Imperialism and Social Reform, by Bernard Semmel

[p015] imperialism and socialism. For this to go on, peaceful relations in the rest of the world must be preserved. And so the ‘Communist’ parties ‘take the lead in the fight for peace’. As a part of this process, certain theoretical dis- tortions of Marxism play an important part. Above all, Marxism is twisted into an economic determin- ism. The dialectic is abstracted from history and reimposed on social development as a series of fixed stages. Instead of the rich variety and con- flict of human history we have the natural series of slavery, feudalism, capitalism and_ socialism through which all societies pass. The USSR’s pre- sent structure is thus sanctified as an ‘inevitable’ successor of capitalism and any ‘criticisms’ of its social and political structure must be regarded as ‘secondary’. An apparent touch of flexibility is given to this schematic picture by the doctrine that different countries will find their ‘own’ roads to Socialism, learning from the USSR but adapting to their particu- lar national characteristics. This is of course a mech- anical caricature of historical materialism. The con- nection between the struggles of the working class for Socialism in, say, Britain, Russia and Vietnam, is not at all in the greater or lesser degree of similar- ity of social structure of those countries, but in the organic interdependence of their struggles. Capital- * For the process by which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fell under the control of Stalin’s fac- tion, representing the class pressures of the petty- bourgeoisie in Russia on the basis of the international defeats of the working class, see L. D. Trotsky, Third International After Lenin, pages 147-163, and The Revolution Betrayed, and I. Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed. LABOUR REVIEW—October-November, 1960 ism is an international phenomenon, and the work- ing class is an international force; the USSR is the result of the first break-through of the world revolu- tion, a result distorted by Russia’s particular econo- mic development before and after the October Revolution, and by the impact of imperialism and the fate of the working-class movement since then. Trotsky laid a firm basis for the study of the re- lation between the Soviet workers’ state and the world working class in his writings between 1924. when ‘Socialism in One Country’ was first theoretic- ally presented, and his death in 1940, There are many Socialists who are naturally re- pelled by the bureaucratic distortion of Soviet society and of the Stalinist parties, as well as by the shameful record of Social-Democracy, and yet fail to escape from the distorted theory and method of Stalinism. Retaining that fundamental charac- teristic of Stalinism, loss of confidence in the ability of the working class of the advanced capitalist countries to conquer power, they dress up this loss of nerve with ‘theoretical’ ideas which have been current in the anti-Bolshevik sections of the Left since the October Revolution and even before. Elsewhere in this issue Brian Pearce takes up certain historical questions bound up with the periodical ‘discovery’ that the USSR is a capitalist State, a discovery which of course leads away from certain uncomfortable political duties, such as the defence of the USSR against imperialism. In this article I want to take up another argument closely bound up with these same ideas, viz., that the root of the trouble lies in the Leninist concept of leader- ship of the working class by a centralized party— Lenin’s ‘party of a new type’. THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN HISTORY Although this argument takes various forms (Lenin’s type of party was suited to autocratic Russia but not to democratic Britain; leadership will emerge naturally from the working class; all organizations develop bureaucracy; the success of 1917 was a ‘historical accident’ taken advantage of by a brilliant Bolshevik élite; Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky predicted the degeneration of the party, etc., etc.), it is always underpinned by a false con- ception of the role of theory and consciousness in history, a tendency towards economic determinism, a notion that the laws of social development are something ‘natural’, standing above men and de- ciding their destinies. Political events and tenden- cies are seen as the ‘natural’ and inescapable reflec- tion of economic interest; Marx’s concept of the political and ideological superstructure on the economic basis becomes a ‘mere superstructure’ of the economic struggle, as one of the founders of the

[p016] OoSee ore BY vex YT WHAT IS REVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP? 95 new ‘Workers’ Party’ recently put it. This implies that politics is only the froth of history, whereas Marx was quite clear that it is in the sphere of politics that men become more or less conscious of the economic contradictions and fight out the issues. Precisely in politics, in the struggle for state power, is the decisive conflict fought out. Trade union and industrial struggle is a school of politics for the working class, in the older capitalist coun- tries decades of trade union struggle were a neces- sary prelude to real class conflict; but the overthrow of political power and the institution of proletarian dictatorship is a qualitatively different question. For this, organization of a more advanced charac- ter, and therefore theory of a much wider and deeper character, is required. This means a politi- cal party which subordinates all partial struggles to the construction of a leadership firmly welded to the working class and completely devoted to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Such a task requires the ability to learn from all past class struggles in society, particularly the failures and successes of the working-class movement, and an understanding of this history in relation to the total existing structure of society, not only in rela- tion to the daily experience of the working class. The consciousness and organization required to achieve the greatest social overturn in history, these are the basic reasons for what has come to be known as democratic centralism, the bogey of so many ‘Left-wingers’. The revolutionary party must incorporate as far as possible the understanding of capitalist society derived from all past theoretical advances and their testing-out by the working-class movement in history. In this tradition and theory there resides a more scientific truth than the working class can derive from its experience of exploitation and day- to-day struggle. Rather than humbly bowing be- fore the experience of the class at ‘the point of pro- duction’, rather than assuming that the workers’ own experience will give rise to revolutionary con- sciousness, Marxists must on the contrary subordin- ate their political and theoretical work to the revolu- tionary party. This is the meaning of revolutionary discipline: that the consciousness represented by the Marxist party constitutes a higher consciousness of the historical tasks of the working class than does the immediate consciousness of the class itself. Only by accepting the discipline of the party, then, does the individual Marxist achieve the prospect of playing an independent historical role. This has nothing in common with the bourgeois notion of ‘free’ individuals imposing their reason upon the world. Rather, an objective analysis of capitalist production demonstrates that the working class is its gravedigger; the working class is consequently the only independent and decisive force in the modern epoch. But classes and social movements have to be welded together as forces by consciously grasping their situation and organizing to overthrow the classes which stand in their way. The relation between party and class is an aspect of this process; it is not enough for the workers to constitute a class ‘objectively’, by reason of their all being wage- labourers: from being ‘a class in itself? the proleta- riat must become ‘a class for itself’. Now Lenin’s primary concern was to find the form of organization and strategy which would ex- press this political independence of the working class. It is true that in Russia his opponents, the Mensheviks, were victims of the mechanical idea that the bourgeoisie was destined to come to power after the defeat of Tsarism; they therefore disagreed with Lenin’s notion of the proletariat leading the struggle against Tsarism, and so the political inde- pendence of the class did not arise for them until after the bourgeois revolution. However, Lenin’s conviction that the working class was the leading independent force in the modern era was part of his general view of ‘imperialism’ as the final stage of capitalism. The fundamentals of organization required for a politically independent working class are not in anyway specific to Russian conditions. Indeed, the essence of Lenin’s position against the Mensheviks should be much easier to grasp in a country which is highly mechanized, where a large proletariat confronts a bourgeoisie firmly estab- lished in power. IMPERIALISM AND LENIN’S CONCEPTION OF THE PARTY It is important to stress the connection between Lenin’s characterization of our epoch and his ideas on organization. Imperialism, with its rapid expan- sion of capital investment, the organization of pro- duction on a very large scale, more and more domination by finance-capital, and the concentration of standing armies and repressive forces equipped with weapons based on the highest levels of tech- nique of mass production, has given rise to social forces and ideas which restrict and hold back the working class. In the imperialist countries them- selves, a considerable stratum of the working class identifies its interests with the expansion of capital- ism itself. The new bureaucratic state provides a jarger number of administrative jobs for the upper layers of the working class and absorbs most of the disappearing old middle class. A new social group of functionaries, officials, managers, teachers. has grown up, and on the basis of this group, together with the skilled working class, a strong opportunist tendency developed in the Labour Movement. In Britain. the early defeat of Chartism and the subse-

[p017] 96 quent prolonged economic expansion led to the development of craft unionism at the expense of political organization. When the new general unions had come on the scene, and the need for inGependent political representation was recognized, it was not revolutionists who presented themselves as the leaders, but men with a very different stand- point. Fabianism started not from the conception of the working class as a revolutionary force, with the struggle for reforms as part of the building of that force, but from the idea that the state should intervene to alleviate the insecurity and poverty caused by the unrestricted operation of the capital- ist market. The more extreme reformists thought that state ownership of certain industries might be necessary to achieve this. In Germany, although the Marxist phrases of the Erfurt programme con- tinued to dominate the statements of the Social- Democratic leaders, a similar development was taking place. The SPD (German Social Democra- tic Party) became a church of the working class rather than a revolutionary party. When the war of 1914-18 broke out, not only did the SPD deputies vote war credits to their ‘national’ governments, like almost every other reformist party in Europe, but they boasted of the service they had given the nation by helping create a disciplined, organized and cultured working class. This conduct of the SPD at the outbreak of war closed a chapter in the history of Marxism. In the epoch of imperialist wars there must be parties of men steeled to resist all jingoism and patriotism, to proclaim the slogan ‘Turn the imperialist war into a civil war!’ The working class of each country had the duty of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ since the main question was one of cracking the front of imperialism. To many ‘orthodox’ Marxists this turn by Lenin was a leap in the dark, adventurism, folly, typical of the “Blanquist’, ‘voluntarist’ tendencies for which he had been so often criticised. But Lenin’s ‘fantastic’ slogan was deeper and nearer to the needs of the masses than all the ‘realism’ of the old Social- Democracy. The German Social-Democratic leaders ended up, at the height of the Revolution in 1918, failing to support the demand for the Kaiser's abdi- cation; and they gave ‘Marxist’ reasons for doing it —‘For the Social Democracy, the external form of the State is unimportant’! And when pressure from below forced their hands they issued a public state- ment to the effect that ‘in insisting upon abdication, they had been motivated solely by the thought that only abdication could preserve order and prevent the spread of anarchy’. Without a doubt, a big factor in the fright of the Social Democratic leaders was the fact that the Russian Bolsheviks were al- teady in power, and there was no telling where the process might stop in Germany. But again a ‘Marxist’ rationalization was offered: Scheidemana LABOUR REVIE! W—October-November, 1960 said afterwards, ‘Political actions can, essentially, only confirm an economic development’. It was just this kind of ‘Marxism’ that Lenin had to de- feat in the course of building a revolutionary party in Russia. His whole effort was to assert the dominance of the role of the proletariat in deter- mining the course of history in the 20th century, a dominance flowing not from any ‘voluntarism’ but from the nature of the crisis of capitalism, the character of imperialism as the highest form of capitalist contradictions. Kautsky and others in the old Social-Democracy fell down on just this point. They were great ex- ponents of Marxism as an explanatory theory of past history, but Marx’s conclusion about the neces- sity of proletarian dictatorship on the bas's of modern socialized production was not fully grasped. To do this meant seeing the working class, its con- sciousness and its organization, as themselves decisive forces in history, not just as the results of history. That is the meaning of Gramsci’s remarks at the head of this article. It is the direct oppos'te of Scheidemann’s ‘Political action can only confirm an economic development’ and of all non- sense about politics being ‘only the superstructure of the class struggle’. An interesting example of Lenin’s method in these questions may be found in his writings during the period of reaction follow- ing the 1905 revolution. A certain Levitsky, some- what in the strain of our own ‘proletarian’ Left- wingers, objected to the Bolshevik Strategy of the working class leading the struggle for liberty against Tsarism. This he saw as a watering down of prin- ciple and advanced the slogan ‘Not hegemony in the national struggle for political liberty, but a class party!’ Lenin roundly condemned this sectarian nonsense, which amounted in effect to an abandon- ment of the political field to bourgeois leadership.* SPONTANEITY AND SECTARIANISM In the Socialist Labour League recently, a small minority developed the idea that as the Labour Party was drifting rapidly to the Right, the only way for the Marxists to preserve their integrity was to set up a party quite independent in every way from the Labour Party. The Labour Party had ceased to be a working-class party in any sense, and a party must be formed which concentrated on the ‘real’ class struggle at ‘the base’, ‘the point of pro- * Incidentally, Lenin’s insistence on the leading role of the working class even during the period of defeat makes nonsense of those of his critics who claim that only during the revolutionary upsurge did Lenin stress this role of the proletariat (e.g., H. Marcuse, Soviet Marxism).