Letters

In Revolutionary Perspectives 34 we published a letter to the SP form a contact because we considered it raised relevant points and because the SP had not replied to the letter. We have since received a reply from the SP which we have passed on to the contact and which we publish below. The letter which we publish does not seriously address the questions raised. In particular it does not address the question of communist consciousness and the use of parliament to establish communism.

The SP assumes that consent for capitalism has been withdrawn and talks about what to do next. Consent will, however, never be withdrawn in the way suggested. The rejection of capitalism and the understanding of the need to overthrow bourgeois productive relations is a process, which as Marx explained can only happen on a significant scale in a practical movement, namely a process of revolution. To pretend otherwise is to separate consciousness from its material basis. As we have argued to do this is to give consciousness an idealist basis. This allows the SP to come to utopian conclusions through a process of formal logic. If consciousness has developed to the point where "consent" were withdrawn workers would have no need for parliament and should express their political will through their own working class organs, namely the workers councils. We refer readers to the Theses on Abstentionism which we publish in this issue.

Although individual consciousness does arise in the way described by AB in the letter below, and we recognise that without this there could be no hope of overthrowing any class society, what Marx says about mass communist consciousness in the famous passage in the "German Ideology" is undoubtedly correct. It is only in a practical movement that the mass of the workers will be open to communist ideas and be able to throw off "the much of ages. "

AB is correct in pointing to the evolution of Marx's ideas. We point out that this evolution took place in response to practical movements of the working class and his analyses of these movements. Marx was clear that revolution was necessary to overthrow the ruling class well before the Communist Manifesto was published. This is stated in the German Ideology. Although Marx did speak, in the Manifesto, of workers winning the battle of democracy to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, this position was substantially revised after the Paris Commune. In the introduction to the German edition of the manifesto of 1872, Marx and Engels point out that the working class cannot "simply lay hold of the ready made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes. " The SP still appears to think that the state machinery could be controlled by a majority in parliament and used to demolish capitalism! Further in his critique of the Gotha programme Marx notes that between capitalist and communist society lies the period of revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.

Letter from SP

In your latest issue (No 34) you carry a letter criticising the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its journal the Socialist Standard... His argument seems to be that, because "political power is ultimately based on consent" (as it is), when the working class withdraws consent to capitalist rule capitalism will come to an end, whether or not parliament is captured or even exists. Logically, this is so. But the SPGB position is that, once this consent has been withdrawn, the question arises of what is the best way to end capitalism with a minimum of bloodshed and of disruption to production and social life? The SPGB answers: in those countries where stable, elective political institutions exist, by organising to take them over (as well as to take over and run production). Other ways are conceivable: ignoring the state, a general strike, civil disobedience, armed insurrection (as have all been proposed by anarchists in particular). The SPGB rejects these on the grounds of the risk of them leading to the "bloody civil war" that your correspondent seems to relish. Your correspondent's misunderstanding of the SPGB position on this probably arises from the fact that he was never a member of the SPGB, but of a splinter from it which did indeed hold that socialism could come only through Parliament and criticised the SPGB for deviating from this caricature of its position. Whereas in fact the SPGB position is that, in the developed capitalist countries, using elective political institutions is the best (if not the only conceivable) way and that, in the event (and where, as in some less developed capitalist countries) of this not being possible, some other method would have to be used. As anyone who had been in the SPGB would know, it has always endorsed the old Chartist slogan of "peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must". Similarly, your correspondent (and indeed you yourselves in your introduction to his letter) conclude, from the fact that the SPGB says that socialist agitation and education is essential to the emergence of a mass socialist consciousness, that it says that this is the only factor involved in this. This does not follow. If it did, then it would apply equally to you since on page 24 of the same issue you state: "It will be the tasks of the members of the future party to carry out the widest possible education (!) of the workers who get involved in the struggle". The SPGB could endorse that. Socialist consciousness emerges out of the interaction of the working class discontent and struggle that is built-in to capitalism and the propagation of socialist ideas by that section of the working class which has, as a result of the same discontent and struggle, come to see things more clearly. Nobody claiming some affiliation with the ideas of Marx could claim otherwise. And the SPGB doesn't. But talking of Marx, while in the 1840's when he (mistakenly, as he and Engels later admitted) thought that the bourgeois revolution in countries like Germany would be rapidly followed by a proletarian one he did think in terms of socialism emerging out of a civil war... later he did argue that workers could and should use the vote and parliament. Anti-parliamentarism is an anarchist not a Marxist position.