Red Europe rally organised by the Fourth International two years ago-understood importance of building international repolutionary vanguard. eague in Australia.
the kind of concepts current in Labour Party circles.
Recently, however, Whitlam in projecting an annual growth rate of 6 - 7 percent over the next few years stated that wall sections of the community must pay". It is becoming more and more clear that Whitlam will depend on the trade union leadership to cooperate in some form of prices and incomes policy. It is within this context that he has promised to abolish the penal powers. Who needs the penal powers when there are other ways of breaking the strength of the trade unions? Another indication of Labour Party policy are the recently legislated anti-union laws in South Australia introduced by the Labour Premier of that state, Mr. Don Dunstan.
We can see therefore that we have onlyhad glimpses of what could be Labour Party policy in relation to the trade unions. The most likely policy is the attempted integration of the unions into the capitalist state by an incomes policy, although we must remember the confrontationist threats issued by Cameron and the experience of previous Labour Governments which on a number of occasions conftonted the Trade Union movement.
On the question of foreign investment the Labour Party has been extremely unclear apart from occasional statements on the threat of foreign takeovers. However, recently Mr. Whitlam has thrown out a promise to the Australian people "to buy Australia back". This type of demagogy, reactionary as it is utopian, strikes a chond with a certain section of the Australias working class.
What are the tasks facing revolutionaries in Australia in the coming period?
What we have seen in the recent period is the beginning of the emergence of a broad vanguard in the working class. This vanguard is dominated predominantly by anti-boss sentiments and is distinguished by its willingness to struggle, and to develop new methods of struggle. This is of tremendous importance for revolutionaries.
Our main task must be to win political hegemony of this emerging vanguard in the working class. Since this vanguard is at the moment under the influence of social democratic and stalinist ideology this involves breaking them from these trends.
Of course, this raises the question of What is working class consciousness?' We should see this in terms of the Leninist concept: "Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the working class is trained to respond to all cases of oppression no matter what class is affected" (What is to be Done?) Thus it is extremely important for revolutionaries in Australia to raise the questions of the oppression of the blacks and the oppression of the people of New Guinea inside the working class movement. The Australian working class is extremely chauvinistic and has tended to succumb politically because of this.
MILITANT
FORTNIGHTLY PAPER OF THE COMMUNIST LEAGUE IN AUSTRALIA Airmail copy: 15p.
For Subscription contact:Jo Andrews, 182 Pentonville Road.
London. NI.
Telephone: 837-9987. THE LEFT AGAINST EUROPE?, by Tom Nairn (New Left Review No. 75. special issue-35p.)
The whole of the current issue of NLR is given over to a book-length study by Tom Nairn of the significance of British entry to the Common Market. On the one hand, the author analyses what entry means for the ruling class, not simply economically but also politically. On the other, and at considerably greater length, he pitilessly dissects the motives and the inner truth of the anti-Market campaign launched by the Labour Party and tailed by the CP and much of the revolutionary left. Not only is this easily the most important and serious thing to have been written by a Marxist on the subject (to be truthful, it has little competition). It also raises sible subject: issues regarding the nature of bourgeois power, the relation between state and civil society, the respective role of subjective and objective factors in opening the way to revolution, the historical significance of nationalism and the nation state, the material conditions for internationalism, etc. A great deal of Tom Nairn's analysis is right; and where it is wrong or inadequate, it demands a full and meditated answer - one, it goes without saying, that cannot be more than indicated in the space of a short review.
REVOLUTIONARY SENSE Tom Nair prefaces his final section "Beyond the Nation" by a quotation from Marx's 1848 speech on Free Trade: "In general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point, In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade... THis central Thesis Is that Marxists should 'in this revolutionary sense alone be in favour of the Common Market, He attacks the confused thinking and political nervelessness which led the Marxist left to adopt an ambiguous position, deploring the chauvinism of the anti-Market campaign but nevertheless taking part in it instead of swimming against the current. As one example of such a position, he cites an article (by Ben Joseph) in The Red Mole, Vol. 2, No. 10, which he effectively disposes of with the aid of a quotation from Ernest Mandel (from The Red Mole, No 14). If Tom Nairn argued only this - that Marxists should not get involved in defending backward capitalism and national particularism; that opposition to the Common Market is as retrograde as the opposition of the Communist Parties to monopolies rather than to capitalism as such; that entry will inevitably erode some of the central mystifications about the nation, parliament, etc. which serve as the ideological buttresses of bourgeois rule - then it would be possible to go along with him. Most of his essay is indeed an eloquent statement of this case, powered by a gut hatred of the diseased trappings of the nationalist mystique and a biting contempt for the lickspittle servility of labourism. But unfortunately he new left review THE LEFT AGAINST EUROPE?
Tom Nairn *To be in favour of Europe... does not imply surrender to or alliance with the left's enemies.
It means exactly the opposite. It signifies recognising and meeting them as enemies for what they are, upon the terrain of reality and the future."
goes much further, and in overstating his case he reveals the fundamental weaknesses in the political viewpoint from which it is written.
Marx, in the speech on Free Trade quoted above, devotes 95 percent of his effort to attacking the Free Traders, and only the remaining 5 per cent (the passage quoted by Tom Nairn) to saying that nevertheless this did not imply support for protectionism. Marx's main preoccupation is to diffcrentiate the communist position from that of either wing of the bourgeoisie. Tom Nairn, in sharp contrast to this, argues that Marxists should support the Common Market (i.e, not just view it as a more advantageous terrain for the waging of the class struggle). In numerous passages he argues that the Common Market will not merely "hasten the social revolution"; It Will create the objective basis for proletarian internationalism. The past century has been the century of nationalism in Europe, he claims, and the internationalism of Marxists has been abstract, the repetition of timeless truths. Only now, with the transcendance of the nation state, will internationalism be grounded in material reality.
FAMILIAR ARGUMENT Why is this line of argument so familiar? Because it is the Marxism of the pre-1914 Second International.. It is as if the October Revolution had never taken place, the Third and Fourth Internationals had no historical validity, the colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the past half-century had no significance in the world struggle for socialI5m. Tom Nairn criticises Ben Joseph for writing of the need to build the internatioan! revolutionary vanguard: "Perhaps: but then, this was true in 1970 as well, or in 1870 for that matter." He further attacks him for writing: "It is not the objective conditions that have been responsible for a lack of socialist internationalism in Europe but a tailure on the part of the bureaucratically led labour movement to live up to its responsibilities." This, for Tom Nairn, is just the old, crude theory of treacherous leaders. But is it?
The truth of the matter is that, whatever the defects of Ben Joseph's formulations the task of building the international revolutionary vanguard is the task of Marxists today as it was for Marx, Lenin and Trotsky (or Luxemburg and Gramsci, for that matter). And the labour movement', the mass organisations of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries, are bureaucratically led. The problem of the respective importance of subjective and objective factors in the failure of revolutions in West Europe is a real one, and it may be that revolutionary Marxists have often tended to under-estimate the objective factors. But what is certain is that Tom Nair totally liquidates the concrete history of the 'subjective factors'. His standpoint here is the determinism of the pre-World War One Second International. It is surprising, in view of Tom Nairn's obvious debt to Gramsci, that he is so unsympathetic to 'optimism of the will.
There is no room here even to begin to indicate the myriad theoretical problems raised by Tom Nairn's study. Has the bourgeoisie not since its creation always been at once universalist and national-particular? United across national frontiers against the threat of revolution anywhere, but compelled by its very nature to compete -one national bourgeoisie against another? Did the League of Nations not coincide with fascism? Is not the notion of a real transcendance of the nation-state just Kautsky's ultra-imperialism in another guise? And if a limited number of nation-states - here those of West Europe -really did merge into a greater nation-state, would not the nationalism thus generated be as effective a weapon in the hands of the new super-bourgeoisie as the old, particular nationalisms had been? Is national imperialism really something of the past, as Tom Nairn suggests? Is imperialism itself really a 'disease' like fascism, rather than the 'highest state of capitalism'? If one rejects the possibility of 'socialism in one country', does that mean that one has to reject the possibility of overthrow of capitalism in one country? (Has not Tom Nairn himself written a brilliant and original study of the May events, which opened up precisely such a possibility?) And can one speak of a proletarian internationalism whose objective basis is not world-wide but confined to a united West Europe -ie one imperialist power?
REAL PROBLEMS To recognize Tom Nairn's Marxism as nonLeninist, however, does not erase the problems he poses. On the contrary, these problems are real ones, which require answering. Luxemburg, the principal intellectual influence on Tom Nairn, was also a nonLeninist and at times an anti-Leninist. And not only did she too pose questions which demanded answers; the resulting discussion between her and Lenin was of great theoretical value to all revolutionary Marxists since that time.
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