00:00 John Riddell: Well, thank you all for organising this very interesting and challenging meeting today. It's great to see such a wide and varied bunch of people get together to discuss a topic which might seem a bit abstract and historical but does have urgent importance for us. I'm very pleased to follow Ed in this. I really do recommend Ed's article in *ISJ* as a very good introduction to the whole topic — and by the way, he does quote enough from my book towards the front that you can, by reading his article, make up your own mind about what this book is about, what it's aiming at.
00:31 I liked Fred's introduction around the historical Mexican figures of Villa and Zapata, because this is very much an old-new question that we have before us. And it is so dramatic, the way Villa and Zapata mobilised the Mexican peasants to conquer Mexico City, overthrow the government, and then, victory achieved, went back home again, only to find out they had to do it all over again.
01:02 In comparison I would take the example of Bolivia, which was also a peasant movement — the cocaleros — who formed a party which established hegemony among working people in Bolivia, which achieved a government, which now has been in power for almost a decade, and which has done a lot of things, particularly in tweaking the nose of US imperialism. Now, I know that advocating for the Bolivian government is an uphill battle among socialists in Britain, but I would say that there is enough about this government that is new and intriguing to make us think that, perhaps rather than just dismissing out of hand this experiment in a government based on working people, it should be examined more closely and engaged with — in the sense of, well, how could this be useful, how could it be more useful, and what has it achieved.
01:33 Now, I'm going to leave Bolivia at that, and say that I think the title of this meeting is quite odd. It says: do we need an anti-capitalist government? Well, we're socialists, aren't we? What other kind of government would we [want]? A pro-capitalist government? A Tony Blair New Labour party? No, no, that's not it, [that's not what] we want to have. But wait — we don't want an [anti-capitalist government either]. Why is it that we don't want an anti-capitalist government? There goes my chalk [?].
02:05 It's because the government is going to be sitting within the framework of the capitalist state, which will inevitably degenerate that government — right? Or is it right? Is it inevitable, or is it possible that a government sitting within the capitalist state could move things forward in some way? That's the question we face. That's why socialists trip over what might seem to be such an obvious question.
02:37 Now, this became apparent to me when I became reactivated in the socialist movement ten years ago, by a couple of people I see before me today and some other friends in Toronto. And I found that the majority of the socialists in Toronto with whom I was working had no working concept of government — of what it is and what to do about it.
03:07 For example, in Quebec, in Canada, we have a very promising workers' party called Québec solidaire. It's a party which is newly formed, is not bureaucratised, is not socialist, but has a basically class-struggle programme and has mass support — well, as I say, about ten per cent of the population. It could form a government. It's determined to form a government. That's what it does. It's not a protest party; it says it's a party to form a government.
03:38 Well, what do we think about that? We support the party, we work to build it. Do we favour or do we oppose its ambition to form a government? Should we say, no, no, you're wrong, you should be just a protest party, don't contest for government, because that's a trap? Or should we say, yes, you should contest for government, but specifically with this line of march?
03:38 Now, this came up again in my activity in Toronto around Greece, because a speaker from Greece came over who was a leader of ANTARSYA, and he made a speech about the situation in Greece in which he didn't mention the word government. And so afterwards I went to him and I said, well, what is your attitude to the Greek government and what should be done about it?
04:09 [He said,] well, you see, we have a problem: any government in Greece within the present political framework will inevitably be reactionary. The only kind of government that could be progressive is one that rests on workers' councils, but there are no workers' councils in Greece, so therefore we have to keep silent about the question of government until the conditions arise in which it can be discussed in a constructive manner. This apparently was, at least from his point of view, the justification for why they don't support Syriza's left government perspective.
04:40 Now, it was raised again around the events in Egypt, which of course are very complex, and I don't mean to analyse them here, but I'd just like to note that some of the statements which our socialist papers in Canada were reproducing from socialists in Egypt [?] were statements of very strong support for a mass movement to overthrow an unpopular government, but they were statements which didn't contain any perspective about what should replace it — which you might say is a Zapata–Villa type approach. And, without getting into the Egyptian question, I just think that's worth noting and thinking about, particularly in the framework of what has happened since.
05:11 Now, we're talking about an old-new question. There is a history to this question that goes back to the *Communist Manifesto*, where Marx and Engels set out the goal that the proletariat should strive for political power, [and] for using this power to carry out a whole system of fundamental demands, to begin to transform the situation of working people. And they call this winning the battle of democracy.
05:43 Later on, based on the experience of the Paris Commune, they specified that this could not be done within the framework of the old state: it had to be done through creating a new state, which would be a state ruled by the proletariat. And that was the working framework within which we came into the twentieth century.
06:13 Now, something happened in the twentieth century, however, that gave matters a new turn. The battle of democracy was increasingly won — to some extent in the first decades, then more and more as the century progressed — in this sense: that the forms of democratic parliamentary rule, of universal suffrage etc., were established over an increasing range of countries in Europe and internationally, but without the content. The capitalists found it possible to grant the forms of what we call bourgeois democracy in a way that would not grant any real authority to working people.
06:45 That posed the question: what should we do? Should we ignore these forms, or should we engage with them? And that was the very first question posed to the Communist International when Lenin and his comrades joined Clara Zetkin and others in organising it in 1919. And their decision was, we should engage with it; that we should take part in these political structures even though we disagree with them and we don't consider them adequate.
07:15 But the question was posed more specifically a year later, in March 1920 — and that's worth thinking about. It wasn't posed by the Bolsheviks, or by Lenin, or by Clara Zetkin, although she was involved: it was posed by the workers of Germany. Because in March 1920 there was a right-wing putsch in Germany led by a man called Kapp, so it's known as the Kapp putsch — that's how he's becoming immortal.
07:47 And in response to this putsch to overthrow a parliamentary government, the workers of Germany in a united upsurge carried out a general strike, took up arms, and beat back the forces of the right wing, overthrew the right-wing putsch — and then thought, what shall we do next?
08:18 And out of this experience came three ideas that were linked together as a kind of triad. One was the idea of united action by all the workers regardless of their ideological outlooks, to overthrow the Kapp regime but also to achieve other immediate goals.
08:18 And the second idea was that we should put forward demands which aim not merely at immediate gains, like an increase in wages or something of that sort, but aim at increasing the leverage and power of working people. For example, in the Kapp putsch they demanded: arm the workers and disarm the right-wing gangs. It wasn't their only demand, but it was a central demand, posed then as a way of the workers starting to acquire some actual authority and power through which more might become possible. That's what Ed referred to as a transitional approach.
08:51 And the third concept they came up with was that all the workers' organisations — political parties and trade unions and anyone else that we could rope in from the working classes — that all these forces should join together to form what they called a workers' government, or sometimes they called it a socialist government. Or whatever you call it: the concept is clear.
09:22 Now, this did not go forward at the time, mainly because of the disunion of the socialists, including the disunion of the communists, because the communists were very much divided on whether this was a good idea or not — this concept of demands, the united front, transitional demands, the workers' government. Some thought it was good, some [thought it] bad. A big debate went on for about two years, and my book is about the wrap-up of the first stage of this debate at the end of 1922.
09:53 And this collection of concepts is what you might call the united front and transitional demands strategy [?] towards political power for working people.
10:25 Now, when the thing was posed in December 1922 at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, it was a somewhat confused and in some ways not totally conclusive discussion. That's why you will benefit by reading my wonderful book, which will give you 1,300 pages of documentation with all the various threads of the debate fully evident. Pardon the advertisement.
10:56 But basically they were talking about three forms of workers' government. The first is what they called an illusory or fake workers' government, and what they had in mind I think we could associate with the Attlee government of 1945. That's the kind of regime they meant: a government that rests on a workers' movement but has a pro-capitalist leadership, that is capable of carrying out significant reforms but strictly within the framework of reinforcing the authority of the bourgeois state.
11:28 And they said that was an illusory [form]. We would vote for a — quote — Attlee or Labour Party government, but we did not consider it the road forward. It might be a step forward if it promoted the development of revolutionary forces. That was essentially their analysis of that.
11:28 The second type of workers' government was what you had in the Soviet Union at the time: that is, a workers' government based on workers' councils, which had totally shattered the old bourgeois state, had overthrown the bourgeoisie, and had set up — for better or worse, as best they could — the foundations for a planned economy and a transition to socialism. And the communists of the time identified that that's what we're aiming for. Although Clara Zetkin, in that congress, added that that doesn't mean that we endorse everything that was done in the Soviet Union; that there are many things that they did which were bad, but they were the best possible option at that time, and future revolutions need not necessarily take this form. So we should bear that remark of Clara Zetkin's in mind.
12:31 But the third kind of workers' government was what they thought of as a transitional workers' government: that is, one that could be a step towards a revolution, but could come to be before the revolution had fully taken place. And that's what Ed is talking about.
13:03 And I'd like to read their description of this — just a capsule description. Sorry about quotes, I know they're difficult in talks, but this is a short quote. And also I'd like to ask Ed a question here: I think there's an aspect of this definition that goes beyond André Gorz, but let's see what you think about this. Okay:
> The tasks of a workers' government are arming the proletariat, disarming the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, workers' control of production, [shifting] the tax burden to the rich, [breaking] the resistance of the bourgeoisie. Such a government is possible only if it is born of the struggles of the masses themselves and supported by militant workers' organisations created by the most oppressed layers.
13:34 So you have in this two elements. It's not a parliamentary formula, although it might be expressed in parliament as well as in other ways. The original formulation, going back to the Kapp putsch, was not parliamentary: the socialists did not have a parliamentary majority. They thought they could do it anyway, because of the balance of forces being very favourable.
14:05 So the two elements are, first of all, a relationship of forces which is shaped by the mobilisation of working people and by the fighting power of their mass organisations; and second, a series of far-reaching demands [which] make serious inroads into capitalist power. We would not have the same demands today, but we would have demands [that] would be similar with respect to their relationship to the society before us: a government that begins to dismantle bourgeois power and empower working people.
14:35 Transitions don't last long — but we should remember there's a difference between clock time and political time. So for example the Chávez regime in Venezuela, which has some features similar to what I'm talking about, some different but some similar, has now been around for fifteen years. A short space of time, of course, in the framework of the transition to socialism.
15:08 Well, in the Fourth Congress — how long have I gone?
15:08 Chair: At least another five minutes or so.
15:08 John Riddell: Yeah? Oh. Well, I'm going to wrap up. In the Fourth Congress they listed a series of possible workers' governments. I mentioned three; they mentioned two others. They mentioned one that, for example, would have more of a peasant base — more like in Bolivia. But they also said this is not a final list of variants, it's just what's before us right now. They just took what was right before them and set it down on paper.
15:39 Well, a hundred years have gone by. You can be sure that when working people make experiments with anti-capitalist governments today they will come up with new forms, and it will look different. And in that sense, the way we have to analyse [it] is with the analysis of the activist today, not simply the analysis of a historian. And in fact I think important aspects of the essence of the workers' government approach have been arising in several different parts of the world, and they have in fact been arising in new forms.
16:11 Now, to wrap up: what happened to the workers' government approach of the Communist International back in the early 1920s? A couple of years later it was repudiated by the Communist International, and under Stalin it was never again revived. It was picked up and continued by the Left Opposition internationally in the 1930s — Trotsky and his comrades, who were resisting Stalinism — and through them it was projected into the present. Although many of the groups descended from the Left Opposition have over time pulled back from this approach [?], like the Socialist Workers Party of Britain.
17:15 So there we have it: today, a body of ideas which may be useful for us in today's struggle. And I simply present it to you as part of a foundation for a broader discussion.
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