Why has the Marxist movement always been so certain that the parliamentary road is not the road to socialism? Why is ‘parliamentary cretinism' one of the surest signs that someone has abandoned a Marxist position for a social-democratic one?
Although this touchstone is often referred to, it is rare that the question is analysed beyond vague references to Parliament being the purest form of bourgeois rule. But what does this mean? Or again, for purposes of proletarian revolution is the problem simplythat, when pressed, the ruling class will tear up its own constitution and rely nakedly on "special bodies of armed men"? (Lenin)
The question of the state, and of bourgeois democracy, is especially interesting, as a matter of fact, because it was here that Marx's own development started. Before he studied any economics at all, and before he even formulated his historical materialism, he had already provided a devastating critique of the contradictions of bourgeois political theory. The results were published in 1843 as Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and On the Jewish Question .
According to Marx, man in modern society led a double life, a public political one, as a citizen of the State, a participant in popular sovereignty, a bearer of the general will, on the one hand; and, on the other, a private, personal life, in which he pursued his own particular interests, and treated others as means to his own ends. The sphere of his public life was the State which represented the community, and legislated universally for all and everyone, without kowtowing to particular persons. The sphere of his private life was civil society, a term Marx took over from Hegel, and which stood for the netw of relationships set up by private dealings of individuals. In Stet. supposed universality of the public sphere, life in civil society was supposed to be thoroughly egotistical. Each individual sought only his own advantage, shinking from no stratagem to pursue his own interest up to the limit which the law laid down.
Having identified these two spheres, in which bourgeois political theory portrayed man as acting, Marx goes on to stress the abstract character of the citizen, and the ideal, allegorical, character of men's common life in the State, as opposed to the actuality of the individual man and the materiality of civil society.
It is an illusion to think of the State as standing above society ruling it. On the contrary, the state is an institution of society which has translated into it the power relationships of that society, and this no matter how democratic it might be.
To understand the basis of this critique it is necessary to examine carefully the nature of political emancipation. Under feudalism political relationships were fused with social ones. Your social class at the same time defined your political position. Indeed politics as the science of public affairs in a sense doesn't exist because affairs of State are the
private affairs of the monarch.
The peculiar character of the emmancipation carried through by the bourgeoisie was that, whilefreeing man politically, it left him in bondage socially. It freed the State from social distinctions only by presupposing them at its basis. Thus in freeing itself from religion the State left man in bondage to religion. It said that as far as your political rights are your religion is irrelevant. In private life people are distinguished as Jews, Christians, but as citizens they are not.
",.ethe state as a state abolishes private propert (i.e.man decrees by a
political means the abolition of private property): when it abolishes the
property qualifications for electors and representatives..."
"But the political suppression of private property not only does not
abolish private property; it actually presupposes its existence. The state
abolishes, after its fashion, the distinctions established by birth, social
rank, education, occupation, when it decrees that birth, social rank, educa-
tion, occupation are non-political distinctions; when it proclaims without
regard to these distinctions, that every member of society is an equal
partner in popular sovereignty, and treats all the elements which compose
the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. But the
state, none the less, allows private property, education, occupation, to
act after their own fashion.....Far from abolishing these effective diff-
erences, it only exists so far as they are presupposed; it is conscious of 2
being a political state and manifests its universality only in opposition
to these elements." (Marx; On the Jewish Question)
Now, not only is it transparently obvious that the political freedom so loudly trumpeted by the bourgeoisie leaves quite untouched the social despotism of capital but it is also clear that it is quite disingenuous, in fact thoroughlyideological, to treat these social distinctions as unpolitical distinctions. The fact of unfreedom in class society permeates the political sphere too, transforming the freedom claimed there into a formal, abstract unreality.
According to democratic ideology the state represents all its citizens, and furthermore all equally - ‘One Man One Vote' ensures this. It matters not whether you are rich or poor you only get one vote just the same. In paroxysms of democratic frenzy we abolish property qualifications, literacy qualifications,residential qualifications, racial qualifications, and heridit.ary qualifications - all distinctions are abstracted away, leaving little more than ability to put a cross on a paper. In this ability we are all equal. Therefore the people have the state in their hands and the state rules society - what have you to complain about?
Thus claims the ideology of bourgeois democracy.
But it is not so simple. There is something a little too abstract about the political agent left when the constitution has finished abstracting him away from his actual empirical characteristics. Take wealth for example - is this an unpolitical distinction? Of course not, it provides the material ° means of political activity .i.e. propaganda etc. Is education unpolitical? On what basis can you choose when you don't know the facts, the arguments and
counter arguments? Or, more correctly, when you have been taught bourgeois ideology instead of facts. Is occupation unpolitical? Who has more time for politics - a leisured individual or a harassed mother of eleven children? Race and religion unpolitical? In a society full of prejudice and bigotry?
The dominance of politics by social life is aptly expressed in the extreme social unrepresentativeness of the members of representative institutions. No examination of formal constitutions will explain this. Nothing there lays it down that most M.P.'s have to be directors! A little reflection on social facts and it is obvious what happens. Little wonder then, that a society characterised by social injustice and class distinction can survive long periods under a democratic constitution. The formal freedoms of the constitution become meaningless in face of the slavery of social life. The idea that politics takes place in a rarified atmosphere above the sordid realities of life is an illusion of constitutions. In fact the state is an institution of society like any other. Politics is therefore a function of the totality of social life (though since it is itself_a part of social life it is not just an epiphenomenon of it - this would be the mechanistic error parallelling the idealistic one. ) To believe otherwise is to fall victim to an ideology that the more sophisticated bourgeoisie, who have heard of political sociology, don't believe themselves.
The democratic state is the perfect form of bourgeois rule because it is the most consistent with its ideology and hence cloaks its rule in the maximum of mystification. A man is most truly a slave when he thinks he is free.
A representative democracy of a bourgeois type is an institution which is designed with a particular view of the nature of man and of the state in mind. This combines an atomistic view of the individual with a thoroughly erzatz and illusory unity at the level of the state as a whole. This can be seen most clearly in Rousseau who lays down that there should be no institutions such as a party mediating between the individual and the State. (Social Contract)
The form in which the individual participates in exercising sovereigny is atomistic in the sense that it is not taken for granted, as it was in feudalism, that there is a class or interest group to which he belongs e.g. the Estate, and through which he could be represented. Actually in con - stituency based systems this is not quite true because the individual is represented via a geographical delimited grouping. But it is clear that this method does not express, or result in, any genuine interest group. The number of occasions on which an M.P. speaks in order to express a constituency interst are relatively rare and the importance attached to them is minor just because it is known to be a local issue. The really important debates are always conducted in terms of the national interest, and the intersts affected always cut across constituencies rather than between them. The only interest grouping which bourgeois ideology is prepared to recognise is therefore the nation itself. It is typical of bourgeois parties that, whatever their actual base, they will always pretend to be 'national parties'. Thus the Labour Government would never say it was introducing socialist measures in the interest of the working class. It always says its measures are required by the ‘national interest'. (If it still wants to call them socialist
then this merely makes them national-socialist - and indeed such measures as the incomes policy are clearly based on corporate-statist premises.)
One of the main results of the Marxist class analysis of society is to demonstrate that 'the national interest' is an utterly spurious creation and that the basic interests of people lie with their class - the propagation of nationalist ideology is the main defence of the ruling class in obscuring this. Correspondingly, all traitors to the working class movement begin by capitulaing to nationalist ideology. A nadir in Britain was reached when Tribune propagated in CND the slogan 'For a British Lead' - a slogan almost tailor-made to divert people from moving towards socialism. Likewise in the recent revolutionary situation in France Waldeck-Rochet signaled quite clearly the capitulationist character of the CPF when he boasted in a speech that the Tricolour always flew side by side with the red flag at C.P. meetings } ‘ancy waving in the faces of the workers the flag of black reaction from Dreyfus to the Gaullist demonstration of May!
The Parliamentary mode is tailor-made for demobilising the working class. It scattergsthem into atoms and regroups them in meaningless geograph= ical units. This context of action is quite divorced from their real life experience and the loyalties and interests generated there. The nature of this dis lacement makes it quite possible for interests which are clear to every/in a dispute at shop-floor level to become fogged in ballot boxés.Note well that up to’a million French strikers may have voted for De Gaulle in the June elections.
When one considers the bourgeois stranglehold on wealth, education, the propagation of ideology, and the organs of repression for dealing with any vanguard that may appear, the task of dislogding them seems almost insupperable. Certainly if one insists on accepting this essentially foreign field of battle and plays by the rules set up by the bourgeoisie, there is no hope. I say this even before taking into account the character of the state machine which the reformists envisage as being a neutral instrument which can be taken over and used for socialist purposes. However, it is clear that the handpicked forces in the Civil Service, the Army, and the Police, are firmly linked to the bourgeoisie, often by family, and always by ideological commitment , Ask a Greek.
Fortunately there is another field and another politics and another kind of party for which we may hold out hope. (Not that Parliament may not have a minor role - see Lenin's polemic against Left-Wing Communism) It was the fundamental insight of Lenin in State and Revolution that the bourgeois state is bourgeois territory, and that new institutions of class rule were necessary for the proletariat. The experience of revolution from the Paris Commune onwards has filled out this abstract formula. But whether it was a question of Soviets or a guerrilla army, historical experience has shown that countervailing institutions are a must, a state within a state must be built up and finally displace the old one.
In a country like Britain with a developed working class, one that constitutes the majority of the population, the main life experience of the mass of the people is centered on the factory. It is here that the fact of bourgeois rule is most clearly present to them, and it is on this experience
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that countervailing institutions of class power are most readily built up. The common situation and interests of the workers in a factory vis-a-vis the boss generates solidarity which expresses itself fairly readily in trade unions and workers loyalty to them. Some people such as revolutionary syndicalists, believe that these institutions alone are capable of carrying through revolution, and Lenin wrote What Is To Be Done to refute this thesis.
Nevertheless when Lenin stresses the need for a vanguard party this does not mean that the field of action of this party is restricted to that of non-Marxist. parties. In brilliant editorials in 1920 Gramsci put the question like this:
"The revolutionary organisations .... are born in the field... in
which the relationshipgof citizen to citizen subsist: the revolutionary
process comes about in the field of production, in the factory, where
the relations are those of oppressor and oppressed, of exploiter to
exploited, where liberty for the worker does not exist, where democ-
racy does not exist; the revolutionary process comes about where
the worker is nothing and wute/bictithing.. <<
So that is why we say that the birth of the workers' factory
councils represents an historical event of profound significance,
represents the beginning of a new era in the history of the human
TACCceee” +
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Representative institutions combining workers in units centered on the place of work are therefore key transitional institutions of the revolutionary process. This is because it is here the workers spend most of their waking time, and, most importantly, it is here that the class-contradictions are expressed in directly unmediated forms - not at one step removed as in the state, education, culture etc. Furthermore it is here that the workers experience exploitation as a collective - they are ell faced with the same problems and can test leadeTSanq policies in action around them. (On this necessaryobjective basis for solidarity and collective action, note how much easier it is to organise council tenants faced with one landlord and one policy than private tenants with many landlords who negotiate rents individually. Again employers are well aware of the advantages of negotiating salaries with their white collar workers individually. ) If there was a revolutionary party of any size and intelligence the Incomes Policy would have been met by using it as the objective leveler for forging a nationwide unity of workers against it. Instead of this we have the miserable spectacle of unions each trying to smuggle their own particular group through some loophole or other.
From the point of view of this analysis the Workers' Control Campaign has an absolutely central part to play in the revolutionary process. It is not just another single issue campaign, because on this issue is focussed the struggle for power in society.
Obviously there are dangers. On the one hand it may lose its identity as an organ of class struggle and become subsumed in colleborationist, participatory schemes which the . more far-sighted bourgeoisie, including the Labour Government, are dangling before it. On the other hand there may develop anti-political, anti-organisational, anarcho-syndicalist tend- + Workers! Control and Revolution, Antonio Gramsci. Published by the Institute for Workers' Control, 91, Cojdemi th St. Nottingham price 1/-
encies., Against both these dangers the only remedy is for a core of revolutionary Marxiststo integrate themselves wholeheartedly into the movement and bring into this core and politically sophisticate a whole range of key militants as speedily as possible. Those who shy away from such tasks may save the purity of their own souls, but they will loose contact with a living and growing movement.