Socialist Organiser's leading supporters appear to have reached a hiatus over their previous characterisation of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers' state. A recent editorial, Reassessing the Eastern Bloc', promises a full discussion on the issue - but adds ominously 'some of us think that some term like "bureaucratic collectivism" is the best approximation. Others would prefer "state capitalism"' It appears that 'old orthodoxy' has been found guilty before trial - leaving only sentence to be pronounced.
A central feature of trotskyism since the 1930s has been its analysis of the Soviet Union as a 'degenerated workers' state'. This means that while the property relations arising from the socialist revolution of 1917 remain (i.e. a nationalised and planned economy and a state monopoly of foreign trade), under Stalin the bureaucracy usurped power and smashed workers' democracy.
As a consequence, Trotsky and his followers called for political revolution in the USSR against the bureaucracy, while at the same time defending the gains of the October revolution against imperialism, independently of and against the bureaucracy.
After the second world war two main views existed on the social transformation of eastern Europe after the Soviet victory over German imperialism. The majority view adopted by the third Congress of the Fourth International in 1951 was that the USSR remained degenerated workers' state and the'Peoples Democracies' in eastern Europe were deformed workers' states - i.e. states with the same property relations as the USSR, but which had had a stalinist state structure imposed upon them rather than arising from the degeneration of a working-class revolution as in the USSR.
Adherents of the view that the class nature of these states was either a capitalist class atop a statified economy oranew kind of ruling class left the Fourth International, and most took a neutralist position during the Korean war. Some subsequently attempted to retain a revolutionary perspective despite their views on the USSR; others drifted to the right or even
There are two main aspects to these debates - first, as to the class nature of these states and SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
F EATURES old trotskyism how they came about, and secondly (but closely connected) what the programme and tasks of revolutionaries should be in relation to them. While nearly all those who claim to be trotskyists have agreed on their characterisation of the class nature of these states, they have had very different views on the nature of their transformation and the tasks which follow from it.
On some occasions sections of the movement have failed to defend workers' rights, or even fellow trotskyists, in their eagerness to support stalinist or nationalist-led revolutions. but SO extrapolate backwards from these important differences to argue that the characterisation of the states themselves is wrong
Such theoretical methods led to SO's lurch to the right, causing it to rupture in 1984. Those of us who opposed this degeneration were involved in the establishment of Socialist Vienpoint, and later Socialist Outlook, and the fortnightly Labour Briefing.
We wrote at the time, "with the cancer of sectarianism established, further decline and degeneration must be the immediate prospect'. The SO editorial board after the split had a freer hand to follow its own path.
The first victim of their 'policy review' was to deny the progressive nature of many strug-
gles against imperialism and practically abandon the principle of national self-determination. SO must be the only trotskyist group in the world to have addressed an open letter to a revolutionary nationalist leader (Gerry Adams) calling on an armed resistance movement (the IRA) to lay down its guns. SO argues rightly that the world has changed since 1916; but far from developing upon Lenin, they throw the movement back to Kautskyism. They claim in this article that post-war capitalism has been capable of a generalised expansion of productive forces and that the workers'
movement is organically developing with
it.
From this they draw the conclusion that
to the extent that bourgeois democracies
(or even capitalist police-states such as
South Korea) allow more openings for
working class organisatión and
democratic rights they are more
"progressive' than the workers' states,
which are historical anachronisms. Logically this could infer that we are no longer in a period when successful working class revolution is possible, if we ever were This is the evolutionary socialism of the Second International complete with its Eurocentric arrogance.
The final question that needs to be asked is: why the change of line? SO gives no reason why the change should be necessary at this time. In fact, ' orthodox trotskyist' theory deals with the current battles within the Soviet bureaucracy better than any'new class' theory can.
The reality is that the change has more to do with the organisational dynamics of SO than with the dynamic of world history. The antisovietism which has increasingly crept into SO's material is finally being consummated with a change of line on the workers' states which sets the seal on the break with trotskyism implicit in their polities for several years.
Groupings which develop a line and perspective to satisfy their own organisational requirements rather than the class struggle are called sects.
Socialist Organiser is at this time a rightward-moving one. Its supporters should understand the significamce of this debate and be warned about the method and political direction in which they are being led.
Mick Woods Pete Firmin Page 25
Red November This November is the seventieth anniversary of the German socialist revolution of 1918. Here PHIL HEARSE tells the story of the German workers' struggle, and analyses the lessons for the
BACA socialist movement today. IT IS A notorious myth that there has never been a socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist west. There has. In November 1918, 70 years ago this month, the German workers rose up and created soviet power - the power of' elected workers' councils - all over
For several months, until early 1919, it was touch and go whether this developing German revolution would win out. Its eventual defeat, compounded by further defeats in the 1920s, paved the way for Hitler's rise to power, the second world war, and ensured the isolation of the young workers' state in Russia. It was a pivotal event in twentieth century history.
The November 1918 uprising came at the end of more than a year of increasing turmoil in Germany, as the defeat of the German army at the front became obvious and the privations of the workers at home became unbearable.
In April 1917 there were mass strikes against food price increases, and then in January 1918 came a mass political strike against the annexations being demanded by the German government at the Brest Litovsk peace negotiations with the Soviet government. Fifty thousand workers were sent to the front as a reprisal,
The world war had led to a split in the mass German workers" party, the SDP (Social Democrats). The anti-war left wing had been expelled in January 1917, and in April of that year formed the Independent Social Democrats (USD). This party had hundreds of thousands of members, in the main revolutionary-minded workers. The Spartakusbund of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht was the extreme left wing of the USPD, but only had a few thousand
At the end of September 1918, with the German armies on the point of collapse, the General Staff officers visited the Kaiser, and demanded the handing over of power to a 'democratic' government (led by Prince Max von Baden) -as the only way to prevent 'anarchy'.
But before this government could be stabilised, the sailors of the Kiel naval base mutinied on November 4. To prevent the sailors being crushed, the USPD leaders in Kiel decided to seize power in the town.That evening a Workers and Sailors Council was formed to administer the local area. The signal for Page 26
IK O B AIS revolution had been given.
In the following days the revolution spread all along the northern coast. Hamburg rose on 5 November; Bremen, Altona, Rendsburg and Lockstedt on the 6th; Cologne, Munich, Hanover and Braunsweig on the 7th. In each of these places, workers and soldiers councils declared themselves the legitimate power.
The focus of events now moved to the capitai, Berlin.The key forces here were the USPD left wing, led by Spartacists Liebknecht and Meyer, and the powerful revolutionary shop stewards movement, the non-party Obleute.
The Obleute decided to wait for 11 November to act, but Liekbnecht pre-empted them with a call for action on the 8th. The indecision about the date was immaterial: the workers rose on the 9th. Thousands rushed to the Reichstag, the parliament building. It was now that the right wing leaders of the 'old party' - the Social Democrats (SPD) intervened, and a fatal blow was struck against the revolution.
As the workers besieged the Reichstag, at 2pm one of the two main SPD leaders, Scheidemann, rushed out and 'proclaimed' a republic - and his support for the workers. The SPD was taking the leadership of the movement in order to head it off. At 4pm Karl Liebknecht arrived at the Riechstag to proclaim the socialist republic — but some of his thunder had already been stolen by the SPD leaders.
Now the question of government - who was to lead the revolution - was posed. The SPD, led by Ebert and Scheidemann, proposed a
coalition SPD-USPD government based on
• all power to the workers' councils;
• socialisation of industry.
Their proposal was for three ministers from each party. After painful indecision, the USPD accepted this proposal. Counter-revolution had been brought into the heart of the leadership of the revolution. Instead of taking all power themselves, the USPD allowed a government to be formed which, with three SPD and two from the right wing of the USPD, gave effective control to the SPD.
It was a fateful mistake. The SPD leadership, which had collaborated with the war, now
presented itself as 'revolutionary'. SPD leaders joined the workers councils everywhere and in many places took the leadership of them. In a revolution, the worst social democratic traitors can become revolutionaries' - for the moment. Although a separate revolutionary executive' of seven SPD, seven USPD and seven soldiers was set up, this was a only a pressure group on the six-person government, led by Ebert, which held the real power. Because of SPD prevarication, by December no moves in favour of the workers, for example socialisation of industry, had in fact been taken. The bourgeois state and economy were still intact. A crucial conflict now developed between the SPD leaders and the left. A nafional congress of workers' and soldiers" deputies was due to be held in Berlin on December 30-31. The SPD leaders decided to propose the election of a 'constituent assembly'. This body was clearly going to be counterposed to the power of the the workers' councils - in effect it would be a bourgeois parliament which would be used to crush the councils.
While the Spartacist left demanded all power to the councils, the USPD leaders wavered. At the congress itself, which the SPD packed with its supporters and to which Luxemburg and Liebknecht were unable to gain admittance, some USPD delegates voted both for the resolutions in favour of 'all power to the councils' and for national elections to a constituent assembly. In consequence Ebert and Scheideman won the day. National elections were called: the 'democratic counter-revolution' was under way.
Political events were moving rapidly. Frustrated by the government's paralysis, the USPD withdrew from the government on 29 December, leaving the SPD in power alone. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
B A C The Spartacist left of the USPD, exasperated by the compromises of the party leadership, left the party, to declare an independent Communist Party (together with the ultra-left IKD based in the north of the country. The masses, especially in Berlin, were growing more and more embittered by government's betrayal of their struggle.
Capitalising on their victory at the congress of workers councils, the SPD leaders now moved to provoke the left and inflict a further defeat on it. On 4 January 1919, the Berlin police chief, a USPD member called Eichhorn, was dismissed. The workers in Berlin saw the sacking as a direct attack on them - because Eichhorn was a supporter of the revolution.
Eichhorn's dismissal was met by demonstrations of hundreds of thousands • of workers, many of them armed. In this situation, sections of the USPD, Spartacists and revolutionary shop stewards decided to try to seize power. A 'revolutionary committee' was set up which appealed forthe workers to rise up in armed revolt and overthrow the government. Although Spartacist leaders like Liebknecht signed the appeal, it was not sanctioned by the party Central Committee. Rosa Luxemburg, in particular, opposed the move as an ultra-left adventure.
Revolutionary insurrection is not to be undertaken lightly. The revolutionaries in Berlin were intoxicated by the sight of tens of thousands of armed workers demanding that the government be got rid of. But they over-estimated the relationship of forces. The workers outside Berlin were not yet ready for armed insurrection.
The Bolshevik leader Karl Radek - secretly in Germany co-ordinating with the Spartacists - was firmly against the uprising. He compared it to the Russian 'July days' in 1917, when secRosa: murdered as the revolution was crushed SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
K the Rising of the (armed) proletariat we were much stronger than you are today." republic.
tions of the Petrograd workers wanted an upris- ing, but the Bolsheviks opposed them. 'We led the masses into a retreat then,' said Radek, 'and The Berlin revolutionary committee' made a second fatal mistake : it dithered. While SPD leaders Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann plotted with the army generals to crush the uprising, the revolutionary committee allowed itself to be drawn into "negotiations' with Ebert. Once a revolution has been called, then it has to be deed it was fatal. fought out to the finish - not stopped for negotiations. Luxemburg, although an op- ponent of the action, demanded that it be car- ried out to the end, once it had been launched: It was one of her last actions: on January 15 she and Karl Liebknecht were arrested. Instead of being taken to prison, they were taken to the Eden Hotel, headquariers of the infamous Garde-Kavallerie Schutzen Division, one of the few regi- ments still fiercely loyal to the old Imperial regime. Luxem- burg and Liebknecht had their skulls smashed in by rifle butts while 'trying to escape'. The January uprising in- itiated civil war. Fifty thousand workers lost their lives in the struggle. Ilwas March before the workers uprising was quenched throughout Germany. The crushing of the uprising by the army's bullets signalled the end of the revolution, and the estab- lishment of a bourgeois lan, 1984. What lessons are to be drawn marks, 1982. from the experience of Red November? The biggest error was that of the USPD in allow-
S ing the SPD leadership to muscle in on the November uprising and form a joint government. But the majority of the Spartacist left in the USPD was consistently ultra-left, despite the efforts of leaders like Rosa Luxemburg and Paul Levi. Splitting the USPD in the middle of the revolutionary upsurge was arguably premature - perhaps it would have been better for the revolutionary marxist leaders to remain in the USPD and try to win it over from the left. The January uprising was certainly premature; in-
The German workers went into the November revolution led by the old SPD, a reformist party, and the USPD — a centrist party divided between a semi-revolutionary left, and a non-revolutionary right wing.
The mass revolutionary party of the German workers was to be created only after the 191819 revolution - the German Communist Party (KPD), formed after the split of the USPD in 1920, (the left going over to the Spartacists to form the KPD, and the right going back to the
The defeat of the 1918-19 revolution showed that social democracy, when the crunch comes, will side with the brutal repression of the workers, rather than with socialist revolution. It was the vivid demonstration of this fact which split the USPD and created a revolutionary Communist party of hundreds of thousands. Further reading: Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic, Ben Fowkes, MacmilThe Lost Revolution, Chris Harman, BookFascism in Germany (vol. 1), Robert Black (Robin Blick), Steyne Press.
Page 27
Tories stick to the soft' targets HARRY SLOAN comments on the antics of the Tory Party conference in Brighton Like a Kenyan front-runner in a 10,000 metres race, Tory leaders found it hard to avoid complacency at this year's party conference. Yet they managed to keep their eye on some ticklish tactical problems.
So much ground had already been conceded to them by the shambolic collapse of the old SDP-Liberal Alliance and by the Labour conference capitulation to the politics of individualism, that there seemed little left to do but pick off some predictable easy targets, wave a few familiar populist banners, keep quiet on the more outrageous measures already in the pipeline, and gloat - with the aid of copious quantities of food and booze.
It was the Labour conference above all which set the scene for another Tory victory whoop - culminating in nearly ten minutes of calculated hysteria in the annual standing ovation for Thatcher's speech.
Thatcher herself poked fun at Neil Kinnock's conversion to the virtues of the market economy:
«For half an hour or so it seemed he had seen the light and would shortly be calling his memoirs "I Did it Her Way". Whatever happened to socialism?'
The Blackpool events have clearly convinced Thatcher even more firmly that few of the sweeping changes from her period of government are likely to be reversed by a Labour government, even in the event of one being elected.
The main thrust of the Tory political 'revolution' - the systematic privatisation of the state sector, demolition of the welfare state, throwing an ever-increasing burden onto the individual and the family unit, is now largely unchallenged.
With no significant opposition worthy of the name within the Tory party itself, there were no real battles for Thatcher to fight this year.
The nearest to a serious difference of opinion was over the state of the economy, where Nigel Lawson's calculations have gone so seriously wrong. Soaring interest rates have clobbered precisely those relatively prosperous, employed, mortgage-paying families that Thatcher has sought to cultivate as an electoral base. Last spring's tax cuts have been wiped out, leaving all but the super-rich worse off.
Amid evidence that the credit-led consumer
Page 28
ATTU RES boom has also produced a growing balance of payments crisis, while inflation is touching the 6 per cent mark, innocent observers might have expected Lawson to suffer a rough ride rather than bask in a standing ovation. In- stead the criticism was largely confined to fringe meeting mut- terings from a handful of largely irrelevant has-beens, including John Biffen and Leon retreat however was on what had once Thatcher: leading her revolution. radical review of the national health service fol- lowing months of secret cabinet-level discus- Health Secretary Kenneth Clarke made the focal point of his speech the announcement of a partial climbdown in the form of an extra £138m towards the cost of the nurses' pay regrading. This proved to be a handy diversion from the impending battle over the imposition of heafty charges for optical and dental checks, and from a much more spectacular climbdown, when Clarke went on to claim that 'we never had the slightest intention of privatising the health service'. This came in stark contrast to the threats of swift and far-reaching changes in the NHS that were made by Thatcher herself earlier this year, and also to the tub-thumping bravado with which Cecil Parkinson insisted that the Tories would privatise the coal industry if re-elected for a fourth term. Every Tory delegate loves to hate Arthur Scargill and the miners: but, despite strenuous efforts by right wing think-tanks, few see the NHS as an easy target. Thatcher has judged that it is still too popular to undergo the full treat- ment. Meanwhile Kenneth Baker kept quiet about his plans to impose new charges on students,
sticking to the safer ground of threatening schoolkids with basins full of religious and pro-imperialist propaganda (on 'Britain's influence for good throughout the empire in the 18th and 19th centuries').
Easy populist jibes were also aimed at British Rail (threatened with privatisation), the unemployed, single parent families, and of course criminals (whom delegates, as usual wanted to hang, if not disembowel).
Yet ministers were careful not to raise the profile of much less popular measures - such as the Poll Tax, and the Housing Bill.
The Thatcher offensive has been ruthless but always sufficiently astute in picking off sections one by one, and driving careful wedges between the interest groups under the Tory hammer. This conference underlined the same leadership approach: while delegates indulged in profit-taking and self-congratulation, the party of capital was laying plans to carry on into the 1990s.
Only a revitalised labour movement that turns back to the collective, class politics of socialism and involves itself in working class struggles can offer a serious challenge to the Thatcher juggernaut. So long as Kinnock and new realism rule the roost at Walworth Road, the Tories will keep on laughing from Brighton all the way to the bank. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 10 November 1988
Repression of Salvadorean workers has increased dramatically. El Salvador: revolution? El