Posts Tagged ‘Trotskyism’
Julian Assange Joins SWP.
Julian Assange: Soon to be Selling Socialist Worker.
In a shock move Julian Assange has joined the British Socialist Workers Party.
In a Press Statement from the Ecuadorian embassy Julian said,
“The SWP’s stalwart anti-imperialism is second to none.
The IS tradition and the Permanent Arms Economy, not to mention Cliff’s views on State Capitalism, are right on line.
They way they replied to some unpleasant women in Glasgow on Saturday deeply impressed me.
But it is the fashion with which they have dealt with accusations of rape against Comrade Delta which has really struck home.
My team of lawyers is at present negotiating with the Swedish authorities to arrange that the allegations against me be settled by the SWP Disputes Committee.”
The SWP announced, “Julian is right to fight US imperialism, and right to bring assault cases to our Disputes Committee. “
Obsolete Leninism: the Left-Wing Alternative.
Obsolete Leninism: the Left-Wing Alternative.
“Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individuals, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amendable to disgrace of punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor good-will.”
William Hazlitt. On Corporate Bodies.
The SWP Special Conference is over. An initial assessment states, it “was extremely disappointing, even for those of us who didn’t expect much by way of surprises. The opposition was weak and scant; the level of debate very low and the CC was hardly pressed at all on any single count.” “The problem is not the numbers, comrades, but the party’s deeply entrenched culture of obedience to a (less and less) “charismatic” leadership.” The Corporate body could do not wrong…..
Others are more dramatic,
And so it is that the rigged conference has taken place, the leadership has secured its victory (though it may well be a Pyrrhic victory) and the opposition has been crushed. Rage and despair will be the natural reactions; however, it’s a good time to pause a moment and take stock.
The leadership is morally bankrupt
Let’s be blunt. The most pressing issue facing the SWP is simply this – is it a safe place? On the face of things, no; on the face of things, the majority of delegates today don’t think that is at all important.
The Party’s underlying difficulties remain. The SWP, culture or not, is the largest left organisation to the left of the Labour Party, and is important within many protest campaigns, and, to a lesser degree, in some trade unions. But it has never come close to offering the ‘leadership’ of the working class and oppressed to which it aspires. In over three decades it has not grown beyond a few thousand members. In recent years it has shrunk.
Weeks of debate on the left have shown that the SWP’s politics and organisational culture are widely challenged. Its inability to deal appropriately with allegations of sexual abuse in its own ranks, its bullying, its ad hoc changes in line, its ‘bureaucratic centralist’ methods to deal with dissent, have been talked over in pages of Web and printed criticism. Many have raised fundamental issues, about the SWP’s Leninism (with, or without, inverted commas), feminism, and the role of political parties in the socialist movement.
Now we are at point where some conclusions can be offered about the causes of this crisis. They indicate, as some have argued, that the Leninist political model that the SWP follows, has serious flaws. The view that an injection of democracy – “true” democratic centralism – can help is, this short piece will argue, not an answer to much deeper difficulties. These come from the impasse of the ‘revolutionary party’ project inspired by Lenin and Trotsky in present day Europe.
- Since the 1980s the conditions in which European left politics operate have been fundamentally changing. The State, the instrument of reform, or something to be ‘overthrown’, has been transformed. The EU fulfils an important regulatory role, and the ‘markets’ shape fiscal demands. In every country the pattern of ‘market states’, in which governments do not just privatise utilities, but hive off a large part of their main functions to private companies, has spread. Political institutions continue to express the electorate’s views by representatives, but a large part of public policy is shaped elsewhere, by financial pressure, and by the organised lobbies of the new state funded bourgeoisie. In these conditions those who promote more markets, more funds for these companies, and more privileges for those with money promote their plans as modernising reforms. Against them left-wing genuine reformers and the revolutionaries who once wished to ‘smash’ the state are often united around the defence of the social democratic institutions of equal public services and welfare provision.
- It is often sweepingly asserted that ‘market societies’, and what was once called ‘post-modernist’ culture, mean that the populations of the West have become politically fragmented, ‘atomised’, and resistant to the ‘grand narratives’ of the left. People turn in on their private lives, their families and friends, and lack the ‘ancient republican’ virtue of dedication to public things. Similar claims go back to the 1920s, if not back to the birth of bourgeoisie society. This may be partly rhetoric. But what has clearly altered nevertheless is the decline in mass participation in political and civil society organisations.
- The disengagement from social and community involvement is harder to explain than a few words about individualism or the spin off from ‘commodification’. In the US one of the longest periods of civic engagement began with the pre-Great War Progressive Age, and even peaked during the 1950s Boom years. (Bowling Alone Robert D. Putnam. 2000) By the 1990s this had weakened, people no longer volunteered, and smaller and smaller numbers of people came along to take up positions in ageing organisations. He looked to change though a new generation of “social capitalists”. We could consider David Cameron’s – failed – experiment in the Big Society to be inspired by this call. Parts of Labour’s One Nation strategy, underpinned by initiatives such as Food Banks for the worthy needy backed by Policy Review chief, Jon Cruddas, are also part of this approach.
- Putnam partly charged television with helping to draw people away from civic responsibility. ‘Social capital’ is now being accumulated in radically different ways, some of which may help re-engage people in more radical directions. Technology has been recast through the Web, (which I am using at this very movement) offering ways of connecting. This can give the impression that “it’s all kicking off” via the Net. This can sometimes be proved through real events (the Arab Spring); sometimes it bolsters less substantial movements, like Occupy! Every single day political initiatives are mobilised, meetings held, demonstrations planned, through this means, and people’s views are broadcast and challenged directly across wide geographical areas.
- How do political parties connect to these developments? It would appear that there are reasons to think they may be obstacles. In Political Parties (1911) Robert Michels claimed that there was an “iron law of oligarchy’. Left parties were groups of a mixture of classes (despite their claims to represent the workers) with “special interests” that tended to form “stable and irremovable” leaders, the “domination of the elected over the electors” He based his judgement on the view that as organisations that aimed to capture state power they would adopt the structures of the public administration, of this.
- More recently John Holloway has claimed that Leninist parties reproduce an oligarchy of knowledge, between the “knowers” in the party and the masses. The Party is equipped with Marxist science and the skills to lead. The rest, even if initially ‘self-organised’ are bidden to follow. This “monological political practice” goes against “non-fetishised, self-determining social relations.” (Change the World Without Taking Power. 2nd Edition. 2005)
- There is nothing inevitable about political organisations operating in this way. The modern dominant paradigm for parties is not state administrative bureaucracy nor an all-seeing Knower but the company ‘flexible’ organigramme. The Parliamentary parties themselves are not US style Caucuses, or, miniature Republics of Barons on the model of the French 4th Republic. They are Leadership-run, subject to rare rebellion. The arms-length (proto-hived off) Civil Service Departments limit the Leader’s power, if only in framing the realm of the “possible”. There are some external democratic constraints. There are figures who would like to base their mass membership operations on a small policy team, alert to political marketing, and a loose, affiliated membership that would operate as their sales-teams and, partly, as collectors of public opinion. In the Labour Party a union and constituency influence persists which defies this trend. It has yet to show much success.
- The SWP has not been able to offer an alternative. The Party’s Central Committee acts both as a semi-permanent oligarchy, and the Knower, determined to tell people what to do. In reality its ambitions over the years have become more modest. Public use of the Marxist phrase the ‘united front’ (now for party inner consumption only) gave way to the American expression ‘coalition’ (an alliance of pressure groups) for its campaigns. Its bizarre hostility to the Internet – evident in the Coherence where dissident Blogs were their major problem – is another indication of an inability to think boldly on the present day political terrain.
- An alternative to the SWP, and other Leninist models on the left, would begin from democratic organisation in the era of the Internet. It would not be a Leadership run body, but a democratic socialist project that drew in the left around a bottom-upward synthesis of people’s experiences and ideas about socialism. Lenin is said to have talked of “practical workers” as the key to a socialist party, but today we can all become practical-theoretical workers. The minimum programme needed to transform the Market States of the world into socialist societies should dominate our political framework. In the absence of a ‘party’ we have our practice.
- A project for a democratic ‘citizens’ revolution’, backed a variety of parties, and small groups. exists. In France. It is called the Front de gauche (left Front). It is not democratic centralist, but a bloc of independent bodies and individuals. We could begin by learning from this not from 1917.
Georges Sorel in La Décomposition du Marxism (1908) described the first ‘Crisis of Marxism’. Before the Great War he talked of the absence of a revolutionary proletariat and the growth of “constructive trade unionism”, that is mass reformism, and the support for “evolutionary socialism” this gave. Against this ‘reformist’ trend Sorel developed his theory of ‘myths’, heroic projections of the future that could not be falsified (L’illusion du poltiique. Shlomo Sand. 1984). Sorel fought against le politique, that is the routine administrative work of government, the compromises of state, for la politique a fundamental change in the world. How this was to come about, was left to action, not plans.
The most famous of Sorel’s myths, the General Strike, still has supporters on the United Kingdom left. Another is the Revolutionary Party. The SWP ISOP opposition declares, “The role of a revolutionary party is to fight for leadership in the class struggle. Democratic centralism is based primarily on conviction rather than discipline. The shared political perspectives required to underpin united political action are not something to be imposed, but are achieved through engagement in debate and argument and informed by experience.”
This is a fundamental flaw in a great deal in the debate about the SWP and Leninism. Lenin’s Party and is ‘Democratic centralism’, figures as a ‘myth’ not a historical reality. Or rather when it is talked about historically it is confined to one ‘good’ period – whose date wavers. Rather than discussing what happened when that party, apparently a model, took power, does not get discussed in the tale of the Good Bolshevik Party. It considered largely a separate issue.
Cut way the fist two sentences comrades. We need shared experience. We need united political action. We have had ample opportunity to verify the mobilising myth of Democratic Centralisation.
It has failed.
*****
This is also worth looking at: Is this the Turning Point for the British Far left?
“Feminism is a dirty word’. What would Marx and Engels think today? – Camilla Power.
Feminism is a Dirty Word’. What Would Marx and Engels Think Today?
This is am extremely important guest post by comrade Camilla Power that we have been requested (amongst other leftists) to present (original here).
“The article takes ‘dinosaur marxists’ to task for refusing to treat rape as a political issue. The author looks at events in the SWP, RMT and across the British left in the light of what Marx and Engels – so often invoked by these ‘dinosaurs’ – wrote about sex and its connection with class.”
‘Bursting like a bombshell over this article as first drafted have been accusations of domestic violence by one RMT comrade against another. *The accused man is a prominent class-fighting activist. The woman victim, who took the case to the police, accuses the RMT of failing to support her, and a specific Union officer of ‘victim-blaming’ by proposing that she ‘beat herself up’. On International Women’s Day 2013, she published photographs of her bruised face, while, ironically, the RMT published a model Domestic Violence Policy for the workplace.
This case confronts every revolutionary activist and will be a stern test for the RMT union as to how it implements its own policy. Unlike the SWP, the RMT have some apparatus of women’s conferences, women’s sections and advisory committees. Will they prove equal to the task of resisting the patriarchal institutional bias of disbelieving the woman who dares to come forward? Their document pays all the right lip service. Will the RMT demonstrate zero tolerance of this behaviour? No person can be a class fighter and commit such violent outrages. The very actions are politically divisive and undermine revolutionary class struggle itself.
Feminism has long been a dirty word in the SWP. In his brave account, former Socialist Worker journalist Tom Walker describes how the male-dominated Central Committee closed ranks with Comrade Delta when a young female comrade was pressured into dropping a rape allegation. When asked what is at the centre of the crisis, what’s the hidden agenda, Walker responds: ‘There isn’t one….It really is about rape, the crisis in the SWP. Specifically the appalling treatment of a young woman who made an allegation of rape against the party’s de facto leader’.(1)
The Guardian online (Mar 9) reports a second alleged rape and cover-up by the SWP, detailing systemic abuse of young women members.(2) The victim claims she was told the alleged rapist was going to be suspended and encouraged to read up on women’s liberation. ‘They said, if you go around calling him a rapist, you’ll be in trouble. If you tell anyone, you’ll be in trouble … They didn’t elaborate. They’re not the kind of people to get on the wrong side of.’
In a March 3 podcast(3) offered by a leading male comrade of the Communist Party of Great Britain, feminism is again identified as the problem. Jack Conrad laments that the issue splitting the SWP appears so ‘trivial’ (listen from around 20 mins in) and the arguments apolitical. He hastily corrects himself that of course ‘rape is not a trivial issue’, but in his view it’s still not a political issue, so hardly worth splitting over.
It would seem that feminism is a dangerous contagion threatening to infect all these Marxist sects with their privileged knowledge of the sacred scripts. Feminists of all hues, bourgeois and revolutionary, will insist that violence and sexual abuse in all circumstances be brought to account. It is the State’s dream to have key organisers of the RMT or even the SWP brought to answer sex charges before a bourgeois court. But the whole of the socialist left currently has no apparatus that remotely provides any means of independent investigation into such serious crimes against the person. It is a matter of revolutionary culture and consciousness to begin to develop alternative systems of justice. Have we got any chance of doing so if rape itself is not considered by marxists a political issue?
As a direct-action, anarcho-marxist, feminist and Darwinian anthropologist – which makes me a pretty weird leftie – I am writing on International Women’s Day, 96th anniversary of the start of Russia’s February revolution. And I’m holding my head in my hands. Do these marxist sectlets seriously imagine they are going to improve their 85 to 15 per cent male/female gender ratio by putting out this message like a broken record? ‘Women comrades, forget you’re female, join your struggle with the workers… Yes, you may be doubly oppressed as mothers and houseworkers – but just put your faith in the revolution, dears, and patriarchy will come out in the wash!’
Isn’t it time these comrades of both sexes stuck their heads out of their caves, scented the air and smelt the decreptitude of late capitalist patriarchy? Haven’t they noticed all these catholic priests, cardinals, BBC apologists for paedophile rings, Lib Dem chief executives, RMT and SWP key organisers accused of violence and sex crimes – exposed because victims increasingly will not shut up to maintain alpha-male offenders in positions to which they have become accustomed? The victims have been women, men and children. But in all these cases, ancient Neolithic hierarchies of gender are being deeply challenged, and not just in Europe but across the world.
But even beyond the headline-grabbing collapse in respect for patriarchy, isn’t it time that marxists apprehended the real crisis in concrete conditions underlying the banker bailout austerity programme? This is undeniably a gendered crisis of working women, who can’t manage any more to pay the rent, find childcare and go to work; while mothers are being pressed onto the job market, under threat of loss of benefits, and deportation wholesale with children to poorer accommodation hundreds of miles from their homes and schools. The crisis in housing itself compels more women to put up with abusive partners as they simply have nowhere else to go.
Even The Guardian’s Seumas Milne writes of the ‘historic shift of women moving left of men’(4) as women pay disproportionately for the banker’s crisis. The lower-paid, part-time and casual workforce of precarious labour is female-dominated; as these working women suffer most from the cuts, so of course do the men and children in their lives. In terms of public sector job losses, women in their fifties are identified as major victims – a generation who are highly experienced and also politicised.
Meanwhile, the BBC’s Paul Mason, in his famous 20 Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off, specifically identified factors of youth and gender as contributory: the typical activist is the graduate with no future, linked up on social media. Women, he says, are the backbone of these new movements: the archetypal protest leader, organizer, facilitator and spokesperson is ‘an educated young woman’.
The more that women come out onto the streets to occupy and organise, the more there will be specifically female experience of protest, including both intense cooperation and revolutionary solidarity, but also, harassment and rape threat, as has been seen to such horrendous effect in Tahrir Square at the cutting edge of the Egyptian revolution. This expresses all the contradictions of a struggle involving islamic patriarchs camped alongside conscious revolutionaries.
Rape not political? Try telling that to a woman in Tahrir Square who faces shaming harassment and threat of rape by thugs bribed by the latest patriarchal hierarchy installed into government. The vanguard of the revolution includes precisely those men who realise the political importance of protecting and helping women comrades to be out there on the street. In other words, the vanguard includes men who understand rape for the political issue it is, and prioritise women’s presence as vital for the conciousness of the revolution.
Rape not political? Try telling Marx. The various Marxist sects, anxious to guard their sacred doctrines for the day they lead the revolution, may not consider women, reproduction and sexuality as important, political topics. But is that true of Marx and Engels originally? Let us take a look at what they say on this.
In 1844 Marx wrote: ‘The immediate, natural and necessary relation of human being to human being is found in the relation of man to woman.’ He continues:
‘From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man has become, and has understood himself as, a species-being, a human being. …It also shows how far man’s needs have become human needs, and consequently how far this other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, and to what extent he is in his individual existence at the same time a social being.’(5)
‘Species-life’(6) in its natural form was sexual life, with all that implied in terms of reciprocity, exchange and productiveness. In its distinctively human cultural form, species-life was economically-productive life, i.e. labour – again, with all that implied in terms of exchange and reciprocity. From the beginning, human production was a dual process of species-life: ‘The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship.’(7) Yet, the natural relationship – sex, – was itself social, and the social relationship, labour, was a relationship with nature.
In Marx and Engels’ understanding, the original human situation involved no conflict between the two forms of species-life – between sex and labour, family and industry, woman and man. Both production and procreation were carried on through the clan (the gens, governed by the principle of ‘mother-right’, with females of one clan ‘married’ as a whole group to males of another), and were under the reciprocal and communal control of women and men. Men’s and women’s lives consisted of acts of exchange between individuals as consciously social beings, sexual exchange being as widely socialised as possible and integral to the system of labour exchange:
‘Exchange, both of human activity within production itself and also of human products with each other, is equivalent to species-activity and species-enjoyment whose real, conscious and true being is social activity and social enjoyment. Since human nature is the true communal nature of man, men create and produce their communal nature by their natural action, they produce their social being which is no abstract, universal power over against single individuals, but the nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own enjoyment, his own.’(8)
The motive of exchange was not private gain but the pleasure of giving, reciprocity, since, as in sexual relations, one’s partner’s enjoyment was equally one’s own: ‘In so far as man is human and thus in so far as his feelings and so on are human, the affirmation of the object by another person is equally his own enjoyment.’(9)
Women’s loss of their original equality, clearly associated by Marx and Engels with the rise of agriculture, occurred when, instead of the earlier relations of sexual and economic reciprocity, there arose ‘Property: the nucleus, the first form, of which lies in the family’ (my italics). A man as husband was now able to privatise and exploit a woman’s sexuality, her reproductive power, and her and her children’s economic labour power. Species-life has now been subordinated to its very opposite – the lust for purely private gain. The family has become an institution demarcated from and counterposed to the wider community, society being separated into families ‘opposed to one another’. This is the foundation of the whole consequent structure of class society. Engels quotes Marx:
‘The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus) but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and the state.’(10)
Engels goes on to describe how, to make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore of the paternity of the children, ‘she is delivered over unconditionally into the power of the husband; if he kills her he is only exercising his rights.’ As private property, the wife has yielded control over her sexuality and the products of her sexuality, her children, merely to maintain her own existence. Species-life has become a ‘means of individual life’. Both wife and labourer perform compulsory forms of labour in which ‘life activity, productive life, now appears to man only as means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to maintain physical existence.’(11)
The contradiction is now complete: the very activity in which women and men go beyond themselves and express their human essence – producing for others rather than merely for themselves – has been subordinated to selfish, animal greed. Social production and reproduction, both forms of human species-life, now appear as separate, alien powers opposed to the individuals whose activities have created them. Marx writes of the worker under capital:
‘To say that man alienates himself is the same as to say that the society of this alienated man is a caricature of his real human nature, his true species-life, that therefore his activity appears to him as a suffering, his own creation appears as an alien power, his wealth as poverty, the natural tie that binds him to other men appears as an unnatural tie and the separation from other men as his true being; his life appears as a sacrifice of life, the realization of his essence as a loss of the reality of his life, his production as a production of his own nothingness, his power over the object as the power of the object over him, and he himself, the master of his creation, appears as its slave.’(12)
Replace the word ‘man’ in the above passage with ‘woman’ and it might exactly describe the situation of a woman in a patriarchal family who has lost conscious control over her sexuality, and has been alienated from the products of her sexuality. In her introduction to Engels,(13) marxist-feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock writes: ‘In some ways it is the ultimate alienation in our society that the ability to give birth has been transformed into a liability. The reason is not simply that, since women bear children, they are more limited in their movements and activities… this was not a handicap even under the limited technology of hunter-gathering life; it certainly has no relevance today.’ Marx and Engels clearly rooted their model of the alienation of power inherent in class oppression in the ‘ultimate alienation’ of women from their own reproductive powers.
In these early writings, Marx saw a systematic parallel between, on the one hand, woman (opposed to man) as the materially productive sex, and on the other, labour (opposed to capital) as the materially productive class. The class relation duplicated on a social level the sexual relation: it included that relation and stemmed from it. The system of sexual dominance under which women were treated as mere instruments of production ended up treating men as mere instruments of production, too. Everything followed from and took its model from that initial sexual domination.
Capitalist economic principles themselves amount to prostitution, insists Marx. No capitalist could object ‘if I earn money by the sale of my body, by prostituting it to another person’s lust’. Prostitution is only the logical extrapolation of the system: ‘Even the species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, becomes an object of commerce.’(14) Or again: ‘Prostitution is only a specific expression of the universal prostitution of the worker.’(15)
The evidence is that Marx and Engels took sexuality very seriously indeed. Marx and Engels’ dialectical vision of the proletarian future was of a return on a higher level to the ancient freedoms of the gentes or clan society, as depicted and argued by anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan in ‘Ancient Society’. And that meant, centrally, women’s sexual emancipation through restoration of the old equalities. If the root relationship of oppression was the private oppression of female by male, this private oppressive relation was the first and foremost target for revolutionary political attack. The single greatest failure of the marxist tradition has been its inability to develop Marx and Engels’ analysis of sex and class. Yet development of Marx and Engels’ basic thesis on sex could only be undertaken in an era informed by feminist consciousness and practice.
Marxist feminists most often have aligned themselves with a tradition which effectively ignored Marx’s own discussion of sex, treating Engels’ ‘Origin of the Family’ as embarrassing and indefensible. They tow the line that the class struggle was primary, while the ‘politics of the personal’ was an irrelevant side-issue – and we observe them doing so yet again as those loyal to the SWP leadership pontificate. Women had only to wait for the victory of the workers’ revolution, when their personal difficulties and suffering of sexual oppression would ‘wither away’ as surely as the alienating powers of the capitalist system were dissolved. Women could fight – but only as workers, that is brought into men’s world; women who remained housewives or childcarers – women who maintained and reproduced labour under Capital – had little contribution to make. The struggle for women’s rights encompassed their equality in the workplace rather than their position in the home.
Where marxists assert that the working class becomes revolutionary through collective control of its own labour power, feminists have fallen short of asserting that women become a revolutionary force to the extent they exert collective control over their own sexuality. The notion of collectivity – sisterhood – as fundamental to women’s power has certainly been central to feminist thought, as has the demand for women’s right to control our own bodies. But an explicit linkage of the two ideas, into a concept of women as a collective body, a class exerting class-control over their collective power expressed in sexuality, has not yet emerged. But it is present in Marx and Engels’ concepts of earliest human society.
Today, Darwinian anthropology is validating the essentials of Marx, Engels and Morgan’s position on the communistic, collective and matrilocal nature of our human origins, and the idea that we are product of a Human Revolution.(16) The revolution which made us human was mobilised through a crisis in childcare; to ensure adequate support for their large-brained and very costly offspring, women (with their sons and brothers) used collective ‘strike action’ to organise men’s labour. In this account, the first word was women’s NO! Today, late patriarchal capitalism rapidly arrives at a point of such crisis of childcare and alienation from our humanity. We need once more a great, collective NO!, creative refusal to accept the destruction of health, welfare, education, childcare and housing. That NO! will be spoken loudest by women of the working class.
So, yes the class struggle is primary, but the class itself is gendered. Too often we still hear marxist dinosaurs discussing the ‘woman question’. That is to assume we’re all men. As an anthropologist I have done fieldwork with the Hadza people, a hunting-gathering group in Tanzania. Their collective noun for all the people is female and plural, including within it all women, children – and men. Their assumption is people are all women! It expresses how central women are to camp life, as producers and reproducers, but it includes everybody. For the Hadza, society is unimaginable without women at the core. And women depend entirely on their collectivity, drawing on that to resist any male attempt to exploit or coerce them.
We need to understand our class struggle in that way. How are we to collectivise and socialise modes of production and reproduction? Our humanity was realised through cooperative childcare and labour. Only so can it be restored. From this viewpoint, it is not a matter of which is the more political issue: the abusive behaviour of men in the movement or questions of revolutionary organisation. We can have no revolutionary consciousness without organising as women and men against any such abuses of power.
As Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight argues at the end of Blood Relations:
‘We have been here – at this point on the spiral – before. The revolution’s outcome is not simply in ‘the future’ conceived as something abstracted from the past. As we fight to become free, it is as if we were becoming human for the first time in our lives. But in this sense, because it concerns becoming human, the birth process we have got to win – our survival as a species depends on it – has in the deepest sense been won already. None of us would be here if it had not been. To understand this may be to understand, and thereby make ourselves the instruments of, the real strength of our cause and the inevitability of our emancipation as women, as workers and as a species. The working class is the first materially productive class in the history of the class society to have acquired the power of the strike. It is the first such class to have acquired the power to say ‘no’. When it understands the identity between this ‘no’ and the ‘no’ which women have been trying to say for the past several thousand years – a fusion of forces will take place to generate a power which no force on earth will be able to stop.’(17)
And what the left must take on board is that the first rule, without which there can be no human culture, is the rule against rape.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Camilla Power is a member of the Radical Anthropology Group. @radicalanthro
Notes
1. http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=7550
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/09/socialist-workers-party-rape-kangaroo-court?INTCMP=SRCH
3. http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/podcasts/podcast-swp-conference-stitch-up
It should be noted that the Weekly Worker has done a great job in hosting Tom Walker’s article on why he left the SWP, as well as numerous articles on Women in human evolution, the Human revolution and Women and revolution. These comrades have provided space for open debate.
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/05/women-left-of-men-historic-shift
5. Marx, K. 1963 [1844] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in T B Bottomore (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Writings. (London: Watts), p.154.
6. Plenty of younger postmodern feminists will be abrasive about this heterosexism dated 1844. For the purpose of this discussion on the analogies of sex and class in Marx, I am using his language, as quoted. In this day and age of Judith Butler’s gender performativity, sex as just culture anyway and aspirations to ‘abolish’ gender, of course such terminology needs reworking. But from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective on human culture, it is hard to avoid some degree of heterosexism in ‘species-life’. An old marxist’s reponse to bourgeois postmodern ideology is to say, well if women’s sections are good enough for the RMT (and evidently very much required in that context) how do young feminists think they will work for the abolition of gender on their terms without being able to organise separately as women?
7. Marx, K and F Engels 1947 [1846] The German Ideology. Parts I & III. (New York: International Publishers), p.18.
8. Marx K 1971 [1844] The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in D. McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Texts. (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.193-194.
9. ibid. p.178.
10. Engels, F. 1972 [1884] The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. (London: Lawrence & Wishart), p.121-122.
11. Marx, K. 1963 [1844] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in T B Bottomore (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Writings. (London: Watts, p.127“0.
12. Marx K 1971 [1844] The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in D McLellan (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Texts. (Oxford: Blackwell), p.194.
13. Engels, F. 1972 [1884] The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. (London: Lawrence & Wishart), p.40.
14. Marx, K. 1963 [1844] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in T B Bottomore (ed.) Karl Marx: Early Writings. (London: Watts), p.37.
15. ibid., p. 156n.
16. See S. B. Hrdy, 2009 Mothers and others. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), on cooperative childcare in human evolution; see C. Knight 1991 Blood Relations, Menstruation and the origins of culture. (Yale UP) for the Human Revolution. Also see J. O’Connell, K Hawkes and N G Blurton-Jones 1999 Grandmothering and the evolution of Homo erectus. Journal of Human Evolution 36: 461-485, for the Grandmother hypothesis; F. Marlowe 2004, Marital residence among foragers. Current Anthropology 45: 277-284 on evolution of matrilocal tendencies; and Beckerman, S. and P. Valentine, 2002. Cultures of Multiple Fathers. Introduction. (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press), for modern updates on ‘group marriage’.
17. Knight, C D 1991 Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), pp. 533-534.
The SWP, Trotskyism, and the ‘Conception of the Epoch’.
The SWP, Trotskyism, and the ‘Conception of the Epoch’.
When the “fox, however, encounters the first animal which exceeds it in size, for example, a wolf, it quickly concludes that quantity passes into quality, and turns to flee. Clearly, the legs of a fox are equipped with Hegelian tendencies, even if not fully conscious ones.”
Leon Trotsky. Open letter to Comrade Burnham. 1940.
In its Special Conference SWP Bulletin ‘Richard’ from Coventry cites Trotsky’s argument with the US Socialist Workers Party “petty bourgeois opposition” (1939 – 1940). Trotsky railed against the “elements”, “divorced from the proletariat” who apparently “vegetate in an artificial and shut-in environment”. Their organisational programme is a “mad hunt for the fourth dimension of party democracy”(In Defence of Marxism. New Park Publications. 1971).
This perhaps represents an important strand that remains in present-day SWP thinking.
Before and during the Second World War there were, inside the American SWP those like James Burnham and Max Shachtman, who questioned the idea that any form of ‘socialism’ remained under Stalin’s rule. The leader of the new Fourth International defended the proletarian foundations, though not the counter-revolutionary bureaucracy, of the Soviet State. The splits around these issues are well-known, and a considerable literature is available on their views, above all on the way they looked at Stalinism, Western states, and democracy.
In this moment in the debate however, Trotsky was also concerned to protect the role of “dialectic materialism” in the Party. For him it was the key to understanding nature, human history and was the foundation of Marxist politics. In another famous quotation he stated, “Anyone acquainted with the history of the struggles of tendencies within workers’ parties knows that desertion to the camp of opportunism and even to the camp of bourgeois reaction began not infrequently with rejection of the dialectic.”
What the ‘dialectic’ was, as Trotsky’s attempt to inject it into a modern Fable of the Fox and the Wolf, indicates, was, and is, far from clear. Certainly SWP Central Committee theoretician Alex Callinicos has not always has much use for it. From his Althusser (1976) to his Trotsky (1990) Professor Callinicos has referred to the writings of Imre Lakatos and his conceptualisation of scientific “research programmes”.
A given fact is explained scientifically only if a new fact is explained with it”, Lakatos wrote. A research programme which predicts novel facts and at least some of whose predictions are corroborated is a “progressive problem-shift” in the history of the sciences. (Lakatos 1978) Orthodox Trotskyism, by contrast, represented a “degenerating problem-shift” since….it sought to rescue Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism from refutation by a series of defensive manoeuvres that lagged behind rather than anticipating the facts. (Trotsky 1990)
Explaining and predicting new facts is indeed the very opposite of Trotsky’s homely example of dialectic. It is true that ‘orthodox’ Trotskyists, like Gerry Healy, developed certain mastery. We hope that the SWP does not intend to smother debate with similar language. There is little risk. We are as aware as Callinicos that ‘dialectics’, in the sense of ‘Dia-Mat’ or even the ‘Hegelian Dialectics’ of ‘Critical Theory’ are as popular on the intellectual market place as the principles of Thomas Aquinas.
In Defence of Marxism does raise some issues. Callinicos has explained the inter- and post-war shift of the New York intellectual critics of Trotsky and the US SWP leadership without any reference to ‘dialectics’ Against Postmodernism (1989). For him this was largely the result of the “experience of defeat”. Stalinism itself, the failure of the American left to make headway, and the Cold War, left these people adrift, searching for theories to make sense of the world. The intellectuals soon “backslid”. They discovered that their lives could be made all the more meaningful – I continue – by accommodating to capitalism and getting good jobs as a result.
Is this a universal phenomenon? The Professor wrote, “Similar stories could be told about every period in which radicals have found themselves isolated since Restoration times.” (Page 171) So, “Postmodernism must be understood largely as a response largely as a response to failure of the great upturn of 1968 – 76 to fulfil the revolutionary hopes it raised.” (Ibid). Yet, he added, the 1980s “were marked by the rise of new labour movements based on proletariats created by recent industrialisation of Solidarnosc In Poland, the Workers’ Party in Brazil, the Congress of South African Trade unions, the new South Korean labour movement.” Thus, “the project of ‘radicalised Enlightenment’ first outlined by Marx, for whom the contradictions of modernity could be resolved only by socialist revolution, still awaits realisation.”(Ibid).
It might be suggested that what is being prepared here is not a ‘dialectical’ theory of the present day SWP opposition. It is simply a way of writing them off. They have an “artificial lifestyle”. Unlike those in the white-collar ‘factories’ where the class struggle continues they are subject to the pressures, of….what?
We might also ask, what kind of Trotskyism is the Majority wedded to that sustains their revolutionary vision? Are they immune to their social environment and the disappointments of the last years, or decades?
Trotksyism and the Conception of the Epoch.
To answer this we should turn backwards, though only by a few years.
In 2010 Alex Callinicos wrote the Bonfire of Illusions. In a post the Tendance introduced this,
Was Autumn 2008 marked by “events of a genuinely epochal character”? The Bonfire of Illusions begins by announcing that it saw the “end of the post-Cold War Era.” 2008’s harvest months saw a war between Russia and Georgia. For Alex Callinicos, King’s College Professor of European Studies, and the Socialist Workers Party’s Maître à penser, it was defining moment. Moscow’s victory underlined its assertiveness, American global weakness was revealed. Read the rest of this entry »
SWP Crisis: Sectarianship, A User’s Guide.
Sectarianship, A User’s Guide.
“In one of the unpublished notebooks of Rilke there is an unpublished phrase….‘If you’re not one up (Biztleisch) you’re one down (Roteleisch).’”
Stephen Potter. Lifemanship.
As the SWP heads towards the March 10th Special Conference, feelings are running high. Public reticence by the opposition In Defence of Our Party faction (IDOP) has not stemmed the flood of allegations of sexual abuse, or the intensity of inner-SWP conflict. Unhelpful contributions, without the best interests of the SWP at heart, appear on the Internet, exploiting this newfangled device to spread their poison.
Yet there were happier times on the left. An epoch, now dimly remembered, when Alex Callinicos could play croquet with Tony Cliff, on grandfather Lord Acton’s lawn. House-guest Gerry Healy would hit in the face anybody who got in the way of the ball. Other luminaries of the left, from Peter Taaffe, Tariq Ali, to Sean Matgamma, would often pop over for a pleasant weekend.
It is no coincidence that the classic guide to the British Workers’ movement, ‘As soon as this Pub closes’ appeared during this period. It instructed a generation. It may need updating (no reference to the Weekly Worker, Permanent Revolution, the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, to start with) but it remains a monument.
Is all this to be lost amongst more sordid revelations and fisticuffs?
There are signs that something of the spirit of those glory years has not gone away. Comrade Dave Dudley remains active. Splintered Sunrise/Soviet Goon Boy has proved himself (there is no higher praise) a worthy successor to ‘As soon as’. By describing the SWP Treasurer as a master of Father Crilly economics, Andy Newman has tapped into this rich vein
As the SWP falls into the sear yellow leaf comrades must defend this, the British ‘sectarian tradition’.
(Below: Extracts from ‘Sectarianship.’ Tendance Coatesy. 2013)
Sectarianship Basics.
What is a Sectarian? “You, you and (especially) you”. That is the answer. But there is another reply. It is to be found in the practice and unceasing struggle of accredited Sectarians, licensed to be so named. We are a large group, and a growing one, formed at our Ipswich ‘Centre’ (123 full-timers). Our graduates have been active in the SWP battles and indeed elsewhere.
Stephen Potter is, as we say, “our look me up to”. He defined Sectarianship (which he called ‘Lifemanship’ pre- our epistemological break) as “how to make the member of another faction feel that something has gone wrong.”
Some think the purpose of factional fights is win a sect’s ‘line’.
But the true Sectarian, with or without rudeness, is out for another goal. Such a trained individual is able to make the other person – or ‘class enemy’ – feel ‘one-down’ (Roteleisch, also a term used by the Frankfurt School and the Platypus Society). That somehow She or He may be prey to serious political errors.
Our other master is James P. Cannon. Some might have heard tales that the founder of the American Socialist Workers Party (not to be confused with the above SWP) was the type who spent his life telling people how he’d got one over on his enemy of the moment. That, and the fact that after his death his party has ended up as a New York Real Estate company with 30 members, could lead to the conclusion that he could not be trusted in telling a child how to tie its shoe laces correctly.
We disagree. Cannon was highly skilled in Sectarianship. He remarked in the History of American Trotskyism (1944) that, “when it is a question of fighting for some political idea, Trotskyists can stay awake longer and speak longer and more frequently than people of any other political type.”
How true.
Cannon knew a sectarian when he saw one, often in the most surprising places. In 1930 he waged a “bitter fight” against admitting somebody to the New York Branch on the justifiable grounds that we wore a corduroy suit, had long hair and sported a “trick moustache”. That the man later became an Oehlerite proves Cannon’s worth.
The Trotskyist leader fought such “weaklings”, “traitorous gangs” “labour skates” for so long that he developed an unerring talent. Talking of later in the 1930s Cannon described his one-time allies in the US Socialist Party as follows, “They were inexperienced and untested. They were ignorant, untalented, petty-minded, weak, cowardly and vain. And they had other faults too.”
Cannon’s skills were put to good use in the 1950s. He linked up with Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert in that decade’s struggle against Pabloite liquidationism and its “spineless lackeys” engaged on “cadre-wrecking” expeditions on his home turf. The SWP leader left his imprint on a golden moment in the history of Sectarianship and of International Trotskyism.
The current (UK) SWP leadership has much to learn from Cannon who also said, “Party membership implies the obligation of 100% loyalty to the organisation, the rejection of all agents of other, hostile groups in its ranks, and intolerance of divided loyalties in general.” (The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. 1943) If only IDOP would listen and confine itself to sectarian – and cromulent - opuscules against Christopher Hitchens!
Sectarianship Praxis.
One can but hope to emulate the masters.
This seems a daunting task.
But it is not so!
Let us take a simple example.
Somebody who has signed the SWP ‘loyalty pledge’ is holding forth. She or He has got going on the numbers of Socialist Workers sold by the branch (normally exaggerated by a factor of three), and that the local workers were gagging for a General Strike.
Here we recommend Stephen Potter’s Canterbury Block.
Quietly add, “Absolutely it’s very encouraging, but not in the (add name of workplace).”
Since the SWPer is unlikely to know more about this workplace than its name, she or he is caught off guard. The flow is interrupted. An element of unease is introduced. Others may be encouraged to speak up, and point out that the call for a General Strike has had fewer echoes amongst the masses than Posadist’s programme for interplanetary socialism.
“But not in..” is a useful tool ….
