Principles

6. Ends and means

Obstacles

Before we can finish this statement with a consideration of the means that are appropriate for pursuing socialist ends, we should first give some consideration to the main obstacles in the way of that pursuit. In summary form they may be listed as:

It follows that, while capitalism obviously remains by far the biggest obstacle to radical social change, as well as the main source of all the other obstacles cited, the only ones that are currently amenable to any Marxist influence are, directly, the left, which in all its 15 decades and more of development has never been weaker, more divided or less effective than it is now; and, indirectly, the working class, which is simultaneously more deeply embedded in capitalism and more subject to its domination than ever; growing in numbers, while acquiring new skills and information; and still the only potential force for the liberation of humanity. The contrast between the objective possibilities for revolution and the absence of the subjective factors that would make a revolution succeed has perhaps never been greater.

In these bleak circumstances the primary task of Marxists must be, as it always has been, theoretical clarification. It is pointless to call for the abolition of capitalism, and the creation of a society based on freedom, equality, democratic control, common ownership of the means of production, and universalism without having any clear notion of what these goals might mean, or of how to get from here to there. It is worse than pointless to indulge in repeated “interventions in the struggle” without clear ideas of the purpose and possible effects of each intervention, which can all too easily end up exposing the weaknesses of the left rather than exercising its remaining strengths.

Thus far we have been highly critical of every group that calls itself “socialist”, whether reformist, Marxist, or other. This is not because we think that we are doing more, or doing better, than they are, although we can certainly take some legitimate pride in not having lined up with torturers, rapists and murderers against their victims, as so many of them have so often in recent years. It is because we think that at least some of them could do more, and do better, if only they could abandon their habits of oppositional posturing and endless introspection (neither of which, we admit, is wholly absent from this statement), and take up once again the task of moving Marxist ideas out of the academic/journalistic ghetto and into the working class.

Means

The watchword of any effective Marxism must be Marx’s own declaration that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” – not by any party or other group substituting itself for the working classes. Yet in this Age of Waiting the working classes have generally been rendered incapable even of defending the gains that earlier generations made within capitalism, let alone of emancipating themselves from it. Capitalism has proved to be more durable, more adaptive and more capable of commanding widespread support than most Marxists ever expected. Accordingly, revolutionary socialists have to act, if they are to act at all, under very adverse conditions of capitalist hegemony and widespread resistance even to liberal reformism, let alone to revolutionary ideas. It follows that any intervention by revolutionary socialists in this nonrevolutionary epoch must be carefully planned and carefully executed, and that certain means to socialist ends must be avoided.

In particular, for any action to count as being potentially helpful in the emancipation of the working classes, rather than potentially helpful in enhancing their oppression or exploitation, it must satisfy something like the following broad criteria:

We acknowledge that these can be counsels of perfection, rather than guides to action, especially where time is short and resources are inadequate. Nevertheless, judged by these criteria, the various paths taken by socialist groups over the decades have all led away from socialism and back, by more or less circuitous routes, into the capitalist swamp.

The “parliamentary road to socialism” is only the most obvious example of such a dead-end street. Marx himself welcomed factory legislation and extensions of the parliamentary franchise, because it was clear that, in the circumstances of his time, these measures did indeed enhance the freedom of the working class. However, it is already 90 years since Rosa Luxemburg concluded that “we live at a time in which no more advantage can be gained in parliament for the proletariat”; it is also more than 20 years since the British Labour politician Michael Foot announced that “With a majority of 50 seats we shall see socialism”, which demonstrates how powerful the reformist delusion can still be. Socialists should certainly not boycott parliaments, since they still provide forums for propaganda (as in the example of Tommy Sheridan, cited above), as well as limited scope for limited improvements in the everyday lives of working people. However, whatever influence socialists may exert inside parliaments is the result, not the cause, of socialist activity outside them. In any case, parliaments are increasingly irrelevant to the making of opinions and decisions about the governance of capitalism, and are being inexorably reduced to a rubberstamping role in relation to decisions taken elsewhere, notably through direct negotiation between elected governments and selected interest groups, and through the policy-making activities of the officials who constitute the “permanent government” in each state.

It is not surprising, then, that much of the left has turned to putting its energies into trade unions and single-issue groups, in the hope that they can figure among the interests that capitalist states feel constrained to consult. This alternative route into the corridors of power is fraught with its own problems. First, campaigns about specific issues, individuals, companies or even countries are all too easily incorporated into the liberal reformist process of rooting out the worst excesses of capitalism in order to uphold what is said to be best about capitalism. Disinvesting from Barclays Bank because of its involvement with the apartheid regime in South Africa may have contributed a little to that regime’s disappearance, but it also inadvertently allowed other banks to appear morally superior to Barclays. Similarly, it would be disastrous if the recent campaign against Nestlé over its pressurising of the Ethiopian government (discussed above) led anyone to suppose either that Nestlé is unusually ruthless in seeking compensation or that it is unusually humane in donating the compensation it received to famine relief: what really matters is that it is an unusually sophisticated player of the public relations game. By the same token, attacking Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates or any other of the more prominent among the world’s richest and most powerful individuals can all too easily play into the hands of their business rivals, as witness Richard Branson’s cunning exploitation of British Airways’ “dirty tricks” against his Virgin group to make himself and his companies seem worthy of sympathy and support. As for uncritically defending, say, Cuba under Castro, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas or even, as some “Marxists” still do, North Korea under Kim Jong-il, we have already pointed out how damaging that particular form of “intervention” can be. The enemy is the capitalist system as a whole, not any one individual, corporation or state within it.

Second, being drawn into campaigns aimed at influencing the holders of power and wealth carries the risk of being drawn into the network of compromises, unequal negotiations and manipulation that has already trapped most “socialist” parties and groups. Collaborating with reformist trade unions, charities and other voluntary groups on specific short-term goals must not be permitted to weaken the independence of revolutionary socialists, or to divert them from their orientation to the working class in favour of seeking influence in ministries or boardrooms. We must also take care to avoid collaborating with groups that are by definition antisocialist – notably nationalists and religious fundamentalists – since the only possible effect of doing so is either to give them a “progressive” image that they do not deserve, or to subordinate socialist goals to theirs, or, most often, both at once.

Accordingly, the left would be more effective, and more consistent, if it refrained from wholesale denunciations of individuals, corporations or states, which simply give comfort to their rivals, and focused instead on three sets of activities:

Revolutionaries in a nonrevolutionary situation

With the parliamentary road closed, and the campaigning route all too wide open, the customary response of revolutionary socialists has been to try, once again, to build a revolutionary party that can lead the workers to victory. This too has turned out to be a dead end. On the one hand, Trotsky’s conclusion still stands: “Events have proved that without a party capable of directing the proletarian revolution, the revolution itself is rendered impossible.” On the other hand, that is by no means the same as concluding that such a party can be built now or any time soon – in the absence of a revolutionary situation; without any support from even a significant section of the working class, let alone a majority; and merely through the willpower of various Marxist theoreticians, battling it out to be the next Lenin or Trotsky while the membership waits for instructions. “Democratic centralism” becomes nothing but centralism when free debate and decision-making are stifled. Simply declaring that the latest party leader and his acolytes speak for “the vanguard of the working class” is a recipe for rapid degeneration and eventual collapse in circumstances where the working class is not following the leader. The attitude typified by Trotsky’s assertion, in 1924, that “In the last instance the party is always right ... One can be right only with the party and through the party”, did not do him any good when the party he belonged to expelled him three years later, and it has no more to offer to the project of human liberation now than it did then. We must accept, however reluctantly, that Victor Serge, who was also expelled, first from the party and then from the Soviet Union itself, was more perceptive than Trotsky when he observed that “Beyond the borders of Russia, the Bolshevik idea of the party has failed completely” – and it did not exactly succeed, in any worthwhile sense, inside those borders.

So we are left with the situation neatly if ironically summarised by Ian Birchall in his account of the French upheavals of May and June 1968:

Why was there no revolutionary party? Because the class struggle had not reached a high enough level to produce one. Why had the class struggle not reached a high enough level? Because there was no revolutionary party.

The only way out of this impasse – between a leadership that has hardly any followers, and a class that does not even know that the leadership exists – is to give up all illusions about building the party before its time has come, and to attend instead to devising new ways of bringing revolutionary socialists together. The Socialist Alliance in Britain shows precisely how not to do this. It could have been foreseen that putting several rival revolutionary parties under one umbrella, in order to fight parliamentary elections and campaign on major issues, would bring out the worst in all of them, and the Alliance’s record of relentless infighting, hopelessly incompetent campaigning, and disgusting entanglements with religious fanatics has served only to confirm that, wherever the next Lenin or Trotsky is currently working, it is not in the Alliance’s ranks. The sad fact is that in Britain, as in every other contemporary capitalist state, the revolutionary sects have become obstacles to progress towards socialism, not vehicles for it, and the derisory numbers of votes won by the Alliance wherever it has put up candidates shows, not only that the mass media are biased against it (as if that was a surprise), but that the working class is not attracted to the prospect of being led, even into Parliament, by people like these. The Age of Waiting is also an era of waiting for revolutionary socialists to grow up.

Nevertheless, even the Socialist Alliance, and its counterparts among the various “rainbow coalitions” of militants in North America and western Europe, are not (or not yet?) so infantile as to embrace the use of violence in the name of socialism. Building a revolutionary party when there is no realistic prospect of a revolution can just about be defended as, if nothing else, a way of keeping revolutionary socialist ideas alive and transmitting them to a new generation, albeit the process too often resembles the game of “Chinese whispers”. Mounting a campaign of “revolutionary” violence when there is no widespread support for it, and no realistic hope of success against the security apparatus of the capitalist state, cannot be defended at all. Every Marxist knows the answer to C.L.R. James’s rhetorical question: “When did property ever listen to reason except when cowed by violence?” Every Marxist also knows that the violence visited upon the victims of capitalism every day far outweighs the violence committed by any of the ultraleft paramilitary groups that have attracted so much media attention over the past 30 years or so. Indeed, it is at least arguable that ultraleft violence is itself a byproduct of capitalist violence – Eric Hobsbawm, for example, has asserted, somewhat glibly, that “Total war and Cold War have brainwashed us into accepting barbarity” – although attempting to understand the origins of violence does not in any way alter the responsibility of those who commit it, both for clarifying their own intentions and for accepting the consequences. Every Marxist should also know, however, that any transitory benefits from ultraleft violence are far outweighed by the long-term damage that it does to the socialist cause – and, more often than not, to the bodies and lives of working-class people who are caught in the crossfire, but lack the protection that states and corporations routinely provide to the wealthy and powerful.

In 1867, after a bomb planted by a Fenian group at Clerkenwell Prison in London killed several passers-by, Marx wrote to Engels as follows:

The last exploit of the Fenians in Clerkenwell was a very stupid thing. The London masses who have shown great sympathy for Ireland will be made wild by it and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletarians to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of the Fenian emissaries.

What applied all those years ago to a movement that probably had the support of a large minority of Irish people applies a fortiori to groups that do not have, do not deserve, and cannot hope to gain the support of the working class for which they seek to substitute themselves.

Revolutionary socialists, constrained to remain nonviolent so long as the majority of the working class remains nonviolent, are thus left with no option but to go on seeking to convey their ideas to others by all the means at their disposal, while matching means to ends by safeguarding freedom, equality and democracy within their own organisations, and displaying an appropriate degree of respect for workers who, quite rightly, do not take kindly to being lectured or preached at. We cannot do better than quote the words of William Morris, who, far from being merely an interior decorator fit for entombment in museums, was one of the most creative of the first generation of Marxist thinkers:

Though there are a great many [workers] who believe it possible to compel their masters ... to behave better to them ... all but a very few are not prepared to do without masters. They do not believe in their own capacity to undertake the management of affairs, and to be responsible for their life in this world. When they are so prepared, then socialism will be realised; but nothing can push it on a day in advance of that time.

Conclusion: our flag stays red

As C.L.R. James conceded long ago, with a certain degree of understatement, “The great masses of workers do not seem to think in a way that corresponds to these ideas”, that is, to socialist ideas of freedom and equality, democratic control, common ownership and universalism. Yet, as James went on to point out, even though “the number of those who thought of socialist revolution in Russia in February 1917 was pitifully few”, the only socialist revolution ever to achieve even temporary success occurred just nine months later. It follows that for socialists there is a need to believe in the workers, as James put it, “more than they believe in themselves”, and, at the same time, to recognise that “The great majority of mankind decide on revolution only after they have tried every other possible way out of their difficulties.” In this sense what we have called the Age of Waiting is a time of waiting, not for something, or just anything, to turn up out of the blue, but specifically for the working class to move towards revolutionary socialism. Until the working class does so, socialists must go on trying to be the ones who, in all spheres of human activity, and unlike any other group of thinkers and doers, consistently favour whatever increases the power, knowledge and happiness of the greatest number – which in practice, and increasingly, means the working class – and oppose whatever obstructs their access to power, knowledge and happiness: principally, but not exclusively, those individuals, groups and structures that monopolise these desirable objects.

This statement is being written a few months before the centenary of the birth of George Orwell, always problematic as any kind of socialist hero (as he would have admitted himself), but still provocative as a source of ideas and insights, as in this passage written in 1947:

Our activities as socialists only have meaning if we assume that socialism can be established, but if we stop to consider what probably will happen, then we must admit, I think, that the chances are against us .... The actual outlook, so far as I can calculate the probabilities, is very dark, and any serious thought should start out from that fact.

How about that for a dose of cold water? Yet water is not necessarily poisonous, and this kind of statement should not be taken, as it so often has been by renegades down the decades, to justify deserting the cause. If socialism is a worthwhile goal, it remains worth fighting for even if it does ultimately fail – and since we cannot know whether it will fail or not, better to keep on fighting than to surrender to the forces ranged against it, and thus make its defeat just that little bit easier.

It is also worth adding that, in upholding and extending the principles of socialism, socialists need certain indispensable habits of thought and imagination. One might be called openmindedness, although it is all too easy to have a mind so open that everything that enters it falls out the other side. Thus, following Orwell again, it is a matter of simple common sense to recall that just because the Daily Telegraph (or the Washington Post, or the Globe and Mail) says that something is true, that does not necessarily mean that it is untrue. Any socialist who rejects the bourgeoisie’s own sources of information as entirely tainted, in favour of relying exclusively on such allegedly socialist collections of gossip, paranoia and bile as, say, CounterPunch or Red Pepper, is condemning her/himself to ignorance and isolation. Any socialist who is incapable of embracing the whole wide universe of the media, picking and choosing what is valuable, and discarding what is worthless, is likely also to be incapable of seeing through the lies of the self-appointed leaders and teachers, religious, political or merely mystical, who are constantly on the lookout for followers and dupes. The only way to prevent either corruption by the culture industry or degradation by self-proclaimed “alternatives” to it is to take the whole lot of them with very large pinches of salt, and to be sceptical but never cynical.

Second, the best mainstay for a genuinely openminded but always critical attitude to information and ideas is what Serge called “the sense of history” – that is, “the consciousness of participation in the collective destiny, the constant development of humanity”, which “involves knowledge, tradition, choice and, hence, conviction”, and “commands a duty – for, from the moment that we know, have understood and discriminated among the possible directions, we must live (act) according to this sudden awareness”. As Serge goes on to say, “The difficulty is that the sense of history comes into conflict with ruling interests; for the same reason, history remains a terribly inexact science.” Nevertheless, outside the natural sciences, history, critically understood on a materialist basis, is all we have even to attempt to learn from (with bits and pieces of the tellingly misnamed “social sciences” as its ancillaries), in order to put the current situation, which can seem overwhelmingly complex, in its context. In this Age of Waiting patience can indeed be a virtue, but only so long as it is informed by an intelligent and imaginative openness to the opportunities, surprises and dangers that history constantly throws at human beings – in particular, to what C.L.R. James called “the always unsuspected power of the mass movement”. As Raymond Williams said:

Once you have decided for revolutionary socialism, not because it is quicker or more exciting, but because no other way is possible, then you can even experience defeat, temporary defeat ... without any loss of commitment.

Finally, we should add that socialists have at least as much need as anyone else for a sense of proportion, which includes a sense of humour. William Morris made a pertinent observation about group psychology, on the basis of his experience in three successive Marxist groups:

Men [sic] absorbed in a movement are apt to surround themselves with a kind of artificial atmosphere that distorts the proportions of things outside, and prevents them from seeing what is really going on.

Talk of world revolution and the transformation of social relations can become vertiginous, and it is little wonder that socialism has attracted its fair share of obsessives and megalomaniacs over the years – but so too has every other ideology. While we can no longer bask in the dream of inevitability that helped to sustain our predecessors in their struggles, we can try to share with them a capacity for enthusiasm and commitment, balancing an equally necessary capacity for doubt and self-criticism. Thus it seems appropriate to end with the following quotation from Simone de Beauvoir:

If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths: they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy. The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not moved by the laughter of a child at play. If we do not love life on our own account and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way.