'Self-activity' makes you blind: a reply to Alex Callinicos and the SWP

'SELF-ACTIVITY' MAKES YOU BLIND

A REPLY TO ALEX CALLINICOS AND THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY

Three years ago the Revolutionary Communist Tendency was a small group of revolutionaries based in London.

Behind it lay five years of political struggle against the prevailing currents on the left wing of the British labour movement, and in particular against the adaptation to trade unionism and underestimation of Labourism that characterised the tradition out of which the RCT emerged. Then, the RCT published only an irregular theoretical journal and occasional pamphlets, even though it had made some theoretical gains in the Marxist understanding of the crisis, the state, reformism and Ireland.

By the late 'seventies the Socialist Workers Party was the largest left group outside the reformist camp. It boasted several thousand members, a national organisation, a weekly paper and a range of other publications. The RCT polemicised against its anti-Marxist theories (the 'Permanent Arms Economy, 'State Capitalism") and its economism (its narrow trade unionist focus and its neglect of broader political questions). But in 1978 and 1979 the RCT was dismissed by its critics as armchair Marxists, eccentric intellectuals and headbangers.

Today things have changed. The RCT has become the Revolutionary Communist Party and is now a much more influential organisation. Programmatic development has taken place on issues such as the Labour Party, unemployment, racism and Ireland; and practical activity has expanded in parallel with this. The anti-racist work we have initiated in East London has taken off in other parts of the country, as a growing body of workers has come to side with us in our commitment to workers' defence. And our Smash the Prevention of Terrorism Act Campaign has become the leading force in raising support for the Irish national liberation struggle in the labour movement.

of what it bemoans as the 'downturn' in working class militancy. Membership has declined, workers have dropped out and the party's rank and file groups in the unions have virtually collapsed. SWP campaigns such as the Anti-Nazi League have slumped and continually have to be relaunched, while SWP journals like Women's Voice and Flame have stagnated. And the SWP has come under fire from the

RCP

- not only at public meetings, but on street corners, picket lines, in union branches and on trades councils. The RCP alternative to SWP politics is no longer simply a matter of words, but of practical actions.

As the SWP's stock jibes against RCP criticisms become less and less convincing, so the pressure has grown on its leaders to prevent members and supporters from drifting away. SWP theoreticians have had to come up with some replies to our arguments. But their most substantial one to date, Alex Callinicos" article 'Politics or abstract propagandism?', reveals more about the SWP than it exposes about the RCP.1 The very terms of Callinicos' polemic - 'abstract propagandism' - show how much the concerns of SWP theoreticians differ from those of SWP branch activists. Though our paper, the next step, has been published regularly since November 1979 and has a wide readership among SWP 22 members, Callinicos quotes it only once, preferring to concentrate instead on material dating back to 1978 and earlier. Likewise, he never once mentions the successful campaigns on race and Ireland we have launched - campaigns which represent serious problems to the average SWP member. This in itself tells us a lot about the SWP critique; but before looking further at his organisation let's see what Callinicos has to say about the history of left-wing politics in Britain and how he fits the RCP into it.

The peculiarities of the British Callinicos' main thesis is that the bane of the British left through the ages has been its proclivity for 'abstract propagandism. He helpfully provides a definition of this: The priority is the propagation of socialist ideas, as a means of expunging bourgeois ideology. Engagement in any partial struggle is not simply a waste of time until this task has been performed, it is positively dangerous, since it serves to reinforce workers' acceptance of capialist society and the divisions between politics and economics. Callinicos traces a tradition of sectarianism' and ultraleftism' from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Socialist League (SL) in the 1880s and 1890s, through the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) of the early twentieth century - plus the "left-wing communists' of the early Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) - to the RCT of the late seventies.

To demonstrate his erudition Callinicos also gives a mention to the utopian socialists of the 1840s and the Eurocommunists of today. But he makes only a shallow abstraction from the facts - he selects isolated episodes from history and constructs spurious "links" between them.

Still, the point of Callinicos' "analysis" is clear: what is common, according to him, to all the diverse groupings he picks from different historical epochs is their refusal to "get their hands dirty' in the everyday struggles of the working class. This idea is easily refuted: it is simply not true that the groupings Callinicos cites took no part in the practical struggles of the working class. Callinicos dismisses the leading role of SDF members in the strike wave of the late 1880s (they acted, he says, as 'individuals"); he forgets that the SDF was the organiser of the unemployed for the best part of two decades. Though smaller, the SL campaigned against unemployment in East London and elsewhere on a scale that dwarfs the biggest efforts of the Right to Work Campaign. The SLP on Clydeside was intimately involved in militant and violent trade union disputes up to and during the First World War and in tenants' rent strikes too. Of all the people who came together to found the CPGB in 1920-21, the leading 'left-wing communists", Willie Gallacher and Sylvia Pankhurst, were among the most active in the day to day struggles on Clydeside and East London, Indeed

of all the organisations mentioned by Callinicos only the SPB fits his caricature of 'abstract propagandism" - which is why, despite the fact that it has survived for more than 70 years, it still merits only a footnote in the history of the British labour movement. Willingness to get involved in 'partial struggles' is not what distinguishes ultra-left "propagandist' organisations from revolutionary ones. Nor indeed does such willingness distinguish between revolutionaries and reformists. From the 1880s onwards the success of the European socialdemocratic parties was based on their ability to win immediate improvements in workers' conditions. They intervened actively in trade union, workplace and local affairs; all their work had a strong 'practical' emphasis. The German SPD, the British Independent Labour Party and later the Labour Party were all fervent advocates of the sort of "practical' approach to socialism which Callinicos upbraids turn-of-the-century revolutionaries for neglecting.

The real problem was very different. The early British revolutionaries did not fail to get involved in everyday struggles - they failed to inform those struggles with Marxist politics. Far from being 'abstract propagandists', they were not propagandist enough. And far from sectarianism being the bugbear of the British left, opportunism has been the most prevalent error.

Over the years the left has consistently avoided challenging the trade unionist and Labourist attitudes that dominate the British labour movement - even though these attitudes paralyse the political development of the working class. The SDF, SLP and the early CPGB provide good examples of this mistake and of its consequences: an inability to connect the immediate struggles of the working class to the task of building a party capable of overthrowing British capitalism. Because the weaknesses of working class politics in the past bear heavily on the present, these organisations merit further attention.

The poverty of propagandism Although Marx worked in Britain his works have never been widely read in the British labour movement. Marxism was popularised among radical intellectuals and militant workers in the late nineteenth century by England for all (1881) in which SDF leader Henry Hyndman plagiarised and vulgarised Marx. Before the feeble plant that was British Marxism could take root it was trampled underfoot by radical liberals, Fabians and the revisionists of Continental social democracy, all of whom came to exert a greater influence on the theory of the British labour movement than scientific socialism. Marxism never advanced much after this inauspicious start. Although some of the most class-conscious workers in the stormy period around the First World War studied Marx, organisations like the SDF, SLP and British Socialist Party were incapable of developing a Marxist understanding of the rise of imperialism, of the role of the state or of the war. From its earliest days the CPGB proved unable to develop Marxist theory and politics. CPB theoreticians parroted the Comintern line and helped play a part in its Stalinist degeneration. As the working class movement staggered from one setback to another during the 'twenties and 'thirties, culminating in the Second World War, Marxism became virtually extinct in the labour movement. All that survived was a vocabulary appropriated and corrupted by Stalinism, a body of theory which liberal academics used as a 'model' for pursuing their fads, and a series of sterile dogmas repeated by left-wing radicals.

All this is of no concern to Callinicos: he is a theoretician whose job it is to disparage theory. He dismisses the RCT's defence of the Marxist tradition as 'palaeo-Marxism' and declares haughtily I shall not waste much time with their theory: 4 And he is true to his word. His criticism is that the RCT mechanically applies the categories of Marx's Capital without taking any account of contemporary reality.

But this indictment is not based on an exposure of RCT publications - it could not be sustained by reference to or quotation from our propaganda. Instead Callinicos refers to an article in the same issue of International Socialism in which a critique of our position can supposedly be found."

This however is of little assistance: Chris Harman's piece Callinicos' own "critique' is pure bluster. It merely highlights the SWP's approach to theory and debate. Assertions are not substantiated, allegations are unsupported by evidence and the whole thing is wrapped up in pretentious verbiage about capitalism being 'an articulated whole motored by the contradictions internal to it. For the SWP "propagandist' is a term of abuse. But it is the failure of the British left to develop good propaganda and good propagandists that underlies its conspicuous lack developing a programme that could mobilise workers and move them beyond their day to day struggles towards the For Marxists propaganda means the advocacy of many ideas to few people', , the spread of revolutionary politics among the most class-conscious workers. A Marxist propaganda group is an organisation that seeks to communicate Marxism to workers (through papers and journals, speeches and meetings) and intervenes in workers' struggles both to show the practical value of revolutionary politics and to win the leadership of the working class away from the reformists. Let's now look at the SWP in the light of Callinicos' attack on 'abstract propagandism'.

The fatalism of 'self-activity *Abstract propagandists' are apparently not alone in seeking to avoid getting their hands dirty. According to the SWP this hygienic hang-up is also the major failing of the reformists. The SWP's central criticism of the Labour left is that it is 'not prepared to face up to the difficult, often unglamorous task of organising against the bosses' offensive on the shopfloor. The SWP, however, is prepared to do just that 1 A Callinicos, "Politics or abstract propagandism?", International Socialism, No 11, Winter 1981.

2 Ibid, pl11. Callinicos is nothing if not self-conscious about devoting an article to polemicising against the RCT. He claims he is only dealing with us because we provide a 'contemporary illustration' (in 'chemically pure form) of the propagandism he seeks to differentiate from the classical Marxist tradition. Ibid p119. 3 Callinicos is fascinated with dirt. SPB members were not prepared to sully their hands', the left communists were unwilling to soil their hands'. But anybody - reformist, revolutionary or even fascist - who wants to gain influence in the working class has to get involved in its day to day struggles.

What Callinicos takes to be the defining essence of SWP politics does not differentiate it from the Labour Party, the RCP or the National Front. 4 Ibid, p122. 5 Ibid, p127. D Hallas, The end of the Labour Party as we know it?', Socialist Worker, 6 June 1981.

and this is held up as the dividing line between reform and revolution. In reality getting your hands dirty' is not a political alternative to reformism. All that it implies is an addition to Labour left politics. This is made clear in the way the SWP supports Tony Benn's campaign inside the Labour Party: That's why the Socialist Workers Party, while we are fully behind Benn's campaign for the deputy leadership, will continue to make our activity that of supporting those struggles where workers are beginning to fight back.'

For the SWP supporting 'struggles where workers are beginning to fight back' - supporting the so-called self-activity of the working class - is enough. Let's look at this dogma a bit more closely. The concept of "self-activity" is a vulgarisation of the Marxist notion of the 'self-emancipation' of the working The latter, as Callinicos correctly points out, rep class. resents the recognition that the task of overthrowing capitalism can only be achieved by the working class itself. The former means that the spontaneous activity of the working class points the way forward to socialism, or in Callinicos struggles of workers a socialism lies through the practical words, The SWP's main activity - calling on workers to engage in struggle - is in fact totally unnecessary. Capitalism constantly forces workers into battle against the system. The capitalist system itself generates the struggle between classes: workers don't need the SWP to urge them to go on question Are workers really likely to strike. Callinicos shake off the immense burden of traditional conceptions unless they engage in mass struggles which bring them into conflict with the employers and the state???

point. The point is this: even though they engage in mass struggles which bring them into conflict with the employers and the state, will workers shake off their traditional conceptions? Our answer is that they will not unless revolutionaries intervene in these struggles and direct them in a consistently anti-capitalist direction. Callinicos' answer is different: The everyday struggles of the class do not merely help to undermine bourgeois hegemony - they serve to bring to the surface a socialist conception of the world that is normally 10 If this were true bourgeois suppressed and concealed.

would have collapsed long ago. But 'a socialist conception of the world' is still far from widespread among British workers after decades of struggle. History shows that the self-emancipation of the working class requires more than 'self-activity'. It requires Marxist politics.

The dogma of 'self-activity' represents the politics of fatalism. It is an abdication from the fight for revolutionary leadership. It means that the role of revolutionaries is reduced to encouraging others to be "self-active", waiting for struggles to burst out. In reality it means the SWP 'supporting' workers in their industrial disputes, while leaving Tony Benn to dictate the political terms.

Piece-rate socialism A look at the SWP's intervention in a recent 'practical struggle' shows the consequences of its fatalistic politics. It also reveals a gulf between the pontifications of the party's intellectuals and the humbler efforts of its industrial activists.

The closure of the Talbot car plant in Linwood, near Glasgow, was a serious setback to the British working class movement. A few days after it was announced the SWP national committee met in a special session on 'the lessons of the defeat. The meeting was attended by Linwood TGWU senior steward Pete Bain and other leading SWP trade unionists, including Mick Brightman, a shop steward at Gardner's (a Manchester factory which workers had occupied to block compulsory redundancies, but which had seen voluntary job losses accepted in their hundreds). This is how SWP leader Tony Cliff summed the discussion up: We have to carefully identify the minority who will fight. The problem is the disappearance of sectional militancy. There is too much measured day work and not enough piece rate system. The piece rate system saved Gardner's because it gave the individual stewards something to fight around.

We must always think about the minority and not the whole factory. Otherwise we will end up saying we are so small that we can do nothing. All or nothing is extremely dangerous, we have to work around the minority action.

"There is also danger in saying that the problem is the politics of the leadership and therefore we can do nothing about it. Politics for revolutionaries is where industrial muscle meets with generalisation. It is not generalisation instead of industrial muscle. We don't accept the separation of maximum and minimum demands like those who on May Day demonstrations talk about the socialist paradise and at work only talk about a 5p pay rise. We have to make the political argument at the point of the industrial muscle and not in the abstract, otherwise there is no class politics.

Unless we understand this we will fall into the trap of talking about the downturn instead of arguing with and supporting the minority who are prepared to fight. We must start from the minority and generalise outwards, not the other way round, If we cannot get a minority fight, then there is no real class politics.

Cliff's goal is much more modest than that of Callinicos. It is not to push this 'practical struggle' on the road to socialism; it is not to involve all the workers at Linwood in industrial action to save jobs. Cliff does not even give the usual SWP advice on elementary trade union organisation and strategy. His object is merely to stimulate a 'minority' appears six times in this short passage) into 'sectional militancy'. And what should be the aim of this minority sectional militancy? Cliff gives the specific example of piece work as 'something to fight around' in preference *Piece wage is the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production', wrote Marx in a chapter detailing the barbaric features of the particular form of payment for the sale of labour-power now favoured by the The dogma of 'self-activity' leads to the celebration of a vicious form of exploitation.

Even if Cliff succeeded in mobilising a sectional, militant minority to fight for piece work, how could this sort of "generalised'? The problem with sectional militancy is that it seeks to defend the interest of a section of the working class. This form of activity, no matter how militant, deepens the divisions capital creates in the working class. Indeed the kind of struggles around different payment systems that Cliff counsels often intensify sectionalism. And sectional militancy has often tended to operate against unskilled workers, women and immigrants.

Again, even if a battle for better wages and conditions were 'generalised' to involve all the workers in a plant or industry, how could this lead to a revolutionary working class consciousness? The most militant and most 'general' trade union activity is still concerned with getting the best deal for the sale of labour-power within the limits of the capitalist system. The consciousness to break out of these limits and transcend divisions within the working class does not emerge spontaneously out of the conflicts workers engage in with their employers, whether they experience such conflicts as individuals, minorities or even majorities.

The history of the British working class confirms this.

British workers to whom SWP theoreticians give lectures on 24

the importance of elementary trade union principles' have 200 years of training in strikes, lockouts, blacking, picketing, dealing with scabs, etc. But in 200 years of 'selfactivity' no revolutionary party has yet emerged from the elementary battle between already seen that Callinicos has little acquaintance with the history of the British labour movement, but we might have expected the past decade to have taught him this.

The politics of the downturn Back in 1974 the embryo of the RCP existed inside Callin- ¡cos organisation as the Revolutionary Opposition (RO).

Now, Callinicos condemns the RO for being 'highly critical of mere involvement in the practical struggles of the day (the greatest Britain had seen since the 'twenties) and for arguing that priority should be accorded to the formulation of the correct Marxist programme* 13 However, he concludes his article with a sombre assessment of the downturn' that has emerged over the last seven years: The great economic battles which shook Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy in the late 'sixties and early 'seventies did not seriously undermine bourgeois domination in these countries.

Widening economic struggles did not of necessity lead to political clarification. as most revolutionaries believed they would.'

'Most', perhaps - but not those revolutionaries who, during the battles against the Industrial Relations Act, the miners' strike and the three-day week formed the Revolutionary Opposition. They saw the urgency for developing a Marxist programme adequate to the situation. They argued that through a struggle for such a programme a nucleus of classconscious workers would emerge which could combat the influence of the Labour Party and the TUC over the strike- They knew that if this crucial wave then in progress. political development failed to materialise then the struggle would be contained and militant workers would become demoralised. They were 100 per cent right. Widening economic struggles' did not lead to political clarification: quite the opposite. Mere 'self-activity' allowed the strongest political force in the workers' movement - the labour bureaucracy - to remain in control. As a result the Labour Party and the TUC delivered the working class over to the new Labour Government's Social Contract in living standards since the 'thirties. 15 But the SWP learnt nothing: it still waits for 'self-activity' to shatter the capital- In the present recession the stakes in the class struggle have been raised. For that reason the SWP's worship of "self activity' is that much more dangerous. While the SWP preaches the virtues of sectional militancy, the labour bureaucrats are left free to dictate the political terms on which workers resist the bosses.

According to Cliff the piece rate system saved Gardner's. It might have saved the profits of Hawker Siddeley (the firm's owners), and it might have helped saved face for the trade union bureaucrats; but neither the piece rate system, nor the SWP's militant defence of it, can save the jobs that are now steadily disappearing through voluntary redundancies at the factory. At both Gardner's and Linwood the SWP paid tribute to the local trade union officials involved and subordinated its activity to their politics on the shop floor. 16 All major SWP mobilisations over the past two years have been on behalf of TUC initiatives. The TUC's People's March, tightly regimented by the labour bureaucrats and designed to suppress all dissent from their policies, became the main focus of activity for the SWP. This was scarcely the 'self-activity' of the working class. But then for the SWP any "self-activity' - in this case the 'self-activity' of the labour bureaucrats - is preferable to no activity.

A clear choice At the turn of the century Lenin wrote of those who ranted on about "self-activity': 'the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement, which our Economists pretical sign cancely The Sul and reactionary in its The SWP's narrow economistic practical approach leads to the neglect of vital issues such as the Irish War, women's oppression, racism in its activity in the labour movement. This is how Chris Harman, the editor of the SWP's journal Socialist Review, justifies his organisation's move to put Irish work at the bottom of its list of priorities: 'Ireland is not a radicalising factor in Britain which leads people to question other aspects of capitalist society: rather it is only when people have questioned these other things that they begin to understand the significance of what is happening in the Six By questioning 'other aspects of capitalist society' Harman means, like Cliff, disputing whether piece work is better than measured day work, whether short-time work is A Callinicos, op cit, p126.

Socialist Review, April 1981. We are often accused of quoting the SWP selectively. Here we quote Cliff in full, largely because of the difficulty of selecting the most fatuous sentences in his K Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Lawrence & Wishart, 1974, p94.

A Callinicos, op cit, p120.

Callinicos has a novel explanation for this fiasco. Workers stayed with their reformist leaders because the revolutionary alternative was tiny, predominantly petit-bourgeois and usually wildly ultra-left. If this is a self-criticism it is misplaced. In 1974 what is now the SWP was 4000 strong, less petit-bourgeois than at any time before or since and never even moderately ultra-left. The real problem was that the radical politics of the 'revolutionary alternative were no match for the politics of the Labour Party and the TUC "The attitude of the officials has helped a hell of a lot. (Mick Brightman, Socialist Review, October 1980) I wish we could say that the fight at Linwood was sold down the river by the national union officials, but it isn't true. There has never been a factory that was pledged so much support before taking action. Support that included the TWU executive, the STUC and even the AUEW executive.' (John Deason, secretary, Right to Work Campaign, Socialist Review, April 1981) On Gardner's see "SWP joins TUC jobs auction', the next step, No 9, January 1981. The SWP has also joined the bureaucracy in blaming workers for the setbacks in shop-floor organisation and militancy in recent months. Instead of exposing the bankrupt policies of the bureaucrats which have resulted in a degree of demoralisation, Pete Bain partly laid the blame for what happened at Linwood on a minority of total scum' there.

V I Lenin, "What is to be done?', Collected Works, Vol 5, p43.

Ironically, Callinicos suffers from the prejudice that the SWP is 18 Ireland after the hunger strike", Socialist Review, January 1981.

preferable to closure, whether voluntary redundancies are superior to compulsory sackings. But British workers have 1969, when the latest phase of the Irish War began; but they have never in significant numbers questioned Britain's right to rule in Ireland.

We have finally arrived at the absurd consequence of the dogma of self-activity. Fighting for piece work is a radicalising factor, the anti-imperialist struggle against the British ruling class is not. While thinker Callinicos meanders page after page, hard-headed Harman succinctly sums up the SWP's real difference with us in one paragraph.

Our position is straightforward. Trade union struggles do not 'revolutionise workers; they do not lead workers to question 'other aspects' of capitalist domination. Rather, it is only when workers support the oppressed against the British state that they begin to develop a broad working class consciousness. Directing workers' struggles in this anti-capitalist direction is the only way to save jobs, maintain wages and conditions and defend the oppressed. It is also the way to pull the most class-conscious workers towards a party that can lead workers' "partial struggles' beyond the narrow limits of trade unionism and towards the overthrow of capitalism.

Despite the anti-capitalist attitudes of many of its members the SWP leadership is building an organisation the SWP provides a radical cover for the reformists' antiracist and Irish solidarity campaigns; it helps the TUC out in its cynical manipulations of the unemployed; and it co-operates with trade union officials in accepting voluntary redundancies in factories up and down the country.

Meanwhile the SWP keeps on hand a string of vulgar academics to provide pompous apologies for its opportunist politics. Callinicos' critique of the RCT is a superficial and cynical piece masquerading as Marxist polemic. SWP members who want to leave him and join us on the road to revolutionary communism will know where to find us.

Mike Freeman 19 evidence a quotation which identifies but two issues - Ireland and racism - as the top priorities for the labour movement. It is a question of raising those issues which most clearly demarcate a distinctive working class approach. How little the SWP understands this approach may be judged from the fact that it chooses to raise nuclear disarmament in the labour movement.

This obscures rather than clarifies class politics.

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