Statement of the Libertarian Socialist Tendency
The Libertarian Socialist Tendency believes that a new society cannot be based upon authoritarian institutions such as the state. Those campaigning against the ruling class need to develop their own organisations based upon workers’ self-management, co-operatives, federalism and grass-roots democracy.
The economic crisis has revealed that economic growth since the war has been based upon increasing inequality and debt. It is neither possible nor desirable to rewind history to a ‘pre-crisis’ situation where we can defend the post-war welfare-state settlement. The state is failing and the left should concentrate on new forms of organisation that can take over its positive functions and reject its coercive and repressive aspects . LU’s role in this is not to establish itself as a new political power but to lead a campaign enabling a diverse range of grass-roots institutions to develop representing a broad social movement.
Whilst certain national institutions such as the NHS and rail network could be retained under a modified form that gives control to workers and users, the state as the over-arching and supreme authority in society should be abolished. There must be fundamental changes to banking, finance, taxation, policing and the control of industry in order to establish an economy run in the interests of ordinary people. The basis of a new society will be the democratic revival of the union movement freeing it from legal restrictions, the creation of community unions, and support of those creating new economies based upon local trading, alternative currencies, co-operatives, and the voluntary and charity sectors.
The Libertarian Socialist Tendency aims to be a space to discuss and put forward policy proposals based on these ideas and welcomes input from all who reject state-based and party-based politics. Please contact us to find out more.
21 comments
21 responses to “Statement of the Libertarian Socialist Tendency”
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There is nothing at all vaguely “socialist” about this statement I’m afraid. It is simply a call for a decentralised (anarchic) “caring” capitalism – remarkably similar to idealistic stuff the Young Liberals used to produce in the 1970’s and 80’s.
“Socialism” in any meaningful form actually requires that a democratic workers state is created which takes into direct public ownership all the “commanding heights” of the economy (yep, as per the old Clause 4) – to be operated for the good of the majority of citizens in society – within the priorities and structures of a democratically created comprehensive National Plan.
Real Socialism requires that the power of the capitalist market (and the capitalist class of superrich) is broken, to be replaced on a local and global scale by a democratically planned economic system of resource allocation – rather than allocation by market forces. To achieve this, and fight off the capitalist backlash, the future socialist workers state will have to be both comprehensively democratic, but also very centralised , at least until capitalism is defeated as a global system of class oppression and exploitation.
Sadly the “Libertarian Socialist Tendancy” seem to understand none of this very basic Socialist ABC stuff. Politically , they are therefore radical bourgeois liberals , not “socialists” in any meaningful form. This bourgeois liberalism has nothing to offer our party or the working class in its struggle against the globalised capitalist crisis.
What trite Leninist bollocks
A “democratic workers state” is what they are proposing, but their vision of it differs to yours in that it is not so narrow or backward in it’s ambition.
John,
“The State and Revolution” by Lenin is worth reading. The state was required as a transitional means of moving to socialism and communism. In practice the concept failed, we should try again but next time with mass involvement before the actual overthrow of the Bourgeois state. Then it becomes really difficult as we try to stop the “great leaders” who “led” us all turning into a new ruling class.
“Those campaigning against the ruling class need to develop their own organisations based upon workers’ self-management, co-operatives, federalism and grass-roots democracy”
Also known as “a state”
Maybe, but a pluralist one.
Tim, people can choose to take part in federal, bottom-up organisations. the state is a monolithic authoritarian system that demands obedience.
John, I think we understand very well the theory of state socialism, but we disagree with it. We are not for reforming capitalism but for the destruction of the capitalist class by a process of democratic, economic, and social revolution. The only justification for the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the workers state was that it was required to ensure the political supremacy of the urban working class over the peasantry. That historical condition is now consigned to history with the global demise of the peasantry as the majority class, even in China and India.
I’m afraid you definitely don’t understand what democratic socialism and the democratic workers state is all about – choosing quite wrongly to caricature this as “state socialism”.
Your failure of understanding of what a democratic workers state is , and why such a structure, alongside a comprehensive system of economic planning , is absolutely essential for the transition from capitalism to socialism, is quite clear from your statement . The need for a workers state is of course completely independent of the existence of a huge peasant majority in a society . Pre Stalinist Marxists never expected socialism to be possible in an undeveloped peasant-based society, and the dire totalitarian fate of the peasant-dominated Stalinist pseudo-socialist “communist” states proves this was correct.
Your political philosophy is an unhappy mix of libertarian anarchism and liberal reformism – heavily polluted with all the “the state is a burden, the state is unnecessary ” ideology which has bled over to sections of the libertarian “Left” from the neoliberal Right, along with other neoliberal concepts like “citizens income”.
Capitalism cannot be reformed gradually out of existence, any more than one could tame a tiger , claw by individual claw. Even moderately radical reform in today’s global capitalist crisis will eventually provoke a direct class on class confrontation with the power of capital. The workers state is the defensive and co-ordinating organisational form required to organise a non-market-based society during the long period of confrontation any single society entering on the path of socialist transformation will require to face up to foreign intervention and the malign sabotage of the international “markets”.
I have no problem with the presence of radical liberal reformists of an anarchist bent being part of our broad Left Unity Party . You are welcome. Just don’t expect those of us who actually are socialists to warm to your liberal reformist agenda.
I’d question the assertion that the notion that the state is unnecessary has come over from the neoliberal, libertarian right to the left.
Classical liberalism and libertarianism was originally leftist and anti-state, and encompasses a broad tradition espoused by figures from Bakunin and Bertrand Russell to George Orwell and Noam Chomsky. There’s nothing anti-state that has bled over to the Left from the Right – it was already there.
Libertarian socialism deserves to be called socialism just as much as state socialism does – both call for public ownership over the means production but the former recognises the failure of the state to keep independent from corporate interests. I understand concerns over whether the libertarian socialist transformation would simply be destroyed at birth, but the point is that we should get as close to this transformation as we possibly can. The less hierarchy there is and the more workers’ self-management and co-operatives there are, the better. Co-operatives have even been formed in Denmark and Germany in the field of renewable energy and, of course, in Latin America.
It’s an ideal, but the closer we get to it, the better.
I better hastily add, in case one of my comments suggests otherwise, that it is of course quite impossible for a single society to make the paradigm shift to socialism – and the defensive workers state form in a single state has to be predicated on being part of a much wider, European-wide ” ongoing socialist transformational process at least. In isolation even the most democratic workers state would degenerate into a form of stalinist tyranny. The point is that your libertarian anarchist decentralised, “bottom up” “model” of transformation would be destroyed at birth by the hyper organised internal and external power of capital.
John, there’s too much to debate here. I would question your theory of the state, point to post-modernist theories of totality, spectacle, and situation. what about the historical failure to reconcile state interest with class interest?
I’m happy to be labelled an anarchist though there is a huge diversity of opinion encompassed by this term. many anarchists say I am a socialist LOL I have spent 6 years organising Bristol Anarchist Bookfair which now attracts 1,000 attendees, The London Anarchist Bookfair attracts 10,000. Not insignificant in comparison to the numbers LU is currently attracting.
I had a quick look at the Young Liberals – the little it says about them sounds quite good! and of course they were labelled Communists by the party leadership – I guess it is all a matter of perspective. Glad you welcome us as part of a broad party – your first comment came across as quite sectarian. It is healthy to disagree on some issues and I am sure there is much we can agree on.
I am from a lib sock background & a member of the rep soc tendency. John p’s argument fails to explain why the momentum of the 1945 – 1990 period, when 30 per cent of the world had astate that had broken with capitalism, despite the defensive centralisation he says is so necessary, wasn’t enough to produce more than Cuba in terms of sustainable socialism of a sort. How big a proportion of the world has to meet histransitionalcriteria before we get genuine workers democracy in any one place? The top – down approach seems to look quite gradualistic itself on the global stage which john p tells us is how it has to work and fragile in the extreme, if it falls back so totally as it did in 1990 after so many decades of being built up. It is a bust model.
Did the anarcho syndicalists of Big Flame , of which you were a member for years, actually think the Stalinist State Capitalist tyrannies of the USSR, China, etc, had actually “broken with capitalism” . John ? I can’t recall, but if you did, you were quite wrong then, as indeed you are now to see the totalitarian women enslaving clerico-fascists of Islamic State as any sort of positive challenge to capitalism and imperialism.
There has as yet never been a fully successful socialist revolution – anywhere. The unstable class-alliance worker and peasant revolutionary socialist state of 1917 Russia was quickly drowned in blood by foreign intervention, and destroyed from within by the rise of the Stalinist Bureaucracy. Cuba was actually (despite its claims) a left bourgeois liberal nationalist revolution , with socialistic features, – not a socialist revolution – quickly subsumed into the authoritarian State ownership Stalinist model (but retaining for decades real mass popular support) because Castro needed the economic and military support of the Soviet Union to withstand the US blockade.
In short , your old Big Flame political model was hopelessly wrong then, as is your current “any force that appears to be opposing the capitalist status quo , whether Islamic fundamentalist barbarism, or petty Scottish nationalism, is worth supporting” , mantra.
The fact remains that only the working class, organised as a self conscious working class (for the first time in history, only recently, now the largest world class), can overthrow capitalism and create socialism. That class has to be the focus of Left Unity in most of its political work. Socialism will only be created by the emergence on a series of centralised, (but democratic) workers states , based on comprehensive state planning – able to stand up to the capitalist fightback internally and externally. All other models are simple libertarian daydreaming.
John P, I think you had better read this Big Flame pamphlet analysing Soviet-type societies before passing judgment from on high – https://bigflameuk.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/unexpected-p1.jpg. It is on the website. Like most from a Trostskyist background, you only date the decline of the Bolshevik Revolution from Stalin. Kronstadt never happened, the NEC never happened, the abolition of the National Assembly never happened and the formation of a political police never happened under Lenin, because there is nothing wrong in your view with top-down socialism – it is necessary to defend the Revolution.
Political space is created by opening up the cracks in Capitalism, overthrowing some of its key structures, like the nation states it most depends on. That’s what increases the chances of struggle and can move things onto a higher stage. Otherwise you just get inertia whilst hoping & party-building in vain for the Trotskyist Big Bang.
Your posts are simply baffling in their profound contradictions , John. I find your continued adherence to the libertarian Big Flame/anarchist line on Leninism and Kronstadt, etc, more than a little strange – given your current enthusiasm for portraying the totalitarian , women enslaving, murderous barbarians of Islamic State and their crazed Caliphate objective as a “progressive historic force”. So as long as you are promoting this disgraceful position , please don’t lecture me on the shortcomings of early post 1917 revolutionary soviet democracy – adopted in a situation of massive foreign intervention and scarcity. Because you simply no longer have the political credibility to do so.
I don’t know if you are aware just how widely on the internet/social media your disgraceful (roundly rejected) LU Conference amendment expressing support for Islamic State (from Guido Fawkes on the right to the anarchists/libertarians on Urban75 and onwards), has been used to vilify and misrepresent Left Unity. Utterly disgraceful.
I shall therefor stick to the traditional radical socialist model of the need for a DEMOCRATIC workers state as being a key vehicle for radical socialist transformation, and view your completely contradictory expressions of support for both libertarian anarchist positions on one hand (the Russian Revolution) and totalitarian clerico-fascism on the other (the Middle East today) with complete bemusement .
“Copyright Moshe Machover” – that was certainly unexpected! Did Moshe write it?
Yes, Moshe wrote that great pamphlet for us in Big Flame, assisted by John Fantom, a BF member, whose real name I forget. The BF International Commission endorsed the pamphlet and then published a long criticism of it! It was yet another attempt by BF to set out its stall in relation to the rest of the left. Our pamphlet ‘The Revolution Unfinished’ on Trotskyism (also on the BF website) was another clarification. Reading these arcane debates on state socialism vs libertarian approaches (on this string) reminds me of how rancorous and off-putting so much of those arguments were. No longer needed or useful, in those forms, in my view.
Why would someone who is against “party based politics” join Left Unity, “THE NEW PARTY OF THE LEFT” to quote our strap line?
Just a question to the Libertarian Socialist Tendency?
Parties (plural) are fine as part of the process of challenging capitalism, but the idea that many Trotskyists have is that they are in THE Revolutionary Party, which will take the working class all the way and make & sustain the revolution. Some organised tendencies within LU think and act in this way; they believe they are engaged in winning the rest of us to THE correct line. Ultimately, they are ‘democratic centralists’ but refuse to see the obvious link between that and Stalinism.
Stuart, good point and something that needs more explanation. The thought behind this was that we do not want a ‘political party’ that aims to win power first in parliament and aim to change society through legislation. Nor do we want a party that seeks to impose its politics through seizure of military and administrative power. although we think it is worth contesting elections and it is worth developing popular control of security and local government, we should primarily be supporting the development of new forms of economic and political organisation outside the ranks of our party e.g. democratic trade unions, community unions, workers cooperatives etc. So rather than focusing on bringing all on the left within the structures of LU (which is what was meant by ‘party-based’) we should turn outward and try to give political leadership to a movement much bigger than our own party.
Phil, while I am with you in terms of strategy, I recall how my old organisation & a few key allies tried to bring a coalition of anarchists, libertarians, community activists, radical trade unionists, gay activists, feminists and anti-racists together in the ‘Beyond the Fragments’ conference in Leeds in 1980.
This is worth looking at – http://eprints.maynoothuniversity.ie/4612/1/LC_review5-2.pdf – and the paperback has just been re-published – http://www.merlinpress.co.uk/acatalog/BEYOND-THE-FRAGMENTS.html
I don’t think there was anything wrong with this strategy, but it could not compete with the bigger battalions on the Left and in the TU movment at the time in fighting a defensive war against Thatcherism. However, those bigger battalions lost that war and are no longer big. These circumstances did not help BTF but the context nowadays is different – UK Uncut, Occuply, a new wave feminism, opposition to the Bedroom Tax and other less traditional movements are up for challenging capitalism. Some LU branches, like my own and Norwich, have started some important work with local unemployed people which we aim to develop and others have regular stalls in shopping centres and other public spaces, which we intend to emulate in Stockport.
So, yes, LU needs to learn from Scotland and be outward-facing in its work, and without insisting theat people join us. If we can build good relationships with other activists, then we earn the right to political leadership over startegic initatives and general interventions.The old Trotskyist party-building model does not work – the rate of membership expansion reaches a plateau and then declines, which is what is happening to LU (stuck on 2000 since March and losing some key members over internal wrangling).