The class nature the Internationa

Mary party, wrote Lenin.

Parties of the Bolshevik type start from the revolutionary role of the working class as the only class which can carry forward the productive forces of mankind, by smashing the capitalist state and constructing socialism.

These parties are based on the scientific theories of Marx and Engels, developed by Lenin and Trotsky; these theories do not arise directly out of the experience of the working class, but are brought into the class struggle 'from without'.

The theory then develops in intimate connection with the class struggle and the building of the revolutionary party.

Marxists characterize the imperialist stage of capitalism, i.e. the period since the 1890s, as the highest and final stage of capitalism, in which wars and revolutions, reflecting the barriers created by capitalist private property to the further development of mankind's productive forces, predominate.

For parties of the Bolshevik type, i.e. the Socialist Labour League and the affiliated sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, all strategical and tactical changes are placed within a study of the relationship of class forces internationally considered from the standpoint of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, which we have outlined.

When our opponents, such as the reformists, Stalinists and revisionists, call us 'dogmatists' and complain of our 'rigidity and 'failure to face up to changing reality, they are in fact objecting to our adherence to these basic principles.

They advocate instead a series of opportunist adaptations to the surface reality of capitalism, a surface which is determined by the superstructure of capitalist politics and ideology.

The task of Marxism is, starting from the continuity of the conquests of Marxist theory in the past, to penetrate through the surface to the reality of class conflict underneath, and from there break up the surface.

Marxism

The crucial point of this process is to bring socialist consciousness, Marxism, to a victory over 'trade union consciousness' , which is, as Lenin stressed, bourgeois consciousness and not the embryo of political or socialist consciousness.

A recent issue of the magazine International Socialism' (organ of the group led by Mr T. Cliff, which declares the USSR, China and the East European deformed workers' states to be 'state capitalist' in nature), devotes a long article •Building the Revolutionary Party' ? to an attack on • the The basis of this attack is that the SUL has consistently adhered to the founding programme of the Fourth International, "The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International (Transitional Programme), which Hallas declares to be irrelevant or false' Hallas presents a tissue of selected quotations and incidents out of context over the period since 1938, and we shall have to deal with his distortions in detail in order to show the essence of his political method and to explain the actual processes from which 1 International Socialism' 40, October-November 1969 No. he has extracted his material; but first it is necessary to understand the principled differences between Marxism and opportunism to which we have referred.

The International Socialism' group's rejection of the gains of the October Revolution is entirely characteristic of the opportunist's rejection of the continuity of Marxism and of the experience and historical gains of the working class.

The petty-bourgeois opportunist begins instead from the surface of events.

The attacks on the Socialist Labour League in which they indulge are an essential part of the same method. They attack us as the continuators of Bolshevism.

The political strength of the Socialist Labour League, manifested above all in the publication of the daily Workers Press, our intervention in the Communist Party Congress and the campaign to stop Wilson's visit to Washington, is above all a vindication of Marxist principle against all opportunism in matters of theory, programme and organization.

When the opportunist enemies of Trotskyism attack these principles, they serve directly the bureaucratic agents of capitalism in the labour movement, starting always from the temporary and relative stabilizations of capitalism combined with the bureaucratic domination of the labour movement which makes such stabilizations possible.

The revisionists who have abandoned the Fourth International and its programme the 'state capitalists' and Pabloite revisionists—are precisely the product of this past period of defeats of the working class, defeats which have been the essential basis of the retention of control by the bureaucracy and the consequent survival of the capitalist The theoretical out- basic •I LABOUR YORKERS CLIFF SLAUGHTER look corresponding to this opportunism is summed up in one word: empiricism.

Empiricism is the characteristic philosophy of the English bourgeoisie, the first capitalist class established in power.

Its empiricism is the philosophical summary and expression of its historical role and outlook.

The bloody dual process of primitive accumulation of capital and dispossession of the small farmers in order to create a propertyless wageearning class-this was condensed into the 'possessive individualism' of English empiricism and utilitarianism: the world is viewed through the eyes of the individual as a combination of external facts, to which ideas are adapted; should the 'fit' between facts and ideas become awkward, then the ideas must be modified.

back This was the bloodless methodology which was finally distilled from the militant materialism of Hobbes and its development, notwithstanding certain political compromises, by Locke.

All the pseudo-Marxist groupings opposed to Trotskyism in the British labour movement fall back on this empiricism or 'common-sense'. Cliff even tells us:

to the let of practice, thom This follows necessarily from his explicit rejection of the Marxist view of the relation between trade union and socialist consciousness; thus:

"The point of departure of a revolutionary organization is the experience - the action, thinking and organization-of the workers, and the aim of its operation raising the historical initiative and drive of the working class."

Insofar as these empiricists follow a course of their own in 2 T. Cliff, "On Perspectives, 'International Socialism', No. 36, April-May 1969. of strength of the class enemy or weakness of the working Class, and the fluctuations of middle-class public opinion, tith radicat manifestanons of the latter in English parliamentary, journalistic and academic life.

Not surprisingly, these groupings, from the Stalinists to the 'state capitalists' • are at a loss to explain the development of the SLL.

According to them, our insistence on the unity of theory and practice, on Marxist printheir alexibility le th ciple, and our of ability to bend to the pressure of the class enemy and its agents, which is not at all the same as the flexibility of tactics necessary to Marxists on the basis of the historical struggle for programme) ought long ago to have consigned us to political oblivion; indeed they themselves have with dicted for us just such a fate. monotonous regularity And now, when the development of our work stares them in the face in one sphere after another, they begin to refer to .. the tragic failure of the SLL to fulfil its early promise....13 A leading member of the same group gives us an excellent definition of the 'state capitalist' view of the relation between theory and practice:

'A too rigid revolutionary theory can be more disastrous than a reformist practice, with the latter it can at least be changed in the future, with the former every struggle has to be seen in cataclysmic terms."

Just as we have seen that a revolutionary party can train its cadres only in a thorough understanding of the necessarily revolutionary nature of the whole epoch in which we live, so it is also true that a constant struggle for the method of dialectical materialism is necessary for the building of the party.

Yet here we have Higgins, like Tony Cliff, painstakingly advocating an empiricist "reformism against Marxist theory. It is not here a question of 'too rigid revolutionary theory', but of Marxism.

The message is that the state capitalists will conform to the 'English' method of adaptation to the 'facts', and the complaint against the Trotskyists is that they will not behave in this English bourgeois manner.

The use of the word 'revolutionary' by the state capitalist spokesman is here as always nothing but phrasemongering, because it is accompanied by the opposite of revolutionary preparation: capitulation to bourgeois ideology on theoretical questions, and abandonment of the struggle against opportunism which must mean acceptance of the politics of opportunism.

The first great experience of the proletarian movement in the imperialist era in this respect was that opportunism would use "theoretical' phrases of a Marxist kind to obscure and thus facilitate its service to the needs of the ruling class.

That was the great lesson of the betrayal of social democracy in the First World War. In Higgins' statement we have precisely this phrasemongering, packaged in the condemnations of 'rigidity' and 'orthodoxy' which sound so 'reasonable' to the petty-bourgeois intellectual.

The Fourth International had to fight its first great theoretical and political battle against exactly such a petty-bourgeois tendency in the shape of James Burnham and Max Schachtman in the Socialist Workers' Party (USA) in 1939-1940.

Trotsky's book In Defence of Marxism' contains the record of this battle.

This petty-bourgeois opposition wanted to confine the discussion to 'concrete' questions, and particularly to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Trotsky exposed the pragmatic, subjective and impressionistic method behind this, the abandonment of dialectical materialism and of the continuity of the Marxist movement.

Burnham was smoked out as a conscious pragmatist; Shachtman played an especially treacherous role, declaring that a difference between dialectical materialism and empiricismpragmatism need not involve political consequences.

These methodological questions must predominate in our answer to Hallas' latest attack on the SLL and Trotskyism.

Characteristically, he does not discuss the history of the SLL and its predecessors with any accounting of the role of his own tendency in relation to it.

His standpoint 3 Hallas, op. cit. 4 J. Higgins, "The igins of the Communist Par n 'International Socialism', 40. that of empiricism, i.e. that of the contemplative observer, appearing to see the process from the outside, despite the fact that he personally, Tony Cliff and others like them were directly involved in many of the events to which he refers.

His presentation appears to concentrate on concrete questions, above all on the relation of Trotskyist policies to the changing economic situation of capitalism and the strength of the Stalinist and reformist bureaucracies, which, according to Hallas, have rendered the Transitional Programme out-of-date.

Trotsky shows conclusively in In Defence of Marxism' that this apparent 'concreteness', because it separates out questions from the overall historical nature of the processes within which they occur, and because it excludes a historical reckoning with the role of the Marxist party which is making the analysis and intervention, is in fact a wainto the abstract.

Hallas's method is in direct continuity with that of Burnham and Shachtman, just as is his political position on the nature of the USSR.

His attack is another stage in the perennial middle-class attack on Marxism, concentrated ever more directly against the revolutionary party and dialectical materialism.

Hallas and Cliff know very well that the theoretical and political groundwork which they lay creates a situation where many of the members of their tendency openly disavow dialectical materialism; the state capitalist group actually provides a breeding-ground for relatively sophisticated methods of destroying the theoretical roots of Marxism while appearing to be 'Marxists' of some special "modern', actually very 'British' (and certainly not 'international socialist'), type.

Cliff is open about this. He will explain, like Shachtman, that he himself 'accepts' dialectical materialism, but that among his members, both leaders and rank and file, there are some who do not; they all consider that the question of adherence to the dialectic is not an important one in relation to membership or even leadership of their organizaIn the universities, where their members are concentrated, the International Socialism group are represented by young and not-so-young men who are busy reconciling Marxism with the varieties of empiricism and theoretical improvisation fashionable in sociology and the philosophy of science, not to mention tired refurbishings of bourgeois economics.

Among them are openly proclaim 'Mensheviks'.

The 'hypothesis-testing' and 'model-building' of these empiricist and pragmatist bourgeois schools of thought is related directly to Higgins' defence of 'reformist practice' on the grounds that 'it can at least be changed in the future; i.e. it is a hypothesis or model to be modified according to every change in the 'facts'.

Exactly the same method is involved in Hallas verdict that the SLL bases itself on a programme which is irrelevant or false' In his own way Hallas realizes that to take on a criticism of the SLL is to challenge the whole basis of the Fourth International. He writes:

'A serious criticism of the politics of the SLL involves not merely a criticism of the views of the theorists of that organization, but a re-examination of the original Fourth Internationalist tradition of which, in essentials, they are the most consistent defenders in this country."

The actual meaning of this issage and all that follows it that Hallas consciously Hallas, op. counterposes to the dialecticalmaterialist outlook that of the vacillating petty bourgeois and his empiricism.

This vacillation and its theoretical rationalization in 'experimentation' and "nondogmatism' is the direct reflection of the desperate position of the middle class and its intelligentsia between the two principal classes in an epoch of wars and revolutions.

But the petty bourgeoisie is not an independent or decisive historical class. It has not the resources to develop and establish an independent ideology.

What we have described is only the characteristic habit of thought and feeling of the petty bourgeois, elaborated in political - theoretical terms. Only in countries and in historical periods when the development of the ruling class provides favourable conditions can this characteristic habit of thought develop into anything resembling a philosophy.

Thus, in the United States, the particular historical conditions under which capitalism developed on a 'virgin' subcontinent encouraged and shaped the conscious fashioning of the 'pragmatist' philosophy of Peirce and james ana the 'instrumentalism' of Dewey.

It was from these thinkers that Burnham took his method in attacking dialectical materialism in 1939-1940.

Like them, he attacked Marxism for its 'dogmatism' The American petty-bourgeois intellectuals were perfectly free to develop such a philosophy of compromise and endless adaptation because conditions persisted for a long time which permitted the softening of social conflicts.

Trotsky wrote the tollowing illuminating lines on the subject:

"The US Secretary for Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, has reproached the author of these Lean Trotsky lines for "a dogmatic narrowness which is utterly nonAmerican", and he opposes to this Russian dogmatism the opportunist spirit of Jefferson, who knew how to compromise with his enemies. Apparently it has never entered Wallace's head that a policy of compromise is not a function of non-material nationa spirit, but is the product of material conditions. A nation whose wealth grows rapidly has sufficient reserves to conciliate the hostile classes and parties. When, on the contrary, the social contradictions are exacerbated, the basis for a policy of compromise vanishes.

"If America has not known "dogmatic narrowness" that is because it has had at its disposal a plethora of virgin territory, of inexhaustible natural riches, and, at least in appearance, unlimited possibilities of enrichment. And yet even in these conditions the spirit of compromise did not prevent civil war when the hour struck.

In any case, the material conditions which constituted the basis for "Americanism"

belong today more and more to the past. Henceforth there traditiona Profound crisis for American ideology.

"Empirical thinking, limited to the solution of immediate tasks, seems adequate, working-class as well as bourgeois circles, for as long as the law of value discovered by Marx fashions everyone's thought. But today, this very law produces opposite effects.

Instead of impelling the economy forward, it undermines its foundations. Eclectic and conciliatory thought, with its hostile and contemptuous attitude siders as a Marxism, dogma", which supreme philosophical and its sion, pragmatism, becomes absolutely inadequate, inconsious, reactionary, and ridic.

Pragmatism and empiricism are more and more challenged even within bourgeois ideology today, from an openly idealist and mystical standpoint, because of the ineluctable drawing of US capitalism into the centre of the world capitalist crisis.

6 Introduction to 'The Thoughts of Karl Marx' The socialist' petty-bourgeois intellectual who inhabits the revisionist groups cannot grasp that his contempt for the continuity of Marxism, his theoretical 'experiments', 'modifications', bringing up. to facts: and 'facing the changing are nothing but a sophisticated reflection of the critical historical situation of the petty bourgeoisie in a revolutionary epoch when all its bureaucratic and ruling-class supports, as well as its traditional ideologies, prove more and more bankrupt.

This ideological crisis is the key to the indifference and sheer chaos on philosophical questions in the 'state capitalist' and other revisionist groups.

Revolutionary leadership is built with a quite different and opposed method.