New Interventions

Volume 12, no 3, Spring 2008

Chris Gray, Some Key Marxian Concepts Base and superstructure In Marxian philosophy Paul Flewers, Accommodating to the Status Quo The Decent Left and its Euston Manifesto Cyril Smith, A Significant Anniversary Two hundred years of Hegels The Phenomenology of Spirit JJ Plant, Secularism, Phobia and Religion Is there such a thing as Islamophobia? Alan Spence, Proletarian Philosophy Fred Casey, the proletarian philosopher Otto Rhle, A Left-Wing Opposition to Bolshevism Two articles from 1920 Mike Jones, The Mohammad Cartoons The murky story in Denmark Mike Jones, Moscow and the General Strike How the Soviet leadership saw the British General Strike of 1926 Ryan Worrall, Henry Sara and Rudolf Hilferding, Analysing the Soviet Union State capitalism, a workers state, or a totalitarian state economy? Mike Jones, Slobodan Miloevi: An Appraisal Was he solely responsible for the Yugoslav collapse? Cyril Smith, Where Are We Going? Marx against Marxism Reviews The history of the car bomb, Gustav Metzgers Eichmann and the Angel, Irish nationalism, Direct Democracy 2 11 22 24 29 35 44 46 51 67 72 78

Were Back (We Hope)

The Editorial Board of New Interventions apologises for the hiatus in the production of the magazine since our last issue. This was because our Production Manager was hit by a serious illness that prevented him from carrying out his duties. He has made a slight recovery, which has enabled him (slowly) to assemble this issue. We hope that his health will improve, and that another issue will be assembled later on in the year.

Chris Gray

Some Key Marxian Concepts

I My investigation led to the result that legal relations as well as forms of government are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the socalled general development of the human mind, but rather have their roots in the material conditions of life, the sum total of which Hegel, following the example of the Englishmen [that is, Scots] and Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, combines under the name of civil society, that, however, the anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy. The investigation of the latter, which I began in Paris, I continued in Brussels, where I had emigrated in consequence of an expulsion order of M Guizot. The general result at which I arrived and which, once won, served as the guiding thread for my studies, can be briefly formulated as follows: In the social production of their life, humans enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or what is but a legal expression for the same thing with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then an epoch of

social revolution begins. With the change of economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical in short, ideological forms in which humans become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. (Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 1, pp 362-63) IT is not at all surprising that analyses of Marxs views on human history should return time and time again to this passage, in which Marx sets out his research programme, so to speak. What was he getting at? Vast quantities of ink and paper have been devoted to the answer to this question by both supporters and opponents of Marxism. However, if we want to expound Marx in writing we have no alternative but to add to the pile, given that many of the explanations on offer somehow manage to miss the point. In particular the recent laudable attempts of those scholars who have acquired the label Analytical Marxists (notably Gerry Cohen and Jon Elster) to distil from Marxs writings a series of propositions that can be made amenable to philosophical analysis suffer nonetheless from a number of failings. My original intention was to consider only the base superstructure motif in all this. However, as the 1859 Preface shows, it is impossible to deal adequately with Marxs remarks on this topic without treating of various other key concepts which appear alongside it in the text. Accordingly, I want to present, first of all, Marxs ideas in these areas as far as possible in his own words, before going on to discuss what other thinkers have made of them. So let us begin with a consideration of what Marx meant by the productive forces, relations of production, etc. II While the notion of human productive powers or forces appears in Marx as early as the 1844 Manuscripts (see Early Writings, ed Bottomore, p 162), it is first developed in The German Ideology. We are informed that: The production of life, both of ones own labour and of fresh life in procreation appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship It follows from this that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of cooperation, or social stage, and this mode of cooperation is itself a productive force. Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible to humans determines the nature of society, hence that the history of humanity must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange. (Lawrence and Wishart edition, p 41) Such considerations are especially important as regards contemporary society, in which certain productive forces mainly machinery and money become at times destructive forces (p 85), and in which the workers are degraded to the level of a mere instrument of production (p 312). Thus certain of the productive forces can at times turn into their opposites; this also applies to production relations (described in The German Ideology as forms of intercourse). At one point, Marx and Engels assert that all collisions [!?] in history have their origin, according to our view, in the con-

tradiction between the productive forces and the forms of intercourse (p 90). In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx speaks of applied science as a productive force of paramount importance, but also observes: Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive force is the revolutionary class itself. (see Lawrence and Wishart edition, p 174) Further passages from the Grundrisse, Capital and Theories of Surplus Value could be cited, but in the interests of brevity I think it is fair to say that Marxs conception of the productive forces can be understood as: 1. Natural resources, which humans can utilise. 2. Human physical and intellectual skills (including applied science) deployed in production, people themselves being the most important productive force. 3. Social relations of production until these begin to act as fetters on further development. The relations of production appear explicitly for the first time in The Poverty of Philosophy (p 100). Here Marx notes that the English could not have produced their contemporary industrial wealth without the presence of such features as private accumulation of capital, modern division of labour, automatic [sic] workshops, anarchical competition, the wage system in short, everything that is based upon class antagonism. As Alex Callinicos notes, these relations are, in class societies, in the first place relations of exploitation (Marxism and Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1983, p 50). Whereas the key text relating to base and superstructure is clearly the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, here again we find the basic ideas in The German Ideology (p 48, where civil society is identified as the base and is contrasted with the rest of the idealistic superstructure). In contrast, the Introduction narrows down the notion of base to the relations of production, which we may understand as (above all) the mode of production of surplus value, the precise way in which the mass of producers are exploited. It is this that serves as a foundation for a legal and political superstructure. It is important to get this metaphor right. Marx is not saying that people basically lack ideas of right and wrong, truth, beauty, etc, until they have satisfied their material needs by establishing a mode of production. (That would in any case be impossible.) All he is saying is that peoples material needs have to be satisfied and their ideological notions (in the loosest sense of the term) must stand in a certain logical relation to the mode of production; they must correspond. (There is no hint here of the notorious one-way relationship harped on by certain critics, who claim that Marx and Engels held that, as regards connexions between the economic sphere and the political and ideological sphere, the traffic is all from the former to the latter.) Equally it must be stressed that Marx is not attempting some kind of full-blown sociology at this point. It is, of course, quite legitimate to try to work out a sociology compatible with Marxs insights in these areas: indeed, Gerry Cohen, Jon Elster and others have attempted to do so. In particular they have tried to formulate a precise definition of the superstructure, specifying certain institutions. For example, Jonathan Wolff speaks of: the legal and political institutions of society, such as laws, law courts, and parliamentary procedures. Marxs image of society is architectural. At the most basic, providing societys foundations, are the productive forces At the next level up we have the economic structure (also, confus-

ingly, known as the base), and, above that, the legal and political superstructure. (Why Read Marx Today?, Oxford University Press, 2002, p 56) One may clearly try to specify which institutions, if any, can be said to be superstructural, but one must realise that none of this is in Marx. What Marx was attempting to do was to throw light on the relations between material production and the emergence of ideas: he was engaged in an ideological critique. This comes out in another passage in the Grundrisse where he emphasises that epic poetry on the scale of Homer is unnatural under modern historical conditions: Is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press? (Grundrisse, Penguin edition, pp 110-11). III If there is a regrettable tendency to attribute to Marx a sort of primitive sociology ostensibly expressed in the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, there is a parallel attribution of a certain philosophical conception which is, if anything, even more misleading. Let us recall Marxs exact words in our principal text: The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. Some commentators have read all this as a form of economic even technological determinism. But the first sentence uses the word conditions, which clearly implies that in Marxs view material factors do not in themselves explain everything about the superstructure. As for the second sentence, all this says is that peoples ideas are to be explained by the conditions under which they live, rather than the other way round. One can quarrel with this observation and indeed Marx would surely have been the first to admit that human consciousness can have an effect on human living conditions but this is not evidence of any form of determinism on the part of Marx. Indeed, it could be argued that Marx was not, in the normal philosophical sense of the word, a determinist at all, as John Bellamy Foster has shown in his book Marxs Ecology (Monthly Review Press, 2000), where he discusses Marxs approval of Epicurus as against Democritus in his doctoral thesis (pp 54-58). For an analysis of the question of free will from a philosophical angle which arrives at conclusions by no means incompatible with Marxism, although the author might well be horrified if we told him, see Daniel C Dennett, Freedom Evolves, Penguin, 2003. IV Marxs key insight undoubtedly was to grasp the potential contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production and its role in the transition from one dominant mode of production to another. Not surprisingly, this emerges very clearly in remarks on his own native country, Germany, as can be seen in Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany in 1848, where Marx writes: with growing wealth and extending trade, the bourgeoisie soon arrived at a stage where it found the development of its most important interests checked by the political constitution of the country; by its random divi-

sion among 36 princes with conflicting tendencies and caprices; by the feudal fetters upon agriculture and the trade connected with it; by the prying superintendence to which an ignorant and presumptuous bureaucracy subjected all its transactions. (Allen and Unwin edition, p 6) Clearly, this analysis could be applied to the era of high capitalism itself. Engels researches into the debased and pauperised condition of the working classes in Britain provided eloquent proof of the obscene prevalence of poverty in the midst of plenty. As Marx himself noted: This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, between misery and dissolution on the other; this antagonism between the productive forces and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted. (The Peoples Paper, 19 April 1856) A typically scholastic objection to this comes from the pen of John Plamenatz, who says: If the development of the productive forces is the causal determinant of epochal social transformations, then this development (cause) would ordinarily be expected to predate the social transformation (effect). However, this does not apply to the transition from feudalism to capitalism: as Marx describes the transformation, capitalist methods of production could emerge only because feudal relations of property were already giving way to others. There were no limbs to break the fetters until the fetters were broken. (Marcus Roberts, Analytical Marxism: A Critique, Verso, 1996, p 60, quoting Plamenatz, Man and Society, Volume 2, Longmans, 1963, pp 282-83). Plamenatz is all at sea here. The development of the productive forces in contradiction to the prevailing relations of production is indeed a sine qua non of progress, a development which must indeed occur prior to the decisive process of transition to a new mode of production, but this does not mean that the process occurs in such a cataclysmic (indeed impossible) manner as that indicated in Plamenatzs final sentence. We now know something about how this process occurred in at least two important Western European countries, viz, France and Britain. In Britain we have the significant figure of Jack of Newbury (John Winchcombe), who, it appears, employed several hundred weavers, and owned a dye-house and fulling mill as well (Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, p 138). Jack of Newbury was one of the earliest English capitalist entrepreneurs: he was able to succeed because he chose to operate outside the areas controlled by the feudal urban guild regulations. (For these regulations, see Leo Huberman, Mans Worldly Goods, Monthly Review Press, 1976, Chapter VI). The situation was similar in France in the eighteenth century, before the outbreak of the great French Revolution. As reported, the French merchant Gournay was asked by prime minister Turgot what the government could do to ease his problems: his reply was simplicity itself: Laissez-nous faire. Let us get on with it. (This was the origin of the term laissez faire: see W Lippmann, The Good Society, Allen and Unwin, 1937, p 185.)

We can assume that Marx extrapolated from the restrictions facing capitalist entrepreneurs under feudalism to posit a contradictory relationship between the productive forces and the relations of production under other dominant modes of production. Here is a research programme which needs to be completed: we need to establish what the successive modes of production in various parts of the world were, and how they succeeded one another. V Having established what Marx was basically trying to do in the Introduction (or Preface), we can now go on to look at what the Analytical Marxists have made of it. For a start, we should note that the Analyticals use a different method of analysis from that used by Marx. I do not propose to reiterate here all that has been said concerning the defects of methodological individualism (see Roberts, Analytical Marxism, op cit; also R Ware and K Nielsen (eds), Analyzing Marxism: New Essays on Analytical Marxism, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplement No 15, University of Calgary Press, 1989), but I do think it is necessary to draw attention to some remarks by Marcus Roberts on the philosophy of science found in certain critics of Marx and the response to it in the writings of Messrs Cohen, Elster et al. This response centres on Cohens attempts to analyse the concepts we have been looking at: Confronting a complex totality, Cohen seeks to analyze it into its constituent parts If technological determinism is to be granted admission to the mainstream of social science, he argues, then it must be possible to distinguish sharply between forces, relations and superstructure. Unless Acton, Plamenatz et al can be defeated on their own methodological terrain, historical materialism falls. (Roberts, Analytical Marxism, pp 63-64). Roberts, following R Miller, effectively argues that both Marxs critics and the Analyticals are barking up the wrong tree. The Anglophone critics (Acton, Bober, Popper, Plamenatz & Co) argued that historical materialism was unscientific (p 68). He continues: This positivist conception of scientific practice, however, was hardly state-of-the-art by the time that Cohen published his defence of Marxs theory of history in the late 1970s. For all their methodological selfconsciousness, the leading Analytical Marxists have signally failed to engage with recent work in the philosophy of science: the work of Kuhn, Feyerabend and Lakatos appears altogether to have passed them by Implicitly, the leading Analytical Marxists, directly engaged with critics of Marxism working within an earlier theoretical conjuncture, have unselfconsciously conceded a positivist conception of science which, while it may have been de rigueur 40 years ago, is glaringly inadequate in the light of more recent intellectual developments. Miller, in particular, has provided a devastating critique of Cohens defence of technological determinism focused upon its underlying misconception of the nature of science. If scientific positivism is conceded, he argues, then Marxs theory of history on any interpretation would be indefensible. But it should not be conceded. Furthermore, Miller claims that the technological determinist reading of Marxs general theory an interpretation disavowed by practically every significant Marxist theorist

outside the Analytical Marxist paradigm, but common to Bober, Acton, Plamenatz, Popper, Cohen, Elster and Roemer is both inconsistent with Marxs theoretical practice and necessarily allied, in virtue of its monistic and causal conception of historical development, to the positivistic (mis)conception of social-scientific practice. [See Miller, Analyzing Marx, Princeton University Press, 1984, p 204]. Circularity understood as the identification of internal relationships between the central explanatory concepts within a scientific research programme is not a problem at all; it is typical of the most interesting scientific theories that phenomena which are connected by way of explanation are also connected, to some extent, by definition. [p 203] (Roberts, Analytical Marxism, p 68) Miller develops this point by means of a discussion of Daltons atomic theory and Darwins theory of evolution, see Roberts summary, Analytical Marxism, pp 68-70. VI This brings us to the key propositions advanced by Gerry Cohen in his Karl Marxs Theory of History: A Defence (Clarendon Press, 1978), viz, the so-called Primacy Thesis and the Development Thesis. Cohen himself states both of these theses. Of the first, he writes: The primacy thesis is that the nature of a set of production relations is explained by the level of development of the productive forces embraced by it (to a far greater extent than vice versa). (p 134) Cohen adds: Some such qualifying phrase is always to be understood whenever the primacy thesis is asserted. (Ibid) In order to remove any misunderstanding, Cohen explains: The primacy thesis implies that changes in productive forces bring about changes in production relations. (p 135) Readers will readily appreciate that this proposition argues for a form of technological determinism. As for the Development Thesis, it can be simply stated as The productive forces tend to develop throughout history. (p 134) As evidence for Marx having subscribed to the Primacy Thesis, Cohen cites the passage in the Introduction or Preface where Marx speaks of relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of material productive forces. He argues that correspond equals are explained by, as in the phrase: Nervous breakdowns correspond to increase in the pressures of life. But there seems no reason to take correspond to as having that meaning: a more natural translation is are appropriate to. Another point to notice is that Gerry Cohen has substituted a slightly different set of words for what occurs in Marxs text: Marx speaks of relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development [my emphasis CG] of material productive forces, whereas Gerry has the level of development. A stage is surely not the same thing as a level: levels are suggestive of mere quantity, whereas stages suggest possible qualitative differentiation which might prove important. For my part, I do not see any evidence that Marx ever actually held the socalled Primacy Thesis. The one piece of evidence which might be cited is Marxs observation in The Poverty of Philosophy, where he writes: M Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth,

linen or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations as just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories in conformity with their social relations. (p 109) Nonetheless, it is possible that Marx was not advancing such a dramatic technological determinism as might appear from this form of words. It could be argued that what he was at pains to stress here was that when scientific progress has advanced so far as to permit a much higher level of productivity similar to that represented by the superiority of the steam-mill over the handmill, then this itself suggests that such production relations as effectively inhibit the extension of this innovation should be subverted, giving way to a more appropriate set of relationships, and that this subversion is what occurs. In other words, while it seems unlikely that Marx upheld the so-called Primacy Thesis, he did uphold the Development Thesis. (We should note, in passing, that Marx revised these comments on mediaeval technology: Jon Elster has drawn attention to a series of observations in Marxs Critique of Political Economy Manuscripts of 1863: Middle Ages. Hand mills, animal mills and water mills. (Windmills invented in Germany in the tenth or eleventh century. No serious use made of them before the twelfth century. Then used exclusively until mid-sixteenth century.) Typical that the German nobility, and after them the priests, claimed the wind as their own property. In 1159 Frederick I declared watermills the property of the Crown. This was later extended to windmills. Seigneurial right or forced-labour mills. Moses says, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth the corn. But their Christian-Germanic lordships assert, During the work the serfs shall have a long wooden collar round their necks, so that their hands cannot reach to put the flour into their mouths. This raises the question as to what exactly Marx meant by the development of the productive forces. Obviously an increase in productivity is involved, but this is not the only aspect. It would seem that, in an historical perspective, the situation is very much one of trial and error. For example, received orthodoxy now apparently holds that nomadism developed after the emergence of settled agriculture rather than before. Nonetheless, in historical retrospect, it would appear that nomadism, as a mode of production, was actually inferior it required a much larger geographical area in order to produce a comparable surplus. Hence, despite undoubted successes (for example, the Sami in northern Scandinavia), nomadism seems ultimately to constitute a blind alley in terms of human development compared with various alternative settled modes. Even this judgement must be seen as conditional, given the current ecological crisis, but it points up an ongoing feature, which is that the meaning of the phrase development of productive forces is no straightforward matter. Marx himself, after all, declared that such development must take place under conditions

most favourable to, and worthy of, human nature (Capital, Volume 3, Moscow, pp 799-800). VII What then, ultimately, is the status of that remarkable Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, whose ideas we have been trying to get to grips with? Friedrich Engels was in no doubt: Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch forms the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. (Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx, 17 March 1883, Marx-Engels Selected Works, Volume 2, p 167) Maurice Cornforth endorses this judgement. For him, Marx discovered the law of the adaptation of production relations to productive forces (The Open Philosophy and the Open Society, Lawrence and Wishart, 1968, p 122). As they are supposed to say in Japan: Ah so! The following questions arise: 1. What form does a societal law take? And is this one? 2. How, if so, can it be demonstrated in the transition from one dominant mode of production to another in a particular country? (For example, does Kautilyas Arthashastra mark the introduction of the tribute-paying or so-called Asiatic mode of production in India, and if so, how? And why?) 3. How can the law be stated? I would argue that Marx himself has already done this in our principal text: In the social production of their life, humans enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. There is no overpowering need to rack ones brains in an attempt to develop a comprehensive sociology from these insights, although those sociologists who are Marxists are no doubt engaged on this work already. There is even less need for a refining of Marxs hypotheses in order to subject them to the techniques of contemporary Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy. The real need is for the use of Marxs insights to furnish explanations for the historical development of human societies worldwide, in order to create a truly human civilisation. The philosophers, as Alasdair Macintyre reminded us long ago, have continued to interpret the world in various ways: the

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point remains, to change it. PS: Since this was written, a copy of Cyril Smiths Karl Marx and the Future of the Human has come into my possession. I am pleased to say that, as far as I can see, the conclusions reached here are in conformity with his: in particular, I would agree with Cyril when he says that: Because he sees humanity as self-producing, Marx knows that productive forces are really the essential capacity of humans to act humanly, that is, to create their own lives. (p 19) He also observes that Marxs famous base and superstructure metaphor was distorted by historical materialism into a blind causal mechanism. (p 20) Too right it was! A bad case of the dialectics if ever there was one.

Paul Flewers

Accommodating to the Status Quo

A Critique of the Euston Manifesto
ONE of the more intriguing aspects of political life over the last few years has been the rise of the so-called decent left. Its adherents can be found in various places, as columnists in daily newspapers and weekly and monthly magazines, running websites such as the theoretical journal Democratiya and the muck-raking Harrys Place, and in think-tanks such as the Henry Jackson Society. The ideas of the decent left a self-applied term adapted somewhat disingenuously from George Orwells writings are encapsulated in the Euston Manifesto. Launched in 2006 and rather arbitrarily named after the London railway terminus near to the pub where it was drawn up, largely by the academic Norman Geras and journalist Nick Cohen, it is a combination of liberal statements that are uncontroversial and with which few people would disagree (in fact, the sections on equality are part of Western ruling-class official discourse these days), a few mild criticisms of the Western ruling classes, and a big rant against the far left. It has been endorsed by a broad range of individuals largely but not exclusively on what might be called the soft left. Some, like Francis Wheen and Cohen himself, have always been known as left-leaning radicals. On the other hand, Geras, along with Jane Ashworth, John Strawson, Quintin Hoare, Alan Johnson and John Lloyd, were at one point or another in far-left groups. Ashworth and Jon Pike are prominent in Engage, a pro-Israel website that spends much of its time attacking anti-Zionists. What unites them here, and what makes this document so much a manifesto for the decent left, however, is a strong dislike of the far left. It is this deep antipathy that runs clearly through the manifesto like, as it were, a red thread, even though, as we shall see, some of the ideas which the Eustonites put in our mouths are barely recognisable to this writer. The Eustonites Friends It is often said that one can tell a man by the company he keeps, and the Euston Man-

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ifesto is no exception here. It has been praised by a wide range of people who would normally have little to do with anyone calling himself a socialist. This is not a fortuitous crossing of paths. Heres Bill Kristol, a veteran US right-winger, and fierce critic of socialism: It articulates 15 principles reminiscent of the much-missed liberal antitotalitarianism of the early Cold War period. Kristol should know; his father was a leading example of a previous generation of Eustonites, moving from left-wing politics in the 1940s to an early manifestation of neo-conservatism. He no doubt can see the parallels. And heres Christopher Hitchens: I have been flattered by an invitation to sign it, and I probably will, but if I agree it will be the most conservative document that I have ever initialled. Hitchens, as everyone knows, has moved a very long way from his socialist roots, and is to all intents and purposes a neoconservative in his current politics (even if his past has yet to catch up). The columnist Daniel Finkelstein gives us a clue to its appeal: I had to come to terms with it myself, after years of thinking myself part of the Left, and it was difficult to do and took me a long time. But it is now more than 15 years since I realised that the Lefts failure to treat all forms of totalitarianism as if they were the same was not going to change. The Right has its failings, Lord knows that it does. But it is a better ally in the cause that the Euston Manifesto champions. It is as simple as that. Here we have someone claiming to be left-wing but is clearly orienting to the right. Finkelsteins admission is revealing, and says a lot about the Manifesto itself. The Manifesto symbolises an orientation to the right. A tell-tale phrase is the statement that we reject the notion that there are no opponents on the left and that we reject, similarly, the idea that there can be no opening to ideas and individuals to our right. Apart from the fact that I cant recall anyone saying that there were no opponents on the left (with Tankies and Gerry Healys lot around, how could one say that?), it is clear, seeing that the Manifesto spends much of its time attacking the left (or what it thinks the left to be), what the Eustonites are saying is: We intend to orient ourselves to ideas and individuals to our right. And that is why Kristol and Hitchens praise a document that claims to stand on the left. Not because of a transitory coincidence on this or that issue, but because they recognise that it represents a big retreat on the part of left-wingers, from transforming society in a socialist direction to accepting liberal democracy as the best well ever have, along with a few improvements here and there. All in all, its the end of history repeated, but from Professor Geras rather from Professor Fukuyama. The Precursors The Eustonites propose a fresh political alignment. But we have been here before. One precedent that immediately comes to mind is Encounter, a magazine that first appeared during the Cold War. Published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and funded indirectly by the CIA, its contributors were often ex-leftists who still thought themselves as a bit radical, but who, in the Cold War, far from dissociating themselves from both imperialism and Stalinism, sided with the former, covering their capitulation with a fig-leaf of opposition to discrimination and poverty. Some were anti-Stalinist left-wingers who had given up on the idea of the working class being able to liberate society, and gradually came to accept bourgeois democracy as the most that could be hoped for. For them, Stalinism changed from being the product of a revolution gone bad to being the inevitable product of trying to go beyond capital-

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ism. It became the main and indeed sole enemy. For ex-Stalinists at the time, they just changed their allegiance from one god (Stalin) to another (capitalism), and their fear of devils changed accordingly. For all of them, any of their (mild) criticisms of capitalism were heavily outnumbered by stern denunciations of totalitarianism and those deemed to support it. Another precursor was the British social democratic theoretician Evan Durbin. His book The Politics of Democratic Socialism (London, 1940) was a fanatical defence of liberal democracy, positing that anyone who opposes liberal democracy, either from a Marxist or fascist direction, had placed himself outwith the political pale and was to be treated accordingly. Although the Eustonites do not go this far (at least as yet), their denunciations of the far left have the odour of excommunication about them. The resemblance of the Eustonites to the Encounter brigade is striking in several areas, not least their attitude towards the USA, the Middle East and the War on Terror. Railing against what it sees as the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking, the Manifesto declares: The United States of America is a great country and nation. It is the home of a strong democracy with a noble tradition behind it and lasting constitutional and social achievements to its name. Its peoples have produced a vibrant culture that is the pleasure, the source-book and the envy of millions. Of course, the Eustonites are aware of its problems and failings, and even admit that US foreign policy has often opposed progressive movements and governments and supported regressive and authoritarian ones note how it states has often opposed rather than often opposes, as if its anti-democratic activities are a thing of the past but this is really a whitewashing of the worlds leading capitalist power. Black voters in Florida would look askance at the idea of a strong democracy; for every example of a noble tradition of a fight against oppression and for equality there have been ignoble traditions of institutional racial discrimination and antiworking-class legislation and actions. For every inspiring example of political, social and cultural manifestations emerging from within the USA, one can more than match an example of disgraceful ruling-class chicanery both within and outwith the countrys borders. By talking of a great country and nation with just a few blemishes, the Eustonites are eliding over the massive class-based gulfs and huge social injustices in the USA, and letting the rapacious US ruling class off the hook. When it comes to Israel and Palestine, the Manifesto says: We recognise the right of both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution. Why the insistence of a two-state solution, one may ask, why make it obligatory? Why not within a single secular, democratic state in which all the inhabitants will enjoy equal national and religious rights? A clue may rest in the next sentence: There can be no reasonable resolution of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict that subordinates or eliminates the legitimate rights and interests of one of the sides to the dispute. Thats right, the legitimate rights and interests of one of the sides to the dispute. This may be a result of poor drafting, perhaps it should read the legitimate rights and interests of either one of the sides to the dispute. Yet one cannot help thinking that the Manifesto means just what it says, and the one of the sides to the dispute is the right of the Israeli state to continue to define itself as a Jewish state, with all the discrimination that flows directly from that. That the Manifesto has gained the approval of the Engage people suggests that this is so.

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Serious Accusations The Eustonites try to tar the far left with accusations of anti-Semitism: Anti-Zionism has now developed to a point where supposed organisations of the Left are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic groups. The first factor is presumably a reference to speakers at anti-war events cosponsored by certain left-wing groups and Muslim organisations, although no evidence is given. There have been incidents when dubious Islamicist orators appeared on platforms at demonstrations, and it must be emphasised that this is by no means acceptable to many on the far left. As for the alliances with anti-Semitic groups, again no evidence is given. There have been some opportunist links made with Islamicist individuals and organisations, particularly by Respect, and, once again, many left-wingers are unhappy with this. However, although I have heard rumours, I do not have direct proof of anti-Semitism on the part of these Islamicists. Taking the seriousness of the Manifestos accusation into consideration, one might think that some concrete proof of this would be necessary before such a categorical statement be made. The Manifesto continues: Amongst educated and affluent people are to be found individuals unembarrassed to claim that the Iraq war was fought on behalf of Jewish interests, or to make other polite and subtle allusions to the harmful effect of Jewish influence in international or national politics remarks of a kind that for more than 50 years after the Holocaust no one would have been able to make without publicly disgracing themselves. Setting aside the peculiar and very snobbish idea that affluence somehow bestows intelligence and good manners upon a person, the Eustonites are silent about the reasons for the growing prevalence of such statements about the power of the Jewish Lobby. Unlike the old-fashioned anti-Semitism with its fairy tales (however lethal the acts that they can sustain), the modern talk of Jewish influence has a material root in the very real crimes of Israeli governments and the arrogant manner in which they deport themselves, the uncritical manner in which Israel lobbyists and Zionist spokesmen support the Israeli state, irrespective of its misdemeanours, in true fellow-travelling style, and the manner in which Zionists associate the Jewish people as a whole with Israel. Can we be surprised that amongst politically naive and ignorant people (however affluent they may be) such feelings of disquiet become muddied with the remnants of old-fashioned anti-Semitism? Nowhere does the Manifesto mention the role of the actions of Israel and its lobbyists in the rise of anti-Jewish sentiments, and this is a disgraceful omission. Equally disgraceful is the Manifestos refusal to admit not only that it is not on the far left that such statements will be heard, but it is also on the far left that one will find powerful and consistent polemics against the very idea of the Jewish Lobby. Moreover, from my observations, the far left does recognise its responsibility in ensuring that its criticisms of Zionism remain free of any taint of anti-Jewish sentiments. Another indication of the Eustonites trajectory can be ascertained by the Manifestos intemperate blast at Amnesty International for its comments on the Guant-

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namo prison camp, a grotesque public comparison of Guantnamo with the Gulag, the legislative measures taken by the US and other liberal democracies in the War on Terror constitute a greater attack on human rights principles and values than anything we have seen in the last 50 years. Of course, the violation of basic human rights standards at Guantnamo must be roundly condemned, but Amnesty International is really going too far. So what did Amnesty International actually say? Here is its statement: Guantnamo has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law. If Guantnamo evokes images of Soviet repression, ghost detainees or the incommunicado detention of unregistered detainees bring back the practice of disappearances so popular with Latin American dictators in the past. According to US official sources there could be over 100 ghost detainees held by the US. In 2004 thousands of people were held by the US in Iraq, hundreds in Afghanistan and undisclosed numbers in undisclosed locations. AI is calling on the US Administration to close Guantnamo and disclose the rest. What we mean by this is: either release the prisoners or charge and prosecute them with due process. That is hardly deserving of the Eustonites violent condemnation, which is heavily redolent of the furious criticisms of Amnesty International in the US right-wing press. Again, this coincidence of views cannot be accidental. Creating a Straw Man The Eustonites do not hesitate in creating a straw man in order to wage an unwarranted attack upon their rivals on the left: We repudiate the way of thinking according to which the events of 11 September 2001 were Americas deserved comeuppance, or understandable in the light of legitimate grievances resulting from US foreign policy. What was done on that day was an act of mass murder, motivated by odious fundamentalist beliefs and redeemed by nothing whatsoever. No evasive formula can hide that. This is another example of the very sneakiness of the Manifesto. Who exactly on the left has said that the attacks were Americas deserved comeuppance? Lets have some evidence. After all, to cite the Manifesto: Political honesty and straightforwardness are a primary obligation for us. What the Eustonites are trying to do here is to imply that those who consider that the attacks on 11 September 2001, and other examples of Islamicist terrorism, are a response to Western policies towards the Middle East and Islamic countries are effectively endorsing those attacks. The handicraft of Geras is clear here. Writing in the Guardian on 21 July 2005, he considered that those like this writer who state that the British involvement in the war against Iraq was a prime factor behind the suicide bombings in London two weeks previously are essentially apologists for the bombers, irrespective of the fact that we uniformly condemned the attacks. Just like Tony Blair (and unlike practically everyone else), the Eustonites patently refuse to consider that one can strongly condemn these atrocities whilst considering that they were a response an appalling, misguided and unjustified response, but a response

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nonetheless to imperialist policies. Indeed, not only do the British security services consider the bombings a response to foreign policy, so did the spokesman for the bombers himself. New Labours foreign policy has greatly increased the danger of Islamicist terror in Britain. One cannot say for sure that had Blair not become involved in the Iraq war, the Islamicist terrorists would not have struck in Britain, but his enthusiastic involvement made them a distinct possibility, if not an inevitability. Merely to say that these atrocities were a product of odious fundamentalist beliefs dodges the question. The Manifesto makes not the slightest attempt to analyse the rise of these beliefs amongst young Muslims in the metropolitan countries. One must ask why these ideas have obtained a hearing, not only in the advanced Western countries, but also in the world at large. Hard-line Islamicist movements, including terrorist ones, were sponsored by Western governments against secular nationalist movements and regimes in the Middle East and Islamic world. I remember 20 years back seeing official British government press packs praising Afghan Mujahuddin as if they were the French Maquis. Certain hard-line Islamic regimes are fted by Western governments; did not a royal entourage from Saudi Arabia the very source of funding for much intolerant Islamic preaching propaganda in Britain visit these shores on a state visit just a few months back? Long-running Western policies towards the Middle East and the Islamic world, and the continued matter of Palestine and Israel, have, thanks to the decline of left-wing and secular nationalist politics in those areas, led to a situation in which resistance has often become based upon Islamicism, and sometimes extreme variants at that. The ham-fisted US response to the attacks on 11 September 2001 under the guise of the War on Terror have given a second wind to such movements and ideas, and poorly drawn-up and badlyimplemented anti-terrorism legislation in various countries also helps to drive young Muslims towards extreme Islamicism. It is not surprising in Western countries, when taking into account the weakness of the left, the growing disillusion amongst the population with the political process and the inability of liberal democratic parties to promote a meaningful challenge to inequality and poverty, combined with the overseas issues outline above, that young Muslims who are becoming politically radicalised have been adopting the ideas and practice of hard-line Islamicism, with a few going to dreadful extremes. Unless these issues are properly confronted, the appeal of Islamicism will continue to grow. The Disaster in Iraq On Iraq, the Manifesto admits that there were disagreements amongst its sponsors over the US invasion. It continues: We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognise its overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people. We are also united in the view that, since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the countrys infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.

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But who exactly are the forces trying to take Iraq in a democratic direction? The USled occupation authorities with their military and mercenary forces that are completely unaccountable to Iraqi people and institutions, and their blatant disregard of the Iraqi government when it makes the occasional decision which they dislike, and the big-power corporate looting of the Iraqi economy? The sundry US puppets who use the rhetoric of democracy to keep in with their paymasters in their hopes of making it as the new Iraqi lite? The various sectarian militias with whom the occupiers have struck deals? Or the working-class organisations trying to cut an existence between the violence and corruption of the occupiers and the rising tide of religious thuggery? There were various reasons for opposing the invasion, but let us concentrate upon the question of democracy. Could any intelligent person, when taking into consideration the record of the USA in destroying left-wing and even liberal regimes and movements in Third World states and backing reactionary, undemocratic ones, take seriously Bushs statements about bringing democracy to the Middle East? The astonishing thing with the pro-war left is how seriously it took the chatter of US official spokesmen and their British assistants about democracy, and, as we have seen already, the Eustonites side-step this reality by stating that US foreign policy has often opposed progressive movements and governments and supported regressive and authoritarian ones, as if it no longer does so. The material basis for liberal democracy does not exist in Iraq. For it to have any real substance, there has to be a stable economy and a stable society. The deliberate dismantling of the Baathist partystate apparatus and the corporate looting of the Iraqi economy through privatisation could not create the basis for liberal democracy, and indeed did the opposite by imploding a comparatively efficient and modern society, notwithstanding the distortions resulting from the grotesque Saddam personality cult and the problems caused by Western sanctions. In the vacuum left by the smashing of that apparatus, it was inevitable that popular power would rapidly fall into the hands of family-based or religious bodies, and that any parliamentary institutions erected by the occupiers would have but a shadow existence. Iraq has no functioning official government; Nouri al-Malikis administration has little authority beyond the fortifications of the Green Zone, and, like his predecessor, he only enjoys his position by the grace of the occupying forces. The manner in which the invasion and occupation was planned and implemented was guaranteed to result not in a liberal democratic regime, or even the semi-democracy of the Turkish or Egyptian varieties, but a social collapse. This is not any post festum conclusion, but was pretty clear at the start. And, unlike Geras, who has recently concluded that Bushs adventure in Iraq was perhaps not a particularly good idea, various people did point this out from the very start. Moreover, it is entirely possible that the utter ineffectiveness of al-Malikis government and the de facto day-to-day running of the country by unelected and unaccountable cliques and militias will lead to the discrediting of the idea of liberal democracy in Iraq. Certainly, left-wingers should not, as some unfortunately do, give a carte blanche to an undifferentiated resistance that is in part mired in vicious sectarian feuds; and support should be given to those forces trying to defend the working class against both the occupation forces and their puppets on the one hand, and sectarian groups on the other. Such forces cannot look to the occupiers for help. Should a militant working-class movement emerge out of the rubble in Iraq, does anyone think that the US authorities would happily let it, say, promote a militant fight

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against the US-backed corporations for better conditions, let alone attempt to take control of the oil refineries? The past record of US and British imperialism strongly suggests otherwise, and the Iraqi puppet authorities have recently used Baathist-era laws against striking oil workers without being criticised by the occupying powers. Humanitarian Intervention As for the Manifestos rejection of, as it dismissively puts it, picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention in Iraq, this is not a dead issue, precisely because one of the main planks of the Manifesto, and one of the most contentious factors, is the call for humanitarian intervention: Humanitarian intervention, when necessary, is not a matter of disregarding sovereignty, but of lodging this properly within the common life of all peoples. If in some minimal sense a state protects the common life of its people (if it does not torture, murder and slaughter its own civilians, and meets their most basic needs of life), then its sovereignty is to be respected. But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue. Once a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed, there is a responsibility to protect. It is interesting that the Eustonites blithely use the term the international community, a code-word for the big powers, and chiefly the USA, which is the state most involved in intervening outwith its borders. The calls for humanitarian intervention became popular amongst certain radicals during the wars ensuing from the collapse of Yugoslavia, and was in this instance almost always a call for the big powers to take military action against Serb forces (they were a lot less vocal when it came to Serbs being victimised, as in the Krajina or in Kosovo once the Albanian nationalists took over, which indicates that there is a certain limit to those whom they feel are justified in receiving protection). What the call for humanitarian intervention means is the demand that the big powers launch a military attack upon whoever is felt to be transgressing the norms of civilised behaviour. It effectively ties radicals to the military-diplomatic manoeuvres and interests of imperialism, as, no matter how much the Eustonites and their ilk may call, the ruling classes of the big powers will not go to the trouble of involving their armed forces unless there are some tangible gains. So our interventionists end up loudly calling for an imperialist attack, and cheering one should it actually take place. Our radicals thus become the propagandists for Western militarism, seeing the hard end of the state after all, even in a liberal democracy, the armed forces are effectively totalitarian organisations as the vanguard for progress and democracy. Logically, considering that quite a few countries Burma, China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, to name just a few regularly mistreat their citizens, the Eustonites should be campaigning for humanitarian intervention against them. Indeed, one might accuse them of a certain reluctance to put the full consequences of their programme into practice in their not campaigning for Western intervention against such countries. Moreover, it is well worth picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention in Iraq, as but shortly after the launch of the Manifesto it was clear that Bush and his sinister crew were building for a military assault upon Iran the Israeli attack upon Hezbollah in Lebanon appears to have been a Washington-inspired

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attempt to provoke Syria and/or Iran into responding, thus providing an excuse for the USA to steam in. Although Teheran and Damascus refused to rise to the bait, and it seems that there is some opposition within the US military to an attack on Iran, such adventures cannot be ruled out so long as Bush remains in the White House. Prominent neo-cons openly advocate bombing Iran. One would hope, in the light of the utter disaster of Bushs adventure in Iraq, that nobody in Britain, except those clinging to a Blairite foreign policy, would endorse any such action. But one cannot be sure. The Threat to Democracy The Manifesto then takes on the question of democracy. It declares: We are committed to democratic norms, procedures and structures freedom of opinion and assembly, free elections, the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers, and the separation of state and religion. We value the traditions and institutions, the legacy of good governance, of those countries in which liberal, pluralist democracies have taken hold. One of the fundamental institutions guaranteeing democracy, it says, are trade unions. Now that is not a contentious point on the left. But let us look at it within the context of opponents of democracy mentioned in the Manifesto. It sets out its opposition to the widespread phenomenon of terrorism inspired by Islamist ideology, which threatens democratic values, and takes a poke at people who make light of the differences between liberal democracies and dictatorships. Now it is true that left-wing groups, especially Stalinist factions, have touted for undemocratic regimes, and that is not to the lefts credit. But let us now consider who in Western countries pose the major threat to democratic rights. The Eustonites fail to recognise that in Britain and the USA, democratic rights are not in danger on account of some left-wingers regard for dictatorships or their attempts to chat up mullahs, or by Muslim terrorists or the ravings of sundry noisy but marginal religious figures, but because they are being directly attacked by the British and US governments anti-democratic, anti-civil-liberty legislation brought in as part of their War on Terror. This is no freak event. The whole history of liberal democracy is one in which the working class has had to fight the bourgeoisie tooth and nail to enjoy its benefits, and in which the bourgeoisie has not only opposed our fight for democracy, but has consistently attempted to wrest it back from us, as we see with Bush and Blair and now Brown, using all manner of dubious excuses for so doing. The main threat facing our democratic rights in Britain is posed by our rulers. It is they who are trying to restrict our democratic rights, and who have already severely restricted trade union rights. The Manifesto talks about defending trade union rights, but is silent about who is attacking them. Blair and Brown have left the bulk of the Tories anti-union legislation securely in place. Privatisation, PFI and PPP deals so beloved by Blair and especially Brown eliminate the albeit very limited influence people have over public services what do the Eustonites say about that, or, more broadly, about the general lack of democratic control over the economy as a whole? Nothing; the question is ducked: We leave open, as something on which there are differences of viewpoint amongst us, the question of the best economic forms of this broader equality

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And when it comes to broader social policy, we can read: The benefits of large-scale development through the expansion of global trade ought to be distributed as widely as possible in order to serve the social and economic interests of workers, farmers and consumers in all countries. Yet the Manifesto is silent about New Labours continuing implementation of Thatcherite policies, with all the ensuing social problems. The Euston Manifesto is quite useless when it comes to fighting for the interests of working-class people in Britain today. On a broader scale, the existence of liberal democracies in many parts of the world today is predicated upon relative economic and social stability; should this falter, then we would see the big powers backing military coups and repression in the time-dishonoured manner. The big powers, and especially the USA, can never be seen as guarantors of democracy. Democratic rights are never safe in their hands. It is quite remarkable to have to state such a basic political truism, but then the Eustonites really do find themselves looking to the big powers as the saviours of humanity. Why Now? The question poses itself: why precisely now have the Eustonites launched their Manifesto? It cannot be because they are in fear of a resurgent wave of revolutionary politics. The left as a whole is probably weaker today than at any time during the last three decades or more. The impact of the far left is tiny, notwithstanding some sizeable anti-war demonstrations and the election of a handful of Respect councillors. There is plenty that is wrong with the far left. But these problems did not start with Respects dalliances with sundry dubious Islamic individuals and organisations. Over the decades sections of the far left have adapted to various antidemocratic and anti-working-class forces in an attempt to overcome isolation or to gain an ally against the ruling class. Left-wing groups have long engaged in all manner of squalid petty manoeuvres, and one need not dwell for long upon their internal regimes to recognise their manipulative and undemocratic nature. This is both demoralising, as it corrupts the fight for socialism, and self-defeating, as it has deterred many people from engaging with the left and demoralised many people who did get involved. Is the retreat represented by the Euston Manifesto a result of repulsion from the these factors? It is possible that the specific standpoint of the Socialist Workers Party over the past few years until late last year, with its Respect project, its promotion of the chronic opportunist George Galloway and its willingness to work almost uncritically with certain Muslim groups, may have been the immediate trigger for the drawing up and launch of the Manifesto. Nevertheless, the left today is no more corrupt and opportunistic than it was, for example, when the International Marxist Group (to which Geras once belonged) and other groups adapted to all manner of anti-working-class forces back in the 1960s. The worst aspects of personal corruption on the far left were exposed and eradicated with the implosion of the Workers Revolutionary Party two decades back. No, what the Manifesto represents is a major retreat on the part of certain leftwing intellectuals from wanting to change the world to tinkering with it in the hopes that some improvements may be had. Its back to Encounter. Not a few of those who

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wrote in that magazine half a century back once hoped that the exploitation, violence and irrationality of capitalism would be replaced by the equality, peacefulness and rationality of socialism. The former revolutionaries around the Euston Manifesto today and Encounter half a century ago share the same trajectory: giving up on hopes of social transformation; linking up with those hoping at best for the amelioration of the worst aspects of capitalism; aiming their main blows at those to their left. This drift is best exemplified by the recent political evolution of the prominent Eustonite Alan Johnson. Only a few years back Johnson clearly described himself as a Marxist and saw Stalinism as an abject distortion of Marxism, now he asserts that a modest, chastened progressive politics can draw most from the social democratic idea, without any recognition that social democracy has to all intents and purposes decayed into BlairismBrownism, which not only has no perspective of social transformation, but has accepted capitalism as it stands, that is to say, is no longer even reformist. Then comes the clincher: Marxism opens the door to totalitarianism. That is not to say Marx was a totalitarian or Marxists are totalitarians. But whatever the subjective intentions and desires, in the theory the door-opening is going on. This could come straight from the pages of Encounter. I guess that Johnson will now have to correct his biography-in-progress of the US Marxist Hal Draper, from praising him as a proponent of human liberation to having him objectively opening the door to totalitarianism. And, whilst Johnson insists that we Marxists merely open the door to totalitarianism, I can imagine the less fastidious elements of the decent left being considerably less delicate in their criticisms of us. One can foresee a situation in which, branded as apologists for totalitarian regimes and movements, and as actual harbingers of totalitarianism itself, we become the most dangerous of enemies for the decent left, however weak we may be. It is no accident that the Euston Manifesto says nothing about socialism how can it when it is predicated upon an orientation towards non-socialist political forces? and, as we have seen, it deliberately leaves unanswered the fundamental question of the economic basis of society. At a time when capitalism clearly cannot overcome poverty and inequality, and when bizarre religious movements constitute one of the major responses to such social problems, is it not imperative for people who claim to stand on the left to declare openly that a democratic transformative form of socialism is the only possible positive counter to capitalism? Yet it is at this precise moment that a concerted attempt is being made to do something quite different. The Eustonites aim almost all their fire to their left, condemning what they see as the lefts dalliances with anti-democratic forces, and in so doing effectively lumping in everyone to their left in that basket. A lot of people on the left are in fact quite happy to oppose the ruling class without lining up with assorted mullahs, sundry nationalists and all sorts of other anti-working-class forces. There is plenty of scope for socialists to oppose imperialism without giving a carte blanche to Islamicism or other non-socialist outlooks, just as there was a space for genuine socialists 50 years ago to promote genuine freedom between the opposing millstones of imperialism and Stalinism. There are real problems with the lefts traditions, not least in respect of the question of the relationship of socialism and democracy, and it is one of many issues that we must critically assess if we are to make any progress in proposing a positive

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alternative to capitalism. However, just like the Encounter socialists half a century ago, those behind the Euston Manifesto are not attempting to provide any meaningful alternative to capitalism. Quite the opposite: they are moving in an entirely different direction. Far from providing a positive course to challenge the status quo, the Euston Manifesto is outlining an approach for a broad ideological and institutional capitulation to it. Finally, it is interesting to note that the Euston Manifesto is named after the least prepossessing railway terminus in London, a drab 1960s concrete shed with all the charm of a backyard coal bunker. Just up the road is St Pancras, a brilliant example of Victorian architecture and engineering prowess, which has recently been tastefully refurbished for the Channel Tunnel traffic. And just as Johnson, Wheen, Geras & Co hark back to the postwar mediocrity of Encounter, we prefer to refer to the inspired works of the Victorian Marx, and apply them, suitably refreshed and updated, to the problems facing us in the twenty-first century.

Cyril Smith

A Significant Anniversary
Two Hundred Years of The Phenomenology of Spirit
THIS year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the publication of a remarkable book. Not that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels The Phenomenology of Spirit caused much of a stir at that time. The author was not a young man 37 years old but it was his first major work. Unemployed, hard up, living in a very minor town in a part of Germany then being occupied by Napoleon, he seemed an insignificant figure. (As if he didnt have enough to worry about, Hegels landlady gave birth to his son while he was still writing the Phenomenology.) But this was a savage attack on the rationalist Enlightenment, the prevailing mode of thinking. Hegel looked at his work as heralding a new world, a world which was the outcome of his view of Spirit. Marxists thought that they followed their leader in condemning Hegel as an idealist. As with most other things, they were quite wrong about this, and Marx praised the Phenomenology for its uncompromising stance, but condemned Hegel for stopping half-way. What is Spirit for Hegel? It is not the same as Mind: it is the whole of mans development, which has reached a particular stage. The Introduction, which opens the book, makes this clear. In a few words, Hegel deals with the questions of the fear of error and its reality, the fear of the truth. In contrast with every philosophy hitherto, the Phenomenology sees its own discoveries as being just steps along the road of human knowledge: The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along the road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science. (p 55)

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Each of these stages is reached as a step embodying the ones that have gone before as a series of Gestalten formations of consciousness. So the various contradictions which appear before we meet the Absolute are explained. Hegel also states the difference between the way things are and the way they appear: For it, what has thus arisen exists only as an object; for us it appears at the same time as movement and as a moment of becoming. Because of this necessity, the way to Science is already Science, and hence, in virtue of its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness. (p 56) Thus, nothing appears without its opposite first coming on the scene. Hegel begins his journey with sense certainty, the objects of consciousness. He starts by the simplest of considerations, of an individual thing, a this, here. So it now becomes universal: Just as universality is its principle in general, its immediately self-differentiating moments within perception are universal. (p 66) About a quarter of the way through the book, Hegels journey reaches beyond consciousness to self-consciousness. A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact selfconsciousness; for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness become explicit for it. The I which is the object of Notion is in fact not object A self-consciousness, in being an object, is just as much I as object. With this, we already have before us the Notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent selfconsciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence; I that is We and We that is I. (p 110) But not yet. First we have not one self-consciousness but two. And that is only possible, Hegel tells us, if they are acknowledged. one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another. The former is lord (Herr), the other is bondsman (Knecht). (p 115) The resulting pair fight for supremacy. This is not just a battle between them, but a war to the death. Only one of them will survive. Or so it seems. The outcome is that the slave is reconciled to his subordination. So it goes, with each Gestalt giving rise to the next in line, and Hegel thinks that every possible form of life and thought is traversed in this process. This means that every kind of what Hegel estimates as occurring in human history finds its place in his story, every kind of science, political, aesthetic or religious attitude. This goes on, until the penultimate chapter, where the Revealed Religion is itself revealed as having not yet become an equally absolute being-for-self (p 478). This is the subject of the final chapter, Absolute Knowing. Here, Spirit shows itself as having had been all along a journey towards freedom. In all the earlier chapters, humanity, both the individual and humanity as a whole, is seen to be limited. Now, at last, the Absolute is attained, or rather not at-

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tained, but transformed. From this point on, any advance which is made carries with it the entire development which goes before it. That is why the Preface, which was written last, is really a preface to all Hegels later works. Karl Marx starts his very different journey from the last chapter of Hegels book, the birth-place of the Hegelian philosophy: The philosopher who is himself an abstract form of estranged man takes himself as criterion of the estranged world. When, for instance, wealth, state power, etc, are understood by Hegel this only happens as entities estranged from the human being, this only happens in their form as thoughts They are thought-entities, and therefore merely an estrangement of pure, that is, abstract, philosophical thinking. Marx was only at the start of his travels. Until his death 39 years later, in 1883, he never ceased to be conscious of his debt to and against Hegel, our great teacher, as he often referred to him. The Phenomenology always remained his startingpoint.

JJ Plant

Secularism, Phobia and Religion

IN a recent issue of one of the New Labour magazines, Ian Birchall criticises Andrew Coates position on secularism, most specifically in that it implies or articulates disagreement with the approach taken by Respect to islam. If Ians article does not exactly call for a reply, it does rather grumble for one. Andrew Coates will no doubt defend himself if he thinks fit; I have some points of my own to make. In the preceding article of the same magazine, Sheila Cohen tells again Trotskys tale of how a dispute over payment for punctuation marks led to a printers strike which eventually triggered the 1905 revolution in Russia. It is entertaining then to find Ian beginning his attack by objecting to Coates putting inverted commas around islamophobia, with the phrase as though no such phenomenon existed. I should like to deal first with whether such a phenomenon as islamophobia exists. One of my jobs in the old GLC was to assist voluntary organisations with computerisation. In that capacity I helped and eventually joined the board of Phobic Action, a self-help organisation for phobia sufferers, founded by a man who one morning found himself unable to leave his bedroom. He remained in that state for a number of years, supported by his mother, until he eventually found a way of coping with his paralysing fear. The biggest obstacle that Phobic Action faced at that time was to win recognition for the fact that phobia is a medical affliction. The GLCs legal section at the time held up my proposal for grant aid to Phobic Action for six months, while I researched enough to win the argument. The lawyers were actually prepared to stand in front of a GLC Committee and say that phobia is not an illness,

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it is simply silliness or inadequacy, and as such outwith the GLCs powers for grant. The path to a wider recognition of phobia as a medical condition was not painless for many of the activists. On one occasion an odious chat show host had invited a group of phobics onto his TV show, and produced a huge spider to terrify an arachnophobic on screen. Studio security staff were hard put to it to save the host from the beating he richly deserved. The episode was not broadcast. The host involved is an enthusiastic litigant and will therefore remain behind a silk screen of anonymity. At about the same time, somebody somewhere invented the concept of homophobia. This was probably not intended as a calculated insult to phobics, but it nevertheless relied on the assumption that a phobia is somehow contemptible or trivial. It was never (to the best of my knowledge) seriously suggested that homophobes should receive support and therapy to overcome their morbid fear. The expectation was that they should simply grow up, pull themselves together, and realise that their fears were no more than a nightmare that would disperse in the pink light of day. I think that a proportion of the people who have a profound distaste for homosexuality and homosexuals may in fact be the victims of a fear condition. Some of these may have been victims of sexual abuse during childhood, or in other circumstances, such as in prison or in the armed forces. There may also be some few who have a genuinely irrational morbid fear of homosexuals, or of homosexual activity, having never had much involvement with either. Such cases might rationally be called homophobic (although the etymology of the word is unsatisfactory). But the term is, in its general use, inaccurate, and therefore confusing when applied to, for example, obsessive or repetitive aggressive or insulting behaviour towards homosexuals. There has been a trend towards tolerance of homosexuality (though generally not of other aspects of sexual diversity such as sexual abuse of the vulnerable or consensual sado-masochism) in some parts of some of the Western states in recent decades. As a result, some people live in less fear and humiliation than would otherwise have been the case (provided always that they know their way around and stay lucky), which in itself is a good thing. I contend that very little, if any, of this improvement has resulted from the diagnosis of homophobia, and none at all from the treatment of this condition. The neologism islamophobia has at least the same potential for confusion. In addition, its use serves to place outside of political discussion certain aspects of islamic practice for example, the repressive nature of the Taliban regime (which excluded women from access to education, stoned adulterers to death, etc), for example, the aim of certain groupings in Nigeria to impose sharia law, or the threat to free speech emerging from islam and a number of other religions. If you raise these matters then you are an islamophobe, and your position is not political but pathological. It is curious that certain political attitudes undergo medical designation and not others. We usually speak of anti-semitism and not of judeao-phobia. Terrorists in North Wales and on the Scottish borders are not diagnosed as anglophobic, but are correctly recognised as criminals. Animal rights terrorists are not categorised as zoophiles, but as enemies of science. Anti-black racists should be treated to the political consequences of their actions, not given therapy and support for their negrophobia (although I discover that MS Words spellchecker accepts it as a word).

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The obverse of the designation of critics or criminals as phobics of course is to absolve them from responsibility for their actions. I await with interest the test case in which a mosque-burner will try to defend her/himself on the grounds that he or she were suffering the acute consequences of an attack of islamophobia. Clearly (I hope) islamics have the same right to expect protection from attacks as any other segment of the population, and their attackers should not be given a medical defence. A good example of a sterile discussion based on medicalisation of political positions is the long-running one around stalinophobia and stalinophilia, between the Spartacists, IBT, Workers Power and others. In 20 or more years, the enthusiastic spraying of these words has generated no light, and not even much useful heat. I should like to deal with some other points raised by Ian. Ian describes George Galloways fawning on Saddam Hussein as formal politeness, and suggests this is excusable in the light of relations between enlightenment writers and their contemporary despots. Now, in the first place, formal politeness in a meeting might take the form of Good morning, thank you for taking the time for this meeting. Galloway, however, expressed personal admiration for Saddam, in the full knowledge of the latters ethnic repression of the Kurds and use of chemical weapons against the Marsh Arabs (no doubt there is now some more politically-correct nomenclature but I dont have time to acquire it). And he did so while claiming to be a socialist. Voltaire and Diderot, as Ian is at pains to point out, were never socialists and would have been horrified at the suggestion that they were. The political evaluation of a radical socialist is based on different criteria to that applicable to enlightenment bourgeois. While we are on the topic of Galloway and Saddam, as a regular visitor to Iraq, Galloway could not have been unaware of the privileged position allotted to sunnis over shia by Saddam. Has he accounted for his admiration for this privilege to his constituents in Tower Hamlets? In the second place, can Ian seriously be drawing a parallel between the status of Diderot or Voltaire and that of Galloway? Galloway shows courage, tenacity and not a little tactical skill, among other qualities. But originality and the ability to frame a novel world view are not foundlings to be laid at his door. Ian argues that religion will only disappear when those social conditions disappear which produce it. It does not follow from that, however, that communists should not oppose it when and where they encounter it in the world as it is today. The same would be true of corruption and other crimes, and conditions such as drug addiction, and for that matter racism, inequality, the oppression of women, unemployment, war and famine. I am sure Ian would not suggest that we should passively wait for changes in social conditions to begin to address these problems. Ian has not demonstrated a logic that differentiates between social problems that we should confront and those that we need not. Drawing upon my trotskyist (Ill trade you uppercases throughout) past, I would propose (again, still) that the communist strategy should be not to draw up a menu of those problems that can be solved before the workers revolution and those which must be postponed, but always to look for the element of transitionality to seek out issues and demands that might lead from the squalid present to the bright and bloody revolutionary dawn. The transition to be sought is now, as ever was, issues which will conduce towards the working class coming to the realisation, through their immediate demands, of the necessity to organise for the taking of power.

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This does not of course necessitate abusive language or violence towards the religious. (Such practices, like religious terrorism, are rarely productive of a change of mind in their targets.) Neither, however, does it preclude forms of argument that the targets might consider objectionable I have in mind Annie Besant dealing with backward religious hecklers by challenging their god to strike her dead. This was doubtless offensive to some christians, but was an entirely acceptable tactic of argument. No religious grouping can be allowed the privilege of setting its beliefs above rational, critical discussion. I have some agreement with Ian in finding Coates definition of secularism (freedom of the public sphere from religious dogma) insufficiently precise as a basis for programme. I should therefore like to propose some specifics, which can be proposed as reasonable and rational reforms, but which can be developed as transitional demands: Faith Schools: We should support and encourage the widespread opposition to these among teachers and others employed in education. As a first step, there should be no new faith schools built by or for any religious tendency. The reasons for this are straightforward: 1. New religious schools as encouraged by Blair et al disrupt the rational planning of education by democratically elected local authorities, leading to waste of resources. 2. Faith schools are de facto selective on ability and/or prior attainment, which erodes equality of educational opportunity. It is a widespread scandal that pushy parents discover their religion in time to become active and generous members of congregations (or whatever the parallel is among non-christians) in the run-up to applying for places in faith schools. 3. Faith schools receive unfair financial advantage over community schools. One scandalous example is that faith schools are assumed by law to have the status of charities, and are therefore exempt from paying the Climate Change Levy. This means their gas and electricity cost 12.5 per cent less than the same services to community schools money that can be redirected into teaching resources and/or staff. This unfairness could and should be rectified. In any instance where the Labour Party in local government shows any spirit, it should be encouraged to reject education strategies that involve faith schools as much as Blairs academies. In the longer term, we should campaign for all schools to be brought into the state system, and be subject to fair and egalitarian resourcing, and fair and egalitarian opportunity to access higher education. This would remove the right of the ruling class to maintain privilege by providing better education to their own offspring. The existing religious schools could be rolled up into that same process. Ian refers approvingly to Bolshevik journals targeted at the religious in prerevolutionary Russia. I agree. I wonder, however, where and how is this approval reflected in the practices and propaganda of either Respect or the SWP? A little more germane to current circumstances might be Lenins several articles of 1913 opposing the establishment of cultural-national schools for Jews and other minorities in tsarist Russia (for example, The Nationalisation of Jewish Schools of 18 August, The Nationality of Pupils in Russian Schools of 14 December). In these Lenin is trenchantly opposed to the segregation of schools on ethnic and cultural lines (which of course implies also on religious lines), and argues (in the second) that:

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We must not champion national culture, but expose the clerical and bourgeois character of this slogan in the name of the international culture of the world working-class movement. This does not mean that minority languages and histories are to be suppressed. On the contrary, citing results from the 1911 school census, Lenin refers to the one Georgian child in St Petersburg (I break my rule and use this offensive name only for the historical illustration) among 48 000 Russians. For this one child he demands not a separate school but the provision of free government premises for state-subsidised lectures on Georgian language and history, and the provision of books in the Georgian language in the public libraries. Parenthetically, in fact the Bolshevik line on public education in the tsarist state would merit more detailed study. Little of Krupskayas writing on education has been translated into English, and neither has the record of the Bolshevik interventions in the state duma demanding educational improvement. In his Bolshevik Visions, William G Rosenberg provides some useful and very interesting documents from the debate in 1923 within the Russian Communist Party and the Comintern on the attitude to religion. Religious Education would not be abolished by the abolition of faith schools. It would be acceptable for families and communities to provide supplementary classes after school or at weekends, just as it would be for them to teach languages or ethnic arts or games. A more difficult issue is the extent to which childrens attendance at such activities can be reliably assessed as truly voluntary. It would also be necessary to remodel the curriculum elements that are currently allocated to religion. The best solution would be to teach critical philosophy during this time, to equip children with the ability to think for themselves about the beliefs and value structures with which they are surrounded. That cannot be immediately implemented because there are few teachers capable of undertaking such work (although the position has been improved a little since the accession to the EU of Poland). As a first step, the teacher training colleges would have to be given a revised brief and curriculum. A very reasonable reformist demand would be for a change to the legislation governing education that requires schools to conduct a daily act of worship, of a generally christian kind, unless the school governing body applies for an exemption. Even the most flabby of Labour MPs could not rationally argue that the countrys economic health depends on a few million children pretending to believe in a few carefully-selected bible stories. This is therefore a demand that capitalism can accommodate without economic loss, but which would on balance benefit rationalism in the mass of the population. The national guidelines for the teaching of religion in secondary schools require to be revised. The emphasis in the curriculum is too much on appreciation and understanding of a range of religions. It fails to stimulate students to come to any conclusions about them. This gives religion a privileged position where its diktats are habitually not subject to critical examination or logical rejection. Religious censorship is an increasingly important area where communists need actively to defend the right of free expression. Recently a sikh mob terrorised a theatre into closing the run of a play they objected to. In an attempt to demonstrate comparable fundamentalist macho, christians attempted to prevent the televising of Jerry Springer: The Opera. And hanging ominously over the whole of our times is the

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shadow of The Satanic Verses, which demonstrated that substantial numbers of religious are prepared to support the call for authors, publishers, translators and book sellers to be murdered. Since freedom of speech and expression are essential to the development of the working class, then we must defend them consistently, even when applied in trivial cases. Whether this is best done by workers defence organisations or by making demands upon the state is a conjunctural issue. Where opportunities exist or can be created, communists should not hesitate to defend freedom of speech in debates against participants in reactionary religious agitations. I suggest that the foregoing indicates a number of areas where the socialist programme must come into conflict with religion. I agree with Ian that a tactical alliance such as the Stop the War Campaign should seek to involve the broadest forces. But it is foolish in the extreme to ignore the dangers of collaboration with religions, as those workers who took part in the Khomeini revolution were to discover to their cost.

Alan Spence

Proletarian Philosophy
Why Fred the Plumber was a Better Philosopher than Bertie the Aristocrat
A PROLETARIAN, a wage-earning worker exploited by a capitalist employer, does not fit into normal patterns of discussions of philosophical matters when the other person involved in the discourse is an aristocrat, or member of a powerful, wealthy and hereditary family. Even more surprising would be the reaction if it was said that the waged worker was a better practitioner at expounding the art and science of wisdom than the hereditary Earl particularly when our aristocrat has written enough books on wisdom and its associate matters to fill the window of a large-sized bookseller. The Earl, of course, is Bertrand Russell, and the plumber, Fred Casey. Bertie is so well known that it is not necessary to do more than mention that he was the Third Earl of a dynasty which, whilst through indirect lines encompasses a swathe of Britains ruling class, began in the direct line with the First Earl, John, who introduced into Parliament the Reform Bill of 1832, so it can be said that radicalism and reform ran in the bloodline of this batch of the nobility. He was born in 1873 and died in 1970. Fred Casey was born in Bury, Lancashire, in 1876 and died there in 1956. By trade a plumber, he made a living from repairing and making watches after an accident in which he lost a leg. Little is known by this author of his personal life, although a little more is available about his politics and his writings on philosophy. He published three books: Thinking in 1923, Method in Thinking in 1932, and How People Think in 1949. In politics he was a lecturer for the Central Labour College, and about the latter, of course, a great deal is known. Established by trade unions who wished to give

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some of their members the benefit of two years of full-time study, it was a breakaway from Ruskin College when a dispute erupted between its mature working-class members, already with years of experience behind them of life and work within an industrial class system, and Establishment people wanting to teach bourgeois studies rather than working-class studies, particularly Marxism, of which many of the students already had knowledge from both self-teaching and working-class educationalists in their home localities. It was established at Earls Court, London, in 1910 and funded by trade unions, and it published the magazine Plebs and pamphlets on aspects of socialist theory and practice. At this time, the early 1900s, when Lenin was teaching that trade unionists needed to be taught from outside the labour movement by middle-class revolutionaries, here in the UK working men and women in the Labour College were writing their own text-books on socialist economics, history and philosophy, and, as students completed their two-year stint, set up colleges in their own localities to pass on to others the knowledge thus gained from this academy of working-class theory and practice. Casey was part of this movement from 1906. Family commitments prevented him from taking a two-year scholarship, but not from being a lecturer in south-east Lancashire, nor from writing his books. The National Council of Labour Colleges became the coordinator of local labour colleges, and it began to provide correspondence courses for those unable to obtain full-time attendance at the Central College. It had a chequered career. Its Marxism grated with many of the more liberal labour people. During the 1920s, a few of the latter from established universities disagreed with its philosophical trend, and they fought continuously to take it out of the curriculum. This latter conflict was compounded by the Casey-led criticism of Lenins belief that thought is real but not material contained in his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, published in English in 1926 by the Communist Party, which had been formed in 1920 from several socialist parties as a response to the world-wide enthusiasm of radical people for social change following the overthrow of Tsarism in Russia by Lenin in 1917. All in all, the struggle was too much for the full-time college, and it closed in 1929. Local branches, however, continued to function in some areas, and the correspondence courses continued until the 1960s when organisationally it was taken over by the TUC. After this it became the educational branch of that body teaching trade unionists the techniques of good trade union practice. Fred Caseys philosophical purpose was to explain to a working-class public the teachings of Joseph Dietzgen: of how to develop these teachings into a format usable by activists in their day-to-day practice, and to do these things within the framework of showing that Dietzgen was a partner with Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in a trio of revolutionaries who collectively formed the foundations of the science of Marxism. Because Dietzgen is not widely known, a brief note on his background will be useful. The presentation of the-thing-itself as a thought-thing, wrote Engels to Marx on 6 November 1868, after reading and returning a manuscript sent by Joseph Dietzgen to Marx, would be very nice even brilliant if one could be sure that he had discovered it for himself. In 1872 at the Congress of the Working Mens International Association held in Stuttgart, Marx introduced Dietzgen to the delegates as our philosopher. He consolidated this when he wrote in the German edition of Capital of 1873:

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The learned and unlearned spokesmen of the German bourgeoisie tried to kill Das Kapital by silence But they found in the workers press Joseph Dietzgens articles stronger than themselves, to whom (down to this day) they owe a reply. So not only did Marx approve of Dietzgen in the field of philosophy, he was also an economist who met with Marxs approval in this field of work as well. Consolidating this high regard of Marx, we have the testimony of Frederick Engels. He wrote: And this materialist dialectics, which for years has been our best working tool and our sharpest weapon, was remarkably enough discovered not only by us but also, independently of us and even Hegel, by a German worker, Joseph Dietzgen. (Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1886) Joseph Dietzgen was a tanner by trade. Born in Blakenburg, near Cologne, in 1828, he became involved in the movement of a capitalism in revolt against the feudalism of Prussia, and he had to flee to America when that uprising was suppressed in 1848. He made a living as a casual labourer using the canal boat network to travel over large parts of the industrialising United States. Back in Germany in 1851, he found employment in his grandfathers tannery, married, and after setting up as a self-employed tanner, became active in local politics and as a working-class journalist. Replying to an advert for a manager in the St Petersburg tannery of the Russian government and obtaining that position, he stayed there for four years before returning to Germany in 1869, and it was from St Petersburg that Dietzgen sent the above-mentioned letter to Marx. Involved in working-class politics on his return to Germany, he was jailed for three months in 1878, and finding difficulty in getting work, he decided to join his son in Chicago in 1881. Here he continued writing and participating in radical politics, including the editorship of a socialist newspaper which he took over during the reactionary period in Chicago following the Haymarket Massacre, which was wrongly blamed on anarchists who were executed but posthumously pardoned when evidence of their innocence came to light. He stayed in Chicago until his death in 1886. Having established some background to Fred and his mentor, we can venture into the core of the discussion between the two philosophers the plumber and the aristocrat to see who was the better exponent of the philosophy of wisdom, or the use of experience and knowledge together with the power of applying them in practice. In the final paragraph of Russells Problems of Philosophy, he summarises his conception of philosophy: Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answer to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminution of the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation, but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered

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great, and becomes capable of that union with universe which constitutes the highest good. The above manifesto seems to me to be of very thin material on which to stand a person who spent an entire adult life engaged in causes to better human life in its manifold ways. Russell would sacrifice prestigious positions in the academic world to pursue some cause that he decided needed his support. He endured prison in the First World War because of his conscientious objections to its conduct. His most notable achievement to the political left was opposition to nuclear war and his support for the campaign in the UK which spearheaded this opposition, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which saw him as its spiritual leader during the last 20 years of his life. Turning to the chapter on Aristotle in his History of Western Philosophy in the expectation of a more robust support for a philosophical direction than found in nebulous recommendations given in Problems of Philosophy, I found the contrary, an explosion of outright indignation and the advice: I conclude that the Aristotelian doctrines are wholly false, with the exception of the formal theory of the syllogism, which is unimportant. Throughout modern times, practically every advance in science, in logic, or in philosophy has had to be made in the teeth of opposition from Aristotles disciples. A viewpoint firmly held is characteristic of Russell; however, given Marxs syllogistic structure of the commodity form in the first chapter of Capital and his almost reverential praise for Aristotles rudimentary discovery of the labour theory of value, and given that Marx must be described as one of the moderns, it must raise problems for those who see themselves as activists in the cause of having Aristotle and his syllogism as a key element in the practice of wisdom. Consequently, a reading of Russells Philosophy for Laymen in his Unpopular Essays seems a medicine either to soothe the pain, or, better still, to cure the bruising from his denunciation of Athens greatest scholar. Not so, however, for here again we have nebulosity in abundance, when he states that of philosophy that: by enlarging the objects of his [the students] thoughts, it supplies an antidote to the anxieties and anguish of the present, and makes possible the nearest approach to serenity that is available to a sensitive mind in our tortured and uncertain world. From the above quotations it seems perfectly clear there is no method of practice in Russells philosophy. Whatever he himself did in his many varied activities, and whatever his thought in writing many books, there is nothing which can be turned into a guide to help people to practise wisdom in a repeatable and sustainable way. Before returning to Fred, a few more words on Dietzgen, for it was from him that Casey learnt the significant part of philosophy which distinguished his contribution to the Marxist, scholastic corpus introduced by Dietzgen. Dietzgens special contribution was that whereas Marx and Engels both recognised and used in their various activities the knowledge that thoughts are reflections in the mind of an external world, Dietzgen took this thought and saw it as a thing

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in its own right. The Cosmos is a material thing and so is every part of it, therefore ideas, which are the product of thought, are also material. He described this process in the aforementioned letter to Marx: Thinking means to develop the general from what is given by the senses, from the particular The power of thought puts together from out of the many the one; from out of the parts the whole Dietzgen wrote many articles on this theme for the German workers press. He published in 1869 The Nature of Human Brain Work, and in 1886, when in Chicago, The Positive Outcome of Philosophy. These books became the stock-in-trade of many socialists attracted to Marxism, for they supplied for its triadic structure the philosophical content, with Marx providing the economic, and Engels the scientific and political sides. The UKs contribution to the above was via individual socialists and those, in particular, who became involved in the NCLC, and at the forefront of this movement was Fred Casey. His first book, Thinking, published in 1923, consisted of a brief introduction to the history of Western philosophy, followed by an exposition of the basics of the dialectical philosophy of Dietzgen. However, it was the book he published in 1932 which gave a further and original dimension to the body of existing Dietzgenian knowledge. This second book, Method in Thinking, set out to explain the method of thinking that people can use to guide them in practice, that is, a formalised method for putting together thoughts from out of the many the one; and from out of the parts the whole. Fred Casey tackled it in this way. State your purpose. Select in your mind (and by research) all the material needed to do the job. When this has been done in and by the mind, a new understanding will have been achieved, that is, what is needed in general to carry out the task. Freds shorthand or formula for this process is described as PMG. He therefore puts in a structured form the way everyone thinks particularly those who have to assemble something, builders, for example to do a job of work. Simple, isnt it? Its the way billions of us think out problems on an everyday basis. Having said that, however, it is a lot more difficult in practice; particularly when the purpose is still hazily known in its material requirements. Contrast assembling a programme of material for the first aeroplane with the four million parts needed to construct the new Airbus being built in France. If the Method is so easy, why has it been lost generally and, in particular, to the labour left? Well, capitalism doesnt accept as a society that thought is material. Just as fingers can clutch to grip an object, so mind assembles thoughts into new generalisations. The PMG process also does away with treating the mind as a mystical something, an aspect of a soul which requires a religion to explain its existence. Then, in the former Soviet Union, Lenins view that thought is real but not material became a dogma, and as such perverted the philosophy of all those communist parties under its influence. Most importantly, however, is the practice of a capitalistic society. Being an individualistic one in which problems are solved by the particular person according to that persons own estimation of its solution, it concentrates the mind on the particular and not the general needs of society. The individual capitalist faces a daily problem as he or she counts the taking of

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the days trading. General problems are put to one side whilst the immediate problem of attending to a profit or loss is attended to. The proletariat, however, has a totally different philosophy, because wagedworkers are employees amongst many other employees and, as a consequence, share problems or benefits in common. Their thought-process, by the normal course of working and living, is a general one, and thus they have to solve problems collectively or generally. The ethical structure of capitalism is also conditioned by the social and economic modes of its existence. A contract between capitalist individuals is the standard which binds them together. Disputes create a state structure which generates laws to provide standards and act as mediators or to punish rogue traders, and an individualist parliament also has to rule in a general way for those members of society who are outside this social and economic structure but must conform to its yardsticks in order for a capitalist society to function with least trouble to its economic purposes. And for this purpose its state structure operates in an oligarchical fashion in the protection of its laws of political economy and the social and civic conduct to ensure its functioning. The ethical structure of the proletariat, however, is that which provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people. A parliament of the general people governs for all the people the NHS, for example, introduced during the exceptional days of 1945 when the working population and radical supporters had power and capitalism was temporarily curbed by this power of a generally-held opposition. Laws are derivatives of the general will, and, as such, have as their standard the rule of the majority, that is, democracy with its state structure managed directly by a general population in all of its manifold institutions similar to that exercised by the citizens of Aristotelian Athens, however, without slaves, but in which all people cooperate and participate as social and economic equals. These, as I see it, are the main reasons for the disappearing act of Dietzgen and Casey from the attention of the scholastic left. However, I think as the left and progressives generally begin to examine the roots of socialism as a reaction to attempts by New Labour to introduce the economic foundations and ethics of capitalism in a new phase of existence transnational imperialism Dietzgen and Casey will come to the fore again. In doing so, we will see that if Fred had ever become involved in discourse on the practice of wisdom with Bertie, he would have shown that proletarian philosophy is a worthy successor to Aristotle: it provides the formal structure by means of which the power of thought putting together from out of the many the one; and from out of the parts the whole, and, by this process, gives the thoughtmechanism for the resolution of daily and long-term problems of the worlds exploited populations.

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Otto Rhle

A Left-Wing Opposition to Bolshevism

We present below for the first time in an English rendition two articles by Otto Rhle. They have been translated by Mike Jones from Die Aktion, a weekly published in Berlin by the German left-wing militant Franz Pfemfert. The first appeared in Volume 10, no 37/38, 18 September 1920, and the second in Volume 10, no 39/40, 2 October 1920. Otto Rhle (1874-1943) was a Social Democratic Party deputy in the Reichstag who, along with Karl Liebknecht, was expelled from the partys parliamentary fraction for voting against war credits during the First World War, and with Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and other militants formed the Internationale group in 1916 and subsequently was a founding member of the German Communist Party (KPD). He gravitated towards the left of the party, which split away after the KPDs Second Congress to form the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). The KAPD and other similar organisations developed increasingly profound criticisms of the Communist International, and were subjected to a sharp critique by Lenin in his Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Rhles articles below show his growing critical attitude towards Bolshevism, and give an account of the unhappy relationship between the Comintern and the KAPD when the latter was invited to the formers Second Congress in the summer of 1920. Despite Rhles optimistic expectations, the KAPD did not last for very long after its separation from the Communist International. It was an unstable assembly of left communists such as Hermann Gorter and Anton Pannekoek, National Bolsheviks such as Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, syndicalists, those like Rhle who were developing the idea that political parties were a barrier to communism, and various outright ultra-left adventurists, and it soon disintegrated. Rhle subsequently wrote a biography of Marx, and, despite his continued criticisms of Bo lshevism, sat on the Dewey Commission investigating the charges made against Trotsky during the Moscow Trials.

Moscow and Ourselves

I THE First International was the International of the awakening. It had to appeal to the proletariat of the world, to arouse it; it had to issue the great slogan of socialism. Its task was propagandistic. The Second International was the International of the organisation. It had to gather, to educate the aroused class-conscious masses, to prepare them for the revolution. Its task was organisational. The Third International is the International of the revolution. It has to set the masses in motion and to unleash their revolutionary activity; it has to undertake the

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world revolution and establish the proletarian dictatorship. Its task is a revolutionary one. The Fourth International will be the International of communism. It has to establish the new economy, organise the new society, realise socialism. It has to dismantle the dictatorship, dissolve the state, and create the society without rulers finally free. Its task is the accomplishment of the communist idea. II The Third International called itself communist. It wants to be more than it can be. It is the revolutionary one, no more and no less. It thereby stands on the highest level of the Internationals so far, and fulfils the highest task needing to be accomplished, and which it is possible to accomplish, today. One could call it the Russian International. Its foundation emanated from Russia. It has its seat in Russia. It is ruled over from Russia. Its brain is wholly the brain of the brains of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Communist Party. For that reason, however, it certainly cannot be the Communist International. What attracts the gazes of the world towards Russia gazes of horror and of admiration is not yet communism. It is the revolution, the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie conducted with unprecedented determination, heroism and consistency; it is the dictatorship. Russia is still far, miles away, from communism. Russia, the first country to undergo the revolution and to fight it through victoriously, will be the last country to arrive at communism. No, no the Third International is no Communist International. III The Bolsheviks in Russia came to power not so much through the revolutionary struggle for the socialist idea, but rather through a pacifist coup. They promised the people peace. And land to the peasants private property. Thus bringing all the people behind them. And the coup succeeded. They skipped a whole era, the period of capitalist development. From feudalism, whose collapse began in 1905, which the war had accelerated and completed, they changed with an amazing somersault into socialism. Few imagined that the political seizure of power by socialists is sufficient to open up a socialist era. What must slowly develop and mature as the product of an organic development, they believed themselves able to complete by construction. Revolution and socialism were for them primarily a political affair. How could such admirable Marxists ever forget that they are primarily an economic affair? The most mature capitalist production, the most developed technology, the most educated labour force, the most abundant productive yield just to mention these are indispensable preconditions of the socialist economy and thereby of socialism at all. Where were these preconditions to be found in Russia? A quicker completion of the world revolution will be able to provide what is lacking. The Bolsheviks have done everything to bring it about. But so far it has stayed away. A vacuum resulted. A political socialism without an economic basis. A theoretical construction. A bureaucratic pile of regulations. A collection of paper decrees. An agitational phrase. And a terrible disappointment. Russian communism is suspended in the air. And it will hang there until the world revolution in the most developed countries, the most mature for socialism, have created the conditions for its

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realisation. IV The revolutionary avalanche is on the move. It has come to a halt over Germany. Soon it will have reached other countries. In each country it meets different economic conditions. Another social structure. Other traditions. Other ideologies. The level of the political development of the proletariat is different in each country; its relationship to the bourgeoisie, to the peasants, is different; therefore its methods of class struggle are also different. In each country the revolution assumes its own face. Creates its own forms. Develops its own laws. However much the revolution develops into the international affair, it is above all an affair of each country, of each people for itself. Though the revolutionary experiences of Russia may be valuable to the proletariat of a country, as thankful as it will be for fraternal advice and neighbourly help the revolution itself is its own affair; it must be independent in the struggles, free in its decisions, and unbiased and unimpeded in its evaluation and exploitation of the revolutionary situation. The Russian revolution is not the German revolution, is not the world revolution. V In Moscow they have another opinion. There they have the standard revolutionary schema. The Russian revolution supposedly took place according to this schema. The Bolsheviks undertook their struggles according to this schema. Consequently, the revolution in the rest of the world also has to develop according to this schema. Consequently, the parties of the rest of the world have to conduct their struggle according to this schema. Nothing is easier and simpler than this. Here we have a revolution there we have a revolutionary party what is to be done? We take the standard revolutionary schema (Lenins patent) out of the pocket, apply it Hurrah! It works and bang! The revolution is won! And what does this wonderful standard schema look like? The revolution is a party affair. The dictatorship is a party affair. Socialism is a party affair. And in addition: Party is discipline. Party is iron discipline. Party is leadership. Party is the strictest centralism. Party is militarism. Party is the most strict, most iron, most absolute militarism. Concretely formulated, this schema means: Above the leaders; below the masses. Above: Authority. Bureaucratism. Personality cult. Leader dictatorship. Power of command. Below: Slavish obedience. Subordination. Stand at attention. A multiple boss order. A KPD Zentrale in the superlative. VI There is no possibility of realising for a second time in Germany the Ludendorff system,1 even were it to be in the uniform of Bolshevism. The Russian methods of revolution and socialism is out of the question for Germany, for the German proletariat.
1. An allusion to the strict form of state mobilisation of society in Germany during the First World War, presided over by General Erich von Ludendorff. It was often known as War Socialism.

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We oppose them. Absolutely. Categorically. They would be a calamity. More than this, they would be a crime. They would lead to ruin. Therefore we want are able ought to have nothing in common with an International which aims to impose, indeed force, the Russian methods upon the proletariat of the world. We must preserve our complete freedom and independence. The German proletariat will make its German revolution, like the Russian proletariat has made the Russian revolution. It has arrived later at the revolution. It has to struggle harder. Because of that it will arrive earlier and more surely at communism.

Report on Moscow
I I TRAVELLED illegally to Russia. The journey was difficult and perilous; but it succeeded. On 16 June, I trod on Russian soil; on the 19th, I was in Moscow. The departure from Germany was a last-minute rush. In April, the KAPD was invited by the Executive to send two comrades to Moscow in order to consult about adhering to the Third International. Then it was said that the two comrades had been gaoled in Estonia on the return journey. So it was a matter of immediately taking up the negotiations again and completing them, if possible to give the KAPD a report prior to the congress, in order to obtain information from it for the congress. All in the greatest haste, as the congress was already to begin on 15 June. As I arrived in Russia, to my joy I ascertained that the news about the gaoling of our comrades was false. They had travelled back via Murmansk, so were by now in Norway on the way to Germany. In addition, I found out that the congress should begin, not on 15 June, but only on 15 July. Less joyful were the further verifications. My first talk with Radek was a frank exchange of views. Lasting for hours. At times very sharp. Every sentence of Radeks was out of the Rote Fahne. Every argument replicated that of Spartakus. Radek is even the boss and master of the KPD. Dr Levi2 and his associates are his willing parrots. They have no opinions of their own, and they are paid by Moscow. I begged Radek to hand over to me the open letter directed to the KAPD. He promised it me, but he did not keep his word. I repeatedly reminded him of it and had it drawn to his attention; but I did not receive it. As I later heard that the two comrades that acted as negotiators had only received the open letter in the last moments before their departure, Radeks attitude became psychologically clear. He, the wiliest of all the wily, the most unscrupulous of all the unscrupulous, considering the perfidious lies and effronteries with which the open letter plainly abounds, felt after all something like shame, so that he avoided having perhaps to give an account of himself in the presence of the insulted and traduced. The methods which I saw handed out in Moscow provoked my strongest repugnance. Where I saw: political scene-shifting, intended to bluff, in order to conceal the opportunist background by crude revolutionary theatrical presentations. I would have rather made off. Though I decided to remain until the other delegate, comrade

2.

Paul Levi (1883-1930) was at this point the central leader of the KPD. He headed the German delegation to the Cominterns Second Congress. He was expelled from the KPD after criticising the March Action adventure in 1921.

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Merges,3 from Braunschweig, had arrived. I used the time to study things. At first, I looked around Moscow, mostly without official guidance, in order also to see things not determined from above for inspection. Then I made a long trip by automobile to Kashira and a journey to Nizhni-Novgorod, Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara, Saratov, Tambov, etc, hence I got to know the most significant places in central Russia. That resulted in an abundance of impressions, more unpleasant than pleasant. Russia is suffering in all its joints from all illnesses. How could it be otherwise! Much could be told; but the example of Crispien and Dittmann 4 does not entice me to emulate them. Because who does that serve? Only the opponents of communism. However, all these faults and defects are, after all, no evidence against communism. At best against the methods and tactics used in Russia for the realisation of communism. One must, however, debate with the Russian comrades about it in another manner. II The Russian tactic is the tactic of authoritarian organisation. The principle of centralism, so fundamental for the Bolsheviks, has been so consistently developed and finally carried to extremes that it has led to over-centralism. The Bolsheviks have not done so out of wantonness or a desire to experiment. The revolution has forced them to do it. When today the representatives of German party organisations get angry and cross themselves over the dictatorial and terroristic manifestations in Russia, then it is all very well for them. Were they in the place of the Soviet government, they would have to act exactly the same way. Centralism is the organisational principle of the bourgeois-capitalist era. With that one can construct the bourgeois state and the capitalist economy. But not the proletarian state and the socialist economy. The council system is called for. For the KAPD in contrast to Moscow the revolution is no party affair, the party no authoritarian organisation from the top down to the bottom, the leader no military superior officer, the masses no army condemned to slavish obedience, the dictatorship no despotism of a coterie of leaders, communism no springboard for the rise of a new Soviet bourgeoisie. For the KAPD, the revolution is the concern of the whole proletarian class, within which the communist party constitutes only the most mature and most resolute vanguard. This vanguard does not expect the elevation and development of the masses to reach its maturity by leader-tutelage, discipline and regimentation. On the contrary: these methods act on an advanced proletariat, like the German, in precisely the opposite way. They choke the initiative, paralyse the revolutionary activity, impair the striking force, diminish the sense of responsibility. Here it concerns awakening the initiative of the masses, freeing them from authority, developing their self-assurance, training their spontaneity, and thereby increasing their sympathy for the revolution. Every fighter must know and sense what he is

3. 4.

August Merges (1870-1933) had been a member of the Spartakusbund, and was a KAPD delegate to the Cominterns Second Congress. He left the KAPD at the congress, and subsequently joined the KPD. He was murdered by the Nazis. Artur Crispien (1875-1946) was a newspaper editor in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). At this juncture, he was a leading member of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), and was a consultative delegate to the Cominterns Second Congress. Wilhelm Dittmann (1874-1954) was a newspaper editor in the SPD and a Reichstag deputy. He too was a leading member of the USPD, and a consultative delegate to the Cominterns Second Congress. Both Crispien and Dittmann opposed the fusion of the USPD with the KPD in 1920.

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fighting for, why he fights, for whom he fights. In his consciousness, each must be a living bearer of the revolutionary struggle and a creative link in the construction of communism. The freedom needed for this will, however, never be attained in the coercive system of centralism, the shackles of bureaucratic-military command, under the pressures of a leader-dictatorship and its unavoidable attendant phenomena: arbitrariness, personality cult, authority, corruption, violence. Therefore: reformulation of the party notion to a federative association notion in the sense of the council conception. Therefore: relief from the external bonds and compulsion by internal readiness and willingness. Therefore: the elevation of communism from demagogic idle talk of the paper phrase to the height of one of the most intrinsically comprehensive and inspiring experiences of all humanity. The KAPD has arrived at this conception by the simple perception of the very obvious fact that each country and each people, because it has its particular economy, social structure, tradition, maturity of the proletariat, that is to say, its particular revolutionary preconditions and circumstances, must also have its own revolutionary laws, methods, unfolding rhythm, and manifestations. Russia is not Germany, Russian politics are not German politics; the Russian revolution is not the German revolution. Therefore, neither can the tactics of the Russian revolution be those of the German revolution. Lenin may demonstrate a hundred times that the tactics of the Bolsheviks have stood the test brilliantly in the Russian revolution they will still not be the right tactics for the German revolution. Every attempt to force these tactics upon us must provoke the most decisive resistance. Moscow is making this terroristic attempt. It wants to raise its principle to the principle of the world revolution. The KPD is its agent. It operates on behalf of Russia and according to a Russian schema. It is Moscows gramophone. Since the KAPD does not play this eunuch role, but has its own opinion, it is persecuted with mortal hatred. One has only to read the abusive insults, the poisonous slanders, with which they fight against us without consideration for the revolutionary situation in which we stand, and the effect which this vile practice must cause amongst our bourgeois opponents. Dr Levi and Fritz Heckert5 have to hurl every item of rubbish pressed into their hands by Radek and Zinoviev against us. These fellows will pay for it. Since, however, the KAPD has held its ground in spite of that, it had to be condemned by the congress of the Third International to submit to its despotic order. Everything was splendidly prepared. The guillotine was set up. Radek smiled as he tested the edge of the blade. And the high court even sat itself in position. It was to be a great scene. The Executive had thought so anyway. Too good to have come off. III As I returned from the Volga, comrade Merges had arrived in Moscow. On the same day, a session of the Executive of the Third International took place. We were not invited. In our absence, the proposal of Meyer (KPD), 6 to deny us admission to the congress, was discussed. The proposal was rejected. After that we were brought to the session where they were so benevolent as to grant us an advisory vote at the congress. During this session we caught sight of the theses which were
5. 6. Fritz Heckert (1884-1936) was a building worker and a left-winger in the SPD. He joined the Spartakusbund, then the USPD and then the KPD, joining its Zentrale in 1919 and its Political Bureau in 1928. Ernst Meyer (1887-1930) was a left-winger in the SPD, joined the Spartakusbund, and was sporadically on the Central Committee of the KPD until 1929.

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to be submitted to the congress. They were conceived as a basis for the decisions of the congress, and Radek, in his boastful manner, had already said to me that, he had them in his pocket. In the pocket! The theses were they not old friends? Indeed. We recognised in them the sufficiently well-known Heidelberg Theses.7 Only they were set out on a somewhat larger scale, theoretically prettied up a little, elevated onto a somewhat more centralist-dictatorial level. From theses of Spartakus-splitting politics, they had become theses of Russian power politics, and now were to become theses of international violation according to Russian methods. We sacrificed a night studying them, and in the morning knew what we had to do. We went to Radek and put to him the question, whether the exclusion of Laufenberg, Wolffheim8 and Rhle, demanded in the open letter (that had still not been handed over to us), was an ultimatum, and whether the Executive insisted on the fulfilment of this demand before the KAPD could be accepted into the Third International. Radek tried every kind of trick, but we demanded a quite clear answer. Radek then stated: the Executive would be satisfied if the KAPD promised that it later, when the occasion arose would free itself of Laufenberg and Wolfheim. There was no longer any talk of my exclusion. This curious indulgence over demands, which they in full voice had raised to a conditio sine qua non, puzzled us. Now, we demanded to know, which demand of the Executive for accepting the KAPD into the Third International would be definitive. Radek stated: You must give a declaration in the name of your party before the beginning of the congress that the KAPD will submit to all decisions then you will obtain a full vote for the congress; then nothing else stands in the way of your adherence to the Third International. Are we hearing right? To declare solemnly that we will submit to the congress decisions, which we still did not know could this be a joke by Radek? No it was serious! What if the congress had then decided to dissolve the KAPD? Joking aside: in fact that was his intention. Radek was thereby unmasked. What then stood in the theses? Ah, now. 1. The communists are obliged to create a tight, centralist, iron, military, dictatorial organisation. 2. The communists are obliged to participate in parliamentary elections and to enter parliament, in order to perform a new type of revolutionary parliamentary work there. 3. The communists are obliged to remain in the trade unions, in order to help the revolution to victory in these remodelled institutions. We knew these three demands from Heidelberg. But now more: 4. Each party adhering to the Third International must call itself the communist party. 5. In each country, only one Communist Party may exist, consequently indeed
7. 8. The Heidelberg Theses were presented by Levi to the KPDs Second Congress in October 1919, and their carrying resulted in the departure of the ultra-lefts. Heinrich Laufenberg (1872-1932) was a left-winger in the SPD, and he chaired the workers and soldiers council in Hamburg as the First World War ended. Fritz Wolffheim (1888-1942) was on the far left in Hamburg during the First World War. Both Laufenberg and Wolffheim were expelled from the KPD at the Heidelberg congress, and subsequently departed from the KAPD because of their National Bolshevik orientation.

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consequently the KAPD must forgo its further independence and dissolve itself into the KPD. All joking aside, the congress was actually to pass the death sentence on the KAPD, and we, the KAPD delegates, for that purpose, were to obtain full votes, that is, we were to be allowed to help pass the death sentence, as long as we would declare beforehand that the KAPD would submit without resistance to the sentence passed. Can one imagine a greater political comedy? Or a greater perfidy? We laughed in Radeks face and asked whether he was crazy. A party which has separated from the KPD over the Heidelberg Theses has constituted itself on a new basis, a new organisational structure, a new tactical orientation, and theoretically given itself a new programme, which stands on its own feet with vital energy, concentrates within it all the active forces of the German revolution, and is far superior to the KPD regarding membership such a party refuses, it should, indeed must, refuse once more to enter into a discussion over the question of its right to exist. Just as the child cannot return to its mothers womb, so the KAPD is not returning once more to the KPD. It is silly, in bad taste, political childishness, even to discuss it with only one word. So we left Radek standing, with the noose he thought he was going to put around the neck of the KAPD, and went our way. We felt no desire to give ourselves unnecessary headaches in this atmosphere of political fraud and deception, of diplomatic theatrical tricks and opportunist back-stairs politics, of moral unscrupulousness and the coolest baseness. We had nothing mentally, nothing to gain at all, at a congress that met so far, so distant from any communism. Therefore, we declared: We gratefully forgo participation in the congress. We have decided to travel home, in order to recommend a wait-and-see attitude to the KAPD; until a really revolutionary International has arisen, which it can join. Adieu! IV Our decision had a surprising effect. Treated like spoiled children up to then, whose wrong-doings only cause the poor parents grief and trouble, and which one best deals with by a good spanking, they now suddenly became more reasonable. The threatening flourished stick vanished behind the mirror, and they fetched the carrot out of the drawer. They began to court us with fraternal words, as it ought to be the norm among communists, and appeared genuinely to want to reach a serious understanding. Even Radek became civil. He negotiated seriously and thoroughly abused the KPD, which he called a rotten and cowardly gang, which he would make wet their trousers. We had lengthy and thorough talks with him, Zinoviev, Bukharin and, at the last moment, one more final talk with Lenin. The great respect and the high admiration that we have for him, and which even increased by this talk, did not prevent us, wholly in the German way, from telling him our opinion. We said to him that we regard it as a scandal and as a crime towards the German revolution that, at a time when a hundred brochures against opportunism need to be written, he finds the time and feels himself induced to write a brochure aimed against the KAPD the active and most consistent party of the German revolution which now, like his other texts from recent times, is utilised by the whole counter-revolution as an arsenal, not in order to correct our supposed false tactics in the interest of the revolution, but in order to kill off any enthusiastic activity of the masses with the help of arguments and quotes from Lenin. We demonstrated to him that he is absolutely wrong-

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ly informed about the situation in Germany, and that his argument for the revolutionary utilisation of parliament and of the trades union only seem ridiculous to the German workers. We finally left him with not the least doubt that the KAPD, just as it rejects any material help from Moscow, also will, with all certainty, not permit any interference in its politics from Moscow. The talks left us with the feeling that the Russian comrades began to realise what a mistake it had been to overbend the bow. After all, the International, that is, primarily Russia, needs the KAPD more compellingly than vice-versa, the KAPD needs the International. Anyhow, our decision was very disagreeable for them, and they sought an arrangement. As we were already in Petrograd on the way home, the Executive sent us another invitation to the congress, with the declaration that they had granted the KAPD (though it had fulfilled, or promised to fulfil, not one of the draconian conditions of the open letter) a full vote for the congress. A too clumsy bait. It was, after all, indeed quite immaterial whether the KAPD was present at its intended execution in Moscow with an advisory or a full vote. So we thanked them once more and went on our way to Germany. The course of the congress has justified our tactic. The decisions taken towards the questions coming into consideration for us party structure, parliamentarism, trade union policy document the most unconcealed opportunism. They are decisions compatible with the views of the right wing of the USPD, decisions that would even mean a violation of the conceptions of Dumig, Curt Geyer, Koenen,9 etc. But ought and can the KAPD place itself with the USPD on the same ground of the same congress decisions? One must answer this question in the affirmative and think through the consequences in order to judge the truly monstrous idea and the absolute impossibility of the KAPD adhering to this Third International. That is not to say that we wanted to oppose an organisational union of the communist workers and an international amalgamation of the revolutionary proletariat. Not at all! Only we believe that belonging to a really revolutionary international will not be determined by paper congress decisions and the goodwill of the authorities. It decides itself by the will to struggle and the revolutionary activity of the masses in the hour of decision. It is the work of the great process of clarification and ripening in the revolution, which separates out everything incomplete and false, and only lets pass the genuine and complete. The KAPD may confidently look forward to this decision, because it will show itself equal to the historical task awaiting it. As I took leave of Lenin, I said to him: I hope that the next congress of the Third International can take place in Germany. Then we will have concretely proved to you that, we were correct. Then you will have to correct your standpoint. Whereupon Lenin laughingly retorted: If it comes to that, then we will be the last to stand in the way of a correction. May it come to that! It will come to that!

9.

Ernst Dumig (1863-1930) edited the SPDs Vorwrts but was dismissed when he opposed the First World War. At this juncture, he was a leading member of the USPD, and was a consultative delegate to the Cominterns Second Congress. He joined the KPD at the fusion, but left it in 1921. Curt Geyer (1891-1967) worked on Vorwrts, and was a USPD Reichstag deputy. He joined the KPD in 1920, but was expelled with Levi. Wilhelm Koenen (1886-1963) was a leading member of the USPD, and he joined the KPD at the fusion.

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Mike Jones

The Mohammad Cartoons

Some Background Information
LOOKING back after a year or so, it is clear to me that the reporting, commenting and positioning relating to the to some offensive cartoons published in the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten, and the resulting demonstrations and more extreme expressions of anger in other, mainly Muslim, countries, were often characterised by a lack of background knowledge and the political framework within which the cartoons emerged. I shall endeavour below to provide some background to the affair. Firstly, Jyllands-Posten, until recent years a stridently right-wing provincial daily, and known on the left, because of its stance as an open supporter of fascism between the two world wars, as The Morning Fascist, The Jutland Pest (Morgan Avisen, Jyllands-Pesten), where the brown pest was a term for Nazism at the time, has now by the use of aggressive marketing become the leading national right-wing daily (traditionally the Danish press had been linked to the various political parties on a regional or local basis). Jyllands-Posten boasted of its role in breaking the left-liberal hold on Danish society in terms of ideas. During the invasion of Iraq, its correspondent appeared to me almost as partisan as Fox News. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Denmark, which had been a staunch supporter of the UN, peace-keeping and international mediation, progressive liberation movements, and not wholeheartedly part of NATO or uncritical towards US policy, has adopted a new activist foreign policy and abandoned the socialdemocratic-inspired outlook. Denmarks role during the Cold War, determined by its history, size and geography, and also by that social-democratic vision, promoted social progress, tolerance, mutual understanding, peace and the rule of law on the international plane, but with the end of the Cold War new opportunities opened up for Danish capitalist interests. This expressed itself, for example, by intervention in the Baltic States in favour of independence. Denmark had historically been a power there, and had economic interests in the recent past. Denmark supported Germanys initiative to destroy Yugoslavia. It participated in the invasion of Iraq and, more recently, was involved in the Ukrainian elections. The activist foreign policy reflects possibilities for a small country that were previously ruled out. In recent years, xenophobia, Islamophobia and racism have taken off in a big way in Denmark. This expresses itself in the increased support for the Danish Peoples Party. There are, of course, real problems of ghettos of Muslims from Africa and Asia who do not speak the language or participate in the labour market. This requires education and integration, and in the case of refugees some can return home when some stability and the necessary conditions permit. To me, it appears as if there is not just a number of unscrupulous politicians whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment, but a fear of Islam that appeared after the attack on the Twin Towers and the discovery of Islamic Terrorism, whipped up by the rhetoric of the so-called War on

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Terror. Denmark suddenly woke up to the presence of a minority that is peaceful and in no way a threat, and the issue has been mainly mismanaged. What struck me over the last few years when reading what I had regarded as the quality right-wing press, within which I do not include Jyllands-Posten, was the tone and often the low level of any comment on Islam. Insults, inaccuracies, falsehoods and out-and-out racial hatred were allowed, particularly in readers letters. I always thought it the job of an editor to permit only expressions of opinion that seriously discuss and add to a debate, but not abuse and anything not furthering one. Perhaps this now passes for freedom of opinion? Flemming Rose, cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, commissioned the Mohammad cartoons, and claims that he was testing the limits of free expression. In Counterpunch Online, John Sugg, in The Cartoons and the Neocon Daniel Pipes and the Danish Editor (14 February 2006), points out that Rose is a close confederate of arch-Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. He describes Pipes as a blatant racist wanting the utter military obliteration of the Palestinians, as believing in the neo-cons lust for a wholesale conflict of cultures. Rose visited Pipes in 2004, and after that meeting the cartoon gambit materialised. This was a planned provocation, but there was no reaction from Muslims in Denmark. Accustomed to being insulted on a daily basis, eventually a few imams reacted, by travelling to certain countries in the Middle East, in order to whip up protests. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Liberal Party prime minister of the coalition government (the Liberal Party is the main capitalist party, emerging from big farming and associated agri-business interests), who rests for his survival on the votes of the Danish Peoples Party, and is not averse to playing the race card himself, played a key role in escalating the crisis over the cartoons that had resulted in a boycott of Danish products, burning embassies and suchlike. He was approached by 11 ambassadors from Islamic countries by letter on 12 October 2005, in which they asked to discuss the cartoons and the manifestations of hatred towards refugees and immigrants. Fogh refused to meet the ambassadors. Widely criticised for this insensitive and arrogant act, Fogh claimed that the 11 wanted him to intervene in order to limit Jyllands-Postens freedom of expression. This was a lie. Publication of the letter showed that the ambassadors wanted a declaration expressing respect for the people concerned and their faith. Retired ambassadors criticised Fogh, and one travelled to North Africa to smooth things over. Danish firms with interests in the Middle East set up their own forum to repair the damage and rebuild links to the Muslim community. In March 2006, Fogh attacked business people, the media, intellectuals, and the oppositional parties, for not backing his so-called defence of free speech. At the same time, Jens Rohde, political spokesman for the Liberal Party, claimed that 12 Muslim men had gone to the school attended by the daughter of one of the cartoonists, with the intention of kidnapping her. This too was a lie. The cartoonist told the press that it concerned six to eight at most Muslim girls of 10 to 11 years of age, who went to the school over a squabble between pupils of two schools that had been going on for years. Some of the newspapers elsewhere in Europe that reprinted the cartoons did so out of misplaced solidarity, as there was no threat to free expression in Denmark, and unknowingly they ended up backing a neo-con provocation by those desiring an anti-Muslim crusade. Others, right-wing papers, had their own agendas. Some are hostile, for example, to Turkey joining the European Union, regardless of its secular

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tradition. Some are hostile to their own Muslim citizens and residents. That renegade left-wingers like Christopher Hitchens would be at the forefront of solidarity with Jyllands-Posten is to be expected, but unfortunately some left-wingers were duped into giving support too, owing to their not investigating the matter thoroughly.

Mike Jones

Moscow and the General Strike

MY parents generation, particular those one worked with, and even more so the politically aware, all had something to say about the General Strike. It was a joke among us young union activists that if one hadnt been involved the older members ignored what we said. The upholders of capitalism in the labour movement said never again, while genuine socialists made their own conclusions as to who or what was responsible for a defeat that had catastrophic effects. Looking back after eight decades, it is worthwhile, while remembering the event, examining some of the arguments commonly held by elements of the left. The upsurge in struggle that occurred following the end of the First World War, when even the Labour Party and TUC leaders threatened a general strike in opposition to intervention against Soviet Russia, was over by the end of 1920. The postwar boom ended and one million were unemployed in February 1921. By June it was two million. The employers attacked wages and conditions all along the line. In March 1921, the government announced the ending of its control of the coal mines. The owners then announced drastic wage cuts and the ending of national agreements. The Miners Federation (MFGB) rejected the deal and a lock-out began. The MFGBs allies in the Triple Alliance called a rail and transport strike for 12 April. Before it came about a compromise was floated, rejected by a majority of the MFGB Executive, whereby the Triple Alliance leaders then called off their solidarity action on 15 April, which became known as Black Friday. The miners were defeated after three months, and they subsequently suffered wage cuts. By the end of 1921, six million workers had suffered wage cuts. Lock-outs took place in various industries, and TUC membership fell by two million during 1921-23. The Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, over the defaulting on reparations, brought about a slight upturn in Britains coal industry during 1923-24. The first Labour government was elected and a slight upturn in struggle took place, along with a shift leftwards in the unions. But once the Ruhr occupation ended, the mine owners demanded more concessions from the MFGB. Indeed, in July 1925 the Tory Prime Minister Baldwin made it clear that all workers would have to undergo wage cuts to help industry get back on its feet. The MFGB rejected the owners demands and received full support from the TUC. Faced with a movement apparently readying itself for struggle, the government backtracked, announced a subsidy for nine months, along with an enquiry into the coal industry. The owners retreated too, and that day, 30 July 1925, became known as Red Friday. The government prepared for the coming struggle, while the TUC did nothing. The results of the enquiry, the Samuel Report, condemned the coal owners, but, contrary to previous enquiries, failed to recommend nationalisation and called for wage

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cuts. The TUC right wing seized on the report as a basis for negotiation, whereas the MFGB, now led by left-winger AJ Cook, rejected it, proclaiming not a penny off the pay, not a second on the day. The owners prepared for a lock-out, informing the miners that current terms of employment would end on 30 April 1926. The TUC planned to call out its members in two waves, and took over the direction of the dispute. But it was still talking to the government, looking for a way out. On 1 May, almost one million miners were locked out. The first wave was due to strike on 3 May at midnight, but printers at the Daily Mail refused to set up a bellicose anti-union leader article and stopped work. Prime Minister Baldwin used that act as an excuse to break off talks, still on the basis of the Samuel Report, with the TUC. At midnight on 3 May, the first wave walked out, including rail and transport workers. In the following nine days there was no weakening; on the contrary, the strike was developing both organisationally and in terms of consciousness. Meanwhile, the TUC General Council, including the lefts, negotiated a deal over the head of the MFGB and called off the strike. The MFGB rejected the deal and carried on struggling until December. The Nottinghamshire area leader GA Spencer broke away and set up a yellow union with aid from the employers. This outfit existed to some degree in other areas too. In fact, the way the General Council capitulated without guarantees led to an employers offensive and imposition of wage-cuts, longer hours, blacklisting, and the spread of non-unionism. In 1927, a raft of antiunion legislation was brought in by the government that limited the ability to strike and ended contracting out of the political levy to the Labour Party. Many of the rights gained in 1906 were lost. The labour movement would not recover until rearmament and the Second World War. The events surrounding the General Strike became mythologised to some extent not so much as a result of political disputes in Britain, but owing to their becoming an issue in the internal disputes among the rival groupings in the summit of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Zinoviev, whose influence had waned, had split from Stalin, who now allied with Bukharin, and courted Trotsky, who during 1925 when the dispute broke out into the open had sat on his hands. Trotskys group allied with that of Zinoviev just prior to the General Strike. So the circumstances of its defeat gave an opportunity for point-scoring. In New Interventions, Volume 5, no 1 (April 1994), I reviewed a collection of essays by Alexander Vatlin (Die Komintern 1919-1929, Mainz, 1993), one of which was devoted to the Anglo-Russian Committee and the internal struggle in the CPSU(B). Ill go over some of the material unearthed by Vatlin, as it illustrates what was going on there. By the mid-1920s, the Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) had proved itself a failure. It had isolated both the Soviet and the revolutionary unions from the majority of organised workers belonging to the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). A campaign for international trade union unity had created enthusiasm, and the Anglo-Russian Committee (ARC), formed in late 1924, was a product of the desire for unity. The right wing of the IFTU wanted of course to keep the reds out, while the left wing favoured unity. The right told the RILU to dissolve itself and apply for affiliation. That would be humiliation. The left wing, including the TUC, sought out means whereby unity could be attained without humiliation. So the ARC was a useful organ for the RILU and the CPSU(B). At the outbreak of the General Strike, Zinoviev advanced draft theses in the CPSU Politbureau expressing, albeit in a very restrained way, a revolutionary development. This was not missed by his opponents, says Vatlin:

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Later Stalin asked Bukharin, in his report to the CPSU CC plenum of the work of the Soviet delegation to the ECCI, to describe this episode in detail and to present it as an error on the part of Zinoviev. (p 106) On 3 June 1926, Stalin sent a telegram from Tiflis, in which he stressed that the draft theses: lacked any word regarding shifting the General Strike on to a political plane, and made no reference to the demand Down with the Conservative Government, long live the Workers Government. The PB majority introduced this new instruction and new slogan into the theses. Zinoviev had to accept the amendment (p 106) Vatlin sees Moscows evaluation of the situation in Britain as not being in accord with reality. Not because of dogma, but, he says, due to the logic of the inner-party struggle. In the struggle against the Opposition, the accusation of right deviation played an extraordinary role. The tone of Stalins telegram, which set out all Zinovievs rightist errors in the Comintern, showed that the truce achieved following the Fourteenth Congress (Zinoviev kept the CI presidency), no longer obtained, and the fight for life and death had begun (p 106). This is illustrated by the fact that the first session of the ECCI Presidium after the strike started was attended by Stalin, something that seldom occurred. Zinoviev advanced the view adopted by the CPSU PB, and concluded that there can no longer be any talk of the stabilisation of capitalism. There were elements of dual power in Britain, and the slogan concerning the establishment of a real Workers Government was propagated. Vatlin sees this as designed in order for Zinoviev to be later accused of a left deviation. On 8 June 1926, the CPGB was sent a letter in line with Zinovievs speech. The calling off by the TUC General Council of the General Strike came as a big shock, and although the Communist International did what it could in the way of international solidarity, its revolutionary hopes were over. Upon his return from medical treatment in Berlin, Trotsky called for breaking up the ARC. On 18 May 1926, Trotsky analysed the errors of the ARC. Correct in itself as a tactic, the CPSUs attitude towards it was mistaken. The masses were left unprepared once the General Council called off the strike. Trotsky referred to the right errors of the majority, and his criticism helped cohere the Opposition. The conflict broke out at the CPSU PB session on 3 June 1926, where Trotsky criticised the Communist Party of Great Britain. The passive and indecisive elements in the party had let slip the opportunity to attain much more than was achieved. Vatlin sees this as a repeat of his accusations over the German October in 1923: Three years later Trotsky wanted to avoid a revival of the criticism against Trotskyism. (p 108) A declaration by Trotsky went much further in stressing the failure of the CPGB to measure up to its tasks. Apparently no full record of this PB session exists. It took a while for the majority of the CPSU leadership to develop its analysis of the events and set out its attitude towards the ARC. When the ECCI eventually discussed it on 8 June 1926, Bukharin led off, while Zinoviev never said a word throughout. Bukharin did not claim that stabilisation had ended, but merely noted that events in Britain confirmed capitalisms instability. The General Council was denounced for betraying the revolutionary movement, but no call was made for a

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break with reformists in general or with the ARC. A similar declaration had been made by the Soviet trade unions the day before. Vatlin quotes from a draft motion advanced by Trotsky during a session of the CPSU delegation to the ECCI meeting on 18 June 1926, in which there is talk of impending revolutionary shocks soon (p 110). As it was not controversial, it vanished into one of the many ECCI commissions. The CPGB sent a protest over the declaration made on 7 June 1926 by the Soviet trade unions, of which it had not been made aware. The CPGB was unhappy about its not coming from the RILU but from the Soviet trade unions, and it was not happy about the attitude towards the ARC. Vatlin says that regardless of the restrained formulation, the criticism aimed above all against usurpation of the rights of the CI as a collective political organ by the CPSU (p 111). Tom Bell arrived in Moscow, and on 18 June 1926, he presented a report on the General Strike. The report contained a sharp criticism of the ECCIs theses, adopted without any representative of the CPGB in attendance Bell opposed the idea of the expectation of the speedy end of British capitalism and disagreed with such utterances that the British working class had been fundamentally transformed by the strike. Bell said that whereas before the ARC had been regarded merely as a diplomatic instrument of the USSR, it was now seen as more important. But no other speaker mentioned the ARC. Vatlin comments: Moreover, it was not mentioned in the resolution adopted by the ECCI Presidium on 22 June 1926. Everyone knew that the fate of the committee would be decided by the CPSU leadership. (p 111) Vatlin states that Zinoviev did not hesitate for a moment in utilising the CPGBs letter to sharpen up the question of the right deviationists and their protectors. After Bukharins report of 8 June 1926 was published in Pravda on 26 June, Trotsky and Zinoviev perceived it as a challenge, and raised the question of staying in the ARC. Under Stalins pressure, Bukharin had accused the Opposition of all sorts of sins. In particular, Bukharin saw Zinovievs doubts about stabilisation in his speech of 21 May 1926 as a radical reassessment of the whole international situation (p 111). Vatlin says that as a result of the attack on him Zinoviev took a step to the left, and then a further step. When the Opposition spoke of the betrayal by the reformists and the passivity of the CPGB, Stalin and Bukharin were in a dilemma: they had to defend the CPGB, which favoured maintaining the ARC, yet they could not ignore the General Councils betrayal. Bukharin had to conjure up some arguments to defend the majoritys position. The British reformist leaders, though no different from those elsewhere, were in a different situation, inasmuch as they were subject to the pressure of the masses. The majority had noted this fact when setting up the ARC. The Opposition then set out to explode the ARC. Vatlin states: If the logic of the majority taken to its end led to Amsterdam [the seat of the IFTU], the logic of the Opposition led to the exit of the Communists from the trade unions. (p 113) If one is not prepared to sit at the same table as the General Council traitors of the ARC, then why should one do so with the TUC or Labour Party leaders? Tomsky, the Soviet trade union leader, who was not so excited over the TUCs ending of the

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General Strike, pointed this out, saying that the Opposition was proposing a generalised left turn and if he was not to sit at a table with opportunists and traitors, or be allied with them, then it would lead to the Communists leaving the trade unions, the Labour Party and the Kuomintang in China. This would, of course, begin under Bukharins leadership in late 1927. Trotsky insisted that the break-up of the ARC should have occurred at the start of the General Strike, but his position based itself on his prognostication of a revolutionary development rather than on any immediate working-class interests. Oppositional speeches were strewn with quotes by Lenin, whereas Stalin quoted Zinoviev, previously a red-hot supporter of the ARC. In Vatlins view, this indicated the degree of sickness in the CPSU leadership. If the majority supported opportunism in taking account of the changed world situation, the Opposition could only look back to Lenin and sink into leftist demagogy. Defending the RILU was a gesture towards the ultra-left factions being purged from the Communist International at the time. If it did appear that a rightist course had been adopted in mid-1926, a left turn was already visible later that year at the ECCIs Seventh Plenum. While at the Eighth Plenum in May 1927, the Opposition had other axes to grind, Trotsky was insisting that one was on the threshold of a new crisis period, new shocks, struggles and uprisings. We are entering a new stage (p 122) In September, the TUC decided to break up the ARC. At the end of the year, Bukharin introduced the new ultra-left turn, which would be sharpened up further by Stalin in 1928 and 1929. The uniting of the Zinovievist and Trotskyist oppositional groups represented a marriage of political convenience, and was in many respects more directly a continuation of the Leningrad Opposition (Robert V Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, New York, 1969, pp 273ff). It was an opportunist alliance and it seized on the question of the ending of the General Strike and the role of the ARC as a part of its own bid for power. The General Strike was not a sign of the end of capitalist stabilisation, nor of any revolutionary development, but was wholly defensive in nature. Moreover, it occurred in a period characterised by an employers and governmental offensive, when there existed mass unemployment and a huge fall in the numbers of organised labour. Since the end of the postwar boom in late 1920, the movement had suffered major defeats, and the attack upon the miners was a second stage of the one opened up in 1921. There was no widespread revolutionary consciousness within the working class, and its self-proclaimed vanguard, the CPGB, had merely 6000 members at the start of the strike, with leadership positions only in such places as Fife and South Wales. The TUC General Council, right-wing as well as left-wing figures, were the acknowledged leaders of the trade union movement, and once they had pulled the plug on the strike little could be done. Nothing would have been different had the lefts of the ARC been denounced, or the ARC been broken up at the start of the strike. Those who claim otherwise ignore the level of consciousness and the real balance of forces. The General Strike should be remembered for the wonderful sense of solidarity of those who came out on behalf of the miners, and the heroic steadfastness of the miners who remained locked out for so long after refusing to accept the TUCs deal. There are many lessons to be learnt from a study of the General Strike in the localities, but the opportunist nonsense spouted by the groupings in the summit of the CPSU, largely motivated by personal ambition, is not worth the time. It merely shows how unhealthy the CPSU leadership as a whole was by then.

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Ryan Worrall, Henry Sara and Rudolf Hilferding

Analysing the Soviet Union

THE rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union led to revolutionary Marxists making attempts to analyse the nature of the Soviet socio-economic formation as it evolved under the Five-Year Plans. Our readers will be aware of the various analyses that have been on offer since those days: state capitalism, degenerated workers state and bureaucratic collectivism being the most familiar of them. We reproduce below three articles originally published in the December 1939, January 1940 and September 1947 issues of Left, a theoretical magazine associated with the Independent Labour Party. The first, by Ryan Worrall, promotes the idea that the Soviet Union was a state capitalist society; the second defends Trotskys concept of its being a degenerated workers state. Worrall (1903-1995) was an Australian doctor and scientist who joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the late 1920s and subsequently joined the Trotskyist movement. He dropped out of organised politics after the Second World War in order to concentrate upon scientific research, but retained his friendship with his old comrades. Henry Sara (1886-1953) was a socialist activist prior to the First World War, and joined the CPGB after visiting the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. He was a founding member of the Trotskyist movement with Reg Groves and Harry Wicks in the Balham Group, and remained a militant until his death. Worralls article provoked an international response. It was translated into Russian and appeared in the Mensheviks Socialist Herald for 11 April 1940. It attracted the attention of the noted German Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding (18771941), who penned a reply, which was published in the Socialist Herald for 25 April 1940, and in an abbreviated form in the issue for 22 May 1946. The latter first appeared in English in the US Modern Review, Volume 1, no 4 in 1947, long after Hilferdings death at the hands of the Nazis in occupied France. Trotskys analysis of the Soviet Union was always very much restricted to the Trotskyist movement, and not to all parts of it at that. Whilst during the postwar period, the theory that the Soviet Union and other Stalinist states were state capitalist was largely confined to the anti-Stalinist Marxist left, prior to the Second World War it was a relatively commonplace idea right across the political spectrum. In the 1930s, a wide range of commentators including George Orwell, the TUC General Secretary Walter Citrine, the Fabian socialist HG Wells, the Menshevik Aaron Yugov, the dissident German communist Arthur Rosenberg, the exiled Russian mystical socialist Nicholas Berdyaev, Norways future fhrer Vidkun Quisling and the eccentric fascist Wyndham Lewis to mention just a few considered that the Soviet Union was a state capitalist society.1 These people merely asserted its state capi-

1.

George Orwell, Impenetrable Mystery, New English Weekly, 9 June 1938, p 169; Walter Citrine, I Search for Truth in Russia, London, 1936, p 131; HG Wells, Summing Up, in The New Russia, London, 1931, p 118; Aaron Yugoff, Economic Trends in Soviet Russia, London, 1930, p 336; Nicholas Berdyaev, The Russian Revolution, London, 1931, p 86; Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bol-

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talist nature, without really explaining why they considered it as such. Others gave albeit brief reasons, for example, that the elimination of the private ownership of capital represented the first stage of the transition to communism,2 or, conversely, that it represented the drift of the Soviet Union away from the goal of an egalitarian society.3 The left-wing socialist J Allen Skinner considered that the existence of great inequalities precluded it from being a socialist society, and this therefore rendered it a state capitalist society.4 Perhaps the strangest explanation was that offered by the British Union of Fascists, who roped the concept of state capitalism into the world Jewish conspiracy theory that they assiduously promoted.5 The idiosyncratic British Marxist Francis Ambrose Ridley provided an intricate rationale for claiming that the Soviet socio-economic formation was state capitalist. He stated that whilst the October Revolution was led by communists aiming at a world revolution, the actual low level of development of the Soviet Union precluded the existence of an egalitarian society and presupposed the existence of a ruling class. With the failure of revolutions in advanced countries, the Soviet Communist Party became transformed into a new ruling class, and, in its quest to develop the country, it adopted the general trends of capitalist development, that is, towards state capitalism. As a new ruling class, the Soviet Communist Party was now in the paradoxical position of having a vested interest in both the continuation of state capitalism and in the prevention of communism, as it would not wish to relinquish power and thereby cease the desirable business of dictating.6 It is easy to understand why non-Stalinist socialists promoted the state capitalist analysis, as they would wish to dissociate the Soviet Union from any identification with socialism, but for non-socialist observers the explanation provided by the US journalist Horatio Knickerbocker that socialism was impossible and the nearest that the regime could thus get towards it was a planned and tatised form of capitalism7 gave a clue to their rationale. This also gives a clue to the postwar restriction of the state capitalist analysis to sections of the far left. During the 1930s, when the vitality of capitalism was questioned even by its proponents, anticommunists were on the defensive, and they sometimes wished to emphasise the similarities between Soviet society and the Western world in order to promote the idea that wherever the left seized power, the resulting society would not be essentially different from the one it overthrew, so radical social change was pointless. After the Second World War, with capitalism going through a period of unprecedented
shevism: From Marx to the First Five-Years Plan, London, 1934, p 103; Vidkun Quisling, Russia and Ourselves, London, 1931, pp 61, 172; Wyndham Lewis, Left Wingism, New Statesman, 27 June 1936, p 1024. Leonard Hubbard, Soviet Money and Finance, London, 1936, p xv; Walter Duranty, Evolving Russia: Communism by Stages, Spectator, 6 December 1935, p 933. Russia in the Making, Economist, 10 July 1937, p 82; Herbert Read, The Necessity of Anarchism, Adelphi, September 1937, p 94. J Allen Skinner, USSR: Democracy or Bureaucratic Autocracy?, Controversy, June 1937, p 60. To satisfy readers curiosity, I shall elucidate. As capitalism was in a state of collapse, it was argued, the Jews were anxious to be prominent in whatever system that would take its place: Marx, himself a Jew, proposed a system of state capitalism (called communism) by which all capital would be controlled by a small number of bureaucrats No better system could be devised than communism for the use of a race anxious for world domination. (Anonymous, Britain and Jewry, London, nd [1938], p 7). FA Ridley, At the Crossroads of History, London, 1935, pp 162-63, 185-92. HR Knickerbocker, The Soviet Five-Year Plan and Its Effect on World Trade, London, 1931, p x

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

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expansion, anti-communists wished to emphasise the differences between the Soviet bloc and the Western world, in order to promote the idea that radical social change could only result in the emergence of a totalitarian society. Hilferding discounted the state capitalist analysis, declaring that the Soviet economy was a totalitarian one from which capitalist social relations had been eradicated, and that Nazi Germany and Mussolinis Italy were evolving in that direction. Hilferdings analysis was not particularly original. By 1940, there were many commentators who had already concluded that the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Mussolinis Italy were a new form of totalitarian society, and that they represented an tatised future for the world. One pioneering work of this genre was Walter Gurians Bolshevism: Theory and Practice,8 a book that set the scene for the many postwar expositions of totalitarian theory, and other observers, such as the noted US commentator on Soviet affairs William Chamberlin and the Guardian correspondent Frederick Voigt, echoed his opinions.9 The MolotovRibbentrop Pact of August 1939 encouraged many commentators to consider that Stalins Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were basically identical. For example, the New Statesman went so far as to venture: By the inexorable laws of its dialectic, Bolshevism brought into being its antithesis, National Socialism. Today the question being asked is whether the ugly thing that now reigns from Vladivostok to Cologne is turning into the inevitable synthesis, National Bolshevism.10 Similar ideas were expressed at many different points of the political spectrum,11 and since then variants of the concept of convergence have become known in leftwing circles as the theory of bureaucratic collectivism. Paul Flewers

RL Worrall

USSR: Proletarian or Capitalist State?

WITH the socialist movement at its lowest ebb since 1914, accurate knowledge, analysis and description of Russia is needed to clear away the doubt and uncertainty, the revulsion and disappointment, which Stalins regime has brought to the working class as a whole. Ironically enough, one who has been the most outstanding opponent of Stalin has added to the confusion surrounding the nature of the regime. Trotsky persists in regarding Russia as a workers state, although that state has shattered proletarian democracy, putting the working class of Russia in a straitjacket, and killing or imprisoning tens of thousands of revolutionary internationalists.
8. 9. 10. 11. Waldemar Gurian, Bolshevism: Theory and Practice, London, 1932. William Henry Chamberlin, A False Utopia: Collectivism in Theory and Practice, London, 1937; Frederick Voigt, Unto Caesar, London, 1938. The Man of Steel, New Statesman, 9 December 1939, p 811. See, amongst many others, writings by the former German Communist Party member Franz Borkenau, The Totalitarian Enemy, London, 1940; the former US radical Max Eastman, Stalins Russia and the Crisis in Socialism, London, 1940; the Guardian correspondent MW Fodor, The Revolution Is On, London, 1941; the former Labour MP Wilfred Wellock, War Aims, New Statesman, 4 November 1939.

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In his latest work on the subject The Revolution Betrayed it is recognised that of Soviets, there remains only the name. The territorial electorates of Russias new constitution are anything you will, but not soviets, and this has been a matter of juridicially liquidating the dictatorship of the proletariat.12 The bureaucracy which has destroyed the soviet system is recognised as having unlimited power, and to be a ruling and privileged stratum an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism. That this bureaucracy has dealt crushing blows to socialism, and has destroyed workers democracy in Russia, Trotsky knows, and sees that in that country there must be, according to all evidences, a second supplementary revolution against bureaucratic absolutism. But side by side with this partial lucidity, half-blind, quixotic sentiments appear, in the disguise of either careless phrases or considered opinions. Trotsky writes of Russia as a workers state, a soviet state, and a socialist state. The Soviet bureaucracy, we learn, has expropriated the proletariat politically in order by methods of its own to defend the social conquests! The proletariat has been expropriated politically (in other words, deprived of political power), but the October revolution is not yet overthrown. The underlying cause of these contradictory statements lies in a false view of the dynamics of capitalist production, particularly in relation to private property. Contrary to common belief, private property is not a specific feature of capitalist production, having been a basic feature of practically every social system of civilisation. Private property has indeed been a specific feature of civilisation, and in one form has been a basic principle of capitalism. But it is not a specific feature of capitalist production, nor is it essential to that mode of production in every phase of its development. Nowhere in Capital does Marx place private property among the specific features of capitalist production. In volume three, the three principal facts of capitalist production are described as follows: (1) Concentration of the means of production in a few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers, and transform themselves into social powers of production. It is true, they first become the private property of capitalists. These are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket the proceeds of their trusteeship (2) Organisation of labour itself into socialised labour, by social cooperation, division of labour, and combination of labour with natural sciences. In both directions the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and private labour, even though it does so in contradictory
12. The New Constitution of Russia has indeed set a legal seal on the annihilation of the soviets. Two national Chambers, monopolising legislation, separate the legislative from the executive bodies of the state, thus destroying a basic principle of workers democracy. The electoral units of the national legislature are not based on the productive units of the working class, but are territorial units, that is to say, parliamentary-like constituencies, electing one deputy to the legislature for every 300 000 of the population. And in these imitations of parliamentary constituencies, there is not even a choice of candidates at election time. The bureaucracy presents one candidate to be elected by each constituency! The so-called soviets are purely local executive organs of the bureaucracy. The vital right of recall of a delegate to a governing body is conspicuous by its absence in the new Constitution. There is no longer even a trace of the soviet system in Russia, save the name soviet.

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forms. (3) Creation of the world market Again, in the same volume, so neglected by students of Marx, he points out that capitalist production is marked from the outset by two peculiar traits, namely: (1) It produces its products as commodities Its peculiar mark is that the prevailing and determining character of its products is that of being commodities so that wage-labour is the typical character of labour The principal agents of this mode of production itself, the capitalist and the wage worker, are to that extent merely personifications of capital and wage labour. (2) The other specific mark of the capitalist mode of production is the production of surplus-value as the direct aim and determining incentive of production. Capital produces essentially capital, and does so only to the extent that it produces surplus-value Now the accumulation of capital, the aim and compelling motive of capitalist production, has become more and more a matter for state control and regulation since 1914. In the nineteenth century, this development was foreshadowed by the concentration of capital in the joint-stock companies. Marx showed how capital was even then beginning to shed its garment of purely individual ownership, and was beginning to float on the social medium of public investment. In other words, the tendency was towards the abolition of capital as private property, within the boundaries of capitalist production itself. Thereby the employer of an enterprise, the actually functioning capitalist, was on the way to becoming a mere manager, an administrator of other peoples capital, and the owners of capital, mere owners, mere money capitalists. Engels, too, was well aware that the essence of capitalism lay not in private property, but in that drive towards further accumulation of capital whose vehicle at the time was private property of a particular kind. Engels foresaw that the further development of capitalism, in the direction of state ownership of the means of production, could lead to the virtual abolition of private property, while the essence of capitalism yet remained. His brilliant forecast of state capitalism held by Trotsky to be an impossibility in practice is as follows: Just as at first the capitalist mode of production displaced the workers, so now it displaces the capitalists, relegating them, just as it did the workers, to the superfluous population even if in the first instance not to the industrial reserve army. But the conversion into either joint-stock companies or state property does not deprive the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organisation with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments, either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine; it is the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all capitalists, the more productive forces it takes over, the more it becomes the real collective body of all capitalists, the more citizens it ex-

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ploits. The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished; it is rather pushed to an extreme. But at this extreme it changes into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the handle to the solution. (Anti-Dhring) In the present century, Lenin described the actual development of the tendency towards state capitalism, terming imperialism the era of the transformation of monopoly capitalism into state monopoly capitalism. In 1917, before the October revolution, he placed on the order of the day: the expropriation of the capitalists, the conversion of all citizens into workers and employees of one huge syndicate the whole state and the complete subordination of the whole of the work of this syndicate to the really democratic State of the Soviets of Workers and Soldiers Deputies. But Lenin did not regard even this step as an escape from the capitalist character of production. He recognised that the power held by soviets would consist (as the first phase of communism) of political power over capitalist economics, especially in the field of distribution. Referring to the interesting phenomenon of communism retaining, in its first phase, the narrow horizon of bourgeois rights, Lenin wrote in September 1917: Bourgeois rights, with respect to articles of consumption, inevitably presuppose, of course, the existence of the bourgeois state, for rights are nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rights. Consequently for a certain time not only bourgeois rights, but even the bourgeois state remains under communism, without the bourgeoisie! This possibility of a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie was realised under Stalin, but in a form exceeding Lenins anticipation of the temporary survival of bourgeois rights. For under Stalin, the bureaucracy set its heel on the growth of communism, while continuing to monopolise the socialised means of production. After the October revolution, Lenin insisted that even state capitalism would be an advance on the system of individual capitalist ownership, scorning those opposed to the concentration of capital in trusts on the grounds that this would create the danger of state capitalism. Lenin welcomed the possibility of concentrating capital to the point of state monopoly, since this would create the essential industrial basis for state socialism, with its control of a technically advanced economy by the workers, through soviet democracy. In a speech in May 1918, he said: Reality says that state capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about in Russia in a short time state capitalism it would be a victory for us. How could they be so blind as not to see that our chief enemy is the small capitalist, the small owner State capitalism is a step towards state socialism The domination of the small bourgeoisie by the other classes and by state capitalism should be welcomed by every classconscious worker, because state capitalism under Kerenskys democratic regime would mean a step towards socialism, and under the Soviet gov-

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ernment almost complete socialism. Lenin is perfectly clear on the vital point that proletarian democracy is an essential feature of state socialism (as contrasted with state capitalism, which is merely control of production as a whole by the state). Proletarian democracy, he states, lies not only in exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the franchise, but also in the fact that all bureaucratic formalism and restriction of elections are abolished; the masses themselves determine the order and time of elections, and every elected person is liable to recall. The masses, moreover, are drawn more and more into political life and administrative work. Throughout Lenins writings after 1917, there is the same emphasis on workers democracy as the specific feature of state socialism: By the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the landowners we have only cleared the way; we have not yet erected the structure of socialism. The whole idea of the state creating socialism through the accumulation of capital,13 on the basis of workers democracy, is embodied in Lenins rough-hewn phrase electricity plus soviets equals socialism. Now Trotsky is well aware that the absence of workers democracy in Russia means the absence of socialism, but at the same time he cannot bring himself to admit that capitalism now reigns in the land of the October revolution. Hence with regard to Russia we abandon such finished social categories as capitalism and socialism, and define Russian society as transitional (capable of developing into socialism, or backwards into private property in the means of production). To describe Russian society as transitional is certainly correct, but it does not answer the questions: what is the aim and compelling motive of production in Russia? Is the state in Russia a workers state or a capitalist state? Trotsky, who has not yet arrived at the first of these questions, answers the second in this way. In Russia the bourgeoisie has been expropriated, and the means of production are owned by the state. The bureaucracy, which controls the machinery of state and rules the country, is not a class. Therefore Russia is not a capitalist state. Therefore nationalisation (socialisation) of the means of production has made the state a workers state (distorted by Stalinism). To deny that Russia is a capitalist state, because the Stalinist bureaucracy is not a class, springs partly from an inability to distinguish structure from function. The structure of the bureaucracy, including the relative lack of private property relations, differs fundamentally from the structure of a bourgeois class, which in general is based upon the principle of private property. But the function of the bureaucracy is that of the bourgeoisie, namely, the accumulation of capital. Aside from the personal ambitions, incomes, extravagances and inefficiency of the bureaucracy, its social aim, objectively speaking, is the accumulation of capital in Russia the production of commodities, the extraction of surplus-value from the working class, the realisation of this surplus-value as profits of the state and the conversion of profits into further state property, especially capital in the form of further means of production; more factories, more machinery, more mines, etc. This primary function of accumulating capital, which a bureaucracy now performs in its entirety for the first time in history, is not combined with working-class control of that bureaucracy, through soviets or

13.

It will of course be realised that the means of production of a country remain capital so long as the system of wage labour and commodity production persists, even though the state be a workers state.

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other forms of industrial organisation of the proletariat. And precisely that fact makes the Russian state a capitalist instead of a workers state. A new type of capitalist state, it is true, since the principle of private property still lies in the dust, but a capitalist state for all that, since the state, minus workers democracy, pursues the aim and compelling motive of capitalism in general. This does not mean that Russia is an imperialist state, for the bureaucracy has not reached that point of seeking to export capital and seize colonies which characterises the imperialist nations. Nor does it mean that Russia should not be defended against attacks on the part of imperialist nations. As pointed out by Lenin, state capitalism entailing the abolition of private property is a step forward in social evolution, and for this reason alone Russian state capitalism should be defended against the imperialist nations, which uphold the principle of private property. In addition, however, the special revolutionary potentialities of the Russian working class, derived from the experiences and traditions of the October revolution, contribute powerfully to the forces of social change, and demand protection by all socialists. Since those special potentialities of further revolutionary action would be crippled by an imperialist conquest of Russia, socialism requires the defence of Russia, even though workers democracy has been destroyed by the bureaucracy. To call Stalins regime by its correct name State Capitalism does not imply the surrender of that regime to the forces of imperialism. The Russian type of state capitalism is capitalism, but it is also a transition stage to socialism a transition stage in which the principle of private property has been abolished, and the means of production are withheld from proletarian control only by a precariously placed bureaucracy. The states socialisation of production has made socialist appropriation the next step in Russia. Unless the forces of reaction succeed in reintroducing private property in capital, that next step will inevitably occur, as a result of the dialectic contradictions of the bureaucratic regime. Sooner or later the Russian proletariat will succeed in establishing socialist appropriation of property in every sphere as the world revolution proceeds to wreck the existing social system. Admitting that in Russia there is state capitalism, the further question remains: how could a proletarian revolution give rise to a capitalist regime, without the occurrence of a violent counter-revolution. But this seemingly innocent question contains a logical fallacy, namely, begging the question. There has been a violent counterrevolution in Russia since October 1917, but one spread over a decade, from the time of the death of Lenin. By combining revolutionary phraseology up to 1933 with counter-revolutionary action, Stalin succeeded in preventing a mass uprising against the growing power of bureaucracy. By tricking, imprisoning, exiling or killing the revolutionary vanguard of the country, by means of a rigid censorship, and by canalising the revolutionary energy of the masses into the Five-Year Plan, Stalin succeeded in violently suppressing his opponents in comparative secrecy. The question has been asked: was there ever a workers state in Russia, since workers democracy was thus nipped in the bud by the bureaucracy, just as it was emerging from the rigours of military communism? There is overwhelming evidence to show that the degree of workers democracy which did exist between 1917 and 1923 was something new in history, qualitatively distinct from any previous type of democracy; something which gave the character of a workers state to the new regime. And as a result of that workers democracy, embryonic though it was, the representatives of the working class, at the head of the new state, were able to conduct a policy of revolutionary internationalism.

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How did Stalins counter-revolution succeed in overcoming workers democracy, without provoking a mass uprising? In reply Trotsky has given the basic factors responsible, but has concealed his own responsibility. The economic and cultural backwardness of Russia, the preponderance of the peasantry, the isolation of the country from the rest of the world, the influence of the world market and of capitalist ideology, especially from 1923 to 1929, were the main factors which permitted the bureaucracy to break free from mass control, and to suppress workers democracy. The fact that in post-revolutionary Russia the historical tasks of capitalist construction had still to be performed in the sphere of technique and industry, made it possible for Stalin and his associates to create a new type of capitalism, in the process of liquidating proletarian democracy. But what enabled Stalin and his supporters to realise this possibility, without any great mass resistance, was the miserable role played by Trotsky and other Russian internationalists in the years from 1923 to 1926. In those crucial years of Stalins rise, Trotsky, as a loyal party member, confined his opposition to academic theses and passive resistance, waiting 18 months before allowing his opposition to come to the knowledge of the masses. The historical role played by Stalin is a dual role, for insofar as he and the bureaucracy have concentrated capital in the hands of the state, to the exclusion of private enterprise and private property in the means of production, the regime has prepared the economic ground for socialism, which is the social stage immediately ahead of mere nationalisation of the means of production. On the other hand, the crushing of workers democracy and internationalism by Stalins bureaucracy, which has thus impeded the development of Russian society into socialism, has been a reactionary pressure, acting against the progressive force of the proletariat. That is why it is not only possible but also necessary for socialists to attack and defend Stalins regime. To attack it as an anti-socialist political force, which the working class especially the Russian working class must eventually overthrow. On the other hand, to defend it against the forces of imperialism of finance capital reaching out with its tentacles of private property for fresh colonial wealth. The technical achievements of the bureaucratic regime, particularly those of the first Five-Year Plan, arose as a result of internationalist politics, during the last year of Lenins life. But the subsequent technical progress of Russia, which canalised revolutionary human energy into a vast plan of industrialisation, and so laid the basis for another and higher phase of internationalism, had as its accompaniment the growth of nationalism. And this bureaucratic nationalism, supported by large sections of the peasantry and proletariat, has temporarily smothered internationalism which made possible the Five-Year Plan. One thing is certain: out of the continued expropriation of small private producers, and out of the continued exclusion of foreign capital from Russia, only socialism can come and must come, sooner or later, as the international economy of the country, with all its contradictions of inequality, invites the extension of socialisation from production to commodity distribution. Since only the rebirth of workers democracy can perform this extension of socialisation, and since workers democracy can only return by overcoming the violent opposition of the bureaucracy, the final solution of this dialectic process is dependent upon the social force including the physical power which the working class of Russia can gather for its second revolution against capital. And such social force is necessarily part of the international movement of the workers of all countries against the present social system.

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Henry Sara

Not State Capitalism

FOR Dr Worrall the Russian problem is solved very simply the present confusion exists because of the wilful stubbornness of Trotsky in terming the Russian state a Workers State, or Proletarian State once Trotsky drops his obstinacy he will recognise the error of his ways and come to agree with the author in defining it much more simply in the term State Capitalism. For this reason, says Worrall, although there is no capitalist class as such in the Soviet Union and because there is a relative (?) lack of private property relations, the structure of the bureaucracy differs fundamentally from the structure of a bourgeois class which in general is based upon the principle of private property, but the function of the bureaucracy is that of the bourgeoisie, namely, the accumulation of capital in Russia the production of commodities, the extraction of surplus value, the realisation of this surplus value as profits (?) of the state and the conversion of profits (?) into further state property, especially capital in the form of further means of production; more factories, more machinery, more mines, etc. Worrall continues: This primary function of accumulating capital which a bureaucracy now performs is not combined with working-class control of that bureaucracy And precisely that fact makes the Russian state a capitalist instead of a workers state since the state pursues the aim and compelling motive of capitalism in general. So what he wants is control of the bureaucracy by the working class! Lenin is said to have demanded in his Testament that Stalin be removed. Numbers of men in Russia have been shot for having in their possession documents in which Lenins words were reprinted. Trotsky argues that the present war by Russia will see a revolution in Russia and the overthrow of the bureaucracy, that is to say, the full achievement of Lenins demand to remove Stalin the sweeping away of the entire bureaucratic apparatus. It is obviously absurd to talk about controlling the bureaucracy: once such a bureaucracy is recognised for what it is, its days are numbered. It is because the Russian question revolves mainly around the political control by the bureaucracy, and not around the question of the social basis of the Soviet Union, that Trotsky defines the Russian state a workers state. In order to oppose Trotskys definition, our author endeavours to cite extracts from Capital to show that Marx held the view that capitalist production was not based primarily upon private property and from Anti-Dhring, to show that Engels demonstrated that state property under capitalism could be used as capital and also that Lenin, too, held the view that state capitalism could be a step towards state socialism. For RL Worrall to assume that Trotsky is ignorant of these references is just sheer impertinence. He says: Nowhere in Capital does Marx place private property among the specific features of capitalist production. This is rather like the attitude of those socialist critics who inform us that nowhere in Capital does Marx refer to capitalism; ergo, it does not exist! According to Worrall, students of Marx should devote themselves to the so neglected Third Volume. But this mild exhibition of pedantry can be ignored (not that there is anything in the Third Volume to support his contention), and Marxs very definite statements in the First Volume can quite profitably be recalled: Centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist

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integument. The integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. Marx is here depicting the final stage of capitalism and he very definitely refers to private property. He goes on to say: The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets its own negation This does not reestablish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era, that is, on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production. The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is naturally a process incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. Marx showed plainly the direction of capitalism, transforming labour into social labour, and means of production into social powers of production, but he certainly never denied the private character and purpose of the system. If Worrall, by his statement that capitalist production has become more and more a matter for state control and regulation since 1914, means to imply that private property has declined in this country, then the facts disprove his claim. (See Public and Private Property in Britain, by H Campion.) In regard to the passage from Engels which Worrall offers in disproof of Trotskys contention that state capitalism is an impossibility, it would seem that Worrall reads into the passage far more than Engels ever intended. Perhaps Worrall would explain how it is that the central bank in this country, the Bank of England, is still a private institution; and why the railways are private property, and a host of other combines and firms have not become state property. If this were an automatic process, as Worrall would have his readers believe, there would be no need to include in a workers programme of immediate demands the nationalisation of the land, railways and the Bank of England. The Communist Manifesto of 1848, which bears the name of Marx and Engels, says: Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character. The Russian revolution did destroy the class character of property, and the capitalist

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state which was abolished gave way to the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is to say, the proletarian state or workers state. Now whatever party, group or section became the government would be faced with the task of overcoming the backwardness of the country by intensive accumulation of capital (using the word capital not in the old sense of the antagonism of capital and wage labour, but with a new content which implies social property in the fullest expression of that word), and this was possible only by giving the workers a limited return for their labour activity, that is, unpaid labour or surplus value must go to the workers state in order that such accumulation could be made for the further extension of state industry. On this important aspect of the transition from capitalist conditions to primitive socialist conditions a few words from Trotsky given in a report which he presented to the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in Moscow in April 1923 can be quoted: In view of the general economic structure of our country, the restoration of state industry is narrowly bound up with the development of agriculture. The necessary means for circulation must be created by agriculture in the form of a surplus of agricultural products over and above the village consumption before industry will be able to make a decisive step forward. But it is equally important for the state industry not to lag behind agriculture, otherwise private industry would be created on the basis of the latter, and this private industry would in the long run swallow up or absorb state industry. Only such industry can prove victorious which renders more than it swallows up. Industry which lives at the expense of the budget, that is, at the expense of agriculture, could not possibly be a firm and lasting support for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The question of creating surplus value in state industry is the fateful question for the soviet power, that is, for the proletariat. An expanded reproduction of state industry, which is unthinkable without the accumulation of surplus value by the state, forms in its turn the condition for the development of our agriculture in a socialist and not a capitalist direction. It is therefore through state industry that the road lies which leads to the socialist order of society. Contrast Trotskys statement of 1923 with Worralls argument condensed above, and it is fairly obvious that to the latter this is all wrong. The accumulation of capital, the production of commodities, and the fact that the worker renders unpaid labour to the state, means that it is not a workers state but is a form of state capitalism, which pursues the aim and compelling motive of capitalism in general. The aim of capitalism in general is to provide an idle class, in complete luxury (there is no such class in Russia). The compelling motive of capitalist society is to make profits, with which persons can buy all the best things in life, to reward a landlord class rent for the right to make use of the land which they own, and to pay interest to a large body of shareholders, bankers and financial agents (again it must be said such sections of private property holders are absent in the Russian workers state). There is a vast difference between a state which aims to preserve the right of private property in the means of production, with the view to the accumulation of profits for private purposes, and a state which aims to accumulate further means of production for social use which can ultimately lead to the social welfare of the people as a whole. To say that the bureaucracy accumulates profits of the state is to

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misunderstand the whole social bases of the USSR. Worrall seems to have got himself into the same mix-up that Dhring did with his commune, wherein the members were to be paid for their labour. Engels says: At the end of a year, and at the end of a hundred years the commune is no richer than at the beginning Accumulation is completely forgotten. Even worse: as accumulation is a social necessity, and the existence of money provides a convenient form of accumulation, the organisation of the economic commune directly compels its members to accumulate privately, and thereby it leads to its own destruction. There is no escaping this economic fact; accumulation of further means of production must go on in Russia for a considerable period either with the aid of the Stalinist bureaucracy or under some more revolutionary leadership. To talk of the next step being that of socialist appropriation is absurd and it is still more absurd to say that the world revolution will wreck the existing social system. The bureaucracy has severely hindered the development of the world revolution, it has crushed its political opponents with brutality, it has widened the breach in wage payments and turned piece work into a socialist principle, it has shown a complete inability to develop the Communist International, but as even Worrall himself has to admit, in spite of all his efforts to demonstrate how deeply the bureaucracy is entrenched it is a precariously placed bureaucracy. That means, if it means anything, that the bureaucracy has no social roots it is not a class but a clique, a group of puppets obedient to the beck and call of the leader. Slowly but surely the leader is losing his influence, and before long must leave the stage. What social basis will his henchmen have when he goes? None! They will be powerless to carry on the tradition of Stalinism, obviously. Is it not correct to say that, more than ever before, Stalinism stands condemned? Yet at this critical stage muddlers want to complicate a perfectly clear issue by introducing the confusing doctrine of state capitalism into the matter. To the average worker, Trotskys definition regarding the workers state will be far more comprehensible than the jargon of state capitalism.

Rudolf Hilferding

State Capitalism or Totalitarian Economy?

THE concept of State Capitalism can scarcely pass the test of serious economic analysis. Once the state becomes the exclusive owner of all means of production, the functioning of a capitalist economy is rendered impossible by the destruction of the mechanism which keeps the life-blood of such a system circulating. A capitalist economy is a market economy. Prices, which result from competition among capitalist owners (it is this competition that in the last instance gives rise to the law of value), determine what and how much is produced, what fraction of the profit is accumulated, and in what particular branches of production this accumulation occurs. They also determine how in an economy, which has to overcome crises again and again, proportionate relations among the various branches of production are reestablished whether in the case of simple or expanded reproduction. A capitalist economy is governed by the laws of the market (analysed by Marx) and the autonomy of these laws constitutes the decisive symptom of the capitalist system of production. A state economy, however, eliminates precisely the autonomy

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of economic laws. It represents not a market but a consumers economy. It is no longer price but rather a state planning commission that now determines what is produced and how. Formally, prices and wages still exist, but their function is no longer the same; they no longer determine the process of production which is now controlled by a central power that fixes prices and wages. Prices and wages become means of distribution which determine the share that the individual receives out of the sum total of products that the central power places at the disposal of society. They now constitute a technical form of distribution which is simpler than direct individual allotment of products which no longer can be classed as merchandise. Prices have become symbols of distribution and no longer comprise a regulating factor in the economy. While maintaining the form, a complete transformation of function has occurred. Both the stimulating fire of competition and the passionate striving for profit, which provide the basic incentive of capitalist production, die out. Profit means individual appropriation of surplus products and is therefore possible only on the basis of private ownership. But, objects Mr Worrall, did Marx not consider accumulation as an essential earmark of capitalism and does not accumulation play a decisive role in the Russian economy? Is that not State Capitalism? Mr Worrall has overlooked one slight detail; namely, that Marx refers to the accumulation of capital, of an ever-increasing amount of the means of production which produce profit and the appropriation of which supplies the driving force to capitalist production. In other words, he refers to the accumulation of value which creates surplus value; that is, a specifically capitalist process of expanding economic activity. On the other hand, the accumulation of means of production and of products is so far from being a specific feature of capitalism that it plays a decisive part in all economic systems, except perhaps in the most primitive collecting of food. In a consumers economy, in an economy organised by the state, there is not accumulation of values but of consumers goods products that the central power wants in order to satisfy consumers needs. The mere fact that the Russian state economy accumulates does not make it a capitalist economy, for it is not capital that is being accumulated. Mr Worralls argument is based on a gross confusion between value and use value. And he really believes that a socialist economy could do without accumulation! But what then (and here we come to the basic question) is that central power that rules over the Russian economy? Trotsky and Worrall reply: Bureaucracy. But while Trotsky refuses to consider the bureaucracy as a class (according to Marx a class is characterised by the place it occupies in the process of production), Worrall makes an amazing discovery. Soviet bureaucracy in its structure (which unfortunately he does not analyse) differs basically from any other bourgeoisie, but its function remains the same the accumulation of capital. The fact that, despite great structural differences, the function can remain unchanged is, of course, a miracle that cannot occur in nature but seems (according to Worrall) possible in human society. In any case, Worrall accepts this as evidence that Russia is dominated by a bourgeois class and thus by state capitalism. He clings obstinately to his confusion of capital and the means of production and seems unable to conceive of any form of accumulation other than capitalist accumulation. He fails to understand that accumulation (that is, the expansion of production) in any economic system is the task of the managers of production; that even in an ideal socialist system this accumulation can only result from the surplus product (which only under capitalism takes the

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form of surplus value), and that the fact of accumulation in itself does not prove the capitalist nature of an economy. But does the bureaucracy really rule the economy and consequently the people? Bureaucracy everywhere, and particularly in the Soviet Union, is composed of a conglomeration of the most varied elements. To it belong not only government officials in the narrow sense of the word (that is, from minor employees up to the generals and even Stalin himself) but also the directors of all branches of industry and such functionaries as, for example, the postal and railway employees. How could this variegated lot possibly achieve a unified rule? Who are its representatives? How does it adopt decisions? What organs are at its disposal? In reality, the bureaucracy is not an independent bearer of power. In accordance with its structure as well as function, it is only an instrument in the hands of the real rulers. It is organised as a hierarchy and subordinated to the commanding power. It receives but does not give orders. Any functionary, as Trotsky justly puts it, can be sacrificed by his superior in the hierarchical system in order to decrease any kind of dissatisfaction. And these are the new masters of production, the substitute for capitalists! Stalin thoroughly exploded this myth when, during the last purges, he ordered shot, among others, thousands of industrial managers. It is not the bureaucracy that rules, but he who gives orders to the bureaucracy. And it is Stalin who gives orders to the Russian bureaucracy. Lenin and Trotsky with a select group of followers who were never able to come to independent decisions as a party but always remained an instrument in the hands of the leaders (the same was true later with the fascist and national socialist parties) seized power at a time when the old state apparatus was collapsing. They changed the state apparatus to suit their needs as rulers, eliminating democracy and establishing their own dictatorship which in their ideology, but by no means in practice, was identified with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Thus they created the first totalitarian state even before the name was invented. Stalin carried on with the job, removing his rivals through the instrument of the state apparatus and establishing an unlimited personal dictatorship. This is the reality which should not be obscured by construing alleged domination by a bureaucracy which is in fact subordinate to the government to the same extent as are the rest of the people. This is true even though some modest crumbs from the masters table may be doled out to it without, of course, a guarantee that other crumbs are to follow and at the price of constant danger to their very lives. Their material share does not constitute any important portion of the social product. Nevertheless, the psychological effect of such a differentiation may be quite considerable. Important economic consequences flow from this fact. It is the essence of a totalitarian state that it subjects the economy to its aims. The economy is deprived of its own laws, it becomes a controlled economy. Once a control is effected, it transforms the market economy into a consumers economy. The character and extent of needs are then determined by the state. The German and Italian economies provide evidence of the fact that such control, once initiated in a totalitarian state, spreads rapidly and tends to become all-embracing as was the case in Russia from the very beginning. Despite great differences in their points of departure, the economic system of totalitarian states are drawing close to each other. In Germany, too, the state, striving to maintain and strengthen its power, determines the character of production and accumulation. Prices lose their regulating function and become merely means of distribution. The economy, and with it the exponents of economic activity,

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are more or less subjected to the state, becoming its subordinates. The economy loses the primacy which it held under bourgeois society. This does not mean, however, that economic circles do not have great influence on the ruling power in Germany as well as in Russia. But their influence is conditional, has limits and is not decisive in relation to the essence of policy. Policy is actually determined by a small circle of those who are in power. It is their interests, their ideas as to what is required to maintain, exploit and strengthen their own power that determines the policy which they impose as law upon the subordinated economy. This is why the subjective factor, the unforeseeable, irrational character of political development has gained such importance in politics. The faithful believe only in heaven and hell as determining forces; the Marxist sectarian only in Capitalism and Socialism, in classes bourgeoisie and proletariat. The Marxist sectarian cannot grasp the idea that present-day state power, having achieved independence, is unfolding its enormous strength according to its own laws, subjecting social forces and compelling them to serve its ends for a short or long period of time. Therefore neither the Russian nor the totalitarian system in general is determined by the character of the economy. On the contrary, it is the economy that is determined by the policy of the ruling power and subjected to the aims and purposes of this power. The totalitarian power lives by the economy, but not for the economy or even for the class ruling the economy as is the case of the bourgeois state, though the latter (as any student of foreign policy can demonstrate) may occasionally pursue aims of its own. An analogy to the totalitarian state may be found in the era of the late Roman Empire, in the regime of the Praetorians and their emperors. Of course, from a social democratic viewpoint the Bolshevik economy can hardly be called socialist, for to us socialism is indissolubly linked to democracy. According to our concept, socialisation of the means of production implies freeing the economy from the rule of one class and vesting it in society as a whole a society which is democratically self-governed. We never imagined that the political form of that managed economy which was to replace capitalist production for a free market could be unrestricted absolutism. The correlation between the economic basis and the political structure seemed to us a very definite one: namely, that the socialist society would inaugurate the highest realisation of democracy. Even those among us who believed that the strictest application of centralised power would be necessary or inevitable for the period of transition, considered this period only temporary and bound to end after the suppression of the propertied classes. Together with the disappearance of classes, class rule was also to vanish that class rule which we considered the only possible form of political rule in general. The state is withering away But history, this best of all Marxists, has taught us differently. It has taught us that administering of things, despite Engels expectations, may turn into unlimited administering of people, and thus not only lead to the emancipation of the state from the economy but even to the subjection of the economy to the state. Once subjected to the state, the economy secured the continued existence of this form of government. The fact that such a result flows from a unique situation primarily brought about by war does not exclude a Marxist analysis, but it alters somewhat our rather simplified and schematic conception of the correlation between economy and state and between economy and politics which developed in a completely different period. The emergence of the state as an independent power greatly

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complicates the economic characterisation of a society in which politics (that is, the state) plays a determining and decisive role. For this reason the controversy as to whether the economic system of the Soviet Union is capitalist or socialist seems to me rather pointless. It is neither. It represents a totalitarian state economy, that is, a system to which the economies of Germany and Italy are drawing closer and closer.

Mike Jones

Slobodan Miloevi: An Appraisal

ALTHOUGH nearly two years have passed since Slobodan Miloevi died in his cell at The Hague on 11 March 2006 while still on trial, there has been little attempt to reevaluate the commonplace perception, particularly in the liberal press, of his role during the collapse of Yugoslavia. For example, a BBC programme on Tony Blairs wars that was shown on 25 November 2007 crudely portrayed Miloevi as being directly responsible for the launching of the violence that wracked the disintegrating federation during the 1990s. The discussion in late 2007 in respect of the pending independence of Kosovo saw the usual points repeated. For example, a fact-box in the Guardian on 20 November declared: The late Slobodan Miloevi of Serbia tried to impose his rule in Kosovo in 1998-99, driving out hundreds of thousands of Albanians in an epidemic of ethnic cleansing. The Christian Science Monitor commented on 21 November: Six centuries later, in 1989, a rising Serb nationalist named Slobodan Miloevi journeyed to Kosovo to pay homage to his fallen ancestors. His visit marked the beginning of another occupation one that transformed Kosovo into a virtual apartheid state. Although Albanians make up more than 90 per cent of Kosovos population, Mr Miloevi purged them from positions of power and barred them from schools, hospitals, and other public institutions. But it was not until Miloevi began a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1999 that the international community intervened militarily to protect the Albanians, ushering in the UN administration that continues to this day. The report continued: Some one million Kosovars were driven from their homes by Serbian ethnic cleansing, and more than 11 000 massacred. We shall look at these claims below. The coverage of the Yugoslav wars often presented the Serbs, and Miloevi in particular, as solely responsible for the death and destruction that occurred there

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during the 1990s. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of the obituaries and leader-articles that appeared in the quality press when Miloevi died were of this type. The authors of these pieces wrote with a joyful satisfaction, as if with him had gone all the responsibility for the tragedy, the bloodshed and death, that overtook Yugoslavia in the 1990s, could be put at his door and then be buried with him. Given the new Hitler label during the NATO aggression, all the appropriate terminology that befits such a person was churned out. The only regret was that he had escaped justice, that is, he was guilty but died before the verdict was reached. Let us examine some examples of this style of journalism. Tim Judah in the Observer (12 March 2006) was typical. Quoting Slavoljub Djuki, an unofficial biographer, he wrote that as a youngster Slobodan was untypical, not interested in sports, avoided excursions and used to come to school dressed in the old fashioned way white shirt and tie. Later, at university and beyond Miloevi did well. Ian Traynors obituary in the Guardian (13 March 2006), was quite the worst of those I saw, but in line with the Guardians reporting from Yugoslavia. Its leader the same day is proud to put down the idea of liberal intervention to Miloevis actions. That is humanitarian war and regime-change by military means, as we have seen since in Afghanistan and Iraq after establishing the principle in Kosovo. Traynor saw Miloevi as Europes chief menace, the most dangerous figure in post-Cold War Europe. Like Judah and many others, he referred to the three suicides in Miloevis family, as if this proved something sinister. Traynor too held it against him that he was a conservative child, a bit of a school swot, dour and older than his years, always smartly dressed. He was not a bully, hooligan, drop-out, drunk or druggie, long-haired scruff, etc, but a model pupil and quite ordinary fellow trying to better himself. When Derek Hatton was prominent in the 1980s during the Liverpool Councils battles with the Tories and witch-hunts from Neil Kinnock, he was attacked for wearing nice clothes. Were I to wear jeans, sandals and a leather jacket, Id be attacked for that, he said. Warren Zimmerman, once US Ambassador in Belgrade was quoted by Traynor, as if he would be an objective source, to the effect that Miloevi was a Machiavellian character for whom truth has no inherent value of its own. Ambassadors are employed to lie on behalf of their country. Was Miloevi any worse than other politicians we know so well? Such as Clinton (I never had sex with that woman), Blair (WMDs in Iraq, Iraqi missiles 45 minutes away from London, etc), Reagan (Contragate), Bush (al Qaeda in Iraq), Helmut Kohl (CDU slush-funds, GDR petrol stations sold to Elf), successive French presidents? Traynor seemed to lead a sheltered life, unlike millions of voters here and elsewhere disgusted with lying politicians. He even quoted CIA psychiatrists (!) who profiled the Serbian leader and concluded he had a malignant narcissistic personality strongly self-centred, vain and full of selflove. Whether that was so I wouldnt know, but these traits are not rare among those who get to the top in politics. Traynor should get out more. The obituary in The Times (13 March 2006) was more objective, as was its reporting from Yugoslavia during the wars, though there are inaccuracies and omissions. Miloevi did not send the JNA (Yugoslav National Army) to prevent Slovenia from breaking away in 1991. That was Ante Markovi, the Federal Prime Minister. Neither did Miloevi reject all compromise over Kosovo, or arrogantly refuse a deal with the Albanians at the Rambouillet peace talks. Mrs Albright had devised demands unacceptable to Yugoslavia regarding NATO troop deployments. She took

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along the KLA leader to head the Kosovan delegation rather than Dr Rugova, the recognised leader. No compromise was desired by the Clinton government, who wanted a war that would remove Miloevi. It mentions the police slayings of Albanian clan families in the Drenica region in early 1998, etc, but not that these were reprisals for KLA killings of both Serbs and Albanians during searches. No mention is made of the KLA, nor of its listing in Europe and the USA as a terrorist organisation that financed its actions by crime. Once it became a tool whereby a war could be justified in order to change the regime in Belgrade, the KLA was held up as a liberation movement. Writing in the Guardian (14 March 2006), John Laughland argued that the case against Miloevi would have been thrown out of a proper court of law. His enemies were unable to produce a single rabid nationalist, let alone racist, quotation from his mouth, while in the four years of his trial not a single witness has testified that he ordered war crimes. He pointed out that although the original indictment in May 1999 at the height of NATOs aggression concerned Kosovo, a year and a half later indictments for Bosnia and Croatia were added. Presumably, because the prosecutors realised that NATOs allegations about genocide in Kosovo could not stand up in court. The Hague Tribunal was set up by the UN Security Council in 1993 on the initiative of the USA. The General Assembly has such a right, but not the Security Council. The USA opposes the International Criminal Court and its right to try any of its citizens. The purpose of the tribunal became clear when the then prosecutor Louise Arbour issued the indictment based on NATO intelligence, and held a joint press conference with Robin Cook, then Foreign Secretary and one of the prime movers regarding the war and its aims. This ad hoc tribunal lacks independence, and the prosecutor has more importance than the judges. Some witnesses had clearly been schooled and were shown up to be liars. The US government censored the testimony of key witnesses. Hearsay evidence was allowed. Miloevi, defending himself, had both to be present in court and use many hours a day examining more than a million pages of documents, as well as talk to his witnesses, yet he faced constant obstacles placed in his way by the judges. James Bissett, who was Canadas ambassador in Belgrade during the early stages of Yugoslavias break-up, wrote in the National Post (15 March 2006), regarding the content of the obituaries of Miloevi, whereby he was to blame for all the death and destruction that accompanied the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation, that all the charges of masterminding four wars, of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing have been repeated so many times that they have become part of received wisdom. Yet the facts tell a different story. Bissett saw Miloevi two weeks prior to his death, as he was to appear as a defence witness so had talks with him over two days. Apart from discussing his health, Miloevi was conscious that the tribunal was a political court set up to make him the scapegoat [and] was aware that there was a Western news blackout of anything revealed during the trial that was favourable to his case. And he was also resigned to the reality that he would be found guilty. The media reporting had been biased from the start, said Bissett. Slobo did not start the wars in Yugoslavia: The fighting started because Slovenia declared unilateral independence and used force to seize customs posts along the Austrian border. Ante Markovi, a Croat and darling of the West as he was pushing through IMF-proposed measures, sent the JNA into Slovenia both to secure the border and to

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ensure that customs revenue was not appropriated. The secession was unconstitutional, and its recognition by the EU was not in accord with international law. Thus the Federal government was in the right. The USA fought a long and brutal civil war to prevent the secession of the Confederate States. Incidentally, television footage showing three JNA conscripts, hands in the air, being shot by Slovenian forces exists, yet nobody was charged. The JNA intervention in Slovenia was half-hearted, and the units returned to barracks in Croatia. Bissett points out that Croatian security and paramilitary forces then surrounded the federal barracks, and fighting broke out in Croatia. Miloevi still had no control over the federal army. The federal defence minister was also a Croat, as was the Foreign Minister. Although set up in 1993, it took five years before the indictment against Miloevi for genocide was issued, at the height of the NATO bombing, yet, writes Bissett, the forensic teams that searched for evidence of this genocide in Kosovo have so far discovered fewer than 3000 bodies bad enough but not genocide. Bissett saw Miloevi as an apparatchik and an opportunist interested in holding on to his power, prestige and privileges. He was not an ardent Serbian nationalist and I believe had little interest in a greater Serbia. As the president of Serbia, he was forced to display sympathy to his fellow Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia, but he did not have authority over them. Bissett concluded that he died before given the chance to set down his side of the story. Now we have only his opponents version of events. Jeremy Scahill, in Counterpunch Online (13 March 2006), takes up precisely Bissetts concluding point in Rest Easy, Bill Clinton. Slobo Cant Talk Any More. Scahill believes that Miloevi was undoubtedly a war criminal, but he was also the only man in the unique position of being able to expose and detail the full extent of the US role in the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Of course, just as the Nuremberg trials excluded crimes committed by the Allies, particularly mass murder and deportations by Stalins NKVD, so the Hague tribunal rejected Yugoslav charges against NATO, and obstructed Miloevis attempts to expose the crimes. Scahill refers to the US bombing of Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers, the cluster bombing of the Ni marketplace the use of depleted uranium munitions and the targeting of petrochemical plants causing toxic and chemical waste to pour into the Danube the bombing of Albanian refugees the deliberate targeting of a civilian passenger train or the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The US relationship with the KLA and the postwar regime in Kosovo would have been examined. Scahill mentions Agim eku, the new prime minister a UStrained war criminal, but not his predecessor Ramush Haradinaj, ex-KLA officer and one of the top gangsters in Kosovo who, when wounded in an attack on the home of a rival, was airlifted to a US military hospital in Kaiserslautern. Miloevi would have surely asked about US involvement in KLA incursions into Serbia proper (Preevo) and Macedonia, where it aided both the government and the Albanian rebels. Machiavellian or what? Scahill includes US interference in the Yugoslav elections in 2000 and the ultimate neo-liberal takeover that was the aim of Clintons sanctions and 78 days of bombing. The USA gave 70 million dollars to the opposition to Miloevi. Germanys Greens boasted of their financial aid too. But it seems to me that probing the criminal links of Zoran Djindji, described by Traynor as the liberal Serbian prime minister, Djukanovi, the Montenegrin president, and other oppositional friends of the West would be more fruitful. Scahill writes that Miloevis last legal battle was an attempt to compel his old

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friend turned nemesis Bill Clinton to testify at his trial. Much could have been exposed. For example, Miloevis long-term efforts which predated 9/11, the 1999 NATO bombing and his own trial to expose the presence of al Qaeda in the Balkans from Bosnia to Kosovo. However, the US does not want this matter discussed in an international court. In his opening statement, Miloevi alluded to some of the information he would introduce during his defence: In 1998 when [Richard] Holbrooke visited us in Belgrade, we told him the information we had at our disposal; that in Northern Albania the KLA is being aided by Osama bin Laden, that he was arming, training, and preparing the members of this terrorist organisation in Albania. However, they decided to cooperate with the KLA and indirectly, therefore, with bin Laden, although before that he had bombed the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, [and] had already declared war. The USA and major European powers at first wanted to keep Yugoslavia together, and Serbia, its strongest component, was supported, which made Miloevi their main ally. But once it began to break up and other states were intervening, the USA changed policy. Miloevi differed from the people heading the other republics, inasmuch as he headed, not an openly capitalist party, but the ex-Communist Party now called the Socialist Party. He was popular among sectors of workers, the peasants and pensioners, and although called a dictator in the Western press he had been elected. He made concessions to Serbian nationalism and allied with various unpleasant nationalist figures in order to remain in power. On the other hand, the Yugoslav United Left party, set up by his wife Mira Markovi, portrayed in the press as a Lady Macbeth figure, and a firm opponent of Serbian nationalism, pulled in the other direction. Miloevi was praised by the West when implementing IMF proposals. He began privatising socially-owned enterprises, but not quick enough for the imperialists. He did not grovel before the US or NATO, and instead he had close ties with Moscow. The Rambouillet Accord contained a commitment to the free market in Kosovo. After the NATO bombing, which did not remove Miloevi but strengthened him, Robin Cook opposed financial aid for rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed by it, complaining that Miloevi had not instituted the necessary market reforms. That was the real reason for wanting the removal of Miloevi. He was too much his own man rather than a US puppet or toady. Was Miloevi any worse than most of the other leading figures involved in the break-up of Yugoslavia? Many of those supported by imperialism were gangsters or had links to criminals. Miloevi, his family and cronies, supposedly profited from privatisation. Hardly rare elsewhere in Yugoslavia and beyond, the clique around Izetbegovi in Sarajevo profited from the black market during the siege. In civil wars, as we know from the USA (1861-65), Spain (1936-39), and numerous African countries currently, but particularly from Yugoslavia due to its proximity, civilians suffer more owing to the fighting for territory. Centres of population are emptied of the enemy after capture. Except where a racist ideology is involved, as with the Nazis, this is a military tactic (critics of the US planning in Iraq see the rush for Baghdad, instead of eliminating the pro-Saddam resistance groups already operating, as the major error). This leads to refugees, but also to killings perhaps rough justice, perhaps purely criminal. In such cases we see not genuine attempts to bring those responsible to justice, but victors justice. When between 200 000 and 250 000 Serbs were driven out of their homes in Croatia in 1995, it was with US backing and

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done with US-trained forces. Killings of elderly and mentally-ill people took place. Presumably, the Clinton regime regarded this as a price worth paying. Noam Chomsky, interviewed in the New Statesman (19 June 2006), regarding Miloevi, points out that, with a single exception (the Raak Massacre), every charge concerning the Kosovo indictment, was for crimes after the bombing The bombing was undertaken with the anticipation explicit [that] it was going to lead to large-scale atrocities in response Now there were terrible atrocities, but they were after the bombings. Chomsky refers to the British parliamentary enquiry finding that until January 1999, most of the crimes committed in Kosovo were attributed to the KLA guerrillas. We pointed out long ago that the Raak Massacre, which tipped the balance, was fabricated, and that the deaths caused by the NATO bombing were roughly equal to the number of Kosovan corpses found by the forensic teams. So contrary to convention regarding extradition, further charges were added. Srebrenicas deaths resulted from, in part, an organised massacre, but Chomsky says there was an intensive investigation by the Dutch government and what they concluded was that not only did Miloevi not order it, but he had no knowledge of it. And he was horrified when he heard about it. So it was going to be pretty hard to make that charge stick. However, Miloevis death denied him the possibility of refuting the charges made against him in court. Furthermore, far bigger villains continue to get away with their crimes, and a pack of journalists upholding the principle of liberalimperialist intervention continue to blame him for everything that went wrong in Yugoslavia.

Cyril Smith

Where Are We Going?

THESE days, most discussions of socialism concern present-day issues and very few are about the future of society. The result is that very little is said about the nature of that future. The reason is quite clear: getting worked up over the corrupt, murderous antics of Bush and Blair, for example, leaves us little time or energy for more serious topics. I want to concentrate instead on the real issues that exercised the attention of Karl Marx. Today, when the news about the workers movement is so depressing, we cannot tell whether to laugh or cry about it. In ancient days, when I was a Marxist, we merely had to wait for better times: one day, when contradictions in the economy had matured, this would no longer be necessary, and economics would see us through, eventually. Today, this is not sufficient for anyone; apart from some sentimental attachment to the old stories, people are not inclined to believe in them. The question of Marxism and its opposition to the ideas of Karl Marx has nearly wrecked the ground for answering questions like these. Marxism gets Marx wrong at every turn. For example, take the footnote at the start of Chapter 15, Machinery and Big Industry, in Volume 1 of Capital: It is easier to find by analysis the content, the earthly kernel of the nebulous concepts of religion than to show by an inverse path how the real

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conditions of life assume little by little the ethereal form. That is the only materialist and therefore scientific method. The weaknesses of the abstract natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality. This is a passage well known to many Marxists. Because the word materialist is used by Marx, they think that he means the same thing as they mean by it. But he does not. As Marx explains, it does not mean that abstract matter causes changes in mind, as the natural scientists believe. That is the easy way out. What is meant by materialism is that everything comprehended is first understood by human beings, with all their defects, limitations and triumphs: wherever they go, their language and history comes with them. The question is this: what does Marx have to tell us about tomorrows world? What can Marxs science tell us about human social development as it will be? Having seen that the way that they labour was the way that men and women were held in subjection, he could say something relating to the various forms of slavery to the future stages of their emancipation. The State is a prime example of this. Marx, with some difficulty, had concluded that the continued existence of this institution was the sign that humanity had still to make the leap to freedom. Marxism, in all its forms, social-democratic, Leninist not to mention their Stalinist perversion took their line from Lenins State and Revolution, at best. They contended that only after a prolonged period of socialism would society be ready, by kind permission of the Marxists, to attempt to live without benefit of the police. Perhaps Marx who never was one of the Marxists can be some help here. He spoke openly of the State as a thing of evil, from his early Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right (1843), right up to the Notes on Wagner (1861). Life without any external power, any kind of force used to exert over the mass of the population, can only get in the way of real freedom. In other words, as soon as human beings get anywhere near to emancipation, they begin to learn to live without the State. Does this really matter? Yes. We can only find our way out of the mess that our rulers have blindly led us into if we study where we are going. Of course, much, much more is required, but that is a necessary prerequisite. Before we can make the necessary leap, several other changes are needed, and first of all the issue of nationalism has to be faced. Nations have developed everywhere and some live off the rest. In the process, the national question has got entangled with religion. How can we learn to live without the State, if we have not at least found out how to get along without many states? I have nothing much to say about such things: they will be answered with difficulty, no doubt by future generations. But what Marx had to say about the future is contained in his thought about his time. I mean that his outlook is futureoriented, unlike all philosophy, the thought of the past. Every feature which he could postulate about the world to come is taken from the present-day world, with necessary changes, of course. Thus, democratic planning of industry is part of modern monopoly, and tomorrows world human order is foreshadowed by the nightmare of todays globalised economy. When, in 1959, the first English translation appeared of Marxs Economic-

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Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,1 I read it eagerly, as befitted an enthusiastic Trotskyist. Most of it was unintelligible to me, of course. I excused their author, who was the Young Marx, as I felt that I could make allowances for a man who was not yet a Marxist. Among the many things I did not know about Marx was that, as yet unencumbered by his later editors, he took the Manuscripts with him into his lifes work, Capital, and that even then they were read by nobody else, even by Engels. Some of the ideas in them, as I afterwards learned, Marx never, as I have pointed out, a Marxist elaborated in his later work, but some of them were so advanced that Marx had no time to return to them. Such an idea is this: Man is a species-being, not only because he practically and theoretically makes the species both his own and those of other things his object, but also and this is simply another way of saying the same thing because he looks upon himself as the present, living species, because he looks upon himself as a universal and therefore free being. (EconomicPhilosophical Manuscripts, Early Writings, pp 327-28) The profundity of these and many other lines is staggering. Not only does Marx sum up the very meaning of human existence, both individual and social, but he does this in terms of freedom. The ability of human beings to produce what men and women need in abundance, is combined with the recognition of the opposite of freedom. Both sides of the argument can be found in the development of modern science and technology: Species-life, both for man and for animals, consists physically in the fact that man, like animals, lives from inorganic nature; and because man is more universal than animals, so too is the area of inorganic nature from which he lives more universal. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc, theoretically form a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of science and partly as objects of art his spiritual inorganic nature, his spiritual means of life, which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and digest them so too in practice they form a part of human life and human activity. In a physical sense man lives only from these natural products, whether in the form of nourishment, heating, clothing, shelter, etc. The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, the object and the tool of his life activity. Nature is mans inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature, that is, nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that mans physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. (Ibid) Where does money come into this? What has it got to do with capital or wages? In his view of history they are passing shadows on the scene. Marx shows the way that society fits into the picture, seeing human beings only existing as human in their association with other humans:

1.

This was the unsuitable name given to them by their Moscow Editors. We must not be too hard on them: at least the Manuscripts did see the light of day.

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The human essence of nature exists only for social man; for only here does nature exist for him as a bond with other men, as his existence for others and their existence for him, as the vital element of human reality; only here does it exist as the basis of his own human existence. (Ibid, p 349) Marx, in his use of alienation (Entaeusserung) and estrangement (Verfremdung), tries to sum up his attitude to labour. Hegel had employed these words to describe the way that the human being separated himself from himself, on the road to the formation of social substance. In the reconciliation of the individual and the social, Hegel tries to show the establishment of the universal. Marx, however, shows that Hegels outlook is the limit of estrangement itself: For Hegel human nature, man, is equivalent to self-consciousness. All estrangement of human nature is therefore nothing but estrangement of selfconsciousness. Hegel regards the estrangement of self-consciousness not as the expression, reflected in knowledge and in thought, of the real estrangement of human nature. On the contrary, actual estrangement, estrangement which appears real, is in its innermost hidden nature which philosophy first brings to light nothing more than the appearance of the estrangement of real human nature, of self-consciousness. (Ibid, p 387) Marx had discovered the secret of Hegel. Hegel had thought he had found the way that human beings were unfree, unable to think for themselves. He saw it as a result of the unfreedom of their thought, and that was overcome only in their heads. Only by studying the history of philosophy was this unfreedom surmounted. Apart from this step, it was inevitable. Marx, on the contrary, saw that it was the effect of the unfreedom of the way that they got their living. I dont mean the methods that they use to make things that people need, but the social relationships that they entered into in order to make them. These are the determinants that mould their very being as humans. The big question, however, is what does he mean by human? In 1843-44, aged 25, Marx began to read the political economists and their perfectly true account of the nature of the reality of life under the inhuman control of capital. His shock then was profound and lasted the rest of his life. (This is pointed out in a paper by Scott Meikle, The Composition of Marxs Reaction to Economic Thought.) Following the essay by Friedrich Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, Marx was led to seek in Smith, Ricardo, Say and others the answer to the question of what in human methods of production held the key to human life. At this point he was able to see the point of a new form of society: it was only the old form revealed. This became the form of society for which he strove for the rest of his life. Sometimes referred to as communism but with careful distinction from existing, utopian or other forms of communism Marx was always trying to expound its characteristics. Here, in 1844, his language is clearer than at any time: Let us suppose that we had produced as human beings. In that event each of us would have doubly affirmed himself and his neighbour in his production. (1) In my production I would have objectified the specific character of my individuality and for that reason I would have both have enjoyed the

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expression of my own individual life during my activity and also, in contemplating the object, I would experience an individual pleasure, I would experience my personality as an objective sensuously perceptible power beyond all shadow of doubt. (2) In your use or enjoyment of my product I would have the immediate satisfaction and that knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need, that is, that I had objectified human nature and hence had procured an object corresponding to the needs of another human being. (3) I would have acted for you as the mediator between you and the species, thus I would be acknowledged by you as the complement of your own being, as an essential part of your own being. I would thus know myself to be confirmed both in your thoughts and your love. (Excerpts from James Mills Elements of Political Economy, Early Writings, p 277) This particular passage did not see the light of day until the 1950s. Today, it strikes us like so much pie-in-the-sky. Has the man never met an actual real live human being? Arent humans selfish, murderous, destructive animals? Any Green will tell you the story: the world was OK more or less until men and women got here. This is what people generally mean by Utopian. But Marx has tried to explain to us that the conditions of life, the way that we humans have been forced to get their living, makes them the way that they are. In order to understand the possibility of a world based on love, Marx first had to paint a picture of the present world. It is the world of Adam Smith, of competition, of exploitation of the labour of others, of women by men. What was explained as natural, could be understood as arising from capital, which forced people to live as they do. What is natural, the outcome of human history, is communism: Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human selfestrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, that is, human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. (Ibid, p 348) This is what the analysis of history reveals: Only through developed industry, that is, through the mediation of private property, does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of the self-formation of man through practical activity. (Ibid, p 375) Would not such a transformation of society require a concomitant change in technology? For Marx, the question is not so simple. Natural science has many different sides, from astronomy to computing, from atomic physics to nanotechnology, from human physiology to the theory of evolution. What they have in common is the logical elaboration of knowledge, if nothing else. Let us say that Marx uses science Wissenschaft in its Hegelian meaning, as organised, systematic knowledge of all kinds. It is not to be confused with natural science, Naturwissenschaft, in that Wissenschaft forms a system, not the product of any individual scientist, but the science.

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Each piece of it is a circle, which together forms an element of the totality, the Absolute. These parts, like Logic, Nature and Spirit, are united in their difference. To comprehend this system is the task of the philosopher, who will in this be able to grasp the whole. Nature has no history apart from humanity. It is only known to man, and this becomes clear only when the real meaning of Nature is revealed in the Absolute. Man is alienated from Nature. Hegels philosophical outlook not only points this out, but also says that it is mans essential nature which separates them. This is what Marx denies. Marx says that this proposition and this statement was another part of the Manuscripts which was totally incomprehensible to me when I read it in 1959 contained what was essential about Hegels philosophy. All the talk about Marxs materialism, as distinguished from Hegels idealism, springs from this misunderstanding of the standpoints of the two men. The fragmentation of natural science is inevitable given the fragmentation of the way in which nature is regarded. The only way that nature could be seen as a unity is for us today as a mathematical abstraction. Technology, the application of this scientific knowledge to human ends or human destruction, is then taken apart from any of this. The accelerating pace of scientific and technological development makes an answer to the problem quite urgent. The advance if this is the word! of technical application makes a threat to the very survival of the species a real subject for debate. At the same time, the most important areas of technical advance are all concerned with the killing of as many people as possible. Marxs observations on natural science, which abound in the Manuscripts, repay careful reading: The whole of history is a preparation, a development, for man to become the object of sensuous consciousness and for the needs of man as man to become sensuous needs. History itself is a real part of natural history and of natures becoming man. Natural science will in time subsume the science of man just as the science of man will subsume natural science: there will be one science. Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sense perception (an identical expression) in the form of the other man who is present in his sensuous immediacy for him. His own sense perception only exists for himself through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man. Mans first object man is nature, sense perception; and the particular sensuous human powers, since they can find objective realisation only in natural objects, can find self-knowledge only in the science of nature in general. The element of thought itself, the element of the vital expression of thought language is sensuous nature. The social reality of nature and human natural science or the natural science of man are identical expressions. (Ibid, pp 355-56) What is important about these and other remarks is that they should be read in terms of the collective nature of humanity, as well as its individual nature. Today, natural science is fragmented into separate pieces, each of which is carried on by a small group of people. A communist order of society will mean that no part of it will have to be performed in isolation. But this is not all. The many and varied aspects of human activities today are set against each other. The value of productive activity or of the exercise of political

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power are alternative incommensurables today, but what about the weight of each of them compared with aesthetic life? Marx has little to say about them as such, but how does each relate to the worth of the rest as alienation disappears? What is poetry, music, literature, drama, dance or architecture? And how do the activities of each of them relate to the life of human beings who consume their products? It is human imagination, the essence of human transformation and selftransformation, which joins together all these aspects of human activity: Only through developed industry, that is, through the mediation of private property, does the ontological essence of human passion come into being, both in its totality and in its humanity; the science of man is therefore itself a product of the self-formation of man through practical activity. (Ibid, p 375) The ontological essence of human passion: this is the individual and social nature of humanity. Every one of the achievements and crimes of history, from war to romantic love, are produced by this activity. Not a single branch of human endeavour, but every one of them. One day, when alienation has been overcome, they will all be united. As long as the State exists, an institution for making some people behave in a way which safeguards the well-being of others, this ontological being cannot be seen. Communism does not just involve making changes in economic arrangements in the way people live. Altering the nature of individual lives, so that they no longer clash with each other, will mean that the individual and the social are harmonised. Communism is seen as a natural consequence of the way that humans are human. One day: when will that be? What do we have to do to get there from here? I dont know, but what I do know is that clearing up what Marx actually thought about the possibilities of it is vital.

Reviews
Mike Davis, Budas Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, Verso, London, 2007
CAR bombs have become so much a feature of world events that unless one takes place close to home, or has particularly gruesome features or global political consequences, it is often but a fleeting item in the daily media in Britain. But as I reviewed this book, a car bomb in Lebanon killed General Franois El-Hajj, the chief of the Lebanese general army staff, an act which Robert Fisk, an authority on Middle East affairs, feared would raise serious questions for the future of that country. Moreover, he wrote: Almost every other week we are faced with an assassination. And, much worse, we are supposed to expect it. Mike Davis, the well-known expert on urbanisation, has produced a concise history of this lethal device, from its prototype in the form of a bomb on a horse and cart detonated in New Yorks financial district by the Italian immigrant anarchist Mario Buda in 1920 (or the bomb-laden cart intended to assassinate Napoleon Bona-

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parte in Paris in 1800), through its first widespread use in Palestine in the late 1940s, to its almost weekly or even daily deployment after 1970. He looks at the use of car bombs not only by political organisations and covert state operatives, but also by the Mafia in Italy and major drug-runners in Colombia. Davis outlines seven salient characteristics of car bombs. They are stealth weapons of surprising power and destructive efficiency, with lorries and vans able to carry several tons of explosives; they are effective advertisements for a cause, and their occurrence is almost impossible to deny or censor; they are very cheap; they are easy to organise; they are inherently indiscriminate in their effect; they are highly anonymous, and this can benefit those mainly covert state forces who wish to conceal their involvement; and most importantly they give extraordinary socio-political leverage to small and insignificant groups, and give more potency to otherwise weak organisations. In respect of the fifth factor, their indiscriminate nature, Davis makes the significant point that this renders the car bomb an inherently fascist weapon guaranteed to leave its perpetrators awash in the blood of innocents; indeed, its use can undermine the moral credibility of a cause, such as in the cases of the IRA and the Basque nationalists ETA in Spain. The first widespread use of motor-borne bombs was by the Zionist extremists of the Irgun and Stern Gang in their fight for a Jewish state in Palestine. Several indiscriminate attacks in Arab areas led to equally vicious reprisals from Arab nationalists, who used exactly the same methods. Graham Greenes estimation that the CIA was behind a series of car bombs in Vietnam in the early 1950s seems convincing. The OAS, the underground militia of the French colonists in Algeria, waged a wholly indiscriminate war in the early 1960s, particularly against Algerian citizens, to try to provoke a race war in France. A widespread and devastatingly effective campaign of vehicle-borne bombs was run against US personnel in Vietnam during 1963-66, the lessons of which the US authorities seemed to forget in their later overseas ventures. The IRA discovered the advantages of fertiliser-based bombs, and in its biggest operation planted 22 car bombs in Belfast on 21 July 1972, exploding in rapid succession. Loyalist paramilitaries, perhaps with the help of British undercover soldiers, exploded car bombs in Dublin. Three hefty IRA bombs in London in the mid1990s caused extensive and costly damage (although, contrary to Davis statement, Liverpool Street station was not wrecked). Other frequent deployers of car bombs are ETA, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Chechen militants, whose actions are described in detail. The Middle East is the central focus of much of this book, and for good reason. In the early 1980s, Lebanon was the scene of a bewildering constellation of guerrilla groups and shadowy state operators, often involving foreign countries, many of whom used motor-borne bombs as a means of terror and/or assassination. This conflict introduced the new concept of the suicide motor-bomber, and Hezbollahs use of this would transform the balance of power in the Middle East, not least with the demolition of the US Embassy and a US marines barracks in Beirut, the latter killing 241 US servicemen. The CIA and Israels Mossad were busy arranging car bombs in Lebanon, and the former had another area of operation in Afghanistan training Islamicist guerrillas, as was Pakistans Inter-Service Intelligence. This, of course, would come back to haunt the USA some years later, both at home and abroad. The Middle East conflict impacted on the other side of the world when in 1994 a car bomb probably planted by Hezbollah destroyed a Jewish community centre in Argentina, killing 85 people.

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To bring the book up to (nearly) the present, Davis investigates the situation following the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, with the disintegration of those two countries, and the rise of extreme Islamicist groups, some under the aegis of al Qaeda. This combination, along with the easy availability of explosives, has resulted in a frightful campaign of sectarian killings in Iraq, as extremist Sunni groups use car bombs in indiscriminate attacks upon Shia citizens (Shia militias tend to use other means of murder). It is true that since Davis completed this book, the Sunni extremists sectarian campaign against Shias has been slowed by large-scale mutual expulsions and the partitioning of Baghdad with Berlin-style walls (thus institutionalising sectarian divisions, and storing resentments for later), but it has by no means stopped. There are a few matters raised in this book that might have benefited from some further investigation. Davis states that several bomb-layers for the Arabs in Palestine in 1947 were deserters from the British forces. Deserters usually wish to get away from military service, not get themselves in even more risky concerns. Were they more politically driven? An account of Oswald Mosleys postwar activities informing us that British fascists contacted the Arab Office in London in order to join the Arab Legion with the express intention of killing Jews (Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, Tauris, 2007, pp46-47) could be relevant. The Real IRA car bomb that killed 29 people in August 1998 in Omagh is mentioned in a chart, but is not investigated in the text. The outcry provoked by this bomb, the work of an Irish Republican splinter group which rejected the IRAs cease-fire and Sinn Fins political trajectory, was enormous, and the atrocity sealed the fate of physical-force Republicanism, probably for ever. There have been persistent allegations that the British security services knew of the impending operation, but did not prevent it as they wanted to conceal the identity of an agent, whose cover would have been stripped if the motor containing the bomb had been intercepted; and that the spooks felt that one final atrocity and one in a predominantly Catholic town at that might (as indeed it did) spell the end of physical-force Republicanism, so they allowed the bombing to go ahead. This book is related to Davis work in the study of urbanisation, as the car bomb is only effective in an urban setting, where motor vehicles are an accepted and unnoticed feature of everyday life, and in which ever larger numbers of people are gathered in confined spaces, making them increasingly vulnerable to death and injury should a bombing take place. The staggering rate of urbanisation, especially in the Third World, over the last half-century that Davis graphically illustrates in his World of Slums (Verso, 2007) does not of course merely mean more people living and working in towns, but more buildings, more roads, more motor vehicles, more anonymity in short, all the requisite factors for the use of motor-borne bombs. Davis notes how globalisation has led to large resorts for Western holiday-makers being constructed in the Third World, and which have been targeted by, amongst others, al Qaeda; he notes the increased use of rings of steel and other methods of deterrence in cities against car bombs, and how the threat is producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle; and he notes how the huge numbers of commercial vehicles in the USA (and by implication elsewhere) make the detection of vehicle-borne bombs very difficult: In truth, cities as large as Baghdad, London or Los Angeles, with their vast seas of cars, trucks and buses, and their thousands of vulnerable in-

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stitutions and infrastructural nodes, will never enjoy universal security. Like drug dealers, car bombers will always find a place to do business. And, as Davis states, because current socio-economic reforms and national concessions seem unlikely to assuage popular discontent, the car bomb probably has a brilliant future. We have been warned. Paul Flewers

Gustav Metzger, Eichmann and the Angel (Cubitt Gallery)

GUSTAV Metzgers Eichmann and the Angel was an installation in the small, artistoperated Cubitt Gallery hidden behind chic office blocks at the Angel, Islington. It is typical of Metzger to find such a serendipitous opportunity for additional resonance the angel of his title is Paul Klees Angelus Novus, not a topographical reference. Klees angel was the trigger for Walter Benjamins best-known illuminating text. Benjamins meditation on Klees angel produced a memorably poetic vision of history: the angel tries endlessly to rescue and repair the things broken by history (memories, relationships, art), but is constantly blown backwards by a storm blowing from heaven. The name of the storm is progress. In Metzgers envisioning, this process of the accumulation of the debris of history consists of newspapers moving along a conveyor belt onto a gathering, rising heap. Visitors to the gallery are invited to add sheets or whole newspapers onto the conveyor belt. I picked a newspaper off the stockpile and threw it onto the conveyor. As it progressed like a tranquil sailing boat towards a maelstrom, I could read the headline Frightened Victims Face Life in a New City. It was about the New Orleans hurricane refugees (their storm was not called progress but Katrina, and a presidency may yet be broken on her wheel); it could have been victims of the Holocaust, of the Notting Hill race riots, the Highland clearances or Japanese PoW camps. (It could have been Metzger himself, sent young to London to escape the Holocaust.) It is not their suffering that creates the debris of history, it is the recording of it. Could Benjamin have believed that his angel would want to battle against the storm of progress to rescue old newspapers? What else do historians spend their time doing? Well, the best of them rescue something of the truth of human experience out of the debris. Behind the heap that falls off the conveyor belt is a wall of old bundled newspapers. The front page pictures, folded and stacked, create a kind of parody of abstract painting as they transform themselves into vertical stripes, repeated and echoed across the wall according to the accidents of stacking. And among them the headlines that happen to fall onto the fold shout repeatedly out of the garbage; like vocal samples in a dub composition greenhouse gas emissions, to Gaza. Metzgers point, of course, is not to create or manipulate such ironies, but to show that they are inevitable. In William Burroughs phrase, he is showing what is on the end of every fork, he is not putting things there himself. Accidental beauty arising from molecular processes or from unintentional human activity has never been far away in Metzgers work. In this exhibition the rollers on the conveyor are the most startling example. Their complex corrosions and accretions could be photographed, enlarged and hung on gallery walls to display extraordinary colour harmonies and textures. They could be filmed while rotating and projected onto the outside walls of universities and cathedrals to comment on the bleak victory of time over culture.

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All of this takes place in a white-painted space that may once have been a garage or stables. But there is one additional element that drags the installation out of a comfortable experimental space. There is a small, white control room supervising the process of turning history into debris. Metzger modelled it after the famous glass booth in which Eichmann was enclosed during his trial. This suddenly makes the whole exhibition much more complex and challenging. This is Eichmanns greenhouse. How is his greenhouse gas reconstructed in the debris of history? It echoes to Gaza, to Gaza, to Gaza. And the conveyor belt clanks and rattles, carrying more stories into history, fed by the Sunday afternoon gallery visitors. And Klees angel looks on, appalled. JJ Plant

Ken Loach (Director), The Wind That Shakes The Barley

TEN years ago Neil Jordans Michael Collins hit the screens, showing the world a rare glimpse of British imperialism at its worst. The story of the Irish Republican legend who famously signed his own death warrant when he signed the truce with the British in December 1921 was not without its churlish critics. Some alleged that Jordan had glorified the founding father of the post-1916 IRA and at a delicate time in the then-current Irish Peace Process. For some, Jordans characterisation of Collins as gunman turned peace-maker was an allegory for the similar trajectory of Sinn Fins Gerry Adams. Ken Loach, who is no stranger to controversy himself, has made a very powerful follow-up to Jordans work and in many respects a far superior product. The Wind That Shakes the Barley is certainly less Hollywood than Michael Collins, and possesses a dispassionate quality as opposed to Jordans more overt polemic. Indeed, his documentary style of direction only reinforces the powerful realism of the Anglo-Irish conflict and the hopelessly self-destructive civil war which followed hard on its heels. If, however, Jordan had one eye on contemporary Irish politics when he released his film, it is probably the case that Loach is looking further afield to Iraq with the clear yet subtle message: the Tans are back in town, but this time its Basra and Baghdad rather than Dublin and Cork! Iraqi comparisons notwithstanding, the film should be enjoyed for what it ostensibly is: a fictional/historical drama. Whilst Michael Collins beautifully captured the doomed comradeship of Collins and Harry Boland, Loach plays the same card with two fictional brothers who head up one of Corks infamous flying columns. The youngest brother Damien has just recently qualified to be a doctor and is about to migrate to London when the death of a young friend at the hands of the Tans forces him to abandon his plans and join the IRA instead. Elder brother Teddy is the senior Republican who ultimately presides over his younger brothers death in much the same way as Collins did with Boland. In both cases, the issue at stake is the 1921 treaty which partitioned six Ulster counties from the 26-county Free State, and which saw comrade and brother alike on opposite sides in the ensuing civil war. Loach captures this raw emotion magnificently with Free State Teddy giving the firing squad the order to execute Damien as tears roll down his face. Damien had refused to tell Teddy where the anti-treatyite weapons were hidden after his brother had implored him on bended knee. However, Loachs work is significantly different from Jordans in other ways. Rather than be the historical narrative of great men, Loachs entire emphasis is up-

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on the ordinary workers and peasants who fought the British in County Cork so bravely and effectively that today Cork is still known as the rebel county. A good example of this is that there is no characterisation of Tom Barry, the recognised guerrilla leader in Cork. This cannot be an accidental omission. Moreover, Loach points to a third force in the Republican milieu which Jordan omits completely the James Connolly-inspired republican socialists who wanted not just an Irish but a workers republic. This is captured superbly in a scene set in a Republican court. A rich money-lending capitalist is attempting to sue a poor old woman who has fallen behind with her payments. When it is discovered that the money-lender is charging extortionate interest rates, the court finds in favour of the woman. This decision creates tension between those Republicans who wanted to keep Irish landlords and industrialists onside (especially those funding the IRA), and those who wished to colour their green flags with a touch of scarlet. With this, Loach has touched on a genuine fault-line in Irish Republican thinking, which some say can be traced back as far as the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798, which was led by Wolfe Tone. One thing that cannot be doubted is that by the time of the 1916 Rising, the muffled cry of Connollys Citizen Army was resonating in the General Post Office in Sackville Street. The coalition with the nationalists carried on after Connollys execution, and it is to his credit that Loach has shone some light on this. This said, a film fully examining the actions taken by workers and peasants during this time and the often reactionary response of the IRA has yet to be made. One for the future, Ken? In Michael Collins, Neil Jordan clearly comes down on the side of the protreatyites. Collins is depicted as both fall guy and a realist who believed the truce was the only realistic option on the table and a stepping stone to a true republic. Loach gives the distinct impression that he does not agree with this. The Free Staters particularly Damiens brother Teddy are presented as cynical poacher-turnedgamekeepers as they batter Dublins Four Courts with borrowed British weapons. So not only no Workers Republic but not even an Irish one, so both radical and reactionary comprised the continuing Republican resistance. The Wind That Shakes The Barley is a moving piece of cinema which is not overtly sentimental but nevertheless has the potential to bring you to tears. The characters are allowed the space to breathe in order to talk for themselves and you find yourself breathing with them and, in one or two cases, for them! For Loach, there are no heros tales, just ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary moment of history which they then subsequently shape through their own agency. And it is precisely this which makes it the uncomfortable yet enthralling viewing that it is. Dave Flynn

Aki Orr, Politics Without Politicians, http://www.abolish-power.org

available

to

copy

from

DIRECT Democracy? Thats the proposition that you, with your neighbours and the man who serves you coffee, the woman who phones to conduct a survey, as well as everyone from New York to Nairobi, all of us, could debate and decide the running of the world. The author of this pamphlet, Aki Orr, is a prominent contributor to the World Direct Democracy Movement website and a campaigner for a Middle East free from atomic, biological and chemical weapons. He has also made a case through various

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media for going beyond Representative Democracy, the democracy of politicians, senates and parliaments, to something more like the proposition above. Of course, to this kind of programme we know the response: its utopian, meaning two kinds of objection. One being that it wont happen (that is, just because someone sketches it out). This objection has a fine tradition behind it of simply asking how we get from here to there. The other response is more hostile. It cant happen. If not history, then human nature, or as its known today our genes, wont allow it. People are selfish, greedy, cruel. Look at the state of the planet, the conflicts between groups; look at Stalinism. Most people though would admit that Representative Democracy itself is not exactly in good shape. Representatives seem more distant and self-involved than ever, more and more actual decision-making is being taken over by appointees, quangoes and private consultants, while interest in what opportunities there are to vote for has declined. What does Aki Orr advance against our scepticism or cynicism? The new communications technology. He is not the first to herald TV, mobile phones and the Net as the means to improving democracy, but his pamphlet has the merit of being more specific. It begins by reminding us that democracy comes from demos-kratia, meaning a community run by all its members its people. In ancient Athens, all citizens excluding women, slaves and foreigners, but not craft workers debated issues that needed collective decisions, and then voted. Individuals were chosen by lottery to carry these out. They were not representatives or leaders, but officers appointed for a year only. Orr compares this with Rule by Representatives, todays definition of democracy, where leaders are elected and then decide almost everything. Though no two citizens are biologically equals, comments Orr, all have equal authority to vote on every law and policy of their society. They can do this through the technology we have acquired since Lenin. Every ministry or department of life education, health, etc will have its own TV channel. Panels selected by lottery will debate on screen the good and bad points of any proposal. Voters can phone in at any time with questions, comments and suggestions. After a specified period, voters will then have 48 hours to vote. A certain number of votes will be required for any proposal to pass to a second round, when it can be voted on again to become policy. Some kinds of poll may require a simple majority of all citizens (presumably on issues like capital punishment), others needing 60 per cent. The distinction between these will itself be a matter for a prior vote. To propose such a debate, it will only take one per cent of all citizens. Voting on all occasions can be by mobile phone or Internet. The TV debate panels would be chosen, Orr says, from a pool of all those with experience and knowledge of specific tasks. Let me suggest that there might be room here for drawing on anyone in fact concerned with the issues, including members of parties. Orr doesnt ignore political parties, but sees them operating in this system as groups organised to promote particular policies, not as large coalitions that aim at their side getting into power and staying there. The pamphlet itself addresses two kinds of problems with this Direct (electronic) Democracy (DD): technical and inherent. A major problem area is the rights of those who find themselves in the minority after a vote. Orr proposes that under a DD Constitution, minorities will always have the right to organise and promote their

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views. Citizens would also take a vote on whether there would be occasions when minorities have a right of veto on particular decisions, as long as the minority can come up with an alternative solution. One of the main attractions of DD is that in this system the disastrous results of any decision could be discovered immediately and the decision revoked. Voters dont have to wait till the next election. However, isnt the whole attempt at designing such a constitution presumptuous? Mustnt we leave it to history and the people of the world to create the form of tomorrows society? Isnt it dangerous to try to plan, and so to circumscribe, the future? Yes, it is premature to have a full blueprint, but it is equally risky to have no idea at all. Tomorrows people are us, faced with much the same problems as we are. We must find ways of making a start now, not by announcement, but by example and speculation (as here, or in, say, utopian fiction), to exercise what Fredric Jameson recently identified as the Desire Called Utopia. Implicit in Orrs vision in any case is the idea that the constitution, the DD society, would always be developing its institutions. In general, the principle of participatory democracy has had its sceptics on the left. In The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 1977), CB Macpherson dismisses the idea of a direct democracy, along the lines of the Athenian hillside gathering or New England town meeting, as something that wouldnt work on a scale larger than the face-to-face. He also points out that some leading group would have to make certain decisions, if only over how to frame the questions that would be debated and voted on. Would Orrs debate panels have that job? Who decides if and when they come up with the right formulation? Negotiation and compromise are not unimaginable in these circumstances, but Macpherson is firm, we cannot do without elected politicians The problem is to make the elected politicians responsible. This rather than the technicalities of voting and debate would seem to be the nub, along with further concerns over the domination of majorities over minorities. Macpherson proposes an alternative: a pyramidal structure. This starts with direct democracy at neighbourhood or workplace level, face-to-face debate with decision by consensus or a simple majority. These meetings would then elect delegates to a local or regional council and so on up to a national (or world) council. This is not unlike the Soviet democracy of post-Revolution Russia and should alert us to the flaws and risks. Macpherson is aware of these and insists that decision-makers and issue-formulators elected from below must be held responsible to those below by being subject to re-election and even recall. Of course, these issue formulators neednt be leaders if they belonged to working groups, reporting back and openly accountable. Under Orrs direct democracy, objections to such issue-formulation, as to anything else, could be lodged electronically. Perhaps part of the problem is not just in the detail but in the image of democracy we have. Pyramids imply a rule by one level either one tyrant or government at the peak, or a collective will at the base; power up or down. Though Orr is aware of conflicts between the majority at any one time and minorities, even DD still sounds like a Rule by One, in this case one big Everybody voting at any time. However, of majority/minority conflicts, Orr writes the best way to resolve them is by all citizens reaching an agreement in advance which issues will be decided by an overall majority of citizens and which by a local majority of those directly involved (pp 26-27). This sounds less like one big world meeting and more like what

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one might call modular democracy. In a modular democratic model, the metaphor is not up and down but wider and wider. A single hospital, for example, would be run on a cooperative basis, but decisions as to where any hospital should be sited would be subject to a wider poll locally, regionally or even internationally. Day-to-day decisions, on the other hand, would be up to officers, including medical staff, though always accountable to patient and auxiliary criticism. Everyone would have a vote in their smaller units as in the larger ones, in their local workplaces through to the global forum. This would combine and connect micro autonomy and macro responsibility. All of these relationships could be developed by practice and public evaluation. With any kind of democratic process, there is always the objection that some people will want to get more involved than others and that these will be busybodies and all too ready to boss professionals around. But freedom is not necessarily an either-or proposition I am free to make you unfree. Professionals may even improve under the scrutiny if its not done as a witch-hunt. Their critics too, all those involved, would be under scrutiny. Then there is the objection as to how we can get there from here. Orr does suggest ways in which individuals separately and joining together can promote DD. But the pamphlet doesnt spend as much space as one might like on the political and other obstacles to its promotion: the many interests counter to DD, from conservative lites in every country to international firms and organisations not wanting to be bothered by too much local input. There is also the global lack of equality in resources, even in something as simple as accessibility to landline and mast systems. One can add to these the lack of experience most people have in any kind of democratic running of things. The pamphlet is a programme, not a full analysis. Orr relies on proposing mechanisms for direct democracy in detail, though the pamphlet is skimpy in analysing what will bring us to join groups and parties to campaign for them. Orr puts his trust in technology, as Marx did in social polarisation and Lenin in the international nature of capitalism, to assist revolution. The new speed and interactivity of communications would supply the basis for training in DD. He assures us that the practice of DD will dispel peoples indifference to their society and the boredom and depression most people suffer today. One can though still admit the possibilities of technology without thinking that the desirable uses are inevitable, which would be as determinist as believing that immiseration led to socialist revolution. And anyway isnt it selfishness and atomisation, fanned by consumerism and fears of crime and terrorism, that are the main obstacles? Its true that nowadays most people only feel responsible for themselves and their children. The state in fact rules by promoting insecurity, emphasising the danger to householders from forces other than itself. But people will not want their lives endangered by top-down decisions either, in the case of issues like nuclear power sites or unjust wars, to mention only a few. The time of widespread demands for more direct control has not yet arrived though. The majority dont yet feel sufficiently threatened by the system and, perhaps just as importantly, encouraged by ideas of an alternative, to pursue greater democracy. Only minorities, often right-wing unfortunately, feel the need to strike back. Still, deference to the posh is no longer the certainty it once was. Most violence anyway is a response to a lack of adequate mechanisms for dealing with grievance. Finding the solution then is an argument for direct democracy. One of the central themes of Orrs pamphlet is that in whatever way the panels

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of debaters are chosen or whatever rights minorities have, all those involved can make errors. The essential thing in any system is how error can be remedied. The real test of any democracy is how accountable the representatives or officers are. Can problems be discovered, corrected and decisions revoked, and how quickly? But again, how do we get from right here to there? For one thing, practise forms of democracy in the one place we can: within our own organisations. There is now no excuse for ignoring minority rights or lack of accountability. The recent Campaign for a Marxist Party has made a good start in many of these areas, by robust debate about the right mechanisms. New Interventions itself has always been one model of combined autonomy and cooperation. The ends now imply the means. Revolution isnt an event, its a process. This then is not a signal for whole blueprints as much as for practice and debate. Mike Belbin

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