Left pragmatism and the crisis of working class leadership
The history of revolutionary Marxist polemics from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky to the present day has been the effort to bring the dialectics down from dusty bookshelves to the workers upon whom the dialectics of history operate and who are driven by their need of self preservation to take action on their own behalf. Dialectics is Marxist science (see Lenin and Trotsky ) which critiques bourgeois ideology as the fetishism of commodities manifest as pragmatism and all its varieties from empiricism, instrumentalism etc.
“This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; describing it in its action as the state, and to explain all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc. etc. arise from it, and trace their origins and growth from that basis. Thus the whole thing can, of course, be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another).”
“It has not, like the idealistic view of history, in every period to look for a category [eg. measuring periods of history in accordance to certain ideas], but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice. Accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism, by resolution into “self-consciousness” or transformation into “apparitions”, “spectres”, “whims”, etc. but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other types of theory.”
“It shows that history does not end by being resolved into “self-consciousness as spirit of the spirit”, but that in it at each stage there is found a material result: a sum of productive forces, an historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor; a mass of productive forces, capital funds and conditions, which, on the one hand, is indeed modified by the new generation, but also on the other prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a special character. It shows that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.”
– Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Chpt 2: Civil Society and the Conception of History
Dialectics vs. Pragmatism, the empiricism of political centrism!
For Trotsky the most dangerous form of bourgeois pragmatism is the bourgeois ideology of empiricism. Empiricism is the application of pragmatism that is antagonistic to dialectics. Dialectics is the method of understanding social reality as the contradiction of opposites rooted in the class struggle in the production of value which is the basis of social change arising out of subjective transformation of objective reality. Empiricism rejects dialectics because it empowers workers as a subjective force able to change the objective reality of class struggle by means of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist social relations. It reduces class struggle over the production of value to its distribution as the level of exchange. Marx called this inversion of production relations as exchange relations the fetishism of commodities, where the production of value produced by labour power becomes the inherent quality of the commodity itself. Class struggle is reduced to the competition between labour and capital over the distribution of value rather than its production. The necessity for revolution to eliminate exploitation of labour power during production is obviated by the the institutionalization of reform and the fetishism of the market
The centrist form of pragmatism as empiricism promotes its fake revolutionary credentials as the enemy of capitalism while locking workers into a reformist struggle for the redistribution of wealth. The empiricist is an idealist who denies the material reality of production relations in capitalism and the historic motive power of class struggle. By taking production as given and reducing class struggle to exchange relations (the struggle over wages and prices) they offer an indirect justification for the survival of capitalism. They reject Trotskyism in method and program and the revolutionary party to lead that struggle. It follows that they renounce dialectics which embodies the method and practice of the transitional program – a set of demands for workers to fight for, and advance from, being able to transform the proletariat into a class conscious revolutionary subject of and for socialism.
Thus the bourgeois form of pragmatism that evolved with US imperialism was adapted by bourgeois intellectuals as empiricism to trap the labour movement in reformism as centrism. It created a new category of revolutionary Marxism as Centristm, which claimed to adhere to Marxism, but at the same time rejecting dialectics as the method of subjective class consciousness transforming the objective reality. Empiricism became institutionalized from a classless pragmatism to escape the working class into a reformist ideology which now part of the objective reality trapped workers in capitalist social relations and politically a socially imperialist bloc with the ruling class. We can see how pragmatism evolved from the ideology that justified the genocides of the indigenous while the US was opening its frontiers to colonial capitalism at its birth, to that of its global hegemony, which in its decline and decomposition today becomes the open apologia for US genocidal warmongering in Gaza. While the US masses are locked into the reformist ideology of empiricism they continue to support US imperialism as a progressive force for ‘democracy’ against Stalinism and fascism. Yet in its desperate attempts to stop its decline its attempts to justify genocide have failed to stop a world wide mobilisation against US complicit, and created the conditions for a return to dialectics as the logic of socialist revolution.
How do we use dialectics to fight the centrists and build the revolutionary party?
Newly activated radicals are rejecting genocide, environmental catastrophe and a no future future. Marxism ruthlessly exposes and destroys the treacherous role of left centrists who demobilize radical workers by refusing to call for and build a united front for the mass workers’ party where most advanced workers can create a pole for our class to learn the lessons which are required to move society forward through socialist revolution. Those lessons can only be won in the struggle to unite the class, not just around each minimum demand at separate work places, separate schools and communities. But to make the jump from quantity to quality means each minimum struggle must be linked by the class (where-else but via its party) to every other struggle where the distributional analysis is negated as the hidden social relations of production behind each emergent crisis and struggle is revealed.
Centrism blocks the masses from founding their mass party and furthermore blocks it becoming a revolutionary organization. No worry, say the left centrists, “we are the revolutionary party-hop aboard.” Listen to them and you would never guess Marxism seeks the abolition of the wages system! For the empiricist centrist, good workers leaders fight for a democratic program and whatever “enough” is!
Revolutionary organizations use a transitional program as a stepwise method for the education of subjective factors (the consciousness of the vanguard workers) in the struggle to take each immediate demand and raise it to the logic of workers taking power. The objectivists tell us that the workers (the subjective factor) are not ready despite the objective conditions being over-ripe. They say you have to approach the workers “where they are” and the program should reflect the subjective backwardness of the masses and adapt to their minimum program. For the right centrists with an orientation to the labor bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy this means vote Blue. For the left centrists with an orientation to the radicalizing youth who want socialism now this means adapting to the maximum program. The right centrists jump from the minimum program to the someday party to the someday socialism while the left centrists jump from the minimum program to join our party, wave a red flag and fight for the revolution in the abstract! What unites the right and left centrists is they do not apply the dialectics through the transitional program. The applied dialectics is the only way to escape the bourgeois consciousness of fetishized commodity relations. Only when the workers know their labor power and natural resources work together to create surpluses can they work to take that wealth into their hands as a class.
Pragmatism as the empiricism of the common man sees values as they present in the distributional explanation of value creation. The special poisonous character of pragmatism’s empiricist variety is the conception that there is some redistributional quantity of moneys, some magnitude enough, some reform, that allows the delay or does away with the need for the socialist revolution, the OVERTHROW of the regime of existing relations of employment, the MODE of production and all the oppressions that serve and sustain these relations.
The struggle against the capitalist mode of production is a struggle which escalates to unite the class around its own party and program which arrives at an understanding of the need for a workers’ government to expropriate the means of production and then organize production by the workers themselves through democratic planning. The capitalists are exposed by the confluence of the entangled series of catastrophic events that are the consequence of the terminal crisis of capitalism. The chaos of the anarchy of production has led to climate catastrophe, escalating inter imperialist war (Ukraine) and settler colonial genocide in Gaza, all as the US/EU economy in the process of decoupling from the petro-dollar is quickly being isolated from the BRICs and is collapsing under the weight of its imperialist military commitments.
The terminal crisis of capitalism, imperialist wars, genocides, environmental devastation, revolution and counter-revolution drive the masses into action. In wave after wave generations of young workers and students are reaching for something that works in -resembling taking power and agency, only to be stymied by layers of misleaders committed to sustaining the status-quo and deflating mass movements with reformist cheerleading and electoralism. While reformism remains a powerful force, the radicalized youth and vanguard workers no longer accept the direct apologia of the Democrats, the labor bureaucracy and their centrist apologists, as bourgeois democracy now equals genocidal war.
Marx begins the intellectual battle against utilitarian bourgeois political economists
Marx’s science of dialectics exposes the bourgeois political economists’ empiricist inversion of value creation which they placed in the realm of exchange relations because they couldn’t see value creation hidden in the process of production. This becomes the OBJECTIVIST reality of capitalist ideology pitted against the SUBJECTIVE reality of class consciousness which develops as workers recognize the exploitation of their labor power in the creation of values.. This wellspring of class consciousness necessarily requires the party program for action that takes workers through the experience of the objective situation, developing their class consciousness as a qualitative change from ideology to scientific socialist knowledge. It is that qualitative change that the reformists resist by defending the objectivist ideology of reformism. In our epoch of capitalism in terminal crises the reformists can only succeed in this betrayal as LEFT CENTRISTS.
The dialectics is painstakingly applied in Vol. 1 Chapter 1 of Marx’s Capital, which rips away the mystification of the social relations of production in social consciousness by bourgeois political economists like Ricardo. Ricardo identified value with price in exchange relations. Value for them is only realized at the market, where eggs are exchanged for coin or labor for wages but it (value) does not even exist for Ricardo until that exchange is complete.
Marx explains that Ricardo and his ilk do not make the distinction between labor and labor power. This is because their empiricist method fails to see that the commodity labor power is capable of producing more than its own value. Hence the value of labor power for them is replaced by the price of labor in the distribution and circulation cycle. It follows that obscuring the existence of surplus value as surplus labor time means that exploitation in the process of production is reduced to its fetishised appearance as exploitation in exchange.
This EMPIRICAL view is very convenient and utilitarian for the capitalist. It denies the worker the information needed to turn every minimum struggle (for a larger share of surplus value-another bump in wages and democratic rights) into a struggle for the entire pie by the expropriation of the means of production. Such only makes sense when the worker understands value is established in the production process through exploitation wherein the capitalist’s control of the labor process allows them to pay the workers less than they produce because the workers must reproduce not only their own individual and social needs but the profit grabbed by capital.
Generations of pseudo Marxists from academia, the education departments of the trade unions, social democratic, Stalinist and even fake Trotskyists reject the dialectics in their attempts to restore Ricardo. Though they swear they do not. They enforce the “fetishism of commodities” and its secret ability to hide value creation in the circuit of distribution. The class struggle, for them, is forever reduced to the struggle over another nickel or dime. The rapid slide into the abyss is disguised as an evolutionary socialism won by social reforms such as graduated income taxes, a minimum (starvation) wage, welfare, unemployment, food stamps, housing vouchers or a place in the queue at the public health clinic.
Neo-Ricardians deny the deepest conclusions of Marx’s crisis theory which not only explains that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) is an inherent law of capitalism but shows how that trajectory is not based on the circuit of distribution and exchange but in the process of production where the law of value is enforced on the shop floor. The TRPF drives the capitalist class in an existential war on the workers to appropriate greater shares of the shrinking surplus values for the shareholders. This war defines the epoch of capitalist decay and is coming to its conclusion as it drives the capitalist class to rape nature of its wealth in both the inanimate forms of water, minerals and air and the living form of human labor power! To defeat the capitalists and win power the working class must overcome not only the reformists misleaders but the centrists two steps to their left who grow at their expense.
“For the revolutionary Marxist the struggle against reformism now changes itself almost completely into struggle against centrism.
Viewed historically, reformism has lost completely its social hosts. Without reforms there is no reformism, without prosperous capitalism, no reform. The right reformist wing becomes anti-reformist in the sense that it helps the bourgeoisie directly or indirectly to smash the old conquests of the working class.” (Two articles on Centrism Trotsky 1934)
We have almost arrived at this economic situation again. The masses in the U.S. had millions of homes sheared from them in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. They enjoy a residue of prosperity/market optimism but the Globally Significant Investment Banks are being bailed out continuously by the Treasury lest the 2008 crash resume overnight. Hence take backs of reforms and rights and no new reforms that increase the masses’ wellbeing are possible without titanic struggles.
Reformism and anarchism are both dead ends This was proven in the last century, yet there are other roadblocks which must be confronted. Again Trotsky put light on the subject:
“The majority of reformists now deliberately employ new colors. Reformism gives place to the innumerable shades of Centrism, which now, in the majority of countries, dominate the workers’ movement. Thus an absolutely new situation presents itself, in a way unprecedented, for work in the spirit of revolutionary Marxism (Bolshevism). The new International cannot form itself in any other way than that of struggle against centrism. Ideological intransigence and flexible united front policy are, in these conditions, two weapons for attaining one and the same end.” Two articles on Centrism Trotsky 1934
Lenin, Luxemburg & Trotsky and the fight to defend dialectics against imperialist ideology
In the lead up to WWI Lenin and Luxemburg had to expose the evolutionary socialists, social chauvinists, social imperialists and reaffirmed the Marxist theory of the state in order to build a revolutionary party, defeat Tsarism and isolate the half stepping Mensheviks who opposed the working class taking power independently by means of social revolution.
In the lead up to WWII Trotsky had to expose the Stalinist degeneration and backsliding from the Bolshevik principle of class independence which led from alliances with the KMT in China to the Hitler/Stalin pact on one side and the petty bourgeois opposition in the U.S. SWP on the other side, all of which rejected the dialectics, refused to defend the post capitalist property relations of the USSR, becoming liquidators rejecting class independence and ultimately becoming state department socialists in the 1950’s after years of sloganeering neither Moscow or Washington they at last supported U.S. imperialism in VietNam.
Not only did Trotsky struggle against Stalinism and the petty bourgeois opposition but he struggled against the influence of the pragmatism which infected the entire leadership and membership of the SWP; not through any intentional fault of Cannon and the worker militants who gave unconditional defense to the USSR, but because pragmatism itself is the infectious unofficial and petty bourgeois philosophy of the USA, materially based in the colonial settler experience including the genocidal conquering of the frontier. The escape from the old world by immigrant workers and the dream of intergenerational economic elevation through individualist hard work, sacrifice, trial and error were turned into a coherent, if irrational ideology and syllabus for the public schools.
The American SWP had problems with dialectics because of its history and the class structure. Under the pressure of the onset of war Trotsky tried to hone the SWP (and FI) leadership and instill dialectics in them and their practice…
“It was absolutely necessary to explain why the American ‘radical’ intellectuals accept Marxism without the dialectic (a clock without a spring). The secret is simple. In no other country has there been such rejection of the class struggle as in the land of ‘unlimited opportunity’. The denial of social contradictions as the moving force of development led to the denial of the dialectic as the logic of contradictions in the domain of theoretical thought.” Trotsky IDOM
Today the world is on the brink of WWIII and empiricism in the workers movement (in the US and internationally) has yet to be defeated and the time is passing fast even if you hear no ticking. We take up this polemic against pragmatism/empiricism in the working class today to guide the next generation of militant youth and workers against the pitfalls of reformism and centrism, particularity the left variant of centrism which disguises itself in the red flags and iconography of revolution but denies the workers the dialectical tools needed to defeat capitalism and build the socialist future.
Break the hold of pragmatism-empiricism and identify where it infiltrates the workers movement!
Dialectics in the work process:
Working for wages is theft! A theft hidden by exchange relations and the myth that the capitalist wages system pays a fair hourly wage, because the worker is only paid the cost necessary for the reproduction of their labor power. The fact that the worker produces his daily wage equivalent in a small fraction of the working day is the source of the mystery of surplus value and profits. The sectoralist left centrists either never learned this, rejected it or don’t understand it. Thus their acceptance of the wages system is proved by the method driving their practice, whether an opportunism favoring reform leadership candidates, or their ideas of sufficient gains represented by the “underconsumptionist” economists, exactly empiricism!
The ‘distributional socialists’ of the trade union leadership treat historical materialism and the lessons of scientific socialism as a hypothetical. Buried is the proof that the primary contradiction of capitalism is exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class, locked in a terminal struggle for control over social surplus values. For them, practice is the decisive test of liberal capitalism to reform itself. They, like John Dewey, promote a liberal pragmatism which “nine instances out of ten chooses the methods of least resistance.”(Novack Liberal Morality) The empiricist substitute for dialectics abandons the entire field of political struggle over the future development of society.
Empiricism in the workers movement can make you think these socialists want revolution but they pose no threat in the here and now to the wars and depressions that are the natural product of the dictatorship of Capital. The left centrist, self-styled improvers of the Marxist method are surprised by every development, whereas the Transitional Program foresees most crises and prepares a methodological bridge of demands to orient the worker masses to think and act in self-defense as one international social class. The Transitional Program is a map of demands for exiting the generalized social crisis and entering and traveling the revolutionary road!
Empiricism boils down to a large-scale acceptance of what is, that is, capitalism. Qualitative change, i.e. revolution is not an option. And the masses are never told and rarely given the opportunity to learn in struggle that the historic revolutionary program of the workers movement is to overthrow the ruling class and expropriate the means of production! “Distributional Socialists” will not advocate for what you want and need; they will find excuses to promote the minimum program. A hundred years ago the Milwaukee Socialists called themselves municipal socialists; fixing potholes became the program and they were rightly derided as sewer socialists. They were and remain the reformist variant. Today the reformist DSA played that role voting for war funding in Congress and joining Biden in crushing the railroad workers’ attempt to strike.
Reformism serves imperialism trapping activists exactly where reformists want them to be in their belief that a slow evolutionary road will resolve the crisis of distributional inequality. They find solutions in eternal calls to ‘tax the rich’ and rebuild the social safety net, solutions which are today unattainable and do not challenge the capitalists’ right to exploit labor.
Right Centrism
The right centrists fail to win adherents with any direct or indirect apologia, their plea for the workers’ vanguard and radicalized youth is to act pragmatically by choosing the lesser evil genocidal Democrats over the authoritarian Republicans. In the epoch of genocide and fascism this makes short shrift of those millions whose intention is to defeat the genocide, stop the inter-imperialist wars and crush the fascist threat. The Palestine solidarity movement and the radicalized youth are not interested in Kamala and voting Blue as it is no solution. Such is part of the ideological quantitative change of this moment which dictates that centrism, to fulfill its duty to imperialism, has to move left into indirect apologetics.
The right centrists are objectively redundant given the need for centrism to move left to contain the revolutionizing of the vanguard. The left centrists are trickier, they reject the dialectics of the transitional program keeping the workers trapped fighting in the realm of exchange relations. For them the minimum/maximum program crowns economic reform with socialist revolution but provides no bridge for the workers movement to get from here to there.
Left Centrism
Left Centrism can attract a layer of radicalized youth and workers internationally. Particularly those groups with a Trotskyist legacy, a functional and sizable infrastructure and a credible understanding of the process of capitalist restoration in China and identification of the present inter-imperialist conflicts in a rapidly changing world situation.
Left centrists can even hide their pragmatism while making credible abstract theoretical presentations on the method of materialist dialectics. Those in the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA) make their explanation of the dialectics but fail to understand and apply the primary lesson Marx used to destroy the bourgeois political economy.
They are becoming more attractive to the radicalizing youth than those who offer the Democrats their support and those who promote Putin, Al Assad and Xi as progressive alternatives to US imperialism. They generally reject the overt class collaboration of the reformists and most of the right centrists. They raise the red flag of socialist revolution. Some both literally and figuratively. Yet they miss the mark because as they raise essential minimum and democratic demands to address the basic needs of the masses they fail to construct a systematic bridge of transitional demands to elevate the consciousness of the masses to advance every struggle for minimum demands to more advanced demands which unveil the logic of and necessity for workers to build united fronts, popular assemblies and to establish their mass party, to build self defense guards and fight for the workers government which will expropriate the big capitalist firms and run the economy under the workers’ own central plan.
Many such centrists will explain that in the terminal crisis of capitalist decay democratic and economic reforms can not be won and sustained. They even explain that the basic needs of the masses can only be won by socialist revolution. What they don’t do is build the transitional bridge in consciousness from the Minimum demands to the Maximum demands. Their method can be reduced to “capitalism can’t meet your needs and is leading to a genocidal abyss. The solution is socialist revolution so join us.”
This formula has misled and burned out generations of militants, the early Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), the Mensheviks, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and dozens of outfits self identified as Maoists, Social Democrats and even some ostensible Trotskyists have repeated this formula ad infinitum. It may work to attract a layer of radicaling militants but once they are organized it traps them in their isolation. They do not have the theoretical tools and methods to bring the program to our class and inject it into the class struggle and allow the dialectics of the class struggle to percolate. Invariably they go to the mass movement as cheerleaders for a minimum demand while waving their red banners! After all the hoopla dies down the masses are lost to them because pragmatism sucks them back into capitalist electoralism. Thus left centrism serves imperialism by wasting the energy of those radicalized by each upturn of the crisis and wave of class struggle.
The newly minted Revolutionary Communist International (formerly the IMT/Militant Tendency led by Allan Woods in the tradition of Ted Grant) are the most advanced ideologically and have become a serious pole of attraction.
Let’s look at the reformed IMT now presenting itself as the new Revolutionary Communist International (RCI) and the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA). See their minimum maximum method on display in their program here. A Fighting Program for the Revolutionary Communists of America – The Communist (socialistrevolution.org) The RCA program revises the Transitional program into the old Menshevik minimum-maximum program. The workers are told they need militant class independent trade unions with democracy but they do not follow up the call for renewed class struggle unions with the call for a mass labor party, rather they call the workers to rally to their new Communist Party. This communist party will fight for socialism and arrive at a workers’ government which will implement the shorter work week and decent living wages for all, will rectify all wrongs, clean up the environment, etc. This not only revises the Transitional program, it erases it!
The entire method of the Transitional Program is that the working class learns through struggle its need for class independent militant trade unions to launch the labor party to advance the demands for shorter work week, to build indispensable organs of workers democracy such as factory committees, popular assemblies and workers councils, form dual power organizations such as wage and price committees and come to the conclusions of the necessity of expropriation of the big capitalists and the planning of the economy by the workers councils. Workers will need to defend every struggle with workers’ self defense guards.
The RCA comes to the workers’ government without the class making its stepwise leaps in consciousness through putting these demands into every union struggle and struggle of the oppressed for basic democratic rights and economic justice. Even many of the DSA members, and various Stalinist outfits could make the same jumps from the minimum demands of the movement to the workers’ government.
And WHAT IS their concept of a workers government? This is a burning question in the mind of every radicalizing worker and they DON’T answer it! Their program is not really that different from the anarchist spontaneists who think that all the wrongs of capitalism will one day ignite a spark and boom the workers build the communist future! The Transitional program is not a wish list, it is a road to power by raising the consciousness of the working class.
The former IMT poses the danger of a left centrist pole of attraction: their pacifist approach to “class war” where they characterize the police as workers in uniform is contrary to the Marxist identification of the police role as strike breaking scab herders who terrorize the most oppressed for a living. This is no mere difference of detail! Likewise they foresee the possibility of a peaceful conquest of power by the proletariat, though all of the history of the last century and rivers of blood since the Paris Commune say this is not possible! …
Today the RCA is calling for an international campaign against the imperialist wars. Militant workers, socialists and trade unionists must indeed unite to stop the imperialist wars by taking united mass actions using working class methods of strikes, factory occupations and blocking and seizing military cargoes. International workers brigades and military blocs with the struggles of the oppressed must be combined as socialists turn the imperialist war abroad into class war to defeat the capitalist class at home. Indeed only by defeating the capitalist class, the capitalist state can the imperialist wars be ended. Only worker governments defended by workers militia and armies dedicated to socialist revolution can end the imperialist slaughter.
Such is the understanding of Leninism, yet the RCA is built on a history of failure to side with the oppressed semi-colonies. They refused to build a military bloc or launch class struggle at home against the imperialist UK war against Argentina over the Falklands. They refused to bloc militarily with the IRA. In Palestine they support the existence of a Zionist state and advocate for a two state solution. They joined the popular front in Venezuela embracing Chavez and now try to distance themselves from Maduro who is qualitatively no different. In Greece they advocated a critical vote for and then blocked with Syriza long after its class nature was exposed as capitalist enforcers of austerity. Rather than taking this moment when they declare a new international to clean up the failure to implement a Proletarian Military Policy and class war against their own ruling class during WWII (see Ted Grant statement about “OUR Eighth Army”, The War and the International, Sam Bornstein and Al Richardson) now they release a volume of Lenin with an introduction by Jorge Martin which turns Lenin into a defensist(!)
On the Ballot we find…
The neo-Stalinist Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) (Marcyite leaders of the ANSWER coalition) with a seven decades long role as activist “best builders” of the anti-U.S. imperialist movement. They long ago became neo-Stalinists, abandoning their Trotskyist origins in the now moribund (and pro-Zionist) Socialist Workers Party (SWP). In their retreat from Marxism the Marcyites became the new Pabolites supporting the Soviet invasion of Hungary, supporting the Stalinist bureaucracy against the unfolding working class political revolution. For Trotsky only the revolutionary workers fighting to re-establish the primacy of the workers councils could defend the post capitalist property relations from the combined onslaught of imperialism, fascism and the backsliding trajectory of the Stalinist bureaucracy. The Marcyites (then the Workers World Party – WWP) turned against the working class program of workers’ political revolution and never looked back.
From then on they abandoned Lenin and Trotsky who applied the Permanent Revolution in 1917 to make the revolution. The Marcyites adapted Stalinism’s Menshevik two stage theory (first complete the national revolution and eventually make the socialist revolution), opening the path to the cross class popular front in all struggles. They became champions of nationalist Third Worldism rejecting the struggle to complete the tasks of the national revolution by Permanent Socialist revolution, thereby (inadvertently) sustaining the world imperialist system under the guise of their righteously indignant anti-imperialist activism.
The stagist method abandoned working class independence, rejecting the fight for Socialist Revolution in the semi-colonies. They and their ilk coddled every variant of authoritarian comprador capitalism even as these leaders crushed the revolutionary workers movements in their countries, all the time with negligible or no criticism. How do they justify this to their base and the workers of the world? Like other fake Marxists in the US, they hide behind a claim that their primary anti-imperialist duty is fighting U.S. imperialism at home, not building revolutionary workers movements in countries where the nationalist comprador bourgeoisie don’t want them. Not only do they look the other way when the comprador bourgeoisie crush workers’ uprisings they universally deride such uprisings as fomented solely by imperialist stooges, they deny their complexity and the class contradictions in the uprising by identifying them all as CIA-backed “color revolutions, ” thereby deny the workers agency and abandoning the workers to their fate.
The ANC led massacre of the Marikana miners strike is the classic example of siding with the counter-revolutionary nationalist regimes against the workers. This is their method and remains so today. Rejecting every nascent revolutionary workers movement (which they did their ideological and activist best to suppress) today they are campists promoting the Russia/China bloc as the progressive alternative to worker-led socialist revolution in the BRICs countries and the imperialist countries alike. Their stageism is on display in the pages of Liberation News:
“BRICS is not an instrument to address inequality within societies — it does not intend to challenge the exploitation of workers by capitalists to build socialism. But it does have the potential to create openings for this project by challenging imbalances among nations in the global economy and diplomacy.”
Their activism has remained attractive to youth and long term weekend ‘anti-imperialist fighters’ with negligible historical and theoretical curiosity. The pressure of the mass movement has driven them a half step leftwards from the reformism and outright support of so-called progressive capitalist candidates to classic Stalinist popular frontism (lately in the cross-class Abandon Harris Movement.) Although they have regularly run candidates for president their political independence is exposed as a sham in their newly minted bloc with the capitalist Greens and rad-lib Cornel West in the “Abandon Harris” campaign, which may lead to an untenable third party but never to a mass labor party. Such is the kind of cross class popular front the PSL (and all Marcyites) have long been comfortable in. Not that this is new for them. In 2020 they promised to stand down if Bernie Sanders was ascendant.
The role of centrism is to head off the emergent revolutionary vanguard and prevent them from winning the working class to political independence and the struggle for power. The reformist DSA and the right centrists can no longer play that role alone as their street credibility wanes. That role now falls to the left centrism. While there are more than a few left centrist outfits we should focus on the most advanced, those who have been through the school of the Fourth International and most credibly distort the dialectics as they recruit young enthusiastic militants to serve the counter-revolution by blocking the path to class independence, rejecting the method of the Transitional program.
The sectarian Spartacist League, which made its imprint on the left publishing a bombastic broadsheet called the Workers Vanguard adorned with the Fourth International’s hammer and sickle for nearly six decades, folded their rag up into a paper bag and then climbed inside for the COVID years. Degeneration ensued as a new generation took the lead following the death of cult leader James Robertson and they haven’t been able to fight themselves out of the paper bag of their own making for several years!
Like a fish out of water, flailing and failing to emerge from their paper bag oblivion, the nearly forgotten but hardly missed Spartacist League has opportunistically latched onto the presidential campaign of the PSL, flopping into the murky waters of their emergent popular front.
As Trotsky observed:
“…sometimes a desperate sectarian leaps headlong into the water, seizes hold of the centrist and helps him drown. So it was; so will it be.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/10/sect.htm
Changing their program and issuing self-critical line changes more often than molting snakes, in 2007 they decided to school Lenin, Debs and Trotsky and took a new “principled” stance against running candidates for executive offices. This, despite a hundred years long tradition and understanding that communists must run candidates when they can to expose the dictatorship of capital, explain the class nature of the state, organize the workers movement and build the revolutionary party necessary to lead the working class in taking power by socialist revolution!
In 2024 they issued a self critical line change and opportunistically endorsed the PSL right centrist presidential campaign climbing aboard with nary a word of critique. This despite being on opposite sides of the barricades in the Ukraine proxy war. Liberation news is clear on that account: “By proxy, the United States and its NATO partners are at war with Russia.” Whereas the PSL implicitly, if not overtly, supports the Russians against Ukraine, the Spartacists call for dual defeatism, characterizing both Ukraine and Russia as dependent (semi-colonial) capitalist states. Where the PSL sees the direct hand of NATO behind every step Zelensky takes, the Spartacists (like the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency – RCIT) claim that with no US or NATO boots on the ground the U.S. is not directly at war with Russia.
A look at the PSL program is a good starting point to understand how pragmatism has displaced the dialectic on the American socialist left in its centrist variants both right and left. A boilerplate explanation of the system of capitalist exploitation and the need for socialist revolution is drawn out in detail. None could say they do not want to make the socialist revolution, far be it from us to make such a claim, that is not the point. But this ‘socialism’ is arrived at via empiricism – the selection of facts that reduces the revolutionary role of the working class to that of voting for bourgeois reforms. Yes, they want socialism, they make every effort to explain that U.S. imperialism must be defeated and even go so far as to say elections are not sufficient; new democratic workers organizations must run things and the top, 100 corporations must be seized by the socialist government and their wealth will be used to meet basic human needs such as housing, education, health care, eldercare etc.. We must make a revolution! Who on the socialist left could argue with that!
However, for all their radicalism their program is idealist and hinges on the pragmatism/empiricism of elementary formal logic to reach conclusions such as the abolition of the senate and supreme court will eliminate the dictatorship of the capitalist class! Nothing about the smashing of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat! No mention of abolishing the unitary chief executive–the president–or how to get these things done. Nothing is said about how the ruling class will respond with violent counter-revolutionary forces when they try to legislate the expropriation of the top 100 corporations. Not a word of warning from the tragic lessons of Allende, Lumumba and Bishop! Not a word about building Labor, Black and Brown self defense against the Trumpist coup or to enforce their planned expropriations. Their bottom line: their program is reducible to capitalism, bad -socialism good. Vote for us and build the PSL. Without a word of criticism the floundering and desperate Spartacist League (SL) swallows this hook line and sinker! As for the SL’s opportunism, every bit of their critique of the Internationalist Group for support of Russia applies to the PSL; their silence in this regard is deafening.
The Internationalist Group (IG), although appearing less volatile and bombastic than the Spartacists, are like the PSL social-imperialists facing off against the state department socialists in an Alice and Wonderland-like mirror of opposing loyalties in Ukraine. The Mad Hatter appears and it is time to take notice. Despite taking pot shots at each other, what unites this variant with right centrism is their inability to identify both the restoration of capitalism in China by and under the direction and guidance of the Chinese Communist Party and its rise as the new imperialist power leading the bloc of the BRICS and SCO and disarming the working class internationally, promoting their bloc as a progressive anti-imperialist alternative. The PSL’s twisted logic was cited above, the ICL/IG/IBT and others from the Robertsonite trajectory cling to the characterization of China as a Deformed Workers State. We have addressed this process adequately here, here and here.
Inject the United Front!
What is that bridge that revolutionary communists must take to the broader working class who are still trapped by the trade union bureaucracy entrenched in the Democratic and Republican capitalist parties? We say it is a united front to build a fighting workers labor party based in the unions and workers communities. Would it have a revolutionary program demanding expropriation of the capitalist class? We would fight for such, but the party doesn’t even exist as of yet and is not even on the agenda of these growing left centrist outfits. Indeed objectively it is necessary and when it comes into existence will arise out of class struggles in the workplace and over the heads of the top bureaucrats of the unions who always apply the brakes when the workers get radical! It will be launched in a struggle by the rank and file not only for democracy in their unions, but for an action program that advances class struggle methods beyond the limits accepted by the bureaucracy and taught at the labor colleges!
Now we have no crystal ball and, although it is highly unlikely, the dozens of left centrist communist outfits may grow as poles of attraction long before the workers break the chains imposed by the bureaucracy, but far more likely these radicalizing youth hit a wall of limitations unless their organizations employ the tactic of the working class united front to build a mass fighting workers labor party. This United Front for the workers party is the organizational form communists can ‘inject’ into the workers movement. But it must learn from prior failures of the Labor Non-Partisan League (LNPL) organized around the rise of the CIO and the Labor Party Advocates (LPA) organized in the 1990s. Both failed to lead the working class to political independence because the labor bureaucracy refused to launch a workers party let alone allow the debate for the program to be taken up in every workers hall and shop floor!
The LNPL used labor funding and the fake American Labor Party to bring votes to FDR just as the fake Working Families Party mobilizes workers to vote Democratic in N.Y. today. The left bureaucracy killed the class struggle drive for political independence to keep the working class trapped in the Democratic Party. And since then their failure to initiate the “Mass Break Out” or “Hard Break” from the Democrats has been used by generations of labor leaders to enforce class collaboration unionism against class struggle and class independence.
Our Opponents Don’t Want Peace!
Both our left and right centrist opponents oppose our call for a United Front Against Imperialist Wars, concretized in a call for a dual-defeatist New Zimmerwald conference.
Our right centrist opponents want war, specifically supporting NATO and Zelensky’s war, even if some of them say they are socialists and do not support Zelensky, his party, etc. As above we call them “state department socialists” and many, such as the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign, which includes the (Democrat) League for a Revolutionary Party and Oakland Socialist are buried in the Harris campaign and are subverting the anti-Assad Syria Solidarity movement into their orbit as we write, wrecking 10 years of principled solidarity.
Our left centrist opponents reject dual-defeatism in a few ways. The PSL seeks a Russian victory, as do Marcyite tendencies generally. The International Leninist Trotskyist Fraction (FLTI) and Workers International Vanguard Party (WIVP), for example, do not see Russia as imperialist, even seeing it as controlled by U.S. imperialism and the IMF (!) Thus they see Moscow’s invasion and NATO’s sponsorship of Zelensky as a pincer movement seeking to crush the Ukrainian workers, the potential vanguard of a European workers’ revolution. Varieties of their conclusions find widespread support in South America. This resembles a dual-defeatist position but is idealist, not recognizing the China/Russia imperialist bloc and its own aims. Then there are those who oppose a dual-defeatist position because there are no U.S. or other NATO troops in action in Ukraine. This includes those who do see Russia as imperialist (RCIT, with it’s initiation of the Sunflower Convoy, an opportunist adaptation to Ukrainian nationalism) and the Spartacists who do not.
Still others, some with some theoretical sophistication but more sectarianism reject the New Zimmerwald call by making what is the classic mistake of the U.S. anti-war movement. The RCA/RCI do correctly see the inter imperialist character of the proxy war and direct intervention by the west, but then abbreviate the classic, correct call by Karl Liebknecht to fight one’s own ruling class as the main enemy, neglecting his Zimmerwald call on all antiwar socialists to give every support to those in the opposing nations who are fighting their bourgeoisie as their main enemy. No surprise that we see no visible international antiwar effort. We’ve had no response to our approach to them and it has been a year and a half. Who is serious?
For us, still others, particularly those political economists who see World War 3 as an impossibility cannot be authentic fighters for peace, which is a concrete state achieved scientifically, as described by Lenin:
“In utilising that temper for their revolutionary agitation, and not shying away in that agitation from considerations of the defeat of their “own” country, the socialists will not deceive the people with the hope that, without the revolutionary overthrow of the present-day governments, a possibility exists of a speedy democratic peace, which will be durable in some degree and will preclude any oppression of nations, a possibility of disarmament, etc. Only the social revolution of the proletariat opens the way towards peace and freedom for the nations.”
– Draft Zimmerwald: Lenin: The Draft Resolution of the Left Wing at Zimmerwald (marxists.org)
Conclusion
We have shown that pragmatism began as the practical philosophy of the common man, pursuing the American Dream by means of genocide, transformed to adapt to the class struggle in the age of imperialism as market fetishism, and today trapping workers in social imperialist institutionalisation of genocidal wars. We counterpose the method of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky – dialectical materialism. We show that from post WWI to the degeneration of the 4th International pragmatism became the enemy of dialectics, sharpened as the empiricism of market fetishism, where centrists of both left and right stripes arose out of Stalinism posing as the greatest threat to socialism. Today’s left centrists are the product of the degeneration of the 4th International. They hang about as flotsam and jetsam, objective barriers to class consciousness. They forget, or misrepresent dialectics as irrelevant to their social imperialist adaptation to actually existing ‘democratic’ imperialism. That degeneration is the result of the failure to embrace the dialectics… to understand the Proletarian Military Policy (PMP) as the Transitional Program against war… and opportunistic implementation of the PMP by the SWP to turn the inter-imperialist war into the war against fascism, not the war against the imperialism at home….Socialism on Trial was a guide to bad habits that later became bad program. Today the return to dialectics as the transitional method and program of a revolutionary international, activated by the subjective power of the organized working class and poor peasants, is needed to explode this objective rubbish, exposing it as fake Marxism tied to a superficial market fetishism of dying capitalism. Our program is simple: for Soviets, Workers’ Governments and socialist revolution!
– Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)
