WSWS: David North on Trotsky and Historiography

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Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
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Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of Classical Marxism
By David North
1st December 2008
The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) held its 2008 National Convention in Philadelphia on November 20-23. Over 600 panels presented papers or roundtable discussions covering more than 1,700 topics in history, economics, political science, literature, language, and film. The convention’s exhibit hall displayed recently published material by about 50 publishers and organizations, including Mehring Books.

A highlight at the convention was the panel on Friday afternoon devoted to “The Intellectual and Political Legacy of Leon Trotsky.” Chaired by independent scholar Lars Lih, the panel presented papers by Baruch Knei-Paz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; David North, chairman of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site; and Vladimir Volkov, independent scholar from St. Petersburg. Attendance was good as 40 people listened attentively to the three papers. Knei-Paz offered a 30-year retrospective of his book, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky. North delivered a contrasting perspective, “Leon Trotsky, Soviet Historiography, and the Fate of Classical Marxism,” which we present below in its entirety. Volkov gave an overview of “The Reception of Trotsky’s Legacy in Russia from Perestroika to the Present.”

Discussion was lively during the time remaining in the two-hour session. One questioner focused on the continuing legacy of the October Revolution of 1917. Another raised the issue of how the history of the 20th century would have been different had Trotsky’s policies predominated in the period after Lenin’s death in 1924. Differing views were defended on the task of historians as alternatives are considered when examining complex historical issues.

While publishing North’s paper today, we will provide further analysis of the issues raised at the conference in the coming days. Here is the text of North’s paper as it was delivered on November 21.
***
More than 45 years have passed since the publication of the last volume of Isaac Deutscher’s extraordinary biographical triptych of Leon Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, Unarmed and Outcast. It would be difficult to think of another biography that had so profound and far-reaching intellectual and political influence. When Deutscher began his project in the early 1950s, Trotsky had been dead for more than a decade. But his murderer, Joseph Stalin, remained very much alive in the Kremlin—the object of a worldwide campaign of public veneration, as disgusting as it was absurd, in which virtually every Communist party participated. Deutscher compared his task as a biographer to that of Thomas Carlyle, who had complained that his study of Cromwell had required that he “drag the Lord Protector from out of a mountain of dead dogs, a huge load of calumny and oblivion.”[1]

By the time Deutscher completed his third volume in 1963, the political environment had changed dramatically. Stalin died in March 1953. In February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev delivered his so-called “secret speech.” He all but denounced Stalin as a political criminal, responsible for the imprisonment, torture and murder of countless thousands of Old Bolsheviks and loyal communists during the purges of the 1930s. Of course, Khrushchev hardly acknowledged the full extent of Stalin’s crimes. The indictment was as evasive as it was incomplete. But the impact of Khrushchev’s speech was politically devastating. The unstated but inescapable conclusion that flowed from the exposure of Stalin’s crimes was that the Moscow Trials of 1936-38 were a frame-up and that the Old Bolshevik defendants had been murdered. The thought that “Trotsky was right” haunted countless leaders and members of the CPSU and associated Stalinist parties throughout the world. And if Trotsky was right about the trials, what else had he been right about?

Amidst the turmoil that erupted inside the Stalinist parties—initiating a process of internal decomposition that led, within 30 years, to their political disintegration—Deutscher’s trilogy assumed immense political significance. The discrediting of Stalin was, to a great extent, a vindication of Trotsky. In the climate of the time, the heroic image of Trotsky evoked by the metaphoric title of Deutscher’s biography did not seem at all hyperbolic. Notwithstanding its significant limitations—especially in the final volume, in which Deutscher pursued rather obtrusively his own past political disputes with Trotsky—the three volumes introduced the heroic personality of the great revolutionary to a new generation of politically-radicalized intellectuals and youth. And what a personality it was! What other figure in modern history exhibited such a vast repertoire of intellectual, political, literary, and martial skills? Deutscher succeeded in imparting to his narrative an immense dramatic tension. But the drama of Trotsky’s life did not have to be invented, nor did it require artistic exaggeration. His life was, after all, the concentrated expression of the vast historical drama and tragedy of the Russian Revolution.

By the 1960s, the Soviet Union had lost its claim on the imagination of intellectuals and students. Deutscher’s biography served as an introduction to the old disputes of the 1920s, in which the work of Trotsky had loomed so large. So many of Deutscher’s readers then made their way to a study of Trotsky’s writings, which gradually became more widely available.

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, interest in the life and work of Trotsky was intense. In 1978, on the eve of his centenary, Professor Baruch Knei-Paz’s The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky was published. Knei-Paz’s approach to his subject, however critical, reflected the predominant sentiment among Soviet scholars that Trotsky was an important political and intellectual presence. Knei-Paz noted that Trotsky “is, even now, and perhaps not unjustly, considered to be the quintessential revolutionary in an age which has not lacked in revolutionary figures.” He described Trotsky’s achievements “in the realm of theory and ideas” as “prodigious.” Trotsky, he wrote, “was among the first to analyze the emergence, in the twentieth century, of social change in backward societies, and among the first, as well, to attempt to explain the political consequences which would grow out of such change.”[2] As a Marxist and an adherent of Trotsky’s political conceptions, there are many elements of Professor Knei-Paz’s analysis and interpretation with which I respectfully disagree. But his meticulous scholarship certainly demonstrated that Trotsky’s life provides fertile ground for serious research. Though Trotsky was a man of action par excellence, he was also an outstanding thinker. Knei-Paz estimated that Trotsky’s writings, if brought together in a single edition, would “easily fill … sixty to seventy thick volumes—without including the vast material contained in the Trotsky archives at Harvard University.”[3]

Professor Knei-Paz set himself definite limits—a necessity for any scholar attempting to tackle a subject as vast and complex as Trotsky’s life and times. He explained that his work was “a study of Trotsky’s own thought, not that of his opponents or followers, nor of the ideological and political movement which came to be identified with his name.”[4] Even with this disciplined focus, Professor Knei-Paz required 598 pages of the Clarendon Press’s compact typography to complete his assignment. But he still left the scholarly community with not only a great deal to argue about, but also a great deal to do.

And yet, Knei-Paz’s book turned out to be almost the last really significant academic contribution to the field of Trotsky studies. That this would be the case would have been hard to foresee in 1978. Knei-Paz’s book was, after all, published on the very eve of an event that should have encouraged Trotsky scholarship—the opening on January 2, 1980 of the previously closed section of the Trotsky Archive at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Until then, Isaac Deutscher, with the special permission of Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova, had been the only writer to gain access to this vast collection of the revolutionary’s private papers. But as it turned out, the opening of this archive had only marginal impact on American and British researchers in the field of Soviet history. During the past 28 years, very little material from this vast archive has found its way into published academic work.

This drying up of Trotsky scholarship after 1978 is a curious phenomenon. After all, the deepening crisis of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe throughout the 1980s certainly justified a more intensive review of the work of Trotsky, who, after all, had been the foremost critic of Stalin and Stalinism, and who had foreseen the demise of the USSR. As a matter of fact, Trotsky’s depiction, in The Revolution Betrayed (published in 1936), of the process of capitalist restoration anticipated, with astonishing accuracy, the economic transformation of the former USSR under the auspices of Yeltsin in the early 1990s. However, in most English-language works dealing with the history, economics, politics and social structure of the Soviet Union, Trotsky appears as a minor, and even marginal figure. The only notable and original contribution to Trotsky studies that appeared in the 1980s—such a tumultuous decade in Soviet history—was a small monograph, entitled Leon Trotsky and the Art of Insurrection, that focused on Trotsky’s achievements as a military strategist. Surprisingly, this highly favorable assessment of Trotsky’s contributions in the art and science of war, insurrection and military command was authored by an officer and professor at the US Army War College, Col. Harold Wilson.

If anything, the situation in Trotsky studies deteriorated in the 1990s. American and British scholarship produced nothing substantial in this field during the entire decade. The only published work that perhaps stands out as an exception, though a minor one, is a single volume of essays, produced by the Edinburgh University Press in 1992 under the title The Trotsky Reappraisal. During this decade, a disturbing trend emerged in Britain, which consisted of recycling and legitimizing old anti-Trotsky slanders. This trend was exemplified by the so-called Journal of Trotsky Studies, which was produced at the University of Glasgow. The favorite theme of this journal was that Trotsky’s writings were full of self-serving distortions. This claim was repeatedly made without any respect for the factual record. Among its more absurd contributions was an article that set out to prove that Trotsky, in his History of the Russian Revolution, had vastly exaggerated his own role in the October insurrection. It informed us that while serious revolutionaries like Stalin went out into the streets to do the heavy lifting, a somewhat befuddled Trotsky was left behind in the Smolny Institute to answer the phones. Mercifully, this journal expired after four issues.

The current decade has seen no improvement. Two new Trotsky biographies were published, the first in 2003 and the second in 2006, by Professors Ian Thatcher and Geoffrey Swain. These works contained no new research, and I have already provided a detailed analysis of their work in an extended review, entitled Leon Trotsky and the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification.[5]

It is worth contrasting the prevailing treatment of Trotsky to the massive volume of material on Stalin. He seems to exert a never-ending fascination on historians. Of course, Stalin, no less than Hitler, is a legitimate subject of scholarly research. There are no appropriate or inappropriate subjects for historical study. But, as Wilde might have suggested, the one unconditional requirement for the writing of history, like for the writing of novels, is that it should be done well. The problem is that much of the writing on Stalin is done badly. Many of the works are crassly journalistic, exploiting in a sensationalist manner material acquired from the Soviet archives. Works by Radzinsky and Sebag Montefiore provide examples of this genre. More troubling, however, are studies by scholars that seem genuinely anxious to rehabilitate Stalin and Stalinism. At times, the conclusions arrived at by such historians are truly bizarre. For example, Professor Stephen Kotkin, in his book Magnetic Mountain, argues that Stalinism was the culmination of the Enlightenment project. Stalinism, he writes:
… constituted a quintessential Enlightenment utopia, an attempt, via the instrumentality of the state, to impose a rational ordering of society, while at the same time overcoming the wrenching class divisions brought about by nineteenth century industrialization. That attempt, in turn, was rooted in a tradition of urban-modeled, socially-oriented utopias that helped make the Enlightenment possible. Magnitogorsk had very deep roots.[6]

At its worst, this tendency, in the guise of providing more “nuanced” appreciations of historical events, advances weird justifications of Stalin and his crimes. Along these lines, in Robert W. Thurston’s Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia 1934-1941, published by the Yale University Press in 1996, we are offered this appraisal of Stalin’s prosecutor, Andrei Vyshinskii:
Thus, in 1935-36, despite his appalling role in the show trials that began in August 1936, Vyshinskii advocated major improvements in legal procedures. Simultaneously, he scorned key NKVD practices and urged much greater tolerance of ordinary citizens’ criticisms, so long as they did not touch fundamental policy.[7]

And, referring to Kamenev, Zinoviev and other defendants in the 1936 trial, Thurston offers this thinly-concealed legitimization of their condemnation by Stalin:
Probably guilty of nothing more than talking about political changes, these men, according to Western standards of justice, did not deserve punishment. But they had engaged in opposition, had had contacts with Trotsky and leaked secret documents to the West, and had wanted to remove Stalin, all of which they had lied about, while proclaiming their complete loyalty. These points provided material for Stalin’s suspicious mind. Why were such people lying? How many more like them existed, and what were their real intentions? Given the Trotsky bloc and the language of the Riutin Memorandum, it might have been easy for people less morbid than Stalin to visualize terrorism at work in some of the many industrial accidents of the period. He embellished matters considerably and told massive lies of his own—but the evidence just given suggests that at this point he took steps to eliminate people who had misled him and conspired with an archenemy, Trotsky. This decision, though unjust, was not part of a plan to create political terror.[8]

While the Stalin industry seems to be a going concern in the field of Soviet scholarship, the protracted depression in Trotsky studies continues. This finds expression not only in the very limited and generally poor quality of research into Trotsky’s life, but also in the absence of significant work on his political comrades in the Left Opposition. How many of the leaders of the Left Opposition, beginning with Christian Rakovsky and Adolph Joffe, have been the subject of full-length English-language biographies? What work has been done on Smirnov, Smilga, Bogoslavskii, Ter-Vaganian, and Voronskii? There has not been, as yet, any comprehensive study of the Left Opposition and its activities. A persistent theme of many contemporary works on the Great Terror is that it had little to do with Trotsky, who by the 1930s, it is claimed, was without any influence within the Soviet Union. But is this really true? What research has been conducted into the activities of Oppositionists? And even if Stalin’s repression made systematic agitation impossible, is it really the case that the Trotskyist Biulletin of the Left Opposition exercised no influence on the thinking of disaffected elements within the Soviet state and party apparatus? Moreover, had all recollection of Trotsky among Civil War veterans of the Red Army, within the officer corps and among rank-and-file soldiers, vanished by 1936? Was Victor Serge simply exercising his artistic license when he wrote of Trotsky, in 1937, that within the Soviet Union, “Everyone thinks of him, since it is forbidden to think of him … As long as the Old Man lives, there will be no security for the triumphant bureaucracy.”[9] These questions cannot be answered until the necessary research is carried out.

But why has this work not been done? This is a complex question which, I suspect, will, itself, at some point become a subject for students of intellectual history. I will not claim to have the definitive answer, but I would like to point to several factors that may have affected the perception and reception of Trotsky in the academic and scholarly community. Let me state from the outset that references to Trotsky’s political “irrelevance” are neither credible nor serious. Trotsky, quite clearly, played a decisive role in the Russian Revolution, one of the key events of the 20th century. He was also, as it so happens, one of this century’s most brilliant literary figures. Walter Benjamin noted in his diary that Bertolt Brecht in 1931 “maintained that there were good reasons for thinking that Trotsky was the greatest living European writer.”[10]

With these qualifications it should hardly be necessary to justify “another book” about Trotsky. One might also, for good measure, add that Trotsky’s political and intellectual legacy, however controversial and contested, continues to exert influence on contemporary politics. Trotsky is, quite obviously, not irrelevant for history. Why, then, has he become irrelevant for historians?
The conservative political and intellectual climate that has prevailed for nearly three decades has been a substantial factor in determining the reception of Trotsky in the scholarly community. Supreme Court justices take note of the election returns and historians read the newspapers. As Trotsky aptly observed in 1938, the force of political reaction not only conquers, it also convinces. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 brought in its wake a flood of embittered denunciations of the entire Soviet experience. The works of right-wing opponents of the socialist project like Martin Malia, Robert Conquest, the indefatigable Richard Pipes and Francois Furet (a former Stalinist) promoted an intellectually-stultifying environment that discouraged a serious, let alone sympathetic, investigation of the political heritage of Russian and European Marxism. It is difficult to imagine the classics of Soviet studies that date from the 1950s and 1960s— works like Leopold Haimson’s Origins of Bolshevism, Samuel Baron’s Plekhanov, or, for that matter, E.H. Carr’s encyclopedic study of early Soviet history—being written in the 1990s. The prevailing intellectual climate was not congenial for those, like the Russian scholar Vadim Rogovin, who sought to explore, within the context of the Marxist and Bolshevik tradition, revolutionary socialist alternatives to Stalinism.

However, not all the problems relating to the academic reception of Trotsky flow directly from the political environment of the last 30 years. There are other long-term intellectual tendencies at work, which substantially predate the elections of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. I am referring to a protracted process, spanning many decades, of a steadily deepening alienation of substantial sections of left intellectuals from the theoretical framework and political outlook associated with the “classical Marxism” of which Leon Trotsky was among the most outstanding and, certainly, the last great representative.

It is not possible at this time to offer an exposition of Trotsky’s philosophical worldview and his conception of politics and human culture. But it must be said, for the sake of the argument being presented here, that crucial elements of this world view included an irreconcilable commitment to philosophical materialism, belief in the law-governed character of the historical process, confidence in the power of human reason (to the extent that this faculty is understood materialistically) and its ability to discover objective truth, and, associated with this, belief in the progressive role of science. Trotsky was a determinist, an optimist, and an internationalist, convinced that the socialist revolution arose necessarily out of the insoluble contradictions of the world capitalist system. Above all, he insisted that there existed a revolutionary force within society, the working class, that would overthrow the capitalist system and lay the foundations for world socialism.

None of these elements of the outlook of classical Marxism—least of all, its optimism—has survived within any significant section of the left intelligentsia. Even by the 1920s, the shattering impact of World War I, the collapse of the Second International, and, somewhat later, in the aftermath of the October Revolution, the political defeats suffered by the working class in Central and Western Europe, undermined confidence in the Marxist outlook and perspective among substantial sections of the left petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. As early as 1926, Hendrick de Man’s frontal assault on Marxism, The Psychology of Socialism, gave voice to the growing skepticism among left intellectuals in the materialist explanation of the development of political consciousness and in the efficacy of Marxist political practice. Marxism’s confidence in the revolutionary effect of objective socioeconomic processes on mass working-class consciousness, de Man argued, was misplaced. The rationally-grounded appeals of Marxists to objective class interests were inadequate as a means of winning the working class to socialism. Many of the arguments advanced by de Man subsequently found their way into the writings of the theoreticians of the Frankfurt School.

The victory of Hitler in 1933, the Moscow Trials, the defeat of the Spanish Revolution and, finally, the Stalin-Hitler Pact completed the political demoralization of the left intelligentsia. The basic perspective of socialism, they believed, had been discredited. The working class had failed. There existed no revolutionary subject in contemporary society. Trotsky, in one of his last major essays, grasped the implications of such arguments: “If we grant as true that the cause of the defeats is rooted in the social qualities of the proletariat itself then the position of modern society will have to be acknowledged as hopeless.”[11] Just seven years later, in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno arrived at precisely this conclusion.

It does not seem an exaggeration to state that the intelligentsia was overwhelmed and exhausted by the tragedies of the 20th century: the two world wars, fascism, the Stalinist betrayal of socialism, and the protracted paralysis of the workers movement beneath the weight of bureaucracy. Pessimism gave way to cynicism and complacency. Paradoxically, overcoming the intellectual demoralization would have required systematic research into the causes of past defeats, and this demanded, in turn, engagement with the ideas of Trotsky and the great school of classical Marxism. But objective conditions, embedded in the long post-World War II economic expansion of capitalism, worked against such an engagement.

What, then, are the prospects now for a re-engagement with Trotsky’s ideas? In formulating an answer to this question, I think it best to employ the same approach taken by Trotsky himself. He insisted on understanding the vicissitudes of his own life within the context of the development of the socialist revolution, within Russia, Europe and the world as a whole. In assessing the shifts in his own fortunes, Trotsky stated that he did not see personal tragedy, but, rather, different stages in the contradictory unfolding of the world socialist revolution. The rise of the revolutionary wave carried Trotsky into power. Its ebb drove him into exile.

It has been many decades since Marxism, as Trotsky would have understood that term, has played any significant role in the life of the working class. But those were decades of capitalist economic stability and substantial growth. The class struggle, to the extent that it manifested itself at all, was kept within traditional channels, under the police supervision of the labor bureaucracies. Now, however, it appears that history has quite suddenly taken one of its surprising turns. The world in which we are meeting today already appears very different from that which existed when the AAASS met last year in New Orleans. Over the past few weeks, references to the Great Depression of the 1930s have become commonplace. It has been acknowledged, even by the president of the United States, that the unfolding crisis has brought American and world capitalism to the brink of collapse.

It is not difficult to imagine that this is a crisis that Leon Trotsky, who coined the phrase, “The Death Agony of Capitalism,” would have understood very well. The old “catastrophe” theory which so many anti-Marxists have had a good laugh over no longer seems so funny, let alone outlandish.

Social being does, in the final analysis, determine social consciousness. If, as seems very likely, the deepening crisis compels on the part of historians a reexamination of long-standing and discredited assumptions, and, with it, a more critical attitude toward the existing forms of society, then I suspect that we will soon be witnessing a renewal of intense scholarly interest in the life and work of Leon Trotsky.

Notes:
1. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed (London: Verso, 2003), p. vii.
2. Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. viii.
3. Ibid, p. xi.
4. Ibid, p. xiii.
5. David North, Leon Trotsky and the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification
Mehring Books (Oak Park, 2007).
6. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 364.
7. Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia 1934-1941, p. 9.
8. Ibid, pp. 26-27.
9. Victor Serge, From Lenin to Stalin (New York: Pathfinder, 1973), p. 109.
10. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 477.
11. Leon Trotsky, “The USSR in War,” from In Defence of Marxism (London: New Park, 1971), p. 15.

WSWS on Pashukanis

World Socialist Web Site on A Marxist perspective on jurisprudence
By Kevin Kearney 26 November 2008

Evgeny Pashukanis, A Critical Reappraisal, Michael Head, Routledge-Cavendish, 2008, 271 pp., $55.95.

Bourgeois jurisprudence's state of decay, manifesting itself most sharply in the perversion of constitutional law and the systematic destruction of democratic rights, can be understood only through an analysis of law in its historical development on an ever-shifting socio-economic foundation.

Such an approach is almost non-existent in legal academia. Instead, academia is dominated by a militantly empirical, practice-based orientation characterized by the meticulous study of individual cases, largely disconnected from history, politics, current social reality and even international law treating the same topics. In most university law libraries today one would be hard pressed to find any serious consideration of the origins and development of what has been virtually deified as the "rule of law."

In this cloistered atmosphere, Michael Head's book, Evgeny Pashukanis, A Critical Reappraisal, shines the light of day on one of the most important legal theories to come out of "the boldest and most sweeping experiment of the 20th century"—the October 1917 Russian Revolution. Head is a law professor at the University of Western Sydney in Australia and a regular contributor to the World Socialist Web Site.

Prior to the revolution, as now, the "rule of law" routinely put its seal of approval on economic exploitation, political repression and state murder. Upon seizing power, the Soviet government disposed of the previous courts, legal system and legal profession in its effort to radically refashion society and facilitate the ultimate "withering away" of the state.

Head notes, at the outset, that the Soviet legal experiment spearheaded a great expansion of basic rights worldwide, particularly in the areas of labor protection, social welfare, domestic relations and gender equality. This period in Soviet law is characterized by groundbreaking achievements such as the eight-hour work day, the establishment of social insurance, rent control and rent-free public housing. Moreover, Soviet women were the first in the world to enjoy full voting rights and—at a time when Great Britain allowed divorce only for women where adultery was proven—the Soviet legal system afforded divorce on demand to all.

In the same vein, the first Soviet criminal code replaced the archaic notions of crime and punishment with the concepts of "social danger" and measures of "social defense," because the former concepts, rooted in religious concepts of evil and individual guilt, served only to obscure the social roots of crime, thereby forestalling any real solutions to anti-social behavior.
Head aptly summarizes the Soviet legal project: "Overall, the Soviet government sought to make a fundamental shift from private property and individual rights to social ownership and collective rights and responsibilities... accompanied by far-reaching efforts to develop more humane and civilized approaches to social problems."

Revolutionary legal debates
Although the goals of the revolution were clearly defined, the tactics for realizing these goals—given the material limitations of the unfolding Russian revolution—could not be rigidly predetermined.

Following the seizure of power in 1917 by the soviets, or workers' councils, the Bolsheviks inherited a society burdened by backward feudal relations, exhausted by years of imperialist war, increasingly isolated from the developed capitalist economies of Western Europe and surrounded on all sides by imperialist predators. A period of civil war ensued in which the displaced Russian ruling elite, backed by imperialist powers, sought to retake the country by force.

From mid-1918 until 1921, the survival of the revolution was the most pressing issue, consuming nearly all the time, energy and, ultimately, the lives of masses of people. This was a harsh period, and, as Head points out, "hardly conducive to theoretical contemplation." Nonetheless, many of the legal concepts and conflicts that would emerge in a more developed form in the following period made their first appearance in the brief window of time preceding the civil war.

The post-civil war period from 1921 to 1924 saw the flowering of legal debates involving a host of soviet jurists and a variety of schools—including what have been described as the sociological, psychological, social function and normative schools. Head cites one scholar's description of the legal discourse in the 1920s as "a dynamic and prolific period in the history of soviet legal thought ... characterized by intellectual ferment, optimism and impatience."

All those involved in the debates were ostensibly seeking the transitional form of law best suited to carry out the revolutionary social transformation, while ensuring sufficient stability for the revolution's day-to-day survival. At the same time, the participants attempted to elaborate a comprehensive Marxist theory of law. Head manages to parse these debates into three core questions: "1) What was the class character and function of the Soviet state and Soviet laws? 2) Whether and how quickly the state would wither away into communism? and 3) What is the underlying role of law in socialist and communist society?"

Within this milieu, the work of Evgeny Pashukanis has evoked more interest than that of any other figure. As Head points out, this is in large part due to an enduring and growing interest in Marxism, the Russian Revolution and the contemporary relevance of Pashukanis's analysis of the law.

In 1924, Pashukanis published his most important work, The General Theory of Marxism and the Law. With this, he sought to probe deeper than other Soviet jurists of the period into the very essence of law itself.

Pashukanis's argument in a nutshell was that law is a historically limited form of regulation peculiar to class societies, peaking under capitalism and destined to fade away with the elimination of socio-economic classes and class conflict—in other words, in a truly socialist society. The most important implication of the theory was that the use of the traditional legal form in post-revolutionary Russia was a continuation of bourgeois law, although in the hands of the proletariat.

The General Theory is best known for its elaboration of the "commodity exchange theory of law," which traced the modern legal form not directly to class interests, but rather to the elemental logic operative in capitalism itself—a process occurring "behind the backs" of both the ruling class and the working masses. Head describes the theory as "the kernel of an historical materialist approach to the rise and evolution of the legal form."

The commodity exchange theory emerged from Pashukanis' debates with the then-dominant legal "instrumentalists"—represented by Piotr Stuchka—who viewed the law as nothing more than a "blunt instrument" of class domination, whose social function was considered as either purely ideological or, at most, just another form of coercion in the arsenal of the ruling elite.
Although Pashukanis did not deny the class instrumentalism and coercive functions of the law, he viewed them as secondary to the nature of the legal form itself. He wrote: "Having established the ideological nature of particular concepts in no way exempts us from the obligation of seeking their objective reality... external and not merely subjective reality." His analysis was unique, in that it was not limited to the role of law under capitalism, but extended to the very concept of law itself as an intrinsic and longstanding instrument of social regulation.

The commodity exchange theory of law
In order to present the basics of Pashukanis' commodity exchange theory, it is necessary to briefly review some points from the first chapter of Marx's Capital.

Capital identifies a duality—an immanent contradiction—within the commodity, as an immediate unity of both a use value and an exchange value. The former embodies what is particular to the commodity, its unique utility and the unique type of labor required for its production. If a useful object, for example a broom, were produced by an individual for his own use, it would be merely a product and not a commodity. However, when such a product is produced for the purpose of exchange on the market and is actually exchanged for another commodity, its value, its social nature, is revealed.

Exchange value is a quantitative ratio of exchange between commodities rooted in the amount of socially necessary labor time that went into the production of the commodities. Although initially this abstract labor time is reflected in a ratio of exchange between two given commodities—i.e., two gallons of milk for one broom—it is eventually represented by a third commodity—the universal equivalent of money.

In this process, the inherent differences between the commodities—the different types of labor required to produce them and their distinct uses—are masked. Quality is transformed into quantity and substance into form, and money is worshiped as the universal equivalent.
Pashukanis argues that this same process—the exchange of commodities in the market place—produces not only the value form, but also the legal form. In the legal form, individual human beings are abstracted into a juridical subject or something akin to the "reasonable man in law," and—ignoring the inherent class differences between these individuals—they are all considered formally equal before the law as juridical subjects.

He finds the origin of this development in the necessities of efficient commodity exchange in the market place. All enter the market place as inherently different from each other, akin to use values. However, all must enter into a definite relationship for purposes of exchange.

At the moment of exchange, Pashukanis identifies three forms which appear in the process: 1) Each merchant must recognize the other as an equal for purposes of the exchange, despite any inherent differences; 2) Each merchant must recognize the free will of the other to exchange the commodity; and 3) Each merchant recognizes the other as the rightful owner of the commodity.
Therefore, the constant exchange of commodities on the market gives rise to three phenomenal forms: equality, free will and a private ownership interest, which find ideal legal expression in the notion of the juridical subject as an abstract bearer of these rights before the law. The individual has thus been transformed into a juridical subject.

Pashukanis argues that this is the essence of the legal form which came into being wherever there was commodity exchange—initially on the periphery of ancient and feudal societies and finally predominating in capitalist society.

Although the legal form finds its fullest expression in contract law, as it is rooted in the concrete requirements of commodity exchange, the victorious bourgeois revolutionaries of Western Europe managed to raise this legal form "to the heavens," enshrining it as a set of "god-given" constitutional principles: liberty, property and equality before the law, as distinguished from the enforced inequality of the outgoing feudal regime, which divided individuals into separate castes from birth, each with distinct rights and responsibilities.

Pashukanis argues that, in its application to the spheres of constitutional law and criminal law, the legal form is effectively disembodied and devoid of any concrete content. Therefore, he asserts, "Outside Contract... the very concepts of subject and will exist only as lifeless abstractions in the legal sense."

The commodity exchange theory, by extension, impacts the concepts of morality and of crime and punishment under capitalism. Ideas of morality, Pashukanis argues, were based on the abstract notions of the rational individual and abstract equality before the law. He asserts that "if moral personality is nothing other than the subject of commodity production, then moral law must reveal itself as the rule of exchange between commodity owners."

By this token, he argues that the capitalist idea of "justice" is also derived from the process of commodity exchange, referring to the concepts of crime, punishment and guilt as examples of the "radical individualism of the bourgeois." As opposed to the concept of collective responsibility which dominated the ancient world, Pashukanis demonstrates that the requirements of equivalent exchange manifest themselves in the notion of equivalent punishment and finally become dominant under capitalism.

On this basis, bourgeois law injects an extreme notion of individual responsibility into criminal law. This is most easily recognized in the notion of "pay-back," or the idea that the legal subject must lose a certain amount of personal freedom as payment for a crime, without regard to the social causes of the anti-social behavior or to any real solution to such recurring, systemic social problems.

As opposed to a system of retribution, Pashukanis advanced the idea of social defense as a response to crime. This approach would abandon the market-based abstract equivalence principle, focusing not on the proportionality of the punishment to the crime, but rather on the correspondence between the measures taken and the ultimate goal of social defense.
With such a non-juridical approach, attention would shift from proving individual guilt to a more all-encompassing focus on the social and psychological symptoms. Examination of the social, cultural and economic environment associated with anti-social forms of behavior would replace the isolated focus on "the facts" of a single incident as the decisive factor in the process.

The commodity exchange theory is firmly rooted in the proposition that the legal superstructure grows necessarily out of the individualization and opposition of interests inherent in the capitalist mode of production. In this socio-economic context, the law suit (or controversy) is the basic mode of resolution of legal matters, whereas a social unity of purpose is the premise for a purely technical regulation—for example, the administration of a system of mass transit or standardized medical procedures. In this manner, Pashukanis draws a fundamental distinction between bourgeois law and what would emerge as socialist regulation.

The theory holds that the legal form would wither away as commodity exchange and market relations gave way to social production and distribution. Pashukanis put it best, saying, "Only when the individualistic economic system has been superseded by planned social production and distribution will this unproductive expenditure of man's intellectual energies (the law and law suits) cease."

In other words, as private interests are replaced by collective interests, society's governance will no longer require the compulsion of formal legal instruments to manage myriad individual disputes, and social regulation will increasingly take the form of simple technical coordination and management.

Although Head notes that this conclusion has been routinely assailed by bourgeois academics as utopian, he points out that "if masses of people actually controlled their own lives as well as the economic, political, social and cultural direction of society" the "unity of purpose"—made possible by socialist revolution—could be a reality.

The demise of Pashukanis and his enduring relevance
Like the revolution itself, the Soviet legal experiment which produced Pashukanis was cut short by the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its attack on Marxism in the form of the nationalist theory of "socialism in one country." The legal complement to "socialism in one country" was the concept of "socialist legality"—a complete abandonment of the classical Marxist perspective of the "withering away" of the state and law. Ultimately, the bureaucratic caste isolated itself from and dominated the masses, necessitating not only the permanency of the state and "the rule of law," but an unprecedented strengthening of their invasive and repressive powers.

With the publication of his General Theory—the same year Stalin unveiled his theory of "socialism in one country"—Pashukanis became the preeminent Soviet jurist, and his book was required reading at universities around the country. Within a period of 12 years, however, Pashukanis found himself under increasing pressure to adapt his ideas more openly to the needs of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Pashukanis was eventually labeled a "Trostskyite saboteur" and executed by Stalin in 1937. His writings were subsequently expunged from the universities.
Pashukanis was by no means a recanting anti-Stalinist, nor was he a Trotskyist. Head successfully tackles this myth by clarifying the political record, which demonstrates that Pashukanis lined up against the Left Opposition, which was led by Trotsky, from at least 1925. Moroever, by putting Pashukanis' theoretical work in the correct economic and political context, Head shows how it was used as Marxist window-dressing for the bureaucracy's counter-revolutionary policies.

He highlights the fact that Pashukanis' General Theory debuted in 1924, after the institution of the New Economic Policy—enacted in 1921 as a temporary policy necessitated by the defeats of the European revolution and enforced isolation of the backward Soviet economy. The NEP made key concessions to capitalist market relations, thus promoting a return to traditional legal forms to protect private ownership in some of the means of production.

Head notes that although the General Theory was shaped by the requirements of the NEP, Pashukanis' theoretical work makes little reference to the NEP. When Pashukanis did refer to the NEP, he merely asserted that it represented an insufficient level of development for the building of socialism. Inherent in this was a bowing to mounting fears that a long period would have to ensue before socialism could be realized in the Soviet Union.

The period of the NEP was laden with political pressures exerted by the growing bureaucratic caste, anxious to consolidate its power on the national arena by abandoning the struggle for international revolution. Head finds the theoretical reflection of these pressures in aspects of the General Theory which naturally appealed to the bureaucratic caste—in particular, its assumption that the struggle for revolutionary social change would have to be shelved for an indefinite period and its general lack of emphasis and clarity on the repressive role of law and the state.

Head illustrates the political logic behind these theoretical failures by tracking Pashukanis' growing and ultimately futile capitulation to the Stalinist bureaucracy, to which he had wedded himself—from his denunciation of "Trotskyism" in 1925, his acceptance of "socialist legality" in 1927, to his repeated revisions of Lenin's State and Revolution in 1936. In that year, Pashukanis repudiated the theoretical core of the General Theory but was nevertheless executed the following year.

Pashukanis made a genuine contribution to understanding the nature of the legal form. But, as Head notes, "by lining up against the Left Opposition, he helped deprive the debates of the analysis and programme that could have combated the political and theoretical degeneration." Ultimately, Pashukanis became a casualty, not because of any principled political stance against the Stalinists, but rather because he still represented a link to the Marxist heritage of the revolution and thus a threat to the bureaucracy.

Head's book also corrects a tendency in other works to isolate the General Theory from its foundations in the Russian revolution and decades of Marxist cultural development in 19th century Europe. In particular, Head is careful to attribute the foundational concepts of Pashukanis' theory—the "withering away" of repressive instruments of government, law as an outgrowth of society's economic development, and the materialist analysis of the state and law—to the works of Marx and Engels.

Beyond this, Head traces key elements of Pashukanis' General Theory—the distinction between law and regulation, the rejection of law as an eternal form of social regulation, and the dual character of Soviet law—to the earlier works of lesser known, but important, Marxist legal scholars such as Lunacharsky, Reisner, Magerovsky, Podvolotsky, Krylenko and Goikhbarg.
Head ends the book by discussing Pashukanis' contemporary relevance. He examines the current assault on civil liberties as a component part of the "war on terror," the crisis in criminal justice and the prison explosion (citing statistics showing that, as of 2005, one in every 136 Americans was under the control of the penal system), from the standpoint of Pashukanis' theoretical perspective.

In the final chapter, Head demonstrates how the General Theory provides a framework for a materialist analysis of the American criminal justice system, which has severed nearly all connection with its stated purpose of protecting society and maintaining the peace, and is rapidly becoming an instrument of intimidation and political repression and a means for systematically stripping away the basic rights of masses of people.

In the context of the "global war on terror," Head's examination is particularly timely. The General Theory demonstrates that the traditional forms of bourgeois democracy and constitutional law are increasingly at odds with the class interests and social policies of the bourgeoisie in times of crisis. Thus they are increasingly abandoned, allowing politically-vetted judges an almost unlimited discretion in constitutional interpretation, and ultimately the freedom to abandon age-old democratic norms altogether, or to place a judicial seal of approval on the executive's efforts to do so.

On this topic, he quotes Pashukanis: "For the bourgeois has never, in favour of purity of theory, lost sight of the fact that class society is not only a market where autonomous owners of commodities meet, but it is at the same time the battlefield of a bitter class war, where the machinery of state repression represents a very powerful weapon... The state as a power factor in internal and foreign policy—that is the correction which the bourgeois was forced to make to the theory and practice of its ‘constitutional state.' The more the hegemony of the bourgeois was shattered, the more compromising these corrections became, the more quickly the constitutional state was transformed into a disembodied shadow, until finally the extraordinary sharpening of the class struggle forced the bourgeois to discard the mask of the constitutional state altogether, revealing the nature of state power as the organized power of one class over the other."

These words have renewed currency at the close of 2008. The economic crisis of world capitalism and the explosion of imperialist militarism across the globe, politically manifested in the "global war on terror" or the "long war," have led US imperialism and all national ruling elites to lay the legal groundwork for just such an "unmasking." Bourgeois democracy and the "rule of law" are giving way to authoritarian capitalism.

World Socialist Website on NPA

Always interesting to read about the LCR and the creation of the new anti-capitalist party in France. Here's the ex-Healyites sectarian and ultra-left take. Shame they didn't take the opportunity to translate the Krivine interview.

France: Alain Krivine explains the role of the "New Anti-Capitalist Party"
By Peter Schwarz 21 November 2008

Last week, the Internet publication Médiapart published an interview with Alain Krivine, the long-time leader of the French Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). The interview throws light on the programme and political role of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), which the LCR plans to found at the end of January.

Krivine makes three things clear: First of all, the new party will be reformist rather than revolutionary; its aim is not to build a socialist society, but rather to refurbish the existing capitalist system. Second, the new party does not represent a political break with the old, bankrupt workers’ organisations, but will operate instead as a vessel for assembling disappointed reformists, Stalinists, trade unionists and petty-bourgeois “lefts.” Third, the party cultivates a cynical and dismissive attitude to the traditions of the revolutionary Marxist movement.
In his first answer, Krivine reveals himself to be within the political spectrum of bourgeois politics. When asked, "How does the LCR analyse the current ‘crisis’ of the capitalist system?" he replies, "It is one of the big crises that periodically rock a system that is dominated by the drive for profit."

This is false and leads to completely wrong political conclusions.

The present crisis is not merely one of the cyclical downturns that grip capitalism at regular intervals—and give way to a new upsurge. It has already spread from the financial sector to the sphere of production and has led to the first worldwide recession since the Second World War. It marks a new stage in the decline of world capitalism and invokes all the historical contradictions that, between 1914 and 1945, plunged the world into revolutionary class struggles, fascist barbarism and two world wars.

At the heart of the crisis is the decline of American imperialism, whose economic superiority provided the basis for the temporary stabilisation of world capitalism after the Second World War. Now, the US is compensating for its economic decline by the aggressive deployment of its military forces. The reaction of the European ruling class has been to undertake its own military rearmament and its own initiatives to redivide the world and its resources. The growth of militarism and social reaction are two sides of the same coin.

This confronts the working class with revolutionary tasks. It can no longer defend itself on the basis of reformist or trade union methods, which seek to achieve class compromise within the context of the national state. The globalisation of production has superseded and rendered obsolete and reactionary the borders of the national state. The decay of all reformist organisations is an expression of this fact. The crisis cannot be solved within the context of capitalist society. It confronts the working class with the task of breaking with the old reformist organisations, taking the political initiative and struggling for political power—or facing a descent into dictatorship and war. The working class is posed with the alternative: socialism or barbarism.

That is not Krivine's perspective. His estimation of the crisis does not substantially differ from that of bourgeois politicians, who—like French President Nicolas Sarkozy or German Chancellor Angela Merkel—declare that the "real economy" is basically healthy, attribute the financial crisis to the misdeeds of a few speculators and promise to resolve the problem with stricter regulations. Echoing them, Krivine declares that the crisis has taken place at a time when "financial wealth no longer corresponds to real wealth."

He proposes a series of "immediate measures"—the setting up of a public banking system subject to democratic control, a prohibition on dismissals at profitable companies, the opening of corporate books, the abolition of bank secrets, a rise in purchasing power by increasing wages and pensions, etc.

While these measures sound radical, Krivine does not link them to a programme of working class power. They are raised from the standpoint of exerting pressure on other parties. The task of the NPA is not the preparation of the working class for inevitable class confrontations by breaking it from the paralysing influence of the reformist, Stalinist and trade union apparatuses. Instead, it encourages the illusion that precisely these apparatuses can be pressured to adopt policies favourable to the interests of workers.

How closely the LCR/NPA is linked to the old bureaucratic organisations is made clear in the next paragraph of the interview.

Krivine boasts that the NPA is already exerting a positive effect on the old parties: "Even prior to its birth, it is already forcing all of the time-worn left-wing parties to define themselves in accordance with the NPA or statements made by Olivier Besancenot [the leading light of the LCR/NPA]. It is already proving useful."

In particular, Krivine appeals to all those who have been left politically stranded by the lurch to the right of their old organisations: "The NPA project consists of creating a political opening for all currents, for all persons who wish to oppose the unparalleled offensive of the entrepreneurs and the Sarkozy government with a unified ‘all together’ approach."

He is pleased that so many have already taken up this appeal: "This party, which still does not even exist, has already absorbed a small group of experienced members from the Socialist Party (more than expected...) and the Communist Party, as well as a strong contingent from the trade union movement and from citizens' initiatives."

Krivine is open to any sort of political manoeuvre or combination—including participation in government. The NPA, he says, "is a tool useful for struggles, useful to develop a political alternative, and, why not, under certain, but not yet existing, conditions, useful tomorrow for the exercise of power. Nothing is impossible, a new chapter is opening up."

Krivine also declares his willingness to cooperate and draw up joint lists of candidates with other political currents. His only condition: no participation "in government coalitions with the Socialist Party, similar to the coalitions entered into by the PRC [Refounded Communism] in Italy and the Left Party in Germany."

Such declarations mean little. The timeline for such promises is usually short. In addition, there are different forms of cooperation. In 1936, the French Communist Party did not directly take part in the Popular Front government led by Léon Blum, which consisted of a coalition of the Socialist Party and bourgeois radicals. Nevertheless, the CP was Blum's most important prop, voting for his government in parliament and strangling the powerful general strike movement of that time in order to secure the survival of French capitalism.

Time will tell whether the NPA takes part in a future French government. At present, its most important task consists of cutting off a new generation of workers and young people from the inheritance of the revolutionary workers' movement. In this respect, it has a similar function to that of the Spanish POUM, whose role Trotsky described as follows: "By their general ‘left’ formulae the leaders of the POUM created the illusion that a revolutionary party existed in Spain and prevented the appearance of the truly proletarian, intransigent tendencies.” In so doing, as Trotsky explained, the POUM bore "an enormous responsibility for the Spanish tragedy." (1)

Krivine is completely dismissive of the inheritance of the Marxist movement. He contemptuously derides the great theoretical and political debates that decided the fate of millions as a controversy over antiquated "isms."
"Up to now we have had difficulty recruiting several hundred people into the LCR who differentiated between Stalinism, Maoism, anarchism, Trotskyism and all manner of ‘isms,’ ” Krivine declares. "Today, the revolutionaries are been heard by millions and are striving, while not denying their struggles, to develop a popular party forcing us to jointly change our vocabulary, methods and our ways of operating."

Krivine categorically dismisses the tradition of Trotskyism, which the LCR had invoked (falsely) up to now: "As a party which seeks to ‘revolutionise society,’ the NPA will not be ‘Trotskyist.’ Instead, it will strive to synthesise what is positive in the different traditions of the workers' movement, enriched by the contribution of the critics of globalisation, environmentalists, feminists, and not least the experience of those who come from traditional parties or the anarchist movement."

This opportunist mixing of irreconcilable political currents into a political mishmash is reactionary. One cannot "synthesise" Stalinism and Trotskyism. What separates them is not just differences of opinion but, in Trotsky’s words, a river of blood. The Stalinist regime murdered far more communists than the fascists, as the Italian fascist leader Mussolini once declared. The conflict between Trotskyism and Stalinism was the highest theoretical and political expression of the international class struggle itself. Stalinism was responsible for defeats of the working class whose impact has lasted for generations. The same can be said with regard to the Marxist movement's disputes with reformists and anarchists.

A revolutionary socialist strategy can be developed only on the basis of an assimilation of the lessons of past struggles. Only when the working class learns from history and draws lessons from earlier victories and defeats can it be prepared for a new period of revolutionary conflict. At the heart of these lessons is the struggle waged by the Fourth International against Stalinism, reformism, Pabloite revisionism and all other forms of political opportunism. The most important lessons of the twentieth century are summarised in this tradition.

The LCR/NPA deliberately strives to sever workers and young people from this history and from the political knowledge that must be extracted from history. It turns toward a new generation that grew up in a period marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union and amidst a propaganda campaign proclaiming the alleged "failure of socialism," and which knows little of the revolutionary traditions of the workers' movement. But it does so not to politically educate this generation, but rather to imbue it with contempt for theory and history. Such a movement can only serve as an impediment to the revolutionary development of the working class and a prop for bourgeois rule.
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Worldwide Socialist Website on SWP and Respect

Britain: the SWP and Galloway’s Respect Renewal on the economic crisis
By Chris Marsden 29 October 2008
Last Saturday the Socialist Workers Party and George Galloway's Respect Renewal held separate meetings where they discussed the economic crisis gripping world capitalism. Galloway's event was his organization's annual conference, but took less than a full day. The SWP's event was a debate entitled "Marxism and the Economic Crisis."

It is just over a year since the SWP and Galloway, then united in Respect, split acrimoniously. Galloway did so amidst accusations that the SWP was ultra-left and that its undemocratic efforts to dominate Respect were an obstacle to building a broad alliance of generally left and democratic forces. The SWP somewhat belatedly discovered that Galloway was orienting towards Muslim businessmen and that he is moving to the right.

The two conferences served to demonstrate how both organizations are continuing their rightward lurch. Their response to what Bank of England Deputy Governor Charlie Bean admitted two days earlier was "a once in a lifetime crisis, and possibly the largest financial crisis of its kind in human history" was identical in all major respects. They sought to downplay the scale of the financial disaster, to reject any possibility of mobilizing the working class to fight for a socialist alternative to capitalism, and to advance instead Keynesian-style government intervention to stabilize the world capitalist economy while securing a number of minimal social reforms.

Even before Respect Renewal met, Galloway had made clear his opposition to any socialist response to the crisis of the profit system. On October 17 he appeared on "The One Show," hosted by Andrew Neil, who asked him, "Will capitalism die?" Galloway replied in the negative. "There is a fire raging in the forest," he said, but we had to hope "that the forest doesn't perish before the flames go out." Capitalism is "not dead because there is not an alternative system ready and waiting to take over. Socialism is not dead either, but it pretty nearly died and it will be a long time before it is in a position to compete as an alternative."

Efforts to "save the forest" supports by Galloway include the Labour government's £500 billion subvention to the banks, which will be paid for by working people. His statement on Prime Minister Gordon Brown's bailout declared that "at last the government is taking action which may begin to shore up the banking system."

"It was essential the government propped up the banks' capital base," he added, warning only that "many in the City" believe that more is needed. There would be further demands on taxpayers "unless more is done to pump prime our collapsing economy now."

Respect Renewal's conference policy documents said very little on the economic crisis other than to call for a defence of "working people, the poor and vulnerable in the current economic climate" by freezing council rents and service charges for a year and implementing wage increases in line with inflation.

The primary role of left apologist for Galloway since his split with the SWP has been played by Alan Thornett's International Socialism Group, the British section of the Pabloite United Secretariat. Thornett's own resolution to the conference was basically identical to Galloway's position, insisting that "Democratic control over the economy through Parliament is essential if a further plunge into crisis is to be avoided" and pledging to "campaign for the public ownership of the financial institutions."

At the conference Thornett's group took second place to Galloway's preferred political partner, the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain. Galloway writes a semi-regular column for the CPB's Morning Star and is anxious to use the party's continued influence within the upper echelons of the trade union bureaucracy as a source of financial and organizational clout in order to advance his own political career. To this end, pride of place alongside Galloway on the platform was given to CPB General Secretary Rob Griffiths.

Galloway has long combined an admiration of Stalin's Soviet Union and Castro's Cuba with Catholicism and an opportunist glorification of various despotic regimes, including Saddam Hussein's Iraq. His claim that socialism "nearly died" refers to the collapse of Stalinism.
Galloway's performance at the Respect Renewal conference made clear that his alliance with the Stalinists is rooted in his deep and abiding hostility to Marxism, Trotskyism and opposition to social revolution.

Galloway addressed the 200 or so delegates in overtly anticommunist terms. We need to stop talking about "dead Russians," he declared (to which someone in the audience added, "And dead Germans"). The break from the SWP was necessary because it was a "Marxist-Leninist far-left party," out of touch with the masses. What was required instead was a new "realistic" left movement with ideas that people understand—to be formed by making "unity" the watchword.
All the problems of the "left" were rooted in the actions of "splitters" and "Marxist sects" who spoke of a "catastrophe" facing world capitalism.

Galloway's statements were so right-wing that even Griffiths was somewhat embarrassed. He agreed with Galloway that Marxism had been supposedly "discredited" by talk of the "crisis of capitalism." But he cautioned a real crisis was now unfolding.

SWP rejects possibility of socialism
Having worked in Respect with Galloway for three-and-a-half years, only for this unprincipled electoral alliance to end in a debacle, the Socialist Workers Party has recently been trying to rescue its credibility by projecting itself as an orthodox Marxist Party. However, the SWP continues to advocate a left regroupment based on a rejection of any possibility of building a revolutionary socialist party.

Saturday's conference was held under the auspices of the SWP's theoretical journal, International Socialism. Its latest issue contained the International Socialist Tendency's October 1 statement on the global economic crisis. Littered with references to "a major economic crisis" that "originated in the very heart of the capitalist system, in the United States," the statement advocates "the nationalisation without compensation of the banks" and little else.
As to the prospects for class struggle and socialism, its verdict is extremely negative. "The relationship between economic crisis and the class struggle is complex and mediated by the political context in which they interact," the IST/SWP states, meaning that "the precise combination of job losses and higher prices in a given country is likely to have a major impact on whether workers are likely to respond with aggressive resistance or demoralised acquiescence" (emphasis added).

The task is not to build a revolutionary leadership, but to develop "a broader radical left that can begin to present a credible and principled alternative to capitalism."

Building this "broader radical left" last Saturday took the form of a debate between leading SWP members, including Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos; the academic Robin Blackburn, a former member of the United Secretariat and contributor to the New Left Review; Peter Gowan, the editor of the New Left Review; and the Keynesian economist Alan Freeman.

Harman kicked off proceedings by stating that though there was talk we were facing another crash like 1929, "To be honest, nobody knows."
His statements are far more sanguine than those of leading financiers, who have acknowledged that the crash is at least as bad as 1929 or, in the case of Bank of England governor Mervyn King, is the "worst since the First World War." Even now share prices in Europe have dropped by more than a quarter and, excluding a bounce, Wall Street will have fallen further in October than at any time since Black Monday 1932.
Despite this, Harman declared, "I don't expect a crisis as bad as the 1930s, as the state will intervene.... I think it will be more on the basis of the Japan crisis"—a reference to the bursting of the speculative property bubble in the early 1990s. James McCurry wrote of such comparisons in the October 28 edition of the Guardian that "the notion that financial crises are a throwback to an era that ended with the death throes of the ‘lost decade' is being exposed as so much folly.... In truth, though, the immediate future promises to be one of unremitting pain for the world's second biggest economy."

When contrasted with Harman, the Keynesian economist Alan Freeman sounded left. While insisting that "you'd have to be really dumb and seeking early retirement not to be a Keynesian now," and that Keynes was better than Marx for understanding the "sort term" development of capitalism, he did warn that the efforts of the capitalists to "reorganise the world politically" may involve "violence and war.... The real cause of the crisis is the decline of the US as the world hegemon.... It is now using its military clout to prevent the day of reckoning and will have to take on its own working class."

Freeman then declared that we were only seeing the beginning of the end for US hegemony and that this could take a hundred years, as it had for the British Empire. To prevent war and fascism meant exerting maximum pressure for the capitalists to employ the "visible hand of the state" to regulate "the invisible hand of the market."

"Neither 1929 nor 1873 (the last crises on this scale) led to any socialist revolution," he said. "Does Keynesianism provide a way out of the crisis of capitalism?" It must do because, "We are not yet on the edge of a socialist revolution."

Harman did not disagree with this appraisal other than to insist, "I don't think the US will crash. Several states will crash but not the US."

For his part, Blackburn had little of substance to add, other than to warn, "We shouldn't make the mistake of saying that all finance capital is bad."
Finance capitalism should merely be brought under control, he said, while the left should call for a set of reforms to be implemented by the capitalists.

These demands were not socialist, he acknowledged, but of a "state capitalist nature." That is all that is possible, Blackburn insisted. The situation is not like 1917 "when no one knew what to do and Lenin put his hand up at the back of the room and said I will take responsibility for this mess," he said to laughter from the hundred or so present.

Posing the question, "But aren't we trying to get rid of capitalism?" he replied, "What we are getting towards are publicly responsible democratic forms of financial governance."

In the closing debate, Alex Callinicos focused on what he claimed were the political consequences of the crash. In a rambling survey, he largely confined himself to insisting that the United States, though weakened, would remain the world's hegemonic power, as neither Europe nor China was in a position to challenge it.

The financial crisis would get worse, he added.
The problem was that political radicalisation in the anti-war movement has developed "well in advance of working class economic resistance.... We need to close the gap between political and economic resistance."

Peter Gowan did little other than to explicitly back Keynesian-style regulation of the capitalist market. "I remember the old International Socialism Journal and us Trotskyists [the IMG] used to oppose the idea of structural reforms. Now the left needs to advance them," he declared.
In the brief debate that followed, a member of the Socialist Equality Party asked, "Speakers have spoken of the depth of the crisis. I have heard solutions like structural reforms and transitional demands. What do the speakers think is the prospect for revolution and do they think the working class will lead it?"

The question was greeted with laughter and ignored by the platform, other than Callinicos stating, "Of course I am for a socialist planned economy. It is important to start talking about that stuff again."