The need for theoretical discussions

I’ve attached the text of a leaflet I’ve prepared for the Leeds Left Unity
Public Meeting: Kate Hudson on The New Left, Europe and Left Unity on 31st
July which can be also posted on the national Left Unity website as a
contribution to the debate on the need to build a new party by a supporter
of the Economic and Philosophical Science Review.

Many thanks,

Phil Waincliffe

All the fake-‘lefts’ (Trotskyist and revisionist) stand exposed by the pro-imperialist fascist coup in Egypt and the barbaric slaughter of pro-Morsi protesters.

Despite Morsi’s role in heading off the Egyptian revolution in imperialist approved stitched-up elections, his compromises with the IMF, the support given to Syria’s bogus “rebels” and the disastrous treaties with Zionism, he was only ever a not-always-reliable stop gap option for the military, who are ultimately imperialism’s preferred choice.

It has since emerged that establishment figures linked to the Mubarak and the generals had helped to finance and organise the protests, and key opposition figures and the military were lobbying western governments for support.  The fascist coup-plotters were immediately rewarded with warmonger Blair’s blessing and $8 billion of aid from the imperialist stooge regimes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. A fuel crisis mysteriously ended over night, and the police, who had allowed crime and traffic chaos to increase under Morsi, suddenly returned to the streets.

There were all sorts of pre-coup media reports about military and police involvement in the protests, and yet a near mystical belief in the “spontaneity of the masses” led the more impressionable fake-‘left’ sects to declare this counter-revolutionary take-over to be a “second revolution”! Some even called for the Moslem Brotherhood’s “thugs” to be disbanded (by “the workers”, of course) at a time when they were being gunned down!!

The less impressionable rightly opposed the coup, but only to spread illusions that more bourgeois “democracy” is the answer, thereby failing to draw the revolutionary conclusion that only a defeat for imperialism can help to create the conditions in which socialism can be built.

Rather than re-assess their mistakes and analyse how they got things so badly wrong, the fake-‘lefts’ have been tying themselves up in verbal knots in their attempt to cover up their errors; just as they have been doing over Syria and Libya, where some have been equally caught in the act of oiling the wheels of imperialist warmongering, and others philosophically trapped by their support for various anti-Marxist bourgeois nationalist or Islamist movements.

Had there been a revolutionary party on the ground in Egypt dedicated to building a theoretical understanding of the world   that provides clarity, then it is possible that those who had good reason to distrust and oppose Morsi would not have been misled into joining the counter-revolutionary protests.

The urgent need in Egypt, Britain and every other country on the planet is for the building of parties of revolutionary theory that will engage in all-out polemical struggles for understanding, and draw in as many layers of the working class as possible into the discussions, with a view to developing the broadest possible objective historical perspective of the world that can then be used to guide their revolutionary actions.

The emergence of a centrist party (a half-way house between reformism and revolution-ism) that gives freedom for such discussions to take place has long been anticipated.

17 years ago, it looked as if Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party would be that centrism; and for the first 3 years, it did give space for revolutionary arguments to be made.  Tragically (for the working class), Scargillism moved to suppress this healthy debate just at the point when the revolutionary argument was beginning to be taken seriously.

This was a tragedy because it has left the working class bereft of leadership for nearly two more decades (following on from many more decades of revisionist retreat from revolutionary theory), and especially after the long described and warned about (by Leninism) capitalist crisis finally erupted in 2008.

The crisis has been raging ever since, bringing war and Slump misery to billions across the planet, and tearing apart entire nations in the process.  And yet, despite the overwhelming proof of Marxism’s long derided theory-based prediction that the internal contradictions within capitalism will eventually tear the entire world apart in the most catastrophic and destructive crisis in history, the only perspective currently presented to the working class is one in which the crisis can be “stopped” by popular pressure and “mass action”.

Yet more reformist wishful thinking, in other words.

The fake-‘left’ sects will make token gestures to “revolution” and even pretend to be in favour of “Leninist debate”, but not one of them are telling the working class that revolution is the only way to end the crisis – by building planned socialist economies everywhere, defended by firm proletarian dictatorships until capitalism has been wiped off the map.

Instead they all urge the working class to action, whether it is for “general strikes now”, “non-cooperation with the war manufacturers”, door-knocking in working class estates, or dogged campaign work in trade unions and protest groups, without ever saying where all this activism is supposed to lead, or how it is supposed to solve anything.

It is mis-leadership and a total capitulation to capitalist pressure and its “freedom and democracy” pretences.

Ken Loach’s appeal for Left Unity is the call for a debate on the formation of a new party for the working class.  For it to develop into a centrist movement, it will need to overcome decades of  anti-theory philistinism and give freedom to debate all the issues vexing the working class, starting with the legacy of the Soviet Union (both its triumphs and philosophical blunders) and the reasons for its demise, the nature of capitalism’s crisis, and how to achieve socialism.

Unfortunately, the same futile “No to Austerity – Stop the War” perspective is now mooted by Left Unity’s ‘Left Party Platform’, with the usual elevation of practical activity over theory.

This is not to say that people should not involve themselves in campaigns or protests, far from it; but it is to say none of it will amount to anything unless it comes with the broadest of revolutionary perspectives, so that the working class has the clearest understanding of where it needs to go if it is to bring the crisis to an end.

But all this theoretical discussion is “just talk” and is “time-wasting” when there is an urgent need to “stop the cuts”, goes the refrain from some Left Unity “activist” quarters.  All sorts of straw men arguments are brought forward against Marxism to supposedly “prove” that “talking never leads anywhere”.  They are often supplemented by arguments against the use of Marxist terminology “because the working class wouldn’t understand it.”  And anyway, all this discussion and debate is “boring” and the arguments “drive good people away”.

It should also hardly need to be said that greatest and most earth-shattering revolution in world history was led by a man who did nothing else but “write boring theory” and argue for it.  That is “all” Lenin ever did – 33 volumes worth (following on from another 50 volumes worth of “theoretical navel-gazing” by Marx and Engels), but he led the Russian revolution because he got the understanding right and brought about clarity – after years of encouraging open debate and discussion with all-comers, and arguing differences out to a conclusion that was the best appraisal of the situation possible at that time.

The impact of  Lenin’s struggle for scientific theory was so immense that it led to the titanic achievements of the Soviet Union (in education, literacy, culture, science, technology, the first man and woman in space, ending the Second World War, raised living standards and life expectancy, technical and military support for Third World  independence movements, etc, etc.), which continued until the 1980s, despite Stalinism’s disastrous retreat from scientific understanding, suppression of discussion and cover up of mistakes.

Far from “alienating people”, all this “cranky theorising” also inspired millions across the world to rise up and overthrow imperialism in their own countries post-1945.

The notion that Leninism only wants to “sit around with people they agree with” is nonsense.  A correct and concrete scientific appraisal of world developments can only come from the opening up of discussion and polemics around all points of disagreement, in order to deepen everyone’s theoretical understanding of what is true about the world.

This is not a “singular and highly subjective” opinion – it’s the positing of a scientific theory proven by historical reality.  An objective understanding of new developments can only come through argument and debate; by putting arguments in writing and testing them through the encouragement of criticism, analysing any theoretical errors made, and re-assessing agreed positions against new developments.  Subjectivity arises from the absence of polemical struggle for a line that reflects the best approximation of reality possible.

The parody of “democratic centralism” now polemicised against by some in Left Unity is that all this theorising is done behind closed doors by elite guru figures who then instruct their membership to uncritically accept it and promote it.

Whilst this may be the practice of tightly-knit closed-in sects, it is a million miles from Lenin’s party of scientific theory which seeks to open theoretical discussions up to the entire working class:

“You gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the ‘average worker’ as a matter of fact rather insult all workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues…Are there not ‘advanced people’, ‘average people’, and ‘the mass’ among the intelligentsia too?…You must realize that these questions about politics and organisation are so serious in themselves that they cannot be discussed in any other but a very serious way. We can and must educate workers (and university and high-school students) so as to be able to discuss these questions with them; but once you do bring up these questions, you must give real replies to them. Do not fall back on the ‘average’, or on the ‘masses’; do not try to get off by resorting to empty phrasemongering.” [see Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” (1909) for fuller quote]

The following Che Guevara quote recently included in an article on Left Unity’s website, usefully criticises Stalinism’s wooden non-Leninist approach to working class education that imparts knowledge through diktat rather than encourages such high-level theoretical discussions:

In this long vacation period I have had my nose buried in philosophy, something I have wanted to do for some time. I came across the first problem: nothing is published in Cuba, if we exclude the hefty Soviet manuals, which have the drawback of not allowing you to think for yourself, because the party has already done it for you, and you just have to digest it. In terms of methodology, it is as anti-Marxist as can be and, moreover, the books tend to be very bad. (p.140-141 ‘Remembering Che’, Aleida Marsh, 2012)

Despite correctly pointing to these limitations, Guevara failed to pin down what the problems in the Soviet Union were, and the reasons why Stalinism ended up in the disastrous philosophical cul-de-sac that ultimately led to the unnecessary liquidation of the Soviet Union.

Far from being evidence that all Marxism ultimately amounts to is “unthinking subservience” as the article suggests, the quote is a call for more discussion and more debate to understand the world.  This does not mean that a soupy eclectic swamp of endlessly discussed abstractions should be allowed to persist, but it does mean a struggle to reach concrete conclusions that can then be tested in practice.

The fake-‘left’ sects have a long history of suppressing and avoiding such discussions for fear of having their opportunistic posturing exposed in front of the working class, as seen in a recent attempt at exclusion from Left Unity meetings in Leeds.

If such philosophically bankrupt anti-theory bids for leadership are allowed to succeed, then Left Unity will fail and the debate will eventually erupt elsewhere, out of necessity, because the crisis is constantly pushing it to the surface.

If Left Unity becomes the vehicle for the struggle for scientific understanding, or even the starting point, then it should be built and promoted enthusiastically.