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On the WSF debate between John Holloway and Alex Callinicos on 'Changing the World without Taking Power'
It is really quite striking how much of Callinicos's theoretical arsenal is derived from what is a transparently idealist, not Marxist analysis. In his debate with Holloway, Callinicos, a leader of the British SWP says: "I absolutely sympathise with one of the impulses behind the slogan ‘Change the world without taking power’. Among a lot of the traditions on the left worldwide there has been what has been called ‘socialism from above’. Whether it is a Communist party with Stalinist traditions or a social democratic party like the Workers Party in Brazil today, it involves the idea that the party changes things for you and everyone else remains passive. "The political tradition I stand in is a very different one. It is that of socialism from below summed up in Marx’s definition of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class. Socialism is about the oppressed and exploited of the world effectively liberating themselves. "My fundamental difference with John is that I believe this process of self-emancipation requires us to confront and overthrow the existing state and replacing it with a radically different form of state power." This will immediately be recognized by many as a line of argument derived from the idea that there have been historically two "souls" of socialism --socialism from above versus socialism from below. Now, this may have some propaganda utility in the same sense that Lenin said that the phrase "socialism is my religion" might be a permissible pedagogical adaptation by a Marxist to make certain ideas more accessible. But I believe if one delves deeply in the source text of this theses, Hal Draper's 1960 article, "The two souls of socialism," (which can be found here: http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/contemp/pamsetc/twosouls/twosouls.htm) one will find rather less than meets the eye. The problem as I see it with Draper's "two souls" thesis is that having traced the evolution of collectivist-egalitarian "models" and democratic popular mass movements, he fails to recognize that with their fusion in Marx, this whole dichotomy or debate gets taken out of the field of ideology and into the field of the class struggle. The clash is only apparently between different "souls" of socialism: it is in reality the clash of different social layers with different class interests. Because Callinicos doesn't recognize this, we get a sentence like "Whether it is a Communist party with Stalinist traditions or a social democratic party like the Workers Party in Brazil today, it involves the idea that the party changes things for you and everyone else remains passive." But is that what is really going on in either case? The expression of an idea, the manifestation of a "from above" ethereal soul? This does, I grant you, handily resolve all sorts of wicked contradictions. There is no need, for example, to study in detail and on its own terms the Soviet state and its evolution or the state that issued from the Cuban revolution and how it evolved. It is only necessary to verify the non-existence of a state of the Paris Commune type and one can then safely dispatch the given case to the "not-socialism-from-below" pigeonhole, whether this be labeled "state capitalism," "bureaucratic collectivism" or even "Stalinism." The idea of "socialism from below," Callinicos says, "requires us to confront and overthrow the existing state and replacing it with a radically different form of state power." But so does the idea of the Kingdom of God on earth. The problem is not describing the ideal forms but discovering in this vale of tears the actual social processes of which those ideas are a reified expression. The "ideal" form of the proletarian state is quite thoroughly explained in the Marxist classics: the Paris Commune form of state, a state which, from its inception, is already in the process of withering away, i.e., where the functions of social organization and control which became concentrated in a body standing above society (because of the class division in society) returning increasingly to society as a whole, because what is now being "controlled" by the state is not the majority, but a minority. What experience has shown, however, is that the pure form of such a state has proven to not yet be possible in any country where a successful anticapitalist revolution has taken place, nor is it easy to anticipate a successful revolution where a pure form of this state would be possible under current circumstances. The only case where it is likely that the form of the state after a successful revolution is going to be one of a "pure" Paris Commune or Soviet type is that of nearly simultaneous revolutions in the main imperialist centers. Rejection of "impure" forms of a workers state is thus tantamount to rejection of all currently possible revolutions and --carried out logically to the end-- it carries the danger of embracing a messianic vision of white euro-north american revolution. Callinicos has already travel a fair distance in this direction, and although couched in optimistic terms, what he preaches is daunting if not defeatist. "John talked about fissures. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a fissure. It tore a great hole in the capitalist system, the biggest fissure so far in world history. But just to break a hole in capitalism, even a hole as big as Russia, was not enough. There was a simple reason. The power of capital is global and it can concentrate its forces massively to destroy any fissure that threatens it. That is what they have been trying to do with Chávez in Venezuela. Whatever the problem is with his politics and so on, the US and its allies have been trying to break the experiment taking place in Venezuela because it threatens to open up a fissure. "The power of capital is so great that usually they can close the fissures. Usually they do so by overthrowing the revolutionary process and destroying its leaders and activists. There are many examples of that. In the Russian case there was a particularly horrible way in which capital won, by creating such pressures as to cause the revolutionary regime to transform itself into a barbarous replica of the global system. "The reason that happened was not that Marx liked the state, but that there was not a powerful enough global movement to break the power of capital globally. That doesn’t have to be our fate. We are already in the process collectively of creating the greatest global movement against capitalism in world history. But we won’t do that if we think that simply creating holes, fissures, in the existing system is enough to destroy it." For Callinicos, a successful revolution is only possible if there is "a powerful enough global movement to break the power of capital globally" and he rejects the idea of revolutions surviving for a time within the framework of a single or a few countries. He thinks, in fact, those revolutions are a diversion: "we won’t do that [building a global movement] if we think that simply creating holes, fissures, in the existing system is enough to destroy it." Callinicos's argument that "The power of capital is global and it can concentrate its forces massively to destroy any fissure that threatens it" is false. It turns the capitalist classes, which is what exists in the real world, into a God -- "Capital" in general -- and imputes to it supernatural strength. The reality, as is being shown daily in Iraq, is otherwise. The idea that Capital can simply make a decision to concentrate all its forces is completely undialectical. There is not one, but many capitals. Their fundamental relationship of one "capital" to the others is not cooperation, but competition. Their competition undermines, limits and constrains their cooperation, as does the existence of "other" classes with "other" class interests. Capitalist society isn't one made up exclusively of capitalists where they all act in concert and therefore can do just as they please. Look no further than the Iraq War, where most of the West European imperialist countries refused to go along with U.S. imperialism, because their interests as individual imperialist countries (composed, in turn, of individual masses of capital) clashed with the interests of the United States. The exception, Britain, can best be understood by looking at the interpenetration of English and American capitalism. There is a sense in which one can talk about Anglo-American imperialism which would be false if extended to "Franco-American imperialism" or "Italo-American imperialism." And there is a material basis for the London-Washington "special relationship" which is quite evident if you look at the interpenetration of these two capitalist classes as reflected in the London and New York stock exchanges. And in addition to the contradictions between Anglo-American imperialism and the continental imperialisms, there are also other social forces. Unless you believe the hoary imperialist myths of "ancient hatreds" that spring from strictly confessional concerns, the Iraqi resistance is an expression of certain social classes and layers of classes. As with so many other political struggles throughout history, these interests may not be explicitly proclaimed or even understood by many participants, but they are there. And they have been a very definite constraint on what the imperialists could do in Iraq, what they could get away with. Even on the level of vulgar common sense, Callinicos's posited all-powerful worldwide Capital does not compute. If this were so, how could there be any unions? How could any semicolonial countries have achieved independence? How could lesbians and gays be winning civil rights like the right to adopt children and to marry? Are we to view all these concessions as capitalist plots? More to the point of Callinicos's argument: how could there be a Cuba? Even if one accepts for arguments sake Callinicos's characterization of Cuba as "state capitalist," how is it possible for a regime that is anathema to the world's most powerful imperialist center to survive for nearly five decades, given the absolute or almost absolute capacity of capital to concentrate all its worldwide forces? This is the tenth successive U.S. administration that has tried to destroy the Cuban Revolution. Why hasn't it been able to do so? Supporters of the state capitalist theses might argue that the hostility doesn't run all that deep, Fidel is really part of the family, not an absolute enemy. I think you'd be hard-pressed to prove this empirically, but the plain fact is that these state capitalist comrades --unlike both the imperialists and the masses in Latin America, for example-- do not ascribe any special significance to Cuba at all. * * * In part, this is because Callinicos judges revolutionary success by idealist criteria. Either you measure up to what Lenin said in The State and Revolution, or you're not the real thing, but a bogus item. But there are good reasons why it is unrealistic and wrong to expect revolutions to be Lenin's little book transformed into a living reality. In his analysis in State and Revolution, Lenin completely abstracts from the international context, from the world imperialist system within which such states are born. He also doesn't take up the relation between the level of culture and economic development of the country where such a state has arisen and the rest of the world. However, these real-world circumstances make a state "simply" of the Paris Commune type impossible. It is one thing to suppress the fading remnants of bourgeois resistance. This is easily enough done with popularly based organs such as the block-by-block Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) in Cuba. If that were ALL that was involved, then something like the CDR's would be the main bodies that carry out policing-type functions, and it would be an especially striking confirmation of the theses that this is a state that isn't really a state, that it is already in the process of withering away. But to confront not just bourgeois stragglers, but the military might and intelligence services of the most powerful imperialism the world has ever known, something more than a CDR is necessary. There is a need for a regular army, specialized organs of intelligence, counter-espionage and counter-sabotage. In the economic sphere it is pretty much the same situation. Lenin in State and Revolution explains that, in the initial stages of the development of communist society, distribution will have to be restricted, i.e., based on "bourgeois law," and adds: "Of course, bourgeois law in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law. "It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois law, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!" It is very important to recognize that, even in presenting the "pure" proletarian state, abstracted from its world context, Lenin explained that it was anything but pure, and would involve much more than soviet or commune-type bodies, but also ones that could only be described as a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie." When you place that state in its international context, you get Lenin's "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" on steroids. If the productivity of labor in the country of the revolution were already significantly superior to those of the capitalist countries, then perhaps one might question the need for a state monopoly of foreign trade. But since it isn't, it is necessary to protect the internal economy of the country from being penetrated and ravaged by imperialist concerns. And like this you can go through specific fields and functions, diplomacy, education, health care, and see that, especially because of the existence of a much stronger imperialist camp, none of these things can simply be left to a committee of the national Soviet in a direct, immediate and transparent way, but MUST instead be handled by specialized bureaucratic-administrative structure, a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie." * * * Lenin is undoubtedly correct in calling this a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie" rather that a "proletarian" administrative apparatus or some other such prettification. These are not the historically evolved nonpolitical, classless, mechanisms of administration of a society of the XXIII Century, but rather the existing political and "classist" forms of administration applied to regulation of a society which, although no longer ruled by the bourgeoisie, is entirely a product of bourgeois society. And because it is a "bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie," a *tendency* towards bureaucratization is inevitable, and under certain circumstances (the destruction of the revolution as a living mass movement of the toilers) this tendency gives rise to a consolidated bureaucratic layer, a caste. This, of course, is the transformation of "socialism from below" into "socialism from above," except that it is marked by the transfer of political control from the working class and its project of developing a socialist society to a self-serving bureaucratic caste. But as Trotsky explained in The Revolution Betrayed, and as life has now completely confirmed, it is a caste whose interests lie not in any form of socialism at all (whether from above or below, or even a fake-socialist "state capitalism") but rather in outright capitalist restoration. Comrades from the Callinicos group and others argue, in essence, that the transfer of political control to a caste, means that the revolution has been completely stripped of all proletarian content. I think that the experience of the USSR and Eastern Europe has now confirmed beyond any possible doubt that, for the toilers, there can be something worse than the British SWP's "state capitalism" -- there can be plain vanilla real capitalism. The assertion that the difference between the two sorts of regime isn't qualitative isn't supported by the data. Moreover, you have the case of Cuba, where you have a government issued from a popular worker and peasant revolution, a government which led the armed workers in carrying out the expropriation of the bourgeoisie as a class, and where that government has for nearly a half century carried out a foreign policy of opposition to imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, as well as a domestic policy aimed at a much more egalitarian society than even the "really existing" socialism of Eastern Europe, never mind more egalitarian than neighboring countries, which are substantially similar to Cuba in virtually all ways but one: they did not have a revolution like Cuba's. For an analysis that starts with fundamental categories like "socialism from above" and "socialism from below," the difference a revolution makes is well-nigh inexplicable. Unless you want to posit that socialism's "from above" soul suffers from multiple-personality disorder, including one stable personality that imagines it is socialism from below and sets its policies accordingly. It is much better to dump the whole schema and instead accept Trotsky's analysis, that these are transitory and highly unstable socio-economic-political formations that do not yet represent even what can be anticipated as the first forms of relatively unfettered and unrestrained proletarian power. Much more than the beginning of what a world socialist commonwealth will look like, a place like Cuba can in many ways better be understood as the world's most successful union, a revolutionary union local with superpowers. I say that because there are "elements" of a state capitalist analysis that clearly do represent insights into reality. And most of all, the reality that Cuba's toilers are still exploited, imperialism still extracts surplus value from the island, due to its insertion in the world capitalist market. Viewed from the angle of the imperialist system as a whole, Cuba relates to it as a single conglomerate, as one more enterprise, a firm. Why not accept then the classification of it as "state capitalism"? Because the politics of it are all wrong. This state does not represent, neither in its origins nor in its quite consistent policies over nearly a half a century, the fusion of local capital with the state into a state monopoly capitalism. It represents rather the expropriation of the capitalists -- which isn't a small detail -- and policies that flow from that politically. If you label a place like Cuba, or even the USSR, state capitalism, then I think, on the basis of the evidence, you have to say that this kind of capitalism is relatively more progressive than the regular flavor; that the working people do have a stake, therefore, in defending this sort of capitalist regime against the previous kinds; and that pending the arrival of the simultaneous world social revolution, workers in a place like Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia should fight for this kind of "capitalism." Trotsky's concept --workers state-- a transitional formation that does not yet represent the sort of full-fledged beginning of the building of socialism analyzed by Marx (in the Critique of the Gotha Program) and Lenin (in State and Revolution) because it is still a besieged island surrounded by much bigger and more productive capitalism, recognizes the contradictory nature of the reality. * * * The illusion that there is such a thing as a "socialism from above" embodied in Stalinism and social democracy was a product of World War II and its specific outcome, in which both the Soviet Union and U.S. imperialism were victors, and the world imperialist system emerged significantly weakened which obligated its recomposition on a new basis. This led to emergence of long term, stable "social" (welfare state) bourgeois democracies in Western Europe; and to the working out of the logic of the position of the bureaucratic caste in the USSR taking on a protracted character. Neither condition obtains any longer and I, for one, greatly doubt that "classical" Stalinism, a prolonged interregnum of bureaucratic rule, is going to reappear anywhere, quite simply because everyone now knows how the story ends. The bureaucratic usurpation of power in from a revolutionary working class that has become exhausted or atomized in the future will I believe immediately have a restorationist character, even if hidden behind slogans about a mixed economy or even socialism. As for a prolonged restoration of "social" capitalism, that would depend on a decades-long upswing in capitalist production, such as that which followed the tremendous devastation of the two World Wars and was largely fueled by rebuilding from them. As for Brazil being an example of "classic" social democracy, the parallels are too striking to ignore, but I believe not enough attention is paid to the differences. Unless one wants to make the case that Brazil has become some sort of imperialist or sub/quasi/partly-imperialist power, this isn't "classic" social democracy because "classic" social democracy is a phenomenon of the imperialist countries, and a central political axis is the "united front" between the working class and its ruling class in defense of imperialist interests (and, from the point of view of the workers, imperialist privilege). In Brazil, I believe what we are seeing instead is a semicolonial nation resisting many imperialist impositions, on everything from "free trade" to giving U.S. imperial storm troopers amnesty in advance for genocide and other crimes against humanity. (Nor, I would like to add, does the classification of Lula's regime as "neo-liberal," as many on the left do, make a lot of sense to me. I do not believe the essence of neo-liberalism is the free market religion, that's just ideological mumbo jumbo from the marketing department. The essence of "neoliberalism" is handing the country and its resources over to imperialist interests. I just don't see it in this case.) Saying Lula's government is an expression of the "from above" socialism might be a useful pedagogical or rhetorical device in addressing those who still have illusions that this is some sort of expression of working class politics. But it doesn't really get you much closer to a concrete understanding of what is going on there. For that, the traditional tools of Marxist analysis, which look at concrete class interests rather than the ideological phantasms that they give rise to, are much more useful. Joaquín