The Swp's Long Fighi

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"For Marxists in advanced countries, Lenin's less serve as a guide than Rosa Luxembourg's, statement on the question of spontaneity.

"However, whatever the historical circumstances moulding Rosa's thought's regarding organisation these thoughts showed a great weakness in the German revolution of 1918-1919."

(T. Cliff, Rosa Luxembourg, [2nd edition] 1968).

Massive demonstration in Lisbon. Mav Dav 1975. Spontaneous militancy was Those like the leadership of the International Marxist committment to a 'democratic centralist party' can be taken for good coin are playing a dangerous game.

They are aiding Tony Cliff and his fellow SWP leaders in their attempts to systematically revise and destroy all the gains of the Trotskyist movement.

It is not good enough for the IMG to accept the self-proclaimed "democratic centralism" of the SWP and put forward a few mild criticisms of the lack of the 'democratic party'.

It is necessary to probe the whole basis of Cliff's understanding of Leninism.

While it might even be correct under certain circumstances to maintain unity with those who hold a different view of Stalinism-if a firm common programme is established, agreed and kept to by all concerned-it is not legitimate for Trotskyists to unify with those who reject everything in the Leninist/Trotskyist tradition except a few surface 'agreements' with Lenin.

For us it is necessary to examine claimed adherence to Leninism both theoretically and practically. The SWP fails both these tests.

At the head of this article we quote the 1st and 2nd editions of Cliff's pamphlet on Rosa Luxembourg. The second quote comes after the IS/SWP convertion to 'Leninism' As we showed last week, the Cliff group adapted to anti-communism in the late 1940s and split with Trotskyism on defence of North Korea against imperialism.

But by the 1960s it felt able to take a position of defence of The key to this change was of course rooted in the changes in petty bourgeois "public opinion" particularly that amongst students who enthusiastically supported the Vietnamese revolution.

Adapted It was the May/June events in France 1968 that led to a change in attitude on the part of Cliff to 'Leninism' The lack of a party to challenge the existing mass leaders was so glaring that even the most blind centrist was forced to see it.

Cliff adapted to this by changing his mind-though giving no explanation of the changes cited above.

Of course recognition of the need for some kind of party does not solve the problem of what kind of party is needed.

In this article we propose to show that the IS/SWP conception is in no way Leninist.

When we consider the revolutionary party we are, of course, considering the central question facing revolutionaries, ie. how to construct one.

What we think about this today comes down to us from the whole history of the Marxist movement.

Decades of struggle - -agre: cal conceptions (T.Cliff, Luxembourg libraries.

We can therefore only give a brief outline of the main issuesan outline designed to prompt further study.

Ramblings

There are many quotes we could select from Cliff's voluminous ramblings on the subject. We have selected the one which follows because we think that it is representative of his thinking.

"Revolutions do indeed start as spontaneous acts without the leadership of a party . . . However after being triggered off by a spontaneous uprising revolutions move forward in a different manner . . . the October revolution was not a spontaneous act but was organised in practically all its important particulars, including the date, by the Bolsheviks...

"Nowadays everyone pays at least lip service to the need for political preparation but in fact substitutionalism [sic!] is still rife on the revolutionary left.

"It needs to be emphasised and reemphasised that, in Marx's words 'the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself' "But the rejection of substitutionalism in no way involves rejecting the necessity for a revolutionary workers' party. The working class is a product of capitalist society. Its consciousness and militancy and understanding is necessarily extremely uneven.

To act, even in sectional struggles, it requires organisation. For it to act as a class for the biggest aim of all, the taking of power and the socialist reconstruction of society, the most conscious and confident workers must be welded together.

"They are the actual or potential leaders of their fellows... This union of these advanced workers is the revolutionary workers' party ... In times of crisis workers respond to some leadership or other... In the absence of a revolutionary party led by the more advanced workers, the mass of the working class will follow or acquiesce in some other kind of load. The vacuum has to be filled ...

"Of course the revolutionary party also needs tradition and theory. In other words its cadres need to have absorbed some of the lessons of past workers' struggles nationally and internationally.

"To weld together a broad layer of advanced workers this Ition Fust to some extent 1959). army officers, managers, lawyers and so on, are subjected to an intense education process which is as much ideological. as technical.

"But it is very dangerous to see the party's job as mainly that of teacher. The main job is to give a lead.

"To do this effectively the party militants must listen, must be sensitive to changing moods among their fellow workers, must know how to link the aspirations of workers to the central political aim. In short they have to learn from their fellow workers as much-or more-as they have to teach.

To repeat, the job is to lead and to lead you have to thoroughly understand those you are leading. Leadership is a two-way process.

... The job of the party leadership is to generalise the experience of the party militants and to lead them as they lead their fellow workers.

... Many (on the left) see the party leadership as the repository of doctrine, of theory, of organisational skill and knowledge. Of course it has to be all these things to some degree. But mainly it has to be the most apt learner, the most sensitive ear and the firmest will."

(T. Cliff, Portugal at the Crossroads, International Socialism 81/82. September 1975).

An understanding of the nature of class consciousness and its development is central to solving our task of transforming the working class in Marx's words 'from a class in itself to a class for itself' This means raising workers to a level where they recognise and are able to carry out their historic task of liberating mankind.

The dispute we have with the IS/SWP is one which in its essentials was fought out by Lenin in his battle against the Russian 'Economists' Basic required reading for those who wish to lead our class today is Lenin's pamphlet What Is To Be Done?

Consciousness

Writing of the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness he says:

"Strikes occurred in the seventies and sixties . . . and they were accompanied by "spontaneous" destruction of machinery etc ... The strikes of the nineties revealed far greater flashes of consciousness; definite demands were advanced, the strike was carefuily timed, known cases and instances in other places were discussed, etc.

Taken by themselves these strikes were simply trade union struggles, not yet Social Democratic [revolutionary] struggles ... the workers were not and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, that is, theirs was not yet Social Democratic (revolutionary] consciousness.

•. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness."

(What Is To Be Donel)

Lenin goes on to stress that:

"Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers ry tamed to respond to all sacrescion. violence and abuse no matter what class is affected-unless they are trained to respond from a Social Democratic point of view"

(What Is To Be Done?)

Careful reading of Cliff's quote alone will show that for the SWP the political preparation for revolutionary struggles consists essentially in generalising the existing struggles and "linking" advanced workers in a force that can fill the "vacuum" when the opportunity exists.

Necessary battle

Cliff specifically rejects the necessary battle with the false, bourgeois, trade union consciousness which spontaneously exists in all sections of the working class, whether they be 'advanced' or backward.

By placing the emphasis on simply 'learning from the workers"' and giving only the most cursory attention to transÄAC.I mission of the theoretical and programmatic heritage of the communist movement to those workers who come into conflict with reformism he opens the way to the opportunism for which the SWP is so welf known.

What did Lenin have to say about the ideological struggle?

... all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of the conscious element means ... a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideo!ogy upon the workers. All those who talk about overrating the importance of ideology . .. imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate and will elaborate an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers "wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders* .. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontanenot enourh to to. ous development of the working class leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology."

(This, Lenin said, "was shown by the history of all countries").

Indeed Lenin went further than this and argued that:

"The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philo: sophical, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals.

"By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engeis, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.

"In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of

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PRESS, Wednesday 4 July

----- pull-quotes -----

Group who peddle the idea that, the SWP's stated

original position can much notwithstanding her over- Rosa Luxembourg,

LĂMEND CONGE