Permanent Revolution - our way forward

The point of this document

Permanent Revolution has been in existence for over a year. In that period we have established a clear presence and identity on the British and, to some extent, international left. It is one that we can build on in the months and years ahead. But it is modest relative to the overall political context in which we operate. We remain very small within a shrinking far left. The labour movement in Britain is extremely weak; victories are rare and generally small in scale. The reluctance by many of those radicalised to join revolutionary socialist organisations and individualism, even on the left, is stronger than for decades. Class politics – which for some of were once the norm of political life and even found their way regularly into sitcoms and TV dramas, never mind university lecture theatres – are regarded by most people, and even by a good number of activists, as an exotic relic of the 20th century.

The principal aim of this document is to make clear that our fight to develop revolutionary Marxism in the 21st century requires us to re-arm in order to rebuild. And rebuilding – after the enormous intellectual and physical carnage that revolutionary Marxism suffered in the twentieth century as a direct result of Stalinism – is the central task of anyone who wants to help create the means of destroying capitalism, outside of a dramatic change in the political and economic situation, winning people to our ideas will be a long term project.

The origins of Permanent Revolution

As a political current we trace our origins to the crisis in the International Socialists (now SWP). We emerged as tendency in the early 1970s during a period of left growth. This period saw heightened class struggle in Europe (1968-75) as a result of the onset of a new period of crisis for world capitalism. It saw the growth of the IST/USEC/WRP/MILITANT, a self-identified Trotskyist left, in combat with Stalinism and social democratic reformism. This situation contained the real potential for the creation of a new revolutionary force capable of leading workers into struggle against capitalism. But, outside of isolated examples, the potential wasn’t realised and the opportunity to make a step forward for the world working class on a scale similar to that of the period immediately after the Russian Revolution was lost.

While the principal factor shaping this outcome was the continuing hold of social democracy and Stalinism over key sectors of the working class, a major problem was the politics – and organisational methods – that the self defined Trotskyists deployed. The bitter truth was that the far left itself had embraced aspects of Stalinism: bureaucratic centralist organisations, political adaptations to petit bourgeois leaders (left nationalists, left bureaucrats etc) and an attitude to the class struggle that elevated the struggle for factional control over campaigns or unions above the building of such campaigns or unions into mighty organs of combat against the class enemy. The sectarianism and opportunism that had been Stalinism’s hallmark since at least 1925 was replayed in various ways by the organisations of degenerate Trotskyism.

From the mid 1970s/early 80s, there was a stall in this growth in Britain. The limits of spontaneous union militancy as a response to the bosses’ offensive became increasingly apparent. Reformism reasserted itself and the weaknesses of the various brands of Trotskyism became clear (to some at least) plunging the USEC into a spiral of factionalism and decline both in Britain and internationally. In Britain it precipitated a major crisis in the IS (SWP). Workers Fight, the Workers League, the Revolutionary Communist Group and Workers Power were the results of this crisis in the IS/SWP, emerging from a series of purges and expulsions as the organisation consolidated a bureaucratic centralist regime.

Even Gerry Healy’s WRP suffered a major split, with the Workers Socialist League being formed by Alan Thornett in the mid 1970s (the WRP was to explode and disintegrate in the aftermath of the miners’ strike in the 1980s). Militant were largely spared this initial crisis of centrism because they were firmly locked inside the Labour Party, whose left grew in the early 1980s around the Bennite opposition. But their own crisis and split followed in the 1980s as a result of the defeat of the left in the Labour Party.

At the same time western Stalinism, still paying a heavy price for the Soviet bureaucracy’s crushing of the Prague Spring (1968), began to fragment. The birth of Euro communism heralded a major shift to the right in many Stalinist parties. The Italian PCI led the way in the 1970s, with the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the party’s formal goal, a “social democratising” process that in the end led to the dissolution of the PCI and the creation of the PDS and RC in Italy. In Britain, Eric Hobsbawm’s defeatist thesis, “The Forward March of Labour Halted” (1978), signalled the opening of bitter struggle between the Euro communists of Marxism Today and the traditional Stalinists. This struggle ended with the dissolution of the CPGB in the early 1990s, leaving behind various Stalinist rumps – the CPB-Morning Star, New Communist Party etc.

This crisis on the left shaped the central project that our current (then Workers Power and the Irish Workers Group, later the MRCI) engaged in. Within the IS/SWP the left faction (pre-cursor to WP) fought on a broad range of political criticism, a critique of the SWP’s abandonment in practice of unconditional but critical support for Sinn Fein/IRA when the bombing campaign in the mainland started, of the leadership’s economistic approach to issues of women’s and black struggles, and of their failure to address the key issues facing the working class – their inability to develop a programme that linked the burning immediate demands facing the working class to the struggle for socialism.

In rejecting the idea of fighting for a revolutionary, transitional, programme, the SWP adopted instead a tailist and opportunist political method. After our expulsion from the SWP in 1975 to address this crisis of centrism and Stalinism and to provide answers to the ruling class offensive of the Thatcher/Reagan decade, we argued for the re-elaboration of a revolutionary programme and the formation of an international organisation on the basis of it. We re-asserted/re-discovered the Comintern’s and Trotsky’s revolutionary positions – on the workers’ government, tactics towards feminism, the rank and file of the unions and the united front, building a revolutionary international, analysis of Stalinism and so on. This was a legitimate and correct response. At the time the left were slapping stage makeup on Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky in order to obscure what their politics really looked like.

After all, if you had decided, like the USEC, that the Sandinistas were carrying out a working class revolution then squaring this analysis with the writings of the great Marxists could only be done by lying. In Britain the SWP’s turn to building the mini-mass party in 1977, followed by its bout of manic depression as a result of the “downturn” in 1979 represented a different but no less significant abandonment of Marxism. Faced with this sort of carry-on our attempt to get to the bottom of why Trotskyism had failed the test of the 1968-75 upsurge, and to develop a revolutionary alternative to it, was the only right and sane course of action. And our achievements throughout that period, and into the late 1980s, remain a central part of our tradition, one we should keep alive in our propaganda and make relevant for a new generation.

A new project for a new period

However, we cannot repeat the project of Workers Power in the 1980s. The world has changed considerably since then. At that time there was a large audience of self-identified Trotskyists, many of whom were being propelled leftwards by the inadequacies of their parent organisations. Our project was to relate to these forces and win them to the idea of a new international organisation. In the wider working class our ideas were directed at what we used to term “a specific layer of shop stewards”. In the workplaces and the unions there was a whole strata of educated militants, often united in networks and to some degree or other influenced by the politics of either centrism or Stalinism, to whom we could direct our propaganda. Our ideas, while not always popular, were not incomprehensible to these militants. They understood many of the points we were arguing because of the political culture in which they had been brought up.

Neither of these audiences exists today to anything like the same extent. The 1980s/90s was a period of defeats. The self-identified Trotskyist left declined and stagnated. Regroupment projects came to nought. Many dropped out. The leaders of the groups that remained embraced a host of new schemas in order to save themselves. Mostly this involved a dramatic turn to the right. The USEC embraced left socialist democracy, the movements, feminism’s “anti-capitalist dynamic”, even Gorbachev, as it sought a saviour from on high. This process of adaptation continues to this day. The SWP followed, having passed through a period of attacking “the swamp” and the rightward drift on the left in the late 1980s.

Under New Labour they embarked on the “united front of a special type” starting with an alliance with the Stalinists and Serb nationalists during the Bosnian and Kosovan conflicts and ending up, via the Socialist Alliance, in Respect, a cross-class, populist project (and internationally in the Zimbabwean MDC a real popular front with white agribusiness with a neoliberal programme). This sharp right turn by the SWP was an attempt to rationalise the contradiction between their crisis perspective (“the 1930s in slow motion”) and the decline of the labour movement and their own organisation. The most telling aspect of these shifts and turns (carried out in a slightly different form but with similar results in Scotland via the SSP) is that they have achieved little. Ephemeral electoral success, at the cost of abandoning the open struggle for revolutionary ideas, has been followed by splits and crisis and the further discrediting of socialism in the eyes of many.

At the same time the defeats of major sections of the organised working class quite literally drove militants from the stage of the class struggle. Whole sectors were destroyed (such as the miners, printers and dockers). Elsewhere leading militants were weeded out and docile union officials replaced them with “partnership” agreements with the bosses.

The specific layer of militants was smashed and dispersed. And with it went much of the political culture in the workplaces that once we could have taken for granted. Of course there are exceptions, such as the RMT, but it is noticeable because it is so exceptional. Indeed its exceptionalism is such that it caused Will Hutton, writing in the Observer, to call on the rest of the union movement to publicly denounce Bob Crow for the strikes on the London Underground and wake up to the fact that “Crow-style socialism is dead.”

Today many of the people we want to speak to – young workers and students challenging globalisation, union militants and campaigners resisting this or that aspect of neoliberalism, the oppressed combating their oppression – are faced with a new set of circumstances which throw up different questions and require us to provide new answers. We need to win arguments about the centrality of class, the validity of socialism, the need for a party, by overcoming the prejudices that have built up in the last two decades.

People who would have accepted many of our premises in the past would have argued about ways and means. Now we have to win them around to accepting them. And that is a very difficult task in a period (in Britain at least) of historically low levels of trade union struggle. It is not an argument we can win by pointing to what is happening out there. It is an argument we have to win, probably amongst a minority of activists, by patient, effective and imaginative argument.

The world economy, the workers’ movement and the left

Today the world economy is in a long upward wave. This is reinforcing the prejudices of those we seek to influence. On the back of the defeats of the workers’ movement, above all on the back of the destruction of the degenerate workers’ state and its satellites, capitalism has entered the period of globalisation with surging rates of growth, especially in former economic backwaters like China and India. It has enjoyed a prolonged period of expansion. This has not liberated it from contradictions. Nor has it driven the working class from the scene. Far from it. The working class is expanding. But its self-consciousness, and the reflection of that in a widespread culture of collectivity and solidarity, has declined. We have to take that as our starting point.

As if the crisis and decline of the left, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the defeats of the workers’ movements and the surge in economic growth were not enough to contend with, we also face the ideological consequences of these events. The intellectual shift to the right, the legacy of post-modernism and the discrediting of Marxism and class politics have all made themselves felt in Britain’s universities. The wave of student radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s was to a large extent self-consciously Marxist (with a touch of anarchist influence here or there). There has been no such wave of student radicalism in Britain for many years and an understanding of Marxism cannot be taken for granted amongst even the most radical of students.

Liberal, libertarian and non-Marxist ideologies centred on the individual rather than the class are more influential in the protests and anti-imperialist actions of youth and students, in the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements. Instead of looking to the declining and sect-like far left groups for leadership and ideas, many activists look to individual thinkers – Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Walden Bello etc. Amongst those who can see the contradictions of globalisation – its fabulous wealth production and the terrible poverty that facilitates this – the solutions on offer are mired within a culture of individualism, petit bourgeois moralism and above all a rebirth of liberal reformism articulated by the charities and NGOs who lead the anti-globalisation movement.

These facts are all largely unpalatable to the British left (and much of the international left). But whether they recognise them or not the facts have taken their toll. The left groups are either stagnant or shrinking. The members carry on with whatever routine their organisations have created for them because they have been thoroughly mis-educated or because they know to question it means a quick expulsion. Others just leave, exhausted or disillusioned. Some become embittered anti-party individuals preaching sermons about the evils of Leninism to anyone who will listen.

Either way the absence of serious class struggle and the distance of many of the groups from the organisations of the working class has plunged the left into a period of isolation in which sect characteristics have come to the fore. Socialist activism divorced from the class is always sect-like. Today the sect-like features of the majority of the organisations on the far left are the ones people see: the street stalls punting for passers by; the ever less frequent and ever smaller public meetings and the internalisation of discussion amongst shrinking groups of people; the front organisations and the stealthy manoeuvres to hijack campaigns that do exist; the turn from campaigning to the comedy circuit (Sheridan) or Big Brother (Galloway). The left is in its worst state since the 1950s.

The political response to this situation has been twofold. On the one hand the SWP has moved rightwards (welcomed on this trajectory by the FI’s British section, ISG/Socialist Resistance). While the Socialist Party has kept out of Respect its politics are little different. Across the entire spectrum the left of the trade union bureaucracy is now wooed with a passion rather than warned against as tomorrow’s potential traitors. Socialist policies are now treated as strong liquor requiring as much dilution as possible. The abandonment of revolutionary militancy in the struggle against fascism is the UAF’s reason for being. Apologies for allies who have become permanent have replaced criticisms of allies who should only ever have been temporary.

This whole drift to the right is capped by the elevation of electoralism into the be-all and end-all of modern political activism. Have the wards been leafleted? This is now the anthem of the SWP Party Notes (the SP have been travelling this road slightly longer and can still couch their rightism in workerist terms but they are just as bad). The alternative to this rightism is the appalling schema-mongering of the smaller groups like Workers Power/LFI (the world pre-revolutionary situation and economic crisis) or the CPGB and its “partyism”. Sectarianism, a refusal to face reality and a refusal to discuss the tasks that face us in the present situation – the tasks of rebuilding the labour movement, winning again the arguments for class politics and re-assembling a core of revolutionary militants who are clear about what they are fighting for – unite the entire British left into one major obstacle to progress.

Permanent Revolution and the crisis of the left

Permanent Revolution has emerged from this crisis of the left. We emerged because, as committed and thinking revolutionaries we want to do something about this mess. We want to rescue and re-develop Marxism for an entirely new period and win a new generation to its banner rather than sit back and watch it turned into either a lifeless dogma or an excuse for reformist chicanery. We now need to find a way of doing this.

The remedy exists. We can build the organisation in a way that reflects its tasks, find a structure for it that suits its tasks and develop a culture of discipline, reliability, dedication and effectiveness that is rooted in class politics, solidarity and genuine collective co-operation. We can do this without resorting to the hysterical bombast of small groups like Workers Power, or to the sleazy opportunism of the bigger ones like the SWP. We can do it by clearly defining our purpose. The key to our future does, actually, lie in our past.

In Workers Power each of us, in different ways, came up against the main failing of virtually every post-war Trotskyist group – a failure to face the truth. By developing perspectives based on an utterly wrong appraisal of the world economy, the world balance of class forces and the actual state of the class struggle, Workers Power turned away from the real tasks faced by Marxists in the post-Cold War period and sought refuge in schemas concocted in the heads of leaders increasingly cut off from the class struggle. Once this happened they shifted the entire focus of the group away from the patient fight for the revolutionary programme inside the working class and towards the impatient repetition of so called “key slogans” amongst the “new youth vanguard”.

The Revo project used new tactics and means of communication. It built us a significant periphery for a group of our size and recruited some able young comrades. However, it was voluntarist to believe we could launch a mass youth movement and the uncertain relationship between Workers Power and Revo led to Revo increasingly being treated as a party front, frequently engaged with its own short term party front campaigns, with all that this meant for the degeneration of our political method.

The hallmark of the original Workers Power was its fight for the primacy of class, programme and revolutionary party. Its degeneration was signalled by the relegation of each of these things. Revo became “the class struggle”, the “key slogans” became the programme and “the new workers’ party” became the party. We came into being to resist this degeneration. Now, in the wider world of the left (internationally and in Britain), the positive espousal of class, programme and revolutionary party can become our defining feature, the central points of our project, and the unifying purpose of our existence. The fight for their primacy can be the means for our re-organising, growing and building a new organisation that will succeed.

Our starting point is that we are an organisation that tells the truth. The organised working class – internationally – is still in a terrible state. It is recovering, but has far from recovered, from the blows it suffered in the 1980s and 1990s. In Britain in countless workplaces unions are tied into partnership deals with their bosses. Shop stewards, let alone stewards’ committees, are hard to find, industrial action is viewed as an exotic exception not a handy negotiating weapon. The relative isolation of Bob Crow, the fast disappearance of the rest of the much heralded “awkward squad” and the emphasis of mega-unions like Unite on their role as protectors of the individual worker are all symptomatic of this parlous state.

The SWP have retreated from the “difficult” terrain of class by building the populist, cross-class Respect – elevating the Muslim Community into a new vanguard and adopting an evermore crass electoralist perspective. But, as events in Tower Hamlets proved, this vanguard will not – cannot – act as an agent for social (revolutionary) change and is quickly leading the SWP into an unseemly war with the likes of Galloway and Yaqoob. In Scotland nationalism has replaced the centrality of class independence and the SSP has wiped itself out as a political force.

The defining feature of our project must be the message that no matter what the difficulties are at the moment, there is no alternative to the working class if the world is to be changed for the better. Our priority must be to address the weakness of its organisations (lack of political independence in countries like Venezuela, lack of basic organisation in countries like Britain). We need to demonstrate that the revolutionary programme is not an ultimatist catechism that says “one solution revolution” but a manual of action for the existing class struggle, one that can be turned into practical everyday solutions in real everyday class struggles. And we need to show that the revolutionary party based on such a programme is not an autocratic sect that has its very own ark of the covenant with Marx, Lenin, Trotsky or whoever, but is rather the most effective means of fighting for revolutionary change.

The fight against imperialist war, racism and deportations, and environmental catastrophe need to be made concerns of the labour movement; at the same time the woeful popular fronts against war, the BNP etc, need to be transformed into healthy workers’ united fronts. Where these do not already exist, we need to build caucuses within campaigns to fight for both long and short term objectives around these lines: for example in STW for walk-outs in the event of an attack on Iran (short term), and for opposition to all manifestations of imperialist militarism (long term). Through such caucuses we can identify the best militants and keep them close to us. We can also direct the best anti-capitalist activists into work within the labour movement and the central tasks of rebuilding union strength

In other words we need to be the partisans of party, programme and the centrality of the working class. Above all we have to stress the importance of rebuilding: rebuilding Marxist theory into something that explains the world, rebuilding working class organisation into something that can change the world and rebuilding socialist organisation into something that can offer leadership in the struggle for change.

We can do it by posing the need to mobilise workers against the BNP, against the privatisation of the NHS and against the imperialist wars. You can set up as many campaigns, coalitions or electoral fronts as you like, print as many fancy leaflets as you like, organise as many colourful demos as you like. But unless you rebuild the workers’ organisations from top to bottom and then lever them into action over such issues you won’t stop the bosses, you won’t stop the privateers and you won’t stop the imperialists.

The truth, the working class and what we need to do

In the present context this re-assertion of the central importance of the working class to the world we live in will prove to be our key means of going forward. This is for two reasons:

* It is true

* We will be one of the very few groups saying it

Our recognition of reality is an enormous strength. Even in the healthy period in Workers Power we were weak on imperialism, on updating Lenin, on understanding the modern labour aristocracy – we need to do that now in the era of globalisation. During the faction fight with WP/LFI we went some way towards developing the negative critique of the catastrophists, but we have yet to properly examine the limits of the forward movement of the world economy, to provide a serious assessment of the real contradictions faced by world capitalism and opportunities for revolutionary socialism today.

But we cannot just do this “on our own” we must consciously work in a new way. We must involve supporters and other socialists sympathetic to our aims in all aspects of our organisation, in contributing to the journal, participating in aggregates, branch and open meetings, working with us in the trade unions and united fronts. We should be open about not having “all the answers”, being willing to learn, to experiment, to alter our ideas. However we do have a programmatic heritage (Trotskyist Manifesto, Founding Principles etc) and a body of work and ongoing analysis in PR that we stand by. The more forces we can draw into discussion about and the development of our positions, even if in terms of clarifying our differences, the stronger our politics will become. We must make a conscious effort to break out of the “secret society with strange rituals to get in” image which infects the small groups on the far left.

And the opportunities exist. Recognising the reality of capitalist growth is not proof that the game is up, merely that the game needs to be played in a different way. And today the differences in the way we operate are dictated by the fact that the current sharp upswing has not produced universal satisfaction with the system. Quite the opposite. It is combined with gross inequality and neoliberalism. This gave rise to an upsurge – even in conditions of boom – in anti-capitalist struggle. The anti-capitalist movement did mobilise many thousands of youth, worldwide, against capitalist injustice. But it was incapable of setting itself free from the new reformism of the Brazilian Workers Party and RC in Italy, of the leading NGOs and of charismatic individuals, from Sheridan and Bove at the lower end, so to speak, through to Chavez at the higher end.

With the left stuck in a time warp – “waiting for the crisis” and moving right in the meantime – we have an opening for our message, in the first place amongst a layer of existing leftists dismayed at the myopia of the established organisations, and in the second place amongst the number of young radicals mobilised by anti-imperialist/anti-war/anti-capitalist sentiments. The people who will listen to us will most likely be few in number in the first place – a minority of the activists. And they will be drawn towards us primarily because of what we have to say. That is not to downgrade what we do. We have to match words with deeds as best we can.

But what we can do is limited by our tiny size and implantation, by our geographically narrow spread. What we can say through a journal can reach hundreds, through a website thousands. Making sure what we say is top grade is central in our coming work. Building up our propaganda output and mobilising the talent of the organisation to help achieve this is a crucial task. We have to take apart false (anti-communist) ideas and strategies and we have to do this in a way that doesn’t lead the activists we want to address to stop reading after the first few sentences.

Look at the output of the left and it is very much as George Orwell described it in his essay, “Politics and the English Language” in 1946:

“The mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing . . . prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a pre-fabricated hen-house.”

We must continue to address the issues that matter today, the issues that are relevant to millions – climate change, the changing status of women, the real nature of globalisation, the why and wherefores of the boom, the real state of the international working class movement, racism in the 21st century, the role of religion today, the new reformism, culture and the working class, anti-social behaviour and the loss of community. The list is endless. We need to explain why climate change is a social problem, why war is not simply the product of George Bush’s madness, why the IMF etc are part of a world system and why neither the UN nor Bono and Bob Geldof are the solutions.

We must re-invigorate and defend Marxist ideas in an era where neoliberalism is triumphant and the former workers’ states have become models of a new capitalist resurgence and development.

Above all we must promote debate. Stalinism discredited communism because it decreed a norm of absolute and total ideological unity. It appeared as a form of religious dogma.

Politics is a practical concern and socialism is, or should be, a guide to action. Intervention in the class struggle is fundamental. Our emphasis on propaganda does not mean downplaying the class struggle. It allows us to draw out the lessons and share them: but it only makes sense, and people will only listen to it, if it feeds off and is integrally related to practical class struggle activity. We must show how revolutionary Marxism is not an abstraction to be shouted on Sundays or whispered to the initiates in small rooms after the main event, but rather the best means for the working class to fight for its needs in the everyday.

Up until now we have only just begun to appreciate the extent of the tasks we face. But above all we should be upbeat about the possibilities for Marxism in the 21st century, because we believe Marxism can triumph.

Permanent Revolution Aggregate September 2007

Sun 28, October 2007 @ 17:55