A Few Questions
1. Why is a new social democracy ‘an ancient proposition’. I agree instinctively but not sure of why. Is it because the capitalist class don’t need to make concessions of that order because they are so strong, or can’t afford to be so weak/ needing to centralise? Or not able to because capital reorganised multi nationally ?
2. Do you mean previous efforts to create socialism couldn’t succeed because to beat the imperialists and develop economically / industrially they needed a capitalist state?
And that what they succeeded in was independent national development and shouldn’t be thought of as ‘workers states’ ( ‘deformed’ or otherwise)?
3. So that means that on their own (in one country) movements couldn’t achieve socialism or go beyond national liberation, whoever was leading the movement eg Latin America in the 80s, would always have been limited even if it hadn’t been led by liberal nationalists ?
5. But Scottish and Irish nationalists need to break up the British state, hence are inherently progressive even if not socialist. So if these movements became overtly socialist, could they develop socialist states?
6. Agree about nature of capitalist state - role to defend class interest even if some of the apparatus - nhs, schools etc - result from concessions, from society pushing back
7. So - and this is my main Q - what are you saying about a socialist state? Do you mean movements need to be seeking to take over the state as it seeks to take over politics? Ie as was starting in Greece with a parallel system then supported by the new Syriza gov? What does it mean for how movements organise now?
Responses
1. The essence of social democracy (SD) is its contract with the capitalist system. The UK, the second most powerful capitalist country in the world in 1945, created such a contract. All the SD contracts were with developed capitalist countries. There were no SDs in underdeveloped countries. Today, SD cannot make contracts with developed capitalist countries – regardless of the working class causing extreme pressure for change - because, with the exception of the US, capitalist organisation is centralised in three main blocks with global corporations and a banking system concentrating most profit and wealth. Most capitalist nations borrow globally. For some time, SD has been unable to increase significant resources for working class people in virtually all the individual capitalist countries and has therefore declined as a political force. Capitalism now uses splits of the working class or will use police or military force to stop any serious widespread anti-capitalist action – rather than offer any SD concessions.
2. The first would-be socialist revolutionaries did not create capitalist revolutions. They wanted socialism and they called it so. But their revolutions (with the evolving motors of state bureaucracy) created societies that were completely run by the new state. It was the new state that used everything it could, including state capitalism, to achieve modern development. They were therefore not creating socialist states and neither deformed or degenerated socialist states. They were, and are, brutal, successful, national revolutions that pushed back imperialism but often used state capitalism (of different types) to develop. They were the second wave of the national revolutions that started in 1645. And they broke down some of the most important 20th century imperialism’s barriers to do so
3. Socialist-named revolutions spread across what was ‘the third world.’ In reality they were fighting western imperialism to win their own development. Spreading several countries might have created possible bases to start building socialism, if they were powerful enough not just to push imperialism back but also the capitalist system of society. The capitalist / imperialist blocks today, the EU and the US, would also be powerful enough to challenge the capitalist system of society – should a wider international revolution develop. Cuba and Vietnam have pushed furthest towards opening socialism, but they are still dominated by the US – and China - preventing any genuine socialist step.
4. If they succeeded, the radicalism of Irish and Scottish nationalism would break up the UK log jam and force a reassessment of a second ‘Scandinavia.’ This would open more possibilities for the working classes, which already have access to modern development, and could understand socialism via new demands for a different sort of society. A general coalition / federation across these small nations could be a first step.
5.-7. In 1917 Russia, dual power (which should have been fully understood as two states) clashed for the leadership of society. The soviets represented exclusively the workers, peasants and most of the army. While the Bolsheviks, eventually, argued ‘all power’ to the soviets in 1917, in practice they did not see the soviets as the exclusive representation of the working class and peasantry. On the contrary, they replaced the possibility of a new leadership based in new soviets with their own party and then with the inevitable bureaucracy of their own party, which in turn pushed exclusively for national economic development. The creation, as full as possible, of the self-organisation or organisations, created by workers and their allies, as the day-to-day alternative to the capitalist state, must be the engine room of a future socialist society. The socialist parties cannot replace this new state. And in the already developed countries, the goals of the new state must include the earliest possible subordination to a new society – via the peoples’ decisive democracy
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