Revolutionaries (23 page)

This brings me to my conclusion. We are in a situation in which marxism is splintered, both politically and theoretically. We must, for the foreseeable future, learn to live with it. It is no good regretting the days when it wasn't. We are in a situation where marxism has to catch up in two ways. It has to liquidate
the heritage of the sort of intellectual ice-age through which it passed (which does not mean that it should automatically reject everything that was said and done during that age), and we have to absorb all that is best in the sciences since we stopped serious thinking on the subject. I am deliberately using brutal terms, for they need to be used. We must ask as well as explain; above all we must ask ourselves. We must be prepared to be wrong. We must stop pretending to have all the answers, because we obviously haven't. And more than anything else, we must learn again to use marxism as a scientific method.

This we have not done. We have persistently done two things which are incompatible with any scientific method; and we have done them not just since the later days of Stalin, but earlier. First we have known the answers and just confirmed them by research; second we have confused theory and political debate. Both are deadly. We said for instance: ‘We know the transition from feudalism to capitalism proceeds by revolution everywhere', because Marx says so, and because if it didn't, then history might not after all proceed by revolutions but by gradualism and the social democrats might be right. Therefore our research will show (a) that the revolution of the 1640s in Britain was bourgeois; (b) that before it Britain was a feudal country; and (c) that thereafter it was a capitalist country. I do not say that the conclusions were wrong, though (b) seems to me to be most doubtful; but this was no way of arriving at them. For if it turned out that the facts did not check with the conclusions, then we simply said, to hell with the facts.

There are historical reasons why we said so, going back to before 1914, but they do not concern us at this moment. And whether or not the facts will suit communists or social democrats has nothing to do with marxism. The fact that the conditions of the British working class are not absolutely deteriorating throughout history suits liberals and social democrats but not revolutionaries. We would be fools and not marxists if for this
reason we denied it. Marxism is a tool for changing the world by knowledge, which we as politicians then use. It is not a means of scoring debating points in politics. Many of our most talented older communists have wasted much of their time as writers of marxist theory by failing to observe this distinction.

We must go back to marxism as a scientific method. Perhaps the most promising sign of the present world – and British – situation, which is otherwise not very promising, is that more and more marxists are going back to it in this way. And the proof of what can be achieved is the fact that socialism, based on marxism, has made most progress in the world even at the period when marxism did its best to make itself ineffective.

¹
A French communist philosopher and critic has written as follows of this period: ‘In our philosophic memory we recall this as the time of the intellecuals in arms, pursuing error into all its hiding places, as the time when we philosophers wrote no books, but turned every book into politics, and cut the world – arts, literature, philosophy, science – with a single blade into the pitiless blocs of class division' (L. Althusser,
Pour Marx
, Paris, 1965, p. 12).

²
Ibid
., p. 21.

³
I am not underestimating the genuine efforts at self-critical analysis of works like Palme Dutt's
Three Internationals
. But they certainly do not go as far as it is possible and necessary to go today.

⁴
For a survey of these discussions, see G. Sofri,
Il modo di produzione asiatico
, Turin, 1969.

⁵
Anyone who has any doubts on this score should read again so typical a marxist statement of the 1930s as John Strachey's
Why you should be a Socialist
, or of the early 1950s as Palme Dutt's
Crisis of Britain
, or for that matter Kuusinen's
Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism
.

The following brief essay is a contribution to the discussion of Lenin's thought, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The subject is one which can be conveniently treated by a British marxist, since the concept of an ‘aristocracy of labour' is one which Lenin clearly derived from the history of British nineteenth-century capitalism. His concrete references to the ‘aristocracy of labour' as a stratum of the working class appear to be exclusively drawn from Britain (though in his study notes on imperialism he also notes similar phenomena in the ‘white' parts of the British Empire). The term itself is almost certainly derived from a passage by Engels written in 1885 and reprinted in the introduction to the 1892 edition of the
Conditions of the Working Class in 1844
which speaks of the great English trade unions as forming ‘an aristocracy among the working class'.

The actual phrase may be Engels's, but the concept was familiar in English politico-social debate, particularly in the 1880s. It was generally accepted that the working class in Britain at this period contained a favoured stratum – a minority but a numerically large one – which was most usually identified with the ‘artisans' (i.e. the skilled employed craftsmen and workers) and more especially with those organized in trade unions or other working-class organizations. This is the sense in which
foreign observers also used the term, e.g. Schulze-Gaevernitz, whom Lenin quotes with approval on this point in the celebrated eighth chapter of
Imperialism
. This conventional identification was not entirely valid, but, like the general use of the concept of an upper working-class stratum, reflected an evident social reality. Neither Marx nor Engels nor Lenin ‘invented' a labour aristocracy. It existed only too visibly in the second half of nineteenth-century Britain. Moreover, if it existed anywhere else, it was clearly much less visible or significant. Lenin assumed that, until the period of imperialism, it existed nowhere else.

The novelty of Engels's argument lay elsewhere. He held that this aristocracy of labour was made possible by the industrial world monopoly of Britain, and would therefore disappear or be pushed closer to the rest of the proletariat with the ending of this monopoly. Lenin followed Engels on this point, and indeed in the years immediately preceding 1914, when the British labour movement was becoming radicalized, tended to stress the second half of Engels's argument, e.g. in his articles
English Debates on a Liberal Workers' Policy
(1912),
The British Labour Movement in 1912
, and
In England, the Pitiful Results of Opportunism
(1913). While not doubting for a moment that the labour aristocracy was the basis of the opportunism and ‘Liberal-Labourism' of the British movement, he did not appear as yet to emphasize the international implications of the argument. For instance, he did not apparently use it in his analysis of the social roots of revisionism (see
Marxism and Revisionism
, 1908, and
Differences in the European Labour Movement
, 1910). Here he argued rather that revisionism, like anarcho-syndicalism, was due to the constant creation on the margins of developing capitalism, of certain middle strata – small workshops, domestic workers etc. – which are in turn constantly cast into the ranks of the proletariat, so that petty-bourgeois tendencies inevitably infiltrate into proletarian parties.

The line of thought which he derived from his knowledge of
the labour aristocracy was at this stage somewhat different, and it is to be noted that he maintained it, in part at least, to the end of his political life. Here it is perhaps relevant to observe that Lenin drew his knowledge of the phenomenon not only from the writings of Marx and Engels, who commented frequently on the British labour movement, and from his personal acquaintance with marxists in England (which he visited six times between 1902 and 1911), but also from the fullest and best-informed work on the ‘aristocratic' trade unions of the nineteenth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's
Industrial Democracy
. This important book he knew intimately, having translated it in his Siberian exile. It provided him, incidentally, with an immediate understanding of the links between the British Fabians and Bernstein: ‘The original source of a number of Bernstein's contentions and ideas', he wrote on 13 September 1899, to a correspondent, ‘is in the latest books written by the Webbs'. Lenin continued to quote information drawn from the Webbs many years later, and specifically refers to
Industrial Democracy
in the course of his argument in
What Is To Be Done?

Two propositions may be derived in part, or mainly from the experience of the British labour aristocracy. The first was ‘that all subservience to spontaneity of the labour movement, all belittling of the role of “the conscious element”, of the role of Social Democracy means, whether one likes it or not, the growth of influence of bourgeois ideology among the workers'. The second was that a purely trade unionist struggle ‘is necessarily a struggle according to trade, because conditions of labour differ very much in different trades, and consequently, the fight to improve these conditions can only be conducted in respect of each trade'. (
What Is To Be Done?
The second argument is supported by direct reference to the Webbs.)

The first of these propositions appears to be based on the view that, under capitalism, bourgeois ideology is hegemonic, unless deliberately counteracted by ‘the conscious element'. This
important observation leads us far beyond the mere questions of the labour aristocracy, and we need not pursue it further here. The second proposition is more closely linked to the aristocracy of labour. It argues that given the ‘law of uneven development' within capitalism – i.e. the diversity of conditions in different industries, regions, etc. of the same economy – a purely ‘economist' labour movement must tend to fragment the working class into ‘selfish' (‘petty bourgeois') segments each pursuing its own interest, if necessary in alliance with its own employers, at the expense of the rest. (Lenin several times quoted the case of the ‘Birmingham Alliances' of the 1890s, attempts at a joint union-management bloc to maintain prices in various metal trades; he derived this information almost certainly also from the Webbs.) Consequently such a purely ‘economist' movement must tend to disrupt the unity and political consciousness of the proletariat and to weaken or counteract its revolutionary role.

This argument is also very general. We can regard the aristocracy of labour as a special case of this general mode. It arises when the economic circumstances of capitalism make it possible to grant significant concessions to its proletariat, within which certain strata of workers manage, by means of their special scarcity, skill, strategic position, organizational strength, etc. to establish notably better conditions for themselves than the rest. Hence there may be historic situations, as in late-nineteenth-century England, when the aristocracy of labour can almost be identified with the effective trade union movement as Lenin sometimes came close to suggesting.

But if the argument is in principle more general, there can be no doubt that what was in Lenin's mind when he used it, was the aristocracy of labour. Time and again we find him using phrases such as the following: ‘the petty-bourgeois craft spirit which prevails among this aristocracy of labour' (
The Session of the International Socialist Bureau
, 1908), ‘the English trade unions, insular, aristocratic, philistinely selfish', ‘the English pride themselves
on their “practicalness” and their dislike of general principles; this is an expression of the craft spirit in the labour movement' (
English Debates on a Liberal Workers' Policy
, 1912), and ‘this aristocracy of labour . . . isolated itself from the mass of the proletariat in close, selfish, craft unions' (
Harry Quelch
, 1913). Moreover, much later, and in a carefully considered programmatic statement – in fact in his
Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question for the Second Congress of the Communist International
(1920), the connection is made with the greatest clarity:

The industrial workers cannot fulfil their world-historical mission of emancipating mankind from the yoke of capital and from wars if these workers concern themselves exclusively with their narrow craft, narrow trade interests, and smugly confine themselves to care and concern for improving their own, sometimes tolerable, petty-bourgeois conditions. This is exactly what happens in many advanced countries to the ‘labour aristocracy' which serves as the base of the alleged Socialist parties of the Second International.

This quotation, combining the earlier and the later ideas of Lenin about the aristocracy of labour, leads us naturally from the one to the other. These later writings are familiar to all marxists. They date in the main from the period 1914–17, and form part of Lenin's attempt to provide a coherent marxist explanation for the outbreak of the war and especially the simultaneous and traumatic collapse of the Second International and most of its constituent parties. They are stated most fully in the famous
Chapter 8
of
Imperialism
, and the article
Imperialism and the Split in Socialism
, written a little later (autumn 1916) and complementing it.

The argument of
Imperialism
is well known though the glosses of
Imperialism and the Split
are not so widely known. Broadly
speaking it runs as follows. Thanks to the peculiar position of British capitalism – ‘vast colonial possessions and monopolist position in the world markets' – the British working class tended already in the mid-nineteenth century to be divided into a favoured minority of labour aristocrats and a much larger lower stratum. The upper stratum ‘becomes bourgeois', while at the same time ‘a section of the proletariat allows itself to be led by people who are bought by the bourgeoisie, or at least are in their pay'. In the epoch of imperialism what was once a purely British phenomenon is now found in all the imperialist powers. Hence opportunism, degenerating into social-chauvinism, characterized all the leading parties of the Second International. However, ‘opportunism cannot now triumph in the working class movement of any country for decades as it did in England' because world monopoly has now to be shared between a number of competing countries. This imperialism, while generalizing the phenomenon of the aristocracy of labour, also provides the conditions for its disappearance.