2020s >> 2023 >> no-1430-october-2023

Sometimes people in other groups and countries contact us with a view to some kind of joint venture or activity. As a recent correspondence illustrates, such well-intended invitations can often expose deep and unsuspected difficulties. It would be unfair to quote our correspondent directly without their permission, but you may surmise their arguments from our own responses below.

Hi there,

I’ve just been forwarded your invite, and sure, happy to have a chat online. If you know anything about us though, you’ll know we’re all about global common ownership now, with no money or markets, and we don’t go in for piecemeal progressive reforms, eg, housing, so I don’t know how much you’d get out of our involvement.
Best regards

Hi there

To be honest I’m reluctant to take part if the purpose is mainly to ‘raise awareness’ about housing issues. The way I interpret this is ‘promoting positive things we can do about housing’, and I’m not convinced there are any. I would be obliged to object that over a hundred years of housing reforms have done nothing to cure the homelessness problem, and in my opinion never will do anything, because housing is like any other commodity that’s produced for profit, not for need, and entirely subject to the laws of the capitalist market. Poor people simply don’t matter in this system, but it’s arguably even worse than that. The more workers are ground down by exorbitant rents and mortgages, the more desperate they get, and the more employers can screw them with low wages, zero-hour contracts and anti-union rules. In this view, homelessness is actually great for capitalism, just like unemployment, and unaffordable health systems. They are not problems it has any intention of solving.

I’m guessing you want to stress the positives, as in these two paragraphs from Jacobin magazine:

‘Certain reform-oriented struggles, especially those around rent control and expanded provision of social housing, offer important opportunities for on-the-ground socialist organizing. But we also shouldn’t be shy about our big-picture diagnosis.

Socialists have to make the case, loudly, publicly, and globally: capitalism can never meet our needs for high-quality, affordable housing. The reason is straightforward: the profit motive’ (jacobin.com/2018/11/capitalism-affordable-housing-rent-commodities-profit).

This is the age-old dilemma of action now or revolution later. It’s always claimed that you can do both, but in practice one is always pursued at the expense of the other. To me it’s like trying to redecorate while your house is on fire. I also can’t go along with the idea that housing reforms could be some kind of step on the way to socialism. You could make the same argument for virtually every charity under the sun, with the result that the steps on the way to socialism rapidly multiply to infinity. And reforms can be undone, and frequently have been, by successive political regimes, so that sadly, reformism is rarely a forward path, more often a circular loop. How many times has Oxfam proposed to eradicate poverty since they were founded in 1942?

I’m replying at some length just so you can see what position I would be obliged to take, which I fear would have the effect of undermining whatever you want to put across. I heartily sympathise with you over the undeniable fact that the working class does not seem interested in socialism right now. But I don’t think the solution is to offer them something else. Part of the reason the working class is not interested in the single socialist step is that they’re too beguiled by the plethora of reformist routes being offered to them.

If you’re happy to proceed on this basis then fine, but I perfectly understand if you don’t think it would be helpful.
Best regards

Hi there,

Based on what you’ve just replied, I’m afraid I have not made myself clear at all. You say you ‘100 percent support radical socialist reforms’. We don’t, because we don’t believe they exist or that they would work. You ask for socialist ideas (I suppose meaning ‘reform measures’) that I support. There are none. You ask what policies I think are best. There are none. Key issues? Just one, getting the world to abolish capitalism. That’s all. No interims, no small steps, no ‘in the meantime’.

Your approach is: the working class won’t listen, so propose progressive things they will listen to instead. In this view, socialism is more of an ongoing process than an end goal.

Our approach is: the working class won’t listen, so make them listen. Socialism is the only goal. There is no process.

You may regard this as an absolutist, rather than a relativist position, and you’d be right. This is not a new debate, it’s as old as the history of socialist thinking, and caused the breakup of the First International. On the one (majority) side, the gradualists, reformists, Fabians and ‘minimalist’ socialists who thought you could introduce socialism by degrees, through progressive government measures. On the other side, the ‘maximalist’ socialists, also called Impossibilists, who demanded the immediate abolition of capitalism, and nothing less.

We are in that maximalist tradition, which is nothing if not uncompromising. We would be the first to admit that we haven’t got what we wanted. But capitalism still exists, and workers are still suffering, with the world possibly on the brink of self-extermination, so we would argue that the minimalists didn’t get what they wanted either. We’re no closer to socialism now than we were a hundred years ago, for all their progressive ideas. In fact, because of all the ‘faux socialism’ being put about, we are arguably even further away.

I admire your energy and initiative in setting up your own political group, obviously in the hope that you can make a difference. The world needs people like you, more than ever. But I would suggest that you take a closer look at these ‘socialist reforms’ you advocate. There are very few genuinely new concepts floating around. Have these reforms been tried before, and if so, what happened? Do they make sense in terms of economics? If you’re not sure, feel free to ask me. If I don’t know, I can find out. A little bit of homework now could save you spending a lot of energy later.

Why not tell me what measures you want to promote, and I’ll tell you what I think?
Best regards

Hi again,

I’m sorry you think I’m being ‘pointlessly hostile’ and wasting your time with ‘idiotic squabbling’. I only wanted you to understand my position and now I guess you do. I suppose you will consider it a waste of time communicating with me, but I will take the trouble to reply anyway. To me, this sort of exchange is not some alternative to the revolutionary process, it’s part of it.

Believe me, I would love nothing better than to get round the table with a united revolutionary socialist movement and form a united plan. If I had the magic power to make that happen I would. I don’t want a divided opposition to capitalism any more than you do.

But if you think that movement is divided by nothing more than petty superficial squabbles, you don’t understand revolutionary politics as well as you think. The divisions go all the way down.

There are two main fault lines:

(1) Minimal versus maximal – the two poles, as already explained. Minimalists are driven by a desperate sense of expediency, but what happens in practice is that they always get drawn into managing capitalism on behalf of the rich. This has happened with every supposedly labour or socialist party that’s ever been in government. In the UK, many of their grandees end up in the House of Lords. What usually happens to the supporters is that, over time, they forget all about socialism and become garden-variety liberals.

(2) Vanguardists versus libertarians – on one side, the Leninists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, etc, who believe the working class is basically stupid and needs an elite revolutionary leadership, who alone are capable of understanding socialist theory. If successful these groups, in the process of imposing their new order, have become a new totalitarian ruling class, very often murderously so. Against them stands an assortment of libertarian socialists, anarchists, syndicalists and some left or council communists, who reject leadership as an inherently weak and undemocratic form of organisation, and insist like Marx that only the whole working class can emancipate itself.

The above presupposes that, at heart, they all want 100 percent socialism, at least at some distant point in the future. Actually, many of the minimalists and vanguardists don’t even want that, or understand what it is. They think socialism is just capitalism managed by the state, or by a revolutionary dictatorship.

I need hardly add that there are other, more minor differences. The vanguardists all hate each other, like the fighting dogs they are. The minimalists (who are often also vanguardists) all promote competing and often infeasible reforms (like UBI) simply to get votes and/or members. Even the libertarians are divided, with most apart from the SPGB being anti-parliament.

I’m not making any of this up. These divisions existed well before you or I were ever born. If you’re going into revolutionary territory, you need to know where the cliff edges are. It doesn’t mean we have to be uncivil with each other, but unity between groups who don’t want the same thing is out of the question. Our solution, whether you agree with it or not, is to specify exactly what we mean by socialism, and then seek out only those people who fully support that aim, so that the revolution can proceed on solid rather than nebulous foundations.
Best regards

PJS

 

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