Rebuilding the forces of socialism

Workers’ industrial struggle has revived in recent months on a scale not seen for decades. That is cause for great hopes. Left-wing political mobilisation, though, has failed to match it. On issues like the NHS, new anti-strike laws, asylum rights, and the environment, activity on the streets has been small in proportion to the number of people opposed to official policies.

That reflects a low ebb of socialist activity in the broadest sense. The activist socialist groups are often not very active and have little cooperation and little dialogue. Many people see themselves as socialists and yet feel no drive to join a socialist organisation, as if being a socialist without collective organisation for socialism makes more sense than being a “trade-unionist” without joining a trade union, which it doesn’t.

We have seen the Sanders movement, the DSA in the USA, Syriza in its heyday, the Corbyn surge in its heyday. There will be more such surges. So far, however, those mobilisations have been too low-temperature for Marxists to generate in them an escalating process of socialist renewal.

Cause

We can list the causes of this period of recession. First, the impact of the collapse of Stalinism (even on long-time anti-Stalinists). That more or less coincided with, and thus was compounded by, successive defeats for the working class in many countries from the early or mid 1980s on; by the successful establishment from the late 1980s (though with much fumbling and trial and error) of the new capitalist world-market order called neoliberalism; by the capitalist successes of the heyday of neoliberalism, from about 1990 to 2008; and by the rapid and drastic restructurings of capitalist enterprise in the last decades, which have left workers and unions almost everywhere scrabbling to keep up.

Even for those who hated Stalinism, in the period when the Stalinist states were still reputed to be economically successful there was a strong temptation to see the realistic character of socialism as it being a matter of taking the collective ownership, the (sort of) planning, and the industrial development, typical of Stalinism in its pomp, and then at all levels in the planning replacing privileged bureaucrats by democratically elected and accountable people. Socialism would be a matter of putting together two elements already tested in practice.

Marx wrote about the Paris Commune: “The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple... They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant”. It was as if that was adapted to: we do not expect miracles, but only to set free the elements of the new society which with old disgusting Stalinist society itself is pregnant.

As long ago as 1936, Trotsky in Revolution Betrayed argued that the Stalinists’ fully-detailed planning, with all prices and production targets (notionally) set administratively, was unworkable even in its own terms. Good planning depends on information which for a long time to come cannot be generated and coordinated without having real markets (with, of course, some of their downsides).

Actually the totally-administered economy ran into stagnation, and would be even less workable if notionally combined with democracy, because even more decisions would be delayed by the time inevitably needed for democratic wrangling at different levels.

The collapse of Stalinism brought that into focus, and the socialist organisation of economic life could no longer be seen as so simple a step forward from an already-advancing process.

Of those revolutionaries shaped in their thinking in the 1960s and 70s, many dispersed after the mid-70s in dismay at the course of Cambodia, Vietnam, and post-Mao China. Of those who stuck to their cause, many began to think after 1991 that, as the veteran French “orthodox Trotskyist” François Sabado put it recently, they had become “revolutionaries without revolution”, revolutionaries whom “the revolution” had abandoned, revolutionaries denied the solace of any new socialistic-tinged revolution (as they see it) since the Sandinista overturn in Nicaragua in 1979.

From the late 1980s the old Communist Parties, often long-established as the main visible leftish force in their countries, shrivelled. The Communist Party of Great Britain, which had over 25,000 members until the late 1970s, wound itself up in 1991. The current Communist Party of Britain, with maybe 1,000 members, mostly elderly and inactive, originates from a 1988 splinter group. The Communist Party of Italy, which had maybe a million members, dissolved in 1991; a fragment of which many revolutionary socialists had high hopes, Communist Refoundation, still exists, but wretchedly. Taking an overview of the last three decades or so, left social-democratic parties have done badly. The groups with some reference to Trotsky have not done as badly, but in general and on average they have diminished in vitality.

This is not the first period of authentic socialism receding as a political force. The ebb is comprehensible in terms of the history of the labour movement. And the grounds for confidence that the tide will turn are equally rooted in history and in our understanding of the basics of capitalism.

Climate crises add urgency and increased relevance to our socialist politics. The adversity and suffering they will inflict on our class, and humanity, will likely increase and change in the coming years and decades. Our class-struggle socialist approach does not offer the instant gratification advertised in NGOish quick “solutions” to climate change. But it will remain relevant, adapting to the changing terrain, and indeed the only hope for humanity to curb ecological catastrophes.

The working class has not disappeared. It has expanded hugely on a world scale. It has not contracted even in “post-industrialising” countries, though its composition has changed (more office and “white-collar” and service workers). Capitalist exploitation, inequality, and insecurity have increased. The working class is neither beaten down and atomised as it was under fascism and Stalinism, nor seduced into complacent acquiescence to the status quo as it was in some richer capitalist countries in the 1950s. The working class, however much pushed onto the back foot, will over time regroup and fight back.

Despite the general recession in industrial militancy, on many issues important for the future (gender equality, anti-racism) the drift of working-class opinion is to the left. In time the workers will rise again, repeating on a bigger scale the signs of revival shown now, generating a cycle of increased struggle bringing increased confidence and organisation bringing increased struggle…

This will not happen all at once, but in spurts and sallies. The speed at which it happens will depend on the numbers, organisation, and energy which active socialists can accumulate in the quiet times and the smaller struggles; and the growth of socialists will depend on our energy, reliability, visibility, and accessibility in the struggles.

Part of our task now is rehabilitating and repopularising a vision of socialism as based in working-class struggle rather than a “world process”, and as it was understood before Stalinism: workers’ government, common ownership of major productive wealth, democracy both in society and in the workplace, and universal basic services. It is a difficulty that we can find no better word than “socialism”, and yet that word carries a baggage of association with a variety of tyrannies or dim minimalist-reform projects miscalling themselves socialist. Maybe in time a new term will catch on which we can use.

Visibility

Young people wanting to change the world will hear nothing about socialism unless we speak out. Or, if they hear anything, it will be only the residues of the decades when the left was overshadowed by Stalinism: “socialism” as a national-developmentalist project, rather than an international, emancipatory, democratic one.

We can transmit and educate ourselves in the tradition of the “heterodox” Third Camp Trotskyists of the 1940s and 50s. In the pivotal time when socialist politics was swamped by Stalinist-tinged developmentalism, they upheld, and expressed through analyses and activities, the idea of socialism as working-class self-emancipation. That tradition disappeared to the margins and the archives in the 1960s, a victim of the human attrition of the activists who sustained it. We have put work into reconnecting with it. We have to make that work our collective property, and make it visible and accessible to people seeking to reorient in socialist politics.

Our task is rebuilding a culture as well as building organisation.