Recent events in Europe have confronted the extreme left with situations where crisis-ridden national bourgeoisies are forced to turn to the traditional parties of the working class to impose the necessary austerity measures on their members. In Portugal a revolutionary situation was only headed off by the actions of the Communist and Socialist parties in government, acting as defenders of Portuguese capitalism. In Italy the CP remains in alliance with the Christian Democratic government fighting to stabilise Italian capitalism at the expense of the Italian working class. In France the ‘Union of the Left’ is fighting for the privilege of doing the same thing while in Spain the PSOE and the CPE wait eagerly for the call to join a coalition which will attempt to solve the economic crisis at the expense of the Spanish workers.
These events have forced the left to make clear its attitude to the ‘workers’ parties’ and the policies they pursue in government, and raised acutely the problems of arguing their programmes to workers committed to these parties. The response of the International Left, which has fallen either into opportunism by liquidating its programme in the search for ‘Socialist’ or ‘Left’ governments, or into ultra-leftism, posing the united front only from below, testifies to the programmatic degeneration of the far left and, in particular, of those International tendencies, like the USFI, who claim to represent programmatic continuity with the Fourth International of Trotsky.
The renovation and re-elaboration of the Transitional Programme is only possible on the basis of a clear and correct understanding of its fundamental positions, and the method for using them. It is for this reason that we publish this article on the workers’ government — an article which looks both at the origins and the development of the slogan and its application by the ‘revolutionary’ left in Portugal.
Though the slogan of the Workers and Peasants Government was not formulated until the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, it was based not only upon the projected needs of the proletariat in Western Europe where the Social Democrats retained the allegiance of the majority of the proletariat but upon the experience of the Bolsheviks in Russia between April and November 1917. The speed and apparent ease with which the Bolsheviks had been victorious obscured, and to this day obscures, the strategy and tactics the party used to win the masses during this momentous eight months.
The situation of Dual Power which emerged from the overthrow of Tsarism in February rested on the continued existence of bourgeois power, albeit badly weakened in the army and state bureaucracy and the Cadet-dominated Duma, and on the Menshevik–SR dominated Soviets. The Provisional Government, consisting of Cadets, SRs and Mensheviks represented a coalition between the leaders of the largest workers and peasants parties and the imperialist bourgeoisie. The former covered this treacherous pact with promises for the future — a negotiated peace with no annexations and no indemnities and land reform.
The first response of some of the Bolshevik leaders, most notably Stalin, was ‘critical’ support to the Provisional Government. Lenin on his return indignantly rejected this position. Defencism was possible only after power had passed into the hands of the proletariat and peasantry. Until then the war remained an imperialist one. Though the workers, peasants and soldiers had elected delegates to the Soviets who supported the Dans, Tseretellis and Chernovs, indignation against the Provisional Government ran high, particularly in the major industrial centres and most intensely in Petrograd.
As early as April demonstrations with the slogan ‘Down with the Provisional Government’ took place in Petrograd. However, Lenin was against this slogan. The Bolsheviks were still a small minority within the working class and had not as yet won the majority to the side of the socialist revolution. In these circumstances the slogan ‘Down with the Provisional Government’ was either an empty phrase or incited the advanced workers to a premature insurrection. The key task was the winning of the supporters of the Mensheviks and the SRs over to the side of the Bolsheviks. As long as wide-ranging democracy continued to exist in the Soviets, that is as long as the bourgeoisie did not feel strong enough to attack soviet democracy, there existed the opportunity to win over the majority of workers peacefully, by propaganda and agitation. The Bolsheviks argued for a series of immediate measures to be taken by the government — redistribution of the land to the peasants, an end to the war, breaking of the secret treaties etc.
Obviously the government of Prince Lvov and the Cadets would never implement such measures. The Bolsheviks argued to Menshevik and SR supporters that their parties should break their coalition with the bourgeois parties and implement such a programme. This could only be done, given the power of the bourgeoisie and landowners, by such a government basing itself on the power of the Soviets. The key slogans of this period — ‘All power to the Soviets’ (in which the Mensheviks and SRs held a majority) and ‘Down with the Capitalist Ministers’ — expressed the demand that the Mensheviks and SRs ‘take the power’, ie form a Menshevik–SR government based on the Soviets.
After the spontaneous semi-insurrectionary movement of the ‘July days’, when the Bolsheviks were outlawed and the power and freedom of the Soviets severely curtailed, the Bolsheviks dropped these slogans and called for the overthrow of the ‘Kerensky military dictatorship’. Lenin held that in this period the Soviets had been hopelessly crippled by their Menshevik and SR leaders and that the Factory Committees were likely to become the basis of working class mobilisation and insurrection. However, the attempt by the reactionary general Kornilov to overthrow the provisional government once again raised the question of the united front as an urgent need for the working class. But even now the Bolsheviks refused political support for the Kerensky Government; indeed the dropping of the demand for his overthrow was based on Kerensky being forced to allow full freedom of propaganda to the Bolsheviks, full freedoms being restored to the Soviets and the arming of the workers against the Kornilov onslaught. ‘
The compromise on our part is a return to the pre-July demand of ‘All Power to the Soviets’ and ‘A Government of SR’s and Mensheviks Responsible to the Soviets’… The compromise would amount to the following: the Bolsheviks without making any claim to participate in the Government (which is impossible for the Internationalist unless a dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasants has been realised) would refrain from demanding the immediate transfer of power to the proletariat and poor peasants and of employing revolutionary methods of fighting for this demand. A condition that is self-evident and not new to the SR’s and Mensheviks would be complete freedom of propaganda and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly without further delays or even at an earlier date…. The Bolsheviks would gain the opportunity of quite freely advocating their views and trying to win influence in the Soviets under a really complete democracy. In words ‘everybody’ now concedes the Bolsheviks this freedom. In reality this freedom is impossible under a bourgeois government or a government in which the bourgeoisie participate, or under any government in fact other than the Soviets. Under a Soviet Government, such freedom would be possible (we do not say it would be a certainty, but still it would be possible). For the sake of such a possibility at such a difficult time it would be worth a compromise with the majority of the Soviets.’ (On Compromises — Lenin)
The compromise did not mean for one minute that the Bolsheviks supported or toned down their criticism of Kerensky’s Government.
‘We are changing the form of our struggle against Kerensky. Without in the least relaxing our hostility towards him, without taking back a single word said against him, without renouncing the task of overthrowing him, we say we must take into account the present situation. We shall not overthrow Kerensky right now. We shall approach the task of fighting against him in a different way, namely we shall point out to the people (who are fighting against Kornilov) Kerensky’s weakness and vacillation. That has been done in the past as well. Now it has become the all-important thing and this constitutes the change.’ (To the CC of the RSDLP — Lenin)
And at the heart of the demand for the Mensheviks and SRs to take the power was a programme of demands both directed at them but most importantly at their supporters who were not only encouraged to force their leaders to act, but also to act on the demands directly themselves.
‘The change, further, is that the all-important thing has now become the intensification of the campaign for some kind of ‘partial’ demands to be presented to Kerensky: arrest Milyukov, arm the Petrograd workers, summon the Kronstadt, Vyborg and Helsingfors troops to Petrograd, disband the Duma, arrest Rodzyanko, legalise the transfer of the landed estates to the peasants, introduce workers’ control over land etc. etc. We must present these demands not only to Kerensky and not so much to Kerensky as to the workers, soldiers and peasants who have been carried away by the struggle against Kornilov. We must keep up their enthusiasm, encourage them to deal with the generals and officers who have declared for Kornilov, urge them to demand the immediate transfer of land to the peasants, suggest to them it is necessary to arrest Rodzyanko and Milyukov, dissolve the Duma, close down Rech and other bourgeois papers and institute investigations against them. The Left SR’s must be especially urged in this direction.
‘It would be wrong to think we have moved further away from the task of the proletariat winning power. No, we have come very close to it, not directly, but from the side.’ (ibid)
The essence of the demand for a workers government is set out even more clearly in a resolution from the Bolsheviks to the central executive committee of the Soviets (the TSIK). The resolution points to the complicity in the Kornilov coup of the Cadets and demands their exclusion from government along with all other ‘representatives of property owning elements’; it declares that the policy of conciliation and non-accountability must end and goes on: ‘
The exclusive authority of the Provisional Government and its lack of accountability are no longer tolerable. The only way out is to form a government of representatives of the revolutionary proletariat and peasantry, which must take the following basis for action:
1. A democratic republic must be decreed.
2. Private ownership of landed estates to be abolished immediately without compensation and the land put under the control of peasant committees…
3. Workers’ control to be introduced on a state wide scale.
4. Secret treaties to be declared inoperative and a universal and democratic peace be offered immediately to all the peoples of the belligerent states.
Immediate measures to be decreed:
1. An end to all repression directed against the working class and its organisations..2. The right to self determination of nations living in Russia to be made a reality…
3. The dissolution of the State Council and the State Duma. Immediate convocation of a Constituent Assembly…’
(‘On Power’ in, ‘The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Central Committee Minutes of the RSDLP’ Pluo Press, P. 42)
Here we have in essence the demand for a workers and peasants government. Firstly a programme of key demands which meet the burning needs of the masses — against the war, economic sabotage and the landowners, and knocking from the hands of the enfeebled bourgeoisie of the instruments of repression. Secondly such a government must be answerable to the organisations of struggle of the workers and peasants and soldiers — Soviets. Thirdly the question of who shall participate in such a government is posed algebraically, ie it s composition is not declared as fixed in advance. The Mensheviks and SRs are imperatively called on once more to break with the bourgeoisie and take up these tasks.
The use of these tactics helped accelerate the realisation of the masses that the Mensheviks and SRs would not carry out these measures and that only the Bolsheviks would. The elections to the Soviets in September/October gave the Bolsheviks the majority they needed to organise the insurrection against the Provisional Government. Even after the October rising and the placing of the power into the hands of the Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks still offered the united front at a governmental level to the other workers and peasants parties on the basis of the key demands of the programme of ending the war, distributing the land, recognising workers control of production and basing the government on the armed Soviets.
This tactic produced a split in the ranks of the SRs with the Lefts joining the government, whilst division and confusion reigned amongst the Menshevik leaders. The ‘Workers and Peasant Government’ was realised as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Poor Peasants.
The debate in the Comintern
In the revolutionary upsurge which swept Europe after the First World War, the importance of the united front tended to be underestimated by those seeking to emulate the success of the Bolsheviks. The embryo Communist parties in the West, for all their admiration of the Bolshevik revolution were almost universally ignorant of the strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik Party in the period leading up to the seizure of power. The dislocation of war, and the collapse of the old International had almost completely cut off one country’s revolutionary movement from artothers, while the new International was chronically weak organisationally. The disastrous results of a CP/Social Democratic ‘Soviet’ Government in Hungary did nothing to recommend the united front to the Western parties, who had little knowledge of the mistakes made by the Hungarian Communists under Bela Kun.
The underestimation of the importance of orienting towards the mass of workers still under the influence of the Social Democracy was in part a result of the composition of the young Communist parties. The latter were largely made up of revolutionary syndicalists, left Social Democrats and the best of the revolutionary anarchists etc. As a result they displayed strong ultra-left tendencies. The role of the Social Democrats in Germany, butchering Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the need to split with these parties, made the tactic of offering co-operation with these ‘agents of the bourgeoisie’ seem either impossible, illusion mongering or outright betrayal. In Germany and Austria the ruling class reeled under the impact of defeat, the rank and file of the army was in revolt, workers seized their factories, the Social Democrats appeared prisoners of their own mass base, Soviets sprang up and Republics, sometimes ‘Socialist’ or ‘Soviet’ ones, were declared.
Even the ‘victorious’ powers were racked by massive upheavals as the impact of the Russian revolution and the deprivations of the war spurred the working class onto challenge the existing order. Both the young Communist parties and the Bolsheviks themselves believed that the social upheavals following the war would lead directly to the conquest of power in at least one of the major capitalist states. Despite set-backs, this perspective dominated the Comintern up to 1921 and is reflected in the manifestoes of the First and Second Congresses. In this period as Trotsky pointed out,
‘…because of the relative ease with which the October Revolution was accomplished, the victory of the Russian proletariat did not present itself commensurately to the leading circles of European workers as a politico-strategic task, and this aspect was not sufficiently assimilated by them… Thereby the questions of revolution strategy in the epoch of the struggle for power were naturally reduced to a minimum’. (First Five Years of the Comintern Vol.2 p. 28)
The European communists had not absorbed the special circumstances which made Russia the weak link in the capitalist chain, the weakness of its bourgeoisie, its dependence on European capital, a revolutionary party steeled over a long period of underground struggle and the absence of a powerful trade union bureaucracy, etc. The defeat suffered by the Communist Party in Germany in March 1921 signalled to the Bolsheviks and the Communist International the need to reassess the immediate revolutionary perspective. In the Soviet Union after the Kronstadt rising it led to the adoption of NEP, a retreat in the economic sphere intimately linked with a retreat on the political field in Europe. (Only with victorious revolutions in the West could war communism have led to a relatively rapid advance towards socialism and Communism.)
The reassessment which started at the Third Congress and was developed and extended during the fourth, started by examining why the massive, largely spontaneous upsurge following the war, had failed to lead to the seizure of power by the working class in the West. While recognising that by 1921 European capitalism had achieved a temporary stabilisation, the Comintern reaffirmed that the parties still operated in a period of revolutions where any stabilisation were transitory and of short duration. The Communist parties in Germany, Italy and France whilst winning to their banners hundreds of thousands of revolutionary workers, particularly young workers, had not succeeded in winning the mass of workers from their traditional parties which remained under the ideological sway of the old reformist leaderships.
The united front tactic addressed itself to this problem. In a situation of capitalist instability where the communist parties still commanded a substantial minority of the working class while the remainder were organised by the reformists and centrists, the question of the united front was posed in all its acuteness. The parties needed to seize every organisational avenue to ensure the maximum co-ordinated action between communist and non-communist working masses around the immediate needs of the class. Taking the offensive against the reformists into both trade union and political fields simultaneously, making a series of specific proposals to reformist trade union and political leaders, demanding joint aid to strikers, action over the unemployed, joint defence against fascists, etc and recording before the eyes of the masses their response.
Such a tactic could not be limited to the trade union field alone — a position which Bodiga wished the Fourth Congress to adopt. Nor could it, in a period when the Social Democracies were being thrust into office by their supporters, only to pull the shaken bourgeoisies’ chestnuts out of the fire, stop short at the question of government. What was to be the attitude of the young CPs to the Social Democrats when they held office, either in coalition with bourgeois parties or on their own. Clearly in terms of these governments their actions they were bourgeois governments. Yet their mass support elected them and expected them to act in the workers interest. It was clearly not enough for the communists to denounce these governments and counterpose simply the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The masses had both with their votes and with their trade unions and Social Democratic Party membership cards indicated that propaganda alone would not convince them that the CPs were right. They suspected the communists of wanting to split the forces of the working class in action against the bosses for immediate, pressing demands. If this could be combatted in the unions and in campaigns by the united front against an openly bourgeois government, were the communists to have nothing to say when the workers parties were faced with the question of taking governmental power? It was this problem that the debate at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern centred around.
The resolution of the Communist International makes clear that the slogan for a workers government ‘is an inevitable consequence of the united front tactic’ (Theses on Tactics — Fourth World Congress). The partial struggles of the working class inevitably ran up against the structures of the capitalist state, against the government of the day. Revolutionaries must be able to provide answers to these ‘governmental’ questions as well as to the questions of involving direct action of the working class.† As Radek put it, ‘
But these demands (for higher wages, retention of the eight-hour day) are not sufficient. Workers who belong to no political partyat all can, and do, demand the daily wage of 1000 marks, whilst 500 marks will not obtain for them the necessities of life. But, they see that to increase their wages in paper money provides no solution from their trouble. To begin with such watchwords suffice, but the longer the struggle lasts, the more essential does it become to proclaim political watchwords, the watchwords of social organisation.’
The Comintern recognised that a political crisis which threatened the bourgeois order could come about as a result of the mass struggles of the working class while the communist parties still commanded the allegiance of only a minority of the working class. In such a situation, the reformist parties would attempt to ‘solve’ the crisis at the expense of the working class, in open or concealed alliance with the bourgeois parties. It was necessary for the Communist parties to demand of those parties which claimed to represent the workers’ interests that they break with their bourgeois allies, take the power and enter on the path of struggle for a workers’ government. ‘
At a suitable time, prepared for by events and our propaganda we shall address ourselves to the working masses who still reject the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat or who have simply not matured enough for these questions and speak to them as follows: ‘You can see how the bourgeoisie is restoring its class unity under the ‘Left Block’ and is preparing its own ‘Left’ government. Why should not we the workers, belonging to different parties and tendencies, create together with non-party workers our own proletarian block in defence of our own interests? And why should we not put forward our own Workers’ Government? Here is a natural, simple and clear statement of the whole issue.’ (Trotsky — Letter to the convention of the French CP, in First Five Years of the Comintern)
The Comintern did not argue that all societies would pass through a period under a workers government as a necessary transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat; it was only one possibility. Obviously such a development was more likely in countries with historically strong reformist parties, and it addressed precisely the problem which was most likely to arise in those countries where the reformist parties maintained their grip on the majority of the working class even in a period of chronic capitalist instability.
A clear distinction was made between genuine ‘revolutionary workers governments’ and ‘liberal or social democratic governments’. A revolutionary workers government would necessarily be based on the active mass organisations of the working class and have been formed out of a period of mass struggles.
‘A Government of this sort is only possible if it emerges from the masses themselves, if it is based on working class organisations that are suited for combat and formed from the broadest layers of the oppressed working masses.’ (Theses on Tactics)
Such a government must carry out a series of measures aimed at solving the crisis at the expense of the bourgeoisie. It must support all working class struggles and aim at strengthening the working class organisations while assaulting those of the bourgeoisie.
‘The most elementary programme of such a government must consist in arming the proletariat, disarming the counter-revolutionary bourgeois organisations, installing supervision over production, ensuring that the main burden of taxation falls on the rich, and smashing the resistance of the bourgeois counter-revolution.’ (Theses on Tactics)
The implementation of such a programme would have a dramatic destabilising effect on the capitalist state and provoke a violent reaction from the bourgeoisie. Such a government could only be a temporary phenomenon, giving rise as it must to a civil war with the forces of the bourgeoisie. Although such a government was not the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Comintern allowed for the possibility of Communists entering such a government under certain strictly laid down conditions.
1. Participation in a Workers’ Government can take place only with the approval of the Communist International.
2. The Communist members of a Workers’ Government remain under the strict control of their party.
3. The Communist members of a Workers’ Government remain in direct contact with the revolutionary organisations of the masses.
4. The Communist Party has the absolute right to maintain its public identity and retain complete independence of agitation. (ibid)
Only the communists could provide the resoluteness of programme and of will to rally the working class against the onslaught of the bourgeoisie. The communists supported by the masses would kick out the social democrats whenever and wherever they betrayed or vacillated in the life or death struggle, winning to the banner of communism the best elements of the reformist parties. Trotsky criticised the ultra-lefts and the French party coming as they did from a revolutionary syndicalist tradition, who in their eagerness to be ‘intransigent’ towards the socialists failed to understand the effect that a period of social crisis, combined with a properly carried out united front tactic would have on that party.
‘But can Communists conceivably participate in the same government with Renaudel, Blum and the rest? Some comrades will ask. Under certain conditions this might prove temporarily unavoidable, just as we Russian Communists were willing, even after our October victory, to permit Mensheviks and SR’s to enter the Government, and we actually did draw in SR’s… For matters to reach the point of creating a Workers’ Government, it is first necessary to rally the majority of the working class around this slogan. Once we achieve this… the stock of Renaudel, Blum and Jouhaux would not be worth much, because these gentlemen are able to maintain themselves only through an alliance with the bourgeoisie, provided the working class is split.
‘It is perfectly obvious that once the majority of the French working class unites under the banner of the Workers’ Government, we shall have no cause whatever to worry about the composition of this government. A genuine success for the slogan of the Workers’ Government would already signify, in the nature of things, the prelude to the proletarian revolution. This is what those comrades fail to understand who approach slogans formally and assay them with the yardstick of verbal radicalism, without taking into account the processes occurring within the working class itself.’ (Trotsky, Letter to the Convention of the French CP.)
The use of the workers government slogan is not of course limited to periods where the formation of a workers government is an immediate or impending possibility. Its importance as a weapon for breaking workers from reformism lies in agitation around the slogan, counterposing the workers government and its programme to their party’s hidden or open bloc with the bourgeoisie. In this we do not say in advance that such a government will consist of the Communist Party and Socialist Party; we argue for a specific programme that a workers government would carry out. To those who agree with such a programme and wish to fight for it in their parties, we say, we will fight alongside you and build a mass movement which will either force your leaders to adopt such policies or sweep them aside and replace them with leaders who will.
Left and right opportunism on the united front
Clearly by the Fourth Congress the Comintern was only just beginning to work out the concrete application of the workers government. The death of Lenin, the defeat of the Left Opposition and the growth of the Russian bureaucracy as an independent force was to rapidly destroy the Comintern as a revolutionary democratic centralist international.
The Fourth Congress recognised that the United Front and the workers’ government slogan in particular was, because it was a tactical compromise, open to serious misuse. Much time was spent in allaying the fears of the left that the formula was not in itself a right opportunist deviation which would play into the hands of those sections of the national parties who still remained tied to social democratic and parliamentary practices. As Zinoviev admitted, ‘
Even our best comrades have made mistakes in the application of this policy… It is only a question of knowing how to apply it… We shall meet even greater difficulties here than in the application of the United Front. But this is no reason why we should reject it as our French comrades have proposed.’ (Zinoviev’s speech to the Fourth Congress).
Ironically enough it was Zinoviev himself who was to use the slogan in a sectarian fashion, equating it with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and thus ‘throwing away’ ‘The Workers’ Government is the same as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It is a pseudonym for Soviet Government. It is more suitable for the ordinary working man and we will therefore use it.‘ (Zinoviev’s speech to the enlarged executive committee of the CI quoted in Meyers speech, Fourth Congress.)
Despite verbal concessions made by Zinoviev in the debate it is clear from his later positions, particularly those put forward at the Fifth Congress, that Zinoviev, even before the Fourth Congress, had tendencies towards a left sectarian position on the United Front. By the next year these had blossomed, starting from a characterisation of social democracy as ‘the left wing of fascism’.
Zinoviev goes on to reject any possibility of a workers’ government involving the social democracy, in the sense envisaged by the Fourth Congress.
‘The strength of the CP’s and of the other alleged workers’ parties is certainly very great. If these workers’ parties were real workers’ parties, not according to their composition, but politically, and we could form a coalition with them, we would become unconquerable in Europe. But these parties are workers’ parties only in name. It is, therefore, nonsense, it is a sin, it is counter-revolutionary utopianism to talk of a coalition of all workers’ parties.’
For Zinoviev the workers’ government had only one meaning. ‘
As a matter of fact, the slogan is connected with the Russian Revolution. What was the meaning of the slogan in the Russian Revolution? It was a pseudonym for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat — no more, no less.’ And again, ‘The Workers’ Government is for us the most powerful and popular form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The workers and peasants perform the deed and then understand it.’ (Zinoviev Report from the EC, 3rd Session 5th Congress)
This position led directly to the adoption of the ‘United Front from below’. The tactic of the United Front as a means of breaking the masses from social democracy was effectively abandoned. To justify this position the strength of the CP in Germany was massively over-estimated and the hold of the Social Democracy over the working class under-estimated. Revolutionaries were left calling on workers and peasants to leave their parties and fight for the proletarian revolution. ‘
On this question we must shun circumlocution. We must say — Comrades, a Workers’ Government is a splendid thing, but in order to form it we must first overthrow the bourgeoisie, and in order to do this, we must have arms, we must organise, we must win over the majority of the working class.’ (Zinoviev, 15th Session of the 5th Congress)
Zinoviev and his modern-day imitators, fail to realise that in abandoning the workers’ government, they abandon one of the most important weapons for winning over the majority of the proletariat to the side of the communists. No compromises for them, everything is black and white, one is left denouncing social democrats as counter-revolutionaries, and demanding their members fight with you for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (but under the guise of the Workers’ Government).† It was against just such ‘lefts’ that Radek argued at the Fourth Congress, trying to point out that the social democracy in times of crisis under the pressures of the masses might well take an apparent left turn. ‘
At the meeting of the enlarged executive and in his speech on tactics, Zinoviev used a very happy phrase. ‘True the Social Democrats are traitors to the proletariat, but they can also betray the bourgeoisie whenever this becomes necessary for their salvation.’ Now the second question is to what extent can we rely on this. Comrades, if curses could kill a party, we would ask Comrade Zinoviev to sign a ukase ordering Scheidemann and company to disappear from the face of the earth. Since this is impossible, we must fight them. The only question is when will we be able to destroy them. It is possible that these people are so tightly bound to the bourgeoisie that they cannot break away from them, so that we will have to destroy them together with the bourgeoisie. But it is possible that there will come a time when, the coalition with the bourgeoisie having become impossible for them, they will be forced to enter a coalition with us. In this coalition they will attempt to betray us. We will be able to conquer them only after their actions within the coalition will have discredited them totally and the masses will have gone over to us.’
While the sectarians reject the United Front to maintain their ‘purity’ the opportunists grasp at it, not as a means to expose the vacillation and treachery of the reformist leaders, but as a method of influencing the policy of these leaders in a ‘left’ direction. The slogan is often interpreted by the opportunists in a purely parliamentary and democratic way, as involving a parliamentary configuration of one or more ‘workers’ parties’ which is then designated a ‘workers’ government’. The role of the mass workers’ organisations and the fight within these for a workers’ government committed to a programme which answers the immediate needs of the class in its fight against the bourgeoisie, is minimised or disappears completely. The most recent example of this opportunist use of the slogan was the content given to the call by ‘Democracia Proletaria’ in the 1976 General Election campaign for a ‘Government of the Left’, made up Lotta Continua, Avanguardia Operaia, and the PDUP, and joined later by the Italian section of the USFI; this centrist grouping argued that a CP/SP led government would be a ‘transitional government opening the way to socialism’, ‘a government motivated by progressive intentions within the capitalist framework’ (sic). Thus fighting for a Workers’ Government becomes fighting for a CP/SP government on its programme. The opportunists fail to make the distinction that the Comintern made between ‘ostensible workers’ governments’, and end up supporting bourgeois governments. Lest people think it is only the Italian section of the USFI who have such a notion of the workers’ government, one finds an essentially similar formulation in the issue No. 6 of Socialist Challenge. In a debate on the British Road to Socialism, Robin Blackburn argues,
‘We are in favour of the formation of Workers’ governments of bourgeois democracy, but the key question remains to delineate the character of the socialist transition. As revolutionaries, we insist that the whole orientation of such a government should be to stimulate soviet-type bodies. It doesn’t mean creating armed workers’ councils as soon as possible. That would be the sheerest adventurism. It does mean creating workers’ councils as soon as possible and rooting them in the masses.’
The statement that the Workers’ Government should be formed on the ‘terrain of bourgeois democracy’ and that it doesn’t mean ‘creating armed workers’ councils as soon as possible’ stamps this as an extreme right-opportunist position, contradicted in every point by the theses adopted as the Fourth Comintern Congress and by every occasion that Trotsky used this slogan. Firstly, to locate the Workers’ Government ‘on the terrain of bourgeois democracy’ is a flat, one-sided and false posing of the situation. A Workers’ Government becomes a possibility precisely in a period when ‘bourgeois society is particularly unstable’, that is to say when bourgeois democracy is in process of dissolution under the blows of open class struggle between the working class and the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie. In Radek’s words, ‘What we have in mind is not a parliamentary combination, but a platform for the mobilisation of the masses.’ It is an intrinsically transitional slogan, ie it opens the road to the working class to transcend bourgeois democracy. What does this mean? Certainly it means the creation of organs of working class power — the organs of workers’ democracy. But Soviets cannot become instruments of class rule before they have become instruments of class struggle. That struggle culminates in armed struggle in the crushing of the military resistance, the dissolution of the ‘special bodies of armed men’ at the service of the class enemy. Thus the Fourth Congress theses stress that, ‘The overriding tasks of the workers’ government must be to arm the proletariat, to disarm bourgeois, counter-revolutionary organisations, to introduce the control of production, to transfer the main burden of taxation on to the rich and to break the resistance of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie.’
If Comrade Blackburn imagines that the bourgeoisie would sit back and watch a workers’ government come to power and proceed to ‘stimulate soviet-type bodies’ then not only does he not understand revolutionary tactics, but he has no measure of the class enemy either. If he does realise this, then why does he decide that ‘creating armed workers’ councils’ to meet this threat is adventurism? The most elementary form of proletarian struggle, the strike, poses the question of force — of picketing. The political general strike poses the question of an armed workers’ militia. (‘a General Strike that does not safeguard itself from acts of force and rout is a demonstration of cowardice and doomed to defeat. Only a lunatic or a traitor could call for a struggle under such conditions’ (Trotsky, Where is Britain Going?)). Does Comrade Blackburn propose that the workers should take governmental power and leave the arsenals in the safe keeping of the generals?
In fact Comrade Blackburn has a totally passive parliamentary notion of a Workers’ Government. But, it will be replied, what about the Soviets? Here again the reality is robbed of all concreteness. The Provisional Governments of Lvov and Kerensky co-existed with Soviets. The Ebert-Scheidemann Government, which butchered Luxemburg and Liebknecht, rested on Soviets. Ramsay MacDonald in 1917 supported the call for soviets. The Austro-Marxist centrists wished to integrate workers’ councils into a republican constitution. The crucial question is what are soviets for? The answer is that as long as the bourgeoisie holds in its grasp the instruments of coercion, the key task of the soviets is to seize those instruments, to mobilise the workers for this struggle.
What Blackburn is in fact doing is diametrically the opposite of what the Comintern Theses advocated. He is disguising a Liberal-Labour or Social Democratic Government as a Workers’ Government with the addition of impotent, disarmed Soviets. He is translating the British Road to Socialism into Trotskyese.
Portugal
It was the situation in Portugal in 1975/76, where an acute crisis posed the question of workers’ power while the reformist parties continued to hold the allegiance of the majority of the working class, which showed that the inability of the ‘revolutionary’ left to grasp the basic premises of the united front tactic led to the most crass opportunism and sectarian errors on the governmental question and a failure to provide any revolutionary strategy for the Portuguese working class.
The overthrow of the Caetano regime in Portugal in April 1974 ushered in a period of chronic destabilisation for Portuguese capitalism. The upsurge of the working class, the disintegration of discipline in the ranks of the army, the discrediting of most of the key political and industrial figures of the bourgeoisie due to their total involvement with Salazar and Caetano, created a situation where only the MFA chiefs could hold the ring. This Bonapartist role was possible because of the tremendous prestige the MFA held as the initiators of the April coup, the lack of political experience of the Portuguese working class and the universal support it received from the political formations of the working class — Social Democrats, Stalinists, and Centrists alike. Not only had the bourgeoisie had to resign political power into the hands of the MFA leaders, it had also been forced to resign control of important sectors of the economy into the hands of the state. This increase in the state capitalist sector, under pressure from the mass struggles of the working class and the fight and sabotage of the bosses, was accelerated by September 1974 and March 1975 coup attempts. The MFA leaders became correspondingly more radical in their language. The attempt to retain a foothold in Africa was abandoned. At the same time the MFA leaders launched vicious attacks on workers’ struggles and in particular at the mushrooming battle for workers’ control, coming to a head in the conflict over Radio Renascença and the newspaper República. The MFA monolith began to fragment into groupings loosely allied with the various political parties or formations — loosely because none of them wished to abandon the key role of the MFA, ie its Bonapartist role. Even the quixotic Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho who stood closest to the left-centrist groupings and mouthed slogans about ‘Peoples’ Power’, was a firm advocate of ‘non-partyism’.
The working class was divided into three basic camps. The best organised, unionised sections of the working class mainly in Lisbon and the south, as well as the agricultural proletarians of the large estates were overwhelmingly behind the CP. The less organised sections of workers stood behind Soares’ Socialist Party. These workers were won to the SP by its radical rhetoric, its support of strikers at a time when the CP was opposing them, its commitment to ‘democracy’ ie elections, rights to organise and assemble, etc.
The third, and markedly the smallest section, was made up of younger workers and soldiers drawn to the struggle to build commissions in the factories and barracks. Impatient of the big workers’ parties’ resistance to this, they tended to generalise their reaction into an anti-party attitude and a propensity to hero-worship figures like Carvalho and the left officers. In this milieu the left-centrist formations — UDP, MES, PRP (B R) — held considerable influence. To this milieu was drawn the USFI section, the LCI.
The major workers’ parties the PSP and PCP had differing but definite strategies. The PSP leadership receiving its financial and political support and guidance from the European and above all the German bourgeoisie through the medium of the Social Democratic and Labour leaders, had the clear project of creating a ‘normal’ West European parliamentary democracy in Portugal. The PCP — no more interested in a socialist revolution than the PSP — preferred a state capitalist dominated economy, a ‘Left’ MFA dominated government with itself installed as bureaucratic representative of the workers — a junior partner in Bonapartism.
The centrists had no definite strategy whatsoever. In their ranks all was confusion. The key task facing revolutionaries was to break the masses of workers from their illusions in the ‘socialist’ nature of all varieties of MFA Bonapartism and in parliamentarism. This meant defeating, in the class, the propagators of these illusions — the CP and SP leaders. This could not be done by propaganda alone. Yet the existence of a significant strata of young militants free from direct CP and SP leadership (though not from the influence of Carvalho and the left officers) as a receptive and growing audience for this propaganda seduced them into believing that it could. Worse, it seduced them into accommodating to the illusions prevalent in this stratum, of avoiding the clear posing of governmental slogans which would expose the nature of the MFA-dominated Provisional Governments.
The utopian-reactionary nonsense of a government of national independence, or a military-people’s government, was adopted and the parliamentary chicanery of Soares, who was looking for an anti-working class pact with the PPD leaders, was denounced but not challenged by a tactical assault on the CP workers.
Yielding to centrist impressionism they took the ‘Peoples’ power’ rhetoric of Carvalho and the Cop-Con officers as good coin, merely needing a little tidying up and encouragement to go further. On the other hand, Soares’ project of a stable, bourgeois democracy was so dangerous that democratic slogans were to be abandoned. After all, Carvalho was in favour of Soviets (more or less), whereas Soares wanted a (bourgeois) parliament.
This approach led to two related errors. Firstly, the failure to tackle the democratic illusions of the great majority of Portuguese workers — ie to really fight bourgeois democracy — and secondly, a total inability to combat left Bonapartist demagogy.
The elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1975 gave the SP and the CP together an overwhelming majority. Yet the MFA had extracted from Soares and Cunhal their assent to a pact which guaranteed the role of the MFA in the ‘revolution’, ie they reduced to nullity the effects of the elections and condemned the Assembly to impotence. Revolutionaries should have called for the breaking of this pact, the breaking of the open and secret deals between the SP and the PPD and the CP with the MFA leaders for a pledge to form a CP/SP government based on the Constituent Assembly. Such a government would not be a ‘Workers’ Government’, and no attempt should have been made to disguise it as such. On the contrary, revolutionaries should have fought to form a United Front of CP, SP, centrist and non-party workers via the centralisation of the workers, soldiers’, tenants’ and peasants’ commissions to fight for the key immediate needs facing the masses, including centrally, democratic rights for soldiers including the election of officers and the disbanding of the military police, for an armed workers’ militia, for defence and extension of nationalisation of key industries and the land, for workers’ control of production, etc. Revolutionaries should thus have called for the struggle for a workers’ government.
Roughly the same situation presented itself before and during the legislative assembly elections in 1976. Here again the workers’ parties struck a deal with the MFA Bonapartists (now, after 25th November debacle, openly and consistently carrying out military repression against workers in struggle). Again revolutionaries should have raised the demand for a CP/SP government based on the Legislative Assembly, the breaking of the pact with the MFA and Eanes, the total rejection of the military/presidential system.
The various Trotskyist tendencies on an international scale, faced with the task of tactics in the ‘democratic’ phase of the Portuguese revolution, fell into two basic errors, both of which amounted to a superstitious fetishising of bourgeois democracy — one ‘negative’ the other ‘positive’. The Mandel tendency in the USFI and the British SWP (IS) developed a violent fear of bourgeois democracy and of the democratic illusions of the Portuguese masses, which must not be ‘indulged’ by the use of democratic slogans. Their horror-stricken shrinking from the constituent and legislative assemblies led them to almost total blindness to the MFA Bonapartists and to their publicists in the working class, the PCP and the centrist groupings like the PRP (BR) and thus to fostering illusions in the bedrock formations of the bourgeois state. The fact that the army was destabilised and that it wore a ‘socialist’ or ‘left’ disguise calmed the anxieties of Cliff, Mandel, et al. Only when the ‘right wing’ generals began to push aside the ‘lefts’ did these weathercocks indicate that the storm was upon the completely unprepared ranks of the Lisbon workers.
The ‘positive fetishists’ of bourgeois democracy, the SWP (USA), the OCI and to some extent Lutte Ouvriere, created a cast iron ‘stage’ out of the democratic tasks facing the workers — the key task was to establish bourgeois democracy first. Emphasising the Bonapartism of the MFA and the bureaucratic sectarianism of the PCP they fell into at best passing over in silence, at worst, painting in glowing colours, the ‘democratic’ nature of the SP’s policy. Soares’ coquetting with the right wing parties and generals, his preparedness to continue mobilisations openly being used by fascists to attack CP and Intersyndical workers and institutions, his threat to remove the Assembly to the North to act as a potential Versailles against a Lisbon ‘commune’ was passed over in silence.
The putting forward of an independent working class programme in counterposition to that of Social Democrats was effectively abandoned, and the fight for a ‘Workers’ Government’ identified with a fight for an SP/CP Government. So Gerry Foley, spokesperson for the SWP on Portugal, argues: ‘if the CP had been interested in establishing a government representative of the workers, it had only to base itself on the constituent assembly and call on delegates there to act in accordance with the clear mandate given them by the voters’. (Intercontinental Press, 21st July 1975)
This is how the opportunists reduce the ‘Workers’ Government’ to little more than a parliamentary combination of ‘workers’ parties’.
Had the clash between the SP and the CP and their generals come to open civil war, it is by no means certain that the two international tendencies in the USFI might not have found themselves in opposite camps.
In this, as in other matters, the SWP found itself in solidarity with the French OCI. Starting from the same premise, ‘… it is not the Socialist Party which in Portugal is waging a bitter struggle against the masses for the benefit of the restoration of power of the bourgeoisie under the form of a corporatist regime. It is the Stalinist party the PCP.’, the OCI goes on to endow the formation of a parliamentary bloc between the SP/CP with almost magical properties. ‘Whatever its policies (sic), a government of workers parties which comes to power lifted on a revolutionary wave, with no ministers representing bourgeois organisations and parties has a tremendous revolutionary significance; the proletariat can bring to power a government of the parties it considers to be its own.’ (New Defeat for the Counter-Revolution in Portugal’, from La Verite, reprinted in Marxist Bulletin 2/3.) The ‘revolutionary significance’ of such a government would depend first and foremost on a revolutionary party’s intransigent criticism of its anti-working class policies. Those who cheer uncritically the formation of such governments only disarm the proletarian vanguard in the face of treachery by Social Democrats and Stalinists alike.
This is not to say that a CP/SP government, let alone a workers’ government, is an inevitable ‘stage’ in Portugal. What is essential is to overcome the resistance of the CP and SP supporters to the transformation of their organisations into workers, peasants and soldiers councils. In Portugal the united front was and is crucial to the formation of Soviets. The congenital centrists such as the PRP (BR) and the MES imagined that propaganda for soviets and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would vapourise the CP/SP obstacle. The existence of a significant strata of non- (or anti-) CP workers, mainly younger workers and largely in Lisbon, convinced the Trotskyist sympathising section of the USFI and its mentors in Paris and Brussels that the ‘revolutionary process’ was producing a ‘new vanguard’. They too fell into tireless propagandism for soviets disconnected from the struggle for the united front. Whilst they avoided — on their own initiative at least — the idiocy of calling for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (whilst there were no soviets it could only have been done by and played into the hands of the MFA Bonapartists) they fell into endless confusion when it came to the question of governmental solutions. In the resolution of the United Secretariat June 1975 (Inprecor No. 29) we find that the LCI is putting its stress on ‘
the necessity of a permanent mobilisation of the workers which allows them to enforce their demands, to expel all the bourgeois ministers from the government and to form a WORKERS AND PEASANTS GOVERNMENT, that is to say of workers organisations and of representatives of agricultural workers and poor peasants: a government of the SP/CP, Intersyndical and other organs representing sections of the working class and agricultural workers. For the decisive advance of the revolutionary process such a government would have to base itself on a system of workers, soldiers and peasants councils.’
Here we find no clarity whatsoever: a CP/SP government, a ‘workers and peasants government’ and the proletarian dictatorship are all confused or rather rolled up into a ‘revolutionary process’. All that is certain is that this ‘process’ does not start in the actual world of today. The question of the masses’ illusions in the elections for the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies are simply ignored. As there is no ‘system of workers and soldiers and peasants councils’ to force the formation of a ‘workers and peasants government’ the USFI neatly takes a step sideways from reality to fantasy and chooses, as the launching pad, a ‘National Workers’ Assembly’. In sum, they refuse to take up the concrete governmental issue — a CP/SP Government, and the United Front in favour of ‘building soviets’ and a critical tolerance of the MFA government.
While the minority in the USFI used the workers’ government in a thoroughly opportunist fashion, identifying it with a CP/SP parliamentary combination, the Majority Tendency and its sympathising section, the LCI, threw in its lot with those who rejected the United Front strategy towards the CP and the SP, and peddled illusions in a ‘government of revolutionary unity’. From June 1975 the IMT of the USFI, despite its formal position of calling on the CP/SP to break with the bourgeoisie and its abstract posing of the question of a workers’ government, in practice counterposed to these slogans the building and centralising of Soviets:
‘The bureaucratic leaders of the CP and SP still control the majority of the working class, although the prestige of these leaderships is increasingly being undermined and shattered. To overcome the present divisions of the working class it is necessary to establish organs within which socialists, communists and revolutionaries can meet, discuss, develop their differences and debate in front of the entire class, so that the entire class can judge. What better forum for free debate and freely accepted unity in action than freely and democratically elected Workers’ Councils.’
And again: ‘
There is no road to victory and no road to building a mass revolutionary party in Portugal today other than the road of tirelessly campaigning for an extension, generalisation, coordination and centralisation of democratically elected Workers’ Councils.’ (Mandel, Maitan and Frank, ‘In Defense of the Portuguese Revolution’. Intercontinental Press, 8th September 1975)
What the IMT trio leave out of this ‘scenario for revolution’ is that it was precisely that active opposition from the CP and SP and their influence in the working class, which was the main stumbling block to building such Soviets. Only the most flexible and audacious united front activities at all levels — workplace, trade union, community and governmental — around a specific programme would have enabled revolutionaries to fight alongside socialist and communist workers in the construction of soviets, with the aim of breaking them from their reformist leaderships. Certainly this united front had to address a whole series of immediate questions, but it could not ignore the crucial question of who should form the government now — particularly in the middle of a violent governmental crisis which saw the CP and SP and their respective generals at one another’s throats. Instead the USFI jointed the other sectarians and ultra-left centrists — the PRP, ISGB, etc — in ignoring the United Front except ‘from below’, and posed it as an ultimatum to CP and SP workers to form Soviets.
The immediate and actual questions of governmental power cannot be simply ignored by revolutionaries. Politics like nature, abhors a vacuum. Nor is it enough to try to fill this vacuum with abstraction such as the LCI/IMT’s use of the ‘Workers’ Government’ was. What is involved is not filling a space in a list of demands on a piece of paper — a purely literary task — but pointing to the working class the next steps on the road to power. The USFI majority, by downgrading the importance of the united front and the call for a CP/SP government in favour of ‘building soviets’, slipped into a benevolent neutrality towards the 5th Provisional Government, with its mixture of Bonapartists and Stalinists. Increasingly the logic of this position was to identify a coalition of ‘workers’ parties’ as worse than a popular front because the latter was built on an unstable Bonapartist base, whereas the former might stabilise bourgeois democracy. This definitely led to ‘lesser evil’ support for the CP — Goncalves bloc, and to trusting the MFA regime to defend the gains of the Portuguese working class. ‘
Given the present political line of the SP and CP leadership, the masses cannot and will not understand the slogan ‘SP/CP Government’ in any other way than as a government based on the constituent assembly, that is the reconstruction (sic) of the bourgeois state apparatus, of bourgeois law and order. That is the immediate goal of the bourgeois counter-revolution, we must oppose it with all our strength.’ (Revolution and Counter Revolution in Portugal — Intercontinental Press, December 22nd 1975)
This covering for the MFA should be no surprise to those who read MMF’s earlier article where they attacked the SWP/US for warning of the possible Bonapartist intentions of Carvalho and the left MFA. ‘
In the July 28th issue of Intercontinental Press, Comrade Foley represents Carvalho as a ‘possible’ ‘General on a white horse’, that is a possible Bonaparte emerging from the power struggle in Portugal. We have no interest in speculating about the secret intentions or basic character of this or that individual officer. We can only judge class and political trends.’
And later, ‘
Lenin and Trotsky suspected Kerensky of not a few ‘Bonapartist intentions’ and denounced them but the Bolsheviks never concentrated their accusation on Kerensky’s presumed desire to become a dictator. Had they done so, there would have been great confusion when it was Kornilov who actually struck.’ (In Defense of the Portuguese Revolution MMF — Intercontinental Press, September 8th 1975)
Thus the USFI muted its criticism of the ‘left’ MFA and CP, preferring to direct its fire against the ‘right’, this in a situation where a significant proportion of the vanguard of the Portuguese working class had tremendous illusions in lefts like Carvalho. This should not be too surprising because, for the USFI, there is always the possibility that a Carvalho or a Cunhal may, under exceptional circumstances, lead a socialist revolution which would result in a ‘deformed workers’ state’. Cunhal might turn out like a Tito, Mao or a Ho Chi Minh, who were able ‘to lead their deformed revolutions to victory … by breaking with the key strategic and tactical theorems of Stalinism.’ (MMF in Defense of the Portuguese Revolution.)
Now, while for MMF it is ‘overwhelmingly likely’ that the Portuguese revolution will follow the classical pattern and will triumph only through the conquest of power by the proletariat, the possibility of other forces leading it automatically leads to a defence of the ‘left’ MFA and CP (potential leaders of deformed revolutions) against the ‘restorers of capitalism’, the SP and the right.
To support this opportunist position, MMF are forced to distort the history of the Bolshevik struggle against the provisional government and Kerensky. Lenin in 1917 attacked those Bolsheviks, who, like the USFI, fell into defending the ‘left’ Bonapartists against the threat from the right.
‘It is my conviction that those who become unprincipled (like Volodarsky) slide into defensism or (like other Bolsheviks) into a bloc with the SRs, into supporting the Provisional Government. Their attitude is absolutely wrong and unprincipled. We become defensists only after the transfer of power to the proletariat, after a peace, after the secret treaties and ties with the banks have been broken, only afterwards.’
And again:
‘… even now we must not support Kerensky’s government. This is unprincipled. We may be asked: aren’t we going to fight against Kornilov? Of course we must! But this is not the same thing. There is a dividing line here which is being stepped over by some Bolsheviks who fall into compromise and allow themselves to be carried away by the course of events.‘ (Lenin to the Central Committee of the RSDLP. Collected Works)
It is little wonder that such a policy in the International led its Portuguese section, the LCI, into a class collaborationist bloc, the FUR, a bloc which characterised the elections as ‘bourgeois’, demanded the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly (presumably by the military) when no alternative workers government was actually in existence, endorsed Carvalho’s guide plan (the Copcon document) for ‘soviets’ and a ‘military-peoples’ government’, as well as the anti-working class record of the fifth provisional government and invited the MFA to join it. As the LCI described it in their self-criticism, it was an ‘accord that supported the MFA and the fifth provisional government, giving rise to all the centrist confusion about the character of the CP and developing a sectarian policy towards the SP.’ (Imprecor, 2nd May 1976). Despite the attempts of the leadership of the USFI to distance themselves from this policy, putting it down to an ‘immature’ leadership in the Portuguese section that was corrected by the steady hand of the International, it can be seen that such a position flowed logically from the positions argued by the leadership of the USFI — Mandel, Maitan and Frank.
The USFI’s majority’s left opportunist distortion of the United Front: ‘left’ phraseology concealing opportunism towards the MFA, flowing from their denunciation of democratic demands which threatened the MFA’s position (e.g. on the Constituent Assembly); led them to occupy a similar position to that of the other major ‘international’ centrist group, the IS (GB) (now SWPGB). The IS chose as a vehicle for its particular brand of centrism the PRP/BR. What made this grouping an ‘authentic revolutionary Marxist organisation’, according to the British IS, was that it ‘(argued the need) for an armed insurrection, (stood) squarely for the dictatorship of the proletariat and (believed) in the need for autonomous organisations of the proletariat (councils/soviets)’. (Portugal at the Crossroads — Cliff) Certainly what it had in common with its British mentor was a rejection of the method of the transitional programme. Also it rejected the United Front tactic. During the spring and summer of 1975 the PRP launched a campaign to build ‘revolutionary workers’ councils’ — CRT.s. These were to, ‘carry out a constant ideological struggle — to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus — to be the organs of the application of revolutionary violence’, ie far from being the highest form of the united front, the PRP confused them with the revolutionary party. What the PRP had no conception of was soviets as arising out of the united front. In a situation where the vast majority of workers remained under the influence of the reformist parties, soviets could only have been built around concrete issues of struggle, not general revolutionary declarations, around the fight to force the reformist leaders to take the power. Only such a tactic could expose the reformist leaders and forge real unity in action. The PRP (like the British IS) had no strategic notion of how to break the hold of the reformists over the working class, and continually lapsed into ‘wishful thinking’. In a hopeless exaggeration of the degree to which workers had broken from their reformist leaderships, the PRP’s paper, ‘Revolucuao’ declared, as early as September 1975, ‘it is now time for the revolutionary forces and the workers to pose the question of insurrection’.
The British IS could give no advice on winning the SP and CP influenced workers to a revolutionary position. The SP was a ‘petty bourgeois’ party with little organisation in the working class. As with the British Labour Party, the ideological strength of the reformist parties (indicated by its voting base) was ignored. The CP, they argued, certainly had an ‘organised’ base, and that was a problem. But even here the question of the united front was not raised. Indeed such was the weakness of reformism, IS could see no bourgeois democratic solutions as being open to the Portuguese ruling class. The 6th Provisional Government as a ‘short-lived transitory phenomenon, leading either to the victory of the proletarian revolution, or the victory of fascism. It (was) a void between two dictatorships.’ (Portugal at Crossroads). It was only in September, after keeping silent for most of the summer and autumn, or rather, bathing in the reflected glory of the ‘successes’ of their Portuguese brethren, that IS began to make some criticisms of the PRP’s more glaring excesses. It was only in the autumn that the importance of the united front was suddenly discovered by Tony Cliff in ‘Portugal at the Crossroads’. Again, it was only presented as a united front from below and even here there was silence as to whether the reformist SP would be ‘invited’ in. ‘What forms exactly, with what parties, the united front will be built in Portugal, we can never know in advance. Quick changes of tactics including that of the united front are needed in a swiftly changing situation.’
The PRP must have been grateful for such clear-sighted, concrete advice. And, sure enough, Comrade Cliff, an expert in the quick change of tactic, dropped all reference to the united front in a pamphlet written two months later. Once again their lack of understanding of using the united front, and a programme of partial demands, as a lever to win workers from their reformist leaders is amply demonstrated. Their explanation of the inability of the revolutionary left to mobilise the workers in defence of the paratroopers on the 25th November was absolutely correct. ‘
The decisive factor in the defeat of the 25th of November was the weakness of the revolutionary left. When it came to the decisive test the reformists were shown to have incomparably more weight within the working class than the revolutionaries.’ And again, ‘the failure of the working class to respond en masse to the calls from the paratroopers on the 25th of November shows that over the class as a whole even in the Lisbon area, the paralysing grip of the reformists was much stronger than the directing influence of the revolutionaries.’ (Lessons of November 25th, Cliff and Harman)
But how do we change the situation? Through the most audacious and flexible use of the united front tactic?
Trotsky, arguing against the ultra-left in Germany in 1933 made the point that, ‘verbal genuflections before the Soviets are as equally fashionable in the left circles as the misconception of their historical function. Soviets are defined as the organs of struggle for power, as organs of insurrection, and finally, as the organs of dictatorship. Formally these definitions are correct. But they do not exhaust the historical function of the Soviets. First of all they do not explain why, in the struggle for power, precisely the Soviets are necessary. The answer to this question is: just as the Trade Union is the rudimentary form of the United Front in the economic struggle, so the Soviet is the highest form of the United Front, under the conditions in which the proletariat enters the epoch of fighting for power. (The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, Pathfinder p.194)
Far from it. With an almost audible sigh of relief, Cliff and Harman direct Portuguese revolutionaries back to the terrain on which the British IS is most at home — the economic struggle: ‘Now, after a period in which political questions have dominated everything, the class will recoup its powers through economic struggle.’
Thus IS, true to its economistic tradition, ignores the fact that, even within the economic struggle, political tasks, albeit different ones, are just as central; that the united front and the workers’ government slogan is a crucial tactic in breaking the hold of the reformists in the trade unions and the factories. In the last analysis, IS has no tactics for fighting reformism in Portugal or Britain — it can only adapt to it, or denounce it.
More recently, the SWP (GB) has gone into more details on its position on the workers’ government, and the United Front, in its International Discussion Bulletin Number Four. In taking to task their ex-fraternal organisation in Italy, Avanguardia Operaia, for using the workers’ government in an opportunist way (in the Democrazia Proletaria election bloc), the SWP make clear their rejection of the Workers’ Government as developed by the 4th Congress of the Comintern. While conceding that ‘real workers’ governments’ might come about before the dictatorship of the proletariat as ‘extreme exceptions’, they have no conception of using the slogan except as part of the united front which takes place from below: ‘In such a movement, unity would be formed between revolutionaries and the base of the mass reformist parties’ (page 11 International Discussion Bulletin No. 4.) Alex Callinicos, in a letter on the United Front, goes on to spell it out more clearly, taking to task another leading SWPer, Ian Birchall, who dismisses demands being made on reformists as ‘orthodox Trotskyism’ (presumably enough to damn it before the SWP membership). Callinicos goes on to argue for the united front in purely organisational terms:
‘For revolutionaries to argue seriously for the united front, they must be in a position to exercise sufficient pressure on the reformist leaders to have to respond to the demand for unity in action. In other words, revolutionaries must posses real forces of their own to bring to the united front’
He goes on to suggest that for the SWP, given the relationship of forces between them and the Labour Party, to call for a united front between the two would be meaningless, while the SWP is becoming big enough to enter into united fronts with the CP. Thus the united front is reduced to organisational agreements. The method of using a set of demands and a programme as the basis for the fight for the united front, of winning reformist workers to such a programme, disappears.
The slogan of a ‘Workers’ Government’ is inseparable then from popularising the party’s own action programme of measures focussing, as it must, on organising the workers for power — arming the workers, mobilising the class in Soviets and factory committees, the struggle for workers’ control over production, the seizure of the real centres of economic power: the banks, the monopolies. To separate the slogan ‘for a workers government’ from the popularisation of the struggle for a programme meeting the objective needs of the working class is in fact to pose the demand in a reformist sense, to allow the reformists to dictate what is ‘for the workers’, to maintain their mantle as the workers’ ‘representatives’. (Hence the absurdity of Robin Blackburn and other ‘Trotskyists’ who talk of being in favour of a workers government ‘on the terrain of bourgeois democracy’, that does not arm the workers or support the class’s direct organisation for power.)
But whereas our programme connected with the slogan is constant (ie revolutionaries have a workers answer to the crisis), the composition of the workers government is left open. We do this not as a trick played on the class but in order to put to the test, openly before the mass organisations, the revolutionary communists and the reformist leaders. The form that the workers government shall take, ie which parties shall be in it, of whom should it be composed, is left open, providing that it is base on the organs of struggle and democracy of the working class — factory committees, soviets, juntas, cordones, even transformed trade unions; not the ‘normal’ bureaucratised labour movement bodies but ones created in struggle.
This is the form of workers government that communists call for, consciously recognising that such a government can only be transitional, opening up as it does, the prospect of open civil war with the bourgeoisie. It is not impossible that a class conscious and resolute working class could force some of its centrist of left reformist leaders onto that path, but this is not probable given the nature of the left reformists and centrists. The task of communists throughout remains winning leadership for their programme for working class power, fighting for the direction and programme of the workers government, openly fighting for the leadership in the mass organisations. The workers government remains a complex of tactics for communists to achieve this task.
Conclusion
The workers government slogan remains a tactic of central importance for revolutionaries in the present period because of the strength of reformism in the working class movement. It is not a simple slogan to be raised or dropped as appropriate. It is a difficult complex of tactics aimed at the problem of winning the mass organisations of the working class away from the reformist leaders in the process of winning state power for the working class. As such it performs a central part; it is in fact ‘the crowning piece’, of the United Front tactic; it is the method by which revolutionaries counterpose their programme and strategy, in struggle, to those offered by the reformists.
Its most simple omnipresent form, addressed to the Social Democrats in power, or on the verge of power, is ‘break with the bourgeoisie — act for the workers’. When they are allied with bourgeois parties, we demand the breaking of the coalition. But when we say ‘act for the workers’, we do not pose this in the abstract. We put forward the key demands of the Action Programme of the party — the key actions against bourgeois power and strategy in the given situation. Without this the call ‘act for the workers’, like the call for ‘socialist policies’ is vacuous; it does not actually put the reformist leaders to the test.
The slogan of a ‘Workers’ Government’ is inseparable then from popularising the party’s own action programme of measures focussing, as it must, on organising the workers for power — arming the workers, mobilising the class in Soviets and factory committees, the struggle for workers’ control over production, the seizure of the real centres of economic power: the banks, the monopolies. To separate the slogan ‘for a workers government’ from the popularisation of the struggle for a programme meeting the objective needs of the working class is in fact to pose the demand in a reformist sense, to allow the reformists to dictate what is ‘for the workers’, to maintain their mantle as the workers’ ‘representatives’. (Hence the absurdity of Robin Blackburn and other ‘Trotskyists’ who talk of being in favour of a workers government ‘on the terrain of bourgeois democracy’, that does not arm the workers or support the class’s direct organisation for power.)
But whereas our programme connected with the slogan is constant (ie revolutionaries have a workers answer to the crisis), the composition of the workers government is left open. We do this not as a trick played on the class but in order to put to the test, openly before the mass organisations, the revolutionary communists and the reformist leaders. The form that the workers government shall take, ie which parties shall be in it, of whom should it be composed, is left open, providing that it is based on the organs of struggle and democracy of the working class — factory committees, soviets, juntas, cordones, even transformed trade unions; not the ‘normal’ bureaucratised labour movement bodies but ones created in struggle.
This is the form of workers government that communists call for, consciously recognising that such a government can only be transitional, opening up as it does, the prospect of open civil war with the bourgeoisie. It is not impossible that a class conscious and resolute working class could force some of its centrist of left reformist leaders onto that path, but this is not probable given the nature of the left reformists and centrists. The task of communists throughout remains winning leadership for their programme for working class power, fighting for the direction and programme of the workers government, openly fighting for the leadership in the mass organisations. The workers government remains a complex of tactics for communists to achieve this task.
