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REVOLUTION BY CLOCKWORK
This accords with their own view of themselves. According to Tony Cliff in SW of August 5th, the revolution will come about through the operation of 3 cog wheels. The first will be the organised working class - 11 million strong in Trade Unions. The second is an organisation of militants who organise struggle at a higher level than their individual workplace but not "going as far as to aim at a complete emancipation of the working class by the overthrow of the capitalist system." The third is, of course, IS - just for the sake of assuming says Mr Cliff: "Let's assume we had in this country a revolutionary socialist party, a combat organisation, steeled in struggle and schooled in the art of strategy and tactics for the overthrow of capitalism. Let's assume that we, the International Socialists who are building such an organisation, had 50,000 members." The second cog nearly exists because IS are in the process of building it says Mr Cliff; i.e., because the economic struggle is intensifying and workers are thinking as a result of this intensification, IS are attracting these workers. No one else is, because there is literally nowhere else for them to go. Apparently, once the third wheel gets into existence, they will all begin to turn in unison the smallest propelling the medium sized one and it in turn propelling the largest one ... to the revolution.
The trouble is that society does not run like a machine. Classes are not automata — they behave dialectically in response to history. Mr Cliff solves this problem in two ways. First: spontaneism. The working class just 'naturally' learn from struggle to be revolutionary: the truth is revealed to the chosen in struggle: "The rising conflict will disclose to workers the magnitude of the struggle, will widen their horizons and will help to clarify their ideas." It is easy to see why IS are angry with Mr Jones. He obviously has not realised that the dockers have been purified and enlightened by their struggle and are now malting revolutionary demands of him rather than defensive ones. Therefore, he is not leading them correctly. He "persuaded" them somehow that they had not experienced this disclosure horizon-widening and clarification, and tricked them into believing they had got just about all they could reasonably expect.
Secondly, Mr Cliff states that "Episodic struggles are very prone to accidents. Their outcome depends on the relation of forces in every specific situation. Because the ruling class is highly centralised, its ability to manoeuvre is much greater than any individual section of the working class. Therefore the need for a revolutionary party, to repeat, as a school of strategy and tactics, and at the same time an active combat organisation, will become more vital than ever." An "episodic struggle" can be nothing else than an historical event in the class struggle. The accident for Mr. Cliff is that they "depend on the relation of forces in every specific situation." If that is an accident, then it is an abnormal, unusual occurrence which is unexpected and does not usually take place. Presumably then for Mr. Cliff reality does not usually exist. If the class struggle does not depend on the relation of forces in every specific situation, what does it depend on? God or the revolutionary spirit perhaps.
We get a clue as to what Mr. Cliff thinks it depends on from the next sentence, where he states that because the ruling class is centralised it can manoeuvre better than any section of the working class which it is confronting in episodic struggle: i.e., it can solve the situation by manoeuvring, by imposing its will on the working class through ruse and better organisation. The dockers strike was an episodic struggle because the working class as a whole was less involved than the ruling class -- the struggle had not been sufficiently "generalised" according to Mr. Cliff. A revolutionary party will organise the working class better and enable it to manoeuvre as effectively as the ruling class. Episodic struggle and the real world of "accidents", where real forces matter, need only disturb us if we don't have a grand design, a plan for how reality ought to work. The ruling class has this and therefore replies to "accidents" by "manoeuvre" and brushes them aside. If the working class had a grand design, which a revolutionary party could give it, it too could do the same and "episodic struggles" need give no further rise for worry.
The fact is that the ruling class deals with "episodic struggles" by analysing the forces behind them and acting on the basis of that analysis. It does not treat them as accidents which must be endured because they are unlikely to occur again; it treats them as the substance of history - as events not of chance but of the action and interaction of real historical forces. It is only from "episodic struggles" that it is possible to draw any conclusions about historical forces - grand designs simply do not exist, nor does pure generalised struggle, by which Mr, Cliff means the working class in the abstract fighting the ruling class in the abstract; anything else is by definition an episodic struggle. The ruling class has no grand design. It does have the will to survive as a class and it has realised that in order to do this it must take account of the working class as the main social and productive force and also of the need to continue to develop the productive forces. That is what Mr. Cliff calls "manoeuvre". It is what Jack Jones calls concession and the working class have agreed with Mr. Jones.
The ruling class has survived not through ruse or deception or the triumph of evil but because it has drawn conclusions from "episodic struggles" and developed itself accordingly. Its organisation is not highly centralised. Indeed, the ruling class has discovered that reality can only be correctly taken account of and acted on if its organisation is highly decentralised and loose - if social forces are given the maximum space and opportunity to manifest themselves in the clearest possible way. This is what bourgeois democracy is all about. Cliff's conception of them is the mirror image of what he thinks a revolutionary organisation should be: Trotskyist bureaucratic fantasy. Far from turning cogs in his revolution machine, a Communist Party will serve the working class only insofar as it can explain and analyse history for the working class and enable it to act consciously in the "episodic struggles" which are the substance of history. To do this it is necessary that a Communist Party be composed of dialectical materialists.