Towards a Discussion on Principles

[p004] Towards a Discussion on Principles THE FIRST ISSUE of Labour Review naturally aroused a good deal of interest in the socialist movement. We have received many, many letters, the overwhelming majority of which whole-heartedly and unreservedly congratulated us. We think it sufficient to quote one which is typical of this sort of letter. It reads: “Let me congratulate you on Labour Review. It is, without doubt, the best Marxist journal in English I have ever seen, both from the point of view of form and content”. That letter came from a man who, until four months ago, was a leading member of the Communist Party and who was formerly a full-time official of that Party. There have been many such letters and naturally, we welcomed them all. In a sense, however, correspondents who wrote in this vein did not help the editors as much as those whose welcome to Labour Review was qualified and supplemented by constructive criticism. In this editorial, we would like to take up some of the more important criticisms made of Labour Review No. I and to explain our editorial reaction to them. The criticisms fall into three main types. Firstly, some critics said that several of the articles were too difficult for ordinary workers. Secondly, some said that too many articles were directed towards members and ex-members of the Communist Party. Thirdly, several people complained that some articles were “sectarian’’. Let us first of all, then, examine the criticism that some articles were too difficult for “ordinary workers”. If what is meant by this is that Labour Review is not a popular, agitational journal, dealing with workers’ day-to-day problems and intended for sale in large numbers, say, at any trade-union branch meeting—we must agree. But then this is not the function of Labour Review as your editors see it. We do not, however, subscribe to the view that workers are unable to study and understand political theory. On the contrary, as Lenin brilliantly showed in What is to be Done?, because they are nearer to the class-struggle, nearer to the “realities” of social life, if properly trained, workers can grasp socialist theory more profoundly than the intellectuals. “The sin we commit,” wrote Lenin, “is that we do not sufficiently 33 stimulate the workers to take this path, common to them and to the intellectuals, of revolutionary training, and that we too frequently drag them back by our silly speeches about what ‘can be understood’ by the masses of the workers, by the ‘average workers’.” This does not of course mean that we only intend to publish high fallutin articles bespattered by long words. We shall certainly encourage all our contributors to write simply and directly. A genius is not one who has the ability to say things we all know in words we ordinary mortals don’t understand, but is often one who is able to put into simple language, complicated and difficult ideas. On the other hand, our contributors will be encouraged to avoid “talking down” to work- ers and we hope that they will not practice that sort of over-simplification of complex theoretical matters which reduces them to shallowness. There is one grave fault which Socialist writers are often guilty of—jargon, Writing in jargon is not just a bad and lazy habit but is usually a symptom of some deep-seated deficiency. Yet there is a real diffi- culty here. Marxism is a social science—the science of social evolution. Labour Review is meant to be a scien- tific journal whose function it is to communicate to its readers accounts of recent advances in Marxist science. Labour Review seeks to do for serious socialists what, for example, the British Medical Journal does for Bri- tish doctors. For example, Marxists believe that the philosophy of dialectical materialism is an essential aspect of political thinking. Necessarily, therefore, Labour Review must publish philosophical articles developing (not merely reiterating) dialectical material- ism. But just as the British Medical Journal, in writing about the search for some new, orally-administered substitute for insulin, has to assume that its readers know something about the causes for the rise and fall of blood-sugar concentration, so those who write in Labour Review on Marxist philosophy will have to as- sume that our readers are acquainted with, at least, the elementary propositions of dialectical materialism. Labour Review No. I contained an article defending the Marxist theory of value from John Strachey’s attack on it. Naturally, the two contributors had to assume, in

[p005] preparing this defence, that our readers already knew something about the labour theory of value. Readers who find any of our articles too difficult in this sense are invited to write to Labour Review and ask for a list of background books. We will be only too pleased to help. Another of the difficulties about reading articles on Marxist science is that Marxism, like all sciences, has its own stock of technical terms. Technical terms are a kind of shorthand—they symbolise concepts arrived at through a long process of experiment, observation, analysis and reasoning. For example, the technical term “the dictatorship of the proletariat” means something precise to the Marxist—though to those unacquainted with socialist theory, the very word dictatorship is simply a terrifying reminder of brutal, personal dictatorships of such people as Hitler. Yet the dictatorship (i.e. rule) of (meaning by) the proletariat (i.e. workers) has nothing in common with personal, autocratic dictatorship; it is in fact the highest form of democracy yet known. The way in which this particular technical term has often been used is a good example of how technical terms easily degenerate into jargon—and indeed it is some- times difficult to draw a firm line between them. Tech- nical terms become jargon when, instead of making an argument more precise, they confuse it. Jargon is the language of those who, because they lack understanding of their subject, are reduced to “blinding with science” both their audience and themselves. If Labour Review is ever guilty of this sort of conspiracy against its readers please call our attention to it, firmly. Now a few remarks on the second criticism, viz., that a majority of articles are directed towards mem- bers and ex-members of the Communist Party. We agree that this was true of our first issue and is still true though to a lesser degree of our second. We make no apologies for this—but do promise to remedy matters in the future. It has become a truism, today, to say that the Communist Party is in a state of acute crisis. What is not widely enough realised, however, is that, out of loyalty to the great Russian Revolution of 1917, a loy- alty misused to their own petty advantage by the Com- munist leaders, in Britain alone, thousands of promis- ing young Marxists have for years been desiccated in the arid desert of Stalinism. At this critical stage in the break-up of Stalinism, it seems to us very important, in the interests of the socialist movement as a whole, to try to help many communist and ex-communists to find the road towards creative Marxism, and to save them from the sterility of Fabianism or continued im- prisonment in the King Street intellectual lock-up. This issue of Labour Review appears just before the special National Congress of the Communist Party—a con- gress which, for good or ill, will be a decisive one. We hope that Labour Review will play a positive role in helping dll those involved in this Congress who want to build a really strong Marxist movement in Britain. However, we hope that our critics on this second score will be somewhat appeased if we list some of the articles to appear in future issues of Labour Review. During the next few months we shall publish, amongst others, articles on the following subjects: The left-wing and the Labour Party; Youth and the Socialist Movement; the present state of British Economy; Automation and Socialism; Marxism and the fight for Peace; the National and Colonial question; Socialism and literature; Natural Science and Marx- ism; Rosa Luxembourg. Finally, we want to say something about the cri- ticism that Labour Review No. I showed sectartan features. This question of sectarianism in the British Socialist movement raises some particularly deep-seated, complex problems. One major difficulty arises because the word has been misused so frequently as a standard “swear-word” by Communist Party leaders. It is, in- deed, interesting that, as far as we can discover, every single person who criticised us for our “sectarianism” was either a member or an ex-member of the Com- munist Party. This word has in the past been applied to so many things that it has ceased to have, for most people, any precise meaning. A good, precise technical term of Marxist science has been deliberately debased into jargon. In the Communist Party, “sectarianism” can mean anything from the attitude of a member who is SO Wrapped up in “serious” music that he has no time for “jazz” (or vice versa) to the opinion of someone who opposes a bureaucratically sponsored resolution recommending workers on strike to return to work “to allow negoitations to proceed”. Those who still believe U.N.O. to be a “thieves kitchen”, those who in the past said it was silly and degrading to adulate Stalin as a demi-god, those who never learned how to forget to use naughty “old fashioned” words like “dictatorship of the proletariat”, “Soviet power”, “reformist illusions” —all these, in their time, have been called “sectarian”. “Sectarian” in fact is, to the Communist leaders, a term for admonishing those who, however superficially, dis- agree with them. Socialists who disagree with them more fundamentally are, as is well known, just plain “fascist counter-revolutionaries”, “petit-bourgeois de- viationists” or “police spies’. In fact, what the Communist Party leaders have tried to do is to hide their own deep-rooted sectarianism (a legacy carried over from their opportunist adulation of Stalin) by flinging the term around as an epithet of abuse against all types of critic in their own party. Unfortunately, this very practice (which so many peo- ple have copied) has prevented honest Communists, in this critical phase of unmasking Stalinism, from mak- ing a fundamental analysis of what sectarianism really is, what its roots in the socialist movement are and how it can be eradicated. For ex-communists and dissident Communist Party members there is no more important task for them to undertake than this analysis. The first step, so it seems to us, is to stop mis-using the word “sectarian”, to stop labelling everyone on the left with whom they disagree as “sectarian”’. There are, of course, serious left-sectarian tenden- cies in the British Labour movement. Left-sectarianism is largely an emotional reaction to the corruption of right-wing reformist labour leaders. It substitutes im- pressions of developments as we would like them to be for a Marxist estimation of things as they really are. Perceiving right wing corruption, the left-sectarian de- clares, in effect, his own incorruptibility and his own “purity”. This induces him to suggest that he alone knows the answers to the problems of the labour move- ment which is as good a way as any to arrive at the con-

[p006] clusion that he alone has nothing to learn. Naturally, from this point of view he is driven on to declaring, in his high sounding “manifestos” that only those who believe as he does are “‘saved”—and promptly cuts him- self adrift from the real movement of the working peo- ple. In a future issue of Labour Review we hope to deal with this question of left sectarianism more fully. We are sure, however, that most of the people who criticised us for our “sectarianism” had something specific about Labour Review No. 1 in mind. We ask our correspondents in making any criticisms always to try to be specific. Then we shall all know exactly what we are discussing. Two of our correspondents were good enough to be explicit. They attributed our “sectarian- ism” to what they called our “Trotskyism’”. True, one did preface his remarks with “I know very little about Trotskyism but...” There are a number of aspects of this dubbing of Trotskyism as “sectarian”. Of greatest importance, there is a tendency amongst some ex-communists to regard as sectarian all those views which represent a direct challenge to the existing capitalist state author- ity. If these people dared (for many of them still retain a sort of irrational, god-like awe for Lenin) they would castigate Lenin’s writings on Britain (e.g. parts of “Left-Wing Communism”’), as “sectarian’’. Any socialist in Britain today, after the recent exposure of Stalinism (but still in the era of Stalin’s “British Road to Socialism’’) is likely to be regarded by some people as sectarian just because he expresses the opinion that, say, no-one has yet produced evidence to show that the general opin- ions of Lenin on the nature of the British State, which he expressed in 1917, are now out of date. What would our critics say about Labour Review if we wrote, with- out quotation marks, the following? “Today, in England and in America too, the pre- liminary condition for ‘every real peoples’ revolution’ is the smashing, the destruction of the ready-made state machinery...” (Lenin State & Revolution). Was Lenin sectarian? Are those who believe these words still to be true sectarian? Of course, it is easy to understand why so many ex-communists feel somewhat repelled by those who repeat Lenin’s words today, for after all, for a whole generation, precisely the same words tripped so easily off the lips of Stalinist com- munist leaders and were made to serve the dirtiest poli- tical crimes. Certainly it is sectarian and doctrinaire to try to prove a point by repeating, parrot-wise, Marx or Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin—but the misuse of quo- tations does not invalidate the opinions of the authors quoted. We have noticed, however, the tendency amongst some ex-communists to label as sectarian the essentials of Leninist thought. For example some readers may allege that many of Lenin’s views are out of date, but, if they are, your Editors want to see them proved out- moded by concrete evidence—not by phrase-mongering and counter-phrase-mongering. Labour Review will gladly print any article on Leninism, however critical, which examines, objectively and concretely, Lenin’s theories. We do believe, however, that some of those who call Labour Review sectarian are, in fact, only rational- 35 ising their own inclinations to make an easy transition from Marx and Lenin to G. D. H. Cole and John Strachey. Would it be sectarian to call this a reformist trend? Apparently it is not the reformist political pro- gramme of the Communist Party these people object to but the bureaucratic dictatorship of party life oper- ated by the communist leaders. As your Editors see it, there is, amongst a few vociferous ex-communists, a definite movement (though the path taken is circuitous) which should properly be described as a reformist accommodation to the continued pressure of imperialism upon those in the Labour Movement who are beginning to move away from Stalinism. We feel that now is the time to examine closely all such trends before they have become hardened into dogma. Your Editors also happen to believe that no-one has yet produced evidence to vindicate a reformist ap- proach to socialism in Britain or elsewhere. But this does not mean that we (or most of our readers) have fixed ideas about all matters connected with socialism and are content to settle every new question by resorting to labels and quotations from the “classics”—Marx, Lenin or Trotsky. On the contrary, we want to encourage every socialist to write down his thoughts on how the problems of socialist advance in Britain will be solved; we want to publish these views so that we all can, to- gether, examine them, sift them, integrate them and develop them. Those who disagree with any of the views expressed by any of the contributors to Labour Review should not dismiss our journal with the “swear- word” sectarian, but should seriously set down their disagreements, unequivocally and at sufficient length for them to develop their disagreements adequately. We shall be pleased to publish them. To return to this matter of Trotskyism. We appre- ciate the point of view of many members and ex-mem- bers of the Communist Party that whether or not Trotsky gave the best possible scientific explanation of events in the socialist movement during the last thirty years is a matter for debate and discussion. Trotsky and his followers have offered a serious ana- lysis of the recent history of the socialist movement. Their writings represent an attempt, in a period of re- volutionary retreat, to continue, after Lenin’s death, the Marxist tradition in social science. They have produced a rich body of literature and ideas worthy of serious study by any literate socialist today on the application of Marxist, scientific methods of analysis to the prob- lems of the international socialist movement. More than this, the importance of “Trotskyism” for the great debate following the Kruschev speech, is that it represents the only attempt so far made from the point of view of Marxism to explain the Stalinist de- generation of the Soviet Union and at estimating the significance of the conflict between the progressive character of nationalized property in the U.S.S.R. and the reactionary bureaucracy which rules that country. Trotskyism is, to date, the only explanation of why the working class of the world needs to defend the U.S.S.R. from imperialist attacks, whilst also helping the Rus- sian workers to get rid of the bureaucracy which auto- cratically rules them. It was Trotsky who insisted that the bureaucracy would not voluntarily give up its privi- leges or liberalise itself as a result of mass pressure. He maintained over and over again that it must be

[p007] overthrown by the revolutionary working class led by a Marxist leadership. Hungary showed how right Trotsky had been on this point. Nor, as far as we can see, have any recent events in the U.S.S.R. itself done anything but confirm the correctness of his analysis. Likewise the present crisis in the Communist Par- ties outside the Soviet Union is further proof that the bureaucrats who control these parties, no matter what their difficulties may be as a result of Kruschev’s speech, are absolutely incapable of transforming them into genuine revolutionary parties. These parties, like the Soviet bureaucracy whom they represent, can never adopt revolutionary policies. That is why they are now split into a number of factions each engaged in a bitter struggle with the bureaucrats. Trotsky’s was the only Marxist theory, deriving its inspiration from Lenin, to expose and explain the _ facts that Kruschev later revealed—at a time when Communists and false “friends” of the U.S.S.R. were selling their political souls to Stalin. For this reason, Trotsky’s theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of Stalinism stands until someone produces a better ex- planation. For all Marxists today are asking for a more scientific explanation of Stalinism than Kruschev’s “devil cult” or Maao Tse-Tung’s eclectic catalogue of “mistakes” and “achievements”. Some people say that there is a danger of involving the British socialist movement in 1957 in a discussion on the relative merits of one side or another engaged in a sterile, obscure political controversy, between two sects of the Russian Communist Party conducted in far-away Russia, way back in the 1920’s and so diverting our attention from the urgent problems of Britain today. Unfortunately for our native empiricists, the truth is that, one way or another, and whether we like it or not, the future of socialism in any part of the world today is bound up, inextricably, with the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its outcome. We cannot escape its presence however we may try. The “Russian question” remains the key for Marxists who wish to derive a correct theory for the socialist movement in Britain today. Others have remarked that there is a danger of elevating Trotsky into a new “socialist god”. Labour Review will certainly have nothing to do with encour- aging such an attitude to Trotsky or, for that matter, to any one else. Nor, we believe, would Trotsky him- 36 self have permitted this to happen. We are absolutely certain that Trotsky did not and could not dot the last ‘i’ or cross the last ‘t’ of Marxism. His achievements would not have been possible without mistakes. What Labour Review says (unlike the “would-be” Marxists of the Communist Party even in their present mood of public breast-beating over Stalin) is that Trotsky needs to be studied. Labour Review, Trotsky, the Reasoner, Univer- sities and Left Review, Lenin, Tito, Gomulka, World News, or Marx himself, not one of these holds the magic key to unlock the future. That key can only be provided by the unity of theoretical study with concrete activity and accurate detailed observation of real life. Trotsky’s are some of the more important works to study... For these reasons, Labour Review publishes arti- cles, which, amongst others, are written from the stand- point of Trotskyism. We would, however, welcome, from any source, that sort of criticism of Trotskyism which, in exposing what they consider to be Trotsky- ism’s shortcomings, point the road to a better theory. We do want, however, to emphasize that Labour Review is not a sectional, Trotskyist journal. We wish to make it the main journal for conducting the prin- cipled discussion of every aspect of revolutionary theory. But Labour Review is not a mere discussion forum for all those who are left of centre in the Labour Move- ment. We are not a “front” magazine patronised by “good friends”. Labour Review is intended to be a journal for the development and enrichment of Marx- ism, establishing and developing the scientific laws of the way in which the people of the world, each day, create their own living history. Our columns are open to all who wish to put a point of view on how Marxist science is to be enriched. Editorially, therefore, we welcome, for example, Bob Davies on William Hunter as heartily as we welcome William Hunter on Bob Davies. What the Marxist - movement in Britain needs above all else is a funda- mental, many-sided, uncensored, principled discussion of the problems of the British and international labour movements, a discussion which will educate (not indoc- trinate) us all in the strategy and tactics of socialist revolution. Labour Review’s aim, in a word, is to develop Marxism, not to revise it—two different things, as Lenin showed to his generation.