[August, 2001. This text is the introductory (and critical) presentation written for the republication of an anonymous text that circulated among certain circles of the British state left in the late 1970s and 1980s. The status of the text, and the motivation for its republication, are explained at the outset below. In due course the original document which the following text deals with will be uploaded to this site in its entirety.]
The following text is a document written by a member of the International Marxist Group (the then British Section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International) over 1978-79 and previously unpublished elsewhere. The principal objective of the author was a refutation of the argument—found in its most developed form in the contemporary Eurocommunist tradition, but also visible in the work of Perry Anderson and, to a certain degree, in that of Ernest Mandel—that in the west of Europe, a strategy for socialist revolution based on a Leninist conception of ‘insurrectionism’ was inadequate to resolve the complexities of a bourgeois class rule founded upon the predominance of parliamentary institutions and structures. In order to refute this idea, the author presents a detailed survey of the twentieth-century European revolutionary experience, east and west, from the revolutionary wave following the First World War, through the Spanish revolution of the 1930s and the Communist Party-led uprisings during the later part of the Second World War, up to the French May 68 and the Portuguese revolution of 1974-75.
We reproduce this text now because its arguments seem to us more relevant than ever; the Eurocommunist star may have faded in the intervening twenty years or so, yet the very terminal crisis of Stalinism itself in all its forms that we have been witnessing prompts the necessity of a revindication of the socialist revolutionary heritage of the European working class even more urgently.
Despite the fact that the essay today appears dated in certain respects (not least with respect to the very crisis of Stalinism just referred to) we feel that its overall conclusions have not been invalidated by the course of events of the last twenty years: we remain as convinced as the author that the next revolutionary wave of the European theatre of class struggle is germinating, even if we accept the author’s counsel as to the need for revolutionary patience. Indeed, one of the strongest themes of the concluding part of the text is the need to take seriously the exigencies of constructing firmly-rooted revolutionary organisations even during periods of relative class quiescence and, mindful of this, we suggest that a study of the historical lessons laid out by the author here would not be a bad way to begin to prepare ourselves for the inevitable battles of the future, whenever they may come.
Below we offer our own assessment of the text. Nevertheless, despite our criticisms of our author’s arguments, our points of disagreement are secondary to his overall argument. What we would ask of you, the reader, is that you allow yourself to draw you own conclusions—although this text is long we feel that it merits serious study—and that you make it available to others.
On its own merits we have to recognise that our author’s text does us a great service. To use his own words, the task of ‘re-excavating’ the historical record of the European socialist revolution has long been overdue. From the continental-wide revolutionary wave that broke out at the end of the First World War, through the Spanish Revolution and the crisis of the 1930s in France, by way of the uprisings in Nazi-occupied Europe, up to May 1968 and the Portuguese Revolution of 1974-5, our author offers us, with verve and with detail, a skilfully executed account of the European revolutionary experience, ann experience that has largely been written out of the standard accounts of twentieth-century European history. For this reason alone he deserves our thanks.
But our author executes his task for a purpose, and that is to engage with a debate—already long-standing in the European workers’ movement—which had broken out with new force in the mid-1970s: that concerning the view that the traditional Leninist ‘insurrectionist’ strategy, an instrument sufficient to blast through the outworks of early twentieth-century Czarism, was a weapon too blunt and brutal to finish with the sophisticated and bedded-in bulwarks of bourgeois rule in the greatly more developed western European sector. Our author’s explicit intention is to revoke this view, advocated in its most explicit form by writers of an overtly Eurocommmunist stamp; his recourse to what Trotsky once called ‘the merciless laboratory of history’, his weapon for doing so.
But there is more to this debate than at first meets the eye. For the writers to which he opposes himself cover a large segment of the political spectrum. By his own account, our author arraigns himself against ‘orthodox’ Eurocommunists, Santiago Carrillo in the van; against what he himself dubs a ‘centrist’ school, personified by Fernando Claudín and Henri Weber; and against those of what he calls the revolutionary left: namely Perry Anderson and Ernest Mandel. Our author’s antagonists therefore form no homogeneous bloc, their heteroclite arguments no single priority. To measure the substantive value of our author’s polemic, then, it is necessary to look in more detail at the range of his own opponents’ positions.
The argument with the Eurocommunist school proper need not detain us long. It is no accident that the central figure against which our author positions himself is Santiago Carrillo, the at the time General Secretary of the Spanish Communist Party and recent (1977) author of Eurocommunism and the State. The date should warn as to the real intentions of this school. The mid-1970s saw the terminal crises of the Mediterranean European dictatorships, within which the Communist Parties planted themselves as champions of bourgeois democracy against fascism, but in alliance with the bourgeois apologists and state functionaries of the latter against the prospect of socialist revolutionary upheaval. In this respect the Eurocommunist polemic is nothing more than an updated version of the classical Stalinist policy of the Popular Front—a strategic alliance between the workers’ movement and an imagined liberal, democratic, anti-oligopolist bourgeoisie, on the political terms of the latter. It was theorised in the 1970s, as it had been theorised in the 1930s, that the temporary subordination of socialist revolutionary aspirations to bourgeois democratic ones was a necessary precondition for the realisation of the former. Three-quarters of a century after the first manifestation of this policy, and a quarter of a century after that of the one under consideration, it is necessary to say once again that there is no automatic causal link between the winning of bourgeois democracy and the realisation of socialism, however desirable in itself democracy may be in the face of fascist reaction, and that the conscious subordination of socialism in order to achieve democratic advantage in fact presents deadly obstacles in the path of the working class and its allies. A simple glance at present-day Spain, Portugal and Greece confirms this: the proof of the pudding, as Engels was wont to say, lies in the eating. It is necessary to say here with clarity, therefore, shoulder to shoulder with our author, that the projection of an advance to socialism—‘east’ or ‘west’—that is not based on the insurrectionary overthrow and destruction of the apparatuses of the bourgeois state, be it a democratic state or no, and the material and political expropriation of the bourgeoisie, is a fiction: a fraudulent claim that stands opposed to the weight of a not inconsiderable quantity of—sadly all too often tragic—historical experience. All talk of ‘traversing’ the state and ‘turning round’ its ‘ideological apparatuses’ is mere window dressing on this fundamentally flawed conception.
But of course the debate with the orthodox ideas of Eurocommunism is not the primary function of our author’s polemical intentions. Carrillo and Hodgson, Claudín and Weber, are, in truth, mere ghosts at our feast. The real target of our author’s preoccupations, as witnessed by not only the number of citations but also by the weight of his argumentation, is the ‘revolutionary socialist’ camp; the central target of his arguments are in fact not the representatives of Eurocommunism but Ernest Mandel and Perry Anderson, the then most prominent leader of the Fourth International and the most outstanding spokesperson of the English-speaking New Left respectively. Let us deal with the arguments of each in turn.
The position of Mandel—expressed most clearly in an article in New Left Review 100—to which our author opposes himself most strongly is that which says that in western Europe, in countries that have an established system of bourgeois democracy, it will be necessary for the working class to prove to itself the superiority of proletarian over bourgeois democracy by means of an extended experience of dual power; an experience of dual power that may last years, and which will precede the actual overthrow of the bourgeois state. The framework within which such a dual power will arise will be one of an increasing incapacity of the ruling class to continue with its traditional methods of rule; as the mechanisms of bourgeois power disintegrate the institutions and practice of dual power spread to the point where the working class and its allies become convinced of the necessity of insurrection and the revolutionary overthrow of the state. Against this view our author advances two fundamental arguments. First, he points out that all the historical experiences of dual power, far from anticipating the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state in fact arise subsequent to an unsuccessful attempt to do so. Thus the historical ‘function’ of dual power, our author argues, is not to teach the proletariat the superiority of forms of proletarian democracy but to allow it to resolve the problem of inadequate political leadership, to allow it to replace political leaders unwilling or unable to move decisively against the bastions of bourgeois power with a leadership adequate to the task. Second, our author points out that in countries with a greater proletarian social weight, dual power, rather than being extended in time, is typically shorter than it is in countries with a more belated economic and social development.
The position advanced by Anderson, again in an article in New Left Review 100, is at its end essentially the same as that of Mandel. Anderson’s principal purpose is a reflection on the contradictory legacy of Antonio Gramsci, a writer and a Communist leader who grappled for many years with the different problems posed for revolutionary strategy east and west. Anderson (following Gramsci) emphasises the central role of ideology and culture in the mechanisms of bourgeois rule within a bourgeois democratic structure, and insinuates the need on the part of the working class to counter these in the same coin. Although Anderson finally finds Gramsci’s solutions to the problem inadequate, he, at the close of his article, points up the importance of an experience of dual power as an educative one for the proletariat.
Our author has little time for Anderson’s prognostications regarding the ideological and cultural mainsprings of capitalist rule. Commenting on Anderson’s reflection that the ‘representative state’ represents the ‘principal ideological linchpin of Western capitalism’, abstracting citizens from their class locations so that the electoral moment ‘reflects the fictive unity of the nation back to the masses as if it were their own self-government’, obscuring the very existence of a ‘ruling’ class, our author points to the masses’ frequently expressed cynicism of the mechanisms of bourgeois democracy, and even points to the possibility that in countries with well-established bourgeois democratic systems this cynicism may even reach greater levels than in countries in which bourgeois democratic mechanisms are less well bedded in: that a weight of continued failure by bourgeois democracy to resolve the real problems of the day may in fact push the working classes of these countries closer to a rejection of bourgeois democracy.
It is at this point that we have to develop a critical assessment of our author’s case. For on this last point there appears to be little evidence of a symmetry between cynicism towards bourgeois democracy and a conscious rejection of it. The most formally democratic country on earth is of course the United States. But it is not possible to equate the very deep level of working class bourgeois democratic cynicism in the United States—a cynicism so deep that the greater part of the working class do not even see the need to exercise the most elementary bourgeois democratic right of voting—with any rejection of the very system of bourgeois democracy itself in the United States; if anything, the reverse would seem to be true. Of course, material factors—relative standard of living, for example—come into play here, something that Anderson expressly underestimates in his New Left Review article, yet in the United States it appears as if disinterest in bourgeois democratic mechanisms goes hand in hand with an unprecedented level of bourgeois democratic ideological hegemony. For sure, the breaking of this blockage will require something more than a ‘strategy of dual power’, with that we can agree.
Yet a consideration of the parameters of revolutionary strategy that underestimates the role of ideology and culture in societies under the rule of the bourgeoisie—in a bourgeois democratic system or otherwise, and let us remember that Russian absolutism did not suffer a lack of ideological devices with which to dazzle the proletariat and, especially, the peasantry—will fall short of the necessities of the socialist revolution.
But there is a wider problem in relation to the phenomenon of bourgeois democratic hegemony, for it is not just the case that the efficacy of bourgeois democracy effects a hypnotic attraction on the masses of the countries in which it is operative, but also evidently true that its attractive power also operates on an international level: few have been the countries in which the masses have recently lived under dictatorship of one form or another in which they have not looked with expectant hope and envious eyes towards the bourgeois democracies of the ‘west’. The experience of the collapse of the ‘people’s democracies’ teaches us this, for example; as does the struggle against apartheid. Misleadership alone surely is not the problem here: while leaders willing to preach the efficacy of bourgeois democracy have not been wanting it is also clear that it has not been necessary to force feed the masses the idea. (Maybe this is the real lesson of the failure to transform the collapse of the southern European dictatorships in the mid-1970s into consummated socialist revolutions.) In this respect, our author’s comments regarding the role of universal suffrage and proletarian democracy are well made, but, by the same token, the problem of bourgeois democracy remains a central one for revolutionaries before the revolution. It should be noted here, however, that the very universal international ubiquity of the ‘bourgeois democracy problem’ in itself mitigates against a conceptual division of the socialist revolution into eastern and western sectors.
But, of course, the mechanisms of ideology and culture are not the only underpinnings of bourgeois democracy. The United States, we have to admit, is something of a special case; elsewhere, in western Europe for example, what is central to the workings of bourgeois democratic systems is the existence of entrenched labour bureaucracies and social democratic parties. Whatever deficiencies bourgeois democracy has in the eyes of the masses, the existence of labour movements offers hope of amelioration of their concerns through recourse to the mechanisms of parliament. Conversely, of course, against whatever fear of the modern labour movements that the bourgeoisies hold, the structural existence of labour bureaucracy offers them hope of containing the demands arising from the working class within the framework of bourgeois rule.
But a treatment of the role and function of labour bureaucracy, and its place in the development of revolutionary strategy, is almost entirely absent from our debate. It is true that our author reflects on what he calls the ‘Kerensky phenomenon’: the almost universal conservatism of the leadership of the working class movement in times of revolution, ascribing a psychological dialectic of uneven and combined development of political consciousness: that the conservatism of the established leaders in time of revolution ‘is perhaps the product of their comparative militancy in peaceful times.’ But surely the fundamental question is not the conservatism of traditional leadership in period of revolution compared to its relative militancy in times of political quiescence, but the natural conservatism of the traditional leadership of the workers’ movement in non-revolutionary periods which is carried over into the revolutionary crisis itself. And here we are forced to acknowledge the qualitatively greater ideological and political weight of labour bureaucracy in countries which enjoy an established tradition of bourgeois democracy compared to those which do not. Pernicious though Menshevism may have been in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Russia, it hardly compares to the brutal and cynically counter-revolutionary role played, for example, by the German SPD in 1918-9.
The absence of a treatment of the concrete problem of labour bureaucracy in the conceptions of the European sections of the Fourth International, of which Mandel was the chief and most public spokesman, is well known. Indeed, the ‘strategy of dual power’ advanced in the 1970s by the sections of the International played the role of a substitute for an adequate strategic conception of building revolutionary parties capable of providing a counter-weight to the labour bureaucracies and the social democratic parties. Equally, the phenomenon of labour bureaucracy forms a central if curious ellipse in the work of Anderson in this period, whatever other merits (and they are indeed substantial) it contains. Whatever insights Mandel and Anderson offer us as to the need to take seriously the specificities of bourgeois rule in the west, their blindness to the phenomenon of labour bureaucracy can only invalidate the utility of their claims; by the same token, our author, as we have seen, is conscious of the problem; but he seriously underestimates it.
But there is yet another aspect to this issue, present in the work of all the authors referred to above, but strangely not commented upon. Each has a conception that periodically bourgeois rule does indeed break down, but none effects a sustained reflection on how this concretely comes about. For what is striking about the myriad revolutionary experiences of the twentieth century is that each occurs not singly, country by country, but as a part of an international wave of capitalist breakdown and revolutionary crisis. Our author’s vocabulary signals the fact: ‘the revolutionary wave of the 1930s’, ‘1914-23: the revolutionary decade’—but it never enters the core of his argument. For the breakdown of capitalist rule, like the operation of capitalist economy, is nothing if not international. The core proof of his thesis that classical Leninist insurrectionism applies to the political structures of the west as much as to the east is the German Revolution of 1918-9. Yet the question as to whether the German Revolution would have occurred at all if the Russian Revolution had not preceded it is a moot one. The pattern is recurring in twentieth-century European history: 1914-23, the 1930s, the mid 1940s, 1968-9, the early to mid 1970s—each of these periods witnessed not single national revolutionary crises but a crisis of capitalist rule on an international scale. The categories of ‘east’ and ‘west’ can look a little artificial when set against this observation.
And here we find what is at the heart of the debate. Once a revolutionary crisis does arise, then we can agree with our author that, east and west, the necessary task is that of the old classical Leninist insurrection. But the key question is not the precise mechanism of revolution, but the precise mechanism of the breakdown of bourgeois rule; our differences with our author are not on the terrain of what is to be done once revolution breaks out but how the revolution will arrive: a question which has a significant import for what revolutionaries do in the interim.
Now the categories of ‘east’ and ‘west’ do indeed demonstrate a real utility in this area; but ‘east’ and ‘west’ need to be understood not as geographical zones within Europe, but as a metaphor for describing where bourgeois rule is at its weakest (maybe today we should be talking of ‘north’ and ‘south’). For there is another striking and recurring feature of the twentieth-century European socialist revolution: the moment of revolutionary crisis within the international revolutionary wave tends to move from ‘east’ to ‘west’ in this metaphorical sense; that is to say, from periphery to centre. Bourgeois rule breaks at its weakest link.
But where is this periphery—our ‘east’—to be found? Bukharin once remarked that the socialist revolution broke out first in Russia because Russia was the poorest of the poor; Lenin rebuked him: the socialist revolution broke out in Russia because Russia was the poorest of the rich. Here we have our ‘east’ and ‘west’: the ‘east’, the periphery of bourgeois rule, is not the geographical or economic periphery of capitalism but that geographical area, social sector or political region where the contradictions of bourgeois rule are posed most sharply. Generalised capitalist crisis is a necessary precondition for the outbreak of revolutionary crisis: this cannot be willed into being by subjective revolutionary optimism—capitalism will not, as our author reminds us, wilt before the orator. But when, under the whip of crisis, revolutionary crises do break out they tend to appear first at the weakest social, political or economic point of capitalist rule: in the revolutionary wave at the end of the First World War, from Russia, spreading west; in the mid 1930s, from backward Spain to metropolitan France; in May 1968, from the revolutionary students to the industrial working class; in 1974-5, impelled by the collapse of the remains of the Portuguese empire, from the junior officers of the MFA to the Portuguese peasants and workers. Here we have our east and west: not closed geographical (or national) areas but dialectically related sectors of the international socialist revolution.
How will our east and west in this sense play itself out in the next great revolutionary wave? The future is impossible to predict and difficult to forecast: when the next generalised crisis of bourgeois rule occurs will the spark, the first moment of a new international revolutionary wave, appear first in Latin America, or in the Pacific Rim, or will the dialectic of the permanent revolution play another of its tricks and take us all by surprise once again? We will have to wait and see. We can be reasonably confident, however, that the spark will not flare initially in the core of international capitalism, in western Europe or northern America. But the bush fire of revolution will indeed spread in this direction, as it has done in each and every one of the revolutionary waves of the past, bourgeois democracy notwithstanding.
Mindful of the experiences of history, therefore, and of the exigencies of the present, what we do as revolutionaries in the interim—and what we do as revolutionaries in the interim is indeed in good part dependent on the existing variations in the modalities of bourgeois rulein the present—will determine whether or not the next spark of revolution breaks into a blazing conflagration, or whether it is extinguished for yet another time.