The Goal and the Movement: The Debate Between John Moore and Chris Trotter Continues.

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Young leftwing protesters march in Athens

 

IN HIS LATEST BLAST against the evils of social democracy, Unrequited Love: Chris Trotter and the Labour PartyJohn Moore quotes the words of the radical socialist, Rosa Luxemburg, as if there’s nothing more to be said.

Apart from the facts.

Rosa was as impatient for the socialist revolution to arrive in 1900 as John is 113 years later. She was a young, radical and passionate Marxist agitator and the revisionist writings of Eduard Bernstein infuriated her in much the same way as my own writings appear to infuriate John.

But, unlike John, Rosa actually got her revolution.

As the German Empire crashed down to defeat in the final months of 1918, the war weary sailors and workers rose up in revolt. The Emperor, William II, abdicated and the social-democrat, Philipp Scheidemann, declared the German republic from a balcony of the parliament building in Berlin.

But the revolution did not unfold in the way Rosa hoped it would. A clear majority of German workers rejected Rosa’s revolutionary programme. Even in the revolutionary councils (an organisational model borrowed from the Bolsheviks in Russia) Rosa and her “Spartacist” allies found themselves outvoted. The mostly social-democratic trade union delegates voted onto the councils were happy to settle for the radical reform of the German state and economy that had suddenly become politically feasible.

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Rosa knew that any attempt to over-ride the reformist consensus by force of arms was doomed to failure. Her Spartacist comrade, Karl Liebknecht, however, insisted that the revolutionary workers must carry the revolution forward, by force if necessary. “Comrades! We are storming the gates of paradise!” Karl told his followers.

Though she understood that Karl was leading the revolutionary fraction of the German working-class to disaster, and that his political extremism would almost certainly cost both of them their lives, Rosa refused to desert the Spartacist cause.

On the 15 January 1919, Rosa was abducted by one of the right-wing paramilitary units deployed against the Spartacists by the Social-Democratic government. She was beaten senseless by their rifle butts and then shot in the head. Her body was thrown into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal.

No one can dispute Rosa’s heroism, but in the final weeks of her life her political judgement deserted her. The forces at the Spartacist leaders’ disposal were never sufficient to carry through the Bolshevik-style revolution they envisaged. In fact, by 1919 Rosa had begun to doubt whether what the Bolsheviks were engaged in was a revolution at all. Certainly, she deplored Lenin’s resort to political terror and the ruthless suppression of any left-wing group which challenged the Bolshevik’s programme.

The stumbling block for German revolutionary socialists, as it was for those in Russia, was how keep the revolution going while, at the same time, keeping it democratic.

In Germany that could only mean acquiescing to the hegemony of moderate social-democracy. Radical reform was as far as the majority of workers were prepared to go. The Spartacists attempt to impose their version of “the revolution” upon their social-democratic comrades by force stripped them of all legitimacy. And, when the reformers looked at what was happening to their Russian counterparts under Lenin’s Bolsheviks, they not surprisingly looked to their own security.

To defeat the Spartacist uprising, the social-democrats turned to the right-wing paramilitary “freikorps” – composed largely of demobilised soldiers. They did this partly in self-defence, but mostly because they knew there was no other viable choice. Had they refused to suppress the revolt, the armies of Great Britain, France and the USA, halted on Germany’s frontiers by the November 1918 armistice, would have been ordered to intervene.

The capitalist powers were not about to sit back and allow Germany to join Bolshevik Russia. To have done so would have meant surrendering the entire European continent to social revolution. Everything they had won after four years of unprecedented slaughter would have been wrenched from their bloody hands at the eleventh hour.

That was never going to happen.

AND THIS REMAINS JOHN’S PROBLEM in 2013, just as it was Rosa’s in 1918-19: the stubborn exigencies of political reality. Politicians of every kind: from revolutionary socialists to reactionary capitalists; have no option but to act within the constraints of the present moment they inhabit. Read those constraints wrongly, as Karl Liebknecht did in January 1919, and the results can be fatal.

John accuses me of seeing in David Cunliffe “the best qualities of [the] ‘democratic socialist’ tradition”. What I actually wrote, in the essay he is quoting, was that I support Cunliffe: “Not because he is the ‘perfect knight’, wholly unblemished by compromise or error; but because, in the course of my daily assessment of who is moving the left forward, and who is holding it back, Cunliffe consistently comes out on the side those who are advancing the cause.”

Part of advancing the cause of social-democracy in 2013 is learning to address the electorate in such a way that it actually hears what you are trying to say. Load down your speech with wild socialist rhetoric and its content is almost certain to be entirely lost. Your political enemies and the news media will simply draw the public’s attention away from the things you are trying to do, and focus it instead on the language you have used to describe the things you are trying to do.

Were I in Cunliffe’s position, “socialism” would not be a word I would use either.

John, however, seems to believe that unless a politician talks like a Marxist academic, he or she must be a traitor.

But even Marx did not talk like a Marxist. Anyone familiar with Marx’s journalism knows that he, too, was acutely aware of the constraints of the present moment.

“Man makes his own history,” writes Marx in the opening paragraphs of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) “but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.”

Nor is Marx as dogmatic as many of his followers. In The Eighteenth Brumaire he paints a picture of bourgeois France in extremis and under enormous pressure from both the Left and the Right. Far from there being “structural mechanisms that require the state to act as a capitalist state”, Marx depicts the French state bobbing like a rudderless ship upon the powerful and constantly changing currents of interrelated and mutually reinforcing political, economic and social crises. It is precisely the absence of the automatic stabilising mechanisms posited by Marxist academics like Amy Beth Bridges and Clyde W Barrow, that allows Louis Napoleon to seize control of the French state and refashion it to suit not only the French peasantry and France’s capitalists; but also, and to a quite alarming extent – himself.

John’s great mission, however, is not to rescue Marx from the clutches of academic Marxism, but to rain down upon the labour parties that so woefully failed the successive political tests of the 30 year period spanning 1979-2009 a truly Biblical measure of retribution.

This is, of course, a remarkably easy thing to do since the wholesale apostasy indulged in by the social-democratic movement across the world over that period  was as spectacular as it was destructive. John would, however, have had a great deal more difficulty in bad-mouthing social-democracy if he had chosen the 30 year period spanning 1945-1975. These were the years of the great post-war boom during which bi-partisan support for what were essentially social-democratic policies engendered the longest and most consistent period of general economic uplift in human history.

What John does not appear to have grasped is that the 30 year neoliberal counter-revolution that mandated all these betrayals is drawing to an end. Across Europe and North America there is a renewed political focus on the problems of inequality. In Britain, Ed Miliband is accused of wanting to return the country to “1970s socialism”. In New Zealand, David Cunliffe and Labour’s rank-and-file are shaking the Left out of its defeatist slumber.

Yes, there is much to be learned from the Winter of Discontent in 2000: but the essence of the historical lesson is that the capitalist ruling class needs to be confronted by a left-wing government committed to more democracy – not less, as Slavoj Zizek contends.

Zizek’s denunciation of “capitalist democracy” differs not at all from the Leninists’ historical denunciation of “bourgeois” and (naturally) “social” democracy. But simply putting an unpopular word in front of democracy cannot mask the fact that what Far Left writers like John and his comrade, Steve Cowan, are offering is a political project in which democracy plays little or no part at all.

Like the Spartacists in Berlin in 1919, John and Steve are completely unmoved by the fact that their version of the revolution is simply not acceptable. Not even to the working-class they claim to speak for. They may heap scorn on Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism, but they studiously ignore his historical achievements.

Because, unlike Rosa and Karl, Eduard was not murdered in the upheavals of 1919. He went on to assist in the formation of the Weimar Republic which, for the next 14 years was universally hailed as the world’s most democratic nation. Its progressive constitution not only extended full political rights to German men and women, but also guaranteed German workers an impressive array of social and economic rights.

That Weimar fell to the Nazis in 1933 was in no small measure due to the Communist Party of Germany’s – the Spartacists’ successors’ – refusal to join hands with the Social Democratic Party in defence of Weimar’s achievements. Democracy was a word the Communists despised almost as much as Adolf Hitler himself.

In the end, John, unlike Eduard (and I hope, myself) does not travel at all. He remains transfixed: rooted to his first and, indeed, his only aim – Revolution. How we are to reach this shining historical moment, and what we are supposed to do once we arrive, John does not explain. For him the socialist goal is everything; the movement towards it nothing.

But to fetishize revolution in this way is to remove it from the historical process altogether. By refusing to acknowledge that the only revolution worth having is the revolution that is constructed collectively and democratically, John has consigned his cherished goal to a region beyond the reach of human endeavour.

Like Christ’s Kingdom, John’s Revolution is not of this world.

25 COMMENTS

  1. But simply putting an unpopular word in front of democracy cannot mask the fact that what Far Left writers like John and his comrade, Steve Cowan, are offering is a political project in which democracy plays little or no part at all.

    So? Perhaps democracy has had its day. It’s certainly proven useless at dealing with the environmental crisis.

    I like democracy, but I’m not willing to let my children burn for it.

    • It’s certainly proven useless at dealing with the environmental crisis.

      Has it or is it more that the corporations own our “representatives”?

    • What environmental crisis? Like the Bolsheviks and Spartacists, some radical tree huggers would impose on the rest of us a system that bears little resemblance to democracy. Threats to your children come from other non-democratic fundamentalism, religious and political, not the environment. You would do well to invest your energy in strengthening rather than weakening the system we have.

      • “What environmental crisis?”

        The one that scientists and academics have been trying to point out to people since at least the 60s. You can argue about the relative seriousness of the various aspects of the crisis, but to imply that there isn’t one suggests a mind in deep denial of the obvious. Do I need to spell it out for you? Mass extinction, climate change, topsoil loss, water pollution and aquifer depletion, ongoing destruction of old growth forest worldwide, chronic build-up of cadium and other pollutants in agri-chemical fertilized soils, not to mention problems that only affect humans, like the peaking of oil extraction and almost every other raw material that industrial society feeds on.

        Thus, trying to strengthen the doomed system we have is an exercise in self-delusion. The system we have will end, and soon, whether we like it or not, as it hits the natural limits of its patterns of resource use. What will replace it, is the question over which people will wage political struggles for at least the next 50 years as they fight over the ever-diminishing remains of the last of the oil.

  2. Brilliant Post Chris Trotter .

    The failure of a democracy should shame the Masses from which it rose because it’s the responsibility of the Masses to maintain [it] .
    We Kiwis ( Particularly Farmers . ) became fat , lazy and complacent / bullied , subjugated and debt imprisoned , thus here we are .

    Democracy is a juggernaut and it’s progress is ponderously slow but it is sure . It’s the very best political system we have , perhaps because of that . Nothing happens quickly under it’s steerage . If things did happen quickly I bet we’d be extinct as a species by now .

    We need rude Capitalist vigour and we need measured Socialist humanness . We really do need both sides for balance .

    But now we know that we must always be ever vigilant against corruption . This disastrous cadre of mentally unbalanced neo liberals have caused terrible harm to us but , as you say , their time is up .

    “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. ” John Philpot Curran . Right of Election in 1790 .

    I say , it’s the responsibility of our elected politicians ( Elected with care after careful public debate) to be the balance post between the extremes of greed and complacency .

    • need rude Capitalist vigour

      No such thing.

      Businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians, and need, therefore, different handling. They are, however, much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be ‘patriots’, perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. You could do anything you liked with them, if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves or tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish. It is a mistake to think that they are more immoral than politicians. If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood, of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are so capable, the nation’s burdens will not get carried to market; and in the end public opinion will veer their way… (Keynes 1938, 607; emphasis added)

      Mazzucato, Mariana (2013-05-15). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Myths in Risk and Innovation (Kindle Locations 517-524). Anthem Press. Kindle Edition.

      It has always been society that has supported innovation. The capitalists have just benefited from that state investment without paying for it.

  3. Bugger it . I meant to write ‘ its . Not ‘ it’s ‘ . My apologies to those with grammar Tourette’s syndrome-Fuck !

  4. you blocked/censored my comment..?

    ..can i ask why..?

    ..and can i plse have it back..

    ..i put a bit of time/effort into it..

    ..seriously..i am gobsmacked..

    ..why was it censored..?

    ..because it might offend trotter..and others..?

    ..f.f.s..!

    phillip ure..

  5. hi selwyn….thnx 4 replying..

    ..(apologies for grump..)

    aarrgghh..!..i can’t find it..

    ..i’ll try a re-composition..

    ..(maybe relying heavily on bullet-points..)

    ..later..

    ..the debate isn’t going away..

    ..basically.. among other things..i was talking about the personal revolutions most of us have yet to undergo..

    ..that the/any focus on just the political..

    can only fail..

    phillip ure..

        • Hi Phillip. I moved TDB to a new server during Wednesday pm to Thursday am. It may be linked to the site settling in. I’ll do some checking of things this weekend.

          Some comments may have been lost if they were posted during that time window. If you can recall when you posted the missing comment, do let me know. Thx.

    • On the off chance you’re using Firefox, I suggest you use the textarea-cache addon. Not sure if there’s an alternative available for Chrome (or any other browser). It will save anything you enter into a text box, even after you submit it, so you can retrieve it if something goes wrong in the submission process.

      Wish they would build that kind of functionality into the browsers themselves…

  6. Like Christ’s Kingdom, John’s Revolution is not of this world.

    Copacetic. Peas in an almost identical pod. Railing against Ceasar or a catamaran, death or oblivion the sole destination.

    Miracles the only difference, between a 2000 year interregnum and nothing at all.

    Miracles created entirely by Scribes. Like Chris Trotter and those who deliver his words and potatoes on a rainy day on a rusty bicycle under a proud red cap.

    Lazarus didn’t raise himself. Pedal, meddle and mend, or rue, stew and blue – and condemn your own mokopuna to this eternal purgatory.

  7. Enduring change is best derived through evolution. Revolution short cuts the evolutionary process and deprives the citizens of the learnings required to reach the conclusions established by Marxists theories.
    We become impatient for change because of the obvious inequalities that surround us. Yet the worlds population continues to grow.

  8. Chris!
    For one I agree with every word of your article.
    That’s the problem with revolutionaries, of whatever stripe.Theyt think they have the answer to everything, and don’t care who they have to trample to get it.

    John

Comments are closed.