How the left can organise to transform society
John Rees
Some lines are given that book...
Whose strategy, whose tactics?
Every organisation has strategy and tactics. Armies obviously have strategies and tactics. So do corporations, NGOs, charities, trade unions, governments, and political parties. But the strategy and tactics you adopt depend on the kind of organisation you are in. Moreover, differences in strategy arise because of the differing class base of the various organisations in society.
So although it seems obvious that discussion of strategy and tactics should be about the most immediate and pressing campaigns in which we are involved, in fact, such discussion must start much further back. It must begin much deeper in the social structure.
We, of course, are interested in the working class and its capacity for resisting the system. So let us look at some of the key characteristics of workers in capitalist society.
Workers are an exploited and oppressed class. They have to work for a wage which represents only part of the wealth that their work produces – the rest creates profits for the owners of the factories, offices, mines, transport systems, information technologies, power industries, supermarkets, and all the other accumulated economic wealth of society.
This subordination has its counterpart in the ideas that workers hold, at least some of the time. Economic and political subordination breeds passivity and fatalism. Some of the clichés we learn early in life express this: ‘the poor are always with us’, ‘there will always be the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate’, ‘so it’s been, so it will always be’.
It is not surprising that many workers accept these ideas, at least partially. Their economic subordination involves being told when to work and when not, how hard to work and at what, what they will be paid, and how much they will have to pay for what they produce when it reappears on the market.
This lack of control over the productive core of society – what Karl Marx called ‘alienation’ – does not encourage ideological independence.
Every conservative, from the heads of corporations to the leaders of the Tory Party, relies on the passivity induced by powerlessness. It provides soil within which acceptance of the status quo takes root.
So is our situation hopeless? Are we in an Orwellian1984-like nightmare where a completely divided and atomised working class is constantly disoriented and immobilised by the propaganda of our rulers? Is this not the Tory dream of a working class without the capacity for revolt? If this were true, our discussion of strategy and tactics would be a short one. No strategy is possible where no resistance takes place.
But alienation is only half the picture. Te system always induces revolt as well as passivity. Te exploitation and oppression that working people and other groups suffer have always provoked resistance, revolt, and revolution. There always comes a point where some group of workers somewhere decide that enough is enough and that they must take some kind of action.
But if the Tory dream of absolute passivity among working people is untrue, we must not think that its opposite, the anarchist dream of perpetual and spontaneous revolt among workers, is true either.
In reality, there is always a battle between where workers interests lie – in combating the system – and where their consciousness is at any given time – which involves acceptance of the system at least to some degree.
Some critics of Marxism say that this distinction– between workers’ interests and their consciousness – is an artificial one invented to explain away that fact that workers ought to oppose the system but often go along with it. How can you say, the critics ask, that workers have interests different from the views they express?
But this is really not a difficult idea to defend. In everyday life, we all accept that individuals’ interests’ can be different from their consciousness. Look at people who smoke cigarettes. We, and they, know where their interests lie. They lie in giving up smoking, because, as it says in large letters on every packet of cigarettes, ‘Smoking Kills’. Yet their consciousness does not register this fact and they go on smoking.
We think we have some insight into why people behave like this: peer group pressure, advertising, family example, stress, and so on. And many of the same social pressures, on a much greater scale, exist to persuade people not to strike, join a union, riot, or make revolution.
The result is that most workers, most of the time, have what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called ‘contradictory consciousness’. They accept certain things about the system while rejecting others. They may be anti-racists, but admire the Queen. Or they may be great trade-union militants, but believe in immigration controls. The variety of such contradictions is endless.
The aim of socialists must be to raise the level of consciousness and combativity among workers. They must find a way to act with workers in such a way that the more conservative elements of this contradictory consciousness are reduced and the more progressive strengthened.
This is what socialist strategy and tactics are all about: finding those organisations, slogans, and ideas that counteract conservatism and passivity among workers and instead encourage them to fight back.
Timing in revolutionary politics
The activity of a revolutionary organisation forms part of a chain of events taking place over time. Te revolutionary minority never controls the whole chain, because it is composed of economic factors, the actions of other political organisations, the consciousness and combativity of the working class, and many other elements that are either wholly or partially independent of the influence of the organised minority.
A network of revolutionaries can have a crucial effect on the course of events, but only
if it accurately gauges the way in which these other factors are shaping them, and if it tailors its actions to promote some outcomes and suppress others. Moreover, and crucially, since the weight of these factors and the overall direction of events are constantly changing, what a revolutionary organisation may be able to achieve at one time may not be achievable even a short time later.
In short, the question of timing is crucial. This is never truer than in the timing of revolution itself.
Here is one less well-known example from the English Revolution. In 1647, after the First Civil War, King Charles was being feted by the moderates in the House of Commons. If they had been successful, the radicals in the New Model Army, the decisive revolutionary force at this moment, would have been marginalised, and the revolution might never have achieved its full stature.
But decisive action by Cromwell – who vacillated before and after attempting to come to a treaty with the King – and the Army radicals, led to the seizure of Charles by a troop of horses commanded by Cornet Joyce (a very worked junior officer). Asked by the King for his commission for the arrest, Joyce simply pointed to the troopers behind him. Had the King not been taken prisoner by the Army, he might have been restored to the throne.
A more famous example comes from the Russian Revolution. The period immediately before the October insurrection was one of confusion among the leaders of the Bolshevik Party. Lenin wrote letter after letter urging preparations for a new insurrection. Lenin’s tone is frantic in this correspondence because he believed that delay would be disastrous: ‘Delay is criminal. To wait…would be…a betrayal of the revolution.’ And again: ‘to miss such a moment…would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery…for it would mean losing weeks at a time when weeks and even days decide everything. It would mean faint-heartedly renouncing power, for on 1-2 November it will have become impossible to take power.
’Finally, after he had threatened resignation from the Central Committee, the Party’s leading body, Lenin’s view prevailed and the insurrection took place on 25 October 1917.
It is not always the case that urgency means a matter of days. In a revolution, as Lenin noted elsewhere, developments that normally take years can be contracted into days, even hours.
But there is, nevertheless, always a window of opportunity outside which certain actions will no longer be possible or will not have the same force. In recent history, for instance, had revolutionaries not decided to launch the Stop the War Coalition within days of the attack on the Twin Towers, it is unlikely that it would have had the same galvanising effect that it did.
Of course, it is also possible to move too quickly. Had the Bolsheviks attempted a revolution in the summer of 1917, when reaction was in the air, it would certainly have rebounded on them, strengthening the counter-revolution, perhaps decisively. At this time, the Bolsheviks to restrain those who wanted to push forward and launch an insurrection. But whether one is urging restraint or advance, issuing a clear call at the appropriate time is essential.
Many years ago, the labour historian Ralph Samuel wrote that one of the things he disliked about the Communist Party was that there was always a tone of emergency in the organisation. Something or other always had to be ‘done now’, ‘could not wait’, and so on. This criticism is misplaced. If a revolutionary organisation is to play its role in the chain of events, whatever that role might be at any given time, it must act with dispatch. There is always something to be done, and, if it is to be done to maximum effect, it needs to be done in a timely manner.
But ‘timely’ is a variable quantity. What is necessary to prepare for imminent revolution may have to be accomplished with greater speed than the preparation for a demonstration in normal times that is six months hence. But since all organisations, even revolutionary organisations, produce their own inertia, adhering to past patterns of work even when new challenges arise, there will always be a battle to turn the organisation to a correct orientation in good time.
Other political forces, both enemies and rivals, will not wait. So timing will always be of the essence for revolutionaries. Duncan Hallas, a leading revolutionary socialist and the author of a very useful study of
Trotsky, used to quote Shakespeare to make the point:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the food, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life,
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
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