The SPGB’s ‘utopian electoralism’

[jondwhite]

Libcom has published a short critique from a SolFed member of the SPGB

http://libcom.org/library/afterthought-extra-parliamentary-electoralism

[Anonymous]

The left like to think there is a battle with the ruling class.Capitalists have no control over the physical process of production and distribution nor the physical protection of that process. Workers do all of this. Workers do not need to 'take control' we already have control. The 'left' are confused romantics.  Capitalists have no control.  It is only workers we need to talk to. It is all in their mind.As Marx said: We have nothing to say to the ruling class, our message is to the workers.The capitalst can't wipe their own arses. When workers wake up there will be fuck all to do apart from the free distribution of everything. The army and police (workers) will stop any interference with that process , then even they will have nothing to do.

[alanjjohnstone]

Appears very sympathetic sounding but actually when we have "friends" like this , who really needs enemies. His summary against our approach is 

Quote:

One, because it's a massive distraction from the more pressing task at hand. Two, because its stated aim of making revolution entirely non-violent is a nonsense. And three, because if you want a system of recallable delegates, you should build that system rather than try to graft it onto a state apparatus that you in theory wish to dismantle.

One – What is the greater distraction…supporting reformism and expending energy and time into reform campaigns that are acknowledged not to be solutions but in the hope that it may "encourage" consciousness through direct action. Over and over again we are counselled that there are more pressing tasks…but  according to SolFed we must re-invent the wheel of work-place organisation and make existing unions and not the capitalist employers as our primary enemy. (surprisingly they have much in common with the Socialist Equality Party's animousity to trade unions)Two – As a syndicalist why does he not take aim at his own tradition. The whole theory of the general strike, otherwise known as the theory of folded arms- was to be a peaceful alternative to insurrection so does he consider his his ideological antecedents to be spouting nonsense? The proponents of industrial unionism certain believe their alternative of using industrial muscle would avoid bloodshed. Three – We have already built a system of recallable delegates…within our own structure as a political party, which is the first step of transferring the principle into the broader electoral process. Too often appreciation of ourselves as a fully democratic party that for over a hundred years has never been properly given the respect it deserves. And over these years we have adapted and not stood still despite the claimed we are a monument. Otherwise, i don't think i would have rejoined. I was going to post these comments on the website, but to be truthful, it wasn't such a long time ago that i engaged in a similar discussion there. But i do take the authors point that the coordination between parlimentarian activity and extra-parliamentarian action can be more fully explored and no doubt will be closer the time. We too have antecedents to refer to for experience of the snags and conflicts that may arise and it is from the relationship with  SPC and the OBU. I certainly accept we have a gap in our literature about how we connect and combine inside and outside parliament. We will face the question of how we defend our immediate interests as a class with our aspirations and aims for socialism itself …and it won't be smooth sailing and may well result in repeats of past debates as in the case of the SLP v. SPA, and IWW v. Politics. We should be preparing now for a new synthesis and fusion of our strategy. So far we have limited ourselves to general and very brief remarks about it. Ideas have to be transposed into actual action to become effective. What we have done is not totally excluded one avenue on principle. The pragmatic and supposed practical reasons, IMHO, against political action in concert with industrial and , of course, community action simply have not been demonstrated sufficently to go solely down one road as argued on Libcom.  

[Anonymous]

Our propaganda needs to move away from the anarchist-like approach of abolishing the state and the syndicalist idea of workers councils etc. It is all confused claptrap.They seem to have an irrational fear of the state that we should not share.We would be better off joining the labour party and boring from within than trying to convince the various loonies on lib com.I cringe when I hear members say " We stand for  a stateless, moneyless, wageless ……."What about the first step before we can have such a society?   Taking control of the state and using its power democratically to dispossess the parasites and reorganise society. Its as if we are afraid to say it.   

[robbo203]

Vin wrote:

I cringe when I hear members say " We stand for  a stateless, moneyless, wageless ……."What about the first step before we can have such a society?   Taking control of the state and using its power democratically to dispossess the parasites and reorganise society. Its as if we are afraid to say it.

I'm surprised to hear you say that Vin.  I would have thought saying one stands for a stateless, moneyless, wageless society is precisely what distinguishes socialists from the reformists.Taking control of the state and using it against the capitalists begins to sound like that claptrap advanced by the Leninists of all hues – the so called "dictatorship of the proletariat",  an oxymoron if there ever was oneI've got nothing against the idea of taking control of the state but the very act of doing so entails ipso facto the complete dissolution of the state.  Anything short of this leads us into the quagmire of Leninist politics and inevitably the retention of capitalism in its statist form

[alanjjohnstone]

 Taking control and using the state to establish socialism is after all just going to be a brief period at the beginning of the revolutionary process. Isn't that our message which we emphasise…and once that is accomplished the state is transformed in such a fashion that it can no longer be described a state.As for the manner of how we organise within socialism, there will be various means of administrating industry and civil society. I happen to believe workers councils will be strongly featured because workers are already effectively organised at the point of production.Without resorting to chapter and verse i have been given to think that if the democratic mandate of a socialist majority in the polls is resisted and the military stays neutral, it will be through industrial action and street protests and mass disobedience campaigns   that we enforce democracy and our template would be the fall of Eastern Europe and Russia and several dictatorships like the Shah and Marcos and more recently albeit for the flaws that later developed…the Arab Spring. To maintain the structure and stability of society we will have to resort to various workers council systems and again learning the lessons of the Winnipeg and Seattle city general strikes…and our own 1926 General Strike and its Councils for Action. I am reluctant to surrender any possible potential weapon ..whether it is the vote or the strike or factory occupation …Circumstances will determine practiceOr should we all consider ourselves state-socialists, Vin? Now that would be confusing 

[robbo203]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

 Taking control and using the state to establish socialism is after all just going to be a brief period at the beginning of the revolutionary process. Isn't that our message which we emphasise…and once that is accomplished the state is transformed in such a fashion that it can no longer be described a state.

 To be pedantic, Alan, I can't see how this can be case…  I think the confusion arises from how one defines the state itself which is something separate from the machinery of the state i.e the bureaucratic apparatus.  I can certainly foresee the latter continuing to exist and to be adapted after the capture of state power but not the state qua state.  To say the state continues to exist albeit for an allegedly "brief period" is tantamount to saying that class ownership of the means of production continues to exist when the whole point of taking over the state is to abolish class ownership!  In other words it is a symbolic act marking the switchover point to a classless (and therefore stateless) society Which is why logically speaking and in terms of Marxian discourse itself, taking over the state must mean exactly the same thing as the dissolution of the state

[Anonymous]

robbo203 wrote:

Taking control of the state and using it against the capitalists begins to sound like that claptrap advanced by the Leninists of all hues – the so called "dictatorship of the proletariat",  an oxymoron if there ever was oneI've got nothing against the idea of taking control of the state but the very act of doing so entails ipso facto the complete dissolution of the state.  Anything short of this leads us into the quagmire of Leninist politics and inevitably the retention of capitalism in its statist form

and how will a minority get control of the state when there is a majority of class conscious workers with delegates in control ? This is the claptrap and confusion I am refering to. It has nothing to do with Leninism, it is an irrational fear of the state. The anarchist position is dangerous and we would do well to oppose it as we always have. You should not be surprised by my confirmation of clause 6 of our principles Anarchists don't believe in using the state,  the World Socialist Movement believes the opposite. Our conference resolution proposing the immediate abolition of the state was anarchist nonsense. There will be a dictatorship of the working class, the dictatorship of the 99%.  This is our position:That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.It would be foolish to expect the capitalist class to voluntarily give up its privileged position in society. The State will be an 'agent of emancipation' in direct opposition to the anarchist utopian position.

[Anonymous]

By the way, my history aint very good but I do believe 1917 had nothing to do with consious democratic control of the state, so there is no comparison.

[alanjjohnstone]

Perhaps it was my ineptitude in being precise in definitions but what i was getting at was this brief moment as described thus which i think is what you are getting at 

Quote:

you cannot carry on socialism with capitalist governmental machinery; that you must transform the government of one class by another into the administration of social affairs; that between capitalist society and Socialist society lies a period of transformation during which one after another of the political forms of to-day will disappear, but the worst features must be lopped off immediately the working class obtains supremacy in the State.

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1930s/1930/no-316-december-1930/parliament-or-soviet-reply-proletarian-usaIt is more fully explained by ALB 

Quote:

In other words, the transition period is a political form between the capture of political power by the working class within capitalist society and the eventual establishment of socialism, a period during which the working class has replaced the capitalist class as the ruling class, i.e. as the controller of state power

http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2010/02/myth-of-transitional-society.htmlWe wield state-power but do not form a state…i fully understand that some may consider this position a distinction without a difference but it will become much more apparent as it actually manifests itself .

[SocialistPunk]

What use will the state machinery be in a socialist society?Surely the "state" is not a reference to the social production of services such as education and health provision. The state is a restricting political force that limits social productive services to those that are necessary for the continuation of the status quo, ie the pursuit of profit.The state is a governing force.For example in Britain the NHS is essentially a self regulating body. It is hampered by state interference in the form of rationing of financial resources. Once freed from financial restriction it would be free to develop into a suitable health provider for the people of this island.  The same goes for education, transport, road maintenance, utility provision, they are all self regulating.For socialism to work a mass movement would need to arise. The people creating that movement  would know what is involved in creating a socialist society. As has been pointed out the SPGB/WSM already has a fully democratic leaderless structure.The way I see it, the gaining control of the existing parliamentary democratic structures is simply a formality of removing the ability of capitalists to control the coercive elements of the state.

[LBird]

Surely the only reason for a worker to vote for the SPGB is because that worker wants to see parliament closed down?I've suggested before that the party, for this strategy, should adopt the term 'Parliamentary Suicide'.This will clarify the strategy for those socialist comrades who are also critics of a supposed 'parliamentary approach', like those on LibCom. They  fear, rightly, that the SPGB aims to employ parliament as a political centre, from which commands will be issued.On the contrary, all political commands must issue from self-developed Workers' Councils, which are democratic from their inception, and are totally structured to reflect the wishes of the class conscious workers, organised as a political force.The purpose of capturing parliament is merely to legitimise the 'closing down' of bourgeois power sources, so that 'legitimate authority' for the armed forces, police, civil service, etc. is clearly and openly handed to Workers' Councils. Of course, 'illegitimate authority' will already have been established, and the only reason for parliamentary activity is to undermine bourgeois 'legitimate authority' in the eyes of those who still claim to recognise it. That is, those liberal officers of the state forces who already reject any attempts at an unconstitutional coup by the reactionaries within the state forces, but who haven't yet, like the majority of the workers within those forces, come to accept a revolutionary position.Put simply, the policy of 'Parliamentary Suicide' is to place those liberals who are within the state, legitimately in their own eyes, onto the side of the revolution.The reactionaries within the state will obviously have to be arrested by a combination of Workers' Councils' units and those units of the state that have come over to the revolution (that is, a revolutionary rank-and-file, revolutionary junior officers, and any liberal senior offices who maintain their declared loyalty to parliament, and thus accept the legitimacy of the transfer of control from the heads of the armed forces to the Workers' Councils).Any units which maintain their previous cohesion, and loyalty to any unelected authority, and determination to resist our legitimate claiming of democratic power, will have to be broken by force.Don't forget, this scenario is taking place in the middle of a huge upheaval, the end of a process during which ever-greater numbers of people will have rejected the market and the state, and will have become class conscious about the need for breaking of state power.The thermometer reading determining the 'heat' of this 'process' is the votes for the SPGB.Do I think that it will happen like this? Quite possibly not, but I agree that all avenues of peaceful transformation should be explored, and if electing a majority of the SPGB to parliament can help this transition, then I'm all for it.Do I think that the SPGB parliament will be giving any orders to workers? No.Do I think the the SPGB parliament will be giving orders to state personnel to transfer their loyalty to Workers' Councils? Yes.That's its final act. End of parliament. End of a phase of history. It commits suicide.

alanjjohnstone wrote:

I happen to believe workers councils will be strongly featured because workers are already effectively organised at the point of production.

This is not clear enough a statement of political intent, alan.Workers' Councils 'will be strongly featured because' they'll embody Workers' Power. They will be both economic and political bodies, not simply 'production' bodies.

[robbo203]

Vin wrote:

and how will a minority get control of the state when there is a majority of class conscious workers with delegates in control ? This is the claptrap and confusion I am refering to. It has nothing to do with Leninism, it is an irrational fear of the state. The anarchist position is dangerous and we would do well to oppose it as we always have.

 I'm not advancing an anarchist position,  Vin.  Like I said, i have no problem with the democratic capture of state power but I see this democratic act as tantamount to signifying the complete disappearance of the state.  This is why a minority will not be able to re-capture the state from the socialist majority – there will be no state to recapture!  In the event of such a minority trying to forcibly reinstate capitalist ownership of the the means of production it wont be a "state" that  will forcibly rebuff such action. It will be a the citizens of a classless stateless communist society that will be doing that! Your mistake, Vin, is to equate the use of force (should be necessary) with the actions of a state. It is not.  There are stateless egalitarian societies where force is quite clearly in evidence such as the Nuer, the subject of  Evan Pritchard's ethnography  (http://classes.yale.edu/03-04/anth500b/projects/project_sites/00_Busbee/500b_evans-pritchard.html) I don't see why in principle a future socialist society might not be able to resort to force, if called upon to do so, without resorting to a state 

Vin wrote:

You should not be surprised by my confirmation of clause 6 of our principles Anarchists don't believe in using the state,  the World Socialist Movement believes the opposite. Our conference resolution proposing the immediate abolition of the state was anarchist nonsense. There will be a dictatorship of the working class, the dictatorship of the 99%.

But cant you see that this implies the continuation of the class relationships of capitalism if you advocate the dictatorship of the working class?  The existence of a working class implies the existence of a capitalist class and insofar as you allow the latter to continue to exist what actually has changed in substantive terms?  Nothing! The socialist revolution will STILL not yet have happened – by definition.  All that will have happened is that you are allowing capitalism to continue and therefore conspiring in the continuing exploitation of workers by the capitalists. THIS is why any talk of the DOTP is so dangerous from a revolutionary socialist point of view since it lends itself to a Leninist position where a minority come to claim to represent the majority  in the transitional period but in practice come to oppose the interests of the majority just as the Bolsheviks did. It is just not realistic to suppose that a militant socialist movement having become a majority and having captured state power by democratic means will allow capitalism and the state to continue one second longer.  On what grounds must workers wait and refrain from abolishing their exploited status for the duration? I cant think of a single plausible reason why they should.  Saying the capitalists (or rather ex capitalists) might use force against them is not a reason at all because such an attempt can clearly be opposed by the non statist use of force if necessary  

Vin wrote:

 This is our position:That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organize consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.It would be foolish to expect the capitalist class to voluntarily give up its privileged position in society. The State will be an 'agent of emancipation' in direct opposition to the anarchist utopian position.

 The capitalist class may or may not voluntarily give its privileged position but it won't be a state that it will have to deal with but rather the militant organisation of a classless stateless communist society.  It is the latter that will resist any attempt to forcibly reintroduce capitalism. In one sense  this argument is a semantic one but it is important to be consistent here in your usage of terms.  A state is an instrument of class oppression in Marxian terms. Consequently the very existence of a state implies the existence of classes and therefore the absence of classless communism/socialism.  If there is no classless communism after the socialist majority has captured power then I put it to you that no socialist revolution has yet taken place and that whoever controls the state in these circumstances will end up being not that much different from, say, the early Labour government and we all know how that panned out in the end!  After all capitalism can only be run in the interests of capital and against the workers.  So who is going to take the blame for continuing to administer a system that operates against the interests of workers in the face of a majority of those workers  who want to end that system forthwith only to be told that they must wait a while longer? It makes no sense

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