*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism (1947)
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
C.L.R. James on Negroes and Bolshevism
Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other CLR James texts. Standard american spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication
The following article by C.L.R. James appeared under a pseudonym in the 7 April 1947 issue of LABOR ACTION, newspaper of the Workers Party of the United States.
Negroes and Bolshevism
The American government is today building up its campaign against the Communist Party, “the Reds.” Readers of LABOR ACTION know that the Workers Party has been the unswerving foe of the Communist Party. But we oppose the Communist Party because it betrays the revolutionary struggle. We attack it because, in its slavish subservience to the Moscow bureaucracy, it uses Negroes and the American labor movement purely to advance the projects and policies of Russia. Many Negroes know this. And they are filled with a deep skepticism of political movements which are in any way radical. At this time it will be useful to recall exactly what Bolshevism was and will always be. There are many lessons for Negroes, not only in judging political parties in general but in judging and forming organizations of their own.
Mass Action
First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle. All other political parties depend on parliamentary means, on petitions, telegrams to Senators, mass meetings at which “important” and “distinguished” politicians speak. Bolshevism does not disdain parliamentary means. But fundamentally it relies upon mass action – mass demonstrations of workers, strikes, picketing, mobilizing workers in order to bring the pressure of organized labor and its allies upon the capitalist states. Let us illustrate the difference by an example. In the years before World War I, the Bolsheviks elected about half a dozen members to the Duma – the Russian Parliament. These elected representatives at once became very active about bills, the budget, parliamentary procedure, etc. They went for advice to Lenin, who was living in exile. Lenin laughed heartily and told them what amounted to this:
“Don’t bother about their bills and their budget and their parliamentary procedure. When you turn comes stand up and tell them about the lives of the workers, tell them about all the exploitation and oppression by the classes they represent and then tell them that it would not be long before the workers will rise in their revolutionary wrath and sweep capitalism and its dishonest thieving parliaments into the dustbin.”
Something at once becomes clear. The Bolshvik deputies were not begging the capitalist politicians and the capitalist state for anything. They were not even speaking to the parliamentarians. They were speaking to the workers outside. They were using the Parliament as a forum to make revolutionary propaganda, to force the attention of the more backward workers, to make the middle classes listen, to expose the fraud of parliamentarism. Naturally the revolutionary party holds its own meetings, etc.
But its main interest in the capitalist Parliament was to use it for mobilizing the workers against capitalism and all its works.
Policy for Negroes
The Negroes of the United States would do wonderfully if they could impose upon any Congress or municipal candidate exactly some such policy. “You want to go to Congress by our vote. What do you propose to do there? Are you going to maneuver with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party? Are you going to waste your time and our votes by arguing with Bilbo and Pappy O’Daniel and Taft and Pepper, that liberal from Florida who gets into Congress by preaching white supremacy? You are of no use to us. Go there not to convince and bargain with them, but to say loudly what we want and say it so that the nationa and all the world will hear. Then you will get our vote. Otherwise we have no use for you.” Bolshevism carried to an extraordinary pitch of skill this use of parliaments for revolutionary purposes. For example, the federal government every years passes financial bills for the salaries of a system ridden by Jim Crow. Would a Bolshevik vote for this? No, he would denounce the system and refuse to give his vote for this iniquitous measure. But if during the discussion of details of the bill, there was a division over whether the lowest ranks of government employees should have an increase of ten percent or not, a Bolshevik would speak in favor and vote in favor.
If parliamentary procedure allowed he would move for the reduction of all cabinet members’ salaries, just in order to expose the injustices of the system. If it were possible to get such motion passed, he would vote for it. But then, when it came to the final vote, he would vote a loud and resounding “No,” indicating thereby his repudiation of the whole system. That is the Bolshevik method. There is absolutely no reason why a Congressman elected by Negroes should not carry it out. The appropriations for war? No. And not a mere vote but a detailed exposure of the whole system. And having made these speeches and carried out these actions in Congress, the Congressman who acted in this way on behalf of the Negro people would do more good for Negroes than the whole Democratic Party.
Don’t Need “Friends”
Exactly the same policy is the Bolshevik policy for a labor Congressman. “Friends of labor” in Congress are no good to thw working class movement. “Friends of Negroes” are no good in Congress to the Negro people. They are no good on City Councils. All they do is to confuse and corrupt the people’s political thinking. Now we ask the Negroes: has this or anything like this been the policy of Ben Davis, for example, the Communist Party member on the New York City Council? One year he is supporting Leham and Mead. Then comes an upheaval in the Communist Party. Browder is thrown out. Foster comes in, a new policy is announced and – Ben Davis supports Mead and Lehman! A genuine Bolshevik is distinguished by the consistency of his opposition to all aspects of the capitalist system. He votes for or supports only those specific things which benefit the workers and the oppressed and he opposes everything else. Now it seems to us that a Negro community like Harlem would create a stir that would be felt in all parts of the country if it demanded of its candidate that his main task in and out of Congress or municipality was to denounce the system and use parliamentary forms and practices as a tribune for the education of the people. The great crime of the Communist Party is that it has prostituted the very name of Bolshevism in the service of Moscow, The American capitalist class is out to break these Stalinists. Negroes cannot stand aside and see this happen without protest. It is an invasion [sic] of democratic rights. But our way of defeating these corrupting rats is to put forward labor and Negro candidates who, by a genuinely revolutionary policy, will educate the people both as to the crimes of American imperialism and the betrayals of the Moscow stooges.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal-The Marxist C.L.R.James On The Russian Question-1941
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
********
C.L.R. James on the Russian Question
Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other C.L.R. James texts. Standard American spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication. We have supplied a subheading (1. Introduction) where this was not present in Scott’s version, but where something was obviously required.
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Resolution submitted by C.L.R. James (writing as “J.R. Johnson”) to the 1941 convention of the Workers Party of the United States.
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Resolution on the Russian Question
1. Introduction
For many years the fact that in Russia the means of production were state property was sufficient for the Fourth International to characterize the working class as ruling class and the Russian state as a workers state.
Today, however, 1941, side by side with a tremendous but declining rate of industrial expansion in Russia, the working class has been reduced to a state of pauperization, slavery, and degradation unequaled in modern Europe. The real wages of the workers are approximately one-half of what they were in 1913. A bureaucrat holds all economic and political power. To continue to call the Russian workers the ruling class is to make a statement without meaning.
Yet Trotsky never wavered from this position. It led him, the direct successor of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, into calling upon the workers of Russia to be the best soldiers in an army that was, according to his own statement, acting as the tool of an imperialist power. The Workers Party, in refusing to accept this position, and in calling upon the Russian workers in this war to turn the guns in the opposite direction, made a profound break not with all that we have thought on the Russian question, but with something far more important, with how we have thought about it. So profound a difference must convince the party that what we face is not a rehash or manipulation of our previous ideas but a fundamental revaluation of the method and equipment with which we previously approached the question. Unless this is absolutely and thoroughly done, the party will live in a state of continual uncertainty, confusion, and recurrent conflict about our fundamental aims. This explains the scope and method of this resolution.
2. The Marxian Theory of Society
Marx rests his theory of society upon the technical level of the instruments of production under given historical circumstances.
“Assume a particular state of development in the productive forces of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce, and consumption, and you will have a corresponding social order, a corresponding organization of the family and of the ranks and classes, in a word, the corresponding civil society.”
These are Marx’s own words. The purely historical, i.e., the chronological analysis of society, places property first. The logical method of Marx examines the actual historical relations always as an expression of the logical analysis, which begins with the technical level of the instruments of production. This determines the relation of the people to each other and the division into classes, which then determine the relation of the classes to the instruments of production and the results of labor. These last, usually expressed in laws, are the relations of property, which, from his earliest writings, Marx always defined as an expression of the mode of production. This is the strict Marxian terminology and the strict Marxian sequence, as can be seen from a casual reading of the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy and The Communist Manifesto.
Applying this method to Russia we find that in 1941 the technical level of production, unsupported by one or more powerful socialist states, compels a social relation of exploited wage-laborers and appropriating capitalists. In order to achieve the bourgeois- democratic revolution in 1917 the proletariat was compelled to seize power. But this seizure of political power was due chiefly to the incapacity of the ruling class and the conjunctural historical circumstances. The working class lacked the maturity in production of a proletariat which was a majority of the population and had been trained and disciplined by large-scale capitalism. All political power rests in the last analysis upon and is determined by production relations. This was the reason for the insistence of Lenin and Trotsky that without the proletarian revolution on a worldwide scale, the Russian proletariat was doomed to sink back to the position of wage-slaves, i.e. the restoration of Russia to capitalism. This is exactly what has happened. The whole society has turned itself slowly over and once more the working class has been pushed back into that submissive role in production which is determined by the low technical level of the productive forces judged on a national scale. The bureaucracy is completely master in the productive process that is the bases of its political power.
No more convincing exposition of Marx’s theory of a society resting on the technical level of production can be wished for.
3. The Theory of Capitalist Society
Contrary to expectation, the role of managers of production has not been seized by members of the old ruling class. The definition of the class which is today master of Russia must rest on an analysis of the mode of production which now prevails. The historical conditions of capitalist production are as follows:
(1) the existence of the world market,
(2) the existence of a class of “nominally free” wage-laborers,
(3) the ownership or monopoly of the means of production by a class which rules production and disposes of the property,
(4) production by private persons for a free and uncertain market.
Such a society produces a certain type of product, the capitalist commodity, which has its own special commodity characteristics. The labor contained in it has the double aspect of both use-value and exchange-value. To use Marx’s own words, “all understanding of the facts depends upon this,” and any analysis of Russia which describes it as a society “unforeseen” by Marxists but yet omits a consideration of this and other aspects of the law of value is so inadequate as to be not only misleading but valueless. The law of value can be rejected. It cannot be ignored or allowed to go by default in a Marxist party.
The Marxian law of value, however, is merely an expression of a certain type of society. This society, contrary to all other societies we have known and expect to know, makes the extraction of surplus labor (called in this instance surplus value) the main aim of production. For Marx “the capitalist mode of production (is) essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labor.” This is crucial.
“It must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus value – the reconversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of the this production of surplus value – is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. It will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for capitalists. This would be overlooking the specific character of capitalist production, which reveals itself in its innermost essence.”
This is the main aim of production in Stalinist society, a capitalist society. All other societies produced for consumption and enjoyment.
All previous societies produced surplus labor, but except in isolated instances, wants or use-values were the main purpose of production. It is only in a society where labor is free of all contact with the means of production, within the environment of the world market, that the contradiction between production for use and for surplus value determines the whole society. Marx speaks of the difference between the use-value and the exchange-value of the commodity as the antithesis of the commodity. The contradictions and antagonisms of capitalistic society are merely embodiments of this antithesis, which is to be resolved in the synthesis of socialism, i.e., by the reuniting of the man of labor and the means of labor, and the abolition of the capitalist world market. International socialist society will produce surplus labor but it once more has as its sole aim the production of use-values.
Today this antithesis between production for use and production for surplus labor can be seen nowhere so clearly as in Stalinist Russia. And that stamps this society as being of the same inner essence as capitalism. Up to 1928, the use-value of the commodity predominated to the limited extent that this was possible in a backward society in the environment of the world market. The industrial proletariat in that year lived, at the very least, up to the standard of 1913. The first Five Year Plan predicted doubling of the subsistence of the working class by 1932.
But from 1929 a decisive change began. The lowering of agricultural prices in the world market threw the Russian plan into chaos. The competition on the world market, in its modern form of imperialist war, compelled the bureaucracy to reorganize the plan to meet the threat of Japan, at heavy cost; and with the coming to power of Hitler and his announcement that the main enemy was Russia, the change in Stalinist production and in Stalinist society became more uncontrollable. The bureaucracy was compelled to continue the process of industrialization at feverish speed. Under such circumstances, in a backward country, with an immature working class, the main aim of production inevitably must become the production of surplus labor, for the sake of more production, for the sake of still more production.
This economic necessity compelled an enormous increase in the repressive apparatus, the consolidation of the ruling bureaucracy by concrete privileges, honor, and authority, and the destruction of persons and ideology connected with the October Revolution. The necessity of autarchy, attempting to produce all that Russia needed within its own border, resulted in further disruption of production, and the mounting indices of production as a consequence represented large uneconomic investment, thus increasing the strain upon the workers. Stakhanovism was a perfect expression of the qualitative change in Russian society.
The climax came in 1936-1937 with the partial breakdown of the economy as exemplified by the charges of Trotskyite sabotage in every branch of production. In the historical circumstances of Russia, the antithesis between production of surplus value and use-value has reached a stage unknown in other capitalist economies. The state of world economy today precludes any thought of a cessation of this mode of production. The economic power of the bureaucracy precludes that this can be done otherwise than at the continued and growing expense of the working class. The system has developed in every essential of production into a capitalist system, and the parasitic bureaucracy has been transformed into an exploiting capitalist class. Henceforward its law of motion must be the same as that of other capitalist societies. An approximate date for the completion of the process is 1936, the year of the Stalinist constitution.
4. The Necessary Movement of Capital and Its Forms of Manifestation
That the laws inherent in capitalist production in Russia manifest themselves in unusual forms is obvious. But their unusualness in Russia is not unique. It is exceeded by the capitalism which Marx himself invented. To deduce the laws of capitalist production, Marx constructed a capitalism such as never existed and never could exist. In it labor, like every other commodity, was always sold at its value, the capitalist found on the market whatever he wished, consumption was always equated to production, fluctuations of prices there were none, no single capitalist enterprise advanced in front of the other in organic composition, unemployment and crisis were absent, all was in complete equilibrium; no capitalist could construct for himself a more ideal haven of peaceful accumulation. Yet this is the capitalism from which Marx drew his laws of motion, and even this capitalism Marx proved was bound to collapse. From this abstraction, which was the frame in which he worked in Volumes I and II, Marx then turned and in Volume III showed the devastating manifestation of the law of motion in capitalist society as it actually was. Thus the very method on which Capital was constructed is a warning to all hasty and ill-based attempts to baptize societies as never before seen, from a consideration of their external forms of manifestation, and not from an analysis of their laws of motion.
Marx dealt extensively with the crisis of over-production, but in 1886 Engels, in a preface to Capital, calmly stated that the decennial cycle of prosperity, overproduction, and crises, seemed to have come to an end, leaving a permanent depression. A few years later he wrote that perhaps this prolonged stagnation was only the prelude to a general world wide crisis, but he was not certain. That the continued absence of the cycle of prosperity, overproduction and crisis invalidated the law of motion of capitalist society was obviously far from his thought. For Marx crisis was an expression of the contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society. The crisis would express itself in different forms but the contradictions of the capital relations would continue.
The “free and uncertain” market of “pure” capitalism has been abolished before now in a national society. Lenin in 1917, before the revolution, stated that the immense majority of the capitalists in Russia were not producing for the market at all but for the state, which advanced them money. It was not commodity production for a free and uncertain market: it was not “pure” capitalism (the quotes are his own) but “a special kind of national economy.” In Germany today that process Lenin described is immensely more advanced than it was in Russia. It would be a perversion to assert that production in Germany is for a free and open market. It would be equally disastrous to see in the abolition of the traditionally free capitalist market, a basic change in the society. The law of motion is not thereby altered. To the contrary, it is the nature of the law of motion to abolish the free market. In Russia the commodity is no longer the product of private individuals. But it is, however, the law of capitalist production to abolish the private character of capital.
That Marx expected the revolution to occur before this was completed alters not one thing in his analysis of the movement of the society. The joint-stock company is “the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production.” The concentration of all available capital in the hands of the Bank of England “does away with the private character of capital and implies in itself, to that extent, the abolition of capital.” The climax of this process is the ownership of all capital in the hands of the State. The bourgeoisie continues to draw dividends, but the drawing of dividends does not make a system capitalist. The dividends can be drawn from a Workers’ State. It is the fact that the state acts as the entrepreneur and exploits the workers that is decisive. “Interest-bearing capitals represents capital as ownership compared to capital a ‘function’.” And, still more clear, “The investing capitalist derives his claim to profits of enterprise and consequently the profit of enterprise itself not from his ownership of capital, but from its production function as distinguished from its form, in which it is only inert property.” Marx in scores of other places pointed out the distinction between production and property. It is one of his great contributions to economic theory.
But all this type of argument shows not only a complete incapacity to understand Russia, but a narrowness of view which will prevent any clear understanding of further developments in traditional capitalist society. Marx’s definitions are both precise and sweeping. In all previous societies, land was the main factor in production. In capitalist society the main factor is accumulated labor, within the environment of the world market. If the laborer controls the accumulated labor we have socialism. Wherever it controls him we have capitalism. “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of Capital.” Marx repeatedly wrote these definitions. The most famous of them, just as this last, applies literally to Stalinist society:
“Capital is a definite interrelation in social production belonging to a definite historical formation of society. This interrelation expresses itself through a certain thing and gives to this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production converted into capital and means of production by themselves are no more capital than gold or silver are money in themselves. Capital signifies the means of production monopolized by a certain part of society, the products and material requirements of labor made independent of labor power in living human beings and antagonistic to them, and personified in capital by this antagonism.”
Such a society, whatever differences it may and must develop from classical capitalism, will move in a certain direction and in a certain way. That is the heart of the problem.
5. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
If the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is the pivot of the Marxian political economy, its second distinctive character is, on Marx’s own evaluation, his method of analyzing surplus value, i. e. surplus labor in the modern historical condition. This he treats as an entity, and his deliberate refusal in theoretical analysis to take into consideration its subdivisions into industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, rent, taxes, etc. is a fundamental of his system. It would be presumptuous to attempt to state it in words other than his own.
“With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, 8:1, so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8 is transformed into labor-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production . . . With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labor incorporated in it also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion.”
The disproportion between constant and variable capital increases and, ultimately, such will be the strain on the worker to produce the necessary surplus that, as Marx says in one place, at a certain stage, if the laborer worked all 24 hours a day, and the capitalist took all the labor instead of merely the surplus over subsistence, it would still not be sufficient. Here in the process of production, and not in the process of circulation (the market) lies the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production. This is the basis of Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit.
“The fact that this analysis is made independently of the subdivisions of profit, which fall to the share of different categories of persons, shows in itself that this law, in its general workings, is independent of those subdivisions and of the mutual relations of the resulting categories of profit. The profit to which we are here referring is but another name for surplus value itself, which is merely observed in relation to the variable capital from which it arises. The fall in the rate of profit therefore expresses the falling relation of surplus value itself to the total capital, and is for this reason independent of any division of this profit among various participants.”
Here is the key to the understanding of the growing crisis in Russia. Part of the annual product goes for necessary wages. Part of it goes to replace the constant capital used up. If as has been estimated the means of production have to be renewed every ten years, then the workers have to produce, yearly, beside their wages, one-tenth of a constantly increasing capital. The rest is the surplus labor. As the mass of capital increases, the mass of surplus labor becomes proportionally less and less. The worker, with no control over the process of production, receives less and less of the product. At a certain stage, in order to make the decreasing mass of surplus value approximately adequate to its task, the capitalist has no alternative but to lower the wages and increase the exploitation of the worker. The worker resists. The capitalist class is then compelled to enslave him. Ultimately, says Engels, the worker will be driven to the level of a Chinese coolie. This is the inevitable enslavement of the worker which Marx prophesies so persistently.
If today when we see the enslavement we begin to see it in a worker no longer “free,” but attached to the factory as the slave or the serf was attached to the land, then the Party will have definitely left the road of Marxism for the most vicious and vulgar empiricism. It is on this movement in the direct process of production that is based the theoretical certainty of the collapse of capitalist production. The competition on the world market, the enormous expenses of an exploiting society, with its military apparatus, bureaucracy, clergy, police, etc., the decreasing productivity of the individual laborer, the millions who do work which can only be called work “under a miserable mode of production,” all this compels such a society to make surplus labor and surplus labor alone, the compelling force of production.
Thus at a certain stage, as in Germany in 1932, the magnificent productive apparatus stands crippled. Such is the size of the means of production and the organic composition of capital, that the enormous quantity of surplus labor necessary for the progressive functioning of a capitalist society cannot be produced. The “functioning capital” available to make this productive apparatus work is too little. It appears to be a plethora of capital, but Marx says this “so-called plethora of capital” is always a capital whose mass does not atone for the fall in the rate of profit. Capitalist production comes to a standstill, first and foremost because the system demands that surplus labor be produced, and sufficient surplus labor cannot be produced. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value has reached its apotheosis. The troubles of the market are merely the reverse side, the result of the contradictions in production.
An identical process of production in Russia moves inevitably to a similar result. The laws of capitalist production, always immanent in an isolated Workers’ State and more so in a backward economy, have been forced into action, in the environment of the world market. The organic composition of capital in Russia mounts with the growth of industrialization. Year by year, however, the mass of surplus labor must grow proportionally less and less. Marx worked out his final theory of accumulation on the basis of the total social capital in the country and denied that this altered the economic and historical characteristics of the society. The expenses of an exploiting class within the environment of the world market, the privileges necessary to differentiate the classes, a vast military apparatus, increasing degradation and slavery of the worker, the lowering of his individual productivity at a stage when it needs to be increased, all these features of Russia are rooted in the capital-wage labor relation and the world-market environment. The advantages that Russia alone enjoyed in 1928, centralization of the means of production, capacity to plan, have today been swamped by the disadvantages of the quest for surplus value.
To its traditionally capitalist troubles the bureaucracy adds one of its own, an excessive waste due to the bureaucratic administration. But Stalin today, like Hitler, contends essentially with the falling relation of the mass of surplus value to the total social capital. That is the economic basis of the constantly growing persecution of the workers by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is no worse than any other ruling class. It behaves as it does because it must. This is the law of motion of Stalinist society. Ultimately the productive apparatus of Russia will stand as impotent as Germany’s in 1932, and for the same reason, its incapacity to produce the necessary surplus labor which is the compelling motive of production for any modern class society. The struggle in Russia is not over consumption, as Trotsky thought, but over production, and the Stalinist state is organized nine-tenths, not for stealing, but for production. The Party must make this clear in all its propaganda and agitation and correct this serious error.
This is the reply to all who see some new type of society superseding capitalism and solving its contradictions. All of these theories are distinguished by their absence of economic analysis, or by the flimsiness of their assumptions. If the Party should adopt the same empirical method in its own analysis, it will completely emasculate its own capacity to answer and destroy the arguments of those who herald the managerial society, the “new” Fascist order, the garrison State, etc. This theory is the heritage that Marx left for the proletarian movement. And it is here that we must be clear or always be in confusion.
6. The Theory of Imperialism
Modern imperialism is a quest for markets in an attempt to check the always declining relation of surplus value to the total social capital. So that Lenin, following Marx, bases his theory of imperialism on production and not on circulation. The circulation process of capital, however, is important for one’s understanding of a particular manifestation of imperialism. In Volume II, Marx repeats in almost every chapter that the capitalist has to set aside some capital year after year until it is large enough for the purpose of reorganizing this enterprise on the necessary scale. Individual capitals may accumulate quickly. What is important is the total accumulation in regard to the social capital as a whole. This mass of surplus labor, embodied in money capital and waiting until it is large enough, forms a substantial part of the capital in the hands of banks, and as capitalist production develops it becomes larger and larger. This money-capital also increases as capital is withdrawn from the production of commodities through its incapacity to produce profits. This is the money-capital of which Lenin writes.
But all imperialism was not necessarily of the particular type Lenin analyzed. Japan and Russia were not, as he said, “modern, up-to-date finance-capitals,” but as he explained, their military power, their domination of colonial countries, their plunder of China, etc., made them imperialist. By 1914 imperialism was therefore a struggle for all or any kind of territory, for the sake of the territory and in order to prevent rivals from getting hold of it. This was done to control raw materials, to export capital, to expand the commodity-market, for strategic purposes, in fact for any purpose which would contribute to the increase of surplus value. That is the obvious economic basis of Stalinist imperialism. Like Hitlerism, it will seize fixed capital or agrarian territory, tin-mines or strategic ports and transport manpower. Within its own borders the bureaucracy mercilessly exploits the subject nationalities. Should it emerge victorious in the coming war, it will share in all the grabbings of its partners, and for the same reason. Trotsky’s idea that the bureaucracy seeks foreign territory merely to expand its power, prestige, and revenues lays the emphasis on the consumption of the bureaucracy. That is false. The “greed” of the capitalist class is a result of the process of production, and the greed of the bureaucracy has the same roots. With a productivity of labor as slow as it is in Russia, and the overhead expenses of an exploiting society within the environment of the world market as large as they are, equal to that of the most highly developed capitalist states, it is not possible for the bureaucracy to escape the same fundamental problems of production as an advanced capitalist state, and to move towards the same attempts at solution.
7. Fascism
If the relations of production in Russia are capitalist then the state is Fascist. Fascism is a mass petty-bourgeois movement, but the Fascist state is not a mass petty-bourgeois state. It is the political reflection of the drive towards complete centralization of production which distinguishes all national economies today.
Finance capital and interlocking directorates are a result of the growing concentration of capital and the increasing socialization of production. The contradiction between this socialization and the appropriation of the product for the benefit of a few, drives the few into a position where to survive they must act as one, against the workers and against the external bourgeoisie.
The Fascist state has deeper economic roots than we have hitherto acknowledged. In this respect the development of Russia is a sign-post as to the future of capitalist society. In 1878 Engels (and Marx approved) made a statement of the most profound social significance for the modern world: that the growing socialization of production would compel the capitalists to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far as that was possible within the framework of capitalist relations. How far is that possible? Today life and Marx’s Capital teach us the probable extent and limits of this process. Marx treated in Volume I the direct process of production, and all the essentials of his doctrine are contained in that volume. In the next volume he treated circulation, as part of the process of production, but as “secondary” and supplementary to production. The “one fundamental condition” of the capitalist mode of production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, he tells us himself that he abstracted from circulation and treated in Volume I.
Then in Volume III, his abstract analysis complete, he for the first time, and only late in the volume, subdivided surplus-value into profit, interest, rent, etc. Today the capitalist class, impelled to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far has left the property relations intact, but the group in control manipulates the surplus value more and more as a whole. Less and less capital is apportioned to production by competition. In Germany today capital is consciously directed to different branches of production. The process will continue. The capitalists abolish the free market and shape circulation as far as possible to their own purposes, rationing every commodity, including labor-power. But the one fundamental condition of capitalist production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, and the process of production (Volume I), that they cannot alter without destroying themselves. Lenin (in the last two pages of Imperialism) as early as 1916, saw that with the increasing socialization of production, “private economic relations and private property relations constitute a shell which is no longer suitable for its contents, a shell which must of necessity begin to decay if its destruction is postponed by artificial means.” The Communist Manifesto of the Third International was written around the same thesis in the most pronounced form.
If Russia today has differences with a capitalist economy where the private property relations have decayed and production is nationalized, these points are not to be detailed for their own sake as being different. Nobody denies their difference. What is to be proved is that these differences alter the law of motion of the society. And this cannot be done, because the contradictions of the whole society are rooted in the class relations of production, which are identical and determine all other relations. What was formerly private and uncontrolled by the very development of capitalist production becomes more and more state-controlled.
It is from there, where Marx placed his basic contradictions, that all capitalist troubles spring. More and more, capitalist society, in Engels’ phrase, will capitulate to the necessity for planning of the invading socialist society. We must be prepared for strange transformations. But as long as wage-labor exists, the capitalist class will have what Engels called not more than the “technical elements” of a solution. “Technically,” Hitler and Stalin have more control of the means of production and are able to do anything. In reality the social relations of production inside the country in the environment of the world market make them merely vain fighters against the general current of world economy. It is this economic necessity of organizing production as a whole (the invading socialist society) but yet the interests of a few (the old capitalist society) that finds political expression in Fascism. Whatever the method, capitalist economy forces the formation of the totalitarian state owing to the needs of production.
8. Socialism
The antithesis of Stalinist society and capitalistic society being the same, the solution of their contradictions is the same. It can be stated in a sentence. The workers must take control of the process of production on a national scale and international scale; this achieved, automatically, according to the technical development and the relations with the world market, use-values will begin to predominate. But with reasonable speed the same must take place on an international scale, or the quest for surplus labor in the world as a whole will drag down the socialist state, unless it commands an exceptionally well-developed and extensive area. “We live,” said Lenin, “not in a state but in a system of states.” The consequences of this transformation will be:
(1) The individual development of the laborer. It is in this that Marx depends with unwearying insistence for the higher productivity of labor which will be characteristic of the new society. “Variable Capital” will now, and only now, meet “Constant Capital” in coordination. In no sphere has our party been so guilty as in its utter neglect of this phase of production during the last ten years. The necessary expansion of production will take place and be maintained in socialist society through the fact that the material and intellectual advantages of society, now the prerogative of a few, will be the prerogative of all, and this, for Marx, means the certainty of an enormous development, not in the worker getting more to eat, but primarily as an agent in the process of production. The creative capacity of the worker, the joy in labor and service, hitherto seen only in the process of revolution, will be applied for the first time to production by the emancipated working class. That is the only way to solve the antithesis between use-value and exchange-value. To presume that Stalinist society has solved it is a monstrous absurdity. The degradation of the Russian worker is an economic fact. Man is the greatest of all productive forces, and once his potentialities are released, the era of human freedom will begin. “Its fundamental premise is the shortening of the working day.” Until then society will be increasingly like Russia and Germany, and plunging to destruction.
(2) This release of the workers for creative labor in production will be immensely encouraged by the entry into productive labor of the millions of idlers and unproductive laborer who infest modern society – the bourgeoisie, the lawyers, the publicity men, the distributors, domestic servants, agitators, storm-troopers, police, etc. All will be trained and placed in productive labor. They are the overwhelming overhead expenses of a class society, in Russia as well as in Germany.
(3) Production will be for social needs and not for millions of non-productive consumers in the army, navy, air-force, and their useless and criminal expenditure. The international division of labor will become a source not of enormous expenditure and autarchy, but a source of cooperation and continuous advance.
It is necessary to emphasize this today. For if it were understood some of the notions now prevalent in the Party could not exist. The idea that if the bourgeoisie should nationalize production and property, the hope for Socialism is utopia – that is a misunderstanding of the contradictions of capitalism which must be driven out of our movement. Such a transformation will solve nothing. The three points outlined above will be as far from realization as ever. A new society begins when the workers take power or when the world market is abolished by the domination of one capitalist state which would be an unspeakable barbarism. Marxism knows no other “new” society, far less any progressive new society. Either the emancipation of labor or increasing barbarism. Only in the most abstract sense can state-property be said the be a higher form, as monopoly capitalism was a higher form than pre- monopoly capitalism. Today we have reached a turning point. The pauperization of the worker, which was formerly relative, is now, on a world scale, absolute. Today in the most advanced capitalist societies, he is on his way to slavery. In its present state, capitalism, whatever its form, except in a few areas and for declining periods, can no longer maintain the worker even in the conditions of his previous slavery. Without the proletarian revolution the state-property form can be the vehicle of barbarism and the destruction of human society. Such terms as higher and lower forms have no meaning in the concrete circumstances. It is not the form of property but the social relations of production which are decisive. Today if the working class is master, the form is progressive. If it is not, the form is reactionary. “In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.” Any society today, in which the aim is not to promote the existence of the laborer is doomed to crisis and disorder and will go always closer to barbarism until the workers take power. That is all there is to Marx, and as he himself states, on an understanding of this, all comprehension of the facts depends.
9. Political Conclusions
On the basis of the above analysis certain political conclusions follow automatically.
They are:
(a) No defense of Russia under any circumstances.
The first condition for working out a long-term policy about Russia is to define the economic nature of the society and the historic character of the bureaucracy. It is bourgeois, and therefore has no rights over the struggles of the workers for their democratic rights. The struggle for socialism is the struggle for democracy, before, or after, the expropriation of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in Russia has to be expropriated, driven away from its stranglehold over the process and the means of production. To do this the proletariat mobilizes all the poor and all the oppressed of Russia. It is prepared without hesitation to restore private property to those peasants who wish it. It rejects a united front with Kerensky and all his scores of followers in Russia who ask the proletariat to fight with them so that they may each get a factory for themselves. With Mensheviks, and with any section of the working class movement, or any other section of society, it forms a united front for what it considers to be working class demands, and for nothing else; it forms these on its own conditions, and the revolutionary proletariat keeps its hands free and makes or breaks these attempts at united action as it sees fit in the interests of the struggle for power. Nothing in Marxism compels the proletariat to form a united front with any group at any time except it thinks to the advantage of the proletariat to do so in its struggle for power.
(b) Denunciation of the CP as the agent of a Fascist power.
It appears that in the minds of some this excludes a United Front with the CP on a specific issue. The contention is not only stupid but dangerous. A United Front is formed with a section of American workers mainly on their intentions against the American bourgeoisie, or the world bourgeoisie, not on account of its belief in Stalinism. If it is not to be formed with them because the CP is the agent of a reactionary bureaucracy which is the enemy of the workers and of socialism, that excludes the United Front with the CP for all those who do not believe that the working class is still the ruling class in Russia. In the case of Browder whom the American government attacked, for obvious reasons the Party will offer a United Front. If the CP, however had called for a mass protest against the War in 1939, then with our present policy the Party should have refused. But even that refusal is not definitive. For according to the temper of the American proletariat, the strength of the Party, the stage of development or disintegration of the CP, the strength of the bourgeoisie, the Party may even, under similar circumstances, decide even to support a specific anti-war action by the CP even though the call was dictated originally by the interests of the Russian bureaucracy. The sophistry which indulges in superficial arguments of the above type must be rigorously rejected. It would be most dangerous for the Party if it allowed itself to be driven into considering the United Front as a collection of fixed laws, instead of a tactical orientation within given circumstances toward a fixed goal.
(c) Propaganda for socialism.
The Party must make it a first task, in its press and all other propaganda and agitation, to preach the necessity of socialism, to explain that no modern society of any kind offers any solution to the problems of modern society, except a society in which the workers hold power. It must with special vigor denounce and expose the ideas that Fascism, managerial society, or bureaucratic state-socialism are in any concrete sense progressive societies or even could be, and it must do this by challenging their proponents on the fundamental economic categories and analysis of Marx.
(d) The Party must initiate a serious study of Marxian economics, and devote a section of The New International regularly to studies in Capital, The Critique of Political Economy, etc. Many of the important points in Capital are still controversial, but it is certain that the development of society offers this generation an opportunity to elucidate by an observation of life many of the problems which were objects merely of speculation by previous theoreticians. This must be the basis of our theoretical work in the future. It is as an example of what we have to do, and how we have to do it, that this resolution has been written. Whatever our conclusions, the uncertainly of the present and the crises of the future demand that we solidly establish our fundamentals. If even we shall decide to abandon the Marxian law of value in the analysis of any modern society, then we should now exactly and concretely why. For it is only from there that we could develop a new method, as will be necessary for any new society.
September 19, 1941
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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C.L.R. James on the Russian Question
Revolutionary History is grateful to Scott McLemee for permission to use his transcription of this and other C.L.R. James texts. Standard American spellings have been retained here, on the assumption they were used in the original publication. We have supplied a subheading (1. Introduction) where this was not present in Scott’s version, but where something was obviously required.
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Resolution submitted by C.L.R. James (writing as “J.R. Johnson”) to the 1941 convention of the Workers Party of the United States.
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Resolution on the Russian Question
1. Introduction
For many years the fact that in Russia the means of production were state property was sufficient for the Fourth International to characterize the working class as ruling class and the Russian state as a workers state.
Today, however, 1941, side by side with a tremendous but declining rate of industrial expansion in Russia, the working class has been reduced to a state of pauperization, slavery, and degradation unequaled in modern Europe. The real wages of the workers are approximately one-half of what they were in 1913. A bureaucrat holds all economic and political power. To continue to call the Russian workers the ruling class is to make a statement without meaning.
Yet Trotsky never wavered from this position. It led him, the direct successor of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, into calling upon the workers of Russia to be the best soldiers in an army that was, according to his own statement, acting as the tool of an imperialist power. The Workers Party, in refusing to accept this position, and in calling upon the Russian workers in this war to turn the guns in the opposite direction, made a profound break not with all that we have thought on the Russian question, but with something far more important, with how we have thought about it. So profound a difference must convince the party that what we face is not a rehash or manipulation of our previous ideas but a fundamental revaluation of the method and equipment with which we previously approached the question. Unless this is absolutely and thoroughly done, the party will live in a state of continual uncertainty, confusion, and recurrent conflict about our fundamental aims. This explains the scope and method of this resolution.
2. The Marxian Theory of Society
Marx rests his theory of society upon the technical level of the instruments of production under given historical circumstances.
“Assume a particular state of development in the productive forces of man and you will get a particular form of commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce, and consumption, and you will have a corresponding social order, a corresponding organization of the family and of the ranks and classes, in a word, the corresponding civil society.”
These are Marx’s own words. The purely historical, i.e., the chronological analysis of society, places property first. The logical method of Marx examines the actual historical relations always as an expression of the logical analysis, which begins with the technical level of the instruments of production. This determines the relation of the people to each other and the division into classes, which then determine the relation of the classes to the instruments of production and the results of labor. These last, usually expressed in laws, are the relations of property, which, from his earliest writings, Marx always defined as an expression of the mode of production. This is the strict Marxian terminology and the strict Marxian sequence, as can be seen from a casual reading of the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy and The Communist Manifesto.
Applying this method to Russia we find that in 1941 the technical level of production, unsupported by one or more powerful socialist states, compels a social relation of exploited wage-laborers and appropriating capitalists. In order to achieve the bourgeois- democratic revolution in 1917 the proletariat was compelled to seize power. But this seizure of political power was due chiefly to the incapacity of the ruling class and the conjunctural historical circumstances. The working class lacked the maturity in production of a proletariat which was a majority of the population and had been trained and disciplined by large-scale capitalism. All political power rests in the last analysis upon and is determined by production relations. This was the reason for the insistence of Lenin and Trotsky that without the proletarian revolution on a worldwide scale, the Russian proletariat was doomed to sink back to the position of wage-slaves, i.e. the restoration of Russia to capitalism. This is exactly what has happened. The whole society has turned itself slowly over and once more the working class has been pushed back into that submissive role in production which is determined by the low technical level of the productive forces judged on a national scale. The bureaucracy is completely master in the productive process that is the bases of its political power.
No more convincing exposition of Marx’s theory of a society resting on the technical level of production can be wished for.
3. The Theory of Capitalist Society
Contrary to expectation, the role of managers of production has not been seized by members of the old ruling class. The definition of the class which is today master of Russia must rest on an analysis of the mode of production which now prevails. The historical conditions of capitalist production are as follows:
(1) the existence of the world market,
(2) the existence of a class of “nominally free” wage-laborers,
(3) the ownership or monopoly of the means of production by a class which rules production and disposes of the property,
(4) production by private persons for a free and uncertain market.
Such a society produces a certain type of product, the capitalist commodity, which has its own special commodity characteristics. The labor contained in it has the double aspect of both use-value and exchange-value. To use Marx’s own words, “all understanding of the facts depends upon this,” and any analysis of Russia which describes it as a society “unforeseen” by Marxists but yet omits a consideration of this and other aspects of the law of value is so inadequate as to be not only misleading but valueless. The law of value can be rejected. It cannot be ignored or allowed to go by default in a Marxist party.
The Marxian law of value, however, is merely an expression of a certain type of society. This society, contrary to all other societies we have known and expect to know, makes the extraction of surplus labor (called in this instance surplus value) the main aim of production. For Marx “the capitalist mode of production (is) essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labor.” This is crucial.
“It must never be forgotten, that the production of this surplus value – the reconversion of a portion of it into capital, or accumulation, forms an indispensable part of the this production of surplus value – is the immediate purpose and the compelling motive of capitalist production. It will not do to represent capitalist production as something which it is not, that is to say, as a production having for its immediate purpose the consumption of goods, or the production of means of enjoyment for capitalists. This would be overlooking the specific character of capitalist production, which reveals itself in its innermost essence.”
This is the main aim of production in Stalinist society, a capitalist society. All other societies produced for consumption and enjoyment.
All previous societies produced surplus labor, but except in isolated instances, wants or use-values were the main purpose of production. It is only in a society where labor is free of all contact with the means of production, within the environment of the world market, that the contradiction between production for use and for surplus value determines the whole society. Marx speaks of the difference between the use-value and the exchange-value of the commodity as the antithesis of the commodity. The contradictions and antagonisms of capitalistic society are merely embodiments of this antithesis, which is to be resolved in the synthesis of socialism, i.e., by the reuniting of the man of labor and the means of labor, and the abolition of the capitalist world market. International socialist society will produce surplus labor but it once more has as its sole aim the production of use-values.
Today this antithesis between production for use and production for surplus labor can be seen nowhere so clearly as in Stalinist Russia. And that stamps this society as being of the same inner essence as capitalism. Up to 1928, the use-value of the commodity predominated to the limited extent that this was possible in a backward society in the environment of the world market. The industrial proletariat in that year lived, at the very least, up to the standard of 1913. The first Five Year Plan predicted doubling of the subsistence of the working class by 1932.
But from 1929 a decisive change began. The lowering of agricultural prices in the world market threw the Russian plan into chaos. The competition on the world market, in its modern form of imperialist war, compelled the bureaucracy to reorganize the plan to meet the threat of Japan, at heavy cost; and with the coming to power of Hitler and his announcement that the main enemy was Russia, the change in Stalinist production and in Stalinist society became more uncontrollable. The bureaucracy was compelled to continue the process of industrialization at feverish speed. Under such circumstances, in a backward country, with an immature working class, the main aim of production inevitably must become the production of surplus labor, for the sake of more production, for the sake of still more production.
This economic necessity compelled an enormous increase in the repressive apparatus, the consolidation of the ruling bureaucracy by concrete privileges, honor, and authority, and the destruction of persons and ideology connected with the October Revolution. The necessity of autarchy, attempting to produce all that Russia needed within its own border, resulted in further disruption of production, and the mounting indices of production as a consequence represented large uneconomic investment, thus increasing the strain upon the workers. Stakhanovism was a perfect expression of the qualitative change in Russian society.
The climax came in 1936-1937 with the partial breakdown of the economy as exemplified by the charges of Trotskyite sabotage in every branch of production. In the historical circumstances of Russia, the antithesis between production of surplus value and use-value has reached a stage unknown in other capitalist economies. The state of world economy today precludes any thought of a cessation of this mode of production. The economic power of the bureaucracy precludes that this can be done otherwise than at the continued and growing expense of the working class. The system has developed in every essential of production into a capitalist system, and the parasitic bureaucracy has been transformed into an exploiting capitalist class. Henceforward its law of motion must be the same as that of other capitalist societies. An approximate date for the completion of the process is 1936, the year of the Stalinist constitution.
4. The Necessary Movement of Capital and Its Forms of Manifestation
That the laws inherent in capitalist production in Russia manifest themselves in unusual forms is obvious. But their unusualness in Russia is not unique. It is exceeded by the capitalism which Marx himself invented. To deduce the laws of capitalist production, Marx constructed a capitalism such as never existed and never could exist. In it labor, like every other commodity, was always sold at its value, the capitalist found on the market whatever he wished, consumption was always equated to production, fluctuations of prices there were none, no single capitalist enterprise advanced in front of the other in organic composition, unemployment and crisis were absent, all was in complete equilibrium; no capitalist could construct for himself a more ideal haven of peaceful accumulation. Yet this is the capitalism from which Marx drew his laws of motion, and even this capitalism Marx proved was bound to collapse. From this abstraction, which was the frame in which he worked in Volumes I and II, Marx then turned and in Volume III showed the devastating manifestation of the law of motion in capitalist society as it actually was. Thus the very method on which Capital was constructed is a warning to all hasty and ill-based attempts to baptize societies as never before seen, from a consideration of their external forms of manifestation, and not from an analysis of their laws of motion.
Marx dealt extensively with the crisis of over-production, but in 1886 Engels, in a preface to Capital, calmly stated that the decennial cycle of prosperity, overproduction, and crises, seemed to have come to an end, leaving a permanent depression. A few years later he wrote that perhaps this prolonged stagnation was only the prelude to a general world wide crisis, but he was not certain. That the continued absence of the cycle of prosperity, overproduction and crisis invalidated the law of motion of capitalist society was obviously far from his thought. For Marx crisis was an expression of the contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society. The crisis would express itself in different forms but the contradictions of the capital relations would continue.
The “free and uncertain” market of “pure” capitalism has been abolished before now in a national society. Lenin in 1917, before the revolution, stated that the immense majority of the capitalists in Russia were not producing for the market at all but for the state, which advanced them money. It was not commodity production for a free and uncertain market: it was not “pure” capitalism (the quotes are his own) but “a special kind of national economy.” In Germany today that process Lenin described is immensely more advanced than it was in Russia. It would be a perversion to assert that production in Germany is for a free and open market. It would be equally disastrous to see in the abolition of the traditionally free capitalist market, a basic change in the society. The law of motion is not thereby altered. To the contrary, it is the nature of the law of motion to abolish the free market. In Russia the commodity is no longer the product of private individuals. But it is, however, the law of capitalist production to abolish the private character of capital.
That Marx expected the revolution to occur before this was completed alters not one thing in his analysis of the movement of the society. The joint-stock company is “the abolition of capital as private property within the boundaries of capitalist production.” The concentration of all available capital in the hands of the Bank of England “does away with the private character of capital and implies in itself, to that extent, the abolition of capital.” The climax of this process is the ownership of all capital in the hands of the State. The bourgeoisie continues to draw dividends, but the drawing of dividends does not make a system capitalist. The dividends can be drawn from a Workers’ State. It is the fact that the state acts as the entrepreneur and exploits the workers that is decisive. “Interest-bearing capitals represents capital as ownership compared to capital a ‘function’.” And, still more clear, “The investing capitalist derives his claim to profits of enterprise and consequently the profit of enterprise itself not from his ownership of capital, but from its production function as distinguished from its form, in which it is only inert property.” Marx in scores of other places pointed out the distinction between production and property. It is one of his great contributions to economic theory.
But all this type of argument shows not only a complete incapacity to understand Russia, but a narrowness of view which will prevent any clear understanding of further developments in traditional capitalist society. Marx’s definitions are both precise and sweeping. In all previous societies, land was the main factor in production. In capitalist society the main factor is accumulated labor, within the environment of the world market. If the laborer controls the accumulated labor we have socialism. Wherever it controls him we have capitalism. “It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialized labor over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of Capital.” Marx repeatedly wrote these definitions. The most famous of them, just as this last, applies literally to Stalinist society:
“Capital is a definite interrelation in social production belonging to a definite historical formation of society. This interrelation expresses itself through a certain thing and gives to this thing a specific social character. Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production converted into capital and means of production by themselves are no more capital than gold or silver are money in themselves. Capital signifies the means of production monopolized by a certain part of society, the products and material requirements of labor made independent of labor power in living human beings and antagonistic to them, and personified in capital by this antagonism.”
Such a society, whatever differences it may and must develop from classical capitalism, will move in a certain direction and in a certain way. That is the heart of the problem.
5. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation
If the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value is the pivot of the Marxian political economy, its second distinctive character is, on Marx’s own evaluation, his method of analyzing surplus value, i. e. surplus labor in the modern historical condition. This he treats as an entity, and his deliberate refusal in theoretical analysis to take into consideration its subdivisions into industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, rent, taxes, etc. is a fundamental of his system. It would be presumptuous to attempt to state it in words other than his own.
“With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, 8:1, so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8 is transformed into labor-power, and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production . . . With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent or the labor incorporated in it also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing proportion.”
The disproportion between constant and variable capital increases and, ultimately, such will be the strain on the worker to produce the necessary surplus that, as Marx says in one place, at a certain stage, if the laborer worked all 24 hours a day, and the capitalist took all the labor instead of merely the surplus over subsistence, it would still not be sufficient. Here in the process of production, and not in the process of circulation (the market) lies the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production. This is the basis of Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit.
“The fact that this analysis is made independently of the subdivisions of profit, which fall to the share of different categories of persons, shows in itself that this law, in its general workings, is independent of those subdivisions and of the mutual relations of the resulting categories of profit. The profit to which we are here referring is but another name for surplus value itself, which is merely observed in relation to the variable capital from which it arises. The fall in the rate of profit therefore expresses the falling relation of surplus value itself to the total capital, and is for this reason independent of any division of this profit among various participants.”
Here is the key to the understanding of the growing crisis in Russia. Part of the annual product goes for necessary wages. Part of it goes to replace the constant capital used up. If as has been estimated the means of production have to be renewed every ten years, then the workers have to produce, yearly, beside their wages, one-tenth of a constantly increasing capital. The rest is the surplus labor. As the mass of capital increases, the mass of surplus labor becomes proportionally less and less. The worker, with no control over the process of production, receives less and less of the product. At a certain stage, in order to make the decreasing mass of surplus value approximately adequate to its task, the capitalist has no alternative but to lower the wages and increase the exploitation of the worker. The worker resists. The capitalist class is then compelled to enslave him. Ultimately, says Engels, the worker will be driven to the level of a Chinese coolie. This is the inevitable enslavement of the worker which Marx prophesies so persistently.
If today when we see the enslavement we begin to see it in a worker no longer “free,” but attached to the factory as the slave or the serf was attached to the land, then the Party will have definitely left the road of Marxism for the most vicious and vulgar empiricism. It is on this movement in the direct process of production that is based the theoretical certainty of the collapse of capitalist production. The competition on the world market, the enormous expenses of an exploiting society, with its military apparatus, bureaucracy, clergy, police, etc., the decreasing productivity of the individual laborer, the millions who do work which can only be called work “under a miserable mode of production,” all this compels such a society to make surplus labor and surplus labor alone, the compelling force of production.
Thus at a certain stage, as in Germany in 1932, the magnificent productive apparatus stands crippled. Such is the size of the means of production and the organic composition of capital, that the enormous quantity of surplus labor necessary for the progressive functioning of a capitalist society cannot be produced. The “functioning capital” available to make this productive apparatus work is too little. It appears to be a plethora of capital, but Marx says this “so-called plethora of capital” is always a capital whose mass does not atone for the fall in the rate of profit. Capitalist production comes to a standstill, first and foremost because the system demands that surplus labor be produced, and sufficient surplus labor cannot be produced. The contradiction between use-value and exchange-value has reached its apotheosis. The troubles of the market are merely the reverse side, the result of the contradictions in production.
An identical process of production in Russia moves inevitably to a similar result. The laws of capitalist production, always immanent in an isolated Workers’ State and more so in a backward economy, have been forced into action, in the environment of the world market. The organic composition of capital in Russia mounts with the growth of industrialization. Year by year, however, the mass of surplus labor must grow proportionally less and less. Marx worked out his final theory of accumulation on the basis of the total social capital in the country and denied that this altered the economic and historical characteristics of the society. The expenses of an exploiting class within the environment of the world market, the privileges necessary to differentiate the classes, a vast military apparatus, increasing degradation and slavery of the worker, the lowering of his individual productivity at a stage when it needs to be increased, all these features of Russia are rooted in the capital-wage labor relation and the world-market environment. The advantages that Russia alone enjoyed in 1928, centralization of the means of production, capacity to plan, have today been swamped by the disadvantages of the quest for surplus value.
To its traditionally capitalist troubles the bureaucracy adds one of its own, an excessive waste due to the bureaucratic administration. But Stalin today, like Hitler, contends essentially with the falling relation of the mass of surplus value to the total social capital. That is the economic basis of the constantly growing persecution of the workers by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is no worse than any other ruling class. It behaves as it does because it must. This is the law of motion of Stalinist society. Ultimately the productive apparatus of Russia will stand as impotent as Germany’s in 1932, and for the same reason, its incapacity to produce the necessary surplus labor which is the compelling motive of production for any modern class society. The struggle in Russia is not over consumption, as Trotsky thought, but over production, and the Stalinist state is organized nine-tenths, not for stealing, but for production. The Party must make this clear in all its propaganda and agitation and correct this serious error.
This is the reply to all who see some new type of society superseding capitalism and solving its contradictions. All of these theories are distinguished by their absence of economic analysis, or by the flimsiness of their assumptions. If the Party should adopt the same empirical method in its own analysis, it will completely emasculate its own capacity to answer and destroy the arguments of those who herald the managerial society, the “new” Fascist order, the garrison State, etc. This theory is the heritage that Marx left for the proletarian movement. And it is here that we must be clear or always be in confusion.
6. The Theory of Imperialism
Modern imperialism is a quest for markets in an attempt to check the always declining relation of surplus value to the total social capital. So that Lenin, following Marx, bases his theory of imperialism on production and not on circulation. The circulation process of capital, however, is important for one’s understanding of a particular manifestation of imperialism. In Volume II, Marx repeats in almost every chapter that the capitalist has to set aside some capital year after year until it is large enough for the purpose of reorganizing this enterprise on the necessary scale. Individual capitals may accumulate quickly. What is important is the total accumulation in regard to the social capital as a whole. This mass of surplus labor, embodied in money capital and waiting until it is large enough, forms a substantial part of the capital in the hands of banks, and as capitalist production develops it becomes larger and larger. This money-capital also increases as capital is withdrawn from the production of commodities through its incapacity to produce profits. This is the money-capital of which Lenin writes.
But all imperialism was not necessarily of the particular type Lenin analyzed. Japan and Russia were not, as he said, “modern, up-to-date finance-capitals,” but as he explained, their military power, their domination of colonial countries, their plunder of China, etc., made them imperialist. By 1914 imperialism was therefore a struggle for all or any kind of territory, for the sake of the territory and in order to prevent rivals from getting hold of it. This was done to control raw materials, to export capital, to expand the commodity-market, for strategic purposes, in fact for any purpose which would contribute to the increase of surplus value. That is the obvious economic basis of Stalinist imperialism. Like Hitlerism, it will seize fixed capital or agrarian territory, tin-mines or strategic ports and transport manpower. Within its own borders the bureaucracy mercilessly exploits the subject nationalities. Should it emerge victorious in the coming war, it will share in all the grabbings of its partners, and for the same reason. Trotsky’s idea that the bureaucracy seeks foreign territory merely to expand its power, prestige, and revenues lays the emphasis on the consumption of the bureaucracy. That is false. The “greed” of the capitalist class is a result of the process of production, and the greed of the bureaucracy has the same roots. With a productivity of labor as slow as it is in Russia, and the overhead expenses of an exploiting society within the environment of the world market as large as they are, equal to that of the most highly developed capitalist states, it is not possible for the bureaucracy to escape the same fundamental problems of production as an advanced capitalist state, and to move towards the same attempts at solution.
7. Fascism
If the relations of production in Russia are capitalist then the state is Fascist. Fascism is a mass petty-bourgeois movement, but the Fascist state is not a mass petty-bourgeois state. It is the political reflection of the drive towards complete centralization of production which distinguishes all national economies today.
Finance capital and interlocking directorates are a result of the growing concentration of capital and the increasing socialization of production. The contradiction between this socialization and the appropriation of the product for the benefit of a few, drives the few into a position where to survive they must act as one, against the workers and against the external bourgeoisie.
The Fascist state has deeper economic roots than we have hitherto acknowledged. In this respect the development of Russia is a sign-post as to the future of capitalist society. In 1878 Engels (and Marx approved) made a statement of the most profound social significance for the modern world: that the growing socialization of production would compel the capitalists to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far as that was possible within the framework of capitalist relations. How far is that possible? Today life and Marx’s Capital teach us the probable extent and limits of this process. Marx treated in Volume I the direct process of production, and all the essentials of his doctrine are contained in that volume. In the next volume he treated circulation, as part of the process of production, but as “secondary” and supplementary to production. The “one fundamental condition” of the capitalist mode of production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, he tells us himself that he abstracted from circulation and treated in Volume I.
Then in Volume III, his abstract analysis complete, he for the first time, and only late in the volume, subdivided surplus-value into profit, interest, rent, etc. Today the capitalist class, impelled to treat the productive forces as social forces, so far has left the property relations intact, but the group in control manipulates the surplus value more and more as a whole. Less and less capital is apportioned to production by competition. In Germany today capital is consciously directed to different branches of production. The process will continue. The capitalists abolish the free market and shape circulation as far as possible to their own purposes, rationing every commodity, including labor-power. But the one fundamental condition of capitalist production, the sale and purchase of labor-power, and the process of production (Volume I), that they cannot alter without destroying themselves. Lenin (in the last two pages of Imperialism) as early as 1916, saw that with the increasing socialization of production, “private economic relations and private property relations constitute a shell which is no longer suitable for its contents, a shell which must of necessity begin to decay if its destruction is postponed by artificial means.” The Communist Manifesto of the Third International was written around the same thesis in the most pronounced form.
If Russia today has differences with a capitalist economy where the private property relations have decayed and production is nationalized, these points are not to be detailed for their own sake as being different. Nobody denies their difference. What is to be proved is that these differences alter the law of motion of the society. And this cannot be done, because the contradictions of the whole society are rooted in the class relations of production, which are identical and determine all other relations. What was formerly private and uncontrolled by the very development of capitalist production becomes more and more state-controlled.
It is from there, where Marx placed his basic contradictions, that all capitalist troubles spring. More and more, capitalist society, in Engels’ phrase, will capitulate to the necessity for planning of the invading socialist society. We must be prepared for strange transformations. But as long as wage-labor exists, the capitalist class will have what Engels called not more than the “technical elements” of a solution. “Technically,” Hitler and Stalin have more control of the means of production and are able to do anything. In reality the social relations of production inside the country in the environment of the world market make them merely vain fighters against the general current of world economy. It is this economic necessity of organizing production as a whole (the invading socialist society) but yet the interests of a few (the old capitalist society) that finds political expression in Fascism. Whatever the method, capitalist economy forces the formation of the totalitarian state owing to the needs of production.
8. Socialism
The antithesis of Stalinist society and capitalistic society being the same, the solution of their contradictions is the same. It can be stated in a sentence. The workers must take control of the process of production on a national scale and international scale; this achieved, automatically, according to the technical development and the relations with the world market, use-values will begin to predominate. But with reasonable speed the same must take place on an international scale, or the quest for surplus labor in the world as a whole will drag down the socialist state, unless it commands an exceptionally well-developed and extensive area. “We live,” said Lenin, “not in a state but in a system of states.” The consequences of this transformation will be:
(1) The individual development of the laborer. It is in this that Marx depends with unwearying insistence for the higher productivity of labor which will be characteristic of the new society. “Variable Capital” will now, and only now, meet “Constant Capital” in coordination. In no sphere has our party been so guilty as in its utter neglect of this phase of production during the last ten years. The necessary expansion of production will take place and be maintained in socialist society through the fact that the material and intellectual advantages of society, now the prerogative of a few, will be the prerogative of all, and this, for Marx, means the certainty of an enormous development, not in the worker getting more to eat, but primarily as an agent in the process of production. The creative capacity of the worker, the joy in labor and service, hitherto seen only in the process of revolution, will be applied for the first time to production by the emancipated working class. That is the only way to solve the antithesis between use-value and exchange-value. To presume that Stalinist society has solved it is a monstrous absurdity. The degradation of the Russian worker is an economic fact. Man is the greatest of all productive forces, and once his potentialities are released, the era of human freedom will begin. “Its fundamental premise is the shortening of the working day.” Until then society will be increasingly like Russia and Germany, and plunging to destruction.
(2) This release of the workers for creative labor in production will be immensely encouraged by the entry into productive labor of the millions of idlers and unproductive laborer who infest modern society – the bourgeoisie, the lawyers, the publicity men, the distributors, domestic servants, agitators, storm-troopers, police, etc. All will be trained and placed in productive labor. They are the overwhelming overhead expenses of a class society, in Russia as well as in Germany.
(3) Production will be for social needs and not for millions of non-productive consumers in the army, navy, air-force, and their useless and criminal expenditure. The international division of labor will become a source not of enormous expenditure and autarchy, but a source of cooperation and continuous advance.
It is necessary to emphasize this today. For if it were understood some of the notions now prevalent in the Party could not exist. The idea that if the bourgeoisie should nationalize production and property, the hope for Socialism is utopia – that is a misunderstanding of the contradictions of capitalism which must be driven out of our movement. Such a transformation will solve nothing. The three points outlined above will be as far from realization as ever. A new society begins when the workers take power or when the world market is abolished by the domination of one capitalist state which would be an unspeakable barbarism. Marxism knows no other “new” society, far less any progressive new society. Either the emancipation of labor or increasing barbarism. Only in the most abstract sense can state-property be said the be a higher form, as monopoly capitalism was a higher form than pre- monopoly capitalism. Today we have reached a turning point. The pauperization of the worker, which was formerly relative, is now, on a world scale, absolute. Today in the most advanced capitalist societies, he is on his way to slavery. In its present state, capitalism, whatever its form, except in a few areas and for declining periods, can no longer maintain the worker even in the conditions of his previous slavery. Without the proletarian revolution the state-property form can be the vehicle of barbarism and the destruction of human society. Such terms as higher and lower forms have no meaning in the concrete circumstances. It is not the form of property but the social relations of production which are decisive. Today if the working class is master, the form is progressive. If it is not, the form is reactionary. “In bourgeois society living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.” Any society today, in which the aim is not to promote the existence of the laborer is doomed to crisis and disorder and will go always closer to barbarism until the workers take power. That is all there is to Marx, and as he himself states, on an understanding of this, all comprehension of the facts depends.
9. Political Conclusions
On the basis of the above analysis certain political conclusions follow automatically.
They are:
(a) No defense of Russia under any circumstances.
The first condition for working out a long-term policy about Russia is to define the economic nature of the society and the historic character of the bureaucracy. It is bourgeois, and therefore has no rights over the struggles of the workers for their democratic rights. The struggle for socialism is the struggle for democracy, before, or after, the expropriation of the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy in Russia has to be expropriated, driven away from its stranglehold over the process and the means of production. To do this the proletariat mobilizes all the poor and all the oppressed of Russia. It is prepared without hesitation to restore private property to those peasants who wish it. It rejects a united front with Kerensky and all his scores of followers in Russia who ask the proletariat to fight with them so that they may each get a factory for themselves. With Mensheviks, and with any section of the working class movement, or any other section of society, it forms a united front for what it considers to be working class demands, and for nothing else; it forms these on its own conditions, and the revolutionary proletariat keeps its hands free and makes or breaks these attempts at united action as it sees fit in the interests of the struggle for power. Nothing in Marxism compels the proletariat to form a united front with any group at any time except it thinks to the advantage of the proletariat to do so in its struggle for power.
(b) Denunciation of the CP as the agent of a Fascist power.
It appears that in the minds of some this excludes a United Front with the CP on a specific issue. The contention is not only stupid but dangerous. A United Front is formed with a section of American workers mainly on their intentions against the American bourgeoisie, or the world bourgeoisie, not on account of its belief in Stalinism. If it is not to be formed with them because the CP is the agent of a reactionary bureaucracy which is the enemy of the workers and of socialism, that excludes the United Front with the CP for all those who do not believe that the working class is still the ruling class in Russia. In the case of Browder whom the American government attacked, for obvious reasons the Party will offer a United Front. If the CP, however had called for a mass protest against the War in 1939, then with our present policy the Party should have refused. But even that refusal is not definitive. For according to the temper of the American proletariat, the strength of the Party, the stage of development or disintegration of the CP, the strength of the bourgeoisie, the Party may even, under similar circumstances, decide even to support a specific anti-war action by the CP even though the call was dictated originally by the interests of the Russian bureaucracy. The sophistry which indulges in superficial arguments of the above type must be rigorously rejected. It would be most dangerous for the Party if it allowed itself to be driven into considering the United Front as a collection of fixed laws, instead of a tactical orientation within given circumstances toward a fixed goal.
(c) Propaganda for socialism.
The Party must make it a first task, in its press and all other propaganda and agitation, to preach the necessity of socialism, to explain that no modern society of any kind offers any solution to the problems of modern society, except a society in which the workers hold power. It must with special vigor denounce and expose the ideas that Fascism, managerial society, or bureaucratic state-socialism are in any concrete sense progressive societies or even could be, and it must do this by challenging their proponents on the fundamental economic categories and analysis of Marx.
(d) The Party must initiate a serious study of Marxian economics, and devote a section of The New International regularly to studies in Capital, The Critique of Political Economy, etc. Many of the important points in Capital are still controversial, but it is certain that the development of society offers this generation an opportunity to elucidate by an observation of life many of the problems which were objects merely of speculation by previous theoreticians. This must be the basis of our theoretical work in the future. It is as an example of what we have to do, and how we have to do it, that this resolution has been written. Whatever our conclusions, the uncertainly of the present and the crises of the future demand that we solidly establish our fundamentals. If even we shall decide to abandon the Marxian law of value in the analysis of any modern society, then we should now exactly and concretely why. For it is only from there that we could develop a new method, as will be necessary for any new society.
September 19, 1941
*From The Archives Of The “Revolutionary History” Journal- Materials On British Trotskyism:On the tasks of the British Bolshevik-Leninists
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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The following five source documents were intended as Appendices to John Archer’s article CLR James in Britain, 1932-38, which appeared in Revolutionary History, Vol.6 No.2/3, Summer 1996. They shed valuable light on relationships between the Trotskyists in Britain and the International. We were not able to publish them at the time because of limitations on available space. We are pleased to make them available to our readers through the web. As the editor's introduction to John Archer’s article stated, we have a great deal of important material from this author which we still hope to publish when the opportunity arises.
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On the tasks of the British Bolshevik-Leninists
The first International Conference of the Fourth International, was actually held in Paris, from July 29-31, 1936. It was usually referred to as the “Geneva” Pre-Conference, for security reasons. More material from this conference can be read in Documents of the Fourth International. The Formative Years (1933-40), Pathfinder Press 1973, edited by Will Reisner.
James attended as a delegate from the Marxist Group, with Bert Matlow as an observer. The Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour Party was represented by Denzil Dean Harber, with Charlie Van Gelderen attending as an observer. The Marxist League was invited but was not present.
More material on the British groups and the “Geneva” conference can be found in Against the Stream. A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1924-38 by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, and in John Archer’s PhD Thesis Trotskyism in Britain 1931-37 (Central London Polytechnic, 1979).
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Resolution on the Tasks of the British Bolshevik-Leninists,
unanimously agreed by the “Geneva” Pre-Conference,
July 29-31, 1936
The Geneva Conference considers it an extremely urgent necessity to effect with the least possible delay the unification of the three English groups which at present are working on the basis of the fundamental principles and programme of the Fourth International. Clearly on this question of fusion, no group can demand that another dissolve itself and that its members join the first group individually. In the opinion of the Conference, the continued existence side by side of the three groups weakens the effectiveness of our movement, by the fact that, without there being apparent differences of principle, they are separate from one another and often work for opposed ends, thus preventing the development of the progress of the Fourth International in Britain. The Conference sees no principled reason for such a division of the forces and demands a fusion on a democratic basis which will make possible the establishment of a section of the Fourth International in this country.
The conference regrets the absence of a representative of the Groves group and the fact that it had not sent a document to the Conference. The Conference invites them to give their approval in principle to the official documents which have come out of the Conference.
The Conference is further of the opinion that the experience of the Bolshevik-Leninists within the ILP must be brought to an end, and that this group which at this moment is working within that organisation must shift its field of work in the direction of the mass organisations, especially towards the Labour Party and the Labour League of Youth. It is true that the Bolshevik-Leninists in the ILP can do trade union work, but they could do it much more effectively if in the eyes of the workers they were not associated with the bankrupt ILP. Their membership of the ILP rises like an impenetrable wall between the Bolshevik-Leninists and the mass movement of the youth, the potential reservoir of revolutionaries, from which the British Section of the Fourth International will draw the greater part of its cadres ” as well as the base of the Labour Party. It is necessary to know, not only the moment at which it is profitable for revolutionary Marxists to enter a reformist or centrist organisation, but also the moment when it is imperative to leave it, and to implant their movement and their ideas in another milieu. The ILP today is nothing but a centrist sect in decline; further work within it can only condemn our forces to mark time and vegetate in a restricted area. The Labour Party, the Trade Unions and in particular the reformist organisation of the youth offer much greater possibilities to strengthen our movement and speed the growth of the section of the Fourth International in Britain.
The Conference recommends to the group which is working in the ILP at this time to act in this way. If the Marxist Group decides to make a new experience (with the journal Fourth International) it will without any doubt reach the conclusion that no further development of the Bolshevik-Leninist forces is possible in the ILP. But there is the danger that this experience involves a loss of time which would be damaging, because it would signify that the Marxist Group would remain without a real or clear perspective for a long period of time. The concrete methods of effecting the departure from the ILP and entry into the Labour Party and the Labour Party's youth organisation, as well as the unification of the forces of the Fourth International in Britain within the Labour Party, must be left to the English comrades to work out. The Conference instructs the International Secretariat and the General Council to follow the development in Britain with the greatest attention and to supply to the British Comrades all the help they can, in accordance with the line proposed by this resolution
July 31, 1936
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Letter to the Marxist Group
This is the full text of the document referred to by John Archer on p.69 of Revolutionary History Vol.6 No.2/3. It was only possible there to give a summary in a footnote.
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from the International Secretariat for the Fourth International,
dated November 7, 1936.
From the International Secretariat for the Fourth International: Berne November 7, 1936
To the Executive Committee of the Marxist Group, London.
Dear Comrades,
We regret that we have not received either the minutes or an official report of your national conference of October 10. The two resolutions accepted by the majority of the Conference, that of James and that of Cooper, have reached us only unofficially. It flows from these resolutions that the decision has been taken – contrary to the decision of the international conference at Geneva – that the group must continue its association with the ILP.
We do not wish to deal exhaustively with this resolution, in which you gave what is, in our opinion, an incorrect appreciation of the ILP: “revolutionary in comparison with the Labour Party or the Communist Party”; “attitude nearly correct on the Abyssinian and Spanish questions...”. There is no such thing as a “nearly revolutionary” party or a “nearly correct” attitude. In the language of Marxism, you call it by the clear term – Centrism. We do not want to reveal here the contradictions which exist in this same resolution in which you speak of... “the isolation from the masses” of the ILP, of its “organisational breaking-up”, of the movement of its leadership to the right, of the “decline in number of its members”; the poor quality of its membership, its lack of industrial contacts, its specific attitudes correct only in superficial appearance and its centrist oscillations, the reasons why the ILP “has become an obstacle for the correct development of the Bolshevik-Leninist work”, and yet ... you decide to remain in this moribund body.
You speak of “crushing” the ILP, of making “a mass withdrawal” at the moment of a split.
The several days which have passed since this resolution was accepted already permit a verification of the correctness or falsity of your perspective. As had been predicted many times, it is not you (!) who are going to crush the ILP, but it is the bureaucracy, much stronger than you, which is going over to the attack to divide you up and introduce confusion in your ranks. We do not have the exact figures of your membership, either now or for the past six months. But it is a fact that you have lost many of them without effectively weakening the ILP. We demand from you that you send us an exact balance sheet, because these are the facts themselves which speak the clearest language.
We have here your minutes, of 25 October, in which you discuss your attitude to be taken towards the sale of your journal, Fight, outside the ranks of the ILP. The attitude of the bureaucracy is crystal clear: “They have declared that the Trotskyists were engaged on an activity hostile to the party”. But, on the contrary, your attitude is ultra-equivocal. What, for example, does this mean: “Our object is to utilise, to break from the ILP, on a political question of the greatest importance which would permit such a split; in our opinion, the question of the sale of the journal is not such a question”.
“Comrade Cooper declared that we should go over to the political question as soon as (?) they attack us on the organisational plane”. If we understood correctly, Comrade Cooper is of the opinion that the prohibition of the sale of Fight is not yet an organisational attack, and that it is necessary still to wait. It is absolutely correct that the question of Fight in itself does not represent a “political issue”. But does this mean that we must wait on and on before leaving? The bureaucracy – and all the experience of France proves this a hundred times – will not attack us on the political plane, on which it is much weaker than we are. The bureaucracy of the SFIO began also by prohibiting La Verité , and as our French comrades, under the influence of Molinier, did not go over in time to the counter-offensive on the political plane, the bureaucracy became stronger, the centrists (Pivert) and the sympathisers no longer solidarised themselves with us, and in the end we finished up by having a split in our own ranks.
Comrade Braun, when he was staying in London, explained to several comrades, and in particular to Comrade Cooper, that with the first issue of Fight the opening of coercive measures will begin on the part of the bureaucracy, and that the Marxist Group must be able to make a turn in twenty-four hours. But we are very much afraid that you are repeating the mistakes which have been so disastrous in France. To call today for a national conference of the ILP can form part of our counter-offensive. But to begin with, this is not a political question, and, in the second place, we are convinced that we are much too weak to force them to have a conference. And, if that is the case, are you proposing to stay in the ILP up to the Annual Conference at Easter? That would be fatal.
There are enough political questions which can serve you as a target for a vigorous attack, without withdrawing a millimetre; we greatly regret that you did not publicly take a position in relation to the Brussels Peace Congress. Fight has been silent on this important question. And all the same, such a resolution or open letter, from the very base of the ILP, would have been of enormous value to combat the centrists of the London Bureau. You did not help us.
In conclusion, we beg you to reconsider your policy on the basis of the facts, to go over at once to the offensive in the political domain, to treat questions of party statues (National Conference of the ILP etc.) of formal discipline etc. ... as entirely secondary questions, to trace a perspective of an open exodus from the ILP with a political declaration which can be used in all our groups in the Labour Party and the League of Youth. Further, we request you to give us an exact report on the forces of the Marxist Group today.
While waiting to hear from you, comrades, we express our fraternal revolutionary sentiments.
For the IS ...
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This is the full text of the document referred to by John Archer on p.69 of Revolutionary History, Vol.6 No.2/3. It was only possible there to give a summary in a footnote.
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Extract from the minutes of the meeting of the International Bureau for the Fourth International on December 13. 1936
England.
Alexander, the delegate of the Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour League of Youth in England:
The decision of the international conference in July, which recommended unification in the Labour Party, has been adopted by the Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour League of Youth, but not by the Marxist Group in the ILP, while the smaller Marxist League has not declared its position. The Marxist Group, at its national conference, adopted at one and the same time a resolution from James to create a new organisation to bring together the different fractions in the various organisations (ILP, LP etc.), and another resolutely to continue the work in the ILP. The Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour Party supported the James resolution. However, since then, under the influence of the American, Field, the James fraction changed its opinion, and decided to quit the ILP to form an independent organisation, by a vote of its London group of 16-6. They have effectively left the ILP (See New Leader). The Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour Party, which moreover calls itself the Youth Militant Group, and which will soon form an adult ‘Militant’ group, the representatives of which were not admitted to the Marxist Group meeting, called upon the latter to re-consider its decision to form an independent group, which would seriously imperil the work in the Labour Party and its Youth organisation, and informed the International Bureau of this dispute. The Marxist Group will hold a meeting next Wednesday to take the final decision; an expression of the views of the international centre will certainly influence this decision.
The situation in the Labour Party, of its left, and especially its youth section, permit very effective work for our ideas in the coming period. Our comrades, who with the advice of cde. Crux and of the IS entered the party and the Labour Youth in February 1936 numbering six, to prepare the ground for the entry of all the British Bolshevik-Leninists, now number 100, and are therefore stronger than the MG which from 120 has come down to 30. Several of the provincial groups of the Marxist Group have come over to the Bolshevik-Leninist Group with the exception of Glasgow, which is awaiting the decision of the Marxist Group as a whole to enter the Labour Party As to the Marxist League, it has always distanced itself from joint work and unification, claiming that the group is a branch of the Marxist Group, and demanding purely and simply that this group enter the Labour Party.
Braun (FN). After two years’ work in the ILP, the Marxist Group had experienced important success in the ILP. However, it had not succeeded in changing the policy of the ILP, or in arresting its continued decomposition. Cde Crux and the IS believed that continued membership of the ILP, which is decomposing and has no serious links with the masses could drag the Marxist Group down in the decline of the ILP and render all its efforts sterile. In 1935 they proposed to leave the ILP in the near future, and with the maximum number of comrades, to enter the Labour Party then.
The opportunities to carry this out have not been lacking, especially since the moment when the bureaucracy of the ILP proceeded to sanctions against the Bolshevik-Leninists (dissolution of the Marxist Group, restrictions on internal democracy) at the time of the capitulation of the Brockway fraction to the Maxton parliamentarians on the question of Abyssinia. But the Marxist Group refused. It decided to make a last experiment with a journal of its own, Fourth International or Fight, the public sale of which was promptly forbidden by the bureaucracy. The party discussion journal which our comrades established was taken from them and launched publicly in opposition to Fight. (FN). Having stuck too long to the ILP, each blow on their heads forced the comrades immediately to go over to the extreme opposite. They condemned the whole policy of entrism, and decided to create an independent organisation. This decision was in the event to provoke a split in the Marxist Group itself, with the Cooper fraction perhaps not having decided to leave the ILP.
The letter from the Marxist Group announcing its decision was read.
Fred (identified at the beginning of the minutes as a representative of the French organisation, but in fact possibly Klement, though more probably Fred Emmett) informed the comrades of the problems of the Labour League of Youth (see the minutes of the meeting of the International Bureau of Youth.)
The Braun motion was read and discussion followed.
Clart (Jean Rous) made a declaration in favour of the motion.
Vilain (Pierre Naville) expressed reservations: the entry into the Labour Party would be effective only if the work were carried on for a long time. However the crisis of the Young Socialists in England foreshadowed a split for April 1937 and hence the creation of an independent youth organisation. Vilain doubts whether the indication is to orient towards an early split if it could only be a very small one which would not contribute in any way to improving our links with the working masses.
Alexander: The Edinburgh Conference of the Labour party (FN) by the block vote of the trade unions and against the opinions of the local organisations of the Labour Party itself adopted a memorandum, which, by reducing the upper age limit of the youth section from 25 to 21 years practically wound the youth section up. This aroused much opposition among the youth and indignation against the leadership (Stalinist) of the youth organisation, which accepted the memorandum. This effervescence can lead in April at the National Conference to the formation of an independent youth organisation, of 8,000 to 10,000 members. Much depends on the support of the local sections of the Labour Party, and from the fact that on all major questions they always have the trade union majority against them. Our entry and our systematic work in the Labour Party and the Socialist League can have good results. It is true that a split in the Labour Party is less imminent than in the Youth, but with a strong opposition from the base of the Labour Party we could more easily defeat the bureaucracy on the battlefield of the youth. However, an independent group, which in any case could not do much, would have the effect of giving the bureaucrats an excuse to exclude purely and simply the Bolshevik-Leninists from the party and the youth.
Artur (who is identified as a ‘member of the General Council’) said that he supported the entry into the Labour Party to support the struggle of the youth.
Vilain: thought that an important split of the Socialist Youth would only have the effect of making them fall still more under the influence of Stalinism, because the split would be on an unclear basis.
Braun: We can only give general instructions. It is for the English themselves to decide their practical realisation. To vote against this motion would be to support the disastrous decision of James.
Xavier: (‘member of bureau’) If the Marxist Group has up to the present not been strong enough to come out of the ILP, how would it be able now to carry out effective independent work? Entry into the Labour Party before April could have positive results.
The motion was supported unanimously, with a reservation by Vilain on perspective. The resolution will be published in the Internal Bulletin of the IS.
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Declaration on the English Marxist Group
This is the full text of the document referred to by John Archer on p.69 of Revolutionary History Vol.6 No.2/3. It was only possible there to give a short comment in a footnote.
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Declaration of the International Bureau
for the Fourth International
on the subject of the English Marxist Group
The Bureau for the Fourth International, at its meeting of December 13, took note of the letter of the Executive Committee of the Marxist Group of November 21 to the IS, in which it announces the decision of the majority of the London group of the Marxist Group to leave the ILP as quickly as possible and to found an independent organisation.
1. The Bureau for IV International must take note that this important turn is in contradiction to the decisions of the conference which was held four week previously, and that it rests solely on the basis of the decision of the majority of the London Group (16 to 6). The Executive Committee of the Marxist Group ought to have called a new conference on this subject, preceded by a report and a discussion of a fundamental character involving all the members. Since this elementary rule of democratic centralism is not observed, the Bureau for the IVth International cannot recognise that the decision taken is valid.
2. Every important political turn requires that the leadership of the organisation as a whole must submit a clear and true balance-sheet of the past policy. The leadership of the Marxist Group has, however, not carried out this duty. There have been three different opinions in conflict in the past:
a) One part of the Marxist Group has supported the tactic established by the resolution of the Geneva Conference:
“The conference is therefore of the opinion that the experience of the Bolshevik-Leninists within the ILP ought to be terminated, and that the group which at the present time is working in this organisation ought to transfer its field of work towards the mass organisations, especially towards the Labour Party and the Labour League of Youth.”
b) The Cooper tendency has outlined the perspective of staying in the ILP until a split permits a “mass withdrawal”. It would consider that the ILP still is a good field of work because it “still offers a large liberty of speech and action to the BLs and the possibility to organise mass work...” “Since there are no decisive reasons or necessary circumstances, or crises in the ILP, we should prepare for the next annual conference (Easter) as the final point of the struggle”.
c) The James tendency proposed to form an independent organisation of all the British BLs as a sort of organisation following fraction work in alien organisations (ILP and LP):
“Since the numerical force which would probably result from this fusion is not sufficient to form an independent BL party, the Marxist Group considers that the independent group must carry on fraction work in the different political parties, with the sole object of gaining sufficient forces to form an independent Bolshevik- Leninist party” ... “in view also of the specific position in the various localities, the Marxist Group considers it inadmissible that all its members should be invited to leave the ILP at once, or within a fixed period.”
The James tendency, just like that of Cooper, places all its hopes in the creation of a new journal (The Fourth International, later Fight), while the Geneva resolution shows the danger which ignoring its decision would involve, in view of the complete lack of a political perspective. Four weeks after the October Conference, the Executive Committee of the Marxist Group saw itself obliged to declare for leaving the ILP and recognising the correctness of the Geneva Resolution. Nonetheless, it does not say one word about how its own perspectives have been shown to be false. On the contrary, it does not point to the responsibility which it bears for having stayed too long in the ILP, but it attacks in general though in a disguised fashion the tactic of entry into alien organisations. It quotes the passage from an article by Trotsky where he says that a party (but not a little propaganda group) must have complete organisational independence, and it adds that the experience of the BLs since summer 1934 proves the correctness of those words. This shows nothing but that, in opinion of the authors of the resolution, the policy of the Bolshevik Leninist groups - which precisely were only propaganda groups and not parties - was false. And they draw from this the following conclusion for the Marxist Group.
“In the light of what is said above, and of the fact that its influence in the ILP has been compromised during the last two months of fractional struggle, when activity has consequently been weakened, and its perspective of gaining more supporters in today very small, the group decides to form an independent organisation as soon as possible.”
Not a word is said about the degeneration which has taken place during the last few months - and that is the sole reason for it - because they did not separate themselves soon enough from the rotting corpse of the ILP.
If they write in another passage of the same resolution that it is permissible to work within centrist-reformist organisations, they give by that a proof that the supporters of the resolution do not defend their opinion in a consistent fashion and that they are tangled up in their own contradictions.
In reality, the decomposition of the “majority” group, which in 1933 did not enter the ILP, and the undeniable success of the Marxist Group to winter 1935 prove that the tactical step of entry was entirely correct. But, as the French experience has already taught us, we have to know, not the right time to enter, but the right time to come out. The decomposition, the internal disputes, the passivity, result solely from the prolonged opportunist existence in the ILP, against the advice of the IS, of the Geneva Conference and of Comrade Crux (Trotsky).
3. When you conceal the mistakes of the past months in this way, and when in consequence you start from false premises, you must necessarily reach false conclusions for the future. Instead of repairing the damage, you will greatly increase it. Neither the split from the ILP which Cooper expected, with the possibility of a “mass withdrawal”, nor the numerical reinforcement which, according to the James resolution, would have enabled an independent organisation to be formed, have taken place. On the contrary: for more than six months, the Marxist Group has not gained a single member of the ILP and, on the contrary, it has lost half of its former members. Even though, therefore, these hopes, and with them the conditions for independence, have not been realised, a majority of the London group of the Marxist Group has decided - and that in direct opposition to the resolutions taken four weeks previously - to create an independent organisation. Not a shred of justification for the reasons for this decision is given, but reference is made, simply and in a completely general way, to the “international situation”. There can be no doubt that not a single member of the ILP, even if he sympathises politically with the Marxist Group, will follow him into complete and hopeless isolation; at the same time you could probably always find comrades of the ILP who would join the Labour Party to strengthen the Left Wing which is forming there, despite all the mistakes which have so far been made.
4. The decision of the Marxist Group to create an independent organisation has a result which is all the more disastrous because the fusion of all the groups, which the Geneva Conference characterised as an urgent necessity, will be obstructed by it. The resolution presented by Comrade James states, among other things: “The group understands that in these conditions an organic fusion with other groups is impossible.” But, unlike the Marxist Group, which becomes weaker and weaker because it stays stuck in an opportunist fashion to the ILP, the Bolshevik-Leninist group in the Labour Party League of Youth, formed only in February of this year with six comrades, has developed extremely rapidly. It is today much stronger than the Marxist Group. Activity and optimism flourish there, and everything indicates that despite the enormous difficulties it will grow still more. Its principle task is to inoculate British Youth against the Stalinist plague, in order that what has happened in Spain and in certain regions of Belgium, where the Socialist Youth, left to itself, has fallen totally under the influence of the Communist International, cannot happen in Britain. The decision of the Executive Committee of the Marxist Group, which makes fusion impossible, shows not only an action against the recommendation of the Geneva Conference, but also against the Marxist Group's own declaration which it took at its National Conference of October 10, where it declared that the premise for the formation of an independent party is the fusion of all the BLs.
5. By the decision to create an independent organisation, you also neglect completely to notice the changes in structure which are taking place in the Labour Party itself, and which will increase enormously as a result of the sharpening of the political situation on the Continent. Just as, in its time in France and especially in Belgium, a progressive Left Wing developed in the Socialist Parties, today an analogous process is taking place in the Labour Party. The Edinburgh Conference signifies, in this connection, an important phase in the history of the Labour Party. Let us quote what Stafford Cripps wrote in Controversy, and what is confirmed by other words from Dalton, the leader of the Right:
“The most significant development of at the Conference was without doubt the attitude of the constituency parties. The opposition to the platform ... of the great mass of the delegates from the local organisations of the Labour Party, who voted together against the platform and against the block vote (of the trade unions) on all important questions. All their political feelings were outraged by their continual defeats, and the principal problem which arose from the Conference was that of the democratisation (!) of the Labour Party itself. The indignation was so great that one felt a spontaneous movement of delegates from the localities, which took places on the night of Thursday, where 240 (out of 290 delegates) were present and declared unanimously for setting up an official ad hoc committee which was then set up to bring together the constituency parties so that they could make more effective their demands for wide power.”
Only someone politically blind could fail to see that the Bolshevik-Leninists, protected by the growing opposition coming from the radicalised worker masses demanding democracy in the Party, contains enormous possibilities of development. Further on this point, the following remark by Cripps is equally very important: “Discipline will become impossible because the base of the movement will do what it feels itself call upon to do without regard to the apparatus.” The Marxist Group takes note in its letter that the splitting away of this Left Wing of the Labour Party is inevitable, and that this will join the right-centrists and strengthen them. It draws from this the conclusion that “even purely as a tactical question, an independent organisation, assuring a centre even a little stable and solid is an urgent necessity in England”. But do the authors of this letter believe that a few dozens of isolated Trotskyists will check, from outside, this strong centrist current? It is absurd. It is only in the closest contact with this Left Wing, it is only as active members of this Left Wing, that you will obtain sufficient possibilities of influencing it, to win the revolutionary part of it for Bolshevik-Leninism. From outside, you will be regarded as impotent and hopeless sectarians, who fear contact with the masses, but who want to impose themselves on the masses from outside as sage counsellors. The “tactical” argument, the only one of those who propose the creation of an independent organisation, crumbles from within itself.
6. The proposal of the London group to provide help for the BLs in the Labour Party from outside by “combined work” may be inspired by the best intentions. But the first who should give their opinion of this help should be the comrades who are in the Labour Party themselves. But they are the most severe opponents of this over-hasty independence, and they declare that an independent group outside could only cause them harm, because they would in that case be regarded as agents of an alien organisation, from which an excuse could very easily be got to exclude them prematurely and without political motivation. This could happen, not only at the hands of the National Executive of the Labour Party, but even of the local organisations of the Labour Party which we wish to win. The combined work, in the way it is proposed, has proved itself to be completely impossible in practice itself. In Belgium, theoretically, such a possibility existed, as a result of the existence of the independent Brussels group. But the collaboration with the comrades of the Action Socialiste Revolutionnaire did not take place, and could not take place, for the reasons which have already been set out. Today, after the fusion, the situation is such that at Brussels, where there was the independent group, the Belgian Party is unfortunately still weak, and has not yet overcome its isolation. That is in another argument against independence.
7. Further, the danger exists that an independent group, turning eternally in a vicious circle, will cultivate sectarian and opportunist tendencies in its own ranks. Field in America is an eloquent example of the political impotence which results from these tendencies. The personal struggles carried on, without principles, by Field, Oehler, etc., against our American section, and which the majority of the London group wish to avoid, is, as experience proves, the sole “political” activity of such a group. It is a bad symptom to see the majority of the London group write that “it is a vice of the Trotskyist movement to create differences, to erect them into insurmountable obstacles and to wage a war of words on this basis”. This is the eternal argument of the Fenner Brockways, Schwab, Field and tutti quanti.
Another proof of the same opportunist influence is that they write that our movement has a “bad reputation” because of “fractional struggles” (as a result of impolite formulations: “philistine centrism”). The fractional struggle at certain periods becomes inevitable. The old Bolshevik Party also had a “bad reputation” in this respect. Intrigues none the less, which ought to be avoided, are always the accompaniment of a bad policy. That is why during the last year the struggle within the Marxist Group was full of personal bitterness, while the BLs in the Labour League of Youth were practically free from this.
8. The Bureau for the IVth International, on the basis of what is said above, is convinced that the Marxist Group must as a whole re-examine fundamentally the decision of the London majority, which cannot be binding for the whole national membership. No one will reproach the comrades for having made mistakes in the past, from the moment that they recognise and openly correct those mistakes. But when a new vote is taken, you must also take into account the comrades who, with or without the consent of the leadership of the Marxist Group, have entered the Labour Party, and have expressed their votes in their manner of acting. The best solution in the present circumstances seems to be this. Let all the English BLs who recognise the decisions of the Geneva Conference for the IVth International convene by the democratic method a constituent conference, where according to the principles of democratic centralism they will discuss and decide which road is the best. The conference will create the homogenous and single organisation of the BLs and will in this way meet the demand of the Geneva Conference for a “unification on the base of fundamental principles and the programme of the IVth International”. Any solution which does not correspond to the wishes of the majority of the English BLs can only fail, and constitute a danger for the work of the BLs. The IS would in that case feel itself obliged to reconsider its relations with such a minority.
December 13, 1936
adopted by the Bureau for the IVth International unanimously
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Statement from the BL Group
This is the full text of the document referred to by John Archer on p.70 of Revolutionary History, Vol.6 No.2/3. It was only possible there to give a short commentary.
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Statement to the Bureau for the Fourth International
from the BL Group in the Labour Party
regarding the fulfilment of the Geneva Resolution
in the Question of the Unity of the British Groups.
Our group accepted the Geneva conference resolution in its entirety and endeavoured to put it into practice. Special attention has been paid by us to the question of unity, and great efforts have been made by us to unite the three groups in this country on the basis of the Geneva Conference resolution. The following have been the results:
1. The Marxist League. From the formation of our group in Feb. 1936 up to the time of the Geneva Conference our group made repeated offers of unity to the Marxist League, but always met with a refusal. We were not even able to obtain a joint meeting of the members of both groups to discuss the matter. After the Geneva Conference we again approached the Marxist League with renewed offers of unity. A further rebuff was the result. The IS wrote to the Marxist League requesting them to cease raising formalistic objections to unity and we then wrote again renewing our offer. We have since had no reply. Copies of all the above correspondence are in the hands of the IS.
At the National Conference of all Bolshevik-Leninists in Great Britain, held on October 11, 1936, the Marxist League was represented by only three comrades, whose statements made it quite clear that their group had no intention of fusing with any other group in the near future. At this same national conference the Marxist League, although itself working inside the Labour Party, made every effort to prevent the Marxist Group leaving the ILP and entering the Labour Party (See its statement to the MG National Conference on Oct. 10th).
A Co-ordinating Committee between the three groups was set up at the October 11th conference. Two meetings of this committee were held shortly after the conference and a representative of the Marxist League was present at each of these, but the role of this comrade was confined to stirring up factional disputes and no effective co- operation took place. Since that time there has been no meeting of this Co-ordinating Committee.
Meanwhile the Marxist League, so far as it can be said to function as an organisation, grows ever more opportunistic, and the policy out forward by its members differs a little from that of the Socialist League. Though most of its members are in the Labour League of Youth, it does not support our fight there and refuses to sell our paper - the Youth Militant. On the contrary, it supports Socialist Youth (which its controlled through the Socialist League), a paper putting forward the centrist policy of the Socialist League and giving no clear lead to the youth.
Further the Marxist League organised the distribution of the English edition of the POUM bulletin, and thus actually supports the opportunistic policy of that party.
It must be remembered that the Marxist League is very small in numbers (about 20 active) and is mainly confined to certain parts of South London. It can in no way be considered a Bolshevik-Leninist organisation, but consists mainly of the personal following of Groves and Dewar, who have steadily degenerated politically since the split in the English section in December 1933, and who attempt to shield their opportunism behind the name of Cde. Trotsky and the prestige of the international organisation.
We consider that experience has amply shown that no unity can be obtained with the Marxist League.
2. The Marxist Group. The degeneration of the Marxist Group is well known to the Bureau of the Fourth International, and is described in the declaration made by the Bureau on the 13th December. The BL Group in the Labour Party expresses its entire agreement with the criticisms of the actions of the MG contained in this declaration. But the situation has now become even worse. The open meeting calling for the new party was held on December 16, despite the declaration of the Bureau. Moreover, although it had been agreed that the journal Fight was a joint publication between our group and the MG, the MG have used their majority on the Editorial Board to publish the second number in the name of the MG, and to advocate in it the new line of the MG. This not only renders our further co-operation on the paper impossible (and this despite the great efforts which we made to set it on its feet) but also greatly endangers our position inside the Labour Party, since the first number which was published in the name of the British Bolshevik-Leninists was sold by us to our contacts inside the Labour Party.
It is obvious therefore that the London MG is determined to persevere in its new course and is not deterred by the fact that it is acting contrary to the wishes not only of our international organisation but also to the majority of the British Bolshevik- Leninists.
It should clearly be realised that the deep internal degeneration has now reached an advanced stage. The following facts are of great significance:
a. The great bulk of the supporters of the new turn are petit-bourgeois in character and their present line expresses their fear of contact with the masses - so far as we are aware only three are of working-class origin (Ballard, Milligan and Westwood).
b. The former leadership of the group (Cooper-Marzillier) are bitterly opposed to the new line (although Cooper voted for it at the Nov 15th meeting) and have refused to leave the ILP. They still, however, remain members of the group, and even of the EC, since the majority being too weak to expel them have allowed them to remain as a “fraction” inside the ILP. The great bulk of the membership of the MG outside London which opposed entering the Labour Party did so upon similar grounds of ILP loyalism and will hence certainly stay in the ILP.
c. Very few of the old experienced comrades now remain in the MG - with but one exception all the remaining comrades of the old minority of the Communist League, who joined the ILP in 1933-34, are either already members of our group or agree with our position and will join us shortly. The general political level of the MG is now very definitely lower than our own.
d. The majority of the group who have taken this new turn consists almost entirely of the personal following of Comrade James, who is himself completely under the ideological influence of the Field group and is in close touch with Crame of the Canadian section of the Field group. It is obvious from the resolution of James passed at the No. 15th meeting of the MG that insofar as they have any political line at all in carrying out their new turn they base themselves in the arguments of Bauer, Oehler, Field etc. The fact that the MG now have principled differences with the policy of our international organisation was admitted by Cde. James in a conversation with Cdes. Harber and Tippet, [ Note by JJP : Subsequently Michael Tippett became a very prominent (and IMHO excellent - listen especially to A Child of Our Time) composer and sought to distance himself from his history in the CP and later the BLG. He became a pacifist and was temporarily imprisoned for opposition to WW2. In the late 1970s was to express support for the “ideas” of prince Charles Windsor. See Appendix 2 of Bornstein & Richardson's Against the Stream for more on Tippett and Trotskyism] when he stated that the reason why they had not expressed these differences in the form of theses was because they feared this would mean expulsion from the international organisation.
In the view of all the above facts we consider that the organisational proposals contained in the declaration of the bureau of December 13th are now out of date and cannot help towards the attainment of unity in the present circumstances. Our group is now probably larger than both the Marxist League and the Marxist Group together and is unanimously in support of the Geneva resolutions. We have ceased to be merely a youth group and are developing work in the adult party. (A new duplicated monthly paper - The Militant - is appearing on 15th Jan.) Moreover, some eighty per cent of the membership of our group is of proletarian origin.
Work has however been held up during the past few months by the efforts we have made to bring the MG and the ML over to our correct position. Nothing has been left undone by us in this respect, but despite all our efforts we have been unable to achieve unity, although nearly all the best elements in the MG have joined us. Far too much of our time of late has been devoted to discussion on relations with other groups instead of getting on with our own work in the Labour Party and the Labour League of Youth.
In view of all the above facts we cannot agree to call another joint national conference with the Marxist Group, since we do not think that it would achieve any useful results. Moreover we are calling a national conference of our own group in February next in order to discuss our own problems and all our energies must be devoted to this.
In the light of all that has been said above we consider that there are no prospects of attaining unity in this country as a result of a merger of the three groups concerned, or of any two of them. Since the Marxist Group and the Marxist League are getting further away from our political position instead of nearer, we consider that the only way in which unity can come about will be through a continuation of the same process as has been taking place in recent months, the absorption by our group of the best elements of the other groups. This process is, however, impeded by the fact that both the other groups have hitherto been able to claim international recognition on the same basis as ourselves. We therefore consider that the time has now some when the Bureau for the Fourth International should state openly that there is only one group in this country which can be considered to be part of the international organisation - our group - and that the other two groups, the MG and the ML, can no longer be considered as sympathetic organisations for the reasons given above and those contained in the statement of the bureau of the 13th Dec. A statement by the bureau of this kind will greatly promote the disintegration of the other groups, which must inevitably follow from their mistakes and from our growth and will thus bring the establishment of a section in this country appreciably nearer.
The Executive Committee, Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour Party
Dec. 29th, 1936
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
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The following five source documents were intended as Appendices to John Archer’s article CLR James in Britain, 1932-38, which appeared in Revolutionary History, Vol.6 No.2/3, Summer 1996. They shed valuable light on relationships between the Trotskyists in Britain and the International. We were not able to publish them at the time because of limitations on available space. We are pleased to make them available to our readers through the web. As the editor's introduction to John Archer’s article stated, we have a great deal of important material from this author which we still hope to publish when the opportunity arises.
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On the tasks of the British Bolshevik-Leninists
The first International Conference of the Fourth International, was actually held in Paris, from July 29-31, 1936. It was usually referred to as the “Geneva” Pre-Conference, for security reasons. More material from this conference can be read in Documents of the Fourth International. The Formative Years (1933-40), Pathfinder Press 1973, edited by Will Reisner.
James attended as a delegate from the Marxist Group, with Bert Matlow as an observer. The Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour Party was represented by Denzil Dean Harber, with Charlie Van Gelderen attending as an observer. The Marxist League was invited but was not present.
More material on the British groups and the “Geneva” conference can be found in Against the Stream. A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain 1924-38 by Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson, and in John Archer’s PhD Thesis Trotskyism in Britain 1931-37 (Central London Polytechnic, 1979).
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Resolution on the Tasks of the British Bolshevik-Leninists,
unanimously agreed by the “Geneva” Pre-Conference,
July 29-31, 1936
The Geneva Conference considers it an extremely urgent necessity to effect with the least possible delay the unification of the three English groups which at present are working on the basis of the fundamental principles and programme of the Fourth International. Clearly on this question of fusion, no group can demand that another dissolve itself and that its members join the first group individually. In the opinion of the Conference, the continued existence side by side of the three groups weakens the effectiveness of our movement, by the fact that, without there being apparent differences of principle, they are separate from one another and often work for opposed ends, thus preventing the development of the progress of the Fourth International in Britain. The Conference sees no principled reason for such a division of the forces and demands a fusion on a democratic basis which will make possible the establishment of a section of the Fourth International in this country.
The conference regrets the absence of a representative of the Groves group and the fact that it had not sent a document to the Conference. The Conference invites them to give their approval in principle to the official documents which have come out of the Conference.
The Conference is further of the opinion that the experience of the Bolshevik-Leninists within the ILP must be brought to an end, and that this group which at this moment is working within that organisation must shift its field of work in the direction of the mass organisations, especially towards the Labour Party and the Labour League of Youth. It is true that the Bolshevik-Leninists in the ILP can do trade union work, but they could do it much more effectively if in the eyes of the workers they were not associated with the bankrupt ILP. Their membership of the ILP rises like an impenetrable wall between the Bolshevik-Leninists and the mass movement of the youth, the potential reservoir of revolutionaries, from which the British Section of the Fourth International will draw the greater part of its cadres ” as well as the base of the Labour Party. It is necessary to know, not only the moment at which it is profitable for revolutionary Marxists to enter a reformist or centrist organisation, but also the moment when it is imperative to leave it, and to implant their movement and their ideas in another milieu. The ILP today is nothing but a centrist sect in decline; further work within it can only condemn our forces to mark time and vegetate in a restricted area. The Labour Party, the Trade Unions and in particular the reformist organisation of the youth offer much greater possibilities to strengthen our movement and speed the growth of the section of the Fourth International in Britain.
The Conference recommends to the group which is working in the ILP at this time to act in this way. If the Marxist Group decides to make a new experience (with the journal Fourth International) it will without any doubt reach the conclusion that no further development of the Bolshevik-Leninist forces is possible in the ILP. But there is the danger that this experience involves a loss of time which would be damaging, because it would signify that the Marxist Group would remain without a real or clear perspective for a long period of time. The concrete methods of effecting the departure from the ILP and entry into the Labour Party and the Labour Party's youth organisation, as well as the unification of the forces of the Fourth International in Britain within the Labour Party, must be left to the English comrades to work out. The Conference instructs the International Secretariat and the General Council to follow the development in Britain with the greatest attention and to supply to the British Comrades all the help they can, in accordance with the line proposed by this resolution
July 31, 1936
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Letter to the Marxist Group
This is the full text of the document referred to by John Archer on p.69 of Revolutionary History Vol.6 No.2/3. It was only possible there to give a summary in a footnote.
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from the International Secretariat for the Fourth International,
dated November 7, 1936.
From the International Secretariat for the Fourth International: Berne November 7, 1936
To the Executive Committee of the Marxist Group, London.
Dear Comrades,
We regret that we have not received either the minutes or an official report of your national conference of October 10. The two resolutions accepted by the majority of the Conference, that of James and that of Cooper, have reached us only unofficially. It flows from these resolutions that the decision has been taken – contrary to the decision of the international conference at Geneva – that the group must continue its association with the ILP.
We do not wish to deal exhaustively with this resolution, in which you gave what is, in our opinion, an incorrect appreciation of the ILP: “revolutionary in comparison with the Labour Party or the Communist Party”; “attitude nearly correct on the Abyssinian and Spanish questions...”. There is no such thing as a “nearly revolutionary” party or a “nearly correct” attitude. In the language of Marxism, you call it by the clear term – Centrism. We do not want to reveal here the contradictions which exist in this same resolution in which you speak of... “the isolation from the masses” of the ILP, of its “organisational breaking-up”, of the movement of its leadership to the right, of the “decline in number of its members”; the poor quality of its membership, its lack of industrial contacts, its specific attitudes correct only in superficial appearance and its centrist oscillations, the reasons why the ILP “has become an obstacle for the correct development of the Bolshevik-Leninist work”, and yet ... you decide to remain in this moribund body.
You speak of “crushing” the ILP, of making “a mass withdrawal” at the moment of a split.
The several days which have passed since this resolution was accepted already permit a verification of the correctness or falsity of your perspective. As had been predicted many times, it is not you (!) who are going to crush the ILP, but it is the bureaucracy, much stronger than you, which is going over to the attack to divide you up and introduce confusion in your ranks. We do not have the exact figures of your membership, either now or for the past six months. But it is a fact that you have lost many of them without effectively weakening the ILP. We demand from you that you send us an exact balance sheet, because these are the facts themselves which speak the clearest language.
We have here your minutes, of 25 October, in which you discuss your attitude to be taken towards the sale of your journal, Fight, outside the ranks of the ILP. The attitude of the bureaucracy is crystal clear: “They have declared that the Trotskyists were engaged on an activity hostile to the party”. But, on the contrary, your attitude is ultra-equivocal. What, for example, does this mean: “Our object is to utilise, to break from the ILP, on a political question of the greatest importance which would permit such a split; in our opinion, the question of the sale of the journal is not such a question”.
“Comrade Cooper declared that we should go over to the political question as soon as (?) they attack us on the organisational plane”. If we understood correctly, Comrade Cooper is of the opinion that the prohibition of the sale of Fight is not yet an organisational attack, and that it is necessary still to wait. It is absolutely correct that the question of Fight in itself does not represent a “political issue”. But does this mean that we must wait on and on before leaving? The bureaucracy – and all the experience of France proves this a hundred times – will not attack us on the political plane, on which it is much weaker than we are. The bureaucracy of the SFIO began also by prohibiting La Verité , and as our French comrades, under the influence of Molinier, did not go over in time to the counter-offensive on the political plane, the bureaucracy became stronger, the centrists (Pivert) and the sympathisers no longer solidarised themselves with us, and in the end we finished up by having a split in our own ranks.
Comrade Braun, when he was staying in London, explained to several comrades, and in particular to Comrade Cooper, that with the first issue of Fight the opening of coercive measures will begin on the part of the bureaucracy, and that the Marxist Group must be able to make a turn in twenty-four hours. But we are very much afraid that you are repeating the mistakes which have been so disastrous in France. To call today for a national conference of the ILP can form part of our counter-offensive. But to begin with, this is not a political question, and, in the second place, we are convinced that we are much too weak to force them to have a conference. And, if that is the case, are you proposing to stay in the ILP up to the Annual Conference at Easter? That would be fatal.
There are enough political questions which can serve you as a target for a vigorous attack, without withdrawing a millimetre; we greatly regret that you did not publicly take a position in relation to the Brussels Peace Congress. Fight has been silent on this important question. And all the same, such a resolution or open letter, from the very base of the ILP, would have been of enormous value to combat the centrists of the London Bureau. You did not help us.
In conclusion, we beg you to reconsider your policy on the basis of the facts, to go over at once to the offensive in the political domain, to treat questions of party statues (National Conference of the ILP etc.) of formal discipline etc. ... as entirely secondary questions, to trace a perspective of an open exodus from the ILP with a political declaration which can be used in all our groups in the Labour Party and the League of Youth. Further, we request you to give us an exact report on the forces of the Marxist Group today.
While waiting to hear from you, comrades, we express our fraternal revolutionary sentiments.
For the IS ...
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This is the full text of the document referred to by John Archer on p.69 of Revolutionary History, Vol.6 No.2/3. It was only possible there to give a summary in a footnote.
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Extract from the minutes of the meeting of the International Bureau for the Fourth International on December 13. 1936
England.
Alexander, the delegate of the Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour League of Youth in England:
The decision of the international conference in July, which recommended unification in the Labour Party, has been adopted by the Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour League of Youth, but not by the Marxist Group in the ILP, while the smaller Marxist League has not declared its position. The Marxist Group, at its national conference, adopted at one and the same time a resolution from James to create a new organisation to bring together the different fractions in the various organisations (ILP, LP etc.), and another resolutely to continue the work in the ILP. The Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour Party supported the James resolution. However, since then, under the influence of the American, Field, the James fraction changed its opinion, and decided to quit the ILP to form an independent organisation, by a vote of its London group of 16-6. They have effectively left the ILP (See New Leader). The Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour Party, which moreover calls itself the Youth Militant Group, and which will soon form an adult ‘Militant’ group, the representatives of which were not admitted to the Marxist Group meeting, called upon the latter to re-consider its decision to form an independent group, which would seriously imperil the work in the Labour Party and its Youth organisation, and informed the International Bureau of this dispute. The Marxist Group will hold a meeting next Wednesday to take the final decision; an expression of the views of the international centre will certainly influence this decision.
The situation in the Labour Party, of its left, and especially its youth section, permit very effective work for our ideas in the coming period. Our comrades, who with the advice of cde. Crux and of the IS entered the party and the Labour Youth in February 1936 numbering six, to prepare the ground for the entry of all the British Bolshevik-Leninists, now number 100, and are therefore stronger than the MG which from 120 has come down to 30. Several of the provincial groups of the Marxist Group have come over to the Bolshevik-Leninist Group with the exception of Glasgow, which is awaiting the decision of the Marxist Group as a whole to enter the Labour Party As to the Marxist League, it has always distanced itself from joint work and unification, claiming that the group is a branch of the Marxist Group, and demanding purely and simply that this group enter the Labour Party.
Braun (FN). After two years’ work in the ILP, the Marxist Group had experienced important success in the ILP. However, it had not succeeded in changing the policy of the ILP, or in arresting its continued decomposition. Cde Crux and the IS believed that continued membership of the ILP, which is decomposing and has no serious links with the masses could drag the Marxist Group down in the decline of the ILP and render all its efforts sterile. In 1935 they proposed to leave the ILP in the near future, and with the maximum number of comrades, to enter the Labour Party then.
The opportunities to carry this out have not been lacking, especially since the moment when the bureaucracy of the ILP proceeded to sanctions against the Bolshevik-Leninists (dissolution of the Marxist Group, restrictions on internal democracy) at the time of the capitulation of the Brockway fraction to the Maxton parliamentarians on the question of Abyssinia. But the Marxist Group refused. It decided to make a last experiment with a journal of its own, Fourth International or Fight, the public sale of which was promptly forbidden by the bureaucracy. The party discussion journal which our comrades established was taken from them and launched publicly in opposition to Fight. (FN). Having stuck too long to the ILP, each blow on their heads forced the comrades immediately to go over to the extreme opposite. They condemned the whole policy of entrism, and decided to create an independent organisation. This decision was in the event to provoke a split in the Marxist Group itself, with the Cooper fraction perhaps not having decided to leave the ILP.
The letter from the Marxist Group announcing its decision was read.
Fred (identified at the beginning of the minutes as a representative of the French organisation, but in fact possibly Klement, though more probably Fred Emmett) informed the comrades of the problems of the Labour League of Youth (see the minutes of the meeting of the International Bureau of Youth.)
The Braun motion was read and discussion followed.
Clart (Jean Rous) made a declaration in favour of the motion.
Vilain (Pierre Naville) expressed reservations: the entry into the Labour Party would be effective only if the work were carried on for a long time. However the crisis of the Young Socialists in England foreshadowed a split for April 1937 and hence the creation of an independent youth organisation. Vilain doubts whether the indication is to orient towards an early split if it could only be a very small one which would not contribute in any way to improving our links with the working masses.
Alexander: The Edinburgh Conference of the Labour party (FN) by the block vote of the trade unions and against the opinions of the local organisations of the Labour Party itself adopted a memorandum, which, by reducing the upper age limit of the youth section from 25 to 21 years practically wound the youth section up. This aroused much opposition among the youth and indignation against the leadership (Stalinist) of the youth organisation, which accepted the memorandum. This effervescence can lead in April at the National Conference to the formation of an independent youth organisation, of 8,000 to 10,000 members. Much depends on the support of the local sections of the Labour Party, and from the fact that on all major questions they always have the trade union majority against them. Our entry and our systematic work in the Labour Party and the Socialist League can have good results. It is true that a split in the Labour Party is less imminent than in the Youth, but with a strong opposition from the base of the Labour Party we could more easily defeat the bureaucracy on the battlefield of the youth. However, an independent group, which in any case could not do much, would have the effect of giving the bureaucrats an excuse to exclude purely and simply the Bolshevik-Leninists from the party and the youth.
Artur (who is identified as a ‘member of the General Council’) said that he supported the entry into the Labour Party to support the struggle of the youth.
Vilain: thought that an important split of the Socialist Youth would only have the effect of making them fall still more under the influence of Stalinism, because the split would be on an unclear basis.
Braun: We can only give general instructions. It is for the English themselves to decide their practical realisation. To vote against this motion would be to support the disastrous decision of James.
Xavier: (‘member of bureau’) If the Marxist Group has up to the present not been strong enough to come out of the ILP, how would it be able now to carry out effective independent work? Entry into the Labour Party before April could have positive results.
The motion was supported unanimously, with a reservation by Vilain on perspective. The resolution will be published in the Internal Bulletin of the IS.
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Declaration on the English Marxist Group
This is the full text of the document referred to by John Archer on p.69 of Revolutionary History Vol.6 No.2/3. It was only possible there to give a short comment in a footnote.
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Declaration of the International Bureau
for the Fourth International
on the subject of the English Marxist Group
The Bureau for the Fourth International, at its meeting of December 13, took note of the letter of the Executive Committee of the Marxist Group of November 21 to the IS, in which it announces the decision of the majority of the London group of the Marxist Group to leave the ILP as quickly as possible and to found an independent organisation.
1. The Bureau for IV International must take note that this important turn is in contradiction to the decisions of the conference which was held four week previously, and that it rests solely on the basis of the decision of the majority of the London Group (16 to 6). The Executive Committee of the Marxist Group ought to have called a new conference on this subject, preceded by a report and a discussion of a fundamental character involving all the members. Since this elementary rule of democratic centralism is not observed, the Bureau for the IVth International cannot recognise that the decision taken is valid.
2. Every important political turn requires that the leadership of the organisation as a whole must submit a clear and true balance-sheet of the past policy. The leadership of the Marxist Group has, however, not carried out this duty. There have been three different opinions in conflict in the past:
a) One part of the Marxist Group has supported the tactic established by the resolution of the Geneva Conference:
“The conference is therefore of the opinion that the experience of the Bolshevik-Leninists within the ILP ought to be terminated, and that the group which at the present time is working in this organisation ought to transfer its field of work towards the mass organisations, especially towards the Labour Party and the Labour League of Youth.”
b) The Cooper tendency has outlined the perspective of staying in the ILP until a split permits a “mass withdrawal”. It would consider that the ILP still is a good field of work because it “still offers a large liberty of speech and action to the BLs and the possibility to organise mass work...” “Since there are no decisive reasons or necessary circumstances, or crises in the ILP, we should prepare for the next annual conference (Easter) as the final point of the struggle”.
c) The James tendency proposed to form an independent organisation of all the British BLs as a sort of organisation following fraction work in alien organisations (ILP and LP):
“Since the numerical force which would probably result from this fusion is not sufficient to form an independent BL party, the Marxist Group considers that the independent group must carry on fraction work in the different political parties, with the sole object of gaining sufficient forces to form an independent Bolshevik- Leninist party” ... “in view also of the specific position in the various localities, the Marxist Group considers it inadmissible that all its members should be invited to leave the ILP at once, or within a fixed period.”
The James tendency, just like that of Cooper, places all its hopes in the creation of a new journal (The Fourth International, later Fight), while the Geneva resolution shows the danger which ignoring its decision would involve, in view of the complete lack of a political perspective. Four weeks after the October Conference, the Executive Committee of the Marxist Group saw itself obliged to declare for leaving the ILP and recognising the correctness of the Geneva Resolution. Nonetheless, it does not say one word about how its own perspectives have been shown to be false. On the contrary, it does not point to the responsibility which it bears for having stayed too long in the ILP, but it attacks in general though in a disguised fashion the tactic of entry into alien organisations. It quotes the passage from an article by Trotsky where he says that a party (but not a little propaganda group) must have complete organisational independence, and it adds that the experience of the BLs since summer 1934 proves the correctness of those words. This shows nothing but that, in opinion of the authors of the resolution, the policy of the Bolshevik Leninist groups - which precisely were only propaganda groups and not parties - was false. And they draw from this the following conclusion for the Marxist Group.
“In the light of what is said above, and of the fact that its influence in the ILP has been compromised during the last two months of fractional struggle, when activity has consequently been weakened, and its perspective of gaining more supporters in today very small, the group decides to form an independent organisation as soon as possible.”
Not a word is said about the degeneration which has taken place during the last few months - and that is the sole reason for it - because they did not separate themselves soon enough from the rotting corpse of the ILP.
If they write in another passage of the same resolution that it is permissible to work within centrist-reformist organisations, they give by that a proof that the supporters of the resolution do not defend their opinion in a consistent fashion and that they are tangled up in their own contradictions.
In reality, the decomposition of the “majority” group, which in 1933 did not enter the ILP, and the undeniable success of the Marxist Group to winter 1935 prove that the tactical step of entry was entirely correct. But, as the French experience has already taught us, we have to know, not the right time to enter, but the right time to come out. The decomposition, the internal disputes, the passivity, result solely from the prolonged opportunist existence in the ILP, against the advice of the IS, of the Geneva Conference and of Comrade Crux (Trotsky).
3. When you conceal the mistakes of the past months in this way, and when in consequence you start from false premises, you must necessarily reach false conclusions for the future. Instead of repairing the damage, you will greatly increase it. Neither the split from the ILP which Cooper expected, with the possibility of a “mass withdrawal”, nor the numerical reinforcement which, according to the James resolution, would have enabled an independent organisation to be formed, have taken place. On the contrary: for more than six months, the Marxist Group has not gained a single member of the ILP and, on the contrary, it has lost half of its former members. Even though, therefore, these hopes, and with them the conditions for independence, have not been realised, a majority of the London group of the Marxist Group has decided - and that in direct opposition to the resolutions taken four weeks previously - to create an independent organisation. Not a shred of justification for the reasons for this decision is given, but reference is made, simply and in a completely general way, to the “international situation”. There can be no doubt that not a single member of the ILP, even if he sympathises politically with the Marxist Group, will follow him into complete and hopeless isolation; at the same time you could probably always find comrades of the ILP who would join the Labour Party to strengthen the Left Wing which is forming there, despite all the mistakes which have so far been made.
4. The decision of the Marxist Group to create an independent organisation has a result which is all the more disastrous because the fusion of all the groups, which the Geneva Conference characterised as an urgent necessity, will be obstructed by it. The resolution presented by Comrade James states, among other things: “The group understands that in these conditions an organic fusion with other groups is impossible.” But, unlike the Marxist Group, which becomes weaker and weaker because it stays stuck in an opportunist fashion to the ILP, the Bolshevik-Leninist group in the Labour Party League of Youth, formed only in February of this year with six comrades, has developed extremely rapidly. It is today much stronger than the Marxist Group. Activity and optimism flourish there, and everything indicates that despite the enormous difficulties it will grow still more. Its principle task is to inoculate British Youth against the Stalinist plague, in order that what has happened in Spain and in certain regions of Belgium, where the Socialist Youth, left to itself, has fallen totally under the influence of the Communist International, cannot happen in Britain. The decision of the Executive Committee of the Marxist Group, which makes fusion impossible, shows not only an action against the recommendation of the Geneva Conference, but also against the Marxist Group's own declaration which it took at its National Conference of October 10, where it declared that the premise for the formation of an independent party is the fusion of all the BLs.
5. By the decision to create an independent organisation, you also neglect completely to notice the changes in structure which are taking place in the Labour Party itself, and which will increase enormously as a result of the sharpening of the political situation on the Continent. Just as, in its time in France and especially in Belgium, a progressive Left Wing developed in the Socialist Parties, today an analogous process is taking place in the Labour Party. The Edinburgh Conference signifies, in this connection, an important phase in the history of the Labour Party. Let us quote what Stafford Cripps wrote in Controversy, and what is confirmed by other words from Dalton, the leader of the Right:
“The most significant development of at the Conference was without doubt the attitude of the constituency parties. The opposition to the platform ... of the great mass of the delegates from the local organisations of the Labour Party, who voted together against the platform and against the block vote (of the trade unions) on all important questions. All their political feelings were outraged by their continual defeats, and the principal problem which arose from the Conference was that of the democratisation (!) of the Labour Party itself. The indignation was so great that one felt a spontaneous movement of delegates from the localities, which took places on the night of Thursday, where 240 (out of 290 delegates) were present and declared unanimously for setting up an official ad hoc committee which was then set up to bring together the constituency parties so that they could make more effective their demands for wide power.”
Only someone politically blind could fail to see that the Bolshevik-Leninists, protected by the growing opposition coming from the radicalised worker masses demanding democracy in the Party, contains enormous possibilities of development. Further on this point, the following remark by Cripps is equally very important: “Discipline will become impossible because the base of the movement will do what it feels itself call upon to do without regard to the apparatus.” The Marxist Group takes note in its letter that the splitting away of this Left Wing of the Labour Party is inevitable, and that this will join the right-centrists and strengthen them. It draws from this the conclusion that “even purely as a tactical question, an independent organisation, assuring a centre even a little stable and solid is an urgent necessity in England”. But do the authors of this letter believe that a few dozens of isolated Trotskyists will check, from outside, this strong centrist current? It is absurd. It is only in the closest contact with this Left Wing, it is only as active members of this Left Wing, that you will obtain sufficient possibilities of influencing it, to win the revolutionary part of it for Bolshevik-Leninism. From outside, you will be regarded as impotent and hopeless sectarians, who fear contact with the masses, but who want to impose themselves on the masses from outside as sage counsellors. The “tactical” argument, the only one of those who propose the creation of an independent organisation, crumbles from within itself.
6. The proposal of the London group to provide help for the BLs in the Labour Party from outside by “combined work” may be inspired by the best intentions. But the first who should give their opinion of this help should be the comrades who are in the Labour Party themselves. But they are the most severe opponents of this over-hasty independence, and they declare that an independent group outside could only cause them harm, because they would in that case be regarded as agents of an alien organisation, from which an excuse could very easily be got to exclude them prematurely and without political motivation. This could happen, not only at the hands of the National Executive of the Labour Party, but even of the local organisations of the Labour Party which we wish to win. The combined work, in the way it is proposed, has proved itself to be completely impossible in practice itself. In Belgium, theoretically, such a possibility existed, as a result of the existence of the independent Brussels group. But the collaboration with the comrades of the Action Socialiste Revolutionnaire did not take place, and could not take place, for the reasons which have already been set out. Today, after the fusion, the situation is such that at Brussels, where there was the independent group, the Belgian Party is unfortunately still weak, and has not yet overcome its isolation. That is in another argument against independence.
7. Further, the danger exists that an independent group, turning eternally in a vicious circle, will cultivate sectarian and opportunist tendencies in its own ranks. Field in America is an eloquent example of the political impotence which results from these tendencies. The personal struggles carried on, without principles, by Field, Oehler, etc., against our American section, and which the majority of the London group wish to avoid, is, as experience proves, the sole “political” activity of such a group. It is a bad symptom to see the majority of the London group write that “it is a vice of the Trotskyist movement to create differences, to erect them into insurmountable obstacles and to wage a war of words on this basis”. This is the eternal argument of the Fenner Brockways, Schwab, Field and tutti quanti.
Another proof of the same opportunist influence is that they write that our movement has a “bad reputation” because of “fractional struggles” (as a result of impolite formulations: “philistine centrism”). The fractional struggle at certain periods becomes inevitable. The old Bolshevik Party also had a “bad reputation” in this respect. Intrigues none the less, which ought to be avoided, are always the accompaniment of a bad policy. That is why during the last year the struggle within the Marxist Group was full of personal bitterness, while the BLs in the Labour League of Youth were practically free from this.
8. The Bureau for the IVth International, on the basis of what is said above, is convinced that the Marxist Group must as a whole re-examine fundamentally the decision of the London majority, which cannot be binding for the whole national membership. No one will reproach the comrades for having made mistakes in the past, from the moment that they recognise and openly correct those mistakes. But when a new vote is taken, you must also take into account the comrades who, with or without the consent of the leadership of the Marxist Group, have entered the Labour Party, and have expressed their votes in their manner of acting. The best solution in the present circumstances seems to be this. Let all the English BLs who recognise the decisions of the Geneva Conference for the IVth International convene by the democratic method a constituent conference, where according to the principles of democratic centralism they will discuss and decide which road is the best. The conference will create the homogenous and single organisation of the BLs and will in this way meet the demand of the Geneva Conference for a “unification on the base of fundamental principles and the programme of the IVth International”. Any solution which does not correspond to the wishes of the majority of the English BLs can only fail, and constitute a danger for the work of the BLs. The IS would in that case feel itself obliged to reconsider its relations with such a minority.
December 13, 1936
adopted by the Bureau for the IVth International unanimously
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Statement from the BL Group
This is the full text of the document referred to by John Archer on p.70 of Revolutionary History, Vol.6 No.2/3. It was only possible there to give a short commentary.
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Statement to the Bureau for the Fourth International
from the BL Group in the Labour Party
regarding the fulfilment of the Geneva Resolution
in the Question of the Unity of the British Groups.
Our group accepted the Geneva conference resolution in its entirety and endeavoured to put it into practice. Special attention has been paid by us to the question of unity, and great efforts have been made by us to unite the three groups in this country on the basis of the Geneva Conference resolution. The following have been the results:
1. The Marxist League. From the formation of our group in Feb. 1936 up to the time of the Geneva Conference our group made repeated offers of unity to the Marxist League, but always met with a refusal. We were not even able to obtain a joint meeting of the members of both groups to discuss the matter. After the Geneva Conference we again approached the Marxist League with renewed offers of unity. A further rebuff was the result. The IS wrote to the Marxist League requesting them to cease raising formalistic objections to unity and we then wrote again renewing our offer. We have since had no reply. Copies of all the above correspondence are in the hands of the IS.
At the National Conference of all Bolshevik-Leninists in Great Britain, held on October 11, 1936, the Marxist League was represented by only three comrades, whose statements made it quite clear that their group had no intention of fusing with any other group in the near future. At this same national conference the Marxist League, although itself working inside the Labour Party, made every effort to prevent the Marxist Group leaving the ILP and entering the Labour Party (See its statement to the MG National Conference on Oct. 10th).
A Co-ordinating Committee between the three groups was set up at the October 11th conference. Two meetings of this committee were held shortly after the conference and a representative of the Marxist League was present at each of these, but the role of this comrade was confined to stirring up factional disputes and no effective co- operation took place. Since that time there has been no meeting of this Co-ordinating Committee.
Meanwhile the Marxist League, so far as it can be said to function as an organisation, grows ever more opportunistic, and the policy out forward by its members differs a little from that of the Socialist League. Though most of its members are in the Labour League of Youth, it does not support our fight there and refuses to sell our paper - the Youth Militant. On the contrary, it supports Socialist Youth (which its controlled through the Socialist League), a paper putting forward the centrist policy of the Socialist League and giving no clear lead to the youth.
Further the Marxist League organised the distribution of the English edition of the POUM bulletin, and thus actually supports the opportunistic policy of that party.
It must be remembered that the Marxist League is very small in numbers (about 20 active) and is mainly confined to certain parts of South London. It can in no way be considered a Bolshevik-Leninist organisation, but consists mainly of the personal following of Groves and Dewar, who have steadily degenerated politically since the split in the English section in December 1933, and who attempt to shield their opportunism behind the name of Cde. Trotsky and the prestige of the international organisation.
We consider that experience has amply shown that no unity can be obtained with the Marxist League.
2. The Marxist Group. The degeneration of the Marxist Group is well known to the Bureau of the Fourth International, and is described in the declaration made by the Bureau on the 13th December. The BL Group in the Labour Party expresses its entire agreement with the criticisms of the actions of the MG contained in this declaration. But the situation has now become even worse. The open meeting calling for the new party was held on December 16, despite the declaration of the Bureau. Moreover, although it had been agreed that the journal Fight was a joint publication between our group and the MG, the MG have used their majority on the Editorial Board to publish the second number in the name of the MG, and to advocate in it the new line of the MG. This not only renders our further co-operation on the paper impossible (and this despite the great efforts which we made to set it on its feet) but also greatly endangers our position inside the Labour Party, since the first number which was published in the name of the British Bolshevik-Leninists was sold by us to our contacts inside the Labour Party.
It is obvious therefore that the London MG is determined to persevere in its new course and is not deterred by the fact that it is acting contrary to the wishes not only of our international organisation but also to the majority of the British Bolshevik- Leninists.
It should clearly be realised that the deep internal degeneration has now reached an advanced stage. The following facts are of great significance:
a. The great bulk of the supporters of the new turn are petit-bourgeois in character and their present line expresses their fear of contact with the masses - so far as we are aware only three are of working-class origin (Ballard, Milligan and Westwood).
b. The former leadership of the group (Cooper-Marzillier) are bitterly opposed to the new line (although Cooper voted for it at the Nov 15th meeting) and have refused to leave the ILP. They still, however, remain members of the group, and even of the EC, since the majority being too weak to expel them have allowed them to remain as a “fraction” inside the ILP. The great bulk of the membership of the MG outside London which opposed entering the Labour Party did so upon similar grounds of ILP loyalism and will hence certainly stay in the ILP.
c. Very few of the old experienced comrades now remain in the MG - with but one exception all the remaining comrades of the old minority of the Communist League, who joined the ILP in 1933-34, are either already members of our group or agree with our position and will join us shortly. The general political level of the MG is now very definitely lower than our own.
d. The majority of the group who have taken this new turn consists almost entirely of the personal following of Comrade James, who is himself completely under the ideological influence of the Field group and is in close touch with Crame of the Canadian section of the Field group. It is obvious from the resolution of James passed at the No. 15th meeting of the MG that insofar as they have any political line at all in carrying out their new turn they base themselves in the arguments of Bauer, Oehler, Field etc. The fact that the MG now have principled differences with the policy of our international organisation was admitted by Cde. James in a conversation with Cdes. Harber and Tippet, [ Note by JJP : Subsequently Michael Tippett became a very prominent (and IMHO excellent - listen especially to A Child of Our Time) composer and sought to distance himself from his history in the CP and later the BLG. He became a pacifist and was temporarily imprisoned for opposition to WW2. In the late 1970s was to express support for the “ideas” of prince Charles Windsor. See Appendix 2 of Bornstein & Richardson's Against the Stream for more on Tippett and Trotskyism] when he stated that the reason why they had not expressed these differences in the form of theses was because they feared this would mean expulsion from the international organisation.
In the view of all the above facts we consider that the organisational proposals contained in the declaration of the bureau of December 13th are now out of date and cannot help towards the attainment of unity in the present circumstances. Our group is now probably larger than both the Marxist League and the Marxist Group together and is unanimously in support of the Geneva resolutions. We have ceased to be merely a youth group and are developing work in the adult party. (A new duplicated monthly paper - The Militant - is appearing on 15th Jan.) Moreover, some eighty per cent of the membership of our group is of proletarian origin.
Work has however been held up during the past few months by the efforts we have made to bring the MG and the ML over to our correct position. Nothing has been left undone by us in this respect, but despite all our efforts we have been unable to achieve unity, although nearly all the best elements in the MG have joined us. Far too much of our time of late has been devoted to discussion on relations with other groups instead of getting on with our own work in the Labour Party and the Labour League of Youth.
In view of all the above facts we cannot agree to call another joint national conference with the Marxist Group, since we do not think that it would achieve any useful results. Moreover we are calling a national conference of our own group in February next in order to discuss our own problems and all our energies must be devoted to this.
In the light of all that has been said above we consider that there are no prospects of attaining unity in this country as a result of a merger of the three groups concerned, or of any two of them. Since the Marxist Group and the Marxist League are getting further away from our political position instead of nearer, we consider that the only way in which unity can come about will be through a continuation of the same process as has been taking place in recent months, the absorption by our group of the best elements of the other groups. This process is, however, impeded by the fact that both the other groups have hitherto been able to claim international recognition on the same basis as ourselves. We therefore consider that the time has now some when the Bureau for the Fourth International should state openly that there is only one group in this country which can be considered to be part of the international organisation - our group - and that the other two groups, the MG and the ML, can no longer be considered as sympathetic organisations for the reasons given above and those contained in the statement of the bureau of the 13th Dec. A statement by the bureau of this kind will greatly promote the disintegration of the other groups, which must inevitably follow from their mistakes and from our growth and will thus bring the establishment of a section in this country appreciably nearer.
The Executive Committee, Bolshevik-Leninist Group in the Labour Party
Dec. 29th, 1936
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