Socialist Labour

So, we have arrived at the reason for the CPGB’s reluctance to advocate a wealth tax; it would unleash the downtrodden working class who would then be open to the demand for the expropriation of the capitalists and a workers’ government. A workers uprising is the US, UK, EU is inevitable, despite the Democrats, the Labour party, Social Democrats and trade union bureaucracy attempts to stop it as they betrayed the 2023 strike wave. Like John McDonnell’s retreat from his 1916 anti-capitalism Timothy Garton Ash tells us that what The Spirit of Churchill and De Gaulle: we need that now in The Guardian March 11. Stalin and the communist parties all agreed back then.

Jack Conrad seeks to marginalise these historical lessons by telling us that under socialism and communism it is democracy that will wither away and not the state, the true Marxist position. This is tied to the confusion about extreme democracy, which they imply is simply and extreme version of capitalist democracy and not its complete opposite, soviet or workers’ democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat. There was no democracy for capitalist parties or publications under the Bolsheviks after January 1918 as the soviets took control and imposed the new mode of production for human need and not profit.

It is true that with the decline of the soviets the Bolsheviks we obliged to substitute the party for the workers’ councils after the 1921 famine and the Kronstadt failed colour evolution, but that was because of the huge death rates of the vanguard of the class in the civil war and the failure of the revolution to spread to Europe and Germany.

In 1948 Ted Grant wrote an article pointing out that it was a great difficulty for Stalin to deal with the communists in Czechoslovakia and impose his corrupt bureaucracy there because of the far more experienced class struggle vanguard there. In Czechoslovakia: The Issues Involved he quotes Trotsky in 1939 in support of the degenerated workers’ state theory, “This measure, revolutionary in character – ‘the expropriation of the expropriators’ – is in this case achieved in a military-bureaucratic fashion. The appeal to independent activity on the part of the masses in the new territories – and without such an appeal, even if worded with extreme caution it is impossible to constitute a new regime – will on the morrow undoubtedly be suppressed by ruthless police measures in order to assure the preponderance of the bureaucracy over the awakened revolutionary masses…” (USSR in War, September 1939).

The replies to SPEW member Joseph O’Connor Meldau at the Communist Forum on 23 March all miss the central problem with the politics of that group. That is, they believe we can achieve socialism via a left Labour Government or an adequate TUSC-led substitute via an Enabling Act in parliament without the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist state itself. Ted Grant in 1948 was a qualitatively different to his legacy in SPEW 2025.

President Bush meets with embattled Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in the Oval Office in Washington, Oct. 10, 1991. Thomas received a fresh vote of confidence from Bush a day after the administration was forced to retreat from a Senate vote because of uproar over s*xual harassment allegations. (AP Photo/Dennis Cook)
In Trump’s US what we are seeing is the construction of a fascist state with the strong possibility of a civil war with the abolishing of the constitution. In 1991, George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, now the most senior Supreme court judge and a believer in the original purpose of all Supreme Courts judgements and amendments to that constitution. One recent commentator cited him as the central character who would defend the constitution. But black man Thomas cited the shocking Dred Scott 1857 judgement, that black people were not citizens and could never escape slavery, which sparked the Civil War, in justification of the 2022 abolition of the right to abortion contained in the Roe Vs Wade 1973 judgement.

We are seeing the construction of a fascist state in the US, to be followed by Germany and elsewhere if it is not defeated. And, contrary to Jack, we do have substantial Blackshirts and Brownshirts in the US now, the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys etc particularly after Trump’s pardoning those who attempted the 6 January 1921 coup, which did have the support of key parts of the Home Guard and US Army and come close to success. His replacement of leading army, CIA/FBI figures and judges with his own supporters shows he has advanced plans to abolish elections in the US.

Neither Mussolini nor Hi**er came to power solely with the support of these street thugs. After the President George H.W. Bush meets with embattled Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in the Oval Office on Oct. 10, 1991. | Dennis Cook/AP Photo, he was allowed to abolish the constitution by the King. Similarly, Hi**er came to power constitutionally and on June 30, 1934, completed the construction of the fascist state by executing the leaders of the Strasserite movement, who sought a second, socialist, revolution after getting rid of the Jews, who allegedly represented finance capital. Ernst Rhom, the Brownshirt leader, was executed despite Hi**er’s opposition because the Gestapo, the state terrorist now replaced these.

A wealth Tax is a Transitional Demand The bombing of La Moneda on September 11, 1973, by the Chilean Armed Forces. A wealth tax is a transitional demand. Together with windfall taxes on the super profits of transnational corp…

A wealth Tax is a Transitional Demand The bombing of La Moneda on September 11, 1973, by the Chilean Armed Forces. A wealth tax is a transitional demand. Together with windfall taxes on the super profits of transnational corp…

Ollie Coxhead, former supporter of Socialist Fight, defends the Popular Fronts of Stalinism. Any suggestions for a reply?

This is reactionary nonsense. That's why Nietzsche was Mussolini's and Hi**er's favourite philosopher. A thorough going reactionary bigot, he was opposed to the "human essence" as Marx defined it, humans are "cooperative co-producers" of wealth; taking from nature what we need for life is our human essence.

In other words there isn't a human being on the face of the planet superior to any other. In like manner there isn't anyone inferior to any other, contrary to Nietzsche's "Ubermensch" reactionary message. We are all different, of course, but that difference should not determine superiority or inferiority politically, materially or socially.

And that principle has been asserted in every serious revolution recorded in human history. Firstly let us look at Rome's "I am Spartacus" revolution. Of course the slave revolution he led did not have to wait for the Spartacus movie, in Germany in the revolutionary 1920s we had a group which took the name.

"The Spartacus League (German: Spartakusbund) was a Marxist revolutionary movement organized in Germany during World War I.[1] It was founded in August 1914 as the International Group by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin, and other members of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who were dissatisfied with the party's official policies in support of the war. In 1916 it renamed itself the Spartacus Group and in 1917 joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), which had split off from the SPD as its left wing faction.

"During the November Revolution of 1918 that broke out across Germany at the end of the war, the Spartacus Group re-established itself as a nationwide, non-party organization called the "Spartacus League" with the goal of instituting a soviet republic that would include all of Germany. It became part of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) when it was formed on 1 January 1919 and at that point ceased to exist as a separate entity.[2]"

Nevertheless the McCarthy witch-hunts did produce the movie in reply:

“I am Spartacus” came from a movie that came out around 1962 give or take a couple of years. At the end of the slave rebellion when Crassus had defeated the servile army, he wanted to know which of the captives was the leader, Spartacus. Each of the slaves then shouted, “I am Spartacus!” in a stunning display of solidarity.

Each of the captured slaves was then crucified along the Appian Way, some 6000 of them. As I recall, the last two were Spartacus and a young man, and Crassus forced the two of them to fight each other to the death. Spartacus, not wanting the young man to endure the long and painful death from crucifixion killed him and was then crucified himself.

The Bolsheviks' October 1917 revolution is the most important example. This is a good analysis:

The October Revolution 1917:

Bolshevik leaders regarded their revolution more or less as just the beginning, with Russia as the springboard on the road toward worldwide revolution. Stalin introduced the idea of socialism in one country by the autumn of 1924, a theory standing in sharp contrast to Trotsky's permanent revolution and all earlier socialistic theses. The revolution did not spread outside Russia as Lenin had assumed it soon would. The revolution had not succeeded even within other former territories of the Russian Empire―such as Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. On the contrary, these countries had returned to capitalist bourgeois rule.[32]

"He is an unprincipled intriguer, who subordinates everything to the preservation of his own power. He changes his theory according to whom he needs to get rid of."

Bukharin on Stalin's theoretical position, 1928.[33]

Despite this, by the autumn of 1924, Stalin's notion of socialism in Soviet Russia was initially considered next to blasphemy by other Politburo members, including Zinoviev and Kamenev to the intellectual left; Rykov, Bukharin, and Tomsky to the pragmatic right; and the powerful Trotsky, who belonged to no side but his own. None would even consider Stalin's concept a potential addition to communist ideology. Stalin's socialism in one country doctrine could not be imposed until he had come close to being the Soviet Union's autocratic ruler around 1929. Bukharin and the Right Opposition expressed their support for imposing Stalin's ideas, as Trotsky had been exiled, and Zinoviev and Kamenev had been expelled from the party.[34] In a 1936 interview with journalist Roy W. Howard, Stalin articulated his rejection of world revolution and said, "We never had such plans and intentions" and "The export of revolution is nonsense".[35][36][37]

Now let us remember the Diggers and Levelers in the English revolution:

The Diggers, Wikipedia records:

"The Diggers tried (by "levelling" land) to reform the existing social order with an agrarian lifestyle based on their ideas for the creation of small, egalitarian rural communities. They were one of a number of nonconformist dissenting groups that emerged around this time. Their belief in economic equality was drawn from Acts of the Apostles 4:32, which describes a community of believers that "had all things in common" instead of having personal property."

The Levellers are described here:

1642-1652: The Diggers and the Levellers
A history of the radical movements the Diggers and the Levellers which sprung up around the English Civil War.

Submitted by Steven. on September 12, 2006
The political and social upheaval that resulted from the English Civil War in the seventeenth century [effectively two conflicts between 1642 -1646 and 1647/48] led to the development of a set of radical ideas centred around movements known as ‘Diggers’ and ‘Levellers’

The Diggers [or ‘True Levellers’] were led by William Everard who had served in the New Model Army. As the name implies, the diggers aimed to use the earth to reclaim the freedom that they felt had been lost partly through the Norman Conquest; by seizing the land and owning it ‘in common’ they would challenge what they considered to be the slavery of property. They were opposed to the use of force and believed that they could create a classless society simply through seizing land and holding it in the ‘common good’.

To this end, a small group [initially 12, though rising to 50] settled on common land first at St George’s Hill and later in Cobham, Surrey and grew corn and other crops. This small group defied the landlords, the Army
and the law for over a year. In addition to this, groups travelled through England attempting to rally supporters. In this they had some successes in
Kent and Northamptonshire. Their main propagandist was Gerard Winstanley who produced the clearest statement of Digger ideas in ‘The Law of Freedom
in a Platform’ published in 1652. This was a defence and exposition of the notion of a classless society based in secularism and radical democracy

The relatively small group of followers of Digger ideas was never particularly influential and was quite easily suppressed by Cromwell and Fairfax.

The most significant of these movements were The Levellers whose revolutionary ideas resonated throughout the succeeding centuries, mostly notably in the demands of the Chartists in the nineteenth century.

The Levellers’ ideas found most support in the ranks of the ’New Model Army’, formed by Oliver Cromwell in 1645 and were largely responsible for the defeat of the Royalist forces led by Charles I, particularly in the decisive Battle of Naseby in June 1645.

By the end of the first civil war in 1646 Leveller ideas were particularly influential and culminated in the Putney Debates where ordinary soldiers debated
evolutionary ideas with their generals; it was at this series of meetings that Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainborough argued the case for universal suffrage (and a lot more than that, I suggest):

“I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he, and therefore truly, sir, I think it is clear to every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put
himself under that government.”

The Conspiracy of Equals in the French revolution stood for the same principle. Wikipedia records: "It was led by François-Noël Babeuf, who wanted to overthrow the Directory and replace it with an egalitarian and proto-socialist republic, inspired by Jacobin ideals"