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From International Socialism (1st series), No.52, July-September 1972, pp.35-37.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Coming British Revolution
by Tariq Ali
Jonathan Cape 95p
Tariq Ali has written a disappointing book, yet most of the points which any revolutionary would want to make (with one important exception) can be found somewhere in the book’s 244 pages.
We should start by outlining those aspects of the book with which readers of IS journal are not likely to disagree. Massive strike waves, the Industrial Relations Act, Ireland, the Common Market; all these show British capitalism in mounting crisis from which it cannot escape, and which it can only grapple with by attacking the working class. Reformism and Stalinism have no answer either in Britain or internationally; only the revolutionary groupings can offer an answer, and must do so by building a revolutionary party rooted in the working class. All these points are made in the introduction and are repeated, and in some cases developed, at other points in the text. The chapters on The Problems of British Capitalism and The British CP’s road to socialism in particular contain useful material. It would be pleasant to be able to record that our major disagreement with the author was on the question of how such a party is to be built and what it could do. Unfortunately Tariq shows little sign of having any answer to either question. Instead he goes into great detail on such questions as the CP and the left groups, CND, VSC, the student movement and the history of the British intelligentsia, which are given a total of 134 pages, as against 28 on the labour movement. This is remarkable, if it is in the working class that the revolutionary party needs to be built. Tariq would argue that it is in the so-called ‘peripheral’ layers rather than in the labour movement that most recruits to a Marxist organisation would be drawn in the present period. But the basis for such recruitment, if it is to be sound, must be the organisation’s programme for intervening in the working class movement. The book nowhere makes clear what the basis and method of that intervention is to be.
Tariq is aware that the industrial relations act and the attack on shop floor organisation through productivity dealing, open up the possibility of a revival of politics within the workers’ movement; the fragmented consciousness and forms of struggle developed during the postwar boom are no longer enough. He also realises (p.71) that
‘The ruling class is well aware that in any factory there is a section of workers who will always oppose the machinations of the management. These workers have a certain political consciousness, and not merely trade-union consciousness ... On the other hand all sections of the class contain workers who are totally under the control of bourgeois ideology ... No action by the advanced section of the working class will ever influence them. Between these two extremes are the great mass of workers ... The question of whether or not they will support strike action depends on and is decided by the continual battle between the backward workers and the bourgeois press and television on the one hand, and the ability of the conscious workers to combat this on the other. What the Tories want to do is to help the backward section of workers by intimidating or sharply changing the ideas of the middle group of workers.’
Now for most readers of IS journal, the obvious conclusion from this point is that the job of revolutionaries is to intervene with the organisation and demands which can increase the cohesion and confidence of this advanced minority, and thus increase their specific weight within the class as a whole. This is the central task of a revolutionary party. The International Socialists attempt to do this by creating organised fractions of political militants in industry, on a Trade-Union and industry-wide basis, who can apply the general analysis and programme of the organisation to the particular conditions in which they operate. In return they can feed their experience back into the political centre of the organisation, thus building a party which knows how to listen to the class, and get a feedback from those layers it has contact with, as well as deliver lectures to it.
This process has so far led to the formation of fractions in the motor industry, in the docks, in the print, and amongst miners, postmen, local government workers, teachers and journalists; many of these also produce or help to produce rank-and-file publications. This activity has also led to the development of programmes of demands, adopted at successive industrial conferences, on the key questions of Trade Union democracy, the fight against unemployment and the industrial relations act.
Now the detailed demands around which IS has attempted to carry on this work may be open to criticism; but the strategy and methodology behind it should be a commonplace for every Marxist, and the centre around which any group attempting to build or helping to build a revolutionary party should structure its work. This does not mean that other sectors of work are ignored, but that they are always strategically related to this centre of gravity of the organisation’s activity.
But these points are nowhere made in Tariq’s book. The need for a revolutionary party is often repeated. We are also left in no doubt that, in Britain at least, it must be based on the working class. But how we build it, and what we do with it when we’ve got it, is nowhere made clear. As a result the book is structured around an absent centre. Because the way the party relates to and leads the class, is nowhere made clear, the ideas on how to build it are eclectic. This eclecticism is raised to the level of theory by the simple device of giving it a name; the strategy of ‘from the periphery to the centre’, or, more pretentiously, ‘the dialectic of the sectors of intervention.’ The basis of this perspective is that at the present time, the main areas of work for revolutionaries lie amongst radicalised youth and students, immigrant workers, women, and in the organisation of single-issue solidarity campaigns with anti-imperialist struggles in (currently) Ireland or Vietnam. The working class comes later.
‘These peripheral areas’ we are told, ‘are not decisive as far as the social revolution is concerned; their importance lies in another direction. For various reasons they are not as susceptible to the reformist ideology which dominates the organised working class, as are the adult workers themselves. This makes it possible for revolutionaries to intervene directly as revolutionaries, and win large numbers of people active in these layers to revolutionary Marxism, to the concept of the Leninist party, and thus acquire a firm theoretical base as well as the quantitative strength with which to start the process of modifying the relation of forces between revolutionaries and reformists inside the centre of the capitalist system, the factory.’ (p.231)
It is a pity that the reader has to wait till page 231 for this point, as he may still be impressed by the weighty point made by our author on page 59:
‘This carrying of the economic struggle right into the workplace instead of at nationally negotiated levels has led some left-wing organisations to believe that the workplace struggle is the key to changing the consciousness of the working class. Nothing could be more dangerous.’
The key to the apparent contradiction is simple; the difference between the two passages is one of tense. The central importance of the struggle in industry is recognised in the abstract and postponed to some undefined future. But no conclusions are drawn from it for today.
Of course the revolutionary left has for a whole period drawn a disproportionate number of its cadres from what are here called the ‘peripheral’ sectors. But the central question in the marxist methodology of party-building is to find a way of overcoming this fact, and turning the best elements from these non-proletarian layers, towards the working class. Instead of facing up to and attempting to solve this problem, the strategy of ‘from the periphery to the centre’ evades it. Tariq can see the problem, but fails even to ask how it can be solved. As he correctly observes:
‘... the British CP has in its ranks many of the most class-conscious workers, many of whom are shop-stewards. Many of these militants are totally opposed to the CP’s industrial policy, but they will not leave the party unless they can see a meaningful alternative which has not only the correct political perspectives, but also the necessary organisational strength to service the needs of industrial militants. Those worker militants not in the CP are either active trade-unionists, and wary of all political organisations because of their experiences with the Labour party or the CP, or else are ideologically still tied to Labourism.’ (p.231)
But the conclusion from this is not that the struggle to build an industrial base must therefore be at the centre of any revolutionary group’s practice, but rather that ‘Hence the revolutionary organisation has to build its forces on the periphery and start the move towards the centre.’ The idea here is presumably that ‘organisational strength’ gained in the ‘periphery’ can then be used to ‘service the needs of industrial militants.’ But in fact, if the organisation has not been centred around intervention in the trade-unions and the factories from the start, the cadres acquired in the initial ‘primitive accumulation’ in the universities and elsewhere will have to be totally re-formed before they can effectively intervene in a field to which their organisation is totally alien.
The whole ‘strategy’ is an attempt to short-circuit a real historical problem facing the revolutionary left by means of a manoeuvre. As Trotsky cuttingly observed:
‘Just as every alchemist of the Middle Ages hoped, in spite of the failure of others, to make gold, so the present-day strategists in manouevres also hope, each in his place, to deceive history ... Even a correctly contrived manouevre is, generally speaking, all the more dangerous for a revolutionary party the younger and weaker the latter is in relation to its enemies, allies, and semi-allies. That is why ... the Bolshevik party did not at all begin with manoeuvring as a panacea, but came to it, grew into it, in the measure that it sunk its roots deep in the working class, became strong politically and matured ideologically.’ (Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder ed., p.136)
The idea of a ‘short cut’ to the working class is substituted for the hard and often unglamorous work of building an industrial base as the chief priority now, in a period, when the audience for revolutionary politics in the working class is larger, and the opportunity of building a revolutionary organisation greater, than at any time since after the first world war. But one cannot expect a serious approach to the politics of the Labour movement from an author who can write (p.25):
‘This’ (i.e. a revolutionary) ‘party would have to thoroughly infiltrate and control certain key unions (not necessarily big unions; in late capitalist society a few well-planned actions by small groups of workers in vital industries could affect capitalism quite severely!)’
Now Tariq would, to his credit, be amongst the first to denounce anyone who spoke of the NLF and the North Vietnamese as ‘infiltrating’ South Vietnam. Vietnam is one country, and it is not the Vietnamese who are ‘infiltrating’ it. But he cannot see that when revolutionary militants fight for leadership within the trade unions, they are not ‘infiltrating’ their own organisations! To imagine that they are is to adopt the terminology of the Economic League and the Monday Club, as surely as to talk of the Vietnamese ‘infiltrating’ their own country is to adopt the language of the Pentagon. The fight for revolutionary leadership within the trade unions is not conducted by ‘infiltration’ but by mobilising the rank and file in struggles around demands, however limited, which make them conscious of their own strength and of the inability of their bureaucratic leaders, tied to the system, to lead a fight against it. The key question is not to find a programme which amounts to, or merely redescribes, the abolition of capitalism. That question can be solved from books, without leaving a library. The question is to find those demands which vanguard militants can use to mobilise the rank and file, in action which broadens consciousness, raises confidence, and can create organs of dual power. To this question Tariq has no answer.
Just as the spirit of God, in the first chapter of Genesis, ‘hovers over the face of the waters’ so the Marxist organisation, in Tariq’s conception, floats rootless between different social strata, pouncing from time to time, now on the students, now on the peasantry of the third world, now on the ‘new youth vanguard’, and occasionally also on a few favoured elements of the working class. (Thus on p.174 student militants are exhorted ‘not to abandon their working-class orientation, or to stop attempting to detach by propaganda some of the militant rank-and-file leaders’, my emphasis). For Marxists, by contrast, the starting point is always the working class and the struggle of its most advanced layers to maintain and extend their position against the backward workers. A Marxist lead to the so-called ‘peripheral’ layers can only be given by an organisation whose centre of attention is the struggle in the factories, the trade-unions, .and the housing estates.
In a number of passages, our author shows a fear that such an orientation must lead to economism, and ‘contamination’ by backward layers of the working class. This fantasy disguises the fact that his own errors are, socially, due to an accommodation to the petty-bourgeois milieu his organisation has chosen to inhabit. Historically, however, the roots lie in the abandonment by his organisation of the central theses of Marxism on the role of the working class as the sole agency of socialist revolution. (A full account of the background to this can be found in the recently published collection The 4th International, Stalinism and the International Socialists, Pluto Press £1.00.)
There is not sufficient space here to detail the unbelievable ignorance of the history of his movement and ours which Tariq displays. He appears to believe (p.116) that Burnham and Shachtman held the theory of State Capitalism, and can argue that Tony Cliff ‘capitulated to Cold War pressures’ by regarding North Korea as a capitalist state on the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, without once mentioning that the theory of State Capitalism was developed before the onset of the Cold War, and that the Socialist Review group was founded after the Korean War started.
He also holds the picturesque view that if the Stalinist States are state-capitalist, then the epoch we are living in cannot be defined as one of socialist revolutions, and therefore ‘the only perspective is that of patient propaganda work for reforms within the working-class movement’. For Marxists, the nature of the epoch as one of capitalist decline is defined by the level of development of the productive forces, and and not at all by whether or not the working class is in power at any point in time; this depends on the relationship of forces between the classes, which can, wondrous to relate, fluctuate. That is why Lenin and Trotsky were able to characterise the epoch as one of revolutions before the Russian revolution. As Trotsky explains,
‘The revolutionary character of the epoch does not lie in that it permits of the accomplishment of the revolution, that is the seizure of power, at every given moment. Its revolutionary character consists in profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions ...’ (Trotsky, 3rd Int. after Lenin, p.82).
In fact Tariq’s bizarre logic rebounds on him. From the fact that he makes the defence of the ‘workers’ states’ a practical political question, we must deduce that he regards it as at least theoretically possible that they could be overthrown. We must therefore conclude that if conventional bourgeois regimes were re-established in Russia, China, Cuba, etc., he would conclude that the nature of the epoch had changed, and that ‘the only perspective is that ... of reforms.’ This logic, which is not ours, assumes that for the working class to struggle for power in any one country, it is first necessary that a workers’ state should exist somewhere else. The name of this theory is of course Menshevism.
We would not like to leave the reader with the view that The Coming British Revolution is an unmitigated disaster. It is a book written by a genuine revolutionary, who has however no strategy for uniting his theoretical aspirations with the revolutionary practice of the working class. Many excellent revolutionary bits and pieces are therefore strewn throughout the book, with nothing to integrate them into a coherent whole. It is therefore necessary to concentrate our attention on the points of difference rather than agreement. Only a serious orientation towards intervention in the working-class movement can give coherence to a revolutionary critique of capitalism. Without that we have nothing but commentary and confusion. In Trotsky’s words:
‘We have here a situation similar to that on board a ship which is equipped, and even overloaded, with numerous Marxism mechanisms and appliances, while its mainsail is so raised as to be purposely swelled by every revisionist and reformist wind.’ (ibid., p.23)
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