PARTISAN!

Echoing the larger stakes of the RCO-Spartacist League/Australia merger, Steve M., a supporter of the Spartacist League, criticises the RCO’s understanding of the role political leadership and the managerial class plays in determining working-class ideology

Editor’s Note: Only slight grammatical corrections have been made; all else remains unabridged.

The RCO’s response to The Road to Party, titled Mountains out of Molehills, attempts to address many of their differences with the SL/A. The present response focuses on the section entitled ‘The Question of “Leadership”’. One would be hard pressed in such a cramped space to find so many falsehoods, unintended contradictions, misconceptions and straw men. Unfortunately, the space this missive will take up will be considerably greater.

Where’s It Coming From?

Let’s begin with this:

‘Absent the context of the mid-20th century, declaring that “leadership” is the primary issue assumes that the working class is an active, but misled, force in society. This error misreads our reality where the class is politically passive, weak, and disorganised. Misreading results in mispractice. The SL/A acts as if class struggle is a contest between small, hardened groups on the left and the right. But the working class is not ground to be taken by formations on the battlefield.’

Seeking to deny that ‘leadership’ is the primary issue, a non-sequitur is resorted to: the working class must be politically ‘active’ before it can be misled! The whole history and role of the reformist leadership of the working class, as manifested in the trade union bureaucracy and its social democratic political expression (ALP, BLP, SPD, etc), has been to render the class politically a non-actor in the class struggle, to be as politically mute and ineffective as possible. This is the root of economism, the deliberate confining of workers’ struggles, if these are to break out at all, to wages and conditions, and never anything outside that. And the most effective misleadership of the class has been that which has rendered the class as politically passive as possible.

Political passivity has always resulted from class struggle defeats where lessons aren’t learnt with no prospect of conducting the subsequent struggle better or at all. Consequently, the class descends into apathy, political passivity, or…desperation. However, political passivity can also pose a threat to the union bureaucrats and labour misleaders themselves because a politically passive rank and file won’t defend them when the bosses come after them. Especially if the self-same bureaucrats and misleaders have stabbed their strikes in the back. Many workers today couldn’t give a toss about their suited union tops, who care more about rubbing shoulders with ALP politicians than the issues facing their dues-paying members. And many workers today have a visceral hatred of the very politicians their misleaders are carousing with.

When the working class is not politically passive is when the reformist misleaders must prove their mettle to the rulers, by neutralising militant workers politically. And they maintain their misleadership positions precisely because they’ve succeeded in keeping the working class in as politically passive state as possible. A problem is that the misleaders can’t always succeed in this, especially when economic and political crises drive the working class to go beyond the permissible bounds of ‘acceptable political discourse’ and are forced to defy their misleaders.

The claim that the SL/A somehow takes class struggle to be a contest between ‘small, hardened groups on the left and the right’ is just plain ludicrous, a pitiful straw man. Where is the evidence of this? Even in its most sectarian phase, the SL/A always acknowledged that it was a small propaganda group with little, although sometimes fleeting, influence on the working class and the class struggle. However, one should never mistake the SL/A for the megalomaniacal Socialist Equality Party, which appears to believe the class struggle is all about them!

Now we come to this little ‘gem’:

‘The reformist leadership of the class reflects the working class’s reformist ideology. This ideology is not just a Machiavellian scheme imposed on it by the bourgeoisie. The combined and uneven development of capital accumulation and commodity fetishism results in economistic and social chauvinistic ideologies emerging spontaneously from the class. These are embodied and reproduced by material practice and rituals of working-class life: the relative privilege of the labour aristocracy, the ghettoisation of migrants and non-white workers, the subjugation of women workers to patriarchal reproduction, and so on. These are all spontaneous processes necessary to the reproduction and valorisation of capitalist social relations. They are not imposed from outside.’

The above is such a sparkling jewel that it should be mounted somewhere, but definitely not on an engagement ring for any RCO–SL/A marriage.

A study of Lenin, Zinoviev and Trotsky, along with countless other Marxists, should disabuse all of such a silly notion that the working class’s ‘economistic and social chauvinistic ideologies’ somehow emerge from ‘combined and uneven development of capital accumulation and commodity fetishism’. One could hardly come up with a more meaningless abstraction, rendered even more so by its ignorant misuse. Marx used the term ‘commodity fetishism’ to refer to the way bourgeois economists viewed economic activity principally as the relations between commodities rather than the social relations between the producers of those commodities. And it is a major challenge to shoehorn ‘the combined and uneven development of capital accumulation’ into a rational, let alone proximate, explanation for ‘economistic and chauvinistic ideologies’. Rather ‘mechanical’, though.

All Marxian analyses of the misleadership of the working class have found it to be a sociological phenomenon, its roots in the labour aristocracy and the trade union bureaucracy who are beholden to the crumbs tossed to them from the bourgeoisie’s table – in exchange for keeping the unruly workers in line, a phenomenon originating from and most evident in the imperialist centres. It is simply mind boggling to claim that these strata and their vitally important roles in maintaining the capitalist status quo are distilled down (i.e., absolved) to working class ‘material practice and rituals’(!). The claim that chauvinism, misogyny, racism, etc, emerge ‘spontaneously from the class’ is a rank idealism that reflects a narrow petty bourgeois worldview, and resembles more the Christian notion of ‘original sin’ than Marxism.

As Marx outlined in The German Ideology, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” And in modern capitalist society, there is a monstrous and well-developed apparatus of indoctrination to make sure as far as possible the ruling ideas and ways of behaviour, and conforming to it all, are imposed on the ruled. This apparatus comprises organised religion (the main ideological enforcer of feudalism), the bourgeoisie’s propaganda outlets and media, their education system; and the misleaders of the working class who serve to transmit these to workers serve an important role. It should be noted also that a fundamental transmission belt for the ruling ideas is the nuclear family, where bowing to authority is drummed into kids from a very early age.

That all this is ‘not just a Machiavellian scheme imposed on it [the working class] by the bourgeoisie’ is disingenuous, a straw man, and misses the point entirely. What other possible role does the ideological and indoctrination apparatus serve? It is successful precisely because it’s not at all Machiavellian, since the ruling class has its dedicated professional cadre of propagandists, advertisers, teachers, academics, reverends, and all the rest, selected and well-groomed to transmit and enforce its ideas, which they sincerely believe in. The ideas and ideology of the ruling class most definitely are ‘imposed from the outside’, and a read of Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent would benefit anyone who might be interested in how the selection and brainwashing of ideological spokespeople for the bourgeoisie is conducted.

Of course when needed, these ideological control mechanisms are backed up by the bourgeois state itself. As has become perfectly obvious to everyone of late, the US imperialists have been relentlessly tightening their control over the major social media platforms, which are owned by US corporations (or about to be, viz. TikTok). While the internet for a time allowed some leakage from their tight net of ideological control, ruling classes everywhere have been frantically introducing censorship legislation, most commonly under the rubric of ‘hate speech’, to put the internet genie back in the bottle. And the unelected EU bureaucrats want to go even further to implement a mechanism for monitoring all text messages (they should just ask the NSA for them).

All of the above attests to the ‘outside’ nature of the efforts in brainwashing the ruling class engages in to keep the ruled in place. And of course the principal agents within the organised working class who aid and abet these efforts are the trade union misleaders.

The working class won’t be broken from its ‘political passivity’, or backward ideas regarding race, immigrants or sex, etc, simply by patiently explaining and educating, which of course are necessary. Workers will only be properly broken from fealty to capitalism and its ideology in hard class struggles with the class enemy when battles have been won that unite the class by race and sex, especially if, along the way, their misleaders get clearly exposed as loyal servants of the bosses and are ousted. Until communists are there to effectively expose the workers’ misleaders and break their stranglehold and seize the leadership in the heat of battle – to render the working class “a class for itself” and no longer simply “a class in itself” – there won’t be a revolution. Instead, there’ll be demoralisation and more ‘political passivity’, the inevitable products of defeat, that the reformist misleaders will only maintain – just as an anaesthetist maintains their patient in a (reversible) coma.

And that is what we see today, a working class ground down from many defeated strikes and campaigns over the last four decades, with very few victories. However, given what’s happening also today, increasingly we’re witnessing a rising fury in the working class – manifesting sometimes in desperation looking to far-right demagogues to blame it all on immigrants (not unlike numerous protectionist trade union bureaucrats, by the way), or on some other occasions seeing the true class enemy and its helpers drop their masks – that likely will break out somewhere and throw up new struggles and new leaders to be intersected by communists to establish the beginnings of communist poles and caucuses in the class.

More Strawmen, More Idealism

‘But these processes can be contested! The SL/A strategy acts as if, were we to displace the workers’ reformist leadership, class struggle would bloom across the country like the sunrise on the morning after. The ideologies that arise from these practices and rituals can only be attacked by replacing those practices. This is the purpose of the theoretical education of the masses, mass trade union activity, the daily struggle with the bosses, and workers’ social clubs.’

Really? How does a strategy ‘act’, by the way? Anyway, no one has ever had illusions that replacing the reformist leadership would see the class struggle blooming ‘like the sunrise on the morning after’. Flowers bloom, and maybe one could say coronal mass ejections ‘bloom’ too, but the sunrise? Actually, history has shown the opposite to be the rule: blooming class struggle (if it really does ‘bloom’!) tends to displace reformist leaders. When workers are willing and determined to place life and limb on the line defending their conditions or fighting for better ones, it is then that reformist misleaders are most likely to be displaced, as they expose themselves as either too unwilling or too incompetent (usually both) to lead the workers to victory. New leaders arise, forged and proven in the struggle, who become a force to be reckoned with and who would make excellent communist cadre (if they’re not bought off by the trade union bureaucracy or framed up by the bourgeois state in the meantime).

Instead, we’re expected to believe this fairytale of ‘replacing those practices’ (which practices? Wife beating? Race baiting?) and ‘rituals’ (Satanic, alcoholic, Christian?!!) being the only way to attack the ideologies that arise from these practices. And this is to be carried out by ‘theoretical education of the masses [presumably and especially about the combined and uneven development of capital accumulation and commodity fetishism, and social chauvinism and economism], mass trade union activity, the daily[?] struggle [read collaboration] with the bosses, and workers’ social clubs.’ This sounds much more like the German SPD at its reformist height with its command over the trade unions and joint shop steward-boss works committees, and all its comfortable workers’ social clubs, libraries, sporting clubs, and so on. Ye gods.

But wait, there’s more:

‘It is only possible for collaborators with the boss to lead the working class because backwards, bourgeois practices and rituals dominate the class. They have dominated the Australian working class consistently for its entire history, but especially so for the last three decades. The problem with the SL/A’s strategy is not that we should not struggle against reformist leaders, indeed we must, but that it neglects the greater task of socialist ideological struggle and working-class re-composition.’

Wrong, plain wrong. Is it really only possible for ‘collaborators with the boss to lead the working class’ because of its backward practices and rituals(!). So, here we have it: there should be no leaders of the working class at all because the working class is backward, etc, so only class collaborators will lead it. Is this some kind of syndicalist joke or is it just plain bad writing? One would hope the latter. If the former, are we expected to believe somehow that socialist ideological struggle and working-class ‘re-composition’ will magically replace those leaders? We are left in the dark here.

Struggling against reformist misleaders is on the order of the day, however, and this struggle will happen in earnest in the heat of class battles themselves. In this context, the ‘greater task of socialist ideological struggle and working-class re-composition’ sounds a lot like some exercise in social engineering, carried out by social workers presumably, to deal with those bad ‘practices’ and base ‘rituals’. What on earth does this rather sinister term ‘re-composition’ mean, anyway? Is it a PC way to say ‘re-programming’, like workers are machines?

So we face the prospect of workers not having any leaders because these can only be the bosses’ collaborators, but don’t worry they don’t need them because our social workers will ‘re-compose’/re-program them. Or the misleaders will magically be ‘displaced’ when the workers are ‘re-composed’. Grotesque.

A Contradiction Dressed Up As ‘Dialectics’

Here comes the coup de grace:

‘Thus, we can have a dialectical theory of the relationship between objective and subjective conditions that avoids the mechanistic trap. When pointing to the failures of the Australian workers’ movements since World War Two, we must acknowledge that racism and economism are results of objectives tendencies and pressures. We can also recognise that these pressures were able to be fought directly by socialist militants through mass ideological education, but also through working class struggle which can alter those objective conditions.’

This is a rather abrupt volte-face, dressed up as ‘dialectical theory‘. Now we are expected believe that ‘racism and economism are results of objectives [sic] tendencies and pressures’ (not from the outside, though!), and not ‘spontaneously’ welling up from your uneducated worker; and that these ‘pressures’ could be fought by ‘mass ideological education, but also working class struggle which can alter those objective conditions’.

First, what exactly is this ‘mass ideological education’? A mass media outlet? YouTubers with millions of followers? Leaflets from aeroplanes and skyscrapers? Haranguing the Sunday crowds at the Sydney Domain (a thing of the long distant past, unfortunately)? We’re left wondering. In fact, the head scratching can leave deep scars. And where would the money come from for such ‘mass ideological education’?

But remember we also have working class struggle that can ‘alter those objective conditions’. Unfortunately, most everyday class struggle doesn’t alter objective conditions all that much, unless in a situation that winning or losing can have major consequences if the workers win or lose big (and that they know it!) and the political landscape and balance of class forces changes dramatically as a result.

Otherwise, class struggle tends more to change subjective conditions, where workers on strike, for instance, can (or are forced to) solidarise with co-workers who may not be the same race, sex, sexuality (or age); and they may come away not only less racist or sexist but more learned in the art and tactics of struggling against the bosses and their state. No amount of time-consuming ideological education, however, can replace the instant of the policeman’s truncheon hitting your skull in learning about who rules and who enforces their rule, as has often been recounted.

So, how does the RCO’s approach to leadership avoid the “mechanistic trap of Marxism-Leninism, which claims that all advances and retreats are the result of large-scale social conditions which socialist militants are unable to meaningfully affect”? On the one hand, we have this notion of ‘mass ideological education’ of the workers to expiate their practices and rituals and (hopefully) point to the way out of their current condition. But our workers will be newly ‘re-composed’ (whatever that might mean!) which does sound rather ‘mechanistic’. On the other, we have class struggles where workers either are led by ‘collaborators’ or, ideally it seems, by no-one at all but who are programmed (ie, ‘re-composed’) to make the right tactical and strategic choices in the heat of battle. An untenable abdication of the need for forging a leadership to actually win if ever there were one.

What’s completely missing in this section on leadership is the question of the revolutionary party. After all, it’s the highest political expression of leadership of the working class. Does the revolutionary party even play a role here that resembles an instrument of revolution? Instead, what we see is a ‘party’ with no role beyond teaching and social work, dressed in some ‘Marxist’ foliage.

In short, the notion of leadership touted here will guarantee that all those “social conditions which socialist militants are unable to meaningfully affect” will remain so. Enough already.