Harrison reduces Marxism to debates Marxism o aepa with Labour 'lefts'

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DAVID WHITFIELD reviews "Marxist Economies for Socialists-A Critique of Reformism John Harrison, published by Pluto Press, paperback £2.40.

Politics is the concentrated expression of economics.

This motto from Lenin, tacked on at the front of Harrison's book has a savage irony in such a context.

Here economic analysis is not so much concentrated into revolutionary politics as dissipated into milk-andwater generalisations.

A former Trotskyist, Harrison now slowly boils up Marx's economics in a private laboratory until they are transformed into useless gas which is absorbed by the poisonous atmosphere of reformism.

This 'Critique of Reformism' falls into three main sections. In the first half, Harrison provides an exposition of 'The Social Relations of Commodity Production' , and in the second approaches the relationship between 'Capitalism and the Productive : Forces' by offering an analysis of capitalist crises, and by criticising the analyses of reformists.

Presentation

Minor details apart, the first section gives a valuable presentation of the central elements of Marxist economics.

Writing simply and concisely, Harrison explains the nature of commodity production and expounds the law of value, before moving on to show what distinguishes capitalism from simple commodity After exposing the wageform and the origin of profit, he deals with the ways in which the economic structure of capitalism affects the whole of social life.

In themselves-and even more as an introduction to reading "Capital'-these pages make a very useful contribution to the political development of the labour movement in Britain.

If they had been published separately, we could have welcomed them enthusiastically, despite all the obvious limitations of such a project.

Erratic

But from here on down, Harrison pilots his readers like a drunk but self-confident tobogganist, heading blindly for burial in a vast bank of snow. The course may be erratic, but the destination is all too certain.

Firstly, he gives some account of the early -and historically progressive phase of capitalism.

Then come two chapters on 'Rotten Capitalism' and 'Capitalism Since the War' where Harrison pits his own •Marxist' analysis against the positions of representative PHOTO: Andrew Wiard, Report Callaghan reformists.

We have many minor points and fundamental disagreements with the analysis put forward here of capitalist crisis in general and the current crisis in particular.

But these pale into insignificance before the grotesque enormity of Harrison's approach to reformism.

Significantly, the emphasis of these last two chapters is on the writings of three prominent reformists-Anthony Crosland, Stuart Holland and Eduard Bernstein-and in the last case, again, the theoretical rather than the practical refutations of Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky.

The tone is set by the reference to *a debate which took place around the turn of the century about the limits to capitalism's progressive role"

This battle of ideas was the historic struggle between revisionism and revolutionary socialism which centred in the German Social Democracy with Bernstein and Luxemburg as its main protagonists.

Luxemburg herself was quite clear as to the importance of the "debate':

• "In the controversy with Bernstein and his followers, everybody in the Party Lenin ought to understand clearly it is not a question of this or that method of struggle, or the use of this or that set of tactics, but of the very existence of the Social-Democratic movement."

Although Bernstein's ideas, his full-blown revisionism, were rejected by the party, it was at this period that the German Social Democracy did cease to exist as a revolutionary movement.

The opportunist current on which Bernstein was able to float became a great sea of class collaboration in 1914 with the vote of the party's deputies in the Reichstag for war credits.

At one level, of course, the battles within the German Social Democracy can be seen as a 'debate' but to concentrate on this formal aspect is to fail utterly in understanding their historical content, and the lessons which such struggles hold for revolutionaries today.

Harrison treats reformism as being essentially a set of ideas-wrong ideas which are to be fought out in a debate.

But ideas are not the essence of reformism, they are its expression. Reformism developed as the result of the massive political pressure brought to bear on the political growth of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie.

At every level it is a deformity of the revolutionary consciousness and independence of the working class.

The degeneration of the German Social Democracy was the first great triumph reformism over revolutionary socialism, and that tradition lives on today within the parties of the Second 'Socialist' International-the international of class collaboration and betrayal to which Callaghan, Schmidt, Golda Meir and other notable agents imperialism belong.

In this unparallelled history of treachery there is of course a real continuityreformists use the same political arguments to justify their sellouts and their attacks on the working class.

But to present this history as an essay in the history of ideas is at best political naivety.

As historical materialists, Marxists do not approach political movements in the one-sided manner of academic abstraction.

We analyse the way by which they develop from specific historical conditions the way in which they spring from the living struggle of class forces and how they act to influence the development of that Such a method is alien to Harrison's 'Critique of Reformism' , and this is most fully evident in the section on the present-day reformism of the British Opposing his own analysis of the current crisis of imperialism to texts by Anthony Crosland ('The Future of Socialism') and, a theoretician of the Labour 'left', Stuart Holland ('Strategy for Socialism' and "The Socialist Challenge'), Harrison is easily able to make many correct points of criticism.

But these debating points are contained within a very definite political method. A concise statement of this position is best left. to Harrison himself:

Schmidt "Regardless of the motivations of particular individuals, right reformism embodies directly anti-working class policies whereas left. reformism represents an attempt to defend workers' interests, albeit an ultimately misguided one.

"While right reformism should be treated with outright hostility by socialists of all persuasions, left reformism should be approached in a spirit of fraternal if unrelenting criticism"

And this astounding announcement of doublethink comes from a self-styled 'Marxist', a 'revolutionary'!

Anyone half-acquainted with the role of the Labour 'lefts' today must wonder how Harrison can justify such a thoroughly mystified piece of political 'analysis' The answer is really quite simple. Harrison is able to take the 'lefts' at face value by following their own time-honoured methoddivorcing their ideas and their words from their actions, their role in the class struggle.

It is no accident that the record of the Labour Party in government since 1974 is glossed over in two easy paragraphs.

An examination of left reformism in practice would be inconvenient to Harrison's thesis, and is wisely left alone.

He fails to mention such trivial facts as the Labour leadership's formation of a coalition with the Liberals, its imperialist role in Ireland and southern Africa, its use of troops to scab on strikes and wholesale strategy of strengthening the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state-surely worth a line or two.

But he also neglects to show any instance of how Tony Benn and his supporters around the Tribune newspaper have 'opposed' these vicious attacks on the working class.

It is not the purity of the 'lefts' socialist conscience which concerns workers but their actions-the leadership they give to the class.

The 'lefts' may not have attacked the working. class so directly as the right wing, but at every stage they have betrayed workers by their capitulations, abstentions, evasions and fine 'socialist' words.

Objectively, they act as a cover for the right wing, shielding its atrocities with their energetic and fervent speechifying.

The root of Harrison's distortion of the reality of 'left' social democracy is not hard to unearth. Consistently, political ideas are divorced from the material conditions of history, the reality of the class struggle., The refusal to fight for revolutionary political leadership of the working class breeds its own corollary and justificationreformism is not the political method of bureaucratic leadership, but a set of wrong and sometimes misguidedly wrong ideas.

Luxemburg The reform of reformism is the ultimate and inevitable "solution"

Of course Harrison advises no such course explicitly. As he says:

«The slump has confirmed Marxist prognoses of crisis. Reformism's inability to offer a realistic way forward has weakened its political hold on the working class.

"The opportunity exists for perhaps the first time for a generation of winning large sections of the labour movement to a revolutionary socialist perspective".

Aroused by this stirring proclamation, the reader eagerly turns the page-only to encounter 'Notes and References' .'Guide to Further Reading' 'Bibliography' ... 'Index' ...and three blank sheets.

What is the revolutionary' conclusion of this 'Critique of Reformism"?

That we should all rush off to place our orders for Socialist Challenge and The Leveller, before writing letters of 'fraternal if unrelenting criticism' to the pages of Tribune?

Benn Harrison offers no political alternative. There is not even a faint glimmer of suggestion as to what political programme can be opposed to reformism in the vital fight for the leadership of the working class, not even the flimsy shred of one policy.

The abstract ideological confrontation is apparently sufficient unto itself-and presumably considered sufficient for the needs of the proletariat.

Waving a red flag in the privacy of your own room is a futile if rather pathetic gesture, and balancing on barricades is a notoriously tricky operation that cannot be sustained for long. In a spirit of unrelenting if fraternal criticism, we urge John Harrison to step down on one side or the other while he still has the choice.

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SULIALISI I'KESS, Wednesday 30 August, 1978 JOHN Crash Erdma back b guise of a banker who thing but a revolutionary Consistently socialist revolution is depicted as a threat even more unpleasant than the effects of the capitalist crisis.