The state controls every part of the armed forces, from policemen’s clubs to the atomic bomb. So long as the capitalist class is allowed to remain in control of the military, there would be no chance of dispossessing the capitalists, or abolishing their system. The primary objective of a revolutionary working class entails gaining control of the armed forces.
There is no possibility of the workers successfully engaging the capitalist class in violence. If the capitalist means of co-ercion was solely the police , then, we could organise workers’ battalions such as the Irish Citizens Army . But the tremendous nature of military force in society today preclude the possibility of prevailing. So capitalists has the supreme weapon w: political power and with it , control of the army, navy, air and police forces and that power is conferred upon the representatives of the capitalist class by elections and that is why they invest such large amounts of wealth and much time and effort to win them .
The SPGB are not pacifists. We considered violence a possibility but we argue that the more workers understand and the more educated they become in socialist ideas, the less chance there would be of violence.
Historically the battle of ideas has been waged both in the mind ( in debates and discussions) and on the streets. The SPGB favour the first approach, and do all we can to keep activity there. Street fighting can only firstly divide us and secondly weaken us. Authoritarian parties such as the old Communist Party denigrate and suppress their opposition so as not to compete by demonstrating the relative values of their ideas. This is where street-fighting plays its negative role: physically removing opposition that one cannot overcome in a battle of hearts and minds. The revolution is aborted in the process, not defended. This is another reason why a socialist revolution must be peaceful.
Revolutionary violence” is a sign of weakness in the working class. Our assumption in the Socialist Party is that significant numbers of capitalists will see the futility of resisting a well-educated, well-organised working-class majority . The capitalist class cannot continue it’s rule even through violence when enough workers decide to break with the capitalists’ legitimacy and the capitalist system.
It was BECAUSE of their control of the state, the German SPD could enforce its rule. And of course, it was the control of the state again that permitted the Bolsheviks to assume dictatorial control over Russia through the coercion of the Red Army over the SR/Menshevik/Anarchist opposition.
The position of the SPGB is that the control of the state neutralises the threat of a recalcient capitalist class thwarting the will of a class conscious majority , which is the precondition of establishing socialism.The SPGB reject ALL forms of minority action to attempt to establish socialism, which can only be established by the working class when the majority have come to want and understand it. Without a socialist working class, there can be no socialism. The establishment of socialism can only be the conscious majority, and therefore democratic, act of a socialist-minded working class. In many of the so-called revolutionary situations in the past that majority did not exist within the working class .
The German SPD prevailed because they indeed had either the active or passive support of most Germans who sought simply a period of respite and recuperation after the war years. Luxemburg understood that the battle for the hearts and minds of the German working class was still to be won and that any insurrection would have been premature. The Sparticist / Revolutionary Shop Stewards Uprising was actually provoked by the Right and certainly not instigated by Luxemburg or Leibnecht. That the Left did what was expected of them demonstrated the political immaturity of the times .
Again the example of the army in Russian Revolution answers those that argue that soldiers (and state employees in general) due to their indoctrination, would not obey the instructions of a workers' parliament but would still respond to the orders of the capitalists. They claim that they could then be used to put down the revolution and this gives rise to further speculation about the need for workers' militia, by-passing parliament and so on. It is quite illogical to assume that the wave of enthusiasm for socialism which would be sweeping through the working class as a whole would somehow miss out that section which forms the bulk of the armed forces. Our evidence for this is the record of previous revolutions. The success of the bourgeois revolution in Russia in 1917 was guaranteed when the military, which for decades had brutally put down all opposition to the tsar, succumbed to the general revolutionary discontent and refused any longer to protect the old ruling class. If soldiers then took up the slogans of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and SRs, how much more likely will they be to accept socialist policies put forward by workers like themselves organised in a mass socialist party ?
The capitalist class are the dominant class today because they control the State (machinery of government/political power). And they control the State because a majority of the population allow them to, by their everyday attitudes but also voting for pro-capitalist parties at election times, so returning a pro-capitalism majority to Parliament, so ensuring that any government emerging from Parliament will be pro-capitalism. Just as today a pro-capitalism majority in Parliament reflects the fact that the overwhelming majority of the population wants or accepts capitalism, so a socialist majority in Parliament would reflect the fact that a majority outside Parliament wanted socialism.
The SPGB contest that control of parliament by representatives of a conscious revolutionary movement will enable the bureaucratic-military apparatus to be dismantled and the oppressive forces of the state to be neutralised, so that socialism may be introduced with the least possible violence and disruption.
To repeat, the Socialist Party is not pacifist and does not exclude if need be violence but has adopted the Chartist slogan "peacefully if possibly, forcibly if necessary".
Only a majority of socialist-minded workers could have made the revolution in Germany. The bloody defeat showed how violence, especially by a minority, is suicidal against an existing organised state. That Luxemburg was against proposing a revolutionary putsch is on record and what she simply did, was what any honest representative of the working class could do when events actually began - she took the side of the workers against blood-thirsty mercenaries.
We do share points of agreement with Luxemburg. The rights of nations to self determination is such a point that Luxemburg is closer in agreement with the Socialist Party of Great Britain than she is with Lenin. But the SPGB certainly did not accept her economic theories as published in Accumulation of Capital .
Nor did Luxemburg share Lenin's conception of the socialist party from as early as "Leninism or Marxism" to her criticisms of the Bolsheviks suppression of democracy. Her idea of what the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" entailed greatly differed from Lenin's and is closer to the SPGB's interpretation.
“There must be the widest participation on the part of the workers, that is, a real democracy, and it was precisely this democracy which alone could be designated as the dictatorship of the proletariat. A party-dictatorship was for her no more than "a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense,, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins." - Paul Mattick
But indeed Luxemburg did view The Russian Revolution as a proletarian revolution and supported the Bolsheviks, warts and all ,in spite of all their various mistakes and all her reservations. What she would conclude if she had lived longer and seen how it developed, well, we will never know, eh?
Luxemburg comments in The Russian Revolution concerning the Bolshevik dissolution of the Constituent Assembly:
"...All this shows that “the cumbersome mechanism of democratic institutions” possesses a powerful corrective – namely, the living movement of the masses, their unending pressure. And the more democratic the institutions, the livelier and stronger the pulse-beat of the political life of the masses, the more direct and complete is their influence – despite rigid party banners, outgrown tickets (electoral lists), etc. To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions..."
See here
The SPGB position is to capture parliament to abolish capitalism, not to assume political office or to institute a policy of reforms. Therefore we can perhaps agree with Luxemburg when she says:
"Our participation in the elections is necessary not in order to collaborate with the bourgeoisie and its shield-bearers in making laws, but to cast out the bourgeoisie and its shield-bearers from the temple, to storm the fortress of the counter-revolution, and to raise above it the victorious banner of the proletarian revolution.In order to do this, is a majority in the National Assembly necessary? Only those who subscribe to parliamentary cretinism, who would decide the revolution and socialism with parliamentary majorities, believe this. Not the parliamentary majority in the National Assembly, but the proletarian mass outside, in the factories and on the streets, will decide the fate of the National Assembly.... It, the mass, shall decide on the fate and the outcome of the National Assembly. What happens in, what becomes of, the National Assembly depends upon its own revolutionary activity. The greatest importance therefore attaches to the action outside, which must batter furiously at the gates of the counter-revolutionary parliament. But even the elections themselves and the action of the revolutionary representatives of the mass inside parliament must serve the cause of the revolution. To denounce ruthlessly and loudly all the tricks and dodges of the esteemed assembly, to expose its counter-revolutionary work to the masses at every step, to call upon the masses to decide, to intervene – this is the task of the socialists’ participation in the National Assembly."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/23.htm
The vote is merely the legitimate stamp which will allow for the dismantling of the repressive apparatus of the States and the end of bourgeois democracy and the establishment of real democracy. It is the Achilles heel of capitalism and makes a non-violent revolution possible.What matters is a conscious socialist majority outside parliament, ready and organised to take over and run industry and society; electing a socialist majority in parliament is essentially just a reflection of this. It is not parliament that establishes socialism, but the socialist working-class majority outside parliament and they do this, not by their votes, but by their active participating beyond this in the transformation of society. There is little difference on emphasis and not of principle between the two positions. We fully agree with her that "Without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat, there can be no socialism."
But the SPGB is NOT a Luxemburgist party, and we do not consider her, or Marx, as infallible canon. Her position, or Kautsky's, did not determine the SPGB critique of the Russian Revolution. And as an experience October 1917. The lessons from it for to-days working class , can only be negative ones.
Many shared Luxemburg's initial support and enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution, that cannot be denied, but on later mature reflection of events, Marxists such as Pannekoek could re-evaluate the whole revolutionary period as a bourgeois revolution from the outset. How long it would have taken for Luxemburg to reach a similar position, who knows?
Can we prove that achieving socialism requires little bloodshed? The SPGB has perhaps the most thought out argument for maintaining that there is all possibility that socialism can be achieved by little violence. Its been discussed and debated within the SPGB since it began all through the various stands of popular contemporary political currents of the time, from insurrectionists to syndicalism. So far, it has been a matter of the Socialist Party unfortunately saying "we told you so" and that hurts and gives no satisfaction to most SPGB members. We want to be proved wrong and that somehow there is a shortcut to socialism. But we are a miserable lot of gloom and doom merchants, but again at same time, we are rosy eyed optimists too in our views that the workers are fully capable of eventually understanding socialism and organising for it with the minimum of social disruption and upheaval and chaos, normally associated with revolution.
The SPGB case is a valid proposition for the working class to choose or reject and it should not be denied to them though omission or by misinterpretation. The SPGB position is that we deem it as very unlikely that the capitalist class would be capable of resisting socialism violently and have argued that in my posts. See also the thread of workers in uniform somewhere on the forums why we think soldiers and police will align themselves with the socialist majority.
But not being soothsayers or determinists, we say that there may indeed be a reaction from the capitalist class and it would be resisted and thus we adopt the slogan "peacefully if possible , forcibly as necessary" and that's been part of the SPGB case since 1904 and the reason we emphasise the importance of capturing political control of the state machinery INCLUDING the armed forces to guarantee the will of the majority over any recalcriant minority.
A 1934 article upon the Austrian workers uprising which may also illustrate our attitude to violence and non-violence by workers:
"Workers all over the world have been moved to admiration by the heroic resistance of the Austrian workers, fighting in defence of their trade union and political organisations. These men were organised in a party to which we are opposed, a party whose policy we know to be wrong, but that should not, and does not, prevent us from welcoming the spirit in which they defended themselves. Their conduct is a proof that the working class can produce men and movements as tenacious, and possessed of as much endurance and integrity, as anything the ruling class can show, despite the manifold advantages of their position...
...The Government was probably surprised by the vigour of the defence, which, perhaps, explains their declaration on the opening day of the struggle that they had it well under control. On the other hand, this may have been a deliberate lie, like many other statements they issued... Never at any time had the Social Democrats the slightest chance of success, unless backed up by a revolt in the regular army. This was rumoured, but falsely...The struggle was not even a forlorn hope, for there never was any ground for hope....
...It was a desperate and spontaneous decision to be crushed fighting rather than to be crushed without that gesture of defiance. As one Social Democratic leader wrote in Vienna during the struggle, it was, in effect, an unequal battle between “old rifles and a few cartridges” on the one side, and artillery and machine-guns on the other...
...being built up on the confused doctrines of reformism instead of on a clear understanding of Socialist principles, the Social Democratic Party found itself faced with a dilemma from which there was no escape. The leaders have for years preached the need to strive for so-called practical, every-day reforms, as stepping-stones to a distant Socialism. But in order to justify this position they had also to claim that the achievements were in themselves of great value. They had to tell their followers that the housing schemes of Vienna, and the various other little gains and liberties, were vital inroads into capitalism and must be defended at all costs. Consequently, when the Government finally made a frontal attack on the Vienna Council the Social Democrats had either to fight or else admit that these things were not worth fighting for. To do the latter meant renouncing the doctrines of a lifetime of propaganda, and was unthinkable. Yet the fact remains that it is not worth while for a workers’ movement to go down in suicidal glory for the sake of the nominal control of part of the machinery of local government...
...Neither in Austria nor anywhere else have the workers’ organisations made any serious inroads into capitalist control. The only way of doing so is for a party solidly based on Socialist knowledge and conviction to gain control of the machinery of Government, national and local, including the armed forces. Attempts by a minority to seize power by force of arms against those who control the Government and the armed forces, or attempts to resist the Government, are always foredoomed to failure except in the rare and exceptional event of the armed forces themselves going over to the workers. Therefore, a workers’ movement which understood the nature of power would never get itself in the false position occupied by the Social Democrats. It would never imagine that it had crippled capitalism and overawed the ruling class when in reality it had only been invited into a nominal share of the Government in order to tide over a period of transition during which the capitalists were not sure of their grip on the situation....
...Realising the hopelessness of armed resistance, the Social Democratic leaders urged the workers to ignore the Government’s deliberate attempts to provoke them, and tried to play for time. Again and again they offered conditional support to Dollfuss and offered to give up their arms if he would disarm the Heimwehr...When, therefore, on February 12th, the executive again counselled delay, the workers acted on their own initiative, thus losing what advantage there would have been in a more unanimous action, ...
...The truth is...that a party which struggles for a series of reforms is bound to be divided at the moment of crisis - those on one side counselling another coalition in order to safeguard the reforms already won,while those on the other side urge independence and resistance. It was true...that the Austrians faced a problem to which there was no solution....A better understanding among the Austrian workers could not have turned defeat into victory, but it would have prevented the illusion being held that armed resistance was a practicable possibility. They would have realised the hard but inescapable truth that the first step is to win a majority, and that, when that is done, there is still no road to Socialism except through the control of the machinery of Government, including the armed forces, and that the Socialist movement must be organised internationally.
We admire the great courage of the Austrian workers and only regret that they should have been in a position in which such heavy sacrifices were demanded without the possibility of commensurate achievements."
Its a sympathetic article that is critical but not from a pacifist position. As they say, the successful battles are the ones that didn't require to be fought and i think that is the principle the SPGB tries to convey when we demand education, knowledge, and understanding rather than workers militias and guns.
AJJ
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