Midnight in the century? (letter)

Living Marxism no. 28, February 1991

Transcribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.

Frank Richards in 'Midnight in the century' (December 1990) says that if you accept his analysis 'it would be easy to draw pessimistic conclusions'. That is an understatement of quite majestic proportions. For Richards there is nothing but decline and defeat anywhere in the world.

He claims, inter alia, 'there is no real sense of a working class movement with a distinctive political identity anywhere in the world', 'Marxism has been discredited', and, to cap it all, 'it seems that the prospects for human progress are worse than at any time this century'. Far from bucking the trend of fashionable bourgeois thought on these issues, Richards just repeats it, adding a minus rather than a plus sign. But the whole schema is contradicted by the facts—facts you can read any month in Living Marxism, as well as the bourgeois press.

First, the organisations which gave the working class its coherence are the trade unions and mass working class parties. Have they disappeared in the advanced countries? Been crushed by fascism as they were in the thirties? Not at all. Trade unionism has declined and the Stalinist parties are in a fearful crisis. But in Britain, where the neo-liberal assault has been at its fiercest, there are nine million trade unionists, despite everything. Was it the Stalinist parties which gave the working class coherence? Or Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon? Richards paints a too rosy picture of the past of working class organisations.

Second, the mood of resignation and defeat which Richards says pervades the world is contradicted by the facts about the very same countries he quotes as examples. Brazil, for example, in the aftermath of 31 million votes for Lula, the candidate of the Workers Party. Or France, in the wake of demonstrations by 500 000 trade unionists and students. One could also throw in things like the insurrectionary general strike in the Dominican Republic, or the military offensive of the FMLN in El Salvador, both in the last few weeks.

What Frank Richards nowhere says is when this world historic defeat for the international working class is supposed to have taken place. It is impossible to understand what he means unless he tells us. Mass revolutionary communist parties have not existed in the West since the twenties. One gets the impression that Richards thinks that only a mass revolutionary current in the working class gives it existence as a political factor. This is the fundamental dividing line among those organisations in Britain which call themselves 'revolutionary'.

If you think a real working class movement exists, then you intervene in it to fight for Marxist politics. If not, you can choose to address the comparatively tiny groups of people who can be won directly to communist propaganda. But if you choose the latter then you can only build what is, scientifically, a small sect—and wait for things to change. Not a very effective way to fight for real Living Marxism.

Phil Hearse London