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I don’t think that Draper was right. Yes, both Social Democratic and Leninist parties seek to lead the working class and to act on its behalf doing something for the workers. In that sense both are “vanguards” that reject working class self-activity and that the emancipation of the working class can only be the work of the working class itself.
But the internal organisation of these two types of party is different. Social Democratic parties, at least on paper, are organised on a democratic basis, with local branches that can propose motions for debate at their conference which decides policy; there are internal elections and sometimes a vote of the whole membership. Ok, these parties are generally controlled by their parliamentary leaders but they are not in complete control.
Contrast this internal structure with that of a Leninist party. Members of these can elect the committee and officers of their local branch but that’s the limit. The leadership decides policy. Conferences don’t vote on motions presented by branches but on a “perspective” or “thesis” proposed by the leadership on a take it or leave it basis. The leadership itself is not elected from a list of individuals proposed by branches but from a slate chosen and presented by the outgoing leadership, once again on a take it or leave it basis. Individuals can’t stand against this slate; those who might disagree with what the leadership slate stands for have to present an alternative slate. Such a party has a built-in (and unapologetic) top-down command structure in the hands of a self-perpetuating leadership that renews itself by co-option.
That is what is more usually the meant by a “vanguard party”. It is a Leninist theory and practice. Social Democratic parties can be described as “vanguards” but not as “vanguard parties”.
Lenin may have originally intended this structure only for Russian political conditions under Tsarism but once the Bolshevik party got power it imposed this structure on the parties in the West that supported its rule. The transformation of these parties from Social Democrat parties to “vanguard parties” was called “Bolshevikisation”.
Anyway, here’s the view we expressed at the time on the Kautsky-Lenin debate:
The following articles have been added to the Jack Fitzgerald Internet Archive:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fitzgerald/index.htm
November 1911: Asked & Answered: Prices and Values.
November 1914: Birds of a feather.
March 1915: The Confusion of the “Clarion” “Economists”.
June/July 1915: Capitalist economics.
March 1918: Working Harder for the Capitalist.That completes all the articles in the Socialist Standard signed by him
Yes, the podcast was interesting. What struck me was how their discussion of the version of Marxism we inherited from Kautsky led to the same sort of discussions and conclusions as we have had in our party — about the inevitability or not of socialism (more the inevitability that capitalism cannot continue indefinitely); the futility of drawing up blueprints since we can’t know the situation when socialism is established; how the “underdeveloped countries” cannot avoid capitalism as long as the developed parts of the world remain capitalist; how governments can only manage the capitalist status quo and how they have to comply with the economic laws of capitalism.
On this last point, the podcasters amused themselves by describing governments as “middle management” carrying out decisions made higher up the chain of command, their boss being the workings and imperatives of the capitalist economy. This analogy had already been made by Peter Joseph of Zeitgeist. It’s good and one we can take up.
British banks seem to be moving towards the situation of banks in the US of having to put up the rate of interest they pay savers so as to retain them.
Under the heading “Barclay’s slides as margins come under new pressure”, today’s Times reports the bank’s financial director as saying:
“Customers are seeking higher yields for their savings and we have changed our pricing in response.”
No only that, many of those they lend money to to buy a house or flat are repaying their loans quicker, so reducing the total income from these loans:
“She said that more than a quarter of customers with home loans were overpaying to reduce their borrowings before remortgaging’”
So their “net interest margin” (“a measure of the difference between what a bank earns from loans and pays to depositors”) is being squeezed from both ends. As this is the source of their profits after paying their running costs, their profits are suffering. As a result the price of the bank’s shares have slid as more investors sell than buy them.
Banks of course are in business to provide an income from their shareholders.
Marx himself used the word a few times in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. He used it in the literal sense of a future State as a political institution as he was criticising the programme’s advocacy of a “free people’s state”. He used it to show that their “future state” was the already existing capitalist state in countries like the USA and Switzerland.
At one point he also asked about “the future state of communist society” (“ zukünftigen Staatswesen der kommunistischen Gesellschaft” by which he said he meant “what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions?” (as of course will some administrative and other functions such as education).
I don’t know if there is any significance in the fact that he didn’t use the word Zukunftsstaat in this connection.
In any event, the content pof the section with that heading in Kautsky’s pamphlet indicates that he was using the word there in a wider sense than just the state as a political institution.
In English the title of chapter IV is has been rendered as ‘Commonwealth of the Future’. But as you can see here in the German, what he has is ‘Der Zukunftsstaat’, that is, ‘The Future State’).
Are you sure that in this context Zukunftsstaat means the future “government machine, or the state in so far as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labour”, as Marx referred to the state in his Critique of the Gotha Programme?
In Germany at the time Kautsky was writing, the word seems to have had more the meaning of “future society”. In fact at the turn of the century quite a few books with that in the title were published. Kautsky actually wrote the preface to one of them by Atlanticus (Carl Ballod), which was a sort of German equivalent of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward:
https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1898/xx/atlanticus.htm
In his preface the word clearly means “future society” rather than future state in the narrow sense (even if a state in that sense was a feature of that society).
It would have been natural for Kautsky to use the word in the same sense in his booklet.
Incidentally, the German original of von Mises’s notorious 1920 article “Economic planning in the Socialist Commonwealth” was “Wirtschaftliche Berechnung im sozialistischen Commonwealth”. Make of that what you will.
The early SPGB was not uncritical of Kautsky on economics as well as politics. In 1902 Kautsky gave two lectures in Amsterdam which he later published as a pamphlet that was translated into English the following year as “The Social Revolution and On the Morrow of the Social Revolution” (and later as “The Social Revolution and on the day after the Social Revolution”).
In a written debate with a Tory party election agent in the columns of the Socialist Standard in May 1914 Jack Fitzgerald described Kautsky’s pamphlet as
“one of the worst works he ever penned”.
In it Kautsky discussed to what extent a “proletarian regime” would be able to immediately increase wages, and went on, prefiguring what he was in write in 1924:
“I speak here of the wages of labor. What, it will be said, will there be wages in the new society? Shall we not have abolished wage labor and money? How then can one speak of the wages of labor? These objections would be sound if the social revolution proposed to immediately abolish money. I maintain that this would be impossible. Money is the simplest means known up to the present time which makes it possible in as complicated a mechanism as that of the modern productive process, with its tremendous far-reaching division of labor, to secure the circulation of products and their distribution to the individual members of society. It is the means which makes it possible for each one to satisfy his necessities according to his individual inclination (to be sure within the bounds of his economic power). As a means to such circulation money will be found indispensable until something better is discovered.”
Fitzgerald was criticising another point that Kautsky had made, which had been quoted by his opponent, that there wouldn’t be enough to immediately increase what workers consumed by much. He said:
“Let us say at once, however, that we repudiate Kautsky on this as we have done on several other points.”
Kautsky’s pamphlet can be found here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1903/xx/socrev2.pdf
And the debate with the Tory here:
I thought Kautsky might have been advocating free love or something like that that the internet censors thought unsuitable for under 18s.
“The Class Struggke” is more generally known as “The Erfurt Programme”, the theoretical underpinning of the programme adopted by the German Social Democrats at their congress held there in 1891.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/index.htm
The first three SPGB pamphlets were translations, approved by Kautsky, of the first three sections of his work. According to the introduction to the first section, the intention seems to have been to publish the whole work but the last two including the one of “The Commonwealth of the Future” were not published.
I will find sone time listen to the podcast to see what it makes of what Kautsky wrote.
From Monday’s Guardian on the current purge in the Labour Party:
“About a month ago, Neal Lawson, a member of Labour since the late 70s, got a letter from the party’s governance and legal unit, inviting him to defend himself over a two-year-old tweet. His apparent offence? He had praised an example of cooperation between the Lib Dems and the Green party, saying: “This is what grown-up politics looks like.” If this was deemed to be an incitement to vote for a party other than Labour, he was warned, he would be in breach of party rules and expelled.”
Mind you, all parties do that.
When I clicked that link I got this message :
“Content not available
We’ve restricted some content for people who aren’t over 18.”What was Kautsky advocating?
It’s not even a realistic hypothesis:
https://labourlist.org/2023/06/labour-free-school-meals-policy-free-universal-poverty/?amp
Nigel Farage was interviewed on BBC radio 4 this morning after having obtained the resignation of the chief executive of NatWest Bank. At the end he mentioned that what he saw as the danger of “central bank digital currency”. He has been complaining against this for years. Here’s a recent tweet from him:
Central Bank Digital Currencies will give the state total control over our lives. This must be resisted. https://t.co/3QwqbkkPjD
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) February 7, 2023
This has become a big issue for the “libertarian” fringe in British politics. They see it as a totalitarian attempt by governments to keep an eye on how people spend their money.
For instance, the Reform Party (the successor to the Brexit Party) candidate in the Somerton and Frome by-election said “oppose a cashless society and central bank digital currency” and one of Piers Corbyn’s slogan in his election address in Uxbridge was in bold capitals KEEP CASH.
We’ve got a better idea of course:
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2009/11/smash-cash.html?m=1
