Michel Pablo and others, The Workers and Farmers' Government, SWP Education for Socialists Series, 42p.
This publication of the Education Department of the Socialist Workers Party is one of the best of their 'Education for Socialists' series. In particular, it reprints important documents of the Communist International and contains a very influential examination by Michel Pablo (no less!) of the historical use of the 'workers government' slogan. Because this article will be the high point of the collection for most readers, it is on the strengths and weaknesses of Pablo's analysis that this review concentrates.
The essential problem which Pablo attempts to come to grips with is the relation between propaganda for a full revolutionary programme, and the fact that revolutionaries also demand, in the present Communist Party and Socialist Party in France, etc. Pablo discusses how, in a whole series of concrete cases, Lenin and Trotsky related propaganda work concerning the tasks of a genuine revolutionary government to concrete agitation for Socialist, or Communist-Socialist Party governments.
As Pablo points out, the propaganda [illegible] poses no particular problem. It is simply the task of explanation which revolutionaries engage in whenever they advance their programme and whenever they put forward the line which a government really acting in the interests of the working class would undertake. In the words of the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International, this is a question of how 'we indefatigably develop agitation around those transitional demands which should in our opinion form the programme of the workers government'. In this sense, the slogan of 'workers government' is a propaganda one primarily fulfilling the task of educating the vanguard on the tasks which it is necessary to undertake in order to overthrow capitalism.
But simply explaining the tasks of a revolutionary government is not sufficient. The only people who could actually carry out such a programme are the revolutionaries themselves, and they are in general far too weak to pose themselves as a government. Simply outlining the tasks which a pure workers government would undertake cannot suffice to break the masses from the reformist organisations. Trotsky explained this beautifully in a debate in the Belgian section of the Fourth International when the sectarian Vereecken attacked Trotsky's slogan of 'Let the Belgian Socialist Party take power'. 'Vereecken replies to this: No! It is necessary to demand a workers government and not simply a socialist government. We must not forget the Stalinist workers, and besides the plan is no good— it threatens us with inflation. I, Vereecken, I will propose a better plan. Is this serious? No, it is ridiculous. Vereecken sets himself outside of reality. He constructs in his imagination a united front that does not exist in Belgium. For this imaginary united front he proposes an imaginary programme, that is Vandervelde (Socialist leader) and Jacquemotte (CP leader) ought to fight together for the perfect plan dreamed up by Vereecken. In this way matters will be splendidly arranged' (The Belgian Dispute).
Pablo discusses how similarly idiotic views to that of Vereecken were dealt with by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia in 1917, and by Trotsky in Spain in 1931, and in France in 1936. Trotsky later codified his conclusions in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in the famous formula that 'Of all parties and organisation which base themselves on the workers and peasants and speak in their name we demand that they break politically from the bourgeoisie and enter upon the road of struggle for the workers' and farmers' government'. That this type of position was not merely conjunctural but corresponded to a profound question of the relation of forces within the working class was explained by Trotsky, in this particular case in relation to Belgium, as follows: 'The slogan of a Social Democratic government is calculated not on some exceptional conjuncture but on a more or less lengthy political period. We could give up this slogan only if the Social Democracy— before its coming to power— should begin to weaken, ceding its influence to a revolutionary party' (Revisionism and Planning).
It is this aspect of Lenin and Trotsky's ideas, the specific answers they gave in specific situations, and not their general propaganda for a revolutionary government, that Pablo expounds most clearly. In particular he correctly insists that the slogans for government must flow not from some arbitrary list of workers' organisations, or from some scheme drawn up in a revolutionary study, but from the real dynamic of the class struggle. In all this Pablo follows in the footsteps of Trotsky's polemic against Vereecken and others.
Unfortunately, it has not been the best aspects of Pablo's article which have been the most influential. The really influential aspects, particularly for the Healyites, the 'Militant' and others, have been on those questions where Pablo quite clearly departs from the position of Lenin and Trotsky. In this sense Gerry Healy and Ted Grant, in particular, have been the truest of the 'Pabloites'.
The most obvious theoretical deviation of Pablo's article lies in its treatment of the demand 'break politically with the bourgeoisie'. The essence of Pablo's mistake is that he reduces the break with the bourgeoisie to the level of a break at the level of government, i.e. to a break from a coalition with bourgeois parties. Naturally, breaking from such a coalition with bourgeois parties is a partial realisation of the formula of 'break politically with the bourgeoisie', but it is only partial. Above all, in Lenin's words, 'politics is participation in the affairs of the state, directing the state, determining the forms, tasks and content of the state's activities'. The demand of 'break politically with the bourgeoisie' is above all a demand for the reformist parties to break with the representative of the bourgeoisie as a whole, to break with the bourgeois state.
Pablo unfortunately, by not grasping this, not only puts forward positions which are wrong, but actually advances positions which are explicitly condemned by Lenin. For example, Pablo says that: 'the formula "All power to the Soviets, Down with the capitalist ministers", meant in practice the demand for a Menshevik-Social Revolutionary Government'.
Here, however, is what Lenin had to say on this view: 'The slogan "Power to the Soviets", however, is very often, if not in most cases, taken quite incorrectly to mean a "Cabinet of the parties of the Soviet majority" [i.e. a Menshevik-SR government — JR]. We would like to go into more detail on this very false notion. A "Cabinet of the parties of the Soviet majority" means a change of individual ministers, with the entire old government apparatus left intact... "Power to the Soviets" . . . means removing this apparatus and substituting for it a new popular one, i.e. a truly democratic apparatus of Soviets.' (Lenin—One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution).
Certainly the transfer of power to the Soviets would have led to the creation of a Menshevik-SR government, but as Lenin points out, and Pablo omits, the real point is not who should form the government but what state that government is based on and responsible to.
'All Power to the Soviets' means the transfer of power to a new state apparatus. Pablo unfortunately falls into the classic social democratic deviation of confusing the question of government and the question of the state. The formula 'Break politically with the bourgeoisie' addressed in 1917 to the reformists meant, as always, not only 'break with the bourgeois parties' but most fundamentally 'break with the bourgeois state'.
Despite this and other errors, Pablo's article remains valuable. Indeed, in many ways it is now more relevant in Western Europe than it has been for many years. The conditions of relative economic, social and political stability during the 1950s and 1960s meant that revolutionaries necessarily had to put almost all their emphasis on the propaganda aspects of governmental slogans. Not only were revolutionaries talking to a tiny vanguard, but the coming to office of reformist workers' parties in no way threw the bourgeois system into crisis—indeed, in many cases the bourgeoisie wanted such parties in office. It is absurd to suggest that the coming to office of the Labour Party in 1964, for example, fulfilled the criteria laid down by the Communist International of 'accelerating the process of the decomposition of the bourgeois regime'.
It is only a complete right-winger who could confuse this situation of the 50s and 60s with the following conditions in which Trotsky demanded as a central demand the call for a social-democratic government: 'The dynamic equilibrium of capitalism is gone; the equilibrium of the parliamentary system is cracking and crumbling. And finally—this is a link of the same chain—the conservative equilibrium of reformism, which is forced to denounce the bourgeois regime publicly in order to save it, is beginning to shake. Such a situation is replete with possibilities (together with dangers). We must not retract the slogan 'power to the social democracy', but, on the contrary, give this slogan an all-the-more-militant and sharp character'. (Revisionism and Planning).
Of course, in the 50s and 60s, revolutionaries still called for governments of the reformist workers' parties, but this could not be a central slogan. Now, however, a new situation is developing in capitalist Europe. In countries such as France, Italy and Portugal a process of general development of crisis in all bourgeois institutions is already well advanced. Britain will follow the same path tomorrow. Under these conditions there is no doubt that the formula of the Transitional Programme, the demand for the reformist parties to 'break politically with the bourgeoisie' in the full sense of that phrase, begins to acquire an entirely greater significance. The coming to office of the Union of the Left in France, or a similar development of the processes which are beginning to manifest themselves in the rest of Europe, would truly massively 'accelerate the process of decomposition of the bourgeois regime' and provide a tremendous spur to the upsurge of the masses.
Under the conditions of the coming years, Pablo's article, and the other material in this collection, will not provide all the answers, but, at the very least, it begins to pose questions which will become increasingly important. For that reason alone, this collection is necessary reading for all socialists.
John Ross