Tuesday 24 December 2013

Merry Christmas and a New Year of Fighting Back!

Hello everyone,
Hope that the mince pies are being consumed and the lights are up - this is your festive update from the Derby Socialist Workers' Party!
 
2013 has been a tumultuous political year, with setbacks for workers like Grangemouth, but also fantastic successes such as the Hovis workers and the ongoing action by the teachers unions and university lecturers - and the SWP has been at the heart of everything, helping to support and organise the fightback wherever we can, celebrating our successes and offering a way forward after defeats.
 
Our next meeting will not be until the 9th of January, when we will be discussing Prospects for socialists in 2014. Come and join us at 7pm at the West End Community Centre!
 
In the meantime a few comrades have been doing the rounds of Derby's fire stations as the fire fighters have been out on strike from 7 pm this evening, taking messages of solidarity and copies of the paper to workers under attack by the coalition who once again want our class to pay for the crisis by cutting essential services.
 
They will be out again on New Years' Eve from 6.30 pm, and as anyone who has been on strike will know, support will be warmly received!
 
In the meantime, here is a picture of Christmas cheer to tide us over until the fightback resumes in 2014!
 

Monday 2 December 2013

Weekly Update #14

Hello everyone,
Welcome to your weekly update from the Socialist Workers' Party!
Branch Meetings
This week's branch meeting is on the question of revolution in Britain, after Russell Brand's recent set-to with Jeremy Paxman on the subject. Come along and let us know your thoughts!

West End Community Centre, 7 pm Thursday December 5th.

Next week's meeting is on the topic of the state's espionage against its own people. Come along to find out about Secrets and Lies!
Thursday December 12th, West End Community Centre, 7 pm


Industrial Action Tuesday 3rd December

Workers across higher and further education are out on strike over changes to their pay and conditions - a hot topic for any worker in private and public sectors at the moment! There should be pickets at Derby University and Derby College tomorrow morning - get down and show solidarity if you can!


If there are any events that socialists should be involved in, but we have not included in this update, please leave a comment or email us at derbyswp@gmail.com.

Sunday 24 November 2013

Weekly Update #13

Branch Meetings
 
This Thursday's meeting is a must for anyone interested in industrial action: After Grangemouth.
 
 Workers and supporters protest at Grangemouth last Sunday
 
Anyone who has heard of Grangemouth will know about the terrible deal that workers were sold by their union recently. What does this mean for the confidence of workers elsewhere, and the wider struggles against austerity? What should the response of socialists be? Come along for a talk and what is sure to be a lively discussion!
 
Thursday 28th November 2013, 7 pm, West End Community Centre
 
Staying topical, next week's meeting will be on the prospects for revolution in Britain, after Russell Brand's recent spat with Paxo (see video here).
 
That's Thursday 5th December, 7 pm, West End Community Centre.
 
 
 
Hands Off Our Unions
 
The People's Assembly have a statement in response to Tory attacks on trades unions. Sign it here: http://thepeoplesassembly.org.uk/handsoffunions/
 
 
SOS NHS
 
There is an organising meeting of the SOS NHS campaign on Thursday 28th November.

Sunday 10 November 2013

Weekly Update #12


Morning comrades!
A couple of updates for you this week from the SWP!

Branch Meeting

This week's branch meeting will be on Verdi and Italian Nationalism. Last month was the 200th anniversary of the composer Verdi, whose music had an enormous impact on Italian unification. Find out more on Thursday 14th November, 7pm at the West End Community Centre!

Next week we have a classically-themed talk with Can Socialists Learn from the Ancient World? One of our comrades will talk us through some important events from the ancient world and ask what lessons we can learn to help us today. Come along for a lively talk and discussion on Thursday 21st November, 7 pm at the West End Community Centre!


Firefighters Take Action over Pensions

At this week's stall we had a petition to support the firefighters in their current dispute over the government's decision to keep firefighters climbing ladders and putting out fires until they are 60. We had a lot of support from the public for the firefighters. Show your support by signing the petition online here:


Why Privatisation is Not the Answer



This post is based on the talk that was given at this week's branch meeting. We had a great discussion from this - enjoy!


Why privatisation is not the answer
The aim of tonight’s talk is to set out some of the socialist arguments against the capitalist and neo-liberal arguments for privatisation. Initially I will set out the case that privatisation is bad for the working class and leads to exploitation – this will not take long as the exploitation of workers under a capitalist system is a common topic of our discussions. The second and major focus of the talk will be on how privatisation actually fails to offer the economic and innovative benefits which it claims to offer.

Starting with the first strand, Marxists are familiar with the argument that under a capitalist system the labour value of the workers is exploited by the owners of the means of production. The work produced by the workers must make profit for the owners of the means of production and so companies squeeze the share of the value of their productivity which is paid to the workers – workers are paid less and the capitalist aims to maximise their productivity and collect a higher proportion of surplus value. In a recent talk we discussed the example of shop workers at an apple store – selling several products at a cost of a few hundred pounds each during the course of the day when their wages for the day are a fraction of the price paid for one of these.

The exploitation of workers is particularly highlighted when we look at less skilled and less well paid forms of employment. As a summer job one year I temped doing picking and packing in a warehouse. This was not a job which I particularly enjoyed but I was in a fortunate position that I was a temp and was paid an hourly rate. Those who were employed directly by the company were paid subject to the number of picks they made per hour. This created a competitive and fractured atmosphere with workers arguing over who had the best pick sheets – everyone wanted to gain the sheets with the highest number of the same item so that they could quickly meet their target of a hundred picks per hour. This sort of pressure and such unpleasant working conditions are, in many ways, an inevitable consequence of the capitalist system.

This exploitation is seen as benefitting the capitalist class at the expense of the working class. The argument seems clear and, when made, often convinces people that the working classes are disadvantaged by the capitalist system. And yet, there are many who accept the arguments for privatisation.

It is valuable to remind ourselves of the problems inherent in capitalism and private companies, yet it is also worth addressing some of the misconceptions regarding the economic value of privatisation.
The first and most common defence is that private companies are more efficient than public run organisations. Many of us probably have our own experiences of working for private companies and I think we would all say that this myth is easily dismissed based on a few anecdotes from that experience. From my own personal experience, I could offer a couple of examples. In another summer university job I temped for a major bank, the inefficiency was evident throughout the company. I had been employed to sort out and ensure that the employee files in the human resources department were up to date and included all of the key documentation needed in employee files.

My job consisted of auditing the files and checking off that there was a signed copy of the contract, proof of address, proof of right to work in the UK and so on – all exciting stuff! I then had to phone individual branches and chase employees for missing documentation – most times I did this it turned out that the employee in question had sent the documents in a number of times. On further exploration of the offices, I soon discovered vast piles of unfiled paperwork accompanied by a tendency of staff who were working on files to keep them in their desk drawer and leave no indication in the filing cabinet as to where the files were. There were an army of temps who had been given no training and were in charge of filing and it seemed that the unofficial ‘non policy’ was to simply create piles of documents that had no file and leave them. The vastness of the company, the trend for hiring in large numbers of temporary workers with no training, no job security and frequently, as a result of these things, little dedication to the work, seem to lead naturally to repeated work and inefficiency.

The scale of these organisations is one reason why inefficiency creeps in. Yet even in smaller private organisations there is inefficiency. If we look at the privatised public services we can see that this trend continues. Public transport gives us several examples of this sort of inefficiency. It is not just the internal inefficiency of organisations, but also the inefficiency of the private model in general. Competition is often presented as a good for innovation and economic efficiency, however, if we look at the wider context we can see that the competition leads to wastefulness and the demands of profitability within an individual company leads to wider inefficient utilisation of resources.

If we take public transport around Derby and Derbyshire as an example we can see first-hand how this wider economic inefficiency presents itself. With the privatisation of public transport companies were motivated by profit and so bus routes and train stations in and to smaller towns have seen a lack of investment, closures and few services. In the context of a wider economic system this is not beneficial in terms of worker’s easy access to their work places or beneficial environmentally. As one example we can see that some of the villages in South Derbyshire are served by infrequent and very expensive bus services. If you were to live in Hatton, for example, most workers there who began their work at nine would be faced with the choice of arriving in Derby at 8:05, being 55 minutes early for their shift, or arriving in the city 5 minutes late for work – the price they pay for the benefit of this service is over £5 for a return ticket. No wonder it is more appealing for so many people to drive into the city for their jobs, using resources inefficiently and having a negative impact on the environment.

Similarly, the drive to compete for a fixed market creates a chaotic system in many instances. Heading from Derby out to South Derbyshire there are two services run by two separate companies – the x-50, which heads off to Stoke, and the Villager services which head to Burton. The x-50 is scheduled to leave Derby 5 minutes before the villager – it stops at some of the same places but a return ticket on one would not be valid on the other as we have separate services competing for the same market. Similarly with the two companies who operate services from Derby to Nottingham. Whilst supporters of the free market economy may claim that private companies adapt their practices to meet the demands of the consumer and will be forced to offer better services and adopt more ethical practices under the compulsion of their customers, we see that in practice this is not the case. Private companies are motivated by maximising their own profit which leads to a narrowing of services offered. The needs of the community are clearly not met by these privately run companies.

The economic benefits of privatisation can also be seen to be a fallacy when we look at the railways as an example. In January of this year the Socialist Worker had an article reviewing the last twenty years of privatised rail networks. It makes an interesting read and was a compelling counter to the claims that privatising benefits tax payers. It deals with the cost to individual commuters initially – the rising cost to commuters is not news to any of us, I’m sure, but it is worth considering some of the statistics: The average worker now spends 15% of their income on travel costs, fares have almost consistently increased above the rate of inflation and a worker in Chelmsford, Essex, would spend £3,540 a year to commute to London. This is all familiar news, but the supposed benefits in terms of tax payer’s money are worth tackling.

In fact, in spite of saving the treasury money and passing the costs onto individuals, we now have individual commuters and the treasury paying increased money for a diminished service. Since privatisation public funding of railways has more than doubled to £5.4 billion a year by 2009 - 2010. In 2012 the government paid £490 million in subsidies to rail franchise. The government funded McNulty report apparently noted these problems but rejected the idea of renationalising, even though this would save £1.2 billion a year, and suggested, rather, ‘that further division was the solution’. Similarly, in April the Guardian published an article headed ‘East Coast rail service costs taxpayers less than private lines, report reveals.’

The key piece of information in the article is that:

The route has been under the control of the Department for Transport since November 2009 after the transport company National Express pulled out.
While about half of all train operating companies paid premiums to the government last year, the report shows that passengers on every franchise were in effect subsidised when money spent on infrastructure was included. However, the net subsidy for East Coast was 1% of the line's income, compared with an average of 32%.’

The cost to workers is higher in terms of personal fares as well as in terms of the amount of public spending diverted to the rail network and the service is not improving. Clearly, again, the needs of the community are not met but the companies are protected from any shortfall in their projected profits.

The second claim which is often confidently put forward by supporters of the free market and privatised economies is that private companies are more innovative and that without private companies technological innovation and progress will stagnate. This is simply wrong and if we look at the innovations and improvements in health care since the establishment of the NHS we can see just how incorrect these claims are. It is reasonable to suggest that in the establishment of the NHS its founders were inspired by what voluntary and community based groups were able to achieve. As David Hands, visiting professor in Health Policy and Management, said in a talk in March 2010 delivered to the Socialist Health Association:
 
[Individuals inspired by the development of community groups and outstanding clinicians have been responsible for innovation in health care.] ‘But the vision of individuals is influenced by the context in which they work.  The collective efforts of the pioneers stimulated the creation of our valued social institutions such as hospitals, health centres, universities, the BBC and the NHS.  Those institutions in turn have created the environment in which innovation and improvement can flourish.
It is interesting to speculate whether some of the innovations that we now take for granted might not have happened had the NHS not existed.  It is beyond dispute that many who chose to work in the NHS have been inspired by the values and vision of the Service and the comradeship of shared endeavour.’
In fact, health care has improved beyond recognition since the establishment of the NHS. People live longer, infant mortality is down and there has been a transformation in the treatment and understanding of many illnesses.

Further to this, if we look at education, since the introduction of the educational reform act and again since the introduction of the National Curriculum, there has been a huge development in educational research, innovation in educational practice and a far greater understanding of how students learn and how teaching can be more effective. Innovation is not the preserve of the private sector, where, in fact, positive innovation is not required for continued success and profitability.

However, this is not to say that publicly run organisations and services are without the inefficiencies and stagnation that we have seen present in private organisations. In another university summer job I worked for the probation service and there was a particularly amusing and depressing story of a recent inefficient development in the practice which perhaps sums up the issues. The managers had decided that the offices in which the probation officers worked should be made open plan.

The probation officers themselves said that this would not work as they required offices where they could hold confidential meetings with their clients. The changes were brought in anyway at great cost, only to discover that probation officers were not able to do their core work of holding confidential meetings with clients in open plan office spaces. As a result, the offices were returned to their former state.

We have all also heard various stories of the creation of what can best be termed ‘busy work’ in Soviet Russia. My own personal favourite is a story of a Russian worker who retired from his night shift job in which he had spent his working life turning screws to the right. On the day of his retirement he met his counterpart who worked the day shift, only to discover that during the day his job was to turn the screws to the left.

Now, we probably take this story with a pinch of salt in terms of reflecting the actual reality. However, it exemplifies nicely the idea that without collectivism and the workers determining how their labour power should be best spent, acknowledging their personal expertise in their job, then publicly run services succumb to the same models of management led and top down organisation which creates exploitation, inefficiency and lack of innovation in the private sector.

However, public companies are better suited to meeting the demands of the community rather than seeking profit. At a time when many of our public services are under threat we must make the argument strongly that inefficiency is not the result of public organisation but of a lack of collectivism and the application of capitalist models of business organisation onto these services.

Sunday 3 November 2013

Weekly Update #11

Hello everyone, just a short one this week!
  
 
SWP Branch Meeting - Privatisation is Not the Answer 
This week we think about one of the biggest fallacies that we have been told for the last 30 years, that privatisation can deliver better public services. Just how wrong is this idea?
 
Come along for .a lively talk and discussion!
 
Thursday November 7th, West End Community Centre, 7pm All welcome!
 

Friday 1 November 2013

Visions of the Future: Utopias and Dystopias


Visions of the Future: Utopias and Dystopias

Tonight’s topic is huge. In the past I have talked about that huge, amorphous socio-econo-ideological silly putty that is religion, but tonight’s topic dwarfs it in at least one sense – the temporal one. Science Fiction is a fairly young literary genre – although older than you might think, as the first SF was a 17th century novella about a journey to the moon by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, and there are elements of what would become common SF tropes reaching back to Shakespeare, Thomas More, Plato and Aristophanes – but its province is the future.

 The future is, as Star Trek VI put it, the undiscovered country. The future by its very nature is indeterminate and yet we feel that it is tangible in some way – that it is potentially concrete. So it is fertile ground for our imaginative impulses and a repository of our hopes and fears.
Our futures can tell us a lot about ourselves. If, as Marx has it, it is not consciousness that determines being but being that determines consciousness, our imagined futures can reveal to us our present by revealing the nature and limitations of our hopes, fears and imaginations.
I have titled this meeting Utopias and Dystopias because as socialists our greatest aim is to change society, and the visionary construction of utopias reflects a desire for something akin to our aims, while the terrible dystopias haunt us, spectres warning us of the cost of failure.
As Marxists, however, we have a very specific idea about our hopes for the future, and in this talk I want to address some of the desires for a socialist future that have been expressed in SF as well as those that are more reflexive in their depiction of our own times. I want to finish by suggesting that socialist ideas about the future are fundamentally different from those that are offered by SF, because it is centred around a problematic rather than a vision. I’ll explain more what I mean by this towards the end.
In this talk, I could have used dozens of authors, films and shows. However, in order that the talk takes less time than the meeting, I’ve divided the talk into several headings: utopias, nightmare utopias, the fractured world, dystopias and the uneasy present. In each section I will discuss one example in relation to socialist ideas of a future we would want to see.


Utopias
Let us start with utopias. These, from a socialist perspective, are hard to find. We could delve back towards Plato to see the construction of an ideal society – but for us it would be no utopia! Plato’s Republic is mechanistic, restrictive, oligarchic and profoundly unequal. In Plato’s utopia, hereditary philosopher-kings devote themselves to reflection while hereditary guardians run the country and fight its wars, leaving hereditary auxiliaries to do the work and live in a society so strictly controlled that even the music is prescribed for them.

So if this is no utopia, what might count? The clearest example I know of is William Morris’ News from Nowhere. Morris was a socialist, although not a Marxist. In his book he imagined a traveller from the present (the mid-nineteenth century) doing a reverse Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and finding themselves in the future, after the revolution. Wikipedia neatly sums up the plot:



the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

This does indeed sound like a utopia, and Morris describes it lovingly. However, even here there are criticisms that we, as Marxist socialists need to point out. There is a lot to be said for the idea that under socialism work will be enjoyable. However, the idea of an agrarian future, or that unpleasant work will not need to be done, is unrealistic. The point of a socialist society is that it is one in which all share in the work, and that the value produced by our labour is available to all. This does not mean that the only work that we will do is work which we find pleasurable. It does mean that there will be less of it to do, however!


Nightmare Utopias?

Some utopias are written with good intentions, yet to a person with a scrap of empathy would sound like the kind of society that no one would wish to live in.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series provide a prime example of this kind of world. In the Foundation series, technology has transformed humanity in to a bountiful galaxy-wide civilisation. Machines do all the work and Asimov’s characters flit around vast sections of space in an oddly empty-feeling universe as gentlemen (and in Asimov’s writing it is almost always gentlemen) of leisure. In the Foundation universe, a stable human civilisation has been created by having a democratic parliamentary system – and a secret organisation of telepaths who control the parliament. This is a common trope in a lot of the bright, shiny SF from the 50s and 60s – that robots will make the need for workers redundant, and that the ideal society is one which is stable and materially prosperous.
But what do socialists want from the future? First of all, we are socialists. We believe in the power of the working class to transform society and do away with classes altogether. ‘Stability’ is not enough. Seen from the correct distance, a lot of societies can seem to be ‘stable’ – the USSR, Nazi Germany or the feudal system, for example. For a given value of ‘stable’, almost any regime can be justified.
Secondly, as socialists we maintain that any society with classes is never truly stable. Classes mean antagonistic social relations (in short, that some do the work and others live off the wealth created by the workers). These tensions can often be managed, but are always antagonistic.
We want the abolition of exploitation, the abolition of the ruling class. At the heart of Asimov’s idea is the belief that ordinary human beings cannot be trusted to run their affairs for themselves, and that an enlightened elite should do this for them. In this country, that idea is known as One-Nation Toryism, which has been rather disturbingly unearthed sewn back together and is currently having the electrodes applied to its temples by Ed Milliband. For us, the patronising attitude of One-Nation Tories, who see the whole country as an Edwardian family with themselves as a firm but fair paterfamilias is the self-delusion of those whose position in society is based on the exploitation of those below, and whose belief that they are ruling solely for the benefit of others is, at best, the result of wilful blindness and at worst a mendacious, cynical fantasy created for the benefit of the credulous.
But in short, for socialists, if there’s a ruling class, it is not a utopia!


The fractured world


The bright and gleaming future of Clarke and Asimov that the fifties and sixties brought us had its mirror. If Clarke and Asimov showed technology at the service of masters, if they showed us an efficient, planned future under the control of a small, centralised authority, a view where society seemed purposeful and to some degree united, the sixties also brought us their chaotic other in the form of authors such as Philip K Dick and Kurt Vonnegut. While Star Trek brought us a benevolent, primary coloured vision of a future US imperium, one critic wrote of Philip K Dick’s book Valis ‘It is … about madness, pain, deception, death, obsessive delusory states of mind, cruelty, solitude, imprisonment, and it is a joy to read.’ The film maker and former Python Terry Gilliam has observed ‘For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K Dick got there first.’
Dick often created dystopias, but this is rarely the focus of his books. He created worlds riven with not just multiple perspectives on reality but with an idea that perception could alter the subjective in a direct way. 
In Dick’s world, order is a fragile and mistaken notion, which quickly tumbles into chaos. An excellent example of this is Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, in which a woman’s experimentation with drugs causes the complete collapse of reality.
In Flow My Tears, the protagonist’s problem is that he is an internationally famous singer and TV host who has suddenly ceased to exist. This causes him some distress: ‘He tried to speak but couldn’t. Inside him his mind churned like a tattered rubber ball, sinking and rising, slowing down, speeding up, fading and then flaring brilliantly; the shafts of light scampered through him, piercing every part of his body.’ At one point he finds one of his own records and tries to play it: ‘swiftly he got it from its jacket and sleeve, placed it on the spindle … Sound of the needle touching plastic surface. Background hiss and the inevitable crackles and clicks. Still no music. The records were blank.’ He then goes upstairs to find the woman who has been helping him – who had left the room a few minutes earlier. He finds ‘on the floor, a skeleton. … The foot bones had cast aside the high-heeled shoes A few tufts of hair clung to the skull, but outside of that, there remained nothing: The eyes had gone, all the flesh had gone. And the skeleton itself had become yellow.’
Dick’s books are often set against the backdrop of a totalitarian or near-totalitarian state, but the reader is faced with multiple perspectives and repeated shifts of the reality that underpins the narrative itself. Dick’s worlds are isolated, barely comprehensible. The central characters rarely know what is going on, and the privileged knowledge that many authors afford the reader cannot be trusted. When we are looking for our future, Dick offers us a delirious intensification of the experience of life under capitalism, where our alienation from each other is taken to the point where we are alienated from reality, and even from our sense of self. A powerless and lonely future perpetually on the brink of annihilation.
It’s interesting that Dick is one of the most-filmed SF authors of all time. Screamers (Second Variety), The Adjustment Bureau (Adjustment Team), Next (The Golden Man), Paycheck, Total Recall (We Can Remember it for you Wholesale), Minority Report, Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) and A Scanner Darkly all have their origins in Dick stories, with several more being lined up for production, including Flow My Tears. Something about his alienated view of the future appeals to us, even when severely mutated by the Hollywood development process.
From a socialist viewpoint, we recognise that capitalism produces alienation. As workers we are alienated from the products of our work, because we do not produce them for our own need or use, and do not realise their value ourselves. As individuals we are alienated from each other through the competitive processes of the labour market, and as a society we are alienated from the value produced by our societies, as more and more of it is captured by fewer and fewer people. Dick’s work is an expression of capitalist relations, that Marx would have recognised:


The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Dick’s work often concludes with a return to some form of reason and reality, but his work is almost universally profoundly pessimistic, and though it may end with a nuclear war and the return of the Neanderthals, as in The Simulacra, we do not find a sense that humans can act in together to achieve a revolution that can overthrow the police states that populate his novels. Dick captures something of the experience of life in a capitalist or police state, but does not offer us anything we can hope for either – as such, he can show us what a dystopia feels like but not a way out.


Dystopias

Having some idea of what a dystopia might feel like, we should now find out what they look like. The problem with dystopias is that there is no shortage of them. It is telling that we find these much easier to imagine than utopias, but that doesn’t make choosing a case study any easier. I was going to go with the most famous and overused of the dystopian novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I think if there is one that captures the spirit of a dystopia, a society which represents the antithesis of humanity is the book that Orwell based Nineteen Eighty-Four on, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 book, We.
Zamyatin was a Bolshevik whose work was a banned in the USSR as it was satirical about soviet society. He also, although this has no bearing on my selection, worked in the shipyards in Wallsend and lived in Jesmond from 1916 until the October Revolution, when he returned to Russia to help with the overthrow of the Tsar.
We is a more perfectly formed surveillance state than Nineteen Eighty-Four. It takes place in the One State, a city whose buildings are made out of glass – the police of the One State don’t even need the telescreens of Orwell. The citizens of the One State have no names, only designations. They have no sense of self and, towards the end of the novel are queuing up voluntarily to be lobotomised by the state to remove their emotions and creativity, the only things which prevent them from being purely functional work units. This truly is a dystopia, a place which has many of the features that as socialists we would like to see: equality, collectivisation, a planned economy. Yet these things, which we think of as tools of liberation, are presented as features of a state so totalitarian that it is barely even a separate entity any more.
What should we say about Zamyatin’s vision? I think the point for us is that collectivisation does not itself equate to socialism. Unless the workers themselves are those who exercise power, freely, it is not socialism. In We, the nature of the ruling class is hard to see, as the One State’s rulers are as invisible as the members of a crowd, but nevertheless they are separate. They are not accountable, they are not part of the working class; they are a separate group who exploit the labour of others through fear. Socialism means a genuinely classless society, which the One State only appears to be.


The Uneasy Present

The last future vision I want to consider is probably the most common in all of SF – the uneasy present. Most SF deals with contemporary themes and heightens specific aspects of our society. For example, Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film of PD James’ book The Children of Men focused on the treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers, which did not feature significantly in the source book. I have decided to use the TV series Battlestar Galactica as an example of this idea.

Battlestar Galactica was revived and ‘reimagined’ in the early 2000s. It takes place in a world where humans live in a federated republic run by a president. The economy is capitalist. The Battlestar of the title is part of a fleet of gigantic space aircraft carriers. Many of the concerns of BSG are familiar to us – the role of military force, the place of democracy, human rights, religious fundamentalism, religious conflict, terrorism, suicide bombing, the role of the media, even labour disputes. There are two major departures from the current US political and social milieu: the existence of artificial intelligence in the form of humanity’s nemesis, the Cylon; and that the human race in the series are the only survivors of a vast nuclear holocaust committed by the Cylon in the opening moments of the first episode. However, AI has been a live issue for several decades now, and genocide is a familiar problem for us today; and together these two allow humanity, which stands in for the US, to see itself as a victim of an aggressor which is (because Cylons are physically identical to humans) inscrutable, intelligent, organised and cannot be distinguished from humanity itself, which again is a common way of perceiving the country by many of its citizens, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.
This is a vision of the future as the present. BSG replicates the post-9/11 American political landscape, with all of its tensions and conflicts, but reconfigures the US so that a single terrorist atrocity becomes a holocaust. With the Cylon, terrorist cells become an all-pervasive threat - from without and within. They have a terrifying military capability, but could also be the man or woman next to you. In fact, because they can programme Cylons agents so well, they could even be you, and you would never know! By making such a change, the US can be cast as a victim, which cannot be achieved to the same extent outside of an SF setting, where it would come up against certain inconvenient truths.
Sound familiar?
The world of BSG is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but a depiction of our modern world – attempting to assert itself and yet with a sense that the old narratives are no longer satisfactory. The central characters of BSG commit war crimes, allow themselves to become an oligarchical ruling class that still pays lip service to democracy, and is a shadow of its former self still attempting to retain its sense of itself in the face of a changed world. All of this should sound familiar to us. As socialists we would apply the same criticisms to the vision offered that we apply to the actually existing class societies that we see in the world around us today.


What do we want from our future?

I have tried to outline five different ways in which popular SF attempts to depict our future, and I have suggested that none of them are satisfactory utopias from our point of view as revolutionary socialists.
Part of the problem is that we are not in a position to dictate what a future socialist society will look like. If we were, that society would not be socialist and we would be just another group looking to establish itself as a ruling class. We believe that a socialist revolution can be made only by the working class, who form the vast majority of people under capitalism, and that it is through the working class acting for itself that revolution will be made and the path to socialism embarked upon.
Ultimately, what dystopias and socialists share is a problematic. Dystopias identify features of contemporary society that are cruel, unfair, or just plain terrifying. Similarly, as socialists we focus on what we do not want to see, because we see it in the society around us. We want change in the structure of society, but do not think it should result in the kind of nightmare utopia that Asimov created, or the agrarian daydream of William Morris, because we do not know what kind of society the workers who make the revolution will create. What we have in common with these visions of the future is the understanding that something is wrong in the world in which we live now, where we differ are our hopes and the ways in which we think the society of the future could develop.
However, just because we would hesitate to define the minutiae of a socialist society, this does not mean that we cannot think about some of the features of one.
John Molyneux, one of our comrades, has written a pamphlet on this very subject, called ‘The Future Socialist Society’ in which he describes some of the things that a future socialist society would need. He says that in the immediate aftermath of a revolution

the core institutions of the new state will be not the workers' militia but the network of workers' councils. Workers' councils are regional bodies of delegates elected from workplaces which in turn will send delegates to a national workers' council. It is this latter body that will be the highest power in the land. The government, the militia and all other state institutions will be responsible and accountable to the national workers' council.
Workers' control of industry is essential. A working class that is unable to control its own workplaces will not be able to control its own state. If control of the new state industries is transferred to a privileged bureaucracy, as happened in Russia, then sooner or later this will come to exert a decisive influence in the society and class divisions will re-establish themselves.
Once workers' ownership and control of industry are established it will be possible to proceed to the introduction of a planned economy. Again it is necessary to distinguish between socialist planning and the capitalist, and state capitalist, planning we are used to. The plan will not be a rigid scheme imposed from above. The working class must be the subject, not the object, of the plan.

The planning process will begin at the base in workplace meetings, factory councils and workers' councils, with a determination of people's needs and priorities and an assessment of the productive capacities of each workplace. On the basis of this input from below the government will have to draw up a coherent plan matching capacity to requirement. The whole plan will then have to be submitted to the working class for debate, and to its representatives in the workers' councils for amendment and approval.

It will be an intensely democratic process and it is only on a democratic basis that it can hope to succeed. For, as the experience of Stalinist Russia has shown, bureaucratic, authoritarian planning leads to false information being fed in from below and formal rather than real plan fulfilment.

The achievement of a workers' planned economy will not only solve the worst economic problems of capitalism (unemployment, inflation, etc) but will open immense possibilities for the future.
The establishment of a planned socialist economy on an international scale will put an end to the recurring crises of capitalism which result in the destruction and waste of productive resources through bankruptcies, under-investment, overproduction and mass unemployment. It will mean the truly immense scientific, technological, economic and human resources currently devoted to the preparation and waging of war will be redirected to socially useful purposes.
[The working week will be reduced, work will lose its character of oppressiveness and humiliation, automation will reduce the need for menial jobs and] Everyone will become both a producer and a planner of production. Everyone will have the time, the energy and the education to participate in the collective shaping of the environment-work which will require the fusion of artistic, scientific, technical and social knowledge, and which will be a collective, creative process.

Finally, we socialists are the sort of people who will never be happy with a utopia. Frederick Engels’ book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific lays out a good case as to why not. Firstly, a future socialist society should have no need of a state at all:


Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.
But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole:
in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;
in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;
in our own times, the bourgeoisie.
When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out.

Secondly, utopian socialists ‘do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. … they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice … If pure reason and justice have not, hitherto, ruled the world, this has been the case only because men have not rightly understood them. What was wanted was the individual man of genius’. There was something of this in the work of the utopians like Asimov. Utopias ignore the economic, political and social forces that define the limits of particular actually existing societies.
In the end, utopias are stories about the way we would like the world to be. They tend to treat actual human beings in a fairly instrumentalist way, with the exception of William Morris’. When we look around at this world, we see the ills that capitalism has visited upon it: huge inequality, in wealth, social status and power, massive exploitation of the many by the few, racism, sexism, starvation in a world that produces enough food for everyone, environmental destruction, the list goes on. We want a better future for ourselves and those who will come after us. We know we can make the revolution, but we do not believe we can or should dictate the future to the victorious revolutionaries. We cannot afford to be instrumentalist about our fellow workers. We are part of the class that has the capacity to end capitalism and must be a part of it, but we cannot and should not speak for a future that has the potential to be the most energetic and creative in human history, as humanity as a whole becomes free for the first time.

There followed a lively discussion. I tried to respond to some of the points raised in my summing up:
  • The idea that change is something to be feared in much science fiction was raised. I suggested that this is because much popular science fiction represents the ideology of the ruling class, and that for the ruling class in a capitalist society change is very much an object of fear. They are a class forced by their economic position to continually revolutionise the means of production, yet the consequences of such change cannot be measured, and the prospect of losing power or privilege haunts them. This is particularly true of American SF, certainly since the economic crisis of the 1970s and especially since 9/11, which reflects an unease in the American ruling class about maintaining their global supremacy. The second reason that so much SF presents fear of change is that it is a useful idea – that if workers are cautious and suspicious of social change then it will make them less likely to accept it. Of course, anyone who has ever lost their job or found their independence at work marginalised through technological revolution will in all likelihood have a suspicion of change in this sense anyway, as they are on the receiving end of the changes in production that the bourgeoisie perpetually make.
  • The ideas of the evil computer, the evil corporation, and formerly the mad scientist had been discussed. I suggested that this is a feature of alienation, expressed through art. In science fiction the idea that technology is going to overtake us, artificial intelligences will take away our agency in some way, or an individual with access to knowledge we cannot understand and cannot control is as common as the idea of alien species that are hostile to humanity. All express the experience of life under capitalism. All express the lack of control we have over our lives, and that every instrument we use is part of a process that we do not fully understand.
  • Finally, the idea of a perfect age in the past, a Golden Age, had been discussed, and the idea that a Golden Age was a permanent feature of human history. I suggested that Golden Ages and utopias have the same well-spring: a desire for a force majeur that can deliver us from our current state; either a divine intervention that can return us to a state of grace long lost, or a belief in an impersonal force of Progress that will drive us forward to a perfect society.
  • In closing, I pointed out that utopia is a Greek word which means 'nowhere' and that utopias are not and cannot be real places. The socialist vision of the future is based upon the concrete and achievable, and the search for a perfect society is the search for a society in which human agency is not really present – a society which should not, and hopefully cannot, exist.

Sunday 27 October 2013

Weekly Update #10

Hello everyone,
A short update this week!
 
SWP Branch Meeting - Visions of the Future: Utopias and Dystopias
 
This week we think about the various visions we have been offered of future worlds. What do our ideas about the future say about us? What would a socialist future look like - and what are our fears?
 
Come along for .a lively talk and discussion!
 
Thursday October 31st, Wes End Community Centre, 7pm All welcome!
 

Sunday 20 October 2013

Weekly Update #9


Hello everyone,
Welcome to your essential guide to the week in Derby!

SWP Branch Meeting – After Unite the Resistance


Following this week's packed and positive Unite the Resistance conference in London, we will be having a report back and looking forward to the future of building Unite the Resistance.

Thurs 24th October 7 pm West End Community Centre, Derby

Derby People's Assembly
This Saturday is the Derby People's Assembly launch event. There will be talks and workshops on a whole series of anti-austerity topics. See flyer below for more details. This is a must for anyone opposing austerity!

You can book online here: https://derbypeoplesassembly.eventbrite.co.uk/




Thursday 17 October 2013

Rosa Luxemburg and the Mass Strike

This Thursday's branch meeting was on the topic of Rosa Luxemburg and her pamphlet The Mass Strike. It was prepared fairly hurriedly so please forgive any glaring omissions.


Rosa Luxemburg and the Mass Strike

Who was Rosa Luxemburg?

Early Life

Rosa Luxemburg lived an extraordinary, if cruelly foreshortened life. From her birth to her early political activity, to her leadership and activism for socialism, to her murder by agents of the German state at the age of 47, she did remarkable things and was a tireless revolutionary.

Rosa was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1871. At the time the area now in Poland was divided between imperialist powers and Rosa was a Russian Polish Jew. As if life was not hard enough already, as a child she had a severe illness which left her with a deformity in her leg that gave her a permanent limp. So she started from a pretty difficult position in society. The Tsarist regime was extremely anti-Semitic and Poles occupied a subservient position within the Russian empire.

However, she received a good education. She used her time when she was ill to read, and her father who was a petit bourgeois, moved to Warsaw at least partly so that his children could have an education. She excelled at school, but was drawn towards revolutionary politics from a young age, being known in the underground by the time she was 15. In fact she was denied a medal for academic excellence when she graduated high school on the grounds of her revolutionary associations.

Revolutionary Politics

She became involved initially with anarchist politics but soon gravitated towards socialism and when she had to flee to Geneva under threat of arrest became one of the very few women who attended university.

So from a very young age she was familiar with extreme repression, she showed an incisive intellect and was a committed activist and revolutionary. By the time she was 23 she was a leading figure in the SKDPiL, a socialist party in Poland that opposed the nationalist agenda of the much larger PPS (Polish Socialist Party) in favour of an internationalist view.

In 1898, at the age of 27, Luxemburg moved to Berlin. Berlin was an important centre for any socialist at the time. It was home to the world’s largest communist party, the SPD, which had a million members. For many socialists at the time, if there was to be a communist revolution the natural starting point was Germany, and Rosa wanted to be where the action was.

The SPD, however, posed problems for revolutionaries. It was a sprawling party that encompassed trades unions, scores of newspapers, and parliamentary politics. It was a communist party in name, but in practice was largely reformist, with a significant revolutionary minority inside it. This was not, by the time Rosa arrived, a new problem. Marx and Engels had criticised the turn towards reformism in a pamphlet called ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’ in 1875. However, Rosa threw herself into the party. She began a speaking tour around Germany to whip up support for the party in forthcoming elections.

Within a year, Luxemburg was involved in a huge debate between herself and Eduard Bernstein, a leading intellectual within the SPD and an advocate of reformism. Reformism, in a nutshell, is the idea that workers can gradually reform the capitalist system from within, fighting to give workers a greater share of capitalist profits, until socialism is constructed in a piecemeal fashion. Rosa was a revolutionary, and argued that the system is fundamentally unstable and prone to crisis, which would always result in an attack on workers’ living conditions. Further she argued that the state is not an independent entity, but that it reflects the needs of capital rather than labour – socialists cannot take over the institutions of such a state and use them for socialist ends.

This is not to say that workers and their organisations should not fight for reforms and improvements. These activities bring improvements to workers’ lives and build confidence to fight. It is to say that socialism cannot be achieved through them. These arguments won her support within the SPD, but also enemies, especially within the bureaucratic and reformist elements that were steering the practical direction of the party. This tension between reformists and revolutionaries, both across Europe and within the SPD would define a lot of Luxemburg’s focus, especially in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, which is the focus of tonight’s meeting.

The 1905 Russian Revolution
Before going into what Luxemburg argued in The Mass Strike, I need to briefly explain the context in which she was writing. This context is the 1905 revolution in Russia, so I need to explain some of what was going on in Russia at the time.

In 1905, 140,000 people marched to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to hand a petition to the Tsar. The petition demanded various reforms, including free universal education, universal suffrage and an eight-hour day. The march was led by a monk and many of the demonstrators carried pictures of the Tsar. It was the essence of a reformist demand. The Tsar ordered troops to open fire, and hundreds were killed in what became known as Bloody Sunday.

Bloody Sunday sparked off mass strikes across Russia and the Empire. Chris Harman, in his A People’s History of the World, puts the 1905 revolution like this:

After the shootings the tone of the strikes became increasingly revolutionary. Socialists produced openly revolutionary newspapers. There was mutiny in the Black Sea fleet, led by the Battleship Potemkin. And there was an attempted uprising in Moscow in December led by the militant ‘Bolshevik’ faction of the Social Democratic Party … A new sort of organisation, based on elected delegates from the major workplaces [the soviets] … became the focus for the revolutionary forces in St Petersburg … it represented a new way of organising revolutionary forces.

208:401

The 1905 revolution failed, however. Tony Cliff explained:

Petersburg was in the grip of a total strike. And the general strike spread from the capital to many cities hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The economic demands of workers led to political demands, economic struggle led to political struggle and vice versa. The two were not separated.

Finally, on 6 August, the Tsar made a concession. But instead of giving the long promised National Assembly, nothing was given but a consultative body – the Duma – with no power to legislate. The Duma was at the mercy of the Tsar. Out of the 1,400,000 Petersburg citizens only 13,000 had the vote. This roused the popular passion to fever heat, and led to the second great wave of strikes in October, in which the demands were overwhelmingly political.

At the same time the demand for the eight-hour day was central. The strike started in Moscow and from there it spread to Petersburg. The Petersburg soviet was established. By 13 October the number of strikers throughout Russia exceeded one million. Practically all the railway lines were stopped? The post stopped, schools were closed, water and gas supplies ceased, the country, the cities and the communications between them were practically at a standstill. Poland was completely paralysed by the strike, as was Finland.

On 17 October the Tsar signed a proclamation giving a constitution to the Russian people. This manifesto pledged civil liberty with inviolability of the person, freedom of speech and association. It promised facilities for spreading electoral rights throughout the nation, leaving the details to the new Duma. Finally it agreed that no law would be enforceable without the approval of the state.

The workers were not satisfied. The Tsar’s proclamation whetted workers’ appetite for more. The revolutionaries demanded the dismissal of General Trepov, head of the police and Cossacks in Petersburg, the removal of the troops twenty miles from the city, a general amnesty and the formation of a national citizen’s militia. They also demanded a political amnesty.

They declared that while there was freedom of meeting, the meetings were still surrounded by troops. While there was freedom of the press, the censorship remained. While there was freedom of learning the universities were occupied by troops. The inviolability of the person was given, but the gaols were filled with political prisoners. A constitution was given but the autocracy remained.

A third wave of strikes followed in November. The heart of these were economic demands. The unifying demand for the eight-hour day now dominated the strike. There was a total strike in Petersburg. On 3 November the whole town was practically shut down.

Outside St Petersburg there was a different picture. In the provinces the strike call was not answered, and in Petersburg itself the employers reacted by mass lockouts affecting tens of thousands of workers. By the beginning of December the Tsar felt strong enough to take massive repressive measures. The whole Executive Committee of Petersburg trade unions was arrested, the National Railroad Union was dissolved, new anti-strike regulations were promulgated.

On 7 December a strike broke out in Moscow in protest against these repressive measures. It spread to St Petersburg where about 125,000 people came out on strike. This was the springboard for an armed insurrection in Moscow. Alas, after a week of struggle the insurrection was bloodily crushed by the Tsarist army.

Socialist Worker Review, 1985:1, January 1985, pp.15-17.

The Mass Strike

It was against this backdrop that Luxemburg wrote The Mass Strike, The Political Party and the Trade Unions in August 1906. As the full title suggests, she was interested in the way that political parties and trades unions should approach a mass strike.

In the Mass Strike, Luxemburg takes on a host of opponents. She condemns the ‘romantic’ anarchists, ‘Mr Gradgrind’ trades unionists, and Engels’ position on strikes.

Engels had said, in 1873, that strikes could not be a way to win socialism. He believed, in Luxemburg’s words, that

Either the proletariat as a whole are not yet in possession of the powerful organisation and financial resources required [to win], in which case they cannot carry through the general strike: or they are already sufficiently well organised, in which case they do not need the general strike.

1986:14

There is something to be said for this view – carrying through a mass strike is a huge organisational undertaking that requires a powerful working class organisations if it is to be victorious. However, Luxemburg’s understanding of recent events led her to say ‘The Russian Revolution has now effected a radical revision of the above piece of reasoning. For the first time in the history of the class struggle it has achieved a grandiose realisation of the idea of the mass strike and … even matured the general strike and thereby opened a new epoch in the development of the labour movement.’ (ibid.) She goes on ‘the mass strike in Russia has been realised … as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism.’ (ibid.: 16) So for her, the mass strike was a means of creating the organisation that would help them to win.

Luxemburg thought that the mass strike was a potentially powerful tool. However, she did not believe it could simply happen at the urging of a few revolutionaries, or that it would automatically succeed. She criticised ‘revolutionary romanticists’ and anarchists: ‘if it depended on the inflammatory ‘propaganda’ of revolutionary romanticists or on confidential or public decisions of the party direction, we should not even yet have had in Russia a single serious mass strike.’ (ibid.: 20)

Luxemburg believed that a general strike could not be called through propaganda, but it was purely a historically inevitable occurrence arising from a particular set of social conditions. The mass strike she saw as a culmination of waves of economic strikes that had built up over several years, and Bloody Sunday was merely a trigger that unleashed the power of a proletariat whose confidence to act had been rising through activity and which had been politicised by Tsarist oppression, which included several massacres of workers and socialists..

When the mass strike did break out, Luxemburg says ‘the appeals of the parties could scarcely keep pace with the spontaneous risings of the masses’ – the revolutionary parties could not lead that which was the spontaneous, organic result of independent working class activity.

The sudden general rising of the proletariat in January … expressed itself forthwith in the circumstances that the proletarian mass … quite suddenly and sharply came to realise how intolerable was that social and economic existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of capitalism. Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging at these chains. All the innumerable sufferings of the modern proletariat reminded them of the old bleeding wounds. Here was the eight-hour day fought for, there piece-work was resisted, here were brutal foremen ‘driven off’ in a sack on a handcart  … all these suddenly awakened by the January lightning bethought themselves of their rights and now sought feverishly to make up for their previous neglect.

(Ibid.: 33)

Luxemburg goes on to note that the Russian proletariat went on to create the things that had been denied in it by Tsarism, such as trades unions, but also a new form of organisation – the workers’ council (soviet). To Luxemburg, the organisation created by the shaking and tugging at chains showed the limitations of the political party in creating and sustaining the mass strike. However, this is not to say that she did not believe that a party had a role to play. She goes on to say ‘even during the revolution mass strikes do not exactly fall from heaven. They must be brought about in some way by the workers. The resolution and determination of the workers also play a part and indeed the initiative and wider direction naturally fall to the share of the organised and most enlightened kernel of the proletariat.’ (ibid. : 53) Part of the context of the Mass Strike is that Lenin at the time had been ‘bending the stick’ towards the party in the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democratic party, moving the Bolsheviks towards a cadre system and closing the ranks of the party. Luxemburg argues against this kind of separation in her polemic, stressing the spontaneity of revolutions and her belief that it is impossible to steer them; or as she put it, ‘revolutions do not allow anyone to play the schoolmaster with them.’ (Ibid.: 54)

The role of a revolutionary party, then, is to give direction to the spontaneous mass strike. Resolute determination on the part of the party, Luxemburg believed, gave confidence to workers involved in mass struggle, whereas vacillation and weakness would undermine the mass strike and lead it only to defeat.

Much of The Mass Strike is aimed at opponents within the SPD and attempting to apply lessons from the Russian revolution to the German situation. It might be tempting to see the SPD as similar to the Labour Party in the UK, but there were substantial differences. Firstly, at least in theory, the SPD was committed to revolutionary change in Germany. Secondly, the SPD had the support of sections of the army, and many of its large demonstrations would be armed – something which one can scarcely imagine of a Labour Party conference today. Thirdly, the SPD had its own, separate trades unions rather than, as the Labour Party was intended to be, being the representative of the interests of the trades union bureaucracy. In theory, the SPD was committed to workers’ struggles to bring about socialism.

In practice however, there were fewer differences between the SPD and an organisation like the Labour Party. In The Mass Strike, one of Luxemburg’s chief aims is to explain the deficiencies of the SPD approach to strike action, which she believed was cautious, mechanistic, bureaucratic and pessimistic. When the Russian Revolution broke out, there was a burst of enthusiasm and the party began to discuss the mass strike. As the revolution was crushed and the energy of the workers seemed to ebb, however, Luxemburg felt that the party was looking for excuses to avoid a mass strike.

In the endlessly spun out press debates which ensued, the idea was more and more watered down. The understanding reached between the Party Executive and the General Commission of the trade unions [returned the mass strike to] the mechanistic formulae haunting everyone’s mind with the living experiences of the Russian struggles.

Writes her biographer, Paul Frolich. So Luxemburg again and again opposes her ideas of the spontaneity of the Russian Revolution to a mechanised, bureaucratised SPD which is profoundly pessimistic because it does not want even to call a mass strike that would grow beyond its control, let alone win one. This is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who knows about the 1926 general in strike in Britain or the unwillingness of other union leaders to back the miners in 1984.

 

Lessons for Today

It is important to recognise that although Luxemburg had many insights and contributions towards Marxist politics, there is no coherent ‘Luxemburgism’ in the same way that we think of Marxism. Her ideas changed and developed both in response to debate with figures such as Lenin and also as she learned from the events she was a part of. For example, in chapter 7, she says ‘the Russian Revolution has for its next task the abolition of Absolutism and the creation of a modern bourgeois constitutional-state.’!

The Mass Strike was written in the aftermath of an astonishing period in working class politics and much of what was written is specific to the period she was writing in. However, the way in which Luxemburg generalises from the experiences of the Russian Revolution still have pertinence – and her criticisms of the Social Democratic parties’ role in the Russian Revolution were borne out by the way in which Lenin’s Bolsheviks adapted to respond to the 1905 revolution. The party ‘threw open the doors’ in the years following 1905, and by 1917 had a massively expanded membership of hundreds of thousands. By maintaining ideological and practical unity of purpose but having a larger social base, the Bolsheviks were able to have a far greater influence on the next wave of struggle. This suggests that Luxemburg was correct in much of her analysis.

All of this suggests of course that we should not counterpose a Luxemburgian spontaneity of the masses to a bureaucratic party. Luxemburg thought that both organisation and spontaneity were needed to make a successful revolution.

Of course today we are at an historically low level of working class struggle in the UK. Workers have not had a significant, large-scale victory in over 40 years. However, as the recent public sector strikes, and the highly political recent strike at Hovis, where workers won the fight for the abolition of zero hour contracts and agency staff are to be offered full-time permanent positions, shows, struggle may again be on the rise. The fundamental antagonism between capital and labour means that struggle can only be kept down for so long, and if in the future we are experiencing an upturn in struggle – and with so many of the strikes being connected to austerity, any upturn must have a highly political content – the role of revolutionaries, wary of bureaucratism (and especially the bureaucratism of the trades unions) on the one side, and yet having sufficient organisation to give direction to spontaneous struggles, will be of enormous significance. It is something that we in the SWP must get right.

All these are points which we may want to open up for discussion, but the last thing I would like to say before we throw the meeting open is a quote from the last chapter of The Mass Strike, of which we may want to consider the application to Derby (and which I hope we may take some issue with):

Amongst the wider section of the masses in the … provinces, in the smaller and smallest towns where local political life is not an independent thing but a mere reflex of the course of events in the capital, where consequently party life is poor and monotonous, and where finally, the economic standard of life for workers is, for the most part, miserable, it is very difficult to secure the double form of organisation [of party and trade union]

(ibid.: 84)

A lively discussion followed, which included a discussion of anarchism in relation to mass strikes, the role of spontaneity in workers' movements, how Luxemburg came to break with the SPD because of their support for World War One, the differences between a general strike and a mass strike, and the links between political struggle and economic struggle.