'Federal republic' and workers' government

Submitted by martin on 17 November, 2002 - 4:23

Schema or banality?
The CPGB and the 'federal republic'

By Clive Bradley
"The combination of capital created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle... this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle."

Marx, 'The Poverty of Philosophy'

In a two-part article written in 1999, Jack Conrad of the CPGB spells out in some detail his party's approach to the question of democracy, the demand for a federal republic, and self-determination. It's a wide ranging article, and I don't intend to deal with all it covers. But the article addresses two questions which are at the core of the debate between the CPGB and the AWL, so there's some value in examining it. These are - explicitly - the 'constitutional question' (democracy, the monarchy, etc) and how it relates to 'economism', and - more or less implicitly - the 'minimum/maximum programme' versus the idea of transitional demands.
Conrad's article is a polemic against two recent correspondents in the Weekly Worker, and some of it is shaped by particular concerns in a specific debate. But a general, if somewhat confusing, picture emerges of the CPGB's central concerns.
'Economism' is a serious error, Conrad thinks, and the struggle against it should be a priority for communists. He means something quite specific by 'economism': the failure to prioritise the fight for a democratic republic of England, Scotland and Wales. Without such a struggle, he argues - or falsely counterposing to it a 'socialist republic' - communists are left only fighting for wage increases, trade union rights, and so on. He is not unconcerned with these issues, but sees them, or some of them, as part of the more general democratic question. He writes:

"There is a hereditary monarchy and an unelected second chamber. Neither Scotland nor Wales have the right to self-determination. There is no provision for independence in the constitution. In that sense Scotland and Wales are oppressed. Women still occupy a subordinate position. Youth suffer under a bureaucratic dictatorship in secondary schools and higher education. Migrant workers are denied basic citizenship rights. Trade unions are crushed by draconian restrictions. The European Union is run by an unaccountable coterie of corrupt bureaucrats. Millions remain unemployed and are subject to threat and intimidation from petty state officials. Pensioners are forced to retire and then eke out a miserable living.
Everywhere this writer looks, he sees how democracy could be enormously extended under capitalism."

I will not argue that Conrad's concern for democracy and the struggle to extend it is wrong, or by itself misplaced. The AWL - contrary to the CPGB's apparent belief - is also concerned about democracy (and would add to his list, for instance, the inner democracy of working class organisations). It's the framework in which Conrad sets it which is wrong. It leads him to put forward an inadequate programme for the class struggle, the highest demand of which is the democratic federal republic; and it is based on a profound - indeed, often, I think, bizarre - misunderstanding of what 'economism' is, historically or now.
Explaining the historical origins of economism, Conrad spends a good deal of the article (most of Part One) discussing the Russian Marxist movement. His account of it, and its implications, is deeply confused.
The debate between Lenin and the 'economists' (the proto-Mensheviks, in effect) was set in the wider debate about the nature of the Russian revolution. All Marxists agreed that the forthcoming revolution against the Tsar should be understood as 'bourgeois' (the Marxist movement was born in polemical struggle with the populists who thought it was 'socialist'). The economists/Mensheviks assumed that, as a result, the bourgeoisie would lead it, and establish a bourgeois parliament/republic. Lenin and Trotsky considered the Russian bourgeoisie too feeble and tied to Tsarism to play a revolutionary role, which would therefore fall to the mass movement, the workers and peasants. There is much in Conrad's article arguing that their two positions - Lenin's and Trotsky's - were more or less the same, both 'permanent revolution' (though he seems to say that on the details, Lenin was right), but I won't go into all that. The central point was this: the economist strategy was to leave 'politics' to the Liberals and focus on building trade unions, etc; Lenin argued that the workers' movement should take up, and lead, the democratic struggle itself. It was partly in this sense that Lenin meant that 'socialist consciousness' comes from 'outside' the trade union struggle: it was only by fighting for democracy that the working class acted as a revolutionary class.
Conrad blurs two things, a general and a specific argument. The more general issue is that the working class should not only fight for its narrow economic issues and that a workers' movement capable of making socialism must express the general interests of society. But there was a much more specific question of the nature of the Russian revolution, a debate about strategy in it. Indeed, Conrad doesn't only blur it for Russia between 1902 and 1917. Referring to the platform of the Communist Party in Germany in 1848, Conrad writes:

Its 'Demands', written jointly by Marx and Engels, were what we would nowadays designate a minimum programme.... we find that "whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic" . Not, it should be noted, a socialist republic... Evidently Marx and Engels considered the republican demand for the abolition of the fragmented monarchy system in Germany a matter of the utmost importance. True, the realisation of their minimum programme presented in the 'Demands' was not within itself to transcend the bounds of bourgeois civil society. Rather it was to prepare the working class for higher tasks. Something that would be ensured by making the revolution permanent. In the mean time, during the period of transition, what was to replace the monarchy? As I have shown, not necessarily the socialist republic. The exact class content of the state is left open-ended. But its form is unmistakable. It is the democratic republic based on the 'sovereignty of the German people'."

It is true that Marx and Engels were to analyse the role of the bourgeoisie in the 1848 revolutions, conclude that they had played a counter-revoutionary role, and call on that basis for a strategy of struggle against them. It is also true that in 1848 Marx and Engels fought hard and successfully for the small communist movement to participate in the democratic revolutions and try to lead them - against those who thought such struggles irrelevant (and in some cases those who opposed them because they thought communists had more in common with the monarchies). A big part of what defined 'Marxism' in its early years was precisely this struggle to get communists to engage in politics, meaning the struggle for democracy. As revolutionaries, Marx and Engels fought for the most radical possible outcome for the bourgeois revolutions of 1848.
But they understood they were bourgeois revolutions. Lenin (and Trotsky) understood that the Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Both Lenin and Trotsky knew that the configuration of forces meant that this would be a bourgeois revolution which the bourgeoisie would not lead, and indeed oppose, which raised complex strategic questions. (Others, like Luxemburg and Kautsky, addressed the same questions). But they were never in doubt they were dealing with a bourgeois revolution.
This was the concrete and specific aspect of the 'democratic question' in Russia. A revolution against the Tsar and the landlords was inevitable; in any revolution in Russia, it would be this which largely propelled it. For the working class, abstaining from this struggle would mean failing to participate in the revolution itself. Fundamentally this was a question of the relationship between the working class and the peasantry. As the overwhelming majority of the population, the peasantry was of major importance for the Russian revolution. Demands for democracy, and for the peasants' rights to land, would be central: if the working class was to lead the revolution, it would have to champion the struggle over these questions.
The same was true in 1848: this is what these revolutions were about, and the communist and working class movement either participated in, and tried to lead, the actual revolutionary movement, or it would be irrelevant. A socialism or communism which had nothing to say on these immediate, democratic questions, was - explicitly - concerned only with making propaganda for the future.
The question is whether this is immediately relevant in the way Conrad implies to contemporary Britain. To be clear: there is, of course, one sense in which the guiding idea that the working class should fight for democracy, and should fight for the interests of all the oppressed, is always and everywhere relevant. But how relevant is the concrete and specific aspect of the debate with the economists regarding Marxists' role in a bourgeois revolution?
Conrad plainly thinks it is relevant with little or no transposition. "Democratic questions," he writes, mocking one of his correspondents, Tom Delargy -

"are the "least important aspects", if not ghastly traps to be avoided. Crudely put, the role of revolutionaries in a country like the kingdom of Scotland [sic] is twofold. In the here and now support and give a socialist coloration to bread-and-butter issues like the minimum wage, cuts and trade union rights. That is practical politics, which in spite of the much vaunted 'transitional' claims of the Trotskyites, remain firmly within the narrow horizon of the monarchy system. Then in the indefinite future lies the socialist millennium. As there is no revolutionary situation in Britain, that resides in the realm of propaganda....

Up to the dawn of the new order the left should critically operate under the constitutional monarchy system and ignore siren calls for a democratic republic. The role of the left is to dream of the future and in the practical world support and encourage strikes and other such economic struggles. Comrade Delargy's anti-monarchism is therefore platonic, not revolutionary. ...

Lenin stress[ed] the necessity for working class hegemony in the struggle for a republic in Russia... for Lenin the "overthrow of the monarchy" was far from unimportant. It was a crucial strategic aim. Unless the workers took the lead against the tsarist system there could be no hope of a revolutionary seizure of power."

A direct parallel is being made here with pre-1917 Russia, not in some general sense, but in a very specific one. But for Lenin, the strategic aim of working class hegemony and democratic republic flowed from the bourgeois character of the revolution itself.
Denying that there is such a straight parallel is not to say that democratic questions are not important. I can't speak for Tom Delargy. But for ourselves, of course we are in favour of a republic, and all other things being equal, a federal one (I will not go into the other issue discussed in Conrad's article, self-determination for Scotland and Wales, here). But is it meaningful to describe contemporary Britain as 'the monarchy system'? It is, it goes without saying, a laughably archaic aspect of bourgeois democracy in Britain that we have a monarch. One can imagine a scenario in which the monarch is pivotal to a revolutionary crisis (refusing to sign bills by a radical government, disbanding Parliament); we know of the role of the monarch's representative in Australia in the 1970s. But the monarchy is not central to revolutionary strategy as it was to Russia in 1917, because the revolution we need to make in Britain is not a bourgeois one. Put another way: are the tasks of revolutionary socialists in Britain different in quality from in, say, France? Or, indeed, anywhere else in Europe where they have republics, which is most of it? Are our tasks more similar to Russia in 1917 than France today? Obviously - surely it does not need to be spelled out - our situation is more or less exactly the same as in France.
In other respects, too, there are big differences with Russia. Sometimes this is argued to suggest we have nothing to learn from the Bolsheviks, and I trust it is understood that this is not my argument. But we live in a country which, all right, has a constitutional monarchy, but also has one of the world's oldest bourgeois democracies. That democracy is certainly limited. But it poses questions for socialist strategy which are more interesting and profound than the mere declaration of a republic. What are the possible relationships between soviet-type institutions and a parliament? Should we be in favour of some sort of parliament-type structures under socialism? And so on. And of course, we don't have a peasantry.

It seems clear, then, that the CPGB do not merely make a 'big issue' out of the 'constitutional question': they see it as the defining question of questions. Not seeing it as they do is 'economism', which is just about the worst sin you can commit.

"The main subject at hand... is economism and how it disarms the working class programmatically. Bolshevism in particular formed itself through unremitting struggle, not only against the economists or strikists of the trade unionist variety but against the 'imperialist economists'. Beating the drum of the new socialist epoch they famously downplayed or dismissed the political fight for democracy under capitalism, in particular when it came to championing the right of nations to self-determination."

Or (referring to an economist approach to the national question):

"These are the politics which really fuel nationalism. Which lead millions who are questioning the established constitutional order to conclude that the Marxists have nothing to offer them. That is the unintended upshot of economism."

There are three possible explanatations that I can see for this stress on the struggle for a republic as if it was a direct parallel to 1848 or 1917. The first is that the CPGB simply don't understand the distinction between a bourgeois and a socialist revolution. I discount that. The second is that they think the revolution to be made in Britain is bourgeois. This is what Sean accused them of in his open letter, and what hugely upset them (it being, more or less, the 'Nairn-Anderson thesis' against which they have written stern polemics). From Conrad's odd survey of the Menshevik/Bolshevik/Trostky debate about strategy, it would seem this conclusion is partly warded off by a confused understanding of the revolution in Russia. But still, I'll return to this.
The third is that the struggle for democracy takes the place, for the CPGB, of the hated 'Trotskyite' idea of 'transitional demands'. Conrad writes, for example:

"To achieve freedom requires revolution. As we have said, not just any revolution though. The socialist revolution will have to be democratic, in the sense that it is an act of self-liberation by the majority and aims to take the democratic state to its limits as a semi-state that is already passing away. Democracy and socialism should not be counterposed. The two are inexorably linked. Without socialism democracy is always formal and stops short of ending exploitation. Without democracy socialism is only post-capitalism: it is not proletarian socialism. The task of the working class is therefore to champion democracy, not leave it to the bourgeoisie. Existing democratic forms must be utilised, new forms developed - eg, soviets or workers' councils - and given a definite social or class content. The purpose is to extend democracy and control from below both before and after the qualitative break represented by revolution...

The idea here seems to be that the whole issue of socialism can be presented as the extension of democracy into all spheres of life (or as their 'what we fight for' column puts it, 'democracy must be given a social content'). On one level, I have no problem with this. The problem, for the CPGB, I think, is that this entirely laudable aim constantly springs back to a more limited one. Thus:

"... democracy and the struggle to extend it trains the workers and brings to the fore the class contradiction between labour and capital. That is the crux of the matter. Far from being a diversion, demanding immediately that Scotland and Wales have the constitutionally enshrined right to self- determination within a federal republic is crucial. Without training the workers in the spirit of consistent democracy there is no struggle for revolution."

There are several problems with this. First there is this reduction of the issue of democracy, of 'giving it a social content' to the federal republic. The social content of democracy, presumably, includes democracy in the workplace and local communities, social equality, and so on - hardly summed up in the demand for a federal republic. Second, it is as if they are imprisoned by this weird parallel with pre-revolutionary Russia. They want to address more general issues and find a way to connect struggles in the here and now to the ultimate socialist objective. But the dogmatic insistence that the struggle against constitutional monarchy in Britain is of remotely the same order as bourgeois revolution against the Tsar constantly pulls them back.
Third, their polemics against the Nairn-Anderson thesis, and interpretation of Russia notwithstanding, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in some way the CPGB thinks the bourgeois revolution in Britain is incomplete. Is the struggle for democracy in bourgeois republics - France, the USA - less important than in Britain? Is there a real, qualitative significance to the preservation of the monarchy in Britain, or is it merely an archaic aspect to the constitutional forms of bourgeois democracy? Either the latter, in which case, while obviously we should favour its abolition, it does not represent a particular, dominant democratic task, or it does indeed mark Britain out as significantly distinct to France or the USA. What this would mean other than that the bourgeois revolution remains incomplete in Britain, I don't know.
I should add that I find the apparent notion here, that fighting for a 'constitutionally enshrined right to self- determination' for Scotland and Wales is what will define the 'struggle for revolution' idiosyncratic, to say the least. Fighting for an immediate referendum on independence, and granting the Welsh and Scottish people independence if they want it, though I wouldn't advocate it as a policy, at least would have a certain militant ring to it. 'Constitutionally enshrined right' - which implies just some law which says that if, at any point, they feel like having self-determination they're entitled to it - seems a bit lame.

Still, that there is an element to the stress on democracy which is attempting to find bridges between struggles now and in the future reveals another issue. The CPGB dismiss 'transitional demands', which they seem to think originated with the Transitional Programme in 1938. The idea of transitional demands is to link struggles today to bigger questions of the reordering of society, the establishment of working class organs of power, and so on. I won't go into the whole question here; I want to focus on one thing in particular, the question of government.
The CPGB want a struggle for politics, and against economism. They define politics as the fight for a federal republic. Politics, however, is not merely this: it is, above all, the struggle for state power. Economism, in Britain in 2002, consists (among other things) in the failure to link working class struggles, even propagandistically, to any overall political - that is, governmental - solutions. The working class faces a bourgeois government; as a result of recent changes in the Labour Party, even the limited avenues for working class political representation which existed for the twentieth century have been hugely curtailed. The working class is beginning to fight this government. Socialists need to set an objective for that fight which addresses the issue of government itself. 'Join the Socialist Alliance' is good advice to individual militants, but not an overall answer. Nor is 'vote SA'. 'A federal republic' doesn't address the immediate issues - wages, the state of the health service, trade union rights, local government funding, local democracy, the crisis in education... a whole range of economic, social, and political/democratic questions which affect working class people. 'Vote Labour' obviously doesn't deal with it.
We need to fight for a workers' government which will address these issues. The working class needs its representatives in politics, who will fight for its interests. To achieve that, we need to transform the labour movement. The Socialist Alliance needs to play a role in transforming the labour movement, not just (though that's important) regrouping the Left. The trade unions need to assert themselves against Blair; possibly - if it happened it would be a huge step - begin to move towards establishing a new 'Labour Party', a new mass party of the working class. Through these struggles, and the fight for a socialist programme, we can begin to make possible an overall, society-wide, governmental answer to Blairism (or the Tories, or whoever).
The CPGB ridicules this proposal. I think they reveal, here, the underlying assumptions of their revolutionary strategy - the focus on the federal republic. "... democracy and the struggle to extend it... brings to the fore the class contradiction between labour and capital,: Conrad writes. Certainly, it can do. But the class contradiction between labour and capital is not only expressed in the struggle for democracy! And the implicit suggestion, that it is only through democratic struggles that a genuinely political class struggle is manifested, flies in the face of the experience of the class struggle itself.
I will take just one example, though an important and compelling one. The best experience of working class revolutionary power in recent European history was France in 1968. (Portugal in the mid-'70s is of course another example). The mass strike was generated by a confrontation between students and the police. But the strike itself spread over a whole range of issues. Indeed, once it was underway, those issues were absurdly limited, and workers' in many workplaces refused to articulate their demands - since their aspirations had suddenly lifted beyond wages and conditions. Democracy (with a 'social content') was at the heart of all this. But it certainly could not be boxed into some framework of 'federal republic' or its French equivalent. It was a revolutionary struggle because, above all, it grew from the fundamental class struggle itself, the raw conflict between capital and labour. And this, surely, is how socialist revolution is possible. Of course we need political intervention, which is why we need a revolutionary party. But the precondition for the rationality of this project is that the class struggle, between capital and labour, in the workplaces, through trade unions, over economic issues as well as others, generates a logic which, fully drawn out, requires the conquest of political power by the working class. As Marx put it, 'the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.' Our job is to make that implicit logic conscious, to draw out the revolutionary logic of class struggle itself.
For Conrad, though, the struggle for democracy seems to be self-consciously less than a struggle for political power. "The minimum programme and the struggle for democracy cannot be skipped... To counterpose the socialist republic and socialism to self-determination and democracy in the here and now is to substitute the wish for the means..."
His opponents in the debate at hand, in 1999, evidently were in general terms opposed to the demand for self-determination (also for Kosova) in a Luxemburgist fashion, and apparently downgrading all democratic struggles as intrinsically less important than economic ones. This is not my argument at all. (To mention just one relevant example from our past: in the SWP's rank and file movements in the 1970s, we criticised their failure to include the struggle against racism in the platform of the movement). But Conrad nevertheless seems to making a bigger claim: fight for a 'minimum' democratic programme now; it is only through the struggle for a democratic republic that we can win socialism. Elsewhere he rejects the charge of 'stageism', so I accuse him of something else: a lifeless schema.
We have seen that he condemns 'Trotskyites' "who which in spite of the[ir] much vaunted 'transitional' claims... remain firmly within the narrow horizon of the monarchy system. Then in the indefinite future lies the socialist millennium." If this means anything at all, it is that no struggle which begins on economic terrain can have a revolutionary logic. Let's take a concrete example: that if the miners' strike of 1984-85 had received the solidarity action it should have; if a general strike (as both we and The Leninist advocated) had taken place - it could not have posed the question of working-class state power without first establishing a democratic republic. Of course, a revolution would abolish the monarchy and implement a host of democratic measures - but if that's all Conrad means it is the most extraordinary banality. He seems to mean more than that: that there can be no revolutionary logic to the class struggle that does not go through the 'struggle' for a federal republic. So, then: schema or banality?
Questions of democracy are not a sort of extra-curricular dogma which Marxists counterpose to the economic class struggle; they are complements to it. Socialist advance comes through a complex variety of struggles - sometimes democratic, sometimes economic. The task of Marxists is to try to unify them and offer a strategic way forward.

Clive Bradley
3/11/02

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