PARTISAN!

Fox Luces, Fremantle

Comrade Volkava’s recent article in Partisan, The Marxist Brotherhood? The Egyptian Revolution and How the Arab Spring Failed is detailed, illuminating, incisive, and correct, and ought to be read widely for these reasons. Therefore, my belief that she falls prey to some moments of ideological tunnel-vision is not to be misconstrued, though I nonetheless feel compelled to express it, in some brief remarks.

In her analysis of the failure of Arab spring to achieve even genuine democracy (much less socialism), Volkova criticises the opportunistic commitment to ‘spontaneity’ expressed by Trotskyist socialists following Tony Cliff, manifested in the Egyptian context by the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR). I enclose spontaneity in scare-quotes quite deliberately, unlike Comrade Volkova, as the opportunism she describes has the precise effect of defusing and derailing the revolutionary spontaneity it claims all the time to be upholding. To demonstrate this, it is sufficient to keep to the facts referred to in the original article, though numerous other historical examples can be provided.

Volkova writes: “[In the Cliffite view] workers are assumed to already possess a disjointed form of revolutionary consciousness. All that is necessary is for socialists to build the confidence of the workers to articulate themselves, seize power, and implement their vision. Socialists must therefore avoid “talking down to the masses”. “Meet them where they’re at” is a common Cliffite phrase.” The incoherence of this position should be immediately obvious. Despite an imagined theoretical commitment to the socialist potential in natural working-class attitudes (a potential which should not be dismissed, incidentally) ultimately the Cliffite socialists belie an utterly condescending view toward workers at the critical moment. To counsel socialists to avoid “talking down” to the masses, to “meet them where they’re at” implies an intellectual position so enlightened and beyond the consciousness of the average worker that to speak openly about one’s aims is inherently dangerous. I submit that this can in no way be accurately described as a commitment to spontaneity, rather the opposite – this is a deep fear of the true spontaneity that comes from a working class disillusioned about all distractions from its task, and enthralled in its own collective power.

To truly harness the spontaneity of the working class – which is a real, salient phenomenon, as both Arab Spring and recent events must attest – it is necessary for us socialists to put aside the tactical layer between communist and masses in favour of unpretentious agitation for the overthrow of the present nature of things. The great killer of spontaneous revolutionary moments is a hesitancy, a draw of breath before collapsing back into familiar structures of logic – whether that be the Shia Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood, or liberal democracy, as in the case of the recent wave of global protests being dubbed the “Asian spring”. Therefore it misses the point to argue, as Volkova does, that what was missing in 2011 was a vanguard party. Were a vanguard party present, the task of that party would not have been just to defeat the forces of reaction and opportunism, but first to awaken the sense of self-potential latent within the working class, without which nothing meaningful can be achieved. The degeneration of revolutions naturally reflect themselves in the leadership structures of those revolutions, but true revolutions take place only when the leaders are accountable to the spontaneous power of the class-conscious people; the production of that consciousness is the primary task of any communist, for there is the locus of possibility.