Arthur Bough

I have posted a response to Martin's argument on Iraq on my blog here - Three D's and Four X's [1]

Response from Tom

Arthur - I'll come back on the Israel thread if I have time, but it's developing into a very broad debate. While I'm surprised at your odd implication that workers can attain management of the means of production 'piece by piece' 'in the here and now', you're right to write as follows:

I’m sure the Minority would be glad to have a slogan which spelled it out clearly such as “Build an International Workers Movement to Kick Imperialism Out of Iraq Now” were it not that such a slogan hardly slips off the tongue. The test would be would the Majority accept such a clearly formulated slogan?

Sure, but I'd be interested to see the minority explicitly indicate their acceptance of such a slogan. For example, more pithily: 'For a workers' movement to smash the occupation'. This deals with the need for a sense of immediacy (i.e. a clear political rejection of the occupation, operative now) by linking it to the question of agency. It also makes explicit the connection between 'Iraqi workers' and 'troops out' that Dan's formulation fails to - though it mentions both components - i.e. that it must be the former that should achieve the latter. David's suggestion - 'Solidarity with Iraqi workers! Troops out now!' - has a similar problem; the temporal question is delinked in the syntax from the matter of agency. I'm inclined to suspect, like Arthur, that this is a lack of clarity rather than a political matter, but I'd be interested to see it clarified.

At the heart of the debate are differing conceptions of the material-dialectic role of slogans or, more broadly, political positions in general. I think that there are two rough perspectives on this in play, both mistaken. This is made more complicated by the inconsistent language of the active participants in the debate from the majority side - such that it's not even clear whether Martin 'surgical strike' Thomas is determined to adopt the perspective of working class action. (Telling that while he was happy to defend Mark Osborne's article on Japan 1946-52, he did not choose to defend his own phrases.) On the other hand, as I show below, at other times he does seem to take that perspective.

Martin, after Lenin, wants a slogan that offers "a positive answer to the question of how Social-Democracy will solve the problem when it assumes power." (Though hopefully not, in line with his earlier comments, 'for full spectrum dominance - proletarian style'.) It is therefore a slogan that operates as a programme for action of a hegemonic power. The question asked is not 'what will we do', it is 'what would we do', and it cannot be both, because plainly those are different things - different in terms of the temporal distance and historical circumstance they imply, and the agential base they assume. (On the other hand, later on, Thomas approvingly quotes an earlier phrase "The demand is not made to advise a government eager to comply. It is made to advise the people involved in the struggle". Well, which is it? Truly, the flow changes like a chameleon.)

The minority's perspective is also skewed. In their case, because they misconstrue the significance of slogans - or more generally, to political demands - against state power, however nuanced. Dan writes: "We believe our slogans and our propaganda must attempt to provide the labour movement with the tools necessary to change that balance of forces." (i.e. exactly the same thing Martin says he believes in the last quotation in the previous paragraph.) The unwritten next premise is that the sort of slogan the workers' movement needs is a slogan about the sort of thing the state should do. Why is this? In trying to bridge the chasm between workers' needs and state activity, the minority falls into another version of the Lenin perspective, quoted above, but at one stage further removed. (i.e. the majority's position may be described thus: "we won't adopt a state perspective, but we will, in adopting a workers' movement perspective, raise a slogan that has them, i.e. the movement, adopting a state perspective".)

So it is arguably true that the "now" in "troops out now" implies more claims than simply that the occupation has no pro-working class content (and that some of those extra claims are wrong); and might, for some people, bring more focus on the matter of timing than of agency. And it is arguably true that "troops out" will be construed by a great many people to mean, effectively, "troops out now". And it is furthermore true that agitational slogans need to be raised as part of constituting a movement; just as true that some of the majority's proclamations have them 'seeing like a state'. What is not necessarily true is that the formulations suggested by David B and Dan acknowledge the full weight of those truths. Firstly, what should be important for socialists is to emphasise working class agency. This is why we should not say - at least not when we are being precise - simply 'end the occupation' (any of the other several 'camps' in play might achieve that). We want to smash it and we want it smashed by a particular group of people, acting in particular ways. Slogans, demands, need to reflect this. A perspective of state agency, whether direct or removed one or two degrees, damages this class perspective, it blinds it. Secondly, because of this, and because of the weakness of the anti-war movement, an agitational language is needed which problematises the movement itself; and hence the need to reconstitute it actively, and on the particular political basis indicated by the previous point.

Finally, in all honesty, we should probably acknowledge that this is an academic debate in many ways. It might clarify things politically, in terms of raising the question of state vs. class perspective. But the sources of movement strength and decline are now almost certainly beyond the salvation of small groups of politically aware people - certainly in the UK, and I imagine in Iraq as well. Just as long as we don't forget that.