Proudhon , socialism , anarchism and the SPGB

Another plagiarised re-hash of postings from here and re-posted here , re-edited but still representative of the SPGB view

The SPGB does have a clear definition of what they would describe socialism to be and it is not to be unexpected that we will not describe those with certain ideas as socialist if it conflicts .
The SPGB point is that we do have something in common with the Kropotkinists and other communist anarchists Alexander Berkman , Murray Bookchin ( although he is now considered by many not to be an anarchist) ie those anarchists that stand for a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society based on common ownership, but not with the Proudhon, ( or Tucker, Warren ) , those who stand for the self-management of a market economy. The problem that aggrieves many members of the SPGB as one article stated is that the anarcho-communists such as pro-Kropotkists seem to feel they have more in common with the Proudhonists, than with us when after all we both agree on the ends (albeit differ occasionally on the means to attain the end and as such is of secondary importance at this point of time in history and what matters far more is what we have in common ) !

The SPGB argument is that capitalism (or property/class based societies in general) necessitates a state. Hence to bring about a stateless society which is what is meant by anarchism you need to get rid of capitalism ( and that logically entails getting rid of the need for money and the market as well , very much echoing Engels to Cuno in 1872 “And since the state is the chief evil [for Bakunin], the state above all must be abolished; then capital will go to hell of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Abolish capital, the appropriation of all the means of production by the few, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is an essential one: the abolition of the state is nonsense without a social revolution beforehand; the abolition of capital is the social revolution and involves a change in the whole mode of production.”)

Proudhon was an opponent of government and wanted a society without one. But being in favour of features of capitalism and wanting to retain the money-prices-wages-profit system (what Marx called "commodity production") well , you know in the eyes of the SPGB (and many anarchists ) that would not make him a socialist . He was against ground rent and interest but not against profit. In fact he was a bit of a currency crank with his ideas of credit bank and stood for a society of small-scale producers trading with each other without the interference of the state. His famous catchword "property is theft" was aimed not at small-scale property but essentially at landed property. He defended individual property against common ownership.
Proudhon was also against workers organising it trade unions, was against workers going on strike for higher wages.

Some would call him the first anarcho-capitalist rather than the mutualist that he was and the reformist he could also be accused of being . Proudhon possessed a popular programme which in essence involved a society of artisans. Proudhon was very concerned at the tendency of employers to exploit employees, and thought that if society was made up of artisans then no such exploitation would take place, each worker would own their own means of production, and would sell their products at the market rate, since the market is an unbiased process of checks and counters, this would tend to balance incomes and prices and provide an equitable system of commodity production and sale, but without the massive problems of class division and exploitation. There are people today who still believe this, Marx's efforts to debunk it notwithstanding.

As for definitions the SPGB has theirs but the definition of "socialist", basically what it generally meant in the 1840s was anyone who wanted to reform society, in whatever way, so as to benefit Labour. That was indeed how it was used them and was of course one of the reasons why Marx and Engels called the manifesto they wrote for the Communist League of Germany in 1848 the "Communist Manifesto" and not the "Socialist Manifesto". Basically, it was much too broad a definition that included too many contradictory views I suppose the more appropriate world (then as much as today) would be "social reformers".It is only on that basis that supporters of private property and the market such as Proudhon, could be called "socialist".

We should be more demanding on labels we ascribe to people . The very words "socialism" and "communism" are connected with the idea that the means of production should be owned by society as a whole (or socially, hence "socialism") or by the whole community (or communally, hence "communism", ). And it is far better that people who are opposed to it are not called "socialists" or “communists".

The difference between socialists and anarchists is not over the aim of abolishing the State as I have stated earlier but over how to do this. Anarchists say that the first objective of the workers' revolution against capitalism should be to abolish the State. Socialists say that, to abolish the State, the Socialist working class majority must first win control of it and, if necessary, retain it (in a suitably very modified form) but for a very short while just in case any pro-capitalist recalcitrant minority should try to resist the establishment of socialism. Once socialism, as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by the whole people, has been established (which the SPGB has always claimed can be done almost immediately ), the State is dismantled, dissolved completely We are not talking years or decades or generations here , but as a continuation of the immediate revolutionary phase of the over throw of capitalism .

But to end with the Anarcho-Marxist case , some quotes from Marx about the abolition of the State .
In 1844 Marx wrote that "the existence of the state and the existence of slavery are inseparable" - "The King of Prussia and Social Reform",
Again, as Engels wrote in a letter to Bebel in March 1875, "Marx's book against Proudhon and later the Communist Manifesto directly declare that with the introduction of the socialist order of society the state will dissolve itself and disappear" .
Then, in a circular against the Bakunin prepared for the First International in 1875, Marx wrote: "To all socialists anarchy means this: the aim of the proletarian movement--that is to say the abolition of social classes--once achieved, the power of the state, which now serves only to keep the vast majority of producers under the yoke of a small minority of exploiters, will vanish, and the functions of government become purely administrative"

The Revenge of the Labour Theory of Value

If the world is lucky, the bubble won't burst, it'll just deflate. But nobody's been feeling lucky for quite some time. Capitalism has made pessimists of us all.

From WSPUS

Bubble Trouble

The hangover

The intoxicating US housing boom has come to an end. Now the economic hangover has arrived. What is likely, at the very least, is a prolonged crisis of the credit system. And as credit greases the wheels of capitalism this is no laughing matter for the capitalist class.

The Federal Reserve has been doing its best to ease the pain—the pain for the investment banks, that is. Barkeep Ben Bernanke announced on March 11 that the Fed intends to generously fund the banks “rehab,” loaning them the incredible sum of 200 billion dollars in return for the tainted “mortgage-backed securities” as collateral. This is very much like a doctor who prescribes a little hair of the dog to an alcoholic as a “cure.” At best, such bailouts will probably only buy a bit of time.

And not very much time at that—judging from the string of collapses in recent weeks. On March 7, the investment fund Carlyle Group Corp. announced that it was unable to meet $37 million in margin calls from its lenders and a few days later it was reported that the 85-year-old investment bank Bear Stearns, which suffered huge hedge fund losses, is being bought out in a fire sale by JPMorgan Chase, which is working in tandem with the Fed.

Far from calming the financial waters, the actions of the Fed have drawn attention to the severity of the crisis and also accelerated the decline of the dollar. It is also doubtful that the Fed will have anywhere near the financial assets needed to bailout more than a selected few of the mass casualties that the crisis will claim.

Somehow the system as a whole—the once inebriated economic body and its battered financial organs—will have to expel the vast quantities of toxic loans that are clogging it up. When other countries face this dilemma, the US has always been the first to prescribe a bit of shock therapy, making use of capitalism’s natural function of regurgitation. For some reason or another, though, the US policy makers are sentimental when it comes to their own venerable financial institutions.

The US government hasn’t lifted a finger to assist the massive number of workers who face foreclosure, while acting quickly to pump money into the accounts of those who have made a good living picking the pockets of those workers. The direct impact of the crisis involving “subprime loans” (once more accurately referred to as “predatory loans”) has already lead to hundreds of thousands of foreclosures, with the overall number of foreclosures up 79% in 2007 alone. Clearly, the US policy makers have every intention of shifting as much of the pain from the crisis onto the working class as is economically and politically possible.

Empty wealth

One benefit to workers from the crisis, however, is that it rips great holes in some of the smug arguments that economists and politicians have tried to pass off as “common sense” (and which seemed plausible enough during the long speculative boom in the US that basically stretches all the way from the mid-1990s until recent months). For instance, it is becoming increasingly self-evident that the prices of many “commodities” lack any real basis and are thus “fictitious” prices to a large extent.

There is an important distinction, in other words, between the products of labor, which are the basis of any society and happen to take the form of commodities in a capitalist society, and the wide variety of things that have a price and thus take the commodity-form but are not the product of labor and thus lack intrinsic value. When capitalism is humming along, no one is very concerned with whether a commodity has intrinsic value or not, so long as it can be sold on the market. Thus, “mortgage-backed securities”—to take one example—were as good as gold for many years.

Now that the housing bubble has collapsed, however, such securities are being shunned, as it is clear that a great number of borrowers will be unable to meet their mortgage payments. The “value” ( = price ) of this commodity has plummeted, wiping out a vast amount of wealth that existed on paper, leaving behind a hard lump of debt.

It is hardly surprising that people flock to gold during a crisis. That behavior is not motivated by a human love of shiny metal objects. Rather, gold has served as the “general equivalent” or money historically precisely because gold has intrinsic value as a product of labor and that value exists in a form that is inherently more durable and divisible than most other products of labor.
In short, a crisis reveals the crucial distinction between commodities in the fundamental sense (as the capitalistic form of products of labor) and commodities in the purely formal sense (as anything with a price). Call it the revenge of the labor theory of value.

There is some irony in the collapse of the housing bubble revealing the distinction between intrinsic value and mere price. Because one of the initial attractions of the housing market to investors, after their dizzying experience with stock-market gambling, was that it appeared to be terra firma. After a vast amount of paper wealth was wiped out of 401k plans and mutual funds circa 2000, it seemed that real-estate was a secure investment in tangible asset.
But to describe a house as having intrinsic value turns out to only be a half-truth. Sure, the house itself has intrinsic value, like any other commodity in the fundamental sense just described, according to the socially necessary labor expended to produce it. In other words, the house’s value (as a structure) stems from the value of the building materials used and the amount of labor expended to assemble them.

However, in addition to the house itself, the price of the land upon which it is built represents a large part of the overall price—and the bulk of the price in the case of large urban areas. And that land has no intrinsic economic value, apart from whatever labor was necessary to clear trees or previous buildings out of the way so that construction could commence. In this sense, real-estate prices are a reflection—more than anything else—of the purchasing ability of the prospective buyers. So it is no surprise that those prices rose rapidly along with the increasing abundance of cheap credit.

Buyers in each particular housing market tried to convince themselves why the price of their own house would never fall (whether because of the desirability of their neighborhood, the solid construction of the house itself, the strong local economy, or some other reason), but in fact there is no intrinsic value around which the price must gravitate—meaning that there is no limit for a price to greatly rise or fall.

Profit-creation

Another central (but often ignored) fact which a crisis helps shed some light on is the origin of profit. During a speculative bubble, when mutual funds or housing prices are steadily rising, profit seems to arise magically from the very act of investment. No one is too bothered to ponder how this feat of alchemy is achieved. When the bubble eventually bursts, it may dawn on some that the actual creation of profit—rather than the mere transfer of money from one wallet to another—involves more than simply letting go of funds and then waiting for an even bigger sum to return in boomerang-like fashion.

And if the person bothers to investigate the matter further, it would become clear that profit is generated in the production process. It is there that surplus-value is generated as the difference between the value of the labor-power the workers sell to capitalists in return for their wages and the value those workers add to the commodities produced through their actual labor. In contrast, much of the profit that appeared to be created during the boom was in fact an expression of the expansion of debt.

The housing boom, like the stock market boom that preceded it, was praised as a way for workers to move up the social ladder, and it seemed that there was enough profit to go around to swell the ranks of the capitalist class. From today’s perspective, however, we see that workers are left in a worse situation than ever following the speculative boom, facing foreclosures and wiped out retirement funds. The only upward mobility in the end was for the money itself, which was coaxed out of the pockets of workers to pad the salaries of the much heralded “financial wizards.”

Granted, in any speculative bubble the expansion of consumption also leads to an increase in productive activity, but it is certainly not the case that the enormous gains made through speculation reflect or correspond to an expansion in surplus-value created via production -value. Rather, the increase in the “value” ( = price ) of real-estate, stocks, or whatever the mania is centered on is fed by the speculation itself. Prices go up as more money is thrown at the object of speculation, and with those rising prices even more money is invested. But there is nothing to sustain the high prices once the speculative demand dries up. This is quite different from an increase of investment in productive activity that results in products containing surplus-value that are sold to realize a profit.

A comparison to eating, rather than the earlier hangover analogy, may highlight the distinction between mere speculation and investment in production. Simply put, speculation is not all that different from a person who consumes a large amount of food without performing any physical activity whatsoever. The result, unless the person enjoys a remarkable metabolism, is weight gain.

During the housing boom, the economy swallowed a tremendous amount of credit that for the most part was not directed towards productive activity, and this inevitably led to a flabby result. The speculative feast was good fun for those who partook of it, but now the heavy debt burden is making it hard for the capitalist economy to function, with the credit crisis also hindering investment in productive activities.

But it is not as if a “muscle-bound” capitalism is a lovely state of affairs either. As mentioned earlier, the surplus-value that arises from productive activity is nothing more than unpaid labor extracted from the working class. So there is no profit without exploitation.

A “fundamentally strong” capitalism (as it is called by those critical of finance capital but enamored by capitalism itself) may conjure up an image of a healthy organism, but really it is more appropriate to picture a young Arnold Schwarzenegger prancing around the stage of a Mr. Universe contest clad only in his over-inflated muscles and surreal suntan. It is not true health or strength, just the appearance of it. And just as Arnie worked out incessantly in the pursuit of muscles for their own sake, without any concern for their actual use, the productive activity under capitalism is only a means of building bigger and bigger profits, rather than being primarily a way to produce material wealth to meet the needs of society’s members in accordance with their collective and democratic will. There are all sorts of side-effects from the mad pursuit of profit, both in the short- and long-term, similar to how Mr. Schwarzenegger’s steroid-fueled body-building in his younger years resulted in open-heart surgery by the time his muscles had sagged with age.

Workers cannot be indifferent to a crisis, no matter how much we are disgusted by the predictable pendulum swing between “boom” and “bust” (and the sudden mood swings it causes among our capitalist rulers), because our lives are directly influenced by today’s financial turbulence. But at the same time, we have no interest whatsoever in thinking up ways to put capitalism “back on track” or make it “healthy” again. Even when the system is in tip-top shape it works directly counter to the interests of workers.

The crisis will not miraculously or mechanically turn every worker into a socialist, as some pseudo-Marxists fervently hope, but it does at least create a situation where socialists may find workers more willing to consider an alternative to capitalism. It is up to us, as socialists, to present that alternative in a convincing way based on our understanding of the essential nature and limitations of the capitalist system.

MS

Also see an earlier Socialist Standard articles:

The UK Housing Bubble

The DotCom Bubble

The Far East Asian Bubble

Booms and Slumps - The Theory

For those in Denver , Colorado , USA

Fridays , 7:30 , January 11, 18 and 25 , 2008

Marx in SOHO

Marx is back! The premise of this witty and insightful "play on history" is that Karl Marx has a chance to clear his name and is mistakenly sent to Soho in New York.
To be held @ Mercury Cafe

mercurycafe.com
2199 California St.
Denver CO,
Mercury Café presents “Marx in SOHO” A play on history by Howard Zinn , Starring Chris Kendall, directed by Bob Buckley

Friday’s January, 11 18 and 25 at 7:30 The Mercury Café presents “Marx in SOHO”, a play by Howard Zinn (author of “People’s History of the United States) starring Chris Kendall and directed by Bob Buckley.

Marx is back!

"Don't you wonder: why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again?"

The premise of this witty and insightful "play on history" is that Karl Marx has agitated with the authorities of the afterlife for a chance to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, though, Marx is sent to Soho in New York, rather than his old stomping ground in London, to make his case.

Originally produced at the Mercury in 2005, the performance (directed by Bob Buckley) drew laughter, tears, standing ovations and sold out houses. Returning star Chris Kendall was nominated for a Denver Post “Best Solo Performance” award for his portrayal of Marx .

January, 11 18 and 25 at 7:30 Tickets $10
2199 California Street, Denver 80205
Reservations: 303-294-9258
www.mercurycafe.com

The role of the soviets in Russia's bourgeois revolution: the point of view of Julius Martov
This article originally appeared in the French political journal, Economies et societes, cahiers de l'ISMEA, Paris, serie S, Number 18, April-May 1976 issue. It first appeared on the internet for the first time here but to widen its circulation i am re-posting in full once more .

The basic principle defended by Marx throughout his forty years of socialist activity can be summed up in the clause of the General Rules of the First International that "the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves". This is a rejection of the view that socialism can be introduced for the working class or that the working class can be led to socialism by some enlightened minority.

Those who set themselves up as leaders of the working class fall into two groups. First, there are the parliamentary reformists who tell the workers: "vote for us and we will introduce socialism for you". And then there are the various "vanguards" who see themselves leading the workers in a violent assault on the capitalist state. Both groups, despite being bitter antagonists, share a common standpoint: a denial that the majority of workers are capable of understanding and of organising themselves, without leaders, in order to achieve it.

But to deny this is to in effect deny that socialism can be established. For socialism, as a fully democratic society based on the common ownership of the means of production(1), demands, in order to function, the voluntary co-operation and conscious participation of the immense majority of the population. It is a society which simply cannot be established by a minority, however enlightened, determined or benevolent. Leaders, whether reformist parliamentarians or insurrectionist vanguards, cannot establish socialism; all they can and have established is some form of state capitalism.

During and after the first world war a number of working class thinkers and militants (such as Luxemburg, Gorter and Pannekoek) came to recognise that the traditional Social Democratic policy of seeking to win a parliamentary majority on an electoral programme of reforms of capitalism could never lead to socialism but only to state capitalism. They re-asserted that only the working class, socialist-minded and democratically-organised, could establish socialism. However, under the impact of the events of November 1917 in Russia, they imagined that the form of working class organisation to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism has been found in the workers' "soviets" or councils that had come into being after the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917.

It is understandable, and perhaps excusable, that in the early days of the "soviet regime" people outside of Russia should have been mistaken about its nature. War-time censorship and the lies of the capitalist press, together with the exaggerations of some of its supporters, meant that little accurate information about what was happening in Russia was available. On the face of it, in November 1917 the Congress of Soviets, a body of working class delegates from all over Russia, had deposed the capitalist Provisional Government and itself taken control of governmental power; capitalist rule had been overthrown and a socialist regime established - at least this is what appeared to have happened.

But those who had some knowledge of Marx's theory of social development ought to have quickly had some doubts. Without denying that capitalist political rule had been overthrown or that power had passed into the hands of people calling themselves socialists, they could have questioned whether the outcome could be socialism. Quite apart from the fact that socialism could only have been established as a world system, neither the economic nor the political conditions for a socialist revolution existed in Russia in 1917. Russia was an industrially backward country, with an overwhelmingly peasant population engaged in individual, rather than socialised, production. The workers and peasants of Russia certainly were discontented, but wanted "Peace, Bread and Land" (as the slogans put it) rather than socialism properly-understood.

To be fair, those who supported the Bolshevik coup d'etat because they believed it to have been a soviet or workers' council revolution did eventually - by about 1921 - come to recognise the real nature of the Bolshevik regime as a minority dictatorship forced by economic circumstances to continue the development of capitalism in Russia. But these "Left Communists" (or "Council Communists" as some of them later called themselves) still continued to believe in workers' councils as the form of working class organisation for establishing socialism.

One man, however, was not taken in by "sovietism": Julius Martov. Martov was one of the second generation of Russian Social Democrats who, at the turn of the century, worked to build up the Social Democratic movement inside Russia. With Plekhanov, Lenin and others he was one of the editors of the journal Iskra which had been launched in 1900 to counter the nebulous theories of "economism". When, however, the Iskra group, together with the rest of Russian Social Democracy, split over the organisation question Martov was amongst the minority (or "Mensheviks", from the Russian word for minority) who opposed Lenin's proposal for a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries which was supported by a majority (or "Bolsheviks"). Martov favoured the traditional Social Democratic idea of a mass, open - and, let it be admitted, reformist - workers' party. Unlike most Mensheviks, however, Martov was an opponent of the first world war, being a member of the small group of "Internationalists" who took up a working-class position on this issue. He was a respected writer (even by Lenin) on Marx and socialist theory and, indeed, it was because of his criticism of the Bolshevik regime from a Marxian point of view that he was forced into exile in 1922, where he died a year later.

Some of the articles he wrote in the period 1919-23 were published in English translation in 1939 under the title The State and the Socialist Revolution (2). Reading these articles it is easy to see why he was such an embarrassment to the Bolshevik government. Not for one moment was he taken in by their claims that the "soviet regime" represented the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as envisaged by Marx (3). For him, it was a cover for the dictatorship, albeit revolutionary, of the Bolshevik Party.

It is instructive to see why the Bolsheviks were, for a few years, advocates of workers' councils. The "constitutional' basis for their seizure of power in November 1917 had been a decision of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets to depose the Provisional Government of Kerensky and set up instead a "Provisional Workers and Peasants Government". Thus the Bolsheviks popularised the slogan, in the rest of Europe as well as in Russia, of "all power to the soviets" (i.e., workers' councils). After they had dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 they were forced, in order to justify this action, to step up their propaganda in favour of the soviets as an alternative to parliament. The election of a Constituent Assembly, which would decide the future constitution of Russia, had long been a demand of all Russian revolutionaries, including the Bolsheviks. Elections, even though held after the Bolsheviks take-over of power, gave the Bolsheviks only a quarter of the seats, a majority going to the peasant party, the Social Revolutionaries. Lenin gave a number of reasons why the Assembly had had to be dissolved such as out-of-date electoral lists and a split in the Social Revolutionary party between the presentation of candidates and the election. But all these could have been remedied by fresh elections. This the Bolsheviks wished to avoid since they were fully aware that the result would be more or less the same. They determined to hold on to power, while still wishing to be regarded as democrats. Hence Lenin proclaimed that the soviet system was a higher form of democracy than the "bourgeois" parliamentary system.

Martov knew this to be hypocrisy. Lenin favoured the soviet rather than the parliamentary system because he knew that he could get a majority under the former but not the latter - a sure sign, we may add, that the soviet system was not more representative or democratic than the election of a central assembly by universal, direct, equal and secret ballot.

The reason for this was that the soviets - the soviets as they really existed in revolutionary Russia as opposed to the ideal workers' councils of Left Communist theory - as loose makeshift bodies were easily manipulable by a well-organised group such as were the professional revolutionaries of the Bolshevik Party under Lenin's leadership. Indeed it could be said that it was precisely because they were the best-organised and disciplined group that the Bolsheviks finally emerged as the government of revolutionary Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist regime - and they came to power by successfully manipulating the soviets.

The soviet system served the Bolsheviks' purpose because elections to the All-Russia Congress of Soviets were neither universal nor direct nor secret. The Congress was composed of delegates from local soviets who were in their turn delegates from local factories. Its members were thus only indirectly elected. Urban areas were over-represented. There were no set procedures for the election of the delegates to the local soviets; in most cases they would have been chosen by a show of hands at a general assembly of the workforce of a factory, with all the drawbacks of this method of election.

We mention these points not to defend parliamentary democracy but to show how the soviet system was far from being the highest form of political democracy.

It is of course a reasonable point to say that in a revolutionary situation such as existed in Russia in 1917 democratic perfection was not to be expected. The soviets were only makeshift representative organisations which had come into being precisely because working class opinion had been denied expression under the Tsarist regime. They thus played a useful role, filling a void until such time as a more permanent, and structured, system of representation could be set up. To praise their makeshift, unstructured character as being a sign of their ultra-democratic nature is to make a virtue out of necessity and to forget that this made not just for flexibility but also meant that it was easier for a determined minority to manipulate them.

A second argument put forward by the Bolsheviks in favour of the soviet system was that it gave power to the more determined revolutionary elements in Russia whereas to have let power pass into the hands of a parliamentary government responsible to a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage would have led to a slowing-down of the revolutionary process. This is undoubtedly true, but it shows clearly that the Russian revolution was essentially a bourgeois rather than a socialist revolution.

The socialist revolution can only be a revolution carried out consciously by the immense working-class majority acting in their own interests. In these circumstances any system of representation - whether soviets or parliament - would give a majority for the revolution. This is not necessarily the case during a bourgeois revolution, however, where the revolutionaries can find themselves impeded by the lack of revolutionary will of the masses. Martov describes a typical bourgeois revolution thus:

"The role of active factor in the overturn belonged to minorities of the social classes in whose interest the revolution developed. These minorities exploited the confused discontent and the sporadic explosions of anger arising among scattered and socially inconsistent elements within the revolutionary class. They guided the latter in the destruction of the old social forms. In certain cases, the active leader minorities had to use the power of their concentrated energy in order to shatter the inertia of the elements they tried to wield for revolutionary purposes. Therefore, these active leader minorities sometimes made efforts - often successful efforts - to repress the passive resistance of the manipulated elements, when the latter refused to move forward toward the broadening and deepening of the revolution. The dictatorship of an active revolutionary minority, a dictatorship that tended to be terrorist, was the normal coming-to-a-head of the situation in which the old social order had confined the popular mass, now called on by the revolutionaries to forge their own destiny". (The State and the Socialist Revolution, p. 16).

That an enlightened minority of revolutionists were justified in ignoring the views of the unenlightened majority in order to carry through the revolution was an idea that had first made its appearance, in the form of Jacobinism, during the French bourgeois revolution. It was inherited by utopian Communists such as Buonarotti, Weitling and Blanqui. And it was, as Martov points out, an element in Bolshevik thinking too.

The Bolsheviks supported the soviet system because it enabled them, as a determined revolutionary minority, to come to power:

"The 'soviet regime' becomes the means of bringing into power and maintaining in power a revolutionary minority which claims to defend the interests of a majority, though the latter has not recognised these interests as its own, though this majority has not attached itself sufficiently to these interests to defend them with all its energy and determination." (p. 19).

This, Martov goes on, applied equally to the partisans of the soviet idea (workers' councils) outside of Russia. They too saw workers' councils as a short-cut to power, as a means of by-passing the need to have majority socialist understanding amongst the working class before trying to overthrow capitalism:

"The mystery of the 'soviet regime' is now deciphered. We see now how an organism that is supposedly created by the specific peculiarities of a labor movement corresponding to the highest development of capitalism is revealed to be, at the same time, suitable to the needs of countries knowing neither large capitalist production, nor a powerful bourgeoisie, nor a proletariat that has evolved through the experiences of the class struggle.

"In other words, in the advanced countries, the proletariat resorts, we are told, to the soviet form of the dictatorship as soon as its elan toward the social revolution strikes against the impossibility of realizing its power in any other way than through the dictatorship of a minority, a minority within the proletariat itself.

"The thesis of the 'finally discovered form', the thesis of the political form that, belonging to the specific circumstances of the imperialist phase of capitalism, is said to be the only form that can realize the social enfranchisement of the proletariat, constitutes the historically necessary illusion by whose effect the revolutionary section of the proletariat renounces its belief in its ability to draw behind it the majority of the population of the country and resuscitates the idea of the minority dictatorship of the Jacobins in the very form used by the bourgeois revolution of the 18th century. Must we recall here that this revolutionary method has been repudiated by the working class to the extent that it has freed itself from its heritage of petty-bourgeois revolutionism?" (p. 21-22).

The view that a revolutionary minority could and should establish its dictatorship in order to try to introduce socialism is of course a denial of the basic principle upheld by Marx that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself". That this view should be popular amongst revolutionaries in Russia was no coincidence. For, as we have seen, the Russian revolution - as the process of overthrowing, root and branch, the Tsarist social order - was essentially bourgeois. The soviets had a role to play in this bourgeois revolution: to allow the determined revolutionary minority to come to power. After noting how in July 1917, when the Congress of Soviets was dominated by the vacillating Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, Lenin had thought of abandoning the slogan "all power to the soviets" in favour of an open demand for "all power to the Bolshevik Party", Martov goes on:

"The consequent course of the Russian revolution cured Lenin of his passing 'lack of faith'. The soviets fulfilled the role expected of them. The rising tide of bourgeois revolutionary enthusiasm set in motion the worker and peasant masses, washing away their 'meanness'. Lifted by the wave, the Bolsheviks possessed themselves of the government apparatus. Then the role of the insurrectionary element came to an end. The Moor had accomplished his task. The State that came into power with the aid of the 'Power of the Soviets' became the 'Soviet Power'. The Communist minority incorporated into this State made itself secure, once for always, against a possible return of the spirit of 'meanness'" (p. 28).

The coming to power of the Bolsheviks did not represent, as they themselves believed, progress from Russia's bourgeois revolution to its "proletarian revolution". It was, says Martov, echoing what Marx had said about the so-called Reign of Terror in France in 1794, "a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution itself". Commenting on the passage in Marx's 1847 article in which this phrase occurred (4), Martov says:

"One might say that Marx wrote this specially for the benefit of those people who consider the simple fact of a fortuitous conquest of power by the democratic small bourgeoisie and the proletariat as proof of the maturity of society for the socialist revolution. But it may also be said that he wrote this specially for the benefit of those socialists who believe that never in the course of a revolution that is bourgeois in its objectives can there occur a possibility permitting the political power to escape from the hands of the bourgeoisie and pass to the democratic masses. One may say that Marx wrote this also for the benefit of those socialists who consider utopian the mere idea of such a displacement of power and who do not realize that this phenomenon is 'only a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution itself', that it is a factor assuring, under certain conditions, the most complete and radical suppression of the obstacles rising in the way of this bourgeois revolution" (p. 59-60).

It only remains to add that, unlike in 1794 in France where the determined minority were replaced by the traditional bourgeoisie after having done their dirty work for them, in Russia the determined minority remained in power and that it was from amongst their ranks that evolved the ruling and exploiting class of the capitalist Russia they had no alternative but to develop.

So, from a bourgeois revolutionary point of view, the Bolsheviks were justified in maintaining their minority dictatorship. Where they were wrong was in imagining, and propagating amongst the workers of the rest of Europe, that this had something to do with "socialism". Their sympathisers in the West, including the Left and Council Communists, were equally mistaken in imagining that the soviets (or workers' councils), which had served as a cover for the Bolshevik minority to come to power, were the form of working class organisation for socialism in advanced capitalist countries.

Certainly, workers' councils or something akin to them, as workplace organisations of the workers, are bound to arise in the course of the socialist revolution. But to claim that they are the only possible form of working class self-organisation is to go too far, is in fact to make a fetish of a mere organisational form. What is important in working class self-organisation, however, is not the form but the principle.

The principles of democratic self-organisation - which are in fact democratic principles generally - can be applied, given a sufficient democratic consciousness, to any working class organisation, including even organisation to contest elections and to control central parliaments and local councils. There is no reason whatsoever in theory why a workers' socialist political party could not be organised on the same basis as has been proposed by Left Communists for workers' councils: no leadership and so no division into leaders and led; the candidates, including those elected, just like the delegates to the ideal workers' council, could be subject to continual control and, if need be, instantly recalled; they could be strictly mandated to fight for socialism and not to pursue reforms of capitalism. In other words, there is no necessary connexion between the principle of democratic working class self-organisation and organisation at the place of work. As stated, what is important is not the form of organisation but the democratic - and socialist - consciousness of the working class. This can express itself in a great variety of organisational forms, including a mass political party. Indeed, this was the form Marx himself expected it to take.

Martov, whose writings are unfortunately not generally known, must be given credit for having demystified a little the idea of workers' councils by showing the essentially bourgeois revolutionary role that the soviets played in Russia in 1917.

Adam Buick

(1) Common ownership is not the same as State ownership. Since the State is a feature only of class societies State ownership is a form of sectional or class monopoly of the means of production. In socialism the State is replaced by the democratic administration of social affairs, including production which would be directed solely to satisfying human needs, with the resulting disappearance of production for sale, profits, wages, money, banks and all the other paraphernalia of buying and selling.

(2) The State and the Socialist Revolution, translated by Integer, International Review, New York, 1939. Integer gives as the source of the articles translated:
"The first two sections of this book, The Ideology of Sovietism and The Conquest of the State, were written early in 1919. They form a compact whole and should be read as such. The first essay appeared serially in the periodical Mysl of Kharkov. The introductory section of the second was first published in the issues of July 8 and September 1, 1921, of the Sozialisticheski Vestnik (Berlin). The remainder of the second essay appeared for the first time in Mirovoi Bolshevism (World Bolshevism), Berlin, 1923, from the text of which the entire present translation was made. The final section, entitled Marx and the Problem of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was first published in 1918 in the Workers International of Moscow, edited by Martov".

(3) For Marx the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was the political form of the period during which the working class would be transforming capitalism into socialism. He advocated that it take the form of a fully democratised State controlled by the working class. See H. Draper 'Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat', New Politics, Vol. I, Number 4, Summer 1962.

(4) "Die moralisierende Kritik und die kritische Moral". A recent English translation of the passage in question reads:
"If the proletariat destroys the political rule of the bourgeoisie, this will only be a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1974, so long as in the course of history, in its movement', the material conditions are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political rule" (Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited by T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Penguin Books, London, 1963, p. 244).

Further reading:
Review of Martov's 'The State and the Socialist Revolution' that originally appeared in the Socialist Standard in 1940.

Martov: a Russian Social-Democrat (A review of Israel Getzler's biography of Julius Martov that first appeared in the November 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard.)

Back Again

Toronto against the war

Some may have noticed a certain degree of inactivity on this blog recently . The explanation being that i was on holiday , two weeks in Toronto , Canada .

Needless to say , for SPGBers there is no such thing as a holiday away from politics .

I met up with John Ayers , secretary of the Socialist Party of Canada and had a chin-wag with him and also with an interested inquirer who he was having discussions with and who hopefully wasn't too put off by my gloom and doom .

I attended a rally about global warming ... which more or less added up to - join the Kyoto Treaty , turn the lights off and we can all save a polar bear .

On the 17th , Toronto participated in the world wide protests calling for troops out of Iraq and the end of the war which i went along to . All the usual were present , the Canadian equivalent of the SWP and of course those Commie Cultists , the Spartacist League

Became embroiled in a rather sterile debate about the potential possibilities presented to the working class by the Russian Revolution and also the relevance of vacuous slogans such as anti-imperialism with a member of the International Bolshevik Tendency but was pleasantly surprised when he recognised that my arguments were ones he associated with the Socialist Party of Canada . Small as they are , i'm pleased they still get recognised by the Leninist Left .

Bought a few books of course . Fromm , Reich , Zinn , Upton Sinclair , Jack London .

Erich Fromm's commentary on Marx's 1844 Economic and Philospohical Manuscripts drew my attention to these thoughts of the Moor :-

" An enforced increase in wages ( disregarding the other difficulties and especially that such an anomaly could only be maintained by force ) would be nothing more than a better remuneration of slaves , and would not restore , either to the worker or to the work , their human significance and worth
Even the equality of incomes which Proudhon demands would only change the relation of the present-day worker to his work into a relation of all men to work . Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist "

And elsewhere ,

"...as this communism [ crude communism ] is concerned; the category of worker is not abolished but extended to all men... This communism, inasmuch as it negates the personality of man in every sphere, is simply the logical expression of the private property which is this negation. Universal envy constituting itself as a power is the hidden form in which greed reasserts itself and satisfies itself, but in another way. The thoughts of every piece of private property as such are at least turned against richer private property in the form of envy and the desire to level everything down; hence these feelings in fact constitute the essence of competition. The crude communist is merely the culmination of this envy and desire to level down on the basis of a preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited measure. How little this abolition of private property is a true appropriation is shown by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, and the return to the unnatural simplicity of the poor, unrefined man who has no needs and who has not yet even reached the stage of private property, let along gone beyond it.
(For crude communism) the community is simply a community of labor and equality of wages, which are paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist. Both sides of the relation are raised to an unimaginary universality -- labor as the condition in which everyone is placed and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community."

Those who claim to be socialists such as the SSP and those in Sheridan's Solidarity should take note of Marx when they advocate a "workers wage" and a "workers state ".

Toronto against Global Warming

A Case of the Trots

As i have stated before , I am no intellectual theoretician but I do grow wearisome of those who do claim to be and fall short of expectations . Latest , I have come across is Hillel Ticktin , of Glasgow University , worldly author , editor of Critique, and sometime writer for the Communist Party of Great Britain . Who am I to question such a man ? But I will in my feeble way .


Hillel Ticktin has an article in CPGB’s Weekly Worker , Seeds of a New Society , and I was struck by just how actually mundane it was but that’s probably because I am no academic like he and missed its pertinent points . Or , on the other hand , its because much of my socialist education has been from the SPGB so that there was little in it that I found particularly original or insightful that I have not read before . I also have a natural disdain for camouflaging simple ideas with verbose explanations or complicated language .

The article touches on such subjects as mentioned on this blog as Economic Calculation and Consciousness .

I was immediately minded by this statement of Ticktin's .

"…socialism can only come into existence on a world scale - it must be international and arrive “all at once”. Capitalism is a world system, and bits of it cannot be removed."

That is something straight out of any SPGB pamphlet .

Of course , a Trotskyist realises that "socialism in one country" is impossible. But, although Trotsky did proclaim this , it didn't mean that he thought nothing could be done in one country and that if a vanguard political party took power and was ruthless and determined enough , it could, he argued, establish a "Workers State". ( Theory of Permanent Revolution) .We of the SPGB have been arguing for decades against the Trotskyist theories of Workers State , Degenerated Workers State , or Bureaucratic Collective State or whatever variant of half-way house they endeavour to use to justify the Bolshevik Coup d'Etat and apologise for its failure .

I was then surprised when I later read Tickin stating :

"The fundamental aspect of a communist or socialist society (I make no distinction between the two) is that for the first time a society is planned by the associated producers themselves."

I’m pleased that Hillel doesn’t make a distinction between the two and now accepts the long held position of the SPGB that has always been opposed by the Left that communism and socialism are synonyms and were used as such by Marx and Engels . Another first for an avowed Trotskyite to admit . Of course , Ticktin seems partial to stating this as he says elsewhere

"Now it is true that the distinction between socialism and communism was actually made and employed by Lenin, Trotsky and so forth. But they put inverted commas around the word ‘socialism’: ie, so-called socialism."

Oh , did they now ?

But whats this ? The CPGB own website on which Ticktin writes ,

" Socialism is the first stage of the worldwide transition to communism "


We didn't need to go very far to find a distinction being made between socialism and communism , did we , and , nope , I can’t see any inverted commas there being used .

Ticktin finds himself in agreement on many things that the SPGB has been asserting as part of its party-case for many years as self-evident . Such as :

"The potentiality for abundance comes into existence within capitalism. Without such a potentiality there would be very great difficulty in ever going over to socialism, because there can be no scarcity in a socialist society…We know there is potential abundance today."

Yup …, sufficient for a society to provide for all according to their needs .

It seems that Ticktin accepts the Von Mises case against socialism that economic calulation is not possible , or at least Ticktin accepts that the "market-socialist” critics have been unable to answer Von Mise . But perhaps , Ticktin is seemingly unaware of the vigourous Non-Market Socialist rebuttal of Von Mise and his Economic Calculation .
That, naturally , brings me to that vast void inside Trotskyism . Where is the Trotskyist programme for the abolition of wages and money and the introduction of free access . I read plenty of their minimum transitional demands but rarely do I ever find the maximum programme .

His Weekly Worker article goes on to discuss aspects of consciousness . and once again it appears as if Ticktin has to repeat old truths . The SPGB has always been the party that has expounded the idea that there were now only two classes in society ( in industrialised countries , that is ) and Ticktin takes on the mantle of the SPGB and discards his cloak of Bolshevism with the analysis that there no longer is a middle class who have now become subject to increasingly proletarianisation .

"I would never have predicted that university lecturers would become workers, but that is what is happening. "

Ticktin on consciousness-----

" the movement for socialism cannot be entirely spontaneous.
There has to be an understanding of the change, which implies that there has to be a political party, expressing the consciousness of the working class, which actively intervenes in that change…Despite this, it is quite clear that there can be no change of system unless the working class actually takes power and creates a new mode of production ."

Well, we won't argue with that but we will look at history and note that the requirement is a political party OF the working class and not an organisation that substitutes itself FOR the working class . Yet again , I willl refer you to this article where The Socialist Party have made it clear that it is much more than just interpreting the world but about the need to take concerted political action to change it .

Ticktin in the article descibes the internal contradictions and conflicts that Capitalism throws up as it continually evolves and develops . The corruptions of Capitalism. Monopolies ...joint-stock companies ...government intervention ...and what he describes as proto or pseudo-socialism , that is , state ownership and nationalisation .
Some of those structures he states will form the seeds of the new society - socialism . Oh , yes , as he says , Engels was talking all about that . Simply put , Capitalism gives birth to Socialism . Socialism springs forth from Capitalism . Woweeee...What a revelation that is . Yes indeed , as many members of the SPGB have been saying for years ...the true transitional stage towards socialism/communism is indeed capitalism .

But , Hillel , please not lets get too carried away with what you describe as capitalististic decay and malfunction .

There is nothing deterministic about the collapse of capitalism simply because it created socialised production methods yet still cannot fulfil society's needs . It can and will stagger on from one crisis to another until the working class accept the alternative and actively work towards it. Hiding that objective behind a screen of theoretical verbiage doesn't help in the least bit .

( Drat , re-reading this and I'm guilty of the same transgression too , darn and damn it . Thank god I qualified this blog by saying it's rambling and rantings )