against the managing director’s ‘offer’ to speak to them individually[1]. In the end the threat that they would lose their jobs if they did not sign up to the new contract was withdrawn, but it is being trialled by those who opt in. A partial victory.
Some UberEats delivery workers came to Deliveroo meetings. They face similar conditions, being falsely given self-employed status; pay has fallen so they barely make the minimum wage, with no guaranteed pay, only getting £3.30 per delivery. After a wildcat strike one worker was sacked (or “deactivated” since he is not protected by employment law), underlining the courage needed by workers who struggle in such precarious industries.
These small strikes by workers in such difficult circumstances demonstrate that they are fully part of the working class and its struggle.
Alex 8.10.16
[1]. See the video of this event at https://libcom.org/article/deliveroo-drivers-wildcat-strike [10]
This critique was one of two originally posted on our online forum by comrade Link. Because of the importance of the issues raised, both the for the ICC and the wider communist movement, we decided to reply on a more formal basis.
The original forum posts can be found here [11]and here [12].
First of all I must say that I am very surprised that the very important text in IR 156 from January 2016 still has not prompted responses from comrades. These documents are significant signposts for the future of the ICC yet have neither been applauded nor criticised - just ignored.
I would like to applaud the approach of self-criticism in preparing the balance sheets contained in the latest IR. In particular, the identification of an underestimation the capacity of capitalism to maintain itself, globalisation and the restructuring of the working class, some limited recognition of the weakness of Luxemburg markets theory and responses to elongated period of decline in working class struggles since wave of period 60s to 80s.
I would criticise the text in IR however as a balance sheet that lacks incisiveness and is too keen to self congratulate itself. In saying that I do recognise the major contributions that the ICC has made on issues such as decadence, the historic course, the working class movement and more generally on the body of work and the range of issues raised for discussion in the workers movement. There has been a growing tendency nevertheless to prepare overlong texts on organisational and behavioural issues, and self-analysis that just tend to disguise weaknesses, obscure issues and self justify. Frankly I’m left with the impression that the concern demonstrated is for ICC militants not today’s working class movement as a whole.
I would like to put forward some obvious questions that the texts avoid:
1 Why the ICC has all these periodic internal confrontations?
2 Why no critical analysis if the ICCs approach to internal discussion? Yes I’m happy to reject the extreme criticisms of Stalinism but it is still the case that internal discussion has been criticised from many quarters. Has the ICCs approach, this determination to reach a conclusion and the determination to make swingeing criticisms of others contributed to these breakups?
3 Has orientation of international organisation in distinction to federal approach been successful? The approach was identified uncritically in the texts but given that the oranisation has given up on being a pole of international regroupment and appears to be withdrawing from intervention in favour of a fraction’s role of analysing past events. Why shouldn’t this approach be questioned through a serious discussion? If the new period changes the focus of militant activity should it not also change the organisational structure?
4 Why have obvious points of political disagreements over the past 40 years not been addressed in the balance sheets? i.e. left as natural party of opposition, 80s as years of truth, parasitism, Decomposition and the idea that we are in the final phase of caitalism, an increasingly problematic understanding of the historic course, economic analysis and problems with Luxemburg’s analysis of role of extra- capitalist markets.
5 Why is there such an inability to provide clarity in the explanations of certain issues? The ICC does not appear to be able to produce definitive statements on what it thinks on proletarian morality, proletarian culture and centrism and the new role as a fraction appears now to join that list (it’s certainly not clear to me from the text).
6 Why has there not been a real attempt to draw a balance sheet of the period of the past 8 years of crisis in the ICC? This has been the explanation for withdrawing from public interventions and reducing publications so, was it crisis and has it been resolved or was it actually just the start of this new practice? Is it continuing or is it over.
7 How have these issues/weaknesses affected ICC political analysis in the recent period? I am particularly interested to hear how early, major criticisms of CWO and IFICC relating to their alleged adoption of academicism and rejection of intervention and lack of understanding of historic course, can be squared with the ICC’s new approach. The ICC has adopted what it was criticising these organisations for yet has not either revised criticisms nor apologised.
Link (14/7/2016)
WR Reply
Thank you very much for your comments and questions posted on the ICC online forum about the critical balance sheet of 40 years of the ICC from International Review (IR) 156[1]. As we indicated to you then we needed more time and reflection to give your questions the answers they deserve. In order to do so in a little depth we won’t take up all the questions in one go - there are a lot - but in installments, with this first reply answering mainly the first two questions of your first post above, leaving the other questions on the fraction from the first and second post to a later date. We hope that the answers we give to your questions will not be seen as our last word on the subject but as only the beginning of a discussion with you.
In recognising the importance and seriousness of this self-critique by the ICC you firstly express your surprise that there has been no public response to it from comrades. By this we assume you refer to the wider milieu of groups and individuals sharing the general internationalist communist left tradition with the ICC. In answer to this point it was said on the ICC forum in reply that there had been an initial reaction to the critical balance sheet from one of our contacts on the ICC forum. We have also had responses from other contacts verbally or by email. But as far as the proletarian milieu as a whole is concerned we have hardly seen any public reaction. Your surprise is understandable, since the fate of the ICC, a significant organisation of the communist left for the past 40 years, is surely of concern for those who espouse the politics of the communist left, even if they disagree with many of our political positions and analyses. More: one would think surely that many of those who disagree with the ICC on whatever question would want to express themselves publicly on the subject as you have done.
While from this political point of view the silence about our self-critique is surprising and regrettable, from the vantage point of the past four decades, such indifference has not been that unusual. Ever since the re-emergence of the left communist milieu internationally since the end of the sixties, it has lacked a significant sense of common purpose which, if it had been pursued, despite the disagreements within it, would have strengthened this whole milieu and accelerated its internationalist impact on the working class much more than it actually has. In hindsight the three Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left in the late seventies which had the goal of confronting these often profound disagreements at the necessary theoretical and political level, and making common public statements on vital current questions facing the working class, were a high water mark. The collapse of these Conferences at the end of the decade has led to a long period of dispersal of the left communist milieu – even if polemics and other limited instances of mutual collaboration have sometimes occurred. The emergence of the phenomenon of political parasitism in 1981 has tended to further exacerbate the atomisation of the left communist milieu and reduce the solidarity between its individuals and groups . The low morale of the left communist milieu in general may help to explain the background to the dearth of response to the 40 year self-critique of the ICC.
In respect of this lack of an effective forum of debate for the whole of the internationalist milieu over the past 40 years, some of your questions seem however to imply that in-depth critiques of our politics and analyses have already been developed within this milieu. But for us it is precisely such profound critiques that are mostly lacking and which still need to be elaborated and deepened. We will point to these below in answer to your questions.
While applauding the self-critique in general you feel that it doesn’t go far enough and that it avoids key questions which need answers.
“I would like to put forward some obvious questions that the texts avoid:
1 Why the ICC has all these periodic internal confrontations?
2 Why no critical analysis if the ICC’s approach to internal discussion? Yes I’m happy to reject the extreme criticisms of Stalinism but it is still the case that internal discussion has been criticised from many quarters. Has the ICC’s approach, this determination to reach a conclusion and the determination to make swingeing criticisms of others contributed to these breakups?”
As you note the 40 year balance sheet is not complete but rather at the beginning and doesn’t provide a detailed history of our method of debate nor of the different splits in the ICC over this period and whether they could have been avoided by a better method. We haven’t avoided the question though, but so far only concentrated on some key questions like that of the fraction, because the latter is closely related to the fundamental issue of whether we have carried out our initial conception of our own role, and the question of the accuracy of our analyses of the world situation and our consequent intervention.
At the moment we are not yet in a position to present a detailed history of our mistakes made in our internal debates nor the extent to which these errors may have contributed unnecessarily to the break ups. And your questions on this matter of internal discussion aren’t very specific. So we can only here try to put this question of marxist debate in the ICC, which of course is not Stalinist, in a wider context.
You commend us for the major contributions of the ICC.
“….I do recognise the major contributions that the ICC has made on issues such as decadence, the historic course, the working class movement and more generally on the body of work and the range of issues raised for discussion in the workers movement.”
The politics of the ICC, its class principles or lines of demarcation of the working class from the bourgeoisie, its analysis of the trajectory of the capitalist mode of production, its marxist method and its organisational principles, are all the product of a tradition of stormy debates in the revolutionary movement that stretches back over a century and a half.
The general conceptions of marxism for example would not exist without the blistering polemics of Marx and Engels against the Left Hegelians in their books the Holy Family and the German Ideology, or the scathing critiques directed against Proudhon’s anarchism and Dühring’s positivism.
The specific tradition of the Communist Left would not be conceivable without the fierce and repeated polemics of Lenin and Luxemburg against the renegade Kautsky concerning the opportunism and betrayal of internationalism by the German Social Democracy, nor a few years later on without the unrelenting criticism of the likes of Herman Gorter and Amadeo Bordiga against the growing opportunism of the Third International.
“At the time that it was founded the Italian Communist Party, animated by the leadership of the Left and of Bordiga, was always an ‘enfant terrible’ in the Communist International. Refusing to submit a priori to the absolute authority of leaders — even those it held in the greatest regard - the Italian CP insisted on freely discussing and, if necessary, fighting against any political position it didn’t agree with. As soon as the CI was formed, Bordiga’s fraction was in opposition on many points and openly expressed its disagreements with Lenin and other leaders of the Bolshevik party, the Russian revolution, and the CI. The debates between Lenin and Bordiga at the Second Congress are well known. At this time nobody thought about questioning this right to free discussion; no one saw it as an insult to the authority of the ‘leaders’. Perhaps men as feeble and servile as Cachin believed in their heart of hearts that this was scandalous, but they wouldn’t have dared to admit it. Moreover, discussion wasn’t seen simply as a right but as a duty; the confrontation and study of ideas were the only way of elaborating the programmatic and political positions required for revolutionary action”. IR 33 ‘Against the concept of the “brilliant leader”’[2].
The ICC in particular would not exist without the confrontation of ideas with both councilism and Bordigism by the Gauche Communiste de France in the 40s and 50s.
Of course all these polemics were accompanied by very profound study and reflection. Painstaking marxist research has usually been stimulated by the intensive confrontation of ideas in the revolutionary movement.
In the history of the ICC itself the principles and analyses that it has developed from the heritage of the past have required the debating of differences. Most of which have not led to splits. The debates on the state in the period of transition, which were not merely internal but also conducted with other groups, or the debates on the reasons for the decadence of capitalism, were both confrontations of important differences that didn’t lead to a separation and in fact are still ongoing. Likewise the development of positions on the proletarian political milieu, on terror, terrorism and class violence, on the critique of the theory of the weak link, on centrism towards councilism, on the theses on parasitism and on the period of the social decomposition of capitalism were all elaborated in our press after extensive debate. In the last decade the International Review has seen the publication of orientation texts on Confidence and Solidarity, Marxism and Ethics and on the Culture of Debate, which were also the object of intense argument within the organisation. While these latter texts, due to the nature of their subject matter, are not final statements they nevertheless constitute in the organisation’s view a valid framework for our approach on these questions and entirely consistent with our marxist method and organisational principles.
All these debates in the history of the ICC which involved, as you might say, ‘swingeing’ criticism, and the desire to reach a conclusion – to see the discussion through to the end – didn’t of themselves lead to organisational break ups.
The decisive reasons that explain the various splits in the organisation, rather than being a result of the debates on general political questions that we mention above, were more to do with political and theoretical questions of organisational principle, in particular that of the primacy of the unity and solidarity of the organisation as a whole against the attempt to assert (often in grotesque ways) the sovereignty of the separate interests of individuals or groups within it. The difficulty for the new generations of revolutionaries since 1968 to understand or accept this principle and its implications, which is at the heart of the question of proletarian morality among revolutionaries, has been a common feature of the splits in the ICC. Yet without the acquisition, defence and explanation of this principle there would be no tradition of organised marxist debate within the revolutionary movement. If for example there had been no defence of organisational principles by the ICC in 1981 against the thefts of the Chenier Tendency or the gangsterism and informing of the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’ twenty years later, then there would be no organisational basis for the subsequent theoretical contributions that you recognise. The need to remain united in spite of differences and disagreements is obviously an existential question.
We can also suggest that the same principle of ‘freedom of discussion, unity in action’ remains a difficult one for the internationalist milieu as a whole to understand and not just the ICC.
We won’t speculate here to what extent the mistakes the ICC made in dealing with this question contributed to the schisms. The important thing to recognise here is that matters of organisational life or death were involved.
It should also be noted that after these break-ups, the ICC was not satisfied with the fact that the dissenters had left – far from it – but attempted to draw out the details and lessons of the splits, their origins and their connection to more general weaknesses in the organisation. And it made these findings public.
After the Chenier crisis for example there were significant elaborations in the International Review of our conception of the functioning and function of revolutionary organisation which had been forgotten or not fully understood in the ICC in the lead up to this crisis.
After the crisis of 1995 a series of six articles were published in the International Review (82-88) on the contemporary significance and relevance of the Hague Conference of the Ist International involving the split between the marxists and Bakuninists.
In light of the theoretical dispersal or indifference of the internationalist milieu that we noted earlier in relation to the ICC’s 40 year self-critique, it is nevertheless remarkable that all these crises in the ICC and the extensive publication of the details and general theoretical lessons from them have not led to a serious and intensive theoretical and political debate within this milieu about them.
To tentatively conclude this reply to your first two questions: in explaining the splits in the ICC and the dispersion of the Communist Left milieu it is necessary to take into account the profound difficulty today’s revolutionaries find in pursuing the confrontation of differences within a unitary framework.
Some short answers to some of your other points:
“I would criticise the text in IR however as a balance sheet that lacks incisiveness and is too keen to self congratulate itself….
There has been a growing tendency nevertheless to prepare overlong texts on organisational and behavioural issues, and self- analysis that just tend to disguise weaknesses, obscure issues and self justify. Frankly I’m left with the impression that the concern demonstrated is for ICC militants not today’s working class movement as a whole”
While recognising this is your opinion we do not share it and would like to hear more of your argumentation and evidence for these views in order to answer them usefully.
“3 Has orientation of international organisation in distinction to federal approach been successful? The approach was identified uncritically in the texts but given that the org has given up on being a pole of international regroupment and appears to be withdrawing from intervention in favour of a fraction’s role of analysing past events. Why shouldn’t this approach be questioned through a serious discussion? If the new period changes the focus of militant activity should it not also change the organisational structure?”
In a second article, we shall take up this question in relation to that of the fraction. For the moment: we haven’t given up on being a pole of international regroupment or on carrying out a communist intervention.
“4 Why have obvious points of political disagreements over the past 40 years not been addressed in the balance sheets? i.e., left as natural party of opposition, 80s as years of truth, parasitism, Decomposition and the idea that we are in the final phase of capitalism, an increasingly problematic understanding of the historic course, economic analysis and problems with Luxemburg’s analysis of role of extra- capitalist markets.”
Please point more specifically to where the political/theoretical disagreements with all these analyses, that you think we should address, have been made. Or elaborate your own position on them a bit more.
“5 Why is there such an inability to provide clarity in the explanations of certain issues? The ICC does not appear to be able to produce definitive statements on what it thinks on proletarian morality, proletarian culture and centrism and the new role as a fraction appears now to join that list (it’s certainly not clear to me from the text).”
See IR 127 and 128 on Marxism and Ethics. IR 111 and 112 on Confidence and Solidarity, IR131 on the Culture of Debate. And IR 43 on centrism. In order to answer your question we need a bit more explanation of why you think these statements are unclear.
“6 Why has there not been a real attempt to draw a balance sheet of the period of the past 8 years of crisis in the ICC? This has been the explanation for withdrawing from public interventions and reducing publications so, was it crisis and has it been resolved or was it actually just the start of this new practice? Is it continuing or is it over.”
IR’s 154 and 156 already give some serious answers to the explanation of the most recent crisis in the ICC. The 40 year balance sheet is part of this explanation which is ongoing. On intervention and the press, we will take that up more in our reply on the fraction.
“7 How have these issues/weaknesses affected ICC political analysis in the recent period? I am particularly interested to hear how early, major criticisms of CWO and IFICC relating to their alleged adoption of academicism and rejection of intervention and lack of understanding of historic course, can be squared with the ICC’s new approach. The ICC has adopted what it was criticising these organisations for yet has not either revised criticisms nor apologized”.
You will have to explain more why you think the ICC has ‘adopted’ academicism and rejected intervention, and where you think we made those criticisms of the CWO, so we can answer more precisely. We don’t consider the IFICC as part of the revolutionary milieu.
Looking forward to your reply to all or part of the above while we work on an answer to your questions about the fraction, in the belief that such a discussion between us is a contribution to fulfilling the tasks of revolutionaries in the working class.
WR, 8.10.16
We are publishing here a critique of the article ‘Towards a communist electoral strategy’ which recently appeared on the website of the Communist League of Tampa (in Florida, USA). We have already published previous correspondence between ourselves and the CLT, in which we welcomed their recognition of the necessity for a world communist party, while also highlighting some of the key differences between our Current and the CLT regarding the conception of the ‘mass party’, the question of whether the communist party takes power, and the relevance of the old social democratic programmes to the communist project today[1]. With the publication of the article ‘Towards a communist electoral strategy’ by Donald Parkinson[2], these differences seem to have widened, or at least become clearer. A comparable process seems to be underway in the relationship between the Tampa group and its Miami affiliate, which has now changed its name to the Workers’ Offensive Group and has adopted a statement of positions which are much more in line with those of the communist left. At the same time, the Miami group has declared that it wants to maintain the discussion with the group in Tampa[3]. We support this decision and want the discussion between ourselves and Tampa to continue as well: hence the present contribution, which we hope will stimulate a response from the Tampa group and others.
We think that this debate on elections is particularly important, not least because in the present political climate in the USA, there is a tremendous pressure on all those who see themselves as being opposed to the capitalist system to set their principles to one side and use their vote to keep Donald Trump from getting his hands on the presidency. In this article, we explain why participation in bourgeois elections in general no longer serves the interests of the class struggle, but directly opposes it.
The text by DP begins by asserting that “participation in electoral politics, and therefore an electoral strategy, are essential if communists are going to gain public legitimacy as a serious political force”. The text recognises that electoral cycles are “endlessly nauseating, particularly this year’s in the USA with the obnoxious Trump vs the neo-liberal imperialist Clinton”. But it refers to passages written by Marx and Engels to support the view that, nevertheless, communists should put up their own candidates, as Marx put it in his 1850 address to the Communist League, “in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint”. DP is aware of the existence of communists like Pannekoek and Bordiga who, in the new conditions created by war and revolution after 1914, rejected all parliamentary activity, but his main concern here is to deplore the fact that their views have had an inordinate influence on a contemporary ‘left’ which is to a large degree “purely based on direct action”. He admits that the appeal of such a approach is understandable, given that “the bourgeois state presents itself as a Leviathan of sorts”, but we should not conclude that “anything that touches it is therefore doomed”. The text then outlines the main elements in the revived communist electoral strategy:
“Yet the question of whether we must smash the state and whether we participate in elections are two different questions. The bourgeois state can be smashed, yet we can still participate within its institutions with the purpose of propagandizing and politically training the working class. Election campaigns, even when lost, serve the purpose of forcing Communists to engage the public at large and argue their positions. However what if Communists actually win elections? Would we not just be managing the bourgeois state?
The first clarification to make is that we would not come to power unless we had the mandate to operate our full minimum program and essentially smash the bourgeois state and create the dictatorship of the proletariat. The party would be a party in opposition and would not form coalition governments with bourgeois parties. Unlike other organizations like Syriza, who act as if they cannot accomplish anything until they are in power, a properly Marxist party would remain in opposition and not form a government until conditions for revolution are ripe.
Another clarification is that we are not going to aim for executive powers we can’t realistically win. The extent to which communists are responsible for managing the state is the extent to which they will be forced to make compromises with bourgeois legality. Rather than running for offices like governor or president, we should aim for offices in the legislative branch such as the federal House Representatives, but also state Houses and Assemblies. In these positions we can vote for and against legislation (as well as abstain) and establish our party as a “tribune of the people” that uses its seat of power to propagandize against the bourgeois state and capitalism. By voting against reactionary laws, even if we are outnumbered by the Democrats and Republicans, we can demonstrate that our party stands firmly against the interests of the bourgeois state and develop mass legitimacy for radical positions”.
What is immediately striking about this passage is that it appears to exist outside of history. There is a complete absence of any idea of the profound changes that have taken place in the life of capitalism and the working class since the days of the Second International when such dilemmas about how workers’ representatives should conduct themselves in parliamentary bodies had a real significance. But with DP’s text, we are taken to a universe where there has been no tendency for the mass parties and unions of the working class to be absorbed into the capitalist state; no qualitative growth of the totalitarian state Leviathan in response to the new epoch of wars and revolutions; no traumatic decades of Stalinist, fascist and democratic counter-revolution which corrupted or exterminated a whole generation of revolutionaries, leaving only a few small internationalist groups fighting against the tide; no tendency, in the generations that emerged after the receding of this counter-revolution, towards a deep suspicion of politics and political organisation of any kind. The result of this real historical process has been palpable: the communists, who by definition must always remain a minority in the confines of capitalist society, have become a miniscule force, even if you are fairly wide-ranging in your definition of what constitutes the political forces of the working class today. In this actual universe, there is no party of the working class, let alone a mass one.
The CLT don’t, of course claim to be a party and don’t think the communist party is close to being formed; neither do they envisage “running any candidates anytime soon, as we are a small sect with little support and limited resources”. But the divorce from reality we saw in relation to the past also applies to a possible electoral strategy in the future, because there is no attempt whatever to consider what changes would have to take place that would make it possible for today’s “small sects with little support and limited resources” to form themselves into a formidable communist party capable of winning a respectable number of seats in Congress or similar parliaments, and even, possibly “winning a mandate to smash the bourgeois state and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat”[4]. Such a transformation could only be the result of a massive upsurge in the class struggle on a world-wide scale, of a movement that would give rise not only a whole new generation of revolutionaries and a serious strengthening of the communist minority, but also engender new forms of mass organisation based on the principles of general assemblies and workers’ councils. This perspective has been validated not only by the soviets of the first international revolutionary wave, but in more recent mass movements – for example the inter-factory strike committees that emerged in Poland in 1980, or the general assemblies that were the focus of discussion and decision-making in the struggle against the CPE in France in 2006 or the Indignados movement in Spain 2011.
It is already significant that the text says nothing at all about the question of the councils, and even appears to hold out the prospect of the communist party coming to power via bourgeois elections. But what is even more significant is that the text doesn’t examine the role of parliament and elections in cases where workers’ councils were being formed and the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat was being directly posed, such as in Germany in 1918, where democratic elections were used as a weapon against the councils, a means of trapping workers in the idea that parliamentary democracy and workers’ councils could in some way co-exist (providing the latter were reduced to tame trade unionist type bodies limited to the individual workplace…). In sum: communists will only be able to act as a party, an organisation which has a real impact on the development of the class struggle, in a pre-revolutionary upsurge, and then it will be more evident than ever that their energies should be directed towards the strengthening of the councils or council-type organisations against the deadly mystifications of bourgeois democracy.
And we should be aware of just how deeply these mystifications have implanted themselves in the minds of the working class, including its revolutionary minorities. The idea that the triumph of democracy and the political victory of the working class amount to the same thing is already present in the 1848 Communist Manifesto. The experience of the Commune enabled Marx and Engels to understand that the working class could not use the existing parliamentary bodies to come to power…and yet how fragile this understanding was, when shortly after writing The Civil War in France, which drew out the lessons of the Commune with magnificent clarity, Marx could still envisage the working class coming to power ‘peacefully’ in certain democratic bourgeois countries like Britain or Holland. And when, in the phase of social democracy which made it seem that the working class could step by step build up its parties and its unions inside the framework of bourgeois society, theoreticians like Kautsky could see no other ‘road to power’ except the parliamentary road[5]. Those within the marxist movement who began to challenge the Kautskyite orthodoxy had a hard battle trying to develop the implications of the new forms of struggle appearing as capitalism’s ascendant epoch drew to a close: the mass strikes in Russia, the appearance of the soviets, the development of wildcat strikes in western Europe. It was through examining these new forms and methods of struggle that Pannekoek, Bukharin and eventually Lenin were able to break through the social democratic consensus and base their programme on the most lucid insights of Marx and Engels – on the recognition that the bourgeois state had to be dismantled, and not by parliamentary decree, but by the new organs of proletarian political power created by the revolution itself. These theoretical developments took place alongside, and in the case of Pannekoek were deeply influenced by, Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the mass strike, which put into question the old social democratic (and, by extension, anarcho-syndicalist) practice of step by step forming the mass organisations that will eventually take over the running of society; in the new conception of Luxemburg and Pannekoek, the revolutionary mass organisation of the working class is a product of the mass movement, and cannot be fabricated by the communist minority in the absence of such a movement.
DP wants us to drop the idea of “anti-electoralism as an eternal principle”. But none of the militants of the social democratic, and then the communist, left fractions considered anti-electoralism as an eternal principle. They were marxists, not anarchists, and they recognised that, in a previous epoch, the period that included the Communist League and the first two Internationals, the strategy of standing workers’ candidates in bourgeois elections could indeed serve what is an “eternal principle” for revolutionaries: the necessity to develop the autonomy of the working class from all other classes. Thus in the mid to late 19th century, marxists advocated participation in bourgeois elections and parliaments because they considered that parliament could still be a field of battle between parties which were tied to an outmoded feudal order, and those which expressed the forward movement of capital, and could thus be critically supported by the workers’ organisations. In this period, it was possible to consider that such alliances could be in the interests of the working class and even a moment in the development of its political class independence. As capitalism reached its limits as a factor of progress, the distinction between progressive and reactionary bourgeois parties became increasingly meaningless, so that the role of revolutionaries in bourgeois parliaments had to be focused more and more on opposing all the different bourgeois factions – on playing the ‘tribune’ role as a lone voice in a purely bourgeois arena. But it was precisely during this phase, the phase of mature social democracy, that the leading currents within many of the workers’ parties were drawn into all kinds of compromises with the capitalist class, even up to the point of accepting posts in government cabinets.
For the left communists, the advent of a period of open revolutionary struggle, and the concomitant triumph of opportunism within the parties of the old International – definitely completed by their role in the war of 1914 and the ensuing revolutionary wave – meant that all the old tactics, even the limited use of elections and parliament as a tribune, had to be thoroughly reassessed. Pannekoek, writing in 1920 when he was still firmly convinced of the necessity for a communist party, accepted that participation in parliament and elections had been a valid strategy in the previous era, but pointed to its pernicious effects in the new conditions:
“Matters change when the struggle of the proletariat enters a revolutionary phase. We are not here concerned with the question of why the parliamentary system is inadequate as a system of government for the masses and why it must give way to the soviet system, but with the utilisation of parliament as a means of struggle by the proletariat. As such, parliamentary activity is the paradigm of struggles in which only the leaders are actively involved and in which the masses themselves play a subordinate role. It consists in individual deputies carrying on the main battle; this is bound to arouse the illusion among the masses that others can do their fighting for them. People used to believe that leaders could obtain important reforms for the workers in parliament; and the illusion even arose that parliamentarians could carry out the transformation to socialism by acts of parliament. Now that parliamentarianism has grown more modest in its claims, one hears the argument that deputies in parliament could make an important contribution to communist propaganda. But this always means that the main emphasis falls on the leaders, and it is taken for granted that specialists will determine policy – even if this is done under the democratic veil of debates and resolutions by congresses; the history of social democracy is a series of unsuccessful attempts to induce the members themselves to determine policy. This is all inevitable while the proletariat is carrying on a parliamentary struggle, while the masses have yet to create organs of self-action, while the revolution has still to be made, that is; and as soon as the masses start to intervene, act and take decisions on their own behalf, the disadvantages of parliamentary struggle become overwhelming.
As we argued above, the tactical problem is how we are to eradicate the traditional bourgeois mentality which paralyses the strength of the proletarian masses; everything which lends new power to the received conceptions is harmful. The most tenacious and intractable element in this mentality is dependence upon leaders, whom the masses leave to determine general questions and to manage their class affairs. Parliamentarianism inevitably tends to inhibit the autonomous activity by the masses that is necessary for revolution. Fine speeches may be made in parliament exhorting the proletariat to revolutionary action; it is not in such words that the latter has its origins, however, but in the hard necessity of there being no other alternative.
Revolution also demands something more than the massive assault that topples a government and which, as we know, cannot be summoned up by leaders, but can only spring from the profound impulse of the masses. Revolution requires social reconstruction to be undertaken, difficult decisions made, the whole proletariat involved in creative action – and this is only possible if first the vanguard, then a greater and greater number take matters in hand themselves, know their own responsibilities, investigate, agitate, wrestle, strive, reflect, assess, seize chances and act upon them. But all this is difficult and laborious; thus, so long as the working class thinks it sees an easier way out through others acting on its behalf leading agitation from a high platform, taking decisions, giving signals for action, making laws – the old habits of thought and the old weaknesses will make it hesitate and remain passive”[6].
Here Pannekoek gets to the root of why the fight for the councils is diametrically opposed to parliamentary activity in all its forms. To make a revolution, the proletariat has to make a fundamental break with old habits of thinking and acting, with the very idea of alienating its own forces through the election of representatives in bourgeois parliaments. For him, the tactic of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’ adopted by the parties of the Communist International (which is very similar to the electoral strategy advocated by DP) could only serve to reinforce the prevailing and paralysing illusions in bourgeois democracy. And we can add that, even though the statutes of the Communist Parties contained a number of precautions against corruption by parliamentary politics, these rules did not prevent the official parties from transforming themselves rather rapidly into vote-chasing machines.
For Pannekoek and other left communists, the same problematic applied to the trade union form, which, while originally emerging as a form of working class self-organisation, had become hopelessly enmeshed in the bourgeois state and its bureaucracy. The counter-revolutionary role played by the old parties and unions in the imperialist war and the proletarian revolution that followed made it clear that the new forms of organisation would develop not inside the shell of the old society, but through an eruption that would shatter the shell itself. In a sense, this was a return to Marx’s observation that the working class is a class of civil society that is not a class of civil society, an outlaw class that by definition can never gain “public legitimacy” in the normal operations of capitalist society. The idea of seeking public legitimacy, of looking for ‘popularity’ and the biggest possible share of the vote, is a gross deformation of the role of communists, whose task is always to defend the future goals in the movement of the present, to speak the truth however unpalatable it may sound, even when this means going against the stream, as revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg did in the face of the wave of nationalist hysteria which temporarily swept over the working class in 1914. Bordiga, who in the debates in the Third International actually considered the question of abstentionism to be a tactic, nevertheless further illuminates the reasons why the ‘electoral’ mentality ties us to bourgeois society. In The Democratic Principle[7], for example, he shows that the principle of bourgeois democracy, the principle of one citizen one vote, is rooted in the very operation of commodity relations, of a society founded on equivalent exchange. A movement for communism is by definition a movement that overcomes the notion of the atomised citizen exercising his rights through the polling booth, as part of a wider struggle against the reified social relationships imposed by the commodity form.
We think that the comrades of the CLT should go back to these theoretical contributions and engage much more deeply with the reasons why these militants rejected all forms of electoral participation. It’s true that DP’s text accepts that there is a danger, confirmed by the German SPD’s vote for war credits in 1914, that party representatives will develop interests independent from the working class. But his answer is that this problem “can be addressed without having to abstain from electoral activities. For example, electoral reps can be required to donate a certain percentage of their salary to the party and be subject to recall by popular vote”. Leaving aside the speculative, even fantastic nature of this whole scenario, this remains a purely formal response which does not get to the heart of the criticisms raised by the likes of Pannekoek and Bordiga.
As we have noted, the CLT is not in any immediate danger of plunging into electoral practices. But its reluctance to consider the real historical conditions facing the communist minority today seems to be pushing it towards a kind of syndicalist activism on the one hand (having said they won’t be running any candidates as yet they say that “our energy right now is being put into making ourselves a more effective organisation and helping get a General membership branch of the IWW started”[8]). More dangerously, its ambiguities about the nature of the ‘left’, which can be seen in the early part of the text, seems to be opening doors to alliances with openly left-capitalist organisations like the Red Party, which looks like an American equivalent of the Communist Party of Great Britain/Weekly Worker in the UK[9], an organisation which has never put into question its historic origins as a faction within Stalinism. Perhaps the CLT sees such alliances as a means of breaking out of its situation as a “small sect without support”, but it is more likely to drown the group in a sea of leftism.
DP’s article, as we have seen, deplores the fact that “large sections of the left” favour direct actionism to the exclusion of a viable electoral strategy. In reality, in a period of considerable difficulty for the working class, where strikes and ‘the movement in the street’ have gone into retreat, many newly politicised elements are being mobilised in support of a ‘new Look’ left in the shape of Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US. These currents all represent a clear attempt to pull militant energies into the dead end of elections and the ‘long march through the institutions’. Communists can only stand against the false hopes they offer by offering a clear critique of bourgeois democracy and its insidious influence within the revolutionary class.
Amos, October 2016
[1]. https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201510/13503/communist-league-... [16] https://communistleaguetampa.org/2016/01/11/debate-on-the-world-party-a-... [17] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201604/13893/once-again-party-... [18]
[2]. https://communistleaguetampa.org/?s=communist+electoral+strategy&submit=... [19] We understand that this is a signed article and may not represent the views of all members of the CLT, but posts by CLT member Pennoid on a thread on libcom, broadly agreeing with the article’s approach, and the absence of any counter arguments by CLT members on their website, seems to indicate that DP’s article has wider support within the group. See https://libcom.org/forums/organise/communist-electoral-strategy-22082016 [20]
[3]. https://workersoffensivegroup.wordpress.com/points-of-unity/; [21] https://workersoffensivegroup.wordpress.com/category/official-statements/ [22]. On elections, the Workers’ Offensive Group says in its points of unity: “All elections are a sham. Political power is fundamentally a question of violence, not votes. The ritual of mass self-delusion that forms part of electoral politics acts as a safe outlet into which the grievances of the exploited class can be harmlessly redirected. Participation in elections helps maintain capitalists’ mental dominion over the working class by reviving the great lie that workers have any voice within this system. Begging pathetically at the feet of the exploiters and entrusting a tiny minority to fight all its battles does not produce independence and assertiveness in the working class, only weakness and submission”.
[4]. The air of unreality also hovers over DP’s view of how the mass party will engage in the field of direct action: “A mass party will have to engage large amounts of workers through “extra-parliamentary” means before it will even stand a chance winning in an electoral campaign. Building class unions, solidarity networks, unemployed councils, mutual aid societies, gun clubs, sports teams, etc. is not to be rejected in favor of electoral action”. This looks very much like more nostalgia for the good old days of social democracy when the working class could maintain its own economic, political and cultural organisms for a lengthy period without them falling into the hands of the bourgeois state.
[5]. See our article on the parliamentarist errors of Engels and Kautsky: https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/199701/1619/revoluti... [23]
[6]. ‘World revolution and communist tactics’, https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/tactics/index.htm [24]
[8]. Again, the Points of Unity published by the Workers’ Offensive Group take a clear position on the union question: “Labor unions, regardless of their internal structure, are not workers’ organizations but organs of the capitalist state that smother and contain the resistance of the working class against the exploitative system through the negotiation and enforcement of contracts with capital. In the heat of the class struggle, the workers must destroy the unions and form their own mass and unitary organizations to direct and carry out their struggle against capitalism”.
[9]. https://red-party.com/ [26]
The discussions around the proposed law on “marriage for all” (same-sex marriage) in France, 2013, aroused much emotion, posturing, grandiloquence and stupidities, and more still when “gender studies” were bandied around as decisive arguments by one camp or another. Then, change of subject, the passionate controversies took a dramatic turn when thousands of refugees, forced from their homes by misery and war, knocked on the door of the developed countries, or when we had the sound of the Kalashnikov aimed at annihilating young people in Paris for their way of life, or the young of Orlando for their sexual orientation. The left, the right, the extreme-right, the extreme-left, all the elements of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie expressed their gut feelings on the media theatre – some among them proclaiming “je suis Charlie” or again “je ne suis pas Charlie”, redoubling the demagogy so as not be outdone by the competition.
Let’s leave the theatre of official politics and return to the basic question posed by racism, xenophobia, sexism and homophobia, by all these social behaviours which reveal human alienation and which can go as far as murder. How does one explain such an unleashing of social violence, how do you understand these prejudices which seem to come from a bygone age of superstition? How, faced with these types of problems, do you guard against the ideological thinking that the bourgeois system abundantly spreads around in order to mask reality and accentuate the divisions which weaken its historic enemy, the class of proletarians?
Of course, one can sense the profound causes of these phenomena in a society divided into antagonistic classes, based on exploitation of man by man, where the commodity imposes its tyranny on all levels of existence, including the most intimate. In a society where a monstrous cold state dominates and watches each individual, it’s not surprising that social violence is extremely high. In this type of society, the Other, the individual in front of us, is straightaway felt as suspect, as a potential danger, at best as a competitor, at worst as an enemy. He is stigmatized for a thousand reasons, because there’s not the same skin colour, the same sex, the same culture, the same religion, the same nationality, the same sexual orientation. Thus the multiple facets of competition that are found at the base of capitalist society regularly give rise to pauperisation, war, and genocides but also at another level, stress, aggression, harassment and psychological suffering, the pogrom mentality, superstition, nihilism and the dissolution of the most elementary social links[i].
But this explanation remains general and is insufficient; it is still necessary to identify the dynamic which generates these prejudices and the acts that they are supposed to justify, or to explain their survival and both their immediate and more deeply-rooted causes. It is a most vital question for the working class. First of all, because in its struggles, it is ceaselessly confronted with the necessity for its forces to come together, to fight for its unity. The struggle to reject or neutralise prejudices which divide its forces, such as racism, sexism or chauvinism for example, is indispensable and it is not won in advance. Secondly, because the revolutionary perspective carried by the working class has the aim of a society without classes, without national frontiers, that’s to say the creation of a human community finally unified at a global level. This means that the proletarian revolution intends to conclude a whole period of human history from the groupings, mixtures and alliances within primitive society up to the struggles of the XIXth century for national unity, a process based on the development of the productivity of labour leading to revolutions in the relations of production and an enlargement of the scale of society.
It’s true that the working class, as a historic class that carries within itself the communist project, as the highest representative of the active principle of solidarity, is already pushed in practice to overcome these divisions. But racism, sexism and xenophobia remain a real problem, since they touch on the subjective factor of the revolution. Objective conditions are not sufficient for the revolution to succeed and it is still necessary for the class to be subjectively capable of undertaking its historic task to the end; for it to acquire, in the course of its struggles, the capacity to unify and organise itself; to develop a depth of intellectual and moral understanding. As for the communist minority, it has to be able to give clear and convincing political orientations, and to constitute a world party when the conditions of the class struggle allow it.
The little book by Patrick Tort, Sexe, race et culture, can help us to better understand these questions and constitutes a real stimulus for the most conscious workers. We already know about the scientific rigour of the works of this author[ii] which are not always easy to read, but the will to make all types of problematic accessible is clearly present here. Conceived under the form of an interview, the book is composed of two parts: the first confronts the question of racism and takes a position on the decision recently made in France by several state and scientific institutions to abandon the use of the word “race”; the second confronts the question of sexism and tries to define the relations between sex and “gender”. All these questions are to be found at the crossroads of biology and the social sciences and cannot begin to be clarified without a critique of the dominant conceptions of “human nature”; in other words, without a critique of the old, congealed opposition between “nature” and “culture”.
Here the contribution of Darwin is considerable. In his own field, the science of life, Darwin puts forward a whole series of theoretical tools and a scientific approach which allow the construction of a materialist vision of the passage of nature to culture, from the reign of the animal kingdom to the social world of man. At the international level Patrick Tort is one of the best authorities on Darwin, and he has now published the complete works in French in the Slatkine (Geneva) and Champion (Paris) editions. The publication of the monumental Dictionnaire du Darwinisme et de l’ évolution, drawn up by him, has put an inestimable tool at our disposal. Notably through the idea of the reverse effect of evolution, he has greatly contributed to making intelligible elements in the anthropological work of Darwin which have been obscured because of their subversive content[iii]. This combat remains very much active today because we still find resistance to the fundamental advances made by Darwin. There are those, trying to avoid the fundamental questions, who feign surprise “What do you see in Darwin? Is this a new cult of a now fashionable scientist?”[iv] There are those that Patrick Tort calls “the premature gravediggers” who, forgetting that Darwin wasn’t a socialist, that he was a man of his time and thus shared some of its prejudices, use carefully isolated quotes as trophies that are supposed to disqualify the whole logic of his work[v].
Of course, we are not necessarily in agreement with all the political positions coming from the text of Patrick Tort. The essential here is to base ourselves on the contributions of different scientific disciplines in order to give more flesh, more clarity to the ideas that, for the most part, marxism has long integrated into its theoretical heritage. The great quality of this author, alongside a rigorous materialist method, is the capacity to bring together different disciplines, his critique of accepted ideas and of good old common sense, products, of both what he calls the “liberal right” and “the dominant progressivist ideology ”. It is this critical approach which enables him to keep his distance from the lumber room of the media, that “great machine of influence”.
The fundamental contribution of the anthropology of Darwin consists of a coherent and materialist description of the emergence of the human species through the mechanism of natural selection, which allows individuals with an advantageous variation to give rise to better adapted and more numerous descendents. Basically the process is the same for all species. In the struggle for existence the least apt are eliminated, which ends up, when certain conditions are met, in the transformation of a species by prolonged selection of advantageous variations, and the appearance of new species. What is transmitted to the descendents, in the case of the higher animals [vi], are not only advantageous biological variations but also the social instincts, the sentiments of sympathy and altruism, which themselves serve to amplify the developments of rational capacities and moral feelings. What happens with man is precisely that the development of sympathy and altruism comes up against the elimination of the weakest and opposes it. The protection of the weak, assistance for outcasts, sympathy towards the stranger who appears similar despite differences in culture and external appearance, as well as all the social institutions responsible for encouraging these reactions, Darwin calls this civilisation. Tort briefly recalls the content:
“Through social instincts (and their consequences on the development of rational and moral capacities) natural selection selects civilisation, which is opposed to natural selection. This is the simplified and current formula of what I have called the reverse effect” (p. 21). It’s a perfectly materialist and dialectical conception. An overturning comes into operation with the appearance of man, who more and more adapts his surroundings to his needs rather than adapting to them, and thus frees himself from the eliminatory grip of natural selection. At the beginning of the process it’s the elimination of the weakest which predominates; then, through a progressive inversion, it’s the protection of the weak that finally imposes itself, an eminent mark of the solidarity of the group. The original error of socio-biology consists of seeing human society as a collection of organisms in struggle; it thus postulates a simple continuity between the biological (reduced to a hypothetical competition of genes) and the social. This is not the case with Darwin. According to him there is a continuity, but it’s a reversive continuity. In effect, the overturning that we have just described produces not a break between biological and social but a new synthesis. According to Tort this notion allows us to understand the theoretical autonomy of the science of man and society, while maintaining the material continuity between nature and culture. It’s a rejection of any dualism, of all rigid opposition between the inner and the acquired, between nature and culture.
The discoveries of Darwin, to which we can add the reverse effect as an indispensible key to understanding his work, represented a real overthrow of our scientific conceptions of the appearance of human society. By calling into question the old certainties (fixism) and the apparent stability of the living world, and by adopting the perspective of its real genealogy, Darwin opened up new horizons. It’s the same type of overturning that was provoked by Anaximander in Greek antiquity when he called into question the dominant view that our planet necessarily had to rest on something. In reality, he affirmed that the Earth floated in space and in this sense there was no up and down. By simply changing how we look at sensual reality, Anaximander opened the door to the discovery of the Earth as a sphere – where people who lived in the antipodes didn’t walk upside-down – and all the scientific advances that flowed from it[vii].
The consequences of Darwin’s discoveries are recalled by Patrick Tort:
At this stage of evolution, natural selection is no longer the main force which governs the future of human beings:
“In other words, if evolution preceded history, history today governs evolution” (p. 1).
“Biology is necessary for the social, but on one hand the social can’t be reduced to the biological, and, on the other hand it is the social which from the point of view of man, actor and judge of his evolution, produces the truth of biology in the capacities that through him biology shows itself apt to reveal” (p. 1).
As there exists a (reversive) continuity between nature and culture, and as “Historic man hasn’t for all that ceased to be an organism, evolution englobes or includes history” (p. 1).
We are not going to reproduce in full the famous quote in chapter IV of The Descent of Man, but only two phrases which are fundamental for understanding the importance of Darwin’s conclusions about man reaching the present stage of “civilisation”: “Once this point is reached, there’s no longer an artificial barrier to prevent sympathies spreading to men of all nations and races. It’s true that if these humans are separated from each other by great differences of exterior appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how it is a long time before we regard them as similar” (Quoted by Tort, p. 23).
By reading The Autobiography[viii] that Darwin reserved solely for his close friends, we can note that he was perfectly conscious of the revolutionary nature of his discoveries, notably of the fact that he called into question belief in God: he himself became an atheist. But he showed an extreme prudence in avoiding, in puritan and religious Victorian England, his book being indexed. We find in this passage the same profound and revolutionary vision of human becoming: national frontiers are artificial barriers that civilisation will have to breach and abolish. Without being communist, without even explicitly envisaging the destruction of national frontiers, Darwin in fact included in his hypothesis a disappearance of the national framework. In this spirit civilisation is not a state of fact, it is a constant and painful movement (“it’s a long time before...”), a continual process of overcoming which, by achieving the unification of humanity, must continue beyond the human species towards sympathy for all sentient beings. Bringing together the perspective forged by Darwin and the one forged by Marx, we consider that on the shoulders of the proletariat and its reconstituted solidarity rests the heavy task of overthrowing bourgeois civilisation in order to allow the free development of human civilisation.
One other important consequence is the way in which we conceive the famous “human nature”. We know the error of the Utopian socialists. Despite all their merits, due to their time they were incapable of defining the premises which, within bourgeois society, favoured the overthrow of existing social relations and the construction of a communist society. It was therefore necessary to invent a whole ideal society which conformed to a human nature as an absolute criterion. By doing this the Utopian socialists took up the dominant vision of their time, an idealist vision still largely extant today, according to which human nature is immutable and eternal. The problem, responded Marx, is that human nature is constantly modified during the course of history. At the same time as man transforms external nature, he transforms his own nature.
The conception defended by Darwin on the relations between nature and culture allows us to go much further than a simple abstract vision of a human nature that’s ephemeral and fluid. A continuity exists between the biological and the cultural, which implies the existence of a constant kernel in human nature, a product of the whole of evolution. Marx shared this vision. It’s what stands out in this passage of Capital where he responds to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham: “To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch”[ix].
Even if the profound roots of human nature have been recognised, the error of interpretation made by the Utopian socialists still remains dominant today. Patrick Tort shows its nature well: “The error is not to affirm the existence of a ‘nature’ in the human being, but to still think of it as an all-powerful heritage which governs it following the intangible law of a sustained and one-sided determinism” (p. 83). This sustained and one-sided dterminism belongs to mechanical materialism. Whereas modern materialism adds an active determination, as Epicurus well understood with his theory of clinamen (the unpredictability or ‘swerve’ of atoms). In his doctorate thesis, The Difference Between the Democritian and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature[x], Marx recognised the considerable contribution of Epicurus which went beyond the reductionist atomism of Lucretius and Democritus and which introduced freedom into matter. This freedom signified that in nature nothing was predestined as absolute determinism claimed, and that there was space for the spontaneity of agents. It meant that for organisms which have acquired a certain autonomy, “at any moment, I can decide on an act, a contrary act or a non-act without the need to be ‘programmed’” (p. 83).
This active materialism – not passive and submissive – defended by Patrick Tort leads to a definition which should be etched in all memories: “’human nature’ is the incalculable sum of all the possibilities of humanity. Or again, on a deliberately existential mode: ‘human nature’ is what is in our own hands” (p. 86).
We have seen above that the persistence of racism, sexism and homophobia are products of a society divided into classes. It’s important to keep this in mind because it is then possible to understand why the struggle of the proletariat, because it’s the only class that can lead to the abolition of classes, includes the struggle against these different phenomena. Whereas the inverse is not true. As soon as anti-racism or feminism claim to wage an autonomous struggle they rapidly become a weapon against the working class and take their place within the dominant ideology. It’s the same with pacifism which, when it’s not explicitly linked to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against capitalism as a social system, is transformed into a dangerous mystification.
But these are still real problems for the proletariat and we must, with Tort, refine the analysis. Xenophobia is not simply a rejection of the Other because of the perception of totally different characteristics. This element is flagrant in the case of racism, but that can and must be explained in a deeper way: “Racism is the rejection of what one exteriorises, of what one hates most in oneself” (p. 22). Fundamentally, what is rejected in the Other is not the difference, it’s what one wants to banish from oneself. “In the most extreme versions, racism must then define itself less as the simple ‘rejection of the Other’ than as the negation of similarity in similarity through the fabrication of the “Other” as vile and threatening” (p. 23).
The person or population aimed at doesn’t represent an unknown menace; it is considered a threat because it is precisely part of ourselves, the part that we consider contemptible. As Patrick Tort says, German Jews and Christians lived together for more than sixteen centuries. It is the one who is most similar that becomes the victim that it’s necessary to kill. In the Old Testament, “the ritual of the ‘scapegoat’ is a ritual of atonement, which exteriorises the guilty part of oneself and dedicates it to the demon and symbolic death in the desert” (p. 28). We know that bourgeois society has very often been the theatre of pogroms or genocides and that the dominant class bears the entire responsibility for them. But it’s necessary to widen our understanding of these phenomena and not stop at their most spectacular manifestations. We should examine to what point the search for a scapegoat and the pogromist mentality, with the extreme violence that they contain, are rooted in the soil of capitalist society, where they always find the nourishment they need.
If you re-read the passage from The Descent of Man quoted above, you can understand better what Darwin wanted to underline with these words: “It’s a long time before we regard them as similar”. The very principle of civilisation is the process of the development of sympathy, that’s to say the recognition of similarity in the other. As this civilisation is the product of natural selection before being overthrown, the process of the elimination of the elimination (the reverse effect according to Tort) is still ongoing and a backward turn is always periodically possible. But from what we’ve said above it means we can’t talk about a still primitive “human nature”. “Anthropology influenced by Darwin has never ceased to metaphorically use a biological concept in order to interpret, within civilisation, the reappearance of ancestral behaviours that return the human to his animal origins: this is the concept of the atavistic return, unfortunately inflated and besmirched in the French hereditary psychiatry of the nineteenth century and in the Italian criminal anthropology which inspired it, but which is nevertheless useful for thinking about what remains, and what can potentially re-emerge, of a persistent ancestral heritage” (p. 27).
The argument most used to fight racism consists of explaining that what appears as great differences in exterior appearances of human beings is objectively negligible when put on the genetic or molecular level. We know very little about “race”, the argument goes on, because in fact it’s the name used for a pseudo-reality and what we do know about it seems enough to conclude that it is non-existent. It is thus ridiculous to be racist. This argument is totally unworkable says Patrick Tort. If tomorrow, scientific research affirmed, thanks to new discoveries, that “races” existed biologically, would that then justify racism? The weakness of this argument comes from the fact that racism addresses itself to phenotypes[xi](biological and cultural) and not to genotypes[xii], to whole individuals with their observable characteristics and not to their molecules. It is thus easy for identity-based conservatism (Alain de Benoist, Zemmour, Le Pen) and for all the racists to appeal to common sense: the races are an evidence that all the world can see, it’s enough to compare a Scandinavian and an Indian.
It’s certain that the non-scientific use which is made of the word “race” totally disqualifies its use and obliges us to at least put it in inverted commas. But in reality “races” do exist and as such correspond to “varieties” which distinguish the identifiable subdivisions within a species. Certainly it’s a very difficult notion to demarcate, it is not homogenous, it remains even more in flux than the notion of species, because the living ceaselessly evolve under the effect of incessant variations and the modification of their milieu. Thus species are not perennial entities but groups that classification ranges under categories. They exist nevertheless. Darwin showed that species are in permanent transformation, but that at the same time it is possible to distinguish them because they correspond to a stabilisation – certainly relative or temporary if they are placed on a geological time-scale – imposed by the presence of other species in competition with them in the struggle for existence, and even by the need for classification. There is, under the regularity of specific forms, an effective combination in relation to a given milieu and an ecological niche which explains why individuals of the same species look alike. “Even if it’s understood that in the history of the science of organisms, classificatory divisions have only a temporary and technical value, there is still a naturalist sense to say that there is a single human species, and that this species, as roughly all biological species, comprises of varieties. In the naturalist tradition ‘race’ is synonymous with ‘variety’” (p. 33).
Racism is a social phenomenon and it is at this level that it’s necessary to respond to it. From this point of view the colonial past continues to have harmful consequences and the proletariat will have to firmly combat “an ideology which turns human characteristics into signs of native and permanent inferiority, as well as a threat to other human beings” (p. 41).
The problematic is globally the same for the question of sexism. Sex is a biological reality, but “gender” is really a constructed cultural reality and thus a becoming, a possibility which remains open. The radical attitude of some feminists or of certain “gender studies” which want to “denaturalise” sex is as stupid as that which denies the reality of visible inter-racial differences. The fight for the social equality of men and women, which will never happen under capitalism, the fight for sympathy towards others, that’s to say for the recognition of the Other as similar despite all the cultural differences – all these combats are at the heart of Darwin’s anthropology. Proletarian ethics continue this heritage. That’s why the struggle for communism is not the work of robotised and undifferentiated individuals, and has nothing to do with a negation of cultural differences. It defines itself as unification in diversity, inclusion of the Other within one association, the creation of a community which has need of the richness of all cultures[xiii].
The critique of dualism and the demand for a reversive continuity between nature and culture, between biology and society, leads us to a rigorous definition of human nature and takes up the Darwinian idea of civilisation as a still unachieved process. What are the consequences for the revolutionary struggle? Within capitalism this struggle is before everything a struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat, even if it bears within it the emancipation of all of humanity. The proletariat must prepare itself for a particularly difficult civil war faced with a bourgeoisie which will never accept giving up power. However it’s not mainly by force of arms that the proletariat will carry the decision. The essence of its strength comes from its capacity for organisation, from its class consciousness and in its natural tendency, on the one hand to achieve unity and on the other hand to draw behind it all the non-exploited layers, or, at least, to neutralise them in periods of indecision about the outcome of the combat. Does this process of unification and integration operate automatically under the pretext that man is a social being and that human nature contains the evolutionary advantage supplied by the generalisation of the sentiment of sympathy? Of course not. But the results of the scientific approach exposed in the book by Patrick Tort, confirm the marxist vision of the importance of the subjective factor for the proletariat, in particular of consciousness, and more globally of culture. They confirm the validity of the Communist Left against the fatalism of degenerating social democracy which defended the opportunist position of a gradual, automatic and peaceful passage of capitalism to socialism. They confirm that the future of humanity is in the hands of the proletariat.
Avrom Elberg
[i] On the nature of violence within bourgeois society, see our article: “Terrror, terrorism and class violence”:https://en.internationalism.org/ir/014_terror.html [30]. International Review, no. 14, 1978 on our site.
[ii] Tort demonstrates this all through the 1000 pages of Qu’est que le materialisme? , Paris, Berlin, 2006. We recommend this book of Patrick Tort in order to deepen the questions treated here.
[iii] We have presented the work of this author and the idea of the reverse effect of evolution in the article The Darwin Effect, A materialist conception of the origins of morality and civilisation on our site https://en.internationalism.org/book/export/html/2842 [31]
[iv] On France Culture, Jean Gayon, a philosopher specialising in the history of sciences and epistemology, doesn’t fear resorting to banality when he declares of Darwin that “he’s neither Jesus nor Marx” (La Marche des Sciences, broadcast February 4, 2016, called “Darwin under fire from today’s reality”).
[v] The International Communist Party which publishes Le Proletaire in France undoubtedly belong to the “premature gravediggers”. You can verify this by reading its magazine, Programme Communiste no. 102, February 2014. In a polemic aimed at the ICC, this group, blinded by the Malthusian legend of Darwin, undertake a real tour de force by confusing not only the Darwin and the social Darwinism of Spencer, but in the same outburst, Darwin with sociobiology.
[vi] By “higher animals” traditionally in natural history we mean the warm-blooded vertebrates - the birds and mammals.
[vii] See our article on the ICC English website https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201203/4739/reading-notes-science-and-marxism [32].
[ix] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S5 [34]
Karl Marx, Capital, chapter XXIV, Section V, “The so-called labour funds”.
[xi] Phenotypes: in genetics, all of the observable characteristics of an individual.
[xii] Genotype: all of an individual’s genes.
[xiii] The proletarian vision of the richness of culture, considered as a positive factor in the fight for unity in struggle – in total opposition to multiculturalism and bourgeois communalism which reproduce the ideology of identity politics– is developed, with numerous historical examples, in our article “Immigration and the workers’ movement” https://en.internationalism.org/ir/140/immigration [36] on our website.
This article, written by a close contact of the ICC in the USA, looks at the current difficulties of the American bourgeoisie as revealed in the Trump candidacy and the rise of populism. Although written before the most recent scandal about Trump’s abusive attitude to women, this episode confirms a central point of the analysis in the article – the existence of a concerted attempt by the more serious factions of the ruling class, across the party divide, to keep Trump out of the White house.
A second part of the article, looking more closely at the situation of the working class in the US, and particularly the deep divisions within its ranks, will be published in the wake of the election.
As the 2016 US Presidential campaign approaches its crescendo, the media promises us this election might be the most important in US History. The bombastic billionaire Donald J. Trump, representing the Republican Party, and the much berated former First Lady and Democratic Senator from New York Hillary Rodham Clinton face one another in a dramatic showdown amid a media spectacle designed to convince the populace of the absolute importance of participating in the electoral process even when neither candidate is a source of great inspiration.
For the vast majority of the pundits, commentators and analysts arrayed on cable television each evening, and whose articles litter Facebook feeds, it is absolutely imperative for the American public to defeat the racist, xenophobic and even ‘fascist’ menace of Trump, even if it means voting for a less than stellar candidate in Clinton. Meanwhile, the minority of talking heads aligned with Trump implore the American voter to reject the politics of the status quo, take a chance on a true outsider and defeat the criminal Clinton, who they say belongs in prison anyway. This amped up rhetoric makes it all look like high stakes for the country and indeed the entire world. The main theme the media pushes day in and day out is that a veritable existential crisis of global civilization might befall us all should Trump somehow win the White House.
From our perspective, we have to once again categorically state the well-tested position of the communist left that the working class has nothing to gain by participating in this electoral swamp. Whether it is voting for Clinton to stop the country from falling into the hands of a dangerous tyrant, pulling the lever for Trump to reject the status quo and “make America great again” or supporting a minor party candidate to display one’s utter disgust with the other options, voting only serves to draw the working class onto the political terrain of the bourgeoisie and derail it from an autonomous fight to defend its living and working conditions.
At the end of the day, whoever wins the election and becomes the next President of the United States, the fundamental underlying conditions of capitalist decomposition that drive the deepening problems of bourgeois political life will remain. Electing Clinton might stop Trump, but it won’t stop the economic, social and cultural dislocations that drive Trumpism (and the populist upsurge more broadly). Electing Trump might stop the shady, corrupt, neo-liberal Clinton from assuming office, but wouldn’t the former reality TV star and neophyte politician really just turn policy over to the same old clique of “experts” as before? And voting for a minor party candidate like Jill Stein (Green Party) or Gary Johnson (Libertarian) might make one feel good about oneself for a few moments as a protest against the two main choices, but then the sad realization that either Clinton or Trump will be President will assuredly quickly set in. What is to be gained then from voting?
No, the only genuine route to struggle against all this for the working class is to resume the defense of its living and working conditions outside this sick electoral circus and beyond the control of all the bourgeois parties – right, left or center. While we recognize that present conditions may certainly hamper this process and that as a result many sections of the working class will be drawn into this electoral fray on one side or the other, we see no reason why this should alter our defense of the principle of abstaining from bourgeois elections that has been a fundamental position of the communist left for the last century
We also must say that on an objective level, the evolution of the US political scene over the last several years has been a stark confirmation of the analysis we have been developing since at least the botched Presidential Election of 2000 that led to George W. Bush becoming President over Al Gore – against the wishes of the main factions of the US bourgeoisie. According to this analysis, the conditions of capitalist social decomposition are exerting a reciprocal effect on the life of the ruling class itself, making it more and more difficult for the US bourgeoisie to control the outcome of its electoral apparatus to produce the results it desires. The botched election of 2000 led to the eight-year Bush Presidency that largely squandered the inter-imperialist advantage the 9/11 attacks gave the US state by invading Iraq in a unilateral and careless way, leading to a precipitous decline in the prestige of the United States on the international level and the increasing frustration of its imperialist goals.
While the US bourgeoisie was able to temporarily right the ship with the election of the first African-American President Barack Obama in 2008 – reinvigorating the image of the US state internationally, reviving the electoral illusion for millions, especially among the younger generations, and providing a measured response to the outbreak of the Great Recession in 2008 – these gains proved frustratingly fleeting. Obama’s Presidency served to ignite a fierce right-wing resistance in the form of the Tea Party, which over the course of his term in office saw the Republican Party increasingly fall under the influence of an erratic and ideologically driven faction of right-wing diehards who could not be trusted to take the reigns of national government.1
Although early in his administration Obama was able to ram through a health care reform plan that has so far survived court challenges from the right, as his Presidency has unfolded, it has become increasingly clear to large swathes of the American public who voted for him that he would simply not be the transformative figure of his campaign rhetoric: he has continued Bush’s mass surveillance programs, aggressively stepped up America’s droning operations abroad, done little to counter income inequality, increased deportations of immigrants and surrounded himself with Wall Street insiders from the start.
Moreover, although Obama has so far avoided entangling the US state in new Bush style Cowboy adventures abroad, his stated international policy of “leading from behind” has not endeared him to the war hawks in either party, as he has come in for increasingly harsh criticism for not standing up to Putin, allowing Syria’s Assad to cross the red line of chemical weapons use without consequences, watching Libya slip into chaos and not sufficiently bombing the Islamic State. On the domestic front, the unabated march of income inequality, the continued hollowing out of the “middle class,” and a failure to bring the contentious political rancor about immigration to a close have fueled a furious “populist” rejection of Obama’s Presidency by many in the so-called “white working class.” 2
This populist upsurge, coupled with the increasing descent of the Republican Party into ideologically driven positions, has created a dangerous situation for the US bourgeoisie at the close of the Obama Presidency. No longer able to trust the Republican Party with national office, the main factions of the US bourgeoisie have been forced to rely almost solely on the Democratic Party as the party of national governance. The increasing difficulty to manipulate election results and the now centuries old institutions of the US state have meant that Obama has had to deal with a Republican Congress for most of his Presidency. This has only increased the pressure on the Democratic Party to transform itself from the ostensible “party of the working class” to a neo-liberal party of technocratic governance and to increasingly show this face to the American public.
As a result, over the course of the Obama Presidency, the Democratic Party itself has become increasingly unmasked as a ‘neo-liberal’ party beholden to the same capitalist interests as the Republicans – discrediting it in the eyes of millions, especially among white workers and self-employed people who have become enamored by Trump’s populism, but also the younger generations, many of whom who were attracted to the insurgent candidacy of the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders during the primary campaign.
These are the main fault lines that have defined the 2016 Presidential campaign for the US bourgeoisie. On the one hand stands a dangerous figure the main factions of the bourgeoisie simply cannot risk assuming the ship of state; on the other a largely discredited representative of the old political guard, who is despised by large sections of the population both right and left – if for different reasons. How can the bourgeoisie manage such a perilous situation? We will explore that question in some analytical detail below.
One thing in this election campaign is certain: the main factions of the US bourgeoisie do not want Trump to win the Presidency. This is true regardless of political party. The Republican Party establishment is as much afraid of a Trump Presidency as the Democratic Party. Major figures in the Republican Party such as the Bush family have signaled they will not vote for Trump. Staples of the “movement conservative” press like the National Review actively oppose him and Republican candidates for Congress and the Senate have had to keep their distance lest they alienate the all important swing voter. While Trump may have the stated support of some Republican figures concerned about their own political future, who do not want to run afoul of the populist upsurge, it’s clear that Trump is regarded as an interloper in the Republican Party.3 Once a Democrat who supported abortion rights and socialized medicine, and who has even sung the praises of the Clintons in the past, Trump’s credentials as a social conservative are in serious doubt. Moreover, his willingness to trash the Iraq War, run down the Bushes and praise Russian President Putin are not in keeping with the Republican Party’s neo-conservative doctrines on foreign policy. So how in the heck did Trump win the Republican Party nomination for President?
The answer to this lies as much in the trajectory of the GOP itself, as in the figure of Trump. As the Obama Presidency unfolded, the Republican Party – already reeling from the disastrous second Bush Presidency – adopted an increasingly hostile and oppositional stance to the President. In the 2010 mid-term elections a new crop of hardcore ideologues associated with the Tea Party movement were elected to Congress, forcing the Republican Party establishment to accommodate an increasingly boisterous right-wing allergic to compromise and even to governance itself.
From violently opposing Obama’ healthcare reform efforts to government shutdowns and even threatening to default on the US national debt, the Tea Party insurgency gave the Republican Party new electoral life in the wake of Obama’s rousing victory, while at the same time threatening the stability of GOP institutions. From 2009, the Republican Party played a dangerous game with the Tea Party, whereby it reaped its insurgent energy for electoral success, while risking a hostile takeover by a virtual mob-like hydra of hardcore right-wingers within its ranks. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner was forced to play a careful cat and mouse game with these insurgents, balancing electoral and political success with the need for actual state governance, which always requires compromises with the other side of the aisle. Eventually however, dealing with the Tea Party insurgents proved too much for Boehner and he resigned from the Speakership in 2014, at which point it was only reluctantly assumed by Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan.
As the Obama Presidency unfolded, it became increasingly clear to the main factions of the US bourgeoisie that the Republican Party could not be trusted to contain its radicals and therefore it was not a viable option to put a Republican in charge of the White House. With a choice between functional gridlock and uncertainty of what an empowered Tea Party movement would bring forth in the Republican Party, the main factions of the US bourgeoisie opted for the former. It was in this context that the US bourgeoisie began preparations for Hillary Clinton, then serving as Obama’s Secretary of State, to succeed Obama as President.
However, just because the main factions of the bourgeoisie have decided to back one candidate in the election doesn’t mean they cancel the campaign. The state still must field candidates from each of the main parties in order to preserve its democratic façade. And although historically the US state has had remarkable success in manipulating the electoral process to produce the desired outcome – particularly through manipulation of the media narrative – the process is not guaranteed to always work as planned, as the election of 2000 showed. In politics, as in life, accidents happen. With each election there is the risk the wrong candidate will win and the US bourgeoisie will be stuck with a less than optimum choice in the executive mansion. While in times past this has not posed a dramatic problem as generally each candidate could be steered by the institutions of the state (the permanent bureaucracy) towards policies enjoying a general consensus among the main factions of the ruling class, the present day descent of the Republican Party has complicated the matter, making it that much more essential that the Democrat prevail in the end.
Historically, the long drawn out primary process has been the main tool through which the US bourgeoisie ensured that the best possible candidate, from its point of view, would become the nominee of each major party. The primary process is consciously designed to weed out mavericks and insurgents as it favors establishment candidates with the political and financial backing of the party hierarchy. However, much like in 2012, the 2016 Republican Party primary opened with a carnival-like atmosphere. With 17 candidates representing various factions of the party, including maverick billionaire Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party primary was generally billed as the contest to see who would lose to Hillary Clinton in the General Election.
Nevertheless, even if the main factions of the bourgeoisie were generally lined up behind Clinton, it was still desirable for them to push forward a Republican who could be a credible governing alternative if an accident happened or Clinton’s own legal troubles proved too much to overcome. Set up for this task were figures like former Florida Governor (and brother and son to former Presidents) Jeb Bush, Florida Senator Marco Rubio (an Hispanic who once favored immigration reform) and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (a darling of the Tea Party who nevertheless appeared to govern effectively, having faced down mass protests over his right-to-work law in 2011 and an attempt to recall him from office). Each of these candidates had their own political baggage, but they had nevertheless shown themselves to be malleable to the political consensus of the main factions of the bourgeoisie.
Nevertheless, the 2016 Republican primary would not turn out like it did in 2012 when establishment candidate Mitt Romney (considered a safe alternative to Barack Obama) fended off a series of insurgent challengers to secure the nomination. The 2016 contest would see Trump systematically take down each of his rivals with a hurl of personal insults and embarrassing call-outs of their political failures. Bush and Rubio were denounced as soft on immigration, while Scott Walker was dispatched for turning his state into a fiscal disaster.4 None of these establishment candidates ever appeared to pose a serious challenge to Trump, flooring the political pundits and seemingly putting fear into the hearts of bourgeois institutions. In fact, Trump’s only serious challenger, the Tea Party firebrand Ted Cruz, was himself a radical outsider despised by a political establishment that only belatedly coalesced around him to try to stop an even greater evil in Trump.
When Trump accepted the Republican Party nomination for President at the party convention in July, it was the culmination of some of the deepest fears of the main factions of the US bourgeoisie (outside of proletarian revolution): an unpredictable, erratic and dangerous figure, considered something like a Messiah to his followers, had usurped the mantle of one of its two main political parties. Certainly, from the point of view of the main factions of the bourgeois, the two party system was now in jeopardy, if not the democratic ideological apparatus itself. There was nothing left to do, but to furiously oppose Trump in the general election – something which, as we will see, the main factions of the bourgeoisie had already concluded required Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination.
But how did Trump do it? How did he succeed where so many insurgent campaigns had faltered before? This is a question that will likely puzzle academic political scientists and sociologists for some time to come, but what seems clear is that Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party is a result of the intersection of his embrace of an international wave of populist politics and his unique personality and personal wealth. Not being beholden to political donors and party institutional structures, Trump was free to conduct a true maverick campaign that took up the main themes of political populism emerging across the old industrial world today: a critique of neo-liberal policies, a promise to defend domestic industries and jobs from outsourcing and international trade deals, a pledge to beef up the safety net for displaced workers and a fierce opposition to immigration – seen by many ‘lower class’ whites as the source of lower wages, declining living standards and community disintegration.5
Substantively, these policies have an appeal to many,, even if only in the sense that they appear the opposite of the bourgeois policy consensus from both major parties over the last several decades.. Copying part of the stylistic playbook of Italian fascism, Trump has built a virtual cult of personality around himself (something that goes back to his days as a pop culture icon in reality TV) that has captured the attention of millions of Americans who are so disgusted with the politics of the neo-liberal capitalist consensus they are willing to take a chance on a man every “responsible” media outlet and pundit tells them is a disaster in the making. However, from the point of view of Trump’s base, the disaster has already happened, only continues to deepen and none of the “responsible” candidates appear to want to do anything about it. Trump’s candidacy is in large part an insurgency fueled by the desperation of millions of working class people whose once relatively stable jobs and expectation of social improvement appear to have been frustrated precisely by the kind of policies liberal elite consensus tells them are in their best interests (Globalization, outsourcing, free trade, etc.).
Still, even if Trump’s stated policy preferences are not in line with the wishes of the main factions of the ruling class today, we must be clear that they nevertheless do not escape the realm of bourgeois policy itself. In fact, it is probably the case that the main factions of the bourgeoisie are right that his stated policies are simply incompatible with the objective political-economic condition of the capitalist world today. Should he by some chance upset expectations and win the Presidency, the working class should be clear that this would not result in the restoration of some Halcyon way of life from the good old days of the post-World War II economic expansion. Rather, he will likely either fail miserably in implementing his policies due to resistance from other bourgeois factions or we will find out that his Presidential aims were in fact a giant hoax all along, as he hands real executive power off to the professional politicians and policy wonks of the very same factions of the ruling class he claims to hate.6 And of course, if he ever did implement his stated policies, that would certainly make things even worse for the majority of the working class - as British workers have already found to their cost, with a collapse in the pound sterling and corresponding abrupt increase in inflation. Trumpian style populism is no answer for what ails the working class.
As we have seen, the Republican Party has rendered itself too volatile for the main factions of the bourgeoisie to trust in the executive mansion at this juncture in time. However, the very descent of the Republican Party has had a reciprocal effect on the Democratic Party, whereby it is increasingly called upon to shed its veneer as the “party of the working class,” and reveal itself as the neo-liberal capitalist institution it is. This process has accelerated over the course of the 2016 campaign and was particularly manifested in the contentious primary showdown between the establishment candidate Hillary Clinton and insurgent upstart Bernie Sanders – the “democratic socialist” Senator from Vermont.
As the 2016 primary season began, the main factions of the bourgeoisie had already long ago settled on Hillary Clinton as their preferred candidate to succeed Obama in the White House. Whatever their fierce rivalry in the 2008 Democratic primary, which saw Obama apply a momentary brake to Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions, the main factions of the bourgeoisie believed that a Clinton Presidency would be the best chance for a stable transition to a new administration and could keep the democratic electoral illusion going. Having voted in Obama as the first African-American President in 2008, the American public would now have the chance in 2016 to vote in the first female President. Having supposedly defeated racism in the 2008 election, the American voter was now ostensibly given the chance to deliver a giant victory for the feminist cause. As such, this time the Democratic primary was supposed to be a virtual coronation of Queen Hillary, as she was expected to face no serious challengers. In fact, many pundits worried that the lack of a serious primary challenger might put her off the game when the general election campaign started in the summer against a battle-tested Republican nominee.
Alas, the coronation proved to be long in coming. The Clinton campaign would face a protracted and surprisingly strong primary challenge from the left in the form of Vermont’s “democratic socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ insurgent campaign was likely not anticipated by the main factions of the bourgeoisie, who probably believed he would amount to little more than a protest candidate earning a paltry single digit vote share. However, as Sanders managed a virtual tie with Hillary in the pivotal Iowa caucus and then surged to clobber her in the New Hampshire primary, the main factions of the bourgeoisie – through the institutions of the Democratic Party and the liberal media – were thrown into a panic.
Buoyed by overwhelming support from the so-called “millennial” generation of younger voters who regard Clinton as part of a discredited old guard of neo-liberal politicians out of touch with the emerging “progressive” consensus, Sanders threatened to make a real game of it. Even if he wouldn’t actually win the primary, his protracted presence – running a genuine campaign in which he correctly and effectively painted Clinton as a neo-liberal friend of Wall Street – threatened to weaken the candidate preferred by the main factions of the bourgeoisie in the general election. Already facing possible indictment over her email scandals and already detested by many voters after years of right-wing attacks, Clinton could not afford to lose the millennial generation (so critical in Obama’s electoral victories) to third party candidates or protest abstentionism.
What followed can be described as nothing less than a political nightmare for the Democratic Party, and its allies in the media, as seemingly no plausible attack was left unused in the quest to make sure Clinton prevailed. Sanders was roundly attacked in the media for being a utopian dreamer out of touch with objective reality, and his supporters were painted as mostly white privileged brats who just wanted everything for free. The Clinton campaign actually employed a small army of paid operatives to patrol social media to “correct” anti-Hillary posts and degrade Sanders. The Vermont Senator’s male supporters were labeled misogynist “Bernie Bros,” while Sanders himself was said to be myopically concerned with class and economic inequality to the detriment of the Democratic Party’s tried and true identity politics around race, gender and sexual orientation. This was of course a way of slandering Sanders and his supporters as out-of-touch white guys, blinded by their “white privilege.” The Clinton campaign actually trotted out African-American surrogates, like former Civil Rights activist turned Congressman John Lewis, to delegitimize Sanders’ own background as a civil rights campaigner in the 1960s while a student at the University of Chicago.
In a bizarre turn of events, before the primary was over, the Clinton campaign, her surrogates, the Democratic Party itself and the liberal media were all basically running a campaign against Roosevelt’s New Deal itself, suggesting that it was based on “white privilege” and that many of its structures were simply incompatible with social reality today.7 Clinton ran against socialized medicine, juxtaposing it to the great “achievement” of the Obama administration – Obamacare, which still leaves millions of Americans without health insurance – and argued Sanders’ goal of free tuition at state universities was simply practically impossible. Rather than run a “Hope and Change” and “Yes, We Can!” campaign as Obama had in 2008, winning over millienials in the process, Hillary was forced to run on an “Accept and be Satisfied” and “No, We Can’t” message. Far from being a candidate of transformative progressive change, Clinton and the Democratic Party itself were revealed as part and parcel of the capitalist political infrastructure, just more useless politicians like all the other useless politicians for tens of thousands of younger voters who had become enamored of Sanders’ message of an expanded Social Democracy and political mobilization in the context of the emergence of something resembling a movement culture.
As the primary progressed and voting irregularity after voting irregularity emerged, many Sanders supporters became increasingly convinced that the Democratic Party was in fact stealing the election from their candidate and handing it over to Clinton in something of a corporate coup d’etat. These suspicions were confirmed in the summer when WikiLeaks released a series of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) showing that the party structures did in fact conspire to defeat Sanders and ensure Clinton was their party’s nominee. However, whatever the veracity of the various “vote rigging” allegations made against the Democratic Party by Sanders supporters, the fact that so many believe them is itself an ominous sign. The Democratic Party and its nominee not only appear as corporate shills to many in the younger generations, they also seem to operate on the level of a third world tyranny. The democratic electoral apparatus itself is now called into question as a result of the Democratic Party’s rather desperate and clumsy conduct in the primary campaign to ensure Clinton would fend off the challenge from Sanders.
Of course, the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party wouldn’t have engaged in such tactics if they didn’t think it was to their electoral advantage and indeed this all proved too much for Bernie Sanders to overcome. For whatever his strengths among disillusioned younger voters and those liberals and progressives disappointed with the Obama legacy, Sanders simply could not make major headway with older minority voters, older women and the various levels of the “professional class” that have become the Democratic Party’s electoral base. The Clinton campaign played its advantage with minorities to the hilt, often engaging in blatant pandering to these groups in something of an absurd complement to Trump’s racial demagoguery. In one debate, Clinton promised not to deport non-criminal illegal immigrants – a promise few serious observers can believe she has any intention of keeping if elected.8 Clinton’s new found progressive discourse on race stood in stark contrast to her conduct as First Lady when she demonized black youth as “Super Predators” or in the 2008 Democratic Primary, when her campaign used racial dog whistle politics to attack Obama for attending the church of the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright.9
Clinton’s blatant flip-flopping on racial politics stood for many as another example of the Clintons’ willingness to “triangulate,” which means being willing to say whatever is politically convenient for them at the moment for a particular audience. Far from constituting the optimistic candidate of a better tomorrow, Clinton has come to be despised by many would-be Democratic Party voters as a slick but substanceless political operative who will say whatever it takes in her quest for political power. Many appear to hate her even more than they hate Trump, even if it’s only because they assume Trump is honest about his bigotry, while Clinton hides her regressive policies behind nice-sounding, but utterly dishonest rhetoric.
In the end, all of Clinton’s advantages proved too much for the upstart Sanders campaign to overcome and Clinton was eventually able to secure the Democratic nomination in advance of the party’s convention in Philadelphia in July. Still, having won 45% of the vote in the primary, Senator Sanders had built up considerable political capital within the Democratic Party. While the main factions of the bourgeoisie may hate him, they also know they need him to play along if their goal of assuring Clinton ascends to the White House over Trump will be achieved. What would Sanders do? Would he go rogue and run as a third party candidate splintering the Democratic Party vote and handing the Presidency to Trump? Would he endorse the Green Party candidate Jill Stein with the same result or would he accept his defeat “graciously,” endorse Clinton and turn his attention to defeating the greater evil of Donald J. Trump?
Anyone who has followed Sanders’ career over the years already knew the answer. Although nominally a political independent, Sanders has always caucused with the Democrats in Congress. He campaigned for Bill Clinton in 1996 and has publicly criticized third party candidates in the past. However distasteful it was to him after his stinging political defeat in a contest that was almost certainly not fair even by bourgeois standards, Sanders nevertheless endorsed Clinton and promised to do whatever he could to keep Trump from becoming President. He gave a rousing speech at the Democratic convention actually claiming – after months of saying the opposite – that Clinton would make a “great President.” From a dangerous insurgent threatening to derail the main factions of the bourgeoisie’s plans, Sanders now became their “useful idiot,” nevertheless becoming among the most important figures in the general election, tasked with delivering his millennial followers for Clinton.
The problem for the main factions of the bourgeoisie was that, to many of Sanders’ erstwhile supporters, this sudden about-face did not seem at all credible. How could the beloved and incorruptible Bernie go from a harsh critic of this war-mongering corporate stooge to calling her a great candidate for President virtually overnight? Many refused to believe it or concluded that some coercion had been worked to make Sanders change course. What did they threaten him with? A harsh lesson in the realities of bourgeois electoral politics was being taught. Still others simply gave up on the Bernie bandwagon and concluded he was a sell-out politician himself who took millions of dollars in small donations, promising a new kind of politics only to turn it all over to the same corporatists he claimed to despise. Many of these voters have since moved on to Greener pastures (no pun intended), such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Others, impressed with Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson’s stance on legalizing marijuana, now carry his banner.
In any case, Clinton’s continuing difficulties with millennial voters is now a major problem for the main factions of the bourgeoisie. Younger voters’ fascination with Barack Obama was the main catalyst for his two electoral victories. Now eight years after Obama’s historic election, many millennials have given up on the Democratic Party altogether – seeing it as the corrupt neo-liberal capitalist institution it is. In their immediate quest to get Clinton elected over Trump, the main factions of the bourgeoisie have unleashed a massive propaganda campaign designed to make these millennials vote for Hillary anyway. This has taken the form of a typical anti-fascist campaign, attempting to convince them that whatever their distaste for Clinton, Trump will inevitably be worse. The fascist must be stopped even if it means voting for the contemptible corporatist.
But the propaganda campaign hasn’t stopped there. A viciousshame campaign has been unleashed in the media and on social networks, shaming anyone who says they will vote third party or stay at home in November. Denouncing such voters as “spoiled,” “privileged” or simply race baiting them as out-of-touch white men, the ideological mouthpieces of the ruling class are engaged in an intense campaign to discipline the younger generation and instruct them in the proper rules of American two-party democracy In the United States’ first-past-the-post system, Duverger’s Law10 is operative – you only get two choices. Voting for a minor party candidate or staying at home will only help the insurgent neo-fascist populism that is on the rise today. If Trump wins it will be the millennial generation’s fault, or Sanders fault or the fault of those political “purists” too good to cast a vote for a flawed candidate. According to this ideological campaign, it will be anyone but the Democratic Party and Clinton’s fault if the nation and the world are forced to endure Trump.
While it is reasonable to expect that the anti-fascist shame campaign will largely succeed and most erstwhile Sanders supporters will cast ballots for Clinton in November, it is also clear that many will do so only grudgingly. For many of these unenthusiastic Clinton voters, the Democratic Party has been revealed as a contemptible institution unworthy of long term electoral loyalty in the absence of a fascist menace like Trump. If it were any other Republican running against Hillary this time, she may very well lose.11 For the main factions of the bourgeoisie, this situation is indeed fraught with peril. As the Republican Party descends further into ideology, incoherence and erratic behavior, the Democratic Party must be called upon as the party of rational and responsible bourgeois governance. However, the more and more it fulfills the role, without another credible party to balance it out, its ideological veneer as the party of the working class and the oppressed is further revealed to be an illusion. Bourgeois electoral ideology finds itself sinking ever deeper into a crisis.
Henk, 10.10.16
1 See Our “The Tea Party”: Capitalist Ideology in Decomposition [40]"
2 We won’t pretend that there isn’t a good chunk of old fashioned racism in the anger towards Obama from among white members of the working class, but it is also clear that part of the rancor comes from white workers who voted for him amidst the unfolding economic crisis of 2008, but who were quickly disappointed by his failures to enact any kind of substantive improvement in their standard of living, other than a half- baked health care reform plan that did little to stem the rising cost of health care in the only major country without a national health program.
3 It is true that while many establishment Republicans have openly rejected Trump, the leaders of the party infrastructure – such as Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus – have had to reluctantly come over to his side. The risk that the Republican Party would openly split apart was a constant fear of the bourgeoisie during the primary campaign. It was necessary for the sake of the stability of the two party system that once Trump won the nomination in the primary contests the party could not be seen to actively oppose him. Of course, the risk of a splintering of the Republican Party is still present, even if it has been momentarily suppressed.
4 Poor Rand Paul (a darling of libertarians, but never a serious candidate for the Presidency) was taken out when Trump simply implied he was ugly.
5 Of course Trump, running as a Republican, has also had to accommodate numerous standard Republican ideas and has given some lip service to social conservative positions on abortion. The extent to which he actually believes any of that is anyone’s guess, but he has actively courted the LGBTQ2 vote in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, which he blamed on Islamic homophobia – hardly a typical right-wing tactic in American politics, but typical of various populist parties in Europe.
6 This appeared to be exactly what Trump was planning when reports emerged that he was courting former rival John Kasich to run with him as the Vice Presidential candidate. According to these reports, Trump promised to let Kasich run both foreign and domestic policy, with Trump assuming a figurehead-like role of “making American great again.” While it was more or less an open secret during the early period of the G.W. Bush administration that VP Cheney was running things, it is pretty clear that given Trump’s personality and temperament, such an arrangement this time would have been nothing short of a disaster for the US state.
7 See the Left Business Observer’s Doug Henwood’s [41] comments on this.
8 To be fair, Sanders made the same promise – the difference being he probably sincerely meant it.
9 It has been suggested by many on the right that it was actually the 2008 Clinton campaign that was responsible for the emergence of the racist “birther conspiracy” regarding Obama’s qualifications for the Presidency. While the campaign itself never used this particular attack, evidence has emerged that it was indeed suggested by one campaign strategist as a potential avenue to delegitimize Obama.
10 A concept in academic political science, Duverger’s Law states that the nature of a country’s voting system will determine the number of viable national parties. A first-past-the-post system generally ensures that only two parties will ever compete for national office. In this conception, voting for a third party in such a situation is irrational, because it only increases the chances the party one is least aligned with will win.
11 A fact that has stoked conspiracy theories that Trump’s candidacy is actually a hoax based on a compact with the Clintons to blow-up the Republican Party and ensure Hillary wins in November – meanwhile Trump gets massive free media exposure to feed his narcissistic ego and keep his family’s brand in the spotlight. While there is no credible evidence this is true, the extremely bizarre way that Trump has run his campaign since securing the Republican nomination certainly raises questions about his seriousness. In fact, it is not only wild conspiracy nutters who have proposed this. It has been suggested, if jokingly, by none other than one of Trump’s vanquished Republican foes Jeb Bush [42].
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/woman-and-child-in-kobani-syria.jpg.size_.custom.crop_.1086x720.jpg
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/03/russia-media-coverage-syria-war-selective-defensive-kremlin
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/04/yemen-famine-feared-as-starving-children-fight-for-lives-in-hospital
[4] https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/protect_syrian_civilians_loc/?slideshow
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201608/14086/question-populism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201605/13931/labour-left-and-jewish-problem
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/che_corbyn.jpg
[10] https://libcom.org/article/deliveroo-drivers-wildcat-strike
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/link/14012/40-years-after-foundation-icc
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/forum/14013/icc-fraction-ir-156
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/033/concept-of-brilliant-leader
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/readers-letters
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/anton_pannekoek_in_the_1920s.jpg
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201510/13503/communist-league-tampa-and-question-party;
[17] https://communistleaguetampa.org/2016/01/11/debate-on-the-world-party-a-response-to-the-icc/
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201604/13893/once-again-party-and-its-relation-class
[19] https://communistleaguetampa.org/?s=communist+electoral+strategy&submit=Search.
[20] https://libcom.org/forums/organise/communist-electoral-strategy-22082016
[21] https://workersoffensivegroup.wordpress.com/points-of-unity/;
[22] https://workersoffensivegroup.wordpress.com/category/official-statements/
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/199701/1619/revolutionary-perspective-obscured-parliamentary-illusions
[24] https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/tactics/index.htm
[25] https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1922/democratic-principle.htm
[26] https://red-party.com/
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/20/parliamentary-sham
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/359/democracy
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/014_terror.html
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/book/export/html/2842
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201203/4739/reading-notes-science-and-marxism
[33] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Charles_Darwin
[34] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S5
[35] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/140/immigration
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/33/alienation
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/douche_and_turd.jpg
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalismusa/201004/3736/tea-party-capitalist-ideology-decomposition
[41] https://lbo-news.com/
[42] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/09/jeb-bush-jokes-of-trump-clinton-conspiracy-theory-heres-a-look-at-the-evidence/
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/hilary-clinton
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2075/donald-trump
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/2081/us-presidential-elections-2016