From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Wed, 1 Jan 1997 00:46:06 +0000
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Transitional Programme


> Date:          Tue, 31 Dec 1996 23:16:10 +1000
> To:            marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> From:          rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
> Subject:       M-I: Re: Transitional Programme
> Reply-to:      marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU

> Thanks to Dave for a useful reply.  I accept I oversimplified the
> differences between Lenin and Trotsky somewhat - your views don't
> contradict the bits'n'pieces I know about this and they make sense.  But,
> you go on to say:
> 
> 'Education can be of two sorts.  One sort of education is to teach workers that 
> revolution comes in stages and that they must compromise with other 
> classes to prepare for the final stage -  socialism some time in the 
> future ... The other sort of education is to say, capitalism is a rotten
> system, 
> even to survive and defend the most basic democratic rights, it is 
> necessary to be prepared to go all the way to the seizure of power.'
> 
> And here I still have a few problems with Bolshevism and Trotskyism as at
> 1997.  Before you start mooting stage theories of revolution as opposed to
> theory in praxis, people have to possess an inkling that the order of
> things is not natural; that a class analysis lays bare the anatomy of their
> plight better than the shit they get from the telly; that the essence of
> their plight cannot be permanently removed within the realms of capitalism,
> no matter how 'human' its face; and that they have agency in all this.  
> 
> I think you (and more so Bob Malecki, who seems to see in every industrial
> conflict a revolutionary act) overestimate the level of such awareness on
> the shop floors and in the dole queues - and by a long way - especially
> amongst the younger elements.  Anybody who tries to 'test and develop
> theory' by throwing a handful of workers against 'the trenches and
> fortifications' today is not educating future socialists, but rather
> sacrificing a few pathological optimists to 'prove' just how natural and
> permament the capitalist order is.  
>
[ I said to be prepared. I don't mean this as an ultimatum: "Unless 
you are prepared to seize power, piss off".   There is a distinction between 
mindless adventurism which you seem to be talking about, and fighting 
each fight with a view to educating workers in the process about the 
need to go further, and ultimately to the seizure of power. Lenin had 
his sympathies with adventurists but he explained that adventurism 
reflects the `weakness' of a revolutionary organisation in the 
working class.  By contrast the Bolshevik method is to fight each 
fight always pointing to the next struggle so that workers become 
empowered in the process.  The need for the seizure of power is never 
hidden from workers in any struggle.  It is stated in the belief that 
as the struggle unfolds workers will fight for more and more control 
overe production, consumption etc, and that this will precipitate a 
struggle for power which can only be resolved in revolution or 
counter-revolution. Not to state this at the start is to 
fatalistically condemn workers to stageism.i.e. to actually 
under-estimate their revolutionary potential.  This is the difference 
between the menshevik min-max programme, and the Bolsehvik 
transtional programme.]
 
> I also take some (but not all) of Lou Godena's points, in as far as the
> majority of workers have a material stake in the current order. 
> Personally, I'm not sure this will *remain* true of the majority
> (Galbraith's *Culture of Contentment* pursues this theme, more or less) -
> and this is a dynamic well worth keeping an eye on.  

> [ at stake?  You mean they are fetishised to death, alienated out 
of their minds, and cannot opt out of wage slavery, except into jail, 
workfare, or worse. To the extent that SOME  [how many, where?]
workers still hold out hope in reforms, better jobs, better wages etc. 
these hopes  will increasingly come up increasingly against the contradiction 
of production for profit which dictates loss of jobs, worse wages etc.  
The `dynamic' for marxists has to be analysed in the context of 
imperialist crisis from all its aspects, economic, political, and ideological. 
This is what allows marxists to characterise the current period as one of 
democratic counter-revolution, but within a worsening structural crisis of 
capitalism.  While workers are everywhere on the defensive, we fight now in 
anticipation of developing  objective conditions which will put revolutionary 
situations on the agenda. But they will not become successful 
revolutions without a programme that carries workers from the 
immediate, defensive struggles over the bridge to the offensive 
struggles. Without that programme, and with a reformist, or 
half-hearted, timid menshevik programme, workers and especially the 
petty bourgeoisie will be attracted to the reactionary, nationalist, 
racist, fascist bosses solution. To prevent that we need a Bolshevik 
world party.]

> Finally, a petit bourgeois revolt of some sort is nascent, I think.  We've
> just started the *New Labour Party* here and, although our programme is
> unambiguously socialist (although a detailed platform is still under
> construction), our branch has a goodly sprinkling of petit bourgeoisie
> (shop keepers and such) who are happy with strong leftist conversation and
> have joined the party specifically to oppose imperialism as they see it
> (which represents to them the bankrupting force that has befallen family
> businesses like theirs).  A party like ours appeals to me because it is
> potentially a megaphone for basic socialism.  It appeals to them because it
> may bring about parliamentary forces against TNCs, and it appeals to
> residual 'moral economy' precepts still evident in Australia's bourgeois
> media today.  If a petit bourgeois cry of indignation emanates, well and
> good.  If the likes of a bourgeois revolution comes about, even better. 
> The spectre of fascism recedes and a space for widespread proletarian
> self-recognition and agitation has been opened up.  And then, I suppose,
> parties like ours will have had their day.  All a bit simple, and certainly
> offensively gradualist to Bolshies in general and Trots in particular - but
> this is about as cheerful a scenario as I can make myself hope for.
> Cheers, Rob.
 
[The New Labour Party sounds like a copy of the NZ NLP which split 
>from Labour in 1989.  It raises the same problems for socialists as 
the Socialist Labour Party in Britain and the Labor Party in the US.  
These animals usually start off as the creatures of the left 
bureaucracy who cannot tolerate the strain of staying in a right-ward 
moving Labour party which flaunts the fact that it is abandoning the 
unions etc.  Its programme is radical economically, that is heavy on
redistribution, but socially quite right-wing, not challenging imperialism 
and being soft on racism. In fact not far from populism. 
Your NLP sounds no more left than most if its 
petty bourgeois members are rejecting Australian `colonisation' by 
MNC's. In my view this makes  NLP members  "Australia Firsters"; 
this could be progressive, if you see Aussie as a semi-colony. I see 
Aussie as a small imperialist country, so that your petty bourgeois 
members are not anti-imperialist, but Aussie-chauvinists. 
If the NLP stays as as bureaucratic shell, recruiting workers 
to on a reformist programme  it is just building another Labor Party Mark 11, 
like Scargill is trying to do, or Anderton succeeded in doing in NZ. 
If left-moving workers are attracted to it seeing it 
as a real "workers" party capable of reforming capitalism, revolutionaries are 
obliged to enter into the fight to prevent the party from consolidating as 
another Labour Party, but rather a mass workers party that is active 
outside parliament and a testing ground for revolutionary vs 
reformists politics.  I don't know enough about the composition of 
your NLP to say what it is. Even so, if is is a signinficant split, 
it would be  important to be in it and to fight for a full socialist programme 
such as a current version of the TP for as long as one can. 
At best it will become a fighting workers party, at worst, a recycled
 Labour party, but in that event, left-moving 
workers can be recruited to revolutionary politics and carry on the 
fight inside [critical support i.e. to break workers from it].  
Dave


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