To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
November 8, 2019
RE: Critiquing Dan La Botz on why some groups recoil from the mass uprisings
By Joseph Green, Detroit Workers' Voice
The struggles that have broken out in one country another another have not met with universal support from the left. This is an important feature of the current situation. It's not just something that I noted in my article October 2019 - the world in struggle (1), but it's been noted by others as well. Dan La Botz is a longtime trade union and socialist activist, and his article The World in Arms Against Austerity and Authoritarianism also raises this issue. (2) So let's compare his analysis of the current movement and mine. We both welcome the current world upsurge, and we also both note the problem it poses for left-wing trends. But we differ on what this means for the radical left.
He writes that
"Around the world, people are rising up in arms, on nearly every continent and in more than a dozen nations. In the last six months there have been rebellions in France, Catalunya, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Haiti, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria. These rebellions have in general had a popular and left learning character and they are angry, militant, and defiant."
He points out that while these struggles are set off by a variety of different events, they reflect an underlying wave of struggle against the current social system. He writes that
"Everywhere, there was a different trigger. Yet the central issue everywhere is the desire to be treated with dignity and respect." And he describes the economic developments of the past fifty years and says "All of this has led to tremendous and well-justified resentment by the majorities in countries around the globe."
One might expect that when people rise up against the years of triumphant conservative capitalism and against conservative and authoritarian governments, the socialist and left-wing forces would be in the forefront of the movement. Both my article and La Botz's point out that this is not what we find. I wrote that "The leadership of these protests are mainly not the old trends of the left, not the Stalinist, Trotskyist, anarchist, religious sectarian, or nationalist trends. In many places, these long-time trends have dirtied their hands in taking part in the ruling regimes, or making corrupt deals with them."
Similarly, La Botz writes that:
"In many of these countries the state has lost its legitimacy and the citizenry no longer has confidence in the historic political parties, but generally speaking there is no political party in a position to put forward an alternative political agenda or a new leadership."
Indeed it isn't just that left-wing forces haven't gained a sufficient following, it's that they may even be obstacles to the movement or part of its target:
"In all of the recent upheavals, we see the working classes and the poor rising up and taking action outside of or even against the social organizations and institutions, the labor unions and the political parties that have in the past pretended to represent them. When the left political parties and union bureaucracies have attempted to restrain these movements, as they have in many places, the workers themselves have either bypassed those institutions or they have tried to force them to act and have striven to push aside the current leaders and to alter the organizations’ policies. Without political parties of their own working people have often been unable to formulate a clear program, but their militant actions and their slogans have made it quite evident that they demand an altogether different sort of society, one where workers' voice are heard and their needs are met."
This is a damning indictment of what various supposedly left parties and union bureaucracies have been doing. It's not just that some left-wing groups have become corrupt, but that there is a crisis in the left as a whole, a crisis that extends to left-wing parties that call themselves revolutionary or communist or socialist.
Yet at the same time Botz says that the problem is simply that the left groups are facing what is supposedly a new situation. This downplays the seriousness of the crisis in the left; it hides the fact we are seeing the bankruptcy of various trends, including reformism, Stalinism, and Trotskyism. He writes:
"The fact that many of these revolts are popular and not led by leftist parties and not guided by socialist ideologies, and that they contain many contradictory currents, has caused consternation among leftist groups both in the United States and elsewhere. Their confusion arises from the fact that they have not for almost fifty years had to try to understand and interpret such mass popular movements."
Here he says that various groups will not support a movement which is not essentially socialist. He doesn't say which groups he is referring to, but this would presumably include many followers of the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution. He implies this stand was OK for the last four or five decades, but is inadequate in the present.
But is it really true that we are now facing a situation which hasn't been seen for almost 50 years? No, it's absurd to imagine that we haven't seen mass movements with "contradictory currents" for half a century. That's simply not the case. The left has repeatedly seen such situations, both internationally and in the US.
For example, the current world upsurge is reminiscent in many ways of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. The very same issue of movements composed of "contradictory currents" and different social groups arose at that time; it was argued in the American left whether to support these movements; this took place in meetings as well as articles; and we in the Communist Voice Organizations pointed out that the Trotskyist and Stalinist theories were proving bankrupt in the face of the Arab Spring.(3)
There are also contradictory currents in the environmental movement. This has always been the case, and it can be seen in the giant climate demonstrations of the last year. Surely they embraced people and social groupings with different class interests, from the working people and minorities who are most severely affected by environmental devastation to establishment environmentalists and a section of bourgeois politicians. It's up to the radical left to build a working class section of the environmental movement that puts forward effective solutions, but it would be delusionary to imagine that the entire movement was united around radical measures or led by socialist ideologies.(4)
And for that matter, something similar has taken place throughout the last 50 years in many other mass movements and social struggles, including the anti-racist movements, the women's movement, the anti-war movements, etc. It is the task of a truly radical left to build the working class section of these movements. But to do so, one has to take account of the fact that these movements, in the broad sense, contain a variety of standpoints and interests.
What's new about the current world protests is not the variegated class character of the movements. What's new is how far the masses have rejected the various parties and groups that usually speak in their name.
The fact that some left parties and groups recoil from these struggles, and some are even on the wrong side of the barricades, reflects longstanding problems in the left. The movement in the second half of the 20th century to fight fake socialism and fake Marxism and to rebuild a genuinely revolutionary communist movement was largely defeated. So Stalinism and Trotskyism have been able to hang on persistently despite their inability to deal with the needs of the revolutionary movement.(5)
To make this more concrete, let's look at a couple of the actual reasons that various left groups would recoil from some of the mass struggles that are now going on.
For one thing, there are groups that support some of the regimes that the masses are protesting against, such as the those who support the Chinese government and thus oppose the Hong Kong demonstrators. True, La Botz himself doesn't do this. He supports the Hong Kong protests, but that doesn't mean that one can ignore the fact that some other left groups oppose the protests and regard the Chinese government as socialist or, at least, not fully capitalist. And it isn't just the Stalinist CPUSA that sees China that way, but various groups from the Trotskyist tradition. Many, but not all, Trotskyists hold that various state-capitalist governments, such as China, are really workers' states, albeit deformed ones or partially capitalist ones. Just because La Botz doesn't mention this Trotskyist theory, doesn't mean that it doesn't have influence among a number of activists.
Another reason for the some left groups recoiling from movements with "contradictory currents" is that the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution is unable to deal with the issue of democratic movements and other struggles that don't directly lead to workers' regimes. So, for example, groups that tried to apply the theory of permanent revolution to the Arab Spring either pretended that this or that struggle was leading to the overthrow of capitalist rule, or denounced the struggle because it wasn't going to lead to a workers' state. 6)
La Botz's article doesn't deal with these or other theories that have helped disorient the left. Instead he writes in a way that slurs over the differences between left trends; this weakens the analysis of the current movements around the world. For example, he writes about whether the mass protests can achieve revolution without characterizing what type of revolution is being talked about:
"The truth is, however, that with the exception of Algeria and Sudan, and perhaps Chile, almost none of these countries is in a pre-revolutionary situation, and in virtually none of them has the social rebellion given rise to a revolutionary political party. Yet it is also true that much of the world at this moment is a laboratory searching for the cure for capitalism, and the social scientists running the experiments are in the streets."
This makes it sound like all the struggles aim at socialist revolution, although only a few are near it ("in a pre-revolutionary situation"). There is a similar impression from his remark that, although the working people don't have their own party or a consistent picture of how the economy and the country should be run, "their militant actions and their slogans have made it quite evident that they demand an altogether different sort of society, one where workers' voice are heard and their needs met."
In fact, we are nowhere near a global struggle for socialist revolution. There are struggles for the right to self-determination; struggles against tyrants; struggles for economic relief; struggles for the demands of the masses to be heard; etc. Taken together, these struggles mark a deepening crisis of market fundamentalism. (7) But, as La Botz wrote but didn't think deeply enough about, there are contradictory currents in the present movements. Indeed, not only are there different class sections of the movement, but the working class section is disorganized, and as La Botz also writes, the demands are "unclear and undeveloped", which is an understated way of describing the major crisis of orientation in today's struggles, and in the left in general. The current struggles, if successful, will pave the way for the development of the class struggle. But they open the path for further development of the class struggle, something which leads towards the ultimate socialist revolution, rather than leading to an immediate attempt to do away altogether with capitalism.
The Trotskyist theory holds that to recognize the limited social nature of a struggle is "stageism" and means to trail behind the bourgeoisie. On the contrary, such recognition is important to show the need for the development of a revolutionary working class section of the movement, that has aims that go beyond the immediate struggle. Such a trend would work both for the most powerful development of the current struggles, and to build up a socialist section of the movement. The development of such a section of the movement, that is, the development of a truly socialist working class movement, would change the situation in those countries, and it would be an important step towards the future socialist revolution.
The current mass struggles around the world not only deserve our support, they are another wake-up call that activists need to deal with the deep crisis of the left. In the current wave of world struggle, the masses often reject all the major parties that were speaking in their name. We should take this seriously and look into why it is so. We should learn from this, and question the roles of the large major trends -- Stalinist, Trotskyist, anarchist, and social-democratic -- that speak in the names of the workers and the oppressed. La Botz writes that "mass popular revolts enter into a political quest and a search for their program and leaders." But the left too has to do that. It's time for the radical left to take up once again a serious political and theoretical quest to develop a better -- and more consistently communist -- revolutionary theory and orientation so as to replace the mistaken and revisionist theories and practices that have been dominant for too long.<>
(1) http://www.communistvoice.org/DSWV-191031.html.
(2) https://newpol.org/the-world-up-in-arms-against-austerity-and-authoritarianism/. October 26, 2019. La Botz is a co-editor of New Politics and a member of Solidarity, an organization that grew out of the Trotskyist tradition.
(3) See the collection of articles at http://www.communistvoice.org/00ArabSpring.html.
(4) See the collection of articles at http://www.communistvoice.org/00GlobalWarming.html.
(5) See "A new assessment of an old trend: Trotskyism as the equally evil twin of Stalinism" at http://www.communistvoice.org/49cTwin.html.
(6) See "Against left-wing doubts about the democratic movement" at http://www.communistvoice.org/46cLeftWingDoubts.html.
(7) Most people today regard
socialism as economic reforms, such as universal health care and other
social benefits and government regulation of parts of the economy. In
that sense, a struggle against market fundamentalism and for economic
relief for the masses is a struggle for socialism, especially if these
reforms involve building up a large state sector or move many people
out of poverty. But the actual overthrow of capitalism, or Marxist
socialism, goes far beyond this to the entire elimination of the
marketplace, capitalist ownership, and even money. A socialist
revolution doesn't do all that at one stroke, but moves step by step in
that direction.<>
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Typo corrected, posted November 8,
2019
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