Capitalism has had a tremendous crash, the most profound crisis of capitalism for three quarters of a century, whose full social and political reverberations we can’t know yet. Capitalism is massively discredited.
For the first time in decades, socialists have an open field to argue for a rational world, a working-class-run socialist society. To argue for a workers’ government. To point out that blind worship of the market is demonstrably crazy.
But the left is not ready for the great crisis of capitalism that is now upon us. The working class and the left are not politically in a fit state to face the assaults on us that are going to take place — the crisis, the possible breakdown of bourgeois democracy, the possible rise of fascism. Nor are we in a position to take advantage of the great favourable opportunities that are opening up to those who have clear class-struggle policies against capitalism.
When Stalinism collapsed, our then paper Socialist Organiser said the collapse was the best thing for socialism for decades. We weren’t wrong then. But for most people, Stalinist Russia defined socialism. Its collapse, combined with the expansion of capitalism, seemed to amount to a complete repudiation by history of socialism. Capitalism had triumphed. Capital continued a huge expansion and restructuring, on the basis of the defeats of the working class in the 1980s.
Instead of bounding forward as we might have done, the real socialist movement continued to shrink.
The pattern here is very important to grasp. Back in the late 1930s, the West Indian Trotskyist CLR James said to Trotsky: “Comrade Trotsky, you were right on a whole range of questions. You were right to warn against the catastrophe that faced communism in China in the nineteen-twenties, you were right about Germany, you’ve been right about France, you are right about Spain now. How is it that you can be right on all these things, and yet the influence of the ‘Trotskyist’ movement hasn’t grown?” (It had actually shrunk, by the late thirties.)Trotsky said to James in reply: “We are the party of the working class. As the Communist Manifesto proclaimed, we have no interest apart from the working class. When that class is defeated, that has a tremendous effect on our prospects. Having been “proved right” does not matter so much as the fact and the consequences of defeat. Workers in the mass don’t respond on the level of general ideas. They respond to facts.
“The great fact is the crushing of the workers in China, in Germany, in Spain... We warned against those defeats. We understood the dangers in advance. If our policies had been followed we would have been able to avert the catastrophe. We weren’t able to do that, so we suffered with the class because of the catastrophe”.
That’s true in general. A Trotskyist movement that isn’t a sect, that doesn’t seal itself off behind closed doors, that doesn’t march to its own rhythm irrespective of the working class — that rational Trotskyist movement suffers with the class, rising or falling with it.
In politics, Marxists start, not by looking at our own small numbers, but at what is objectively necessary. We pose as “tasks” to ourselves and to the working class the things that are objectively necessary. Instead of being paralysed by our own small size and disarray of the left around us, we have to find the will and determination and the historical perspective to rise to the challenges we face.
We are not ready? We must make ourselves ready!We have to rise above paralysis to promote clear revolutionary socialist politics, vigorously and ardently, in the working class.
Throughout the world, the working class has been much augmented in the long period of capitalist expansion, greatly increased in numbers. There are in our world far more workers than there were in the world of the great mid-20th century crisis. There is good reason to believe that that working class will be able to fight back, hold its own, and advance.
The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has in many ways become reduced to a propaganda role, whereas in the past, for example, we were able to organise the broad left in the Labour Party (in the 1980s).
Like the broad labour movement, AWL is not ready. In our case for organisational rather than political reasons. AWL is now a loose grouping, too loose.
We think we have virtues. We try to be honest and rational in politics. We work at avoiding demagogy and kitsch-left sloganising. We don’t organise ourselves as a closed sect. Our people have the right to think for themselves and to express their thoughts publicly. That is in sharp contrast to most of the “Leninist” left.
As rational Marxists, we try to root ourselves in the actuality of history. We draw conclusions from the catastrophic failures of the left in the past. We stand in, and propagate, a great tradition.
That is a great asset. Yet it needs to be said clearly and starkly: as things stand, AWL is not yet “fit for purpose”. We need to raise ourselves to meet the demands of the new situation — raise ourselves higher than we can do easily without straining or stress.
Vountarism? Yes. Voluntarism, the will to do things, plays a very important part in politics. As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci put it: “Reality is the result of the application of wills to the society of things... to put aside every voluntary effort and calculate only the intervention of other wills as an objective element in the general game is to mutilate reality itself. Only those who strongly want to realise it identify the necessary elements for the realisation of their will.”We need to generate the collective will to perform our tasks, to argue the case for a workers' government, to convince people who are sceptical (and there are many such). We need to carry and spread the conviction that the working class can take power.
In the new period AWL has to increase the things we do and try to do, to improve our press and make it more of a tool in our intervention.
AWL consists of people who have faced up to the degeneracy of the Trotskyist movement and of the demagogic “kitsch-left” , We have had to dig into the past to try to understand that. We are a propaganda group. We explain things, pose a long overall perspective.
But AWL is also a fighting propaganda group. That's what's we've always been, except that the “fighting” element has decreased as the class struggle has decreased. Now the tempo is changing, and we have to change tempo too.
Long, long ago, in 1967, we end the preamble for the constitution of the Irish Workers' Group in words AWL now repeats: “We call on you to join us. We want not the spare evenings of dilettantes, but the dedicated, active lives of revolutionaries, people who make the struggle for socialism the core content and organising principes of their lives”.
The big political convulsions will probably follow the economic convulsions with some delay, maybe considerable delay. But we cannot afford to wait until the big political convulsions arrive. The outcome of those convulsions depends on the forces "pre-ordered over a long period" already active when they arrive. Efforts improvised in the midst of the convulsions will be overshadowed by the forces that are already on the scene. In particular, young people radicalised in political convulsions will not wait to examine the less visible and assertive groups: they will rally to those with visible active initiative.
We've had nearly two decades of relatively steady capitalist growth on the back of entrenched working-class defeats. Despite our efforts to countervail, that has slowed our metabolism. We require a "voluntarist" effort to turn that round in advance of the big political convulsions.
1. The driving force in that effort can only be our awareness of the era-defining implications of the economic convulsions - awareness that, by virtue of our Marxist self-education, we have in advance of the general populace.
2. We need leading committees capable of deciding promptly on initiatives and pushing them through. We need branches that are visible, take initiative, and have regular well-organised activity through which to draw new contacts in and organise "induction" of new members. As well as having members individually active in workplaces and branches as trade unionists, we need union fractions which have a presence in the union on broader political issues as well. Especially where AWL activists are on their own in a city or a trade-union environment, they need visible broader political activity as well as their individual trade-union work. And we need a systematic drive to find and engage with new contacts. In short, we need to turn ourselves into an effective instrument for educating ourselves, educating those around us, and turning the educated into educators.
3. First: to develop discussion and awareness on the crisis throughout the AWL.
4. Second: to strengthen the office.
5. Third: in each branch, to develop a branch organiser and a branch committee willing and able to drive regular proper branch meetings and visible public activity. Every branch meeting should start with a political report. Branches need to run regular educational discussions, but also have enough “business” in their meetings that as a norm every member comes to the meeting with some report to give from activity and comes away with new activities to tackle. They need to run regular AWL public activity (stalls, sales, etc.) which makes us visible to new potential contacts, to be regularly involved in public political campaigns and forums (whether Trades Council, anti-cuts campaigns, anti-fascist activity, No Sweat efforts...), and to run regular public or open meetings.
6. Fourth: each branch to have fund-raising as a weekly concern.
7. Fifth: to discuss with every individual about their activity and how they will respond to the crisis. In the nature of big convulsions, the coming period will spur new people into activity, revive some people who had slowed down in the long period of lull - and "shake off" some others who find themselves unable to respond. The coming period is no time for "nominal" or "paper" activists. We should do a re-registration of membership: if some people are unable to respond, unable to mobilise themselves sufficiently, then, after due discussion we should re-categorise them as sympathisers - while constantly working to draw them back into the activity which we are organising with new contacts, sympathisers, and members.
8. In political convulsions, the outcome always depends on "the force, permanently organised and pre-ordered over a long period, which can be advanced when... the situation is favourable (and it is favourable only to the extent to which such a force exists and is full of fighting ardour)... The essential task is that of paying systematic and patient attention to forming and developing this force, rendering it ever more homogeneous, compact, conscious of itself..." (Gramsci).