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Attempt at Balance of the LRC Conference

Marie Lynam
17th November 2009 at 10:44
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Hello comrades, Marie Lynam, GMB, individual capacity, 15.11.09

About the State Socialist conceptions of the Commune on the occasion of the LRC Conference 14.11.09

I greet the Conference, which was a good one.

In a first point, I wish to comment on the Commune’s invitation to its London Forum on “The degeneration of Labour and where is the Labour Party going?” In my point 2 below, I comment on (the adopted) resolution No. 14, moved by the same comrades at the LRC Conference yesterday. Among other things, and presumably in the context of the old Soviet Union, this resolution condemns “the failure of [the] State Socialist conceptions”.

First, about the ‘degeneration’ of Labour: It seems to me that the Labour Party never degenerated. From the beginning, it was a reformist Party that wanted capitalism to have a human face. The intention might have been to civilize a shameless cannibal. It is a matter of record that Labour succeeded partially in this, at certain times. The cannibal would even use a knife and a fork, at certain times, if Labour would be so kind as to go and do the hunting. Objections would surely lose Labour its job in the Great House.

But when Labour was set up, capitalism seemed the only way of life. You had to kill in order to live, or so it seemed. And when Labour came to government, this meant that a Workers Party based on the Trade Unions had gained the power to be in government. This was quite a conquest at the time. Such a process is still unique, or almost unique, in the world - coming in Britain from earliest industrialization, first bourgeois revolution and a huge working class. It is easy to take for granted the great social gains this allowed – like a single Trade Union Centre. But by the same token, it is easy to fall into the error of believing that the cannibal will one day be reformed.
It could be said that when New Labour invaded Iraq, Labour had acquired the same tastes as the cannibal and sunk to its level. But if this is degeneration, it happened long before New Labour and Iraq. Indeed, since Labour never planned to kill the cannibal, it could be said that it always colluded with it, more or less.
Perhaps the problem needs to be posed differently; perhaps it simpler to say that the decline in Labour’s humaneness mirrors the increased savagery of capitalism.

Or rather, that there has not been a degeneration of Labour so much as a degeneration of its project to humanize capitalism.

- - - - - -

My point 2: About [the] State Socialist conceptions of the Commune:
There is a contradiction in terms in that resolution. The ‘state’ exists only in class society - one class oppressing the other;  whilst ‘socialist’ indicates a society where distribution is no longer enforced, but carried out by the automatic equitability of the organization of things. There cannot be ‘State Socialist conceptions’.
Had the Soviet leadership allowed the revolutions that followed 1924 to succeed instead of helping their defeats – thus helping Hitler’s rise – the Third International would have continued, creating, retaining and impelling socialist and communist tendencies. There would have been Soviets in Europe. The British Communists would have grown, as well as Socialist or Communist currents in the Labour Party. The fact that the LRC still needs to be invited to join Liberation today underlines not the limitations of the LRC so much as the limitations of the imperialist Labour structure it has not yet broken away from.

The story of the LRC is inseparable from the history of Labour. The Labour Party is a Workers Party at its base, but an imperialist structure with an imperialist functioning. The Labour leaderships cannot be other than imperialist, because they emanate from an imperialist structure. Those who enter this structure become changed by it, as they go up in the hierarchy. The LRC and the Labour Left are not suffering so much from the failures of Stalinism (as implied in the Commune’s Resolution) as from Labour’s original endorsement, and then management, of the imperialist State.

The capitalist State uses property to accumulate private capital, whilst the Workers State uses property to accumulate human progress. This is analyzed in the works of J. Posadas*.
But the capitalist State and Capital are not the same things. The recent bank bailout showed that the capitalist State remains the agent of social coordination that holds the wealth of society as a whole. And that the continuation of capitalism depends on its ability to force the State to bail it out. Thus, between State and Capital, there is a relationship of one dominating the other. There is no reason to think that this domination cannot be reversed, since it was done in Russia, China and many other countries.

The bailed-out bankers have the power to access the coffers of the State. But since you should own what you buy, it is a matter of time before the State has access to the coffers of the Banks. Very little indeed is needed to solve this problem. It is a small problem of leadership.

The difficulty is in building this leadership: The State over-rules parliament at every big turn, and Finance Capital overrules the State at every big turn. It follows that to challenge Finance Capital, one needs another form of State, a Revolutionary State or/and Republic that imposes its right to access the coffers of the Banks.
That leadership reverses the relation between State and Capital, and can no longer be the servant of the old State dominated by the priorities of capital (of which killing in order to live).
Marie Lynam - 15.11.09

* J. Posadas, Revolutionary State and Socialism, published in 2008 in the Scientific, Cultural and Political Editions.

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