Last night I attended the second meeting of an attempt to set up a branch of a new socialist party in Bristol, called Transform
There was lower attendance than the previous meeting. I believe that is because the date and time for the meeting was decided on in quite a hurry with limited input from the wider group, meaning it was scheduled for a time that many people could not make. Nevertheless there were some interesting discussions and of course the most interesting things were the disagreements.
Many, including myself, argued for the importance of ‘listening’ to working class people and involving ourselves directly in struggles going on in communities or workplaces, before writing programs or standing in elections.
Others put more of a priority on trying to stand for election, whether or not we have done this groundwork, emphasising the importance of spreading socialist ideas via hustings etc.
While there is no necessary contradion between these positions, if the latter were taken to extremes I feel it would be problematic and contradict the spirit of the 10 principles we all signed up to. The ten ‘core principles’ of transform include two separate aims (number 8 and 9). The party: proposed party:
(8) Contests elections in order to offer voters a socialist alternative and build power locally and nationally, without promoting the idea that voting alone can solve the present crises.
but also;
(9) Seeks to build power in communities, workplaces and on the streets.
As I pointed out in my last post, nothing in point 8 indicates a belief that the proposed party is capable of winning a national general election, nor that ‘socialism’ could be achieved by such a government even if it did. This is a big party of why I signed the call to create this party.
Standing in elections claiming to represent the working class and to be fighting for socialism, while staying separate from the actual struggles of the working class, would be to ignore many lessons from history.
The Folly of Reformism
Where has ‘socialism’ been achieved through the ballot box? Nowhere.
Where has it been achieved outside of and in opposition to the State? Everywhere it has ever existed even a tiny bit.
Simply put, the bourgeoisie will never allow a socialist government to rule it’s State. The way Corbynism was undermined by the political and media establishment was nothing compared to how “Democratic Socialists” have been treated in other countries. This month is the 50th anniversary of the fascist counter-revolution in Chile which saw the Socialist president Allende lying dead in his own office and hundreds of thousands of working class activists murdered.
General Pinochet was the man responsible for this with the support of the governments of Britain, the US and the corporations they represent like ITT, whose interests were threatened by Allende and so lobbied the US government to support the coup. As his title suggests, he was in the military and therefore was a part of the very state apparatus which Allende naively tried to use to create ‘socialism’ – leading to such tragic consequences for himself and all of Chile.
Some people use the word ‘deep state’ to describe these features of bourgeois ‘democracy’ by which democratically elected governments can be undermined by the forces of the military and bureaucracy representing the interests of the ruling class. The term is often used by conspiracy theorists, especially on the Right, who sometimes talk as if they believe that genuine democracy once existed but was corrupted by nefarious elements. This is because they ignore history.
The State has NEVER been democratic, and in Britain never even had a constitution pretending it was. The Glorious Revolution which created our modern political system in 1689 was a revolution of the protestant aristocracy and mercantile capitalist class, who created the system to suit themselves.
Working class people took hundreds of years to get the vote and create a political party to supposedly represent their interests. When the first Labour prime minister, Ramsey MacDonald, came to power he betrayed the working class by forming a coalition government with the Tories and Liberals to impose what we would today call Austerity.
There are so many other examples but one which springs to mind is Syriza in Greece, who even went against the results of a nationwide referendum to impose austerity despite claiming to be socialist.
Things like this happen because States usually operate by being constantly in debt to financial capitalists who are then able to force governments to do their bidding, no matter if it is to the detriment of the working class or even other capitalists.
The bourgeoisie will first seek to discredit socialist leaders, as they did to Corbyn. If they are elected despite this they will use the financial system to force them to discredit themselves, as happened to Syriza, Ramsey MacDonald and others. And failing this they will just kill us all, as in Chile, Indonesia and so many other places.
The Revolutionary History of the Working Class
Marx and Engels made clear in the Civil War in France (1871) that they believed socialism could only be achieved through destroying the old state and creating a new one, meaning they had changed their minds since writing the Communist Manifesto (1848). The period between 1848 and 1871 is one of the most interesting in European history and this shift in perspective was due to many factors, but one of the most important was the example of the Paris Commune.
The manifesto was written at a time when both the bourgeoisie and the working class were fighting for basic democratic rights. Although the manifesto poetically described how the interests of these two classes were opposed, they still had hopes that if free elections were held in bourgeois states then a working class party might be able to win and impose policies that would lead to socialism.
By 1871 they had not only lost faith that the bourgeoisie would play fair and allow this, but also been inspired by how the working class of Paris had created their own democratic system government in order to pass policies in their interests, rather than trying to reform the existing State.
In 1905 in St Petersburg the working class did a similar thing, using the word Soviet, usually translated as “council”. (The French word Commune is also usually used to describe what we would call local councils). The memory of this experience led to them repeating the experiment in 1917.
In Spain in the Civil War, similar things happened in Catalonia. So many workers were members of the revolutionary CNT Union that the union itself became effectively the local government in many areas, organised on similar radically democratic principles to the Commune or the Soviets.
More recently in 1994 many villages in the south of Mexico declared their autonomy and created their own self governing structures in the Zapatista rebellion. In the North of Syria the Kurdish YPG/YPJ set up a system of government based on similar principles in the region they call Rojava (West Kurdistan).
The Role of the Revolutionary Organisation
In all these examples there were socialist political organisations who played a big role in creating these new forms of government, usually after having embedded themselves within working class communities for years or even decades. This is the kind of organisation I want to be a part of – one which is embedded in working class communities and patiently explains the need for a revolution to overthrow capitalism and create an egalitarian democracy, while winning trust and respect from the wider class by always demonstrably fighting in the interests of the whole class.
Standing in elections may or may not be part of this process, but when it is it is not with the aim of forming a government over the existing state and having to negotiate with financial capitalists, but merely to use the public platform it gives in order to spread our critiques of the existing system as well as our hopeful vision of the future, in order to further build the revolutionary movement of the working class.
Genuine socialist parties or organisations act in order to facilitate the self-emancipation of the working class. They do not substitute themselves for the class and take power over hierarchical organised, bureaucratic states and claim to be acting in the interests of the working class whilst exploiting them. This is the tragedy of Marxist-Leninism: the Bolshevik party which played such an important role in creating the Soviets and destroying the old state, then set up a new state and took power away from the Soviets.
The most inspiring part of the Transform meeting last night was hearing from an older comrade with decades of experience in organising workers who emphasised the long term nature of this kind of organising. He spoke of how organisations may have very few people coming to their meetings at first but that when the organisation is doing something which working class people clearly see is in their interest, they may suddenly explode.
If we do not listen to the working class and simply write a program full of policies we assume the working class will support, then we are falling into the same trap of substituting ourselves for the class. If we are not embedded within working class communities in struggle, we will not know what the wider class actually wants and will therefore not be able to create a successful program.
Conclusion
Transform still has not written a program nor a constitution, so there is still everything to play for. I still believe it has the potential to be an organisation genuinely rooted in the working class, but only if it admits to itself that this is not currently the case and forms a realistic strategy to remedy this.
If we do field candidates at elections I hope we are wise enough not to choose people who are just attention seeking opportunists with delusions of finding themselves rubbing shoulders with the Westminster elite whistle posing as radicals, but rather choose people committed to the self-emancipation of the working class.
Raz O'Connor 