Book reviews – Chibber / Kelly / Isitt, Malhotra
Reformist mish-mash
Confronting Capitalism. How the World Works and How to Change It, By Vivek Chibber. Verso. 2022. 164pp.
A significant part of this short book presents a clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works, its relationship with the state and the struggle it inevitably generates between the two classes in society – capitalists and workers. It explains how and why the organisation of the capitalist system determines that, despite the vast resources and wealth it makes available, ‘a thin layer of the population’ is able to live in luxury while millions struggle to keep their heads above water and ‘experience life as a daily grind’. It goes on to explain how capitalists, regardless of an individual’s character or personal values, are compelled by the nature of the system they operate in to minimise costs and seek profit, wherever possible and whatever the consequences.
The book also takes down the widely held idea that governments are somehow neutral in the conflict between the vast majority who have to seek employment to survive and the tiny minority who offer and control that employment. It demonstrates how and why, far from mediating between workers and capitalists, the role of governments, whatever their stated ideology, is to govern on behalf of the capitalist class and in their collective profit-making interest. The state, in other words, has the role of a class organ, and governments of whatever colour are its administrators. As the author writes, ‘the state in capitalism is not and cannot be politically neutral’.
Following this lucid explanation of how capitalism works are recommendations on, as per the book’s title, ‘how to change it’. But from here on in it goes very much downhill. After telling us quite reasonably and correctly that ‘to truly enable full participation in the decisions that affect us all, it will be necessary to go beyond capitalism’, what it then gives us is a mish-mash of prescriptions not on how capitalism can be replaced by a non-capitalist, non-market system but about how it can be reformed so as to be more palatable. Alarm bells start to ring in particular when it refers in a relatively positive way to the Bolshevik revolution (‘the most successful model of the past hundred years’), to Nordic ‘social democracy’ and to ‘workers’ control in some Soviet satellites’ and informs us that ‘even while the Russian experience can’t serve as a model, there are aspects of it that still have a lot to offer’. The author clearly doesn’t see the Soviet Union as the state-capitalist society that it was and as a system that was as far away as can be imagined from the free-access, moneyless, stateless society that socialism has to be. And in fact, as a way forward, he advocates ‘the Leninist party model’, described as ‘a mass cadre-based party with a centralised leadership and internal coherence’, which must adopt ‘a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics’ and ‘a gradualist approach’. One of the names he gives to this approach is ‘non-reformist reforms’.
But is the author here doing what many other opponents of capitalists do and advocating ‘in the meantime’ stages to a real socialist society, one without the markets, buying and selling and class antagonisms which this book has outlined so admirably? Apparently not, since his ambition which he reveals to us on the last page of his book is to ‘start down the road of social democracy and then to market socialism’. The enormity of the contradiction in terms represented by the idea of ‘market socialism’ is nothing short of mind-boggling.
HKM
Enter the Twilight Zone
The Twilight of World Trotskyism, By John Kelly. Routledge. 2023.
This is effectively the updated sequel to Kelly’s book Contemporary Trotskyism, which was reviewed in the October 2018 Socialist Standard. It is a lot shorter than the first, more international in outlook, a little repetitive in places and surprisingly polemical.
Kelly argues that after a period of significant decline, the Trotskyist movement worldwide entered a period of relative stability in the early 21st century which has in more recent years been shattered by another period of organisational sclerosis, bloodletting and waning membership. There are now no less than 32 international organisations claiming to be the Fourth International or its successor, and in the UK alone there are currently 21 separate Trotskyist organisations that openly identify as being such.
One of the most significant recent splits concerns the so-called Socialist Party of England and Wales (SPEW) and its international body, the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI). This split has been over the growth of identity politics linked to their Irish affiliate and led to the formation in the UK of the 200-strong Socialist Alternative group. Kelly estimates there are now around 9,000 Trotskyists in total in the UK, the majority of them in the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and SPEW, the only parties with over a thousand members – though in SPEW’s case only just.
Kelly identifies the main centres of World Trotskyism as being the USA, Britain, France and Argentina (based on parties, memberships, publications, electoral statistics, etc). The organisational issues noticeable in Britain are equally obvious elsewhere – the USA has 23 separate Trotskyist groups, France 15 and Argentina 16. He attempts to look beyond the sect-like nature of these groups to some of the more fundamental underlying issues with Trotskyist politics that we have often identified ourselves in this magazine. These include the dishonest and incredible nature of ‘transitional demands’; Trotskyists’ rigid adherence to Leninist methods while bizarrely expecting a different outcome to those achieved by Leninists previously in Russia, China, etc; their obsessive catastrophising (a massive world crisis and revolution is always just around the corner, yet somehow never materialises); and their conceptions of how members may be recruited and supporters gained that bear little relationship to the underlying reality.
Over the years we ourselves have had some political sport pointing these things out, and have sparred with more Citizen Smith clones occupying a Trotskyist parallel universe than we care to remember. Though it’s also fair to say that at least some of the failures and limitations experienced by the Trotskyists (and others that seek to position themselves more generally as anti-capitalists) could also apply to us. Indeed, Kelly emerges as something of a reformist in this book and takes a sideswipe in our direction, saying ‘Tony Judt’s remark about the British propaganda sect, the SPGB, applies with equal force to [many of the Trotskyists]: “Impervious to change, and too small to be adversely affected by its own irrelevance, it will presumably survive indefinitely”’ (p.98). This didn’t make much sense the first time we read it and it makes little more sense here. Also, it is a bit odd as nowhere does he explain to readers what the SPGB is (we’re not even in the List of Abbreviations included) and because his main argument in this section appears to be that many of the Trotskyist groups are actually ageing out of activity and existence completely: ‘It appears that instead of being carried forward to revolutionary triumph by the laws of history, the forces of Orthodox Trotskyism are being carried into oblivion by the law of biology’ (p.99).
Kelly ends by saying ‘After more than 80 years of Trotskyist activity, with no revolutions, mass parties or election victories to its name… the Trotskyist movement has become a dead end for socialists’ (p.105). We can, of course, agree. But it’s a shame he doesn’t seem to hold the view that the same comment could be applied – equally though for partly different reasons – to the Labour and Social Democratic parties. Their repeated failure to successfully reform the market economy has driven the politically frustrated into the hands of Leninists of all varieties for decades – and we suspect Keir Starmer’s likely pending government will keep them in business for quite a while yet.
DAP
Canadian impossibilist
Class Warrior. The Selected Works of E. T. Kingsley, Edited and introduced by Benjamin Isitt and Ravi Malhotra. Canadian Committee on Labour History. 2022.
E. T. Kingsley (1856-1929) was a prominent member of the old Socialist Party of Canada that was founded in 1905 as a result of socialist parties and groups in the various Canadian Provinces merging. Based in British Columbia, he was the editor of its paper, the Western Clarion, one of its main organisers and a popular speaker. In their introduction, the authors describe him as the founder and leader of ‘the British Colombia school of socialism’ which adopted the ‘impossibilist perspective’ that ‘viewed capitalism as a system that could not be reformed’ and ‘stressed the impossibility of uplifting the working class through incremental reforms’. This led them to seek support only for ‘the abolition of the wages system’ and to avoid advocating ‘palliative measures’, a position the authors describe, not unfairly, as ‘one-plank Marxism’, the one plank being to win political power for the sole purpose of using it to establish the common ownership of the means of production.
They mention the SPGB as espousing ‘similar ideas to this very day’. Unfortunately, this is in connection with Kingsley’s opposition not just to ‘palliatives’ but also to trade unionism and strikes which he also regarded as useless. For him, the trade union struggle for better wages and conditions was not part of the class struggle, but was just a commodity struggle. This is not (and was not at the time) our position, nor that of other members of the SPC.
There were certain obvious parallels between the SPC and the SPGB. The SPC pioneered the idea of writing ‘Socialism’ across the ballot paper where there was no socialist candidate standing; they took the position that socialists elected to national or local office should judge measures put before them on whether or not they would be in the interest of the working class; and they refused to affiliate to the Second International on the grounds that it was dominated by reformists. They opposed participation in the First World War. Kingsley didn’t, which led to him leaving the SPC.
The authors suggest that Kingsley and the SPC advocated, and practised, taking part in elections (Kingsley was a candidate himself on a number of occasions) ‘primarily as a means to educate the public about the evils of capitalist wage exploitation’. This is to get the emphasis quite wrong. The SPC, and Kingsley in particular, saw elections as the way for the working class to win control of political power as the first step towards abolishing capitalist wage slavery. As Kingsley put it in 1911 in articles reproduced in the book:
‘The determination of the workers to conquer the state and use its organized powers for the purpose of striking the fetters of wage slavery from their limbs by the abolition of capitalist property, marks the awakening of labor.’
‘The conquest of the capitalist State by the working class will open the gateway for the transformation of capitalist property into the collective, or common, property of the working class. This will mean the ending of the wages slave system … With the ending of the rule of capital, “the State will die out”, as Marx and Engels have said. With no longer a ruling class and a class to be ruled it would no longer have a function to perform. It would become obsolete.’
That the way to ‘conquer the state’ was through the intelligent use of the ballot box by the working class was spelt out in this passage from a pamphlet Kingsley published in 1916:
‘In most countries the workers possess some semblance of a franchise, and to that extent at least they have the legal right to conquer the state for their own purposes. In countries where the workers do not possess the franchise, or where there are such limitations placed upon it as to nullify their superiority of numbers, they are justified in exercising their political power in any other manner they may choose for the attainment of the end in view. In Canada and the United States, there is nothing in the way of a working class conquest of the public powers at the polls at the present time, except the peculiar perspicacity of the slave that usually enables him to readily discern his master’s interests, while at the same time remaining blissfully blind to his own.’
The last sentence is a typical example of Kingsley’s style of speaking and writing with its heavy use of irony. He didn’t hold back from calling workers ‘slaves’ and telling them they were stupid to support capitalism and its politicians, but his audiences seemed to like it. This pamphlet, The Genesis and Evolution of Slavery, the only one he wrote, is a typical socialist propaganda pamphlet of the time.
The editors have included a lot of what he wrote and said after he left the SPC over his support for the war. After the end of war, he seems to have convinced himself that not only capitalism but civilisation itself was about to collapse and that ‘the only hope for the race was for the farmers and city dwellers to come to some arrangement whereby the latter would withdraw to the land and sustain themselves’. He forgot his Marxian economics and came up with the currency-crankish idea that surplus value only existed as debt settled by future production and which couldn’t go for much longer.
This nonsense makes painful reading. The editors probably included his writings and speeches from this period as in them he also took the overthrow of the Kerensky government in Russia in November 1917 as what it appeared to be: the workers there taking power. The authors betray their Trotskyist background when they note that Trotsky’s ‘notion of transitional demands is unlikely to have appealed to him’. Of course it wouldn’t! Such a programme of palliative measures would have had no appeal to an impossibilist (and still doesn’t). In that respect the ‘British Columbia school of socialism’ was way in advance of Trotskyism.
The old Socialist Party of Canada disappeared in the 1920s and was reconstituted in 1931 with the same declaration of principles as the SPGB, including the ‘conquest of the powers of government’ with a view to converting them from ‘an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation’. Two of those mentioned in the book as chairing or speaking at Kingsley’s meetings for the reformist Federated Labour Party — W. A. Prichard and Charles Lestor — later returned to ‘impossibilism’. For a history of the past and present SPC see: www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/SocialistParty/HistoryofSPC.pdf
ALB
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