00:00 Ed Rooksby: I'm going to talk, I hope slightly coherently, about an article that I published recently in *ISJ*, the Socialist Workers Party journal — which was quite nice of them. I don't know; you can often read things into why certain things get published at certain times. I think it's quite interesting that they let me publish this article right now, because I think there has been recently, as I say in the article, a revival of quite big questions about strategy, about socialist strategy.
00:34 We're going back in many ways to old questions — but unanswered questions — about what is the relationship, what ought to be, what could be the relationship between socialists, the state, reform and revolution. I think that we're going back to debates that have been largely absent over the last three decades, but they're coming back in interesting ways.
01:05 And I think there are several reasons for this revival, this resuscitation of an old debate. First of all, clearly the left is reinvigorated but disoriented at the same time by the crisis — by the failure of the left to capitalise on the crisis; the sense that the established social democratic parties across Europe, not just in Britain, are in the process of decomposition, are degenerating, are simply forcing the austerity agenda themselves, no different from the conservative parties and so on. And so this has opened up a space to their left, and a debate amongst the radical left about how do we take advantage of this, how do we actually fill this gap, [now] there is this opportunity.
01:35 Secondly, relatedly, the rise of Syriza in Greece. For all their problems — I'm not a cheerleader for Syriza, but I think they're a hugely welcome development and I support them critically — their dramatic rise, to now be a government in waiting in Greece, possibly, is a big thing. Who'd have thought, ten years ago, that there'd be a Marxist group, an anti-capitalist socialist party, an anti-austerity party, on the verge of taking power in a European country?
02:06 So clearly this too has reinvigorated the left. It's given us hope. It's also raised awkward questions about — well, what happens if the worst happens? For many people the worst thing is [that] Syriza win power. What happens when they take power? It raises all sorts of obvious problems. It raises the old debate about reform [and] revolution, and the character of the state, and what you can do, how far you can push things.
02:37 And the third factor, I think, is the crisis in the SWP — which, whatever you think about it, and whatever it has caused [inaudible], has freed things up to some extent on the left, I think in quite positive ways. I wouldn't want to see the SWP disappear; I think if it does it'll be a disaster actually for the left in this country. But it has opened up the debate.
03:08 The second aspect of this is that one of the reasons why things like left reformism — and I'm apparently denounced [?] as a left reformist, or a centrist, or something like this — these old terms have reappeared quite recently, I think often in SWP presentations at Marxism, [where] people were warning for example about the dangers of left reformism. There have been several publications in SWP journals and magazines about left reformism and why it's wrong, why we shouldn't [do it], and so on.
03:39 That's raised the question. But I think it's also worth saying that this term has been used in a sort of internal disciplinary way. There's a lot of tactics behind it: to raise [the charge of] incorrect strategy and to use it as a way of holding the line within the party. I think there's a lot of internal manoeuvring going on, and often a debate between the revolutionary socialists on the one hand and the left reformists is actually an internal debate conducted by proxy [?].
04:10 Also, it's interesting to see a revival of the term Eurocommunist — I think Richard Seymour is now a Eurocommunist, and that's a bad thing. I think that the way that the term left reformism — and this is the term I think that debate pivots on in many ways at the moment, [or] part of the debate on strategy — the way it's used is unhelpful.
04:42 I don't want to go through the details of this, [I] don't have time, but in Paul Blackledge's article, in John Molyneux's [?] piece for *Irish Marxist Review*, and also Mark Thomas's article in *Socialist Review*, when they bring up this term left reformism, I think it's used in quite a slippery way — not necessarily intentionally, but I think it's very problematic, and I go into that more in my article.
05:14 One of the big reasons why the SWP is getting quite exercised about left reformism is also the rise of Left Unity. I'm not trying to bash the SWP, by the way — I have quite a good relationship with many people in it, and they are a major force on the left — but I think there's a remarkable ambiguity in relation to it: they want to be part of it, and yet they see it as a threat, and they think they've been excluded, and so on. And I think that's part of what the debate is about too.
05:46 What I want to do, and what I do in the article, is defend the idea of a left government — or, in the phrase of the Comintern, drawing very heavily on John Riddell's book *Toward the United Front*, which I do really recommend you read, [the phrase] "the workers' government", particularly associated with figures such as Clara Zetkin [and others] [?]. I think it's an idea that we need to revisit, for several reasons.
06:16 The main reason is, I think, the lesson of Syriza — and I think it's not a lesson only about [Greece]; [there is] Venezuela, Bolivia and so on. Today, left-wing challenges [that] aren't simply the inchoate, occupy, autonomist challenges — and we might agree on the weaknesses and strengths of those sorts of strategies, those sorts of practices — the ones that can really challenge, and really do challenge, capitalist power, the power of capital, tend to get channelled through parliamentary institutions, tend to throw up an electoral challenge, tend to throw up, if they're successful, a governmental challenge. And I think we shouldn't run away from that.
06:46 What the SWP tend to do is run away from this: tend to assert the necessity of a revolutionary challenge, which is left very abstract I think, and which relies on a kind of magical thinking, where day-to-day struggle — whatever it is, Right to Work, Unite the Resistance and so on — somehow generates a system of embryonic workers' councils and throws up a revolutionary situation. Of course there's quite a big leap there, from the day-to-day struggles to the revolutionary situation. How do we get there? I think that's the unanswered question. I think it's answered in an abstract way, or not answered, by many revolutionary socialists, people who identify as revolutionary socialists.
07:47 And I think we do need to go back to the debates within the Comintern that John writes about, where this problem was raised and addressed, I think in a straightforward and very honest way. The basic idea is that we shouldn't be afraid of taking power. To talk about taking power on the left in Britain at the moment is a million miles away — but look, in Greece this is an immediate question that people have to face.
08:18 And I think if ever there was a rise of the radical left in Britain and across the rest of Western Europe, we'd be seeing a similar thing: the rise of a party which you might call left reformist or centrist, which is committed both to parliamentary channels and to extra-parliamentary channels, whose strategy focuses on taking power within the capitalist state. If that is the constraint we face, if that's a realistic assessment of where left-wing struggle is likely to go today in Western European countries, we need to prepare ourselves [by] thinking about: okay, how do we approach this? How do we avoid the — we all know about the various reformist pitfalls that would face [us] — how do we face the constraints that the capitalist state itself imposes on socialist activity?
08:49 Very quickly — how long have I got?
08:49 Chair: Another eight minutes or so.
09:21 Ed Rooksby: Okay. In the article that I published I wanted to return to André Gorz. He was associated with all sorts of bad views — he wrote *Farewell to the Working Class* and so on — but he also came up with an extremely creative, thoughtful, very rich account of the relationship between reform and revolution. I also draw [inaudible] but Gorz is perhaps the stronger figure I draw on.
09:53 He is associated with many things, but one of the key concepts he is associated with, which I think is a really useful concept, is the idea of structural reforms. Structural reforms can be caricatured, and there are various sorts that you can have: you can have a left social democratic form, or you can have a revolutionary form, of the structural reform. And that's what Gorz writes about in *Strategy for Labor* and *Socialism and Revolution*, published in the late sixties [and] early seventies.
10:25 He's trying to think through the relationship between the struggle for reform [and] the implementation of reform by a left government — a left government [and a movement] in a dialectical relationship between a radical left-wing government and a mass movement outside the government kind of forcing it on. And the reforms that he talks about, structural reforms, are meant to build up the ideological, psychological, material [and] democratic capacities and resources for the working class to then seize power in a revolution. He wants to bridge the gap between the struggle for reform and the point at which you might actually get to a feasible revolutionary situation — and the solution is the idea of structural reforms.
11:26 I won't go through this in too much detail, but he argues that a revolution can only emerge organically and dialectically through a process of struggle through reform. So revolutionary consciousness is built from a pedagogical process of struggle for feasible objectives — "feasible" in inverted commas — corresponding to the experience, needs and aspirations of workers.
11:59 So at first these demands and aspirations and reforms will, from the standpoint of a generally reformist consciousness — which is of course most people, 99.9 per cent of people — appear legitimate within the system. They will appear achievable, just, necessary. But they won't necessarily seem, to the people struggling for them, to imply a change of system or a challenge to capitalism. But as the struggle develops, the anti-capitalist implications of the needs of those people struggling for those reforms become revealed through the process of reform itself. And so through its experience of struggle, and through its experience of trying to push reforms on a government [and] getting it to implement these reforms, [the class] educates itself and learns about its capacity for self-government.
12:30 This of course depends on a left government perspective. Once you're talking about reforms — the struggle for reform, campaigning for reform — if we're talking about a programme of reforms, a series of significant reforms, we're implicitly also talking about [the fact that] we need to think about what political instrument it is that actually implements those reforms, [that] puts those reforms into effect.
13:01 And I think that is the big black hole in the return to Trotsky's notion of transitional demands that you see, for example, in Alex Callinicos's recent publications. He returns quite interestingly to the notion of transitional reforms, drawing on Trotsky, [in] one very interesting article in the *ISJ* published two or three years ago. He draws on Costas Lapavitsas and the group he works with at SOAS [?] — a series of reforms that they came up with to provide a transitional programme within Greece — and Alex pushes this forward; he's very much in favour of it. But the big question is: who actually implements these reforms?
14:03 In other publications, of course, Alex is talking about the relationship between ANTARSYA and Syriza, and he's against Syriza's left government perspective, [and] against ANTARSYA supporting Syriza's call for a government of the left. And this is a clear contradiction: who is it who puts these transitional demands into effect? If you're not calling for a left government, what are you calling for? It's completely circumspect; it's not addressed. And I think that's the big problem for Callinicos.
14:35 As John remarks in one of the articles on his blog — you can also find it on the *Links* journal; there are several articles there if you search — he talks about the transitional programme that the Fourth Congress of the Comintern debated, about the workers' government, and also about Syriza in relation to this. His comment is that demands for social reforms ring hollow unless capped by the perspective of a workers' political instrument to lead and carry them out. Who actually carries out these reforms?
15:06 A similar idea has been raised by Stathis Kouvelakis, [who is] on the Central Committee of Syriza, on the left of that party. He's argued in the past about the way in which Leninist revolutionary strategy neglects the political — doesn't have a political vehicle for the implementation of the reforms it seems to be pushing.
15:38 And just to finish up — and of course John can talk about this much more knowledgeably than me, and what I write about this in my article is drawn completely from John's book *Toward the United Front* — one of the strange things about the SWP's version of Leninism is that it ignores the ways in which the Comintern under the Leninist leadership in the early 1920s actually developed its own left government perspective, actually moved [to] the notion of transitional demands.
16:08 In the early 1920s, the conclusion they drew from the international context was that, whereas in say 1919 it looked like there was an immediate prospect of revolution in many Western European countries — there were soviets that existed, often quite sophisticated organs of workers' democracy — by the early 1920s these had largely disappeared. And [the Comintern] moved towards a transitional demands perspective; and from there people like Clara Zetkin, and also Radek and others in the Bolshevik party, actually drew the necessary conclusion from that, which is that if you're going to call for transitional [demands] you also need to call for a workers' government.
16:38 So within the Leninist tradition — I'm not alone in this, but within the Leninist tradition — there are the resources to conceive of the possibility and necessity of a left government. And that, I suppose, is what I want to leave you thinking [about].
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