Mike McNair: Replies in defence of his book

Mike Mcnair replies

(For the PDF of this article and the original polemic click here)

Dave Esterson's article

Labour may be productive or unproductive. The same is true for polemics, but for different reasons. A productive polemic engages with what the target actually says and forces the target to respond to these arguments. An unproductive polemic is unproductive in the same sense as Soviet shoe “production”: the shoes are ill-fitting and tend to fall apart rapidly. Unproductive polemics characteristically merely reproduce the writer’s prejudices.

Dave Esterson’s review of my book is mostly unproductive polemic. It accuses me of saying things I don’t say and of not saying things I do say. It almost entirely ignores my substantive arguments, which he characterises as “bedknobs and broomsticks Macnair attaches to his book.” It displays bravura  rhetoric and a posture of “justified anger” – at the end of the day mainly to avoid arguing with the book.

To get rid of the 90% of crap I should begin with pointing out two things. The first is that my book is not in any sense about blaming the leaders of the Russian Revolution for its defeat, as Esterson repeatedly claims. In the first chapter I wrote (pp23-24):

“. . . when I criticise the arguments and decisions of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, I do not intend by this to pass some sort of moral judgment on the decisions they took under extremely difficult circumstances.

“I do not even necessarily mean that any superior alternative was open to them. For example, I said above that October 1917 was a gamble on revolution in western Europe, which failed. But the alternative to this gamble put forward by Martov and Kautsky – a Menshevik-SR government based on the Constituent Assembly – was unreal: the real alternative available was either the policy the Bolsheviks actually followed, including the coercion of the peasantry to supply food, ‘red terror’ and so on, or a government of the White generals and ‘white terror’. The problem here is not the actions the Bolsheviks took: it is their over-theorisation of these actions, which has been inherited by the modern far left.”

This comment is substantially identical to much of what comrade Esterson writes about the Russian Revolution. On this front he merely mistakenly thinks that he disagrees with me.
The second point is that I am not in any sense interested in “rehabilitating” any part of Kautsky’s conduct and ideas from August 1914, when he became a scab – with two exceptions among his arguments, one of which he shared with Luxemburg and the other with Trotsky.

On this front I don’t propose to reproduce extensive quotations. Part of the reason comrade Esterson’s attempt to tag me as a Kautskyite is a waste of time is because Bill Jeffries already made the attempt in responses to David Broder’s review of the book on the commune website.

I replied pointing out the falsity of Bill’s selective quotations and inability to see what was before his eyes or read my plain English denunciations of Kautsky. The whole exchange is at http://thecommune.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/revolutionary-strategy/ and it would be a waste of the limited space available here to reproduce it.
Two exceptions

The first of the two exceptions is the criticism shared by Kautsky and Luxemburg of the extension of banning parties and papers beyond open counter-revolutionaries. Kautsky criticised this – wrongly – at a time when it was only open counter-revolutionaries who were banned. Luxemburg responded to the 1918 ban on the Left SRs, which was to ban the party with the largest mass support after having rigged the elections to deny it a victory (Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in power, Ch 11).

The objection, which I share, is that without freedom to organise against the momentary majority, the proletariat as a class cannot rule. This criticism is in fact, also shared by comrade Esterson: but he fails to confront the underlying theoretical issues. The logic of going beyond emergency bans to a system of one-party rule did not come from any practical counter-revolutionary activities of the Menshevik-Internationalists, Left SRs, and so on, at the end of the Civil War. It came from the (Hegelian-Marxist) demand for “strict unity of will”. This is most clearly expressed by Lenin in his speech to the 3rd All-Russia Trade Union Congress in April 1920 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/07.htm), but was argued by Lenin and others in various other places.

The second exception is the view shared by Kautsky, Martov and Trotsky that objective conditions in Russia alone were insufficient for socialism.
By “socialism” all these authors meant, at first, was the state and economic regime which would immediately succeed capitalism, i.e. in Marxist and Trotskyist terms, the dictatorship of the proletariat: this usage of “socialism” for the dictatorship of the proletariat was normal in the Second International. It was only through the Russian polemics of the 1920s that “socialism” came to mean a separate stage beyond the immediate outcome of overthrowing capitalism.

Kautsky and his co-thinkers thought wholly in terms of separate national development, and therefore concluded that proletarian revolution in Russia (and in Germany, and in Austria . . .) was ultraleft adventurism.

Trotsky – and, in 1917-21, the large majority of the Bolsheviks – agreed that the material basis for socialism did not exist in Russia. Taking power was therefore – in the words I have used – a gamble on revolution in western Europe. If the revolution does not spread, they said, the Russian revolution will inevitably be defeated. But unlike Kautsky and his co-thinkers, they were clear that the world war posed immediately the question of world proletarian revolution. On this basis, to take the first step in Russia – to gamble on the world revolution – was justified.

On this question I think the Bolsheviks were right and Kautsky and his co-thinkers were wrong and scabs. I have argued this point more fully last year: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/688/macnair.htm; the whole series of which this article is part (August 2-September 13 2007) is strongly relevant to the present polemic. I admit that I should have integrated at least part of that series into the book under review in order to make my position clearer.

Comrade Esterson’s polemic against me on this question is something different. It is a rerun of the standard Stalinist polemic against “Trotskyism” on this very question: Trotskyism, these people said,amounts to Menshevism because it is “defeatist” about the ability of the Russian working class to win through “class struggle” and insists that only world revolution can win.
Tony Clark of the ­Stalin Society and Communist Party Alliance has been for months polemicising in the Weekly Worker letters page against the CPGB (and me), and in favour of Stalin, on precisely similar grounds. He would presumably applaud comrade Esterson’s arguments.

If we throw all this stuff out, we throw out with it the whole structure of comrade Esterson’s argument in terms of the blame game and the grounds of his angry rhetoric. There remains a substantive issue at stake. Comrade Esterson insists that revolutionaries today should identify with the left wing of the pre-war Second International as opposed to its centre, because the left identified with the mass class struggle and the centre (allegedly) did not.

In the chapters of the book which discuss the debate in the Second International, I “gave faces to” the right by the name of Bernstein, the left by the name of Luxemburg, and the centre by the name of Kautsky. I was explicit, however, that all three identifications were imperfect. On the right Bernstein was nearer to Marxism than Keir Hardie or Jaurès was (p36), and Luxemburg was closer to the centre than were the real ideological leaders of the syndicalist and semi-syndicalist left like Sorel, Arturo Labriola, Gorter, Pannekoek, or Bogdanov and Lunacharsky (p37). “Down to 1914,” I wrote, “Russian Bolshevism was a tendency within the centre, not a tendency opposed to it.” (p54)

This last point is absolutely fundamental. I could, if I chose, have written the arguments against the coalitionist strategy of the right and the general strike strategy of the left entirely through quotations from Lenin’s polemics against these tendencies. But to do so would be a subtle form of historical falsification. The connection of Lenin’s line before 1914 with the strategic line of the Second International centre tendency has been amply demonstrated – most recently in Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered.

Why is this fundamental?

The immediate goal of communists has to be the political power of the working class. This is only possible if the existing state power is zerbrechen, smashed up: i.e. the soldiers, etc, cease to obey their commanders (or are defeated) and a new armed force is created controlled by the working class.

The process by which this happens involves revolutionary crisis. Crisis can break out through military defeat, and/or through mass strikes and demonstrations, and/or through the victory of a “left” party or coalition in elections and attempts to overthrow it by a coup (as happened in Spain and has occurred on several occasions in Latin America).

But crisis of the state does not spontaneously lead to victory.  The (temporary) victory of the Russian revolution was due to the presence of a faction-party which expressed the workers’ aspiration to take political power and reconstruct the society: the Bolsheviks. The defeat of the German and Austrian revolutions in 1918-19 (and the eventual victory of Nazism in those countries) was due to the absence of such a party.

On this point I am in entire agreement with the post-1917 Bolsheviks and with Trotsky among them. Moreover, Trotsky was in my view right in Lessons of October and in his various polemics with the Spanish left in the 1930s to insist that fetishism of soviets could not substitute for a party.

Further, it is clear that by February 1917 the Bolsheviks were already a faction-party with wide and deep mass roots. They were not a grouplet which suddenly “got big” under conditions of revolutionary crisis, but a faction-party which in 1912-14 was already winning the majority of workers’ votes in both Duma and trade union elections, but which had been temporarily knocked back by repression in 1914-16.

Repeated revolutionary crises since 1918 have only confirmed and reconfirmed the point. If the working class is to take political power, it must have a party with real mass roots, which is determined to fight for ­political power, before the crisis breaks out. Sects – even sects which grow very large, like the Fedayeen in 1979-80 Iran – are no substitute.

But this means the construction of a mass party has to take place under conditions in which the question of power is not immediately posed. Moreover, it means that organising work and propaganda work, whose payoff is not immediate, is as important as immediate agitation round strikes and other forms of the immediate class struggle. Further, the party has to carry on propaganda and agitation on political questions – on questions of the constitution and the structure of political power. This de-legitimises the existing state order, legitimises the mass class struggle and worker solidarity, and prepares the political ground for workers to aim for power when crisis breaks out.

This fact is why the centre built mass parties one of which – the Bolsheviks – could reach for power, while the Second International left did not. The lefts thought that the mass struggle would solve the problem of the bureaucracy: Luxemburg is explicit on the point and so is Trotsky, while the real all-the-way mass strike advocates like Sorel or Bogdanov’s Vpered-ists argued against any political action under capitalism as corrupting.

The result is unorganised ideological polemic against the right, like the left in the SPD; or sects, like the SDKPiL of Luxemburg, Jogiches and Dzerzhinsky, or the DeLeonists; or ephemeral unorganised mass-action lefts, like the Italian Maximalists. These three forms have been repeated – too often! – by the post-1945 far left.

The ideas of the pre-1914 centre, including Kautsky, are therefore the necessary starting point. Put another way, Bolshevism, not Vpered-ism, is the necessary starting point. It is necessary to criticise the ideas of the centre, and I do so: they were radically wrong on the state, on nation versus internationalism, and – except for the Bolsheviks – wrong on “unity of the workers’ movement”, i.e. unity with the right under any conditions, and for these reasons the majority of their leaders became scabs.

But the ideas of the Second International left and the fetishism of “struggle” as opposed to political action are no alternative. The far left has been trying them repeatedly and uselessly for the last 50-odd years.

Comrade Esterson insists we should keep banging our heads against this wall. To do is to commit yourself in advance to the defeat of the working class when revolutionary crisis does break out.

Sun 01, March 2009 @ 18:27