Mr Tariq Ali's radical mumbo jumbo

The Coming British Revolution, by Tariq Ali.

Revolutionary perspectives?

Predictably, Tariq Ali's book is being well received in liberal and reformist quarters. These gentlemen, of whom the Fabian 'New Statesman' is representative, sniff him out with a sure instinct.

Now that capitalism's long post-war boom is so obviously dead that even they are beginning to realize it, they sense also that something might be needed to help reformism keep its hold.

Perhaps, they think, someone with a more revolutionary-sounding phraseology will prove useful. 'It won't exactly shake Wall Street . . .' says the 'New Statesman' reviewer, and '. . . there will be more books like this one'. He waxes enthusiastic only over Tariq Ali's attack on the Socialist Labour League.

The purpose of this book is to claim for Tariq Ali's International Marxist Group, entirely spuriously, the role of organizing for a revolutionary party in Britain. To this end, it is designed above all else to dismiss and discredit the Socialist Labour League, the British section of the Fourth International, and its paper the Workers Press.

Before we discuss the distortions of Marxism in Ali's book, let us say just what is the reality behind the coming socialist revolution in England. There is nothing abstract or demagogic about this reality.

Mass unemployment and open class warfare in Ireland and Britain result from the most profound crisis of British capitalism. Because of the long-accumulated and incurable decline of British imperialism, now thrown into the melting-pot of international trade war and slump, and no longer sheltered by world boom, the employing class has been compelled to embark on a policy of destroying the basic rights of the working class.

This attack means discarding the reliance on compromise mediated through the trade union bureaucracy. Such a change in the method of rule adds to the economic crisis a profound political crisis.

Because the Socialist Labour League, in opposition to all revisionists such as the IMG, has always worked on this perspective, we have been able to pose concretely the path to working-class power in Britain: demand that the unions mobilize the working class to make the Tories resign and replace them with a Labour government to legislate the Charter of Basic Rights.

Tariq Ali and the IMG have consistently opposed the perspective of capitalist crisis and struggle for power, but now Ali rushes into print under the title 'The coming British revolution'. A careful reading of the book shows that he still opposes the revolutionary perspective. Far from being an analysis of the developing situation, it is a charter for continuing the old game of middle-class radical protest. In order to sound more plausible, Tariq Ali covers up the past of his own movement.

Even at this late stage, Tariq Ali shows some sort of split mentality on the economic crisis. In the introduction, he talks about he and his friends 'laying bets' as to which company will be the next to go bankrupt. But Ali hedges his bets on the big question of the capitalist system.

'Many people still seem to doubt that Britain is in a crisis and feel that the situation will be stabilized once again as it was after World War II. Certainly this is a short-term possibility [particularly if Britain enters the Common Market], but the structural problems of British capitalism could only be sorted out if the working-class organizations were viciously smashed.' (p. 21.)

This is mumbo-jumbo. The 'structural problems' have been there for scores of years. The question is precisely whether the present acute crisis can be solved through 'stabilization' like that of 1944-1945. And Ali's answer is that of the ruling class itself: that entry into Europe makes it a possibility!

Actually Tariq Ali—the 'revolutionary'—is more optimistic than the serious bourgeois economists. He says: 'There are even certain indications that in the short term there might be tendencies in operation which are favourable to this country's economy.'

Tariq Ali's determination to look on the bright side for British capitalism is not surprising in view of the predictions made in the past by his co-thinkers. He recommends to his readers the IMG pamphlet 'The Credibility Gap' by Tony Whelan for its criticisms of the SLL, but he prefers to forget the economic and political perspectives upon which Whelan—and the IMG—based themselves in that pamphlet.

Is it possible to take seriously a political tendency which based itself on the following perspective, for example? Ernest Mandel, international 'theoretician' of the IMG tendency, wrote as late as 1971 that armament expenditures, '. . . make it possible to put a damper on cyclical fluctuations by stabilizing an important part of investment volume. In this way, the American economy is protected against a crisis like that of 1929.' (Reprinted in the Canadian 'Labour Challenge', October 25, 1971.)

Even after the Nixon measures of August 15, Mandel saw only a stage of 'slower growth', and paid no attention to the role of the working class in a situation where international crisis forces the bourgeoisie to attack every basic right.

Because of this completely wrong economic perspective, the IMG and its international collaborators worked on a political programme which opposes the revolutionary role of the working class.

Marxism and idealism

In 1970, in a pamphlet published by the IMG, Tony Whelan predicted that Wilson would create a 'pre-election boom'! Politics would go on in the same old way:

'. . . the British working class is not, yet, moving in a revolutionary direction or even, in its masses, accessible to revolutionary socialist propaganda: the situation is neither pre-revolutionary nor rapidly developing into a pre-revolutionary situation.' (T. Whelan: 'The Credibility Gap'.)

It is this perspective, writing off the working class as a revolutionary force, which led the IMG to conclude that it was from students, and from the protest movement on Vietnam, that any gains could be made. They condemned the Socialist Labour League's orientation towards the working class and the building of the daily Workers Press. They denounced the refusal of the SLL to participate in their bogus 'united front' in the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, which, according to Whelan, would provide the basis of a new revolutionary leadership. He wrote:

'. . . the struggle in solidarity with the Vietnamese Revolution has drawn into activity, particularly around VSC, thousands of youth, both students and young workers, who, despite many elements of mistaken ideas, adventurist tendencies, etc., are eager for a showdown with capitalism. And not only can the SLL not reach them, but they are by-passing the SLL on the left. It is from these youth that the core of the new revolutionary party will be built: therefore for Trotskyists to be unable to influence them is a very serious matter . . . we are eager to prove the superiority of our theories in action.'

No one can deny that the years since 1968 have provided ample opportunity for this 'proof' of the positions of the IMG and the Socialist Labour League. The IMG, working on the perspective that capitalist crisis was far away and any development of working-class revolutionary consciousness indefinitely postponed, relied upon its optimistic impression that the protest movement, devoted at that time to Vietnam, would provide something they called a 'revolutionary party'.

Everyone knows the actual outcome of the Vietnamese Solidarity Campaign. It disintegrated completely, in as many different directions as those from which its supporters had come.

They were in any case brought together, like the IMG itself, on a completely idealist basis, sharing the impression from immediate events that sufficient 'revolutionary' feeling could be aroused for their 'showdown with capitalism'. This is what lay behind the whole policy of 'confrontation' pursued by the political protesters, especially in the universities.

Tariq Ali's pretentions to being a Marxist have only survived this experience because of the diligence of the capitalist press and TV in building him up as the 'extreme left' in Britain. The one virtue of his new book is that he bursts this bubble himself. If anyone doubted that the philosophical basis of the IMG and Tariq Ali was sheer idealism, one paragraph in this book suffices to settle the issue.

Chapter II begins:

'Marxism maintains that consciousness determines history. In that respect it does not differ from other theories of history. What Marxism demands is that consciousness itself must be explained; that not only must it be examined as it exists at the moment, but the factors which determine its future development must also be constantly subjected to analysis. In late capitalist society the sole agency of social change is the working class. It is therefore essential to put into perspective the historical features which have shaped the present level of consciousness of the working class and attempt to analyse how this consciousness could develop and change in the future.'

Here are the germs of the whole IMG position. Tariq Ali tries to make Marx an idealist! Marx and Engels wrote over and over again that the basic question of philosophy was that of the relation between being and thought, being and consciousness.

Marxism is founded upon materialism. The world of nature, and the social relations of production entered into by men to struggle with nature, are objective, they exist independently of whether we are conscious of their laws or not. The class struggle growing out of these social relations of production is objective; it exists independently of our consciousness. Our consciousness is the reflection of these objective realities in our brains.

What sort of a 'Marxist' tendency is it that permits Tariq Ali to write down and publish such a monstrosity as: 'Marxism maintains that consciousness determines history'?

The only effect of such a book is to confuse and mislead any reader who is interested in Marxism. Marx's struggle against idealism was in order to show that not the will of man but the necessities of production and the social relations produced by it determined history. Freedom could be achieved only in the recognition of this necessity.

The idealists are those who are misled by the apparent independence of their ideas, which seem to come out of their own heads. Contrast Tariq Ali's 'consciousness determines history' with Lenin:

'In actual fact, man's ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it—they find it as something given, present. But it seems to man as if his ends are taken from outside the world, and are independent of the world ("freedom").' (Lenin. 'Collected Works.' Vol. 38 (Philosophical Notebooks) p. 189), and further:

'Life gives rise to the brain. Nature is reflected in the human brain. By checking and applying the correctness of these reflections in his practice and technique, man arrives at objective truth.' (p. 201).

Finally, paraphrasing Hegel with approval, Lenin stamps firmly on Tariq Tli's 'consciousness determines history':

'The "objective world" "pursues its own course," and man's practice, confronted by this objective world, encounters "obstacles in the realization" of the end, even "impossibility".' (p. 214.)

Tariq Ali tells us later in his book that Marxist theory has been fought for in Britain in the present generation by the group round the 'New Leaf Review'. He no doubt accepts the view often propounded by that group that Lenin was some crude materialist, whereas the true Marx cannot really be called a materialist. Let us see, therefore if Tariq Ali fares any better with Marx than with Lenin in the sphere of philosophy.

The best known of Marx's writings on historical materialism is the 'Preface' to his 'Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy' (1859). What does it say about consciousness and history?

'The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.'

Is there a last resort for Tariq Ali? Was there perhaps a young Marx who could be found to agree that 'consciousness determines history'? Here is an extract from 'The German Ideology' (1845-1846), when Marx was 27 years of age:

'. . . we do not set out from what men say, imagine or conceive, nor from what has been said, thought, imagined, or conceived of men, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We begin with real, active men, and from their real life-process show the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process . . . Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.'

The fruits of idealism

It is because Tariq Ali and his IMG advisers in writing this book, such as Pat Jordan and C. van Gelderan, have substituted idealism and empiricism for this materialist outlook that they are politically only a protest movement and theoretically a purely revisionist tendency on every basic question of policy and programme.

It is for the same reason that Ali, in writing in one chapter on 'The British Labour Movement' does not deal with Chartism, the first mass proletarian movement in history, nor with the bourgeois revolution of 1640. Not only Trotsky but Lenin, Marx and Engels all laid a solid foundation of theoretical investigation of these class struggles as the starting point for understanding the workers' movement in Britain today.

Tariq Ali thinks he can analyse Social-Democracy and Stalinism in Britain purely on the basis of his impressions, and not from the necessary study of bourgeois class structure and bourgeois ideology in Britain. For the same reason the IMG can never understand itself and its own history.

Anything in Tariq Ali's book on the Trotskyist movement itself is purely for the purpose of attacking the Socialist Labour League. The IMG itself is a scraping together of anti-Bolsheviks who find the SLL an obstacle to their good relations with the reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies and the middle class. They have clutched the tattered banner of the Pabloite clique (Mandel, Frank, Hansen, Maitan) who falsely claim to be the Fourth International (the 'United Secretariat').

This split first came into the open in 1953 and has never been healed. This split, and the open participation of the Pabloite sections in Ceylon and Algeria in bourgeois governments merits one page in Tariq Ali's book! He provides not a shred of analysis or explanation of the IMG's own origins and theoretical settlement with the theoretical questions of the split.

Similarly, he ignores completely the early years of the Fourth International, when Trotsky fought a bitter struggle for dialectical materialism as its theoretical foundation, against the pragmatism and idealism dominant in the Socialist Workers' Party (1939-1940).

Instead of presenting his case for the IMG in such a historical and theoretical way, Tariq Ali serves up once again the impressionism and gossip peddled by his group for years, always a servile assistant to the right-wing reformists and Stalinists. In the face of all the achievements of the members of the SLL—the daily Workers Press, the Young Socialists' movement, the unrelenting campaigns on all the major working-class issues, the building of a new leadership which has begun in the factories and unions—Tariq Ali repeats the tired old allegations that the SLL's members are driven too hard, are non-political activists, and only stay a short time in politics.

This rubbish was never given a serious hearing outside the coffee-bars and common-rooms, and in the workers' movement today it is pushed aside contemptuously, as the policies and campaigns of the SLL win more and more support and as the SLL fights consistently, and successfully, for the broadest possible interest in Marxist theory.

It is worth dealing with just one of Tariq Ali's distortions, since it exposes at the same time the IMG's own complete departure from any Marxist perspective.

Tariq Ali says (pp 122-123) that the SLL ceased to work inside the Labour Party, and created the SLL (1959) as an open revolutionary organization, because of the 'pressure' from ex-Communist Party members who had joined the Trotskyists only since 1956. Says Tariq Ali, this withdrawal was carried out behind a smokescreen of exaggerated claims of a witch-hunt by Transport House.

The record speaks differently. When the SLL was formed it applied immediately for affiliation to the Labour Party, requesting the same rights to speak and publish independently as, say, the Fabian Society. This was refused, and the League proscribed. We had reached a stage where it was necessary and principled to assert our right to work within the Labour Party, but without sacrificing the open struggle for our party and platform.

The forces we sent into the Labour Party after that date, i.e., in the Young Socialists from 1960 onwards, understood first and foremost this struggle for independent revolutionary politics and party, and it was for this reason that they won the youth movement from Transport House, despite the assistance given to Transport House by the immediate predecessors, and some of the present members, of the IMG.

The Young Socialists came out of the Labour Party in 1964-1965 on the same basic principles. The alternative was to allow the reformists to smash the youth movement built up since 1961 by trampling on the decisions of the majority, who had supported the League's policies and elected a National Committee with 'Keep Left' supporters in the majority.

The same people, now in the IMG, who opposed the SLL's struggle for independent revolutionary politics in the early 1960s now team up with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn in an ultra-left attitude to the Labour Party, and condemn the SLL policy of fighting for the return of a Labour government pledged to socialist policies. They devoted themselves in the 1970 General Election to 'revolutionary propaganda, rather than canvassing for the return of a Labour government.' (p. 144.) This has now led Tariq Ali to a totally reactionary conclusion:

'The Labour Party is totally bureaucratized and the only orientation which revolutionaries can have to it is to devise a strategy of destroying it, which means in effect destroying its trade union links.'

The idealists of the IMG work therefore to turn the best elements in the working class away from the most essential crisis of all: the crisis of revolutionary leadership. In Britain this new revolutionary leadership will be forged only in the actual struggle to overcome and go beyond the dominance of reformism, of trade union consciousness, of bourgeois consciousness.

And at this very point, Tariq Ali advocates breaking the trade unionists' links with the question of a Labour government. Everything written by Lenin and Trotsky on the class struggle, strategy and tactics, is thrown into the rubbish bin, and this is inevitable once the IMG has dispensed with the philosophical foundations laid by Marx and Engels.

To answer all the falsehoods and absurdities in Tariq Ali's book would require another book of greater length. Serious workers—all those who start from the necessity of building a revolutionary leadership based on Marxist theory—will be unerringly guided by the fundamental questions of philosophy and programme on which Tariq Ali and the IMG have exposed themselves as anti-Marxist through and through.