Workers' Liberty

Creche available. Email awl[++at++]workersliberty.org, or phone 020 7207 3997, to book places. Read Scruton; Silone; and Browder debates.

“We affirm, and we reaffirm it in the teeth of that hideousness which is known as Stalinism, that socialism for us, yesterday, today, tomorrow, still means the end of class rule; the end of class privilege; the freeing of the people from all chains and all coercion, the fullest realisation of democracy, the emancipation of women and of children; the end of slave camps, police terror, frame-ups, butchery of the socialists, abundance for all, and therefore liberty for all.”
Max Shachtman, Is Russia a socialist community?

A) Has socialism a future?

Reading:
Roger Scruton, Has socialism a future?

Aim:
To rebut the dominant ideas used by bourgeois writers against socialism.

Scruton raises a number of objections to socialism:
i) There is no such thing as class
ii) Stalinism was socialism
iii) Human nature means people are not equal
iv) Elites are necessary
v) Central planning won’t work
vi) Democracy is opposed to socialism
vii) Private property is the key to freedom
vii) Revolution is simply destructive

Questions:

1) Take three of these objections (the school organiser will "distribute" the objections among the workshop groups). Discuss each one and write down a short bullet-points answer?

2) Have you come across a different argument used against socialism? If so, write it down briefly and discuss a response?

3) How could the AWL do better at arguing against the “ruling ideas of the epoch”?

B) Socialism vs Stalinism

Reading:

Shachtman, Is Russia a socialist community?

Aim:

To distinguish socialism from Stalinism.

Questions:

1) Shachtman highlights the criterion against which Stalinism should be judged by Marxists:
i) The level of industrial development
ii) Labour productivity
iii) Big technological advances
iv) The “improved economic welfare of the workers” (exploitation)
v) Equality (especially between men and women)
vi) Democratic rights (to form unions, strike, freedom of the press etc)

How did the USSR measure up against these criteria between 1928 and 1991? Which is most important?

2) How does Cuba/Venezuela/Vietnam [the school organiser will assign each workshop group a country to consider] measure up against these criteria today?

4) Shachtman argues that paying no official more than the average worker will prevent the growth of bureaucracy under socialism. What other measures would a workers government put in place?

C) The Third Camp

Reading:

Draper, The Third Camp

Aim:

To understand what the Third Camp is and is not.

Questions:

An interview with Ignazio Silone (1939)
Q. In the event of a war between Italy and France, which country would you favour?
A. Tunisia.
Q. What do you mean?
A. The world is now divided into two great fronts: one composed of the conservatives, that is, of the democracies or other partisans of collective security; the other composed of the revisionists or fascists. Neither of these two fronts is capable of assuring peace or of solving the economic and political problems now confronting the world.
Real peace depends today on the rapidity with which a third front is created, on the rapidity with which revolutionary workers all over the world retain their political autonomy and resume the struggle to overthrow capitalism.
This third front did once actually exist in the form of a revolutionary Russia and of militant workers’ parties elsewhere, but at present it exists only in potentiality.

1) In 1956 Silone repudiated his politics of 1939, arguing against the “sophism of equidistance” which treated Western capitalism and Stalinist totalitarianism as “objectively identical”. The West, though bad, was better than the East. They weren't the same. So socialists should back the West. How do we answer this objection?

2) Can you describe another case where you think socialists should take a "Third Camp" stance even though the "first" and "second" camps are not equally bad? And a case where we should take sides with a "lesser evil" even though it is pretty evil?