Judges clear who they defend

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In the face of 4 unemployed, Jack agreed with a judgement which stated:

"A man (sic) has the right to be able to work and to freely compete in a particular field. NATSOPA in fighting redundancy were interfering with that freedom"

Jack clinked in his fat fee (the case involved a five day hearing) and returned fortified to fight job loss in the TGWU. NATSOPA, meanwhile, could face a bill of £16,000 for compensation.

Jack is not unique.

Conniving When four women blacklegs were held to have been unfairly dismissed by Watsall Council under the 1980 Act for refusing to join NUPE, there sitting on the tribunal was another union official.

Members of NATSOPA T& G national organiser Ron Todd and the TGWU may well be asking why their officials are implementing the very legislation that their unions are pledged by conference decision to totally oppose.

Why for example is Mr Kitson conniving in his district officials drawing tribunals expenses to finel tellow trade unionists under laws that his members have mandated them to spend their time fighting? LAST WEEK saw two new brazen statements of class justice from the bench of British courts.

In Edinburgh, Lord Mayfield of the Court of Session granted an interim court order to BL management for the eviction of the workers occupying • the Bathgate factory in their struggle against redundancies.

Sacrosanct

Lord Mayfield proclaimed that the occupation constituted an infringement on the rights of property", and was preventing the company carrying on its business. A significant part of BL's "business" at present is of course the mass manufacture of redundancies. Indeed while the "rights of property" for BL and the ruling class as a whole are defended as sacrosanct by Lord Mayfield and his fellow judges, the right to work is being systematically attacked and destroyed with the active backing of the courts.

The previous Monday had seen a Judge representing the British direct rulers in the North of Ireland impose a crushing £7,500 fine and £20,000 costs upon a union official-for the "crime" of leading a fight against redundancies!

Mr Martin King, Newry branch secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union was hauled before the courts after he had organised a strike in defence of seven workers declared redundant.

The judge, Mr Justice Murray, declared he was satisfied that Mr King had gained access to the factory, taken charge of the situation and directed a walk out.

Resort By directing the workers to strike "he clearly induced them to break their contract of employment."

Never mind of course that by abruptly declaring seven workers redundant in the middle of the week the employer had himself broken the workers' contract of employment: the courts act to defend the rights of the owners of industry, not the working class.

Tebbit's new proposals aim to load the scales still further in favour of the employers in order to force home still further sackings and speed-up.

The labour movement was built only by mass action flying in the face of such legislation. It can now be defended only by the resort once again to mass action.

Majority

So long as the state apparatus built by the capitalists for the defence of their system of exploitation remains intact it will continue to act against the organisations and basic rights of the working class.

This has been seen to be the case no matter which government holds a formal majority in Parliament.

A new kind of legal ›siem -io defend the interasis of the working classcan only come from a net kind state-a state.

History has repeatedly proved that there is no way the existing state machine and judicial apparatus can be transformed piece by piece into a socialist state.

Mass action is needed to force through the nationalisation of capitalist property, the disbanding of the armed forces and police, the dismantling of the bourgeois courts and state bureaucracy and the establishment of a workers' government based on the power of workers' councils and workers' militia.

And a new leadership is needed that recognises and is prepared to carry ou: these radis

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday 4 February, 1982 Page 10 JOHN O'MAHONY's discussion series continues this week, arguing that the real working class alternative to Stalinism is not-as Foot would have it—a cringing legalism which abandons any active concept of socialism as a new society, but the democracy of workers' councils. AS WE saw last week, Michael Foot holds to the view that the totalitarian system in the USSR was the direct and inevitable result of a primary sin committed by the Russian workers in 1917: they used violence to defend themselves and then to establish and defend their own workers' government.

But Foot's method of argument is incompatible with serious historical analysis. It reduces the whole question to one of broken taboos: it leads straight to a superstitious approach to politics, and away from a rational account of what vent wrong - and what nust now be done to put il right.

And consequently it leads to one or other variant of the idea that the working class cannot take power, and should not try.

In Britain - the conclusion must be - the last class with the historic right to fight for and take power was the bourgeoisie - back in the 17th century. Why the curse against perpetrators of revolutionary violence has not jinxed the British system this last 300 years, Foot forgets to explain to Or does the curse apply only to the working class? Yes. Because socialism as a distinct system to replace capitalism is, according to to this view, an 'apocalyptic' dream: and you will probably end up in nightmare of the Stalinist gulag if you dare to strike out from the rules and constraints of the existing British parliamentary system.

Oven when that system allows the sustained and savage tyranny against millions of people which the Thatcher government legally inflicting, the working class must still submit, lest worse things follow from a resistance that overflows the hallowed constitutional channels of the sacred system.

For no earthly power has the right to suborn an anointed prime minister until her full 5 years are up!

For those who struggled, by revolutionary means and mass agitation, to win the first version of the system out of which existing British parliamentarism has evolved, democracy was a living movement for real self-rule, for government of, for and by the people.

Unthinking For Foot it becomes a decadent set of constitutional rules, forms and regulations which must be treated with reverent superstition.

For if one thinks, even subconsciously, in terms of broken taboos and of original sin by the revolutionary working class to explain Stalinist totalitarianism, then you must tread, carefully! You don't know where the hidden taboos, curses and voodoos may be lying in wait for you!

Foot says that Stalinist "apologists have never been able to explain how the enormities of Stalinism happened — or what guarantee there can be that they should never develop That's for sure. Yet part of Fout's conclusion arises from his own unthinking acceptance of much of the self-definition of the bureaucracy: he accepts that the bureaucrats have some connection - other than that of murderer to victim - with socialism and with the revolutionary struggles of the working class.

In contrast to both Foot and Stalinists, Trotskyists have a rational, materialist, class explanation of what went wrong in Russia.

Russia in isolation was known by the Russian labour movement to be unripe for socialism. Through defeat of the workers in the West by the strength of the ruling class, of which the treachery of the right wing socialists was a major part, the workers' revolution was isolated in the USSR.

A distinct privileged caste emerged and eventually took direct power. The totalitarian system is the system of their unbridled rule over society and over the working class.

As well as a rational explanation, we have a rational political programme of working class action: revolution against the bureaucracy (which for reasons of technical definition we call political revolution, but which will in fact also be a tremendous social revolution which will liberate from bureaucratic tyranny the workers, peasants and oppressed nationalities of the Stalinist states).

Even if it could plausibly be argued that certain institutions set up by the revolution in the terrible struggle for survival in the civil war and against the 14 intervening states contributed to the degeneration and the emergence of Stalinism, it would only follow that certain mistakes were made which had great consequences.

It would not follow that democratic mass working class action to take power and disarm the ruling class leads to totalitarianism.

On the contrary. If the Russian workers had an armed militia system, totalitarianism would not survive a week in the USSR.

If the Polish strike pickets who guarded the gates in Gdansk in August 1980 carrying pick-axe handles had gone on to organise an armed workers' militia, then the martial law would have been impossible.

If the British trade union movement had an armed militia now, then Britain would be a much safer place for democracy than in fact it is now.

Or would armed resistance by the Polish or USSR workers, even against Stalinism, also be a breach of the taboos of Foot's pacifist god?

The conclusion from Stalinism, says Foot, is 'the necessity of establishing some truly independent parliamentary institutions"' . This, he says, is the course Solidarnosc would have wished to follow in Yes! In August 1980, the most democratic Parliament ever to meet in Poland lived and functioned for a month at Gdansk.

It was not a Parliament like the one bound by the five year rule which sustains Mrs Thatcher. It was a workers' council, a 'soviet' , composed of factory delegates from the entire region, who reported back to their electors and could easily be replaced.

Revered

It was counterposed to the bureaucratic state apparatus, and incompatible with it and with the bureaucrats served by it.

Such a system of intense democratic self-rule is always and everywhere incompatible with the rule of a stable bureaucratic state machine behind the scenes. That is why, though it was a Parliament, it belonged to the type of the 1917 workers' councils, and not to the type of Michael Foot's revered institution.

Just as he invokes the dead, safe, radical causes of the past, and falsely appropriates them for use against those who stand in their living continuity, Foot misuses the Polish experience. For that tremendously democratic "parliament' in Gdansk could only have been developed and consolidated as a revolutionary movement. It could only live if it could find the force to disarm the Polish state and successfully raise the cry of national revolt against Russian overlordship in Poland (and the rest of Eastern Europe: only a movement spreading across Eastern Europe could hope to defy and defeat the Russian state).

Instead, the workers' movement, the unchallengeable power in Poland in August 1980, decided to bow to the fact of Russian overlordship in Poland, and the consequent rule of the Polish bureaucracy. It transformed itself into a 'trade union' - though in fact Solidarnosc was always much more.

And the forces of Stalinist reaction gathered strength for the blow they struck last December.

What would Foot have advocated in Poland? Reliance on the Sejm (the official Parliament - which showed some life, in fact)! A long, moderately conducted, war of attrition -perhaps for decades - to make the Sejm "a real Parliament'?

The only guarantee against counter-revolution in Poland would have been an armed working class which overthrew the bureaucracy and secured Polish independence. And only a mass armed revolutionary movement of the Polish workers could have achieved that.

The road to democracy in Eastern Europe and the USSR — surely even Michael Foot will have to agree - is the road of armed revolt.

Suppose they - won what then? They should choose parliamentary system based on the existing British model? They should set up a separate state bureaucracy and armed forces with a professional officer corps, to which the workers wou then surrender their guns Perhaps, to put the cr on it and bring it to o British level of democrat perfection, they shou invite some foreign princ ling to come and be the constitutional king?

Shield

To suggest it is to sho how senseless and pr posterous that would be and how irresponsible the attitude of the Foo who pride themselves r their adherence to dem cracy in Britain now.

The only sure guarant against capitalist or Stali ist counter-revolution active, self-controlit mass democracy in re control - without a reser military force which is tl iron hand in the parli mentary glove, and whit the ruling class (or rulir bureaucracy) can use strike down the masses ar their democracy.

Foot's view of Stali ism is all of a piece with h views and perspectives f Britain, and his sell-avo ed Fabian politics.

Foot does not unde stand that Stalinist tots itarianism is the rule of distinct social formatio And he does not unde stand that the Briti parliamentary system a shield and an instrume for the rule of a social clas He says of Poland th "it is by no reckoning irr evant to our own argumen about political institutions and refers to the inabili of the Stalinist states develop or protect genuin independent institutions"

There is no more blata example of Foot's cla blindness for British po ties than his inability understand who rules in tl USSR - the fact that tote itarianism arises because minority rules over the va oppressed majority (al

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Socialist Organiser. Thursday 4 February. 1982 Page 1/ Facing page: Paris Commune; Lenin and Trotsky. Above: partisans in the civil war after the CORRECTION: The refer- magazine 'Chartist' ', the ence in last week's article majority of the old Chartist on Socialism and Demo- group. The statement in the cracy to 'the Chartists' was article would not be true of imprecise. What was the former 'Chartist" meant was the comrades minority.

therefore totalitarianism is simply inconceivable as an instrument of the working class majority).

Even though the totalitarian bureaucracies are not fully-formed ruling classes, they are materially privileged elites with all the worst features of historic ruling classes, including their need for a vicious state machine to oppress and repress the masses.

(It is the historic virtues of fully-developed ruling classes that the bureaucracies lack: a necessary and therefore, for their time, progressive role in a given type of social/economic formation).

Foot himself has an elitist conception of "socialism' - a civilised Fabian elitism which he contrasts with Stalinism and... Thatcherism!

Condemning Stalinism's sacrifice of generations, he insists on the need 'to let them (emphasis added] establish for themselves what may be the nature and scale of the sacrifice"' • But this shows he has missed the point.

In a socialist democracy no elite would 'let' the people decide matters: no-one else but the majority could decide.

And when Foot contrasts his view of socialism to trade union direct action, the elitism is again clear.

"Increasingly as the years passed, he [Aneurin Bevan] placed his confidence in collectivist, social power, to be wielded by the central state, acting through Parliament, with all the devices, chances and protections of open debate which he knew so well how to exploit on behalf of... his people and his party"

Foot's difference with unfalsified Marxism over democracy is that he is himself a mere bourgeois democrat and an elitist, who counterposes the limited accomplishments of bourgeois democracy to the necessary development of democracy which the working class must achieve if it is itself ever to rule directly in society.

He has abandoned the notion of developing and deepening democracy, and maybe never understood the revolutionary Marxist goal of developing democracy beyond the present system into social and economic self-rule and self-administration.

In the view of Marxists, such a qualitative expansion of democracy in the running of society lies at the other side of a socialist revolution which overthrows capitalism (and, in the Stalinist states, the bureaucracy).

But that revolution is in turn inconceivable except as the culmination of a great explosion of working class democracy and of struggle to defend, expand and deepen democracy.

Workers' socialist revolution would undoubtedly present itself to the ruling class and its hangers-on as highly authoritarian, but to the mass of the people as a great expansion of democratic self-rule. This paradox merely expresses the fact that our society is divided into two antagonistic classes, one of which must go down so that the other can rise.

When Foot accuses us of being anti-democratic, he takes his own bureaucratic conception of socialism and accuses the Marxists of wanting to realise it too rapidly and brutally. It is easy enough for him to do this, with the aid of the press and the monstrous example of the Stalinist states to point to. It is nevertheless completely dishonest.

It is linked to the basic lie that defines democracy by one of its forms - Parliament. All the so-called ultra lefts, from those who oppose Parliament on principle to those who want to work within the existing political institutions, advocate another form of democracy — the democracy of workers councils.

Foot advocates limited measures of nationalisation lof moribund industries) by the existing military/bureaucratic state. The Stalinist state apparatuses are the sole masters of their societies. When the Fabian looks at Stalinism, he is looking at producing the bi-monthly himself in a distorting mirror — or rather in a different historical dimension.

The statist 'socialisms' of Fabians and Stalinists are cousins if not twins. Both rest on the rule of an elite over the masses (in Britain, with a five-yearly release mechanism).

The Fabians of course are not the sole masters, or even the masters: at most, the role history has given them is to be the statist-oriented agents for solving some of the probl -ems of capitalism. They operate within the system set up by the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary epoch, and refined by mass The Stalinist bureaucrats emerged as the sole masters of the Russian state (and later other states) -backward, and with no tradition of democracy except that of the Soviets of workers' representatives, which the bureaucrats, as a precondition for their own rule, had to smash and destroy.

Foot's polemic is shot through with mixed feel ings and ambivalence towards democracy. The Fabians recognise in Stalinism a development in a barren climate of their own "socialism' . Some recoil in horror, though others, like the Webbs in the 1930s, have embraced it.

The Marxist programme - of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky - proposes socialisation of the means of production to be achieved by the working class and to be administered by and Russian Revolution for that class. As a precondition for the healthy development of the socialist society, there is to be no state in the old sense.

The workers' state is not Stalinist collectivism, a tyrannical all controlling state which is the instrument of the bureaucracy against the people and especially against the working class. Nor is it any version of the existing state collectivism of the Fabians, writ large or modified.

Socialist transformation by the working class will only be possible if it is linked to expansion of liberty: "every cook shall govern" as Lenin put it. When the supposedly anti-democratic Marxists advocate something other than parliamentary democracy, this expansion of liberty is what they advocate.

The present type of Parliament is organically tied to the old historical form of state power — rule of society by minorities, typically through bureaucracies. Socialism needs the destruction of that form of state power.

If the bureaucratic form of state power were fused with control of the wealthproducing activities of society, then it could, even in a relatively rich society like Britain, lead to corruption, inefficiency, and abuse of power, perhaps even to a bureaucratic dictatorship.

So perhaps Foot, Kinnock etc are right to beware of themselves and their socialism! But they should not attribute it to us.

There are two distinct but interwoven strands in the attitudes the labour movement has taken to parliamentary democracy.

The first was and is ardent championing of parliamentary democracy and democratic liberties. In varying alliances with sections of the middle class, workers and early labour movements fought to extend the suffrage and enlarge the power of Parliament - often by revolutionary means.

The first mass political labour movement, Chartism, took shape around demands for the reshaping of the existing parliamentary system so as to admit the working class to the suffrage and make it possible for workers to be MPs.

In Britain, as late as 1917 the Workers' Socialist Federation led by Sylvia Pankhurst (emerging out of the Workers' Suffrage Federation, which in turn came out of the left wing of the suffragette movement in the East End) based themselves on an extremely radical programme of democratic reform attempting to graft on to the British parliament features of the workers council system thai had just emerged in Russia. SI IC tr In 1934 Trotsky suggest ed a united front witl reformist workers in Franci for a similar programme.

The second strand ha been the drive to creati new, different, specificall working class organs o democracy - either b: converting old forms fo the purpose, or by establ ishing completely nev ones.

The Paris Commune ir 1871 was an example of thr taking over of old forms The creation of new form: began in Petrograd Russia, in 1905 when striking workers whi did not have political rights elected their own loca parliament or council o wörkers' deputies - the 'soviet' After the overthrow o: Tsarism in February 1917 a vast network of soviets developed, with pyramid: of city, district, and all Russian gatherings.

In their own way, from the ground up, the soviets realised such old working class demands as direci control of the legislature -delegates could be recall. ed and replaced.

The soviet network show. ed itself to be a uniquely flexible and responsive system of democratic self. organisation and, increas. ingly, of sell-rule by the Russian masses. Whereas even the most democratic parliamentary system was jied to the bourgeois milit. ary/bureaucratic structure he soviets were counter. posed in toto to the surviv. ng Tsarist military/bur. eaucratic state.

In 1917 the Congress of soviets (with the Bolshevik Party majonty as its driving orce) seized state power.

Thereafter the drive to eform and develop the xisting parliaments gave ›lace, for millions of revoutionary workers throughut the world, to a commitnent to soviets as the highst form of democracy, as ne workus cass orm or lemocracy.

This commitment beame a central part of the rogramme of revolutionry socialism.

In the hands of the right ving of the international abour movement, the ommitment to perfecting he democratic institutions f capitalist society became commitment to the bourgoisie against the revoluionary workers. In termany the 1918 revoluion created a bourgeois emocratic regime, with he right-wing Socialists in liance with the Junkers gainst the revolutionary rorkers.

In the mid-'30s the Stalnists dropped soviets rom their programme and, ursuing alliances with the ight of the labour move. lents and with Liberais to erve Russian foreign poidisting pariazeri *: le same ume they pusses le debilitating lie thai Lalinist totalitarianism was a form of 'workers democracy' The result was to banish concern with democracy and to falsify the very languare and concepts.

The basic idea that socialists must continue the struggle for human liberty and freedom was expunged from the programme of "communism'. 'Democracy' and 'socialism' became cynical catch-cries, shot through with double-think about the democracy of the ociety where the Stalinis bureaucrats ruled.

Trotsky noted the corrupting effect of this on the labour movement itself when he commented on the Norwegian Labour Party:

I soon had occasion to become convinced, by experience, that the old bourgeois functionaries sometimes have a broader viewpoint and a more profound sense of dignity than Messrs , 'Socialist' Ministers...

Since 1917, soviets workers' councils elected from factories and districts have been thrown up in a large number of countries in conditions of large-scale working class struggle. and Hungary in 1918, ind Hungary again in 195t hrough to Ğdansk in 1980 soviets have emerged as flexible forms of working class democratic factory organisation factory committees generalised to the whole of society.

Soviets

The historical experience of soviets as a form of social rule is of course limited As early as the end of 1918 the COUPS the USSR were being undermined as freely functioning democratic organs by the exig encies of civil war, and they were shortly to be gutted of all real life. This process culminated in the ban on every party but the Bolsheviks March 1921. Intended as a temporary civil war measure, Is became fixed as the norm of the Stalinist political counter-revolution.

Nevertheless, it is clear:

• That these soviets, which have emerged in vastly different conditions and countries, are not accidental forms. At the very least, tney are valuable ore organisation in strugglethey ans of working class self • In Russia before were blasted by civil war, they were a form of democracy more flexible, adjustable and responsive than any other 'parliamentary' system.

• Being independent of the existing bureaucratic/ military system to which capitalist rule is tied, they - to go by experience so far - the best form of organisation for a workers' movement that is seriously setting about transforming society against the will of the ruling class.

• That they than are more Many other known form of democracy for the socialist rule of the working class, in so far as it involves a qualitative expansion of the direct exercise of democracy.

• That they can and will re-emerge at intense levels mass working class action, when the strug le overflows the channels LANE existing system. We probably came close to it in Britain in 1972.

This 1s why workers' councils are a central part of the programme of revo. lutionary Marxism The word 'soviet has been utterly debased by assed it with the ica warE: 5000:z S-s: =2:sc - = I see soviets, it is not socialist 50...

and it is not a republic.

But - Marxists remain committed to soviet democracy. We continue the old socialist committment to expanding democracy in a qualitative way. We explain the limits of existing democracy and the possibilities of a different democracy.

Is this Marxist commitment counterposed to the basic labour movement commitment to parliamentary democracy? Not at all.

Socialism is not possible until the mass of workers want it and are prepare to realise it - neither is an extension of democracy beyond the level already attained.

It is in the direct interests of the working class to defend the existing system against anti-democratic attacks. It is in our interest to extend it and better it (for example by making the next Labour prime minister subject to election-by the labour movement, outside of Parliament; by freeing the existing system from the dead grip of the parliamentary oligarchy of the PLP; and by ensuring that there is some relationship between what aspirant MPs and aspirant majority parties say they will do, and what they actually do). All this is the difference between and bad eircetateen in obe existing body politic.

Thus Marxists have much in common with people in the labour movement whose best nution of democracy is parliamentary democracy. We can agree to fight to rejuvenate the existing system; we could agree to defend it with guns against, for example, military coup.

Marxists can and do form such alliances with honest 'non-soviet' democrats. The reason why we cannot and do not form such relations with the right wing and the soft left is not because we are not democrats, but because they are very bad democrats.

They worship the miserably inadequate system that exists.

They have done more than any Marxists to educate sections of the labour movement about the limits of parliamentary democracy: they have even exaggerated those limits and made them far more narrow than they would be for a fighting labour movement intent on defending the working class interest. They have, in successive Labour governments and especially since 1964, done more than anyone else to discredit parliamentary democracy and render cynical large sections of the labour movement.

The cynicism has corroded not only democracy but the political consciousness of the labour movement. Marxists, while we tell the workers who listen to us that they should rely only on their own strength, see no advantage or gain for our polities in cynicism.

While small groups can advance to a higher understanding by way of such disillusionment, the great mass of the labour movement is thrown back by it.

The mass of the labour movement will advance to a better understanding of the limits of parliamentar democracy, not by pure disgust with the LabowRight - politically. that = a passive response. asc politically limited ever when it helps generate =dustrial direct action - **. =ust skely by striges, sa= =: aremptie: de i we .. = _STe B00I =2:324 102 evis democracy.

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Socialist Organiser, Thursday 4 February, 1982 Page 12

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