This is a powerful and convincing polemic from Molyneux against the Owen Jones reformist "that wraps it all up for revolutionery socialist change then - from now on its vaguely leftish reformism or nothing " positions, and well worth reading, However , as with almost all the Trotskyism-derived radical Left, Molyneux is still locked immoveably in the fascination with "Leninism" and the "lessons of the October 1917 Revolution". The counterposing of the claimed " lessons" of October 1917 ,with the quite correct need to fight bland leftish reformism - aimed only at boosting up Labour's voting strength through sowing illusions in its potential to become an agent for mildly radical change, is fundamentally false and misleading. For a start Molyneux takes it as read that the Bolshevik Revolution (or coup as it actually was) was a "success".
"The left wing argument for a ‘government of the left’ is that even if it did not break immediately with capitalism or with the capitalist state it would nevertheless be able to ‘open the way’ or ‘point the way’ to the socialist transformation of society. The historical experience suggests otherwise.
Consider first the example of the Provisional Government in Russia that issued from the February Revolution. Formed on the basis of a mass popular insurrection and involving Mensheviks and SRs, this government must have seemed at the time to be the very incarnation of a left government[1], and at the beginning it commanded near universal popular support, including from the moderate wing of Bolshevism (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin). When, in April, Lenin arrived at the Finland Station and proclaimed no confidence in the Provisional government most of ‘the left’ thought he had taken leave of his senses. But Lenin was right. In practice this government continued its collaboration with the bourgeoisie, continued the imperialist war, failed to give land to the peasants and failed even to call a constituent assembly. Far from ‘opening things up’, in reality it opened the way to the counter revolutionary Kornilov coup. Had it not been overthrown from the left, by the workers led by the Bolsheviks, the probability is, as Trotsky observed, that fascism would bear a Russian, not an Italian name."
Now I do buy totally into Molyneux's critique of the inevitable 1936 Spain or "Salvadore Allende's Chile" type failure of any purely Left Reformist attempt to radically attack capitalism in any developed capitalist state TODAY. But why oh why does he have to use the completely inappropriate example of the Bolshevik coup in an economically backward semi-feudal peasant -based state like Czarist Russia to try and prove his point ? Firstly Molyneux ahistorically claims the alternative to the Bolshevik revolution was a "proto fascist" regime. Now I don't think the Kerensky-led bourgeois democratic government would have survived either, but what would have replaced it wasn't "fascism" but simply a return to the completely authoritarian semi-feudal Czarist autocracy that already existed, NOT "fascism". Secondly Molyneux just assumes that Lenin and Trotsky's gamble "paid off" and the revolution was a "success". This simply imports wholesale the Stalinist myth of the "Revolution" , which of course legitimises their bureaucratic class rule , into the wider socialist historical narrative. For Fuck Sake, the October 1917 Revolutions was actually comprehensively LOST by the mid 1920's - that's what the eventual complete victory of the Stalinist bureaucracy, the Purges/murders of all the old Bolsheviks, actually means ! And we all now know, with the hindsight of nearly 100 years, that the Stalinist bureaucracy were in fact not even a permanent bureaucratic "New Class", as some neo-Trotskists" claimed, but just a "proxy stand-in " for the conventional bourgeoisie. How do we know this ? Because there has been a complete conventional bourgeois capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and it is also underway in China and Cuba too as we sit here.
Owen Jones and all his petty reformist ilk are indeed pure poison to the building of an effective mass radical resistence movement against capitalism. However the apparently immoveable tendancy of revolutionery socialists to cite the failed Bolshevik 1917 Revolution as the key evidence to support revolutionery anti capitalist politics against this reformist drivel is a depressing example of how far the revolutionery Left has to go ideologically to reorient itself to the undoubtedly non-reformist needs of our times, with politics that can break decisively from "Lenin-worship" . For a start it is nonsense to counterpose "bolshevik party structures", and the particularities of the revolutionery situation in 1917, war-torn, semi-feudal, Czarist Russia, in a debate about the usefulness or otherwise of building broad, radical anti austerity and anti capitalist "Syriza" type movements. Of course the Owen Jones Labourite reformists want to co-opt a Syriza-type movement into supporting Labour electorally . But the job of revolutioneries surely is to be in there, at the building of any such large movement, specifically arguing the futility of any linkage to Labour, or reformism in the longer term. Ignore any" Syriza-type" development though and the revolutionery Left just condemns itelf to irrelevence. a "Syriza" type radical movement would inevitably buckle in a revolutionery situation, as the Greek Syriza will do. However no proto-revolutionery situation will even develop unless the widespread growing opposition to austerity can be built into a mass movement - we need to operate at the ideological level most people are at TODAY. In other words the entire Syriza-type movement is a "TRANSITIONAL" one, making economic and political demands and relating to people on the basis of pretty limited, essentially reformist demands, but which capitalism cannot meet in a worldwide capitalit crisis. Eventually in this situation, reformist demands can lead to revolutionery ones. Unfortunately if the mobilisation of masses of people around essentially reformist demands are left to the utterly reformist likes of Owen Jones, whilst revolutioneries sit in glorious ideologically pure isolation in their various mini "Bolshevik" reenactment Parties , polishing their busts of Lenin, memorising his timeless pearls of wisdom, it will be a movement leading nowhere fast.
