Like German social democracy, Bolshevism had a minimum-maximum party programme. It was their DNA. But, asks Jack Conrad, was their programme irretrievably flawed, as argued by Tony Cliff and the SWP?

As we have seen, for John Rees, and before him Tony Cliff, the fact that the Socialist Workers Party has no agreed programme is regarded as a positive virtue.1 By the way, that does not mean it has no programme at all. De facto the SWP has an unofficial programme. In practice, at least today, the SWP’s programme is the miserable populism, eclecticism and Keynesianism of Respect.

It is the revolutionary programme of Marxism that is a politically incorrect concept in SWP circles. It is spoken of in terms that are entirely negative: rigid, inflexible, binding of hands and feet, a straightjacket. The absence of a Marxist programme is perceived as serving the interests of ‘party’ building. The final aim is nothing, the SWP everything. Unencumbered by an elaborated long-term strategic road map and a democratically agreed set of principles, the SWP leadership can thereby perform the most sudden about-turns. Swimming with what is perceived as the most fertile tide is always the overriding determinate.

Without a programme and a democratic internal life the rank and file can neither judge nor hold to account the leadership. Not surprisingly then, since the SWP came into existence as a trend, its history has been one of sudden and violent zigzags - adapting to cold war Labourism in the 1950s; jumping on the pro-Viet Cong bandwagon during the 1960s; banking on militant shop stewards in the early 1970s; preaching downturn miserablism in the 1980s - including, incredibly, during the 1984-85 miners’ Great Strike; alibying the anti-muslim regime of Slobodan Milosevic over Kosova in the 1990s; establishing Respect in the 2000s, all the while still hypocritically condemning the ‘official communist’ popular fronts of the 1930s. Virtually any line can be adopted, as long as it goes to build the ‘party’ - usually measured arithmetically in crude membership figures.

Needless to say, the approach outlined above is contrary to the spirit and example of Bolshevism, which Rees and co ritualistically claim as inspiration - at least since the turn from ‘Luxemburgism’ in the late 1960s. The Bolsheviks, of course, considered the programme of cardinal importance. That is why Lenin, to the untrained eye, went to what might appear to be hair-splitting lengths in order to formulate the programme, and why the Bolsheviks met all attempts to compromise or water it down with the fiercest hostility. Lenin savaged legal Marxists, anti-theory strikists and revolutionary defencists in countless open polemics.

It is surely no exaggeration to say that without the revolutionary programme there would have been no mass Bolshevik party, let alone a successful revolution in October 1917. Around the programme the Bolsheviks were able to organise the workers not merely in defence of their own economic terms and conditions, but as the hegemon or vanguard of the democratic revolution. The tiny working class was inspired and empowered by the rigour, scope and demands of the programme - it summed up the Marxist analysis of Russia, the attitude of the workers to the state and the various classes, put Russia’s revolution in the context of the world revolution and outlined the main lines of practice that flowed from it. As a result, workers came to master and take a lead in all political questions - national self-determination, fighting anti-semitism, war and peace, women’s equality, etc - and crucially was able to put itself at the head, or at least win the benign neutrality, of the broad peasant masses in the fight to overthrow the pro-war provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky.

Tactical flexibility is, of course, essential for any serious working class party or organisation. The Bolsheviks showed a commendable ability to manoeuvre, but all the while maintaining their principles. Underground committee work gave way to mass agitation, street combat to a semi-legal press and parliamentary activity, etc. Of course, even when it comes to programmatic strategy and principles, there must be room to question and change in light of new circumstances. There was modification of the programme: eg, after the fall of tsarism and dual power in 1917. The Bolsheviks also ‘stole’ the entire agrarian programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1917 in order to win support from the peasant countryside. But such programmatic changes always came about only after serious, often exhaustive, debate and a democratic vote.

Lenin’s party - the attentive reader will hardly need reminding - united around and fought its way to power on the basis of a programme closely modelled on the minimum-maximum Erfurt programme of German social democracy. Lenin was perfectly candid: “We are not in the least afraid to say that we want to imitate the Erfurt programme.”2 Not that his Russians copied the Germans. That would have been stupid. Specific conditions and tasks had to be accounted for. Crucially, however, Lenin insisted, the immediate programme of Russian social democracy - what we now call communism - squarely focused on the overthrow of tsarism and the establishment of the democratic republic.

As we have seen, the German SDP, while accepting most of the points argued for by Fredrick Engels in his Critique of the Erfurt programme, shied away from his most important suggestion. Ending kaiserdom was worriedly brushed under the carpet, as was the concomitant: the immediate, or minimum, demand for the democratic republic - what Engels and Marx called the “form” of the rule of the working class.3

The Bolshevik’s minimum programme was designed to transform the workers from a slave class - in Hegelian terms a ‘nothing’ - into a class that is ready to seize state power and thus begin the fight for the maximum programme. The minimum programme mapped out a road which began with the tsarist autocracy, but culminated in a democratic republic born of a popular revolution. Economically this regime would quickly sweep away what were called ‘feudal relics’; however, initially at least, things would not radically go beyond the essential norms of capitalist commodity production.

Nevertheless, Russia was to be ruled over by the working class in alliance with the peasant masses. Here, despite Lenin’s insistence that the two halves of the programme must be separate, was the transitional bridge that joined the minimum and maximum sections of the programme. The Bolsheviks were committed to using the salient of state power to help spark the international socialist revolution in the countries of advanced capitalism. By making the anti-tsarist revolution permanent - or, to convey it more accurately in English, uninterrupted - the Russian Revolution, because it would stop being purely Russian and become a world revolution, would without a change of regime proceed to the tasks of communism.

Economism
Of course, it is not only the SWP which rejects the Bolshevik programme. In defence of their own economistic practice, Leon Trotsky’s other epigones - the Socialist Party in England and Wales, Socialist Appeal, Labour Briefing, International Socialist Group, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, Workers Power, Spartacist League et al - woefully misrepresent the history of Marxism and especially Bolshevism. They certainly want to paint the history of Bolshevism so that it appears in their particular trade unionist, Labourite, populist or anarchistic colours. That way reflected glory lies. Yet, at the same time, they target for opprobrium the minimum section of the Bolshevik party’s programme. Supposedly the Bolsheviks saw sense and abandoned it during the course of 1917.

As an aside, it is worthwhile here, once again, dealing with that term ‘economism’. Naturally economists, including those mentioned above, define economism in a particularly jejune fashion. That way, in their own minds at least, they have to be found completely innocent of the ugly charge. Hence the plaintive cry. ‘I can’t understand why you in the CPGB call us economists’. If I have heard it once, I have heard it a thousand times.

Below are four specially selected, but representative, examples of economism self-defined; it is a self-replicating Hydra.

l Let us begin with Tony Cliff’s decoy of a definition: “Socialists should limit their agitation to purely economic issues, first to the industrial plant, then to inter-plant demands, and so on. Secondly, from the narrow economic agitation the workers would learn, through experience of the struggle itself, the need for politics, without the need for socialists to carry out agitation on the general political and social issues facing the Russian people as a whole.”4

l Next an ‘official communist’ dictionary definition: “Its proponents wanted to limit the tasks of the working class movement to economic struggle (improving labour conditions, higher wages, etc). They held that political struggle should be waged by the liberal bourgeoisie alone.”5

l The International Socialist Group’s Bob Jenkins can speak as the head of orthodox Trotskyism: economism is “orientating to daily trade union struggles” and this “leads them to underestimate the important new political issues and movements unless they are to be found in the unions”.6

l Finally we turn to the AWL’s Pete Radcliff for a definition from unorthodox Trotskyism: “Economism was the term Lenin used to describe the politics and approach of revolutionaries who exclude themselves from the political struggle ... and merely concentrated on trade union agitation.”7

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Even against the “old economism” of 1894-1902 Lenin fielded the term in the “broad sense”.8 The principal feature of economism is lagging behind the spontaneous movement and a general tendency to downplay the centrality of extreme democracy. That is why in 1916 Lenin attacked those Bolsheviks who, citing war-torn capitalism’s supposed inability to grant meaningful reforms, dismissed the demand for national self-determination. He branded this trend “imperialist economism”.9

Countless other manifestations of economism could be cited - eg, atheist economism, which, relying on technological and scientific progress, dismisses the need to combat religious superstition, or Trotskyite economism, which equates the former USSR with some kind of a workers’ state due to nationalised property forms.

Hence not all economists concentrate, or limit, their agitation to trade union or workerist perspectives. Eg, in banal rightist form: leave issues like the national question in Scotland and Wales for Blair and the nationalists to squabble over; meanwhile we will fight against civil service job cuts and build opposition to NHS ‘marketisation’. Eg, in leftist form: forget the struggle for a republic within capitalism - “Instead of a political revolution, a general strike for socialist revolution.”10

Besides this particular narrow form, many economists willingly, even enthusiastically, follow a rainbow of existing causes or demands - petty bourgeois greenism, feminist and black separatism, CND pacifism, Scottish nationalism, auto-Labourism, etc. So economists do not, by any means, shun politics. Rather economism veers away from the Marxist conception of politics. Crucially economism eschews taking the lead on democratic questions and uniting all democratic demands into a working class-led assault on the existing state.

Take the ISG’s Dave Packer. Back in 2001, with the support of the SWP he successfully opposed the CPGB proposal that the old Socialist Alliance should conduct a “militant” campaign against the monarchy. Similarly, and perfectly in tune with that craven desire to tone down, to restrict and to follow the line of least resistance, Alan Thornett, the ISG’s main leader, sided with the SWP in opposing a CPGB-supported motion in Respect which would have committed it to fighting for a secular state - supposedly that would put off muslims.11

The results of this timid, shrinking, penned-in approach can be seen with Respect’s 2005 general election manifesto (originally drafted by comrade Thornett and subsequently watered down by John Rees and George Galloway). Instead of a programme designed to challenge the United Kingdom state, Respect presents a series of demands and pledges such as increased spending on schools and the NHS, higher pensions, abolishing the anti-trade union laws, renationalisation of the railways and slashing the arms bill. Part old Labourism, part Keynesianism, part left populism.12

Leave aside the elementary principle of ‘not a penny, not a person’ for the capitalist military, this is completely inadequate. How our rulers rule through the UK’s constitutional monarchy system is entirely absent. Nothing about disbanding the standing army and replacing it with a people’s militia, nothing about abolishing the monarchy and the second chamber, nothing about self-determination for Scotland and Wales, Irish unity or the fight for a democratic republic in Britain. In short, no struggle for a “more generous democracy” under capitalism which would facilitate the organisation of the workers as a class, enabling it to take command of all democratic questions and issues.

Essentially Respect is committed to form a popular front government under the existing monarchical state and to using that machine to substantially improve the lot of the British population. A cynical lie or a naive promise. Either way, an entirely illusory prospect.

Given the election of a Respect government (unlikely), there are two likely courses. Firstly, political pressures force Respect to instantly abandon its reform programme and settle down to managing the system in the normal way. Look at what is happening in Italy. The government of Romano Prodi, disgracefully supported by Communist Refoundation, came to office promising all manner of things. Now, just six months on, with its finanziaria, it is imposing swingeing neoliberal public sector cuts.

Secondly, it presses ahead despite threats and blandishments and is faced with a strike by capital. Millions are laid off, the City of London goes into free fall and capital haemorrhages abroad. Given its probable composition and established political method, a Respect government would buckle and turn on those who voted for it. That is not simply to show richly deserved disrespect to leading individuals. It is the lesson of history. Reliance on the existing bureaucratic, quasi-democratic state inevitably takes well-meaning left reformists (and revolutionaries) to Blairite conclusions. Given such a predictable scenario, workers would not only suffer back-stabbing attacks, demoralisation and disorientation. They would be left marooned as an economic class of slaves, not elevated to a political class of self-activating revolutionaries.

Two sources
Let us return to the main thread of our argument. The SWP’s anti-programmism has, I believe, two main theoretical sources. The first lies in Tony Cliff’s unconventional but relatively perceptive reading of Trotsky’s Transitional programme in light of developments following World War II. Whereas orthodox Trotskyites such as Ernest Mandel (comrade E Germain) dogmatically refused to acknowledge an unprecedented economic boom and awaited the predicted imminent slump, Cliff, to his credit, made the attempt to come to terms with reality.13 A reality which forced him to dump Trotsky’s programme. The other source of Cliff’s anti-programmism is his conventional, but misplaced Trotskyite rejection of pre-1917 Bolshevism and its minimum-maximum programme.

Unsurprisingly, we find Tony Cliff’s ideas on this subject most fully elaborated in the first two of his four-volume study of Lenin. And as can be seen in Gareth Jenkins recent series of articles on the life and ideas of Cliff, this work still enjoys a central place in the SWP pantheon. According to comrade Jenkins, “the most important contribution Tony Cliff made” to the reorientation which the SWP needed to cope with the two decades of the 1975-95 ‘downturn’ in the class struggle “was his four-volume political biography of the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, published between 1975 and 1979.”14 Needless to say, Cliff’s Lenin says a lot more about Cliff than Lenin.

Cliff quite correctly characterised the attitude of the Mensheviks as tailist (the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks came into existence after the split in the Iskra faction at the 1903 congress of the Russian Socialist Democratic Labour Party). According to their evolutionist schema, the overthrow of tsarism in Russia had to be followed by the class rule, with a western-style parliamentary government, of the bourgeoisie. Tsarism was viewed as an antiquated and semi-feudal obstruction on the linear ladder of progress. Russia was certainly not ripe for socialism - socialism being the first stage of communism. Before socialism and working class power could arrive on the historical stage the bourgeoisie would have to carry through its preordained tasks.

The historic job of the bourgeoisie was to develop capitalist production under conditions of bourgeois democracy - the bourgeoisie and democracy were wrongly but invariably seen as inseparable. Alongside capitalist relations of production a mass working class inexorably rises. Eventually this class would eclipse the peasantry in population terms. Only then was socialism feasible. If the forthcoming revolution against tsarism was bourgeois, reasoned the Mensheviks in a conference resolution of April-May 1905, then the working class and its party “must not aim at seizing or sharing power in the provisional government, but must remain the party of the extreme revolutionary opposition”.15 A stance which still leads some to characterise the Mensheviks as the left wing of the RSDLP. As shown by subsequent history, an obvious mistake.

Anyway, for mainstream Menshevik thinking the role of the working class was at most to critically push the reluctant bourgeois parties forward into their predetermined position as leaders of the revolution. Taking power, or participating as coalition partners in a revolutionary government, had to be avoided. Why? Because if the working class party seized power it would not be able to satisfy the needs of the masses; immediately establishing socialism was an illusion entertained only by non-Marxists such as the socialist revolutionaries. Like Pol Pot, their socialism was peasant-based. Moreover, if the working class aggressively pursued its own short-term interests or succumbed to the temptation of power it would lead the bourgeoisie to “recoil from the revolution and diminish its sweep”.16

Lenin held to an evolutionary schema similar to that which informed the Mensheviks. However, as a great revolutionary Lenin never let a bad theory get in the way of a good revolution. His Marxism was rich and dialectical and therefore soared above the bleached categories insisted upon by the Menshevik wing of the party. Russia might not be ready for socialism (if by that one means leaving behind commodity production and what Marx called “bourgeois right”, ie, equal pay for equal work, as opposed to the higher communist principle of ‘From each according to their ability; to each according to their need’). But that did not stop Lenin advocating a revolution led by the working class. The existing social and economic material limits explain why Lenin and the Bolsheviks described that revolution as bourgeois.

Against the Mensheviks Lenin insisted that to make such a revolution one had to aim to take power. To fulfil the party’s minimum programme - overthrowing the tsarist monarchy, arming the people, separation of church and state, full democratic liberty, decisive economic reforms such as an eight-hour day, etc - it was necessary to establish a revolutionary government which embodied the democratic rule of the mass of the population. Lenin summed this up in the following famous algebraic formula: the ‘democratic dictatorship [ie, in Marxist terms the rule] of the proletariat and peasantry’.

Such a regime would not bring complete liberation for the working class. Economically Russia would develop as a capitalist country - albeit one under the armed rule of the working class and peasant masses. Indeed the Bolsheviks envisaged a phase of controlled development of capitalist production and economic relations. Without that the working class could not grow in numbers, organisation and consciousness. Lenin argued that this last named subjective factor was bound up with objective conditions.

The Bolsheviks knew that the class balance of a revolutionary government of the proletariat and peasantry could not be determined in advance. The struggle itself decides. Needless to say, the Bolsheviks planned in their minimum programme and fought in practice for working class leadership. In other words, a workers’ state supported by the peasant majority. Something that relied not primarily on forces internal to Russia, but on sparking the external socialist revolution in the west. Without that conflagration a working class-led regime in Russia was bound to be short-lived.

The Russian bourgeoisie was both cowardly and counterrevolutionary. The bourgeois parties wanted a compromise deal with tsarism, not its overthrow through a people’s revolution. Russia had no Cromwell or Milton, no Washington or Jefferson, no Marat, St Just or Robespierre.

The only force capable of gaining a decisive victory over tsarism, overcoming bourgeois counterrevolution and ensuring the full sweep of the revolution was the proletariat in alliance with the peasant mass. Russia, it hardly needs saying, was overwhelmingly rural. Naturally the proletarian party laid great stress on its agrarian programme. Landlord power would be smashed and land nationalised and democratically distributed to the peasants without any redemption payments. This was not a socialist measure for Lenin. It would, though, help clear away the Asiatic features of traditional Russian society and allow capitalist relations to develop along an “American path”.

How long was this stage of working class rule, combined with controlled capitalist development, to be? According to Cliff, up to 1917 Lenin “anticipated that a whole period would elapse between the coming bourgeois revolution and the proletarian socialist revolution”.17

Here, in Cliff, we have a devious formulation. After all, how long is “a whole period”? It also leaves unanswered what Cliff means by socialism and whether or not the October Revolution of 1917 actually ushered in not a working class-led state, but socialist relations of production and exchange. I have argued that the post-October 1917 regime was a proletarian-peasant alliance - albeit with bureaucratic deformations and a Communist Party increasingly substituting for the active role of the proletariat - till the 1928 counterrevolution within the revolution. The idea that the USSR was socialist represented a Stalinite conceit that was yet to come. Only in the mid-1930s did Stalin announce that the Soviet Union had fully completed the transition to socialism.

Cliff stupidly sets Lenin up as an advocate of the “theory of stages” - by definition a cardinal sin for any self-respecting Trotskyite. First stage, the anti-tsarist revolution. After which, for a “whole period”, Russia would undergo capitalist development - of course, under democratic conditions. Only after such a “whole period” could the working class think about putting forward its own class agenda and preparing for the second, socialist, revolution.

Actually, as we have illustrated, this theory of artificial stages in Russia was advocated by the Mensheviks. Their analysis flowed from vulgar evolutionism and was, as we have seen, very superficial. The long and the short of it was that, in the event that a popular revolution proved successful in Russia, the proletariat puts the bourgeoisie in power. Obeying the ‘laws of history’, it then patiently waits in the wings, as a “party of extreme opposition”, until capitalism has been fully developed and the conditions created for socialism.

For the Mensheviks, then, there would have to be two revolutions in Russia. One bourgeois, with a bourgeois state. The other, coming a long time after, was socialist, with a socialist state. The two are separated by a definite historical stage, or a “whole period”, and crucially by distinct and antagonistically opposed regimes.

Yet, as we have seen, Lenin explicitly rejected this mechanical reasoning. Lenin considered the bourgeoisie in Russia counterrevolutionary. As a class it could not even begin the ‘bourgeois revolution’. The workers would have to take the initiative in overthrowing tsarism at the “head of the whole people, and particularly the peasantry”.

If their popular uprising proved successful and remained under proletarian hegemony, then the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would not meekly make way for the bourgeoisie. Yes, capitalism would be “strengthened” - ie, allowed to develop. But there would be strict limitations. Not only an eight-hour day, full trade union rights and complete political liberty, but an “armed proletariat” in possession of state power. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry would also wage a “relentless struggle against all counterrevolutionary attempts”, not least from the bourgeoisie.

Such a hybrid regime could not survive in isolation. It would, and must, act to “rouse” the European socialist revolution. The proletariat of socialist Europe would in turn help Russia move to socialism (which requires definite material conditions in terms of the development of the productive forces). Inevitably there would, with the course of economic progress, be an increasing tension between the proletariat and the better off peasantry. But not necessarily a specifically socialist revolution: ie, the violent overthrow of the state in Russia.

Put another way, there would not be a democratic or bourgeois stage and then a socialist stage at the level of regime. Democratic and socialist tasks are distinct and premised on different material, social and political conditions. But particular elements interweave.

The revolution could, given the right internal and external conditions, proceed uninterruptedly from democratic to socialist tasks through the proletariat fighting not only from below, but from above: ie, from a salient of state power. The revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry thereby peacefully grows over into the dictatorship (rule) of the proletariat, assuming internal proletarian hegemony and external proletarian aid from a socialist Europe. Here is Lenin’s theory elaborated in his 1905 pamphlet Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution.18

So in truth, then, Lenin employed entirely elastic formulations concerning the “whole period” of capitalist development under the democratic rule of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin’s “whole period” spoken of by the ventriloquist Cliff could therefore theoretically be reduced to zero in terms of time. In other words, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had a programme of permanent revolution of the sort Marx and Engels developed in Germany during and after the great revolutionary wave of 1848. So why does Cliff mischievously present Lenin’s theory as no more than a variation on the Menshevik schema?

Minimalism
According to Cliff, and others from the same school, the role of revolutionaries in a country like ours is twofold. In the here and now, build ‘broad’ campaigns against war, the BNP, etc, and lend support to bread and butter issues like wages, preserving the NHS, restoring trade union rights. That is practical politics, which, in spite of grandiloquent phrases about the logic of the struggle, remain firmly within the narrow horizon of the present economic system and the UK constitutional monarchy state.

Then, in the indefinite future lies the socialist millennium. As there is no revolutionary situation in Britain, that exists in the realm of propaganda, where the ideologically defined sects engage in a primeval battle for supremacy - the SWP appearing as of this moment triumphant over once mighty rivals: eg, the Morning Star’s ‘official communism’, the Workers Revolutionary Party founded by Gerry Healy and Peter Taaffe’s rump Militant Tendency, nowadays known as the Socialist Party in England and Wales.

The minimum, or immediate, programmatic demand for a federal republic and extreme democracy advocated in the CPGB’s Draft programme never had a place in comrade Cliff’s world view. The only republic Cliff willingly countenanced was the socialist republic.

In the meantime his SWP actually gave a left gloss, or alibi, to Blair and his constitutional programme. Remember, the SWP campaigned for and enthusiastically welcomed the election of the Blair government in May 1997. Subsequently the SWP called for a ‘yes’ vote in the Scottish and Welsh referendums; a ‘yes’ vote over the Good Friday deal for Northern Ireland; a ‘yes’ vote for the ‘presidential’ Greater London mayor; and a ‘yes’ vote for the Racial and Religious Hatred Act.

Evidently Cliff’s SWP had a minimalist, Erfurt-lite programme, which was completely separate from his programme for socialism. What this means in practice is that the SWP is content to leave initiative around high politics to others. No wonder Cliff was determined to rubbish Lenin and his Bolsheviks and proved incapable of learning from the criticisms of the German SDP that came from Marx and Engels - they advocated a democratic republic in Germany. Lenin and the Bolsheviks took their cue from Marx and Engels. Their programme was Erfurt-plus. They were committed to a minimum, or immediate, programme, whereby the working class would exercise hegemony in the struggle for the democratic republic. A foreign country for Tony Cliff.