What is WIN? When and why was it founded? What is its role?
by Roger Silverman.
The Workers’
International Network emerged out of an online socialist discussion list (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/socialistdiscussion).
This is a broad forum for the free exchange of ideas between socialists of a
range of affiliations and of none, which I set up together with some
co-thinkers in various countries (mostly but not exclusively former CWI
members) in 2006.
WIN’s ideas had
been germinating over several years of discussion, both online and at
occasional get-togethers. At one such international meeting, it was agreed to
prepare a document putting forward the common consensus that had been arrived
at by those comrades who had been corresponding and meeting over the years, and
at the next meeting in Dublin in 2009 it was agreed that the draft document
presented there would be extended and sent out to the whole list as a political
statement under the title Preparing for revolution. Then in
2012 a new document was added, called The future International: socialists and the
movement against capitalism. These documents represent the views of one
group, which for purposes of identification adopted the name Workers’
International Network, among several that were already represented on this list.
In that sense WIN
is a distinct political tendency. But in the past, the word “tendency” was
sometimes used as a deliberate euphemism for an organisation claiming to be a
vanguard of cadres of the future revolutionary leadership. We say we have
plenty of those already. Our documents spell out – uniquely among all other
such documents – that establishing such a vanguard is not the immediate task of
the day. We have no such pretensions. We are simply making a modest
contribution towards the development of ideas which we hope will help to
clarify the next steps forward. We are a tendency in the sense of its original
definition: a group of like-minded people with a common outlook who wish to
identify themselves as such and argue for their point of view. WIN is not a
revolutionary party, even in embryo; it is a network. And its documents are not
intended as a blueprint, but as a basis for discussion.
We hope to
reach active committed workers engaged creatively in real struggles. Any hint
of the old instant-answer I-told-you-so attitudes which were the negative side
of the old left groups’ tradition will alienate them, and rightly so. There is
understandably a scepticism on the part of even the most experienced and
committed activists at any hint of the old exclusivist messianic postures. This
is a healthy attitude on their part. Yes, we are keen to place at the disposal
of the new generation of fighters for a new world whatever theoretical lessons
we think might be learned from history. And yet today, from Athens to Cairo to
Santiago to South Africa, millions have been marching, mobilising, striking and
above all talking. We can be sure that the heated debates they have had will
have at least as much to teach us as whatever abstract lessons we may have
gleaned from our study of the textbooks. We need to learn from their experience
and their ideas, and to find ways to engage in mutual discussion of the way
forward for workers throughout the world.
Certainly,
historical precedents are crucial as a key to understanding events as they
unfold. However, we should guard against the temptation to artificially graft
preconceived templates on to living processes. The most important quality –
something almost uncannily possessed by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and other great
revolutionaries – is an ability to listen. Who is to say that the embryo of a
new revolutionary international is not already being created right now, in the
debates that must be raging in workplaces, street corners and shanty towns
across the world?
How is WIN
organised?
WIN is still in
its very modest beginnings. It is a small and fairly loose network of activists
in a few countries. WIN comrades have played a role wherever they are based: in
leading strikes, peasant struggles and women’s struggles in Pakistan, and helping
to build a new united workers’ party there; in the uprising of South African
mine workers, in anti-cuts and anti-racist campaigns in Britain, in occupations
and strikes in the USA, in campaigns for the rights of sans-papiers in France,
in trade union struggles in Ireland, etc. Through our online network and in
international visits, we have tried to make contact and engage in dialogue with
worker militants worldwide. WIN members
constantly correspond online and meet every few months to review perspectives
and exchange political ideas.
What is WIN’s
perspective for workers’ struggles?
The relocation
of industry through globalisation has transformed the world’s working class.
There has been a haemorrhage of manufacturing jobs from their traditional
location. One third of US manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2001. And the
number of manufacturing jobs in Britain has fallen below three million for the
first time since 1841!
Meanwhile,
there are well over 100 million industrial workers in China – more than twice
as many as in all the G7 countries put together (the USA, Germany, Japan,
France, Britain, Italy and Canada). China has this year crossed the line to
become a predominantly urban society. Of the world’s three billion wage
workers, for every one worker in the West there are now five based in China,
India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and South-East Asia. Women now
constitute a majority of the world’s workers, and the proletariat is now for
the first time a majority of the world population.
These
demographic changes account largely for the relative eclipse of proletarian and
socialist traditions in the old industrial societies of the USA and many
Western European countries. At the same time, they are a source of unshakable
hope in the revolutionary potential of the world working class and the future
of socialism worldwide.
The current
underground strike wave in China recalls the 1890s in Russia: a period of rapid
industrialisation when millions of young peasants are being uprooted from
medieval conditions and transplanted into high-tech modern industrial
factories. That economic boom in Russia ended in a general strike, the birth of
Soviets, and the 1905 revolution – events that transformed the international
working class and ushered in an era of world revolution.
How does WIN
envisage the development of a future International?
The old mass
movements of organised labour in their previous strongholds have been eroded by
the collapse of Stalinism; by capitalist triumphalism and political
disorientation; by organic changes in the composition of the working class; by
major trade-union defeats, the strangulation of the ex-colonial countries, and
the long credit boom. But a new, stronger, more cohesive international class is
being built, bestriding every continent, and rapidly learning anew the strategy
and tactics of the class struggle.
Workers
everywhere are beginning to rise to their feet again. But their struggles are
diffuse and unco-ordinated. There is no International, and no organised
programme to change society. Now more than ever we need a single party of the
working class. Civilised life, war and peace, and environmental survival all
depend upon it. In the absence of such a party, the alternative is a nightmare.
Dark forces stalk the world: nationalism, racism, bigotry, fascism, fundamentalism,
nihilistic terror. That is the face of reaction today. The choice is: socialism
or barbarism. Marx’ aphorism once seemed little more than a rhetorical
flourish, but it is quite literally and imminently the choice now facing
humanity.
The creation
of a worldwide party of the working class is not at all an abstract or unreal
idea. Every day, in every continent, we see new evidence that such a party is
straining right now at every nerve to materialise. Mass communications and the “information
revolution” have made the present generation incomparably better informed than
their grandparents. The world has drawn together and a new global consciousness
has arisen. The size and specific weight of the proletariat have grown
everywhere.
In 2003,
thirty million people worldwide marched to protest at the impending war on
Iraq. In 2011 the occupy movement spread across the planet. On 14th
November 2012, workers across Southern Europe will go on a one-day
international general strike. When tens of millions of workers and young people
protest – on the same issues, with the same slogans, often on the same day in
internationally synchronised action – that means that the world party of the
future is almost a reality now. The international movement against capitalism
needs to be embodied in a permanent thriving organised movement. It is the task
of socialists to give conscious expression to this process.
How are
perspectives affected by the environmental crisis?
Recent years
have seen some of the biggest recorded natural disasters, in the form of
earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, volcanic eruptions, forest fires,
and in Japan the resulting nuclear crisis, some of them undoubtedly linked to
climate change. Quite apart from environmental disaster, faith in the boundless
potential of technology has gone; in its place has come a conviction that
society is fast reaching the limit of the world’s finite resources, especially
in terms of energy. There is a widespread understanding that capitalism has
despoiled the planet, that civilisation itself is under threat. In the absence of a socialist answer, it is
understandable that this helps create feelings of helplessness; of fatalistic
resignation to the inevitability of Armageddon.
There are few
illusions left about the dictatorship of corporate power. What is lacking is
confidence in the power to overthrow it. There is an awareness of the sheer
enormity of the task of breaking the stranglehold of the corporations, and a
lack of any conception of what could replace it. It is therefore the prime task
of socialists today to re-establish once again theoretically the rationality of
socialism. It has to be demonstrated all over again before it can become once
again a living force. The ideological case for socialism has to be argued all
over again, in an entirely new context, to inspire a politically virgin proletariat.
What does WIN
say about the struggles of women today?
The assault by
the neo-liberal ruling class on the welfare state and the social gains made
since the Second World War is having a massive impact on women, both as users
of these services and as those employed within them. The primitive accumulation
of capital is happening this time in the robbery of the welfare state and all
the gains that women have won in the last sixty or more years. In some
countries, such as Zimbabwe, the welfare state is already virtually dismantled;
in others, such as Greece, it is the subject of bitter struggle. Other states
are manoeuvring towards the same objective.
WIN recognises
the role of women in patriarchal society, both feudal and capitalist, in
defending the population from the robbery and primitive accumulation of the
ruling class, and the persecution that follows. Violence against women is used
to repress mass resistance.
How does WIN
envisage a new International will be created?
When Marx and
Engels helped to found the First International, their objective was to unite
all the disparate, nascent workers' organisations around the world – no matter
how limited. Even outside the parameters of the working class, they strove to
encompass all genuine movements of protest against the existing order. Their
mission was to try to unite all the existing embryonic organisations of
resistance to capitalism into a single worldwide movement. That would give them
the framework within which to pit what they considered their scientific ideas
against those of the assorted sectarians peddling their quack panaceas. The
IWMA was to become a worldwide ideological workshop, in which all the rival
ideas could be tested out in practice against the experiences of the workers in
victory and in defeat. What was needed – then as now – was a forum in which to
debate the issues.
A new
international today will not in its incipient stages mean a monolithic world
party with a sharply defined ideological line. Today is not 1920, when no less
than 21 conditions were laid down for affiliation, and, to make doubly sure,
Lenin even added a list of named individuals who would never under any
circumstances be admitted to the new International. Neither is today 1938, when
Trotsky had to denounce in a single breath the Stalinists and social democrats
along with bourgeois liberals and fascists.
These were not
at all expressions of sectarianism. They were a measured response to the
reality of such historic betrayals as collusion in the mutual slaughter of the
first world war, and the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact. They belong to the
era when mighty social armies had been established at enormous sacrifice by the
working class, which had then fallen prey to traitors. The task then was to
replace these traitors with leaders worthy of the rank-and-file. Today the
generals no longer betray and collaborate; if only things were so simple. They
have openly switched sides, and their armies have largely disbanded.
The First International
was an amalgamation of disparate pioneering campaigning radical groups, with
all their confusions and misconceptions – incipient workers' parties groping
towards a common outlook. Marx and Engels used the crucial few years of the
International's meteoric growth as a political workshop in which to forge a
coherent world programme and ideology. As Engels explained, the aim of the IWMA
was “to
weld together into one huge army the whole militant working class of Europe and
America. Therefore it could not set out from the principles laid down in the
(Communist) Manifesto.” Yet it is a stunning tribute to Marx and Engels
that within seven short years they had already won the argument. Although the
IWMA itself was dashed against the rocks of reaction, once the tide had turned
and the newly emergent mass parties and trade unions throughout Europe and
beyond had established the Socialist International in 1889, it was under the
banner of the ideas of the Communist Manifesto.
The task ahead
of revolutionaries today is far closer to those facing Marx and Engels in their
day. The future International will not arise principally from mass splits in
long-established traditional parties, in revolt against their ruling
bureaucracies. It will look initially much more like the First than the Third.
It will necessarily encompass a broad range of opinion. It will be an
international projection of the confusions and conflicts within each country’s
nascent parties. We will find ourselves working alongside all kinds of
disparate and quite probably naive forces. The simple but strict proviso for
uniting our forces will be our common sincerity in fighting capitalism, and our
common recognition of the key role of the working class. In the furnace of
struggle, all the rival ideologies will be tested, and the best will win out.
The new international will be alive with debate.
The
Internationals of the past reflected the working class of their times. The
First International was actually called an association of working men.
Even the Third International was almost entirely concentrated in Europe. The
International that will emerge from the coming struggles will encompass tens of
millions of men, women and youth from all the continents.
How does WIN
differ from existing left groups?
The left groups
all have their origins in a period when there were mass socialist or communist
parties numbering millions. Generations of workers lived, fought and died
defending their political heritage. All that was holding them back from victory
were the material interests of the bureaucratic cliques – reformist and
Stalinist – at their head. The mission of the left opposition groups was to
expose the crimes and betrayals of the leadership of those parties and prove
themselves a worthier alternative vanguard.
The task
facing socialists now is different. Historical, economic and demographic
factors have changed the political landscape. Today it is a question of
rebuilding the movement itself, rather than simply providing an alternative
programme and leadership for it.
To varying
degrees the old left groups succeeded in educating their cadres and sharpening
their skills as theoreticians, writers, speakers and organisers, achieving in
some cases admirable results. The loyalty of these activists to those
organisations to which they have given their lives is an understandable and
praiseworthy quality. However, it carries with it the risk of cliquism and
conservatism; of a sectarianism which consists of an unwillingness to put the
needs of the wider movement above the petty advantages of their own
organisation. In such a situation, they risk losing a sense of proportion. They
would indignantly deny it, but in practice many of the old left groups still
sincerely believe that the future depends on their winning leadership of the
workers’ movement, and this leads them in practice to give priority to the need
to build their own organisations before the objective needs of the class. They
might agree formally that the tasks have changed; however, their style,
structure and persona have not changed accordingly. They often present
themselves still as a vanguard, as having all the answers; their internal
regime is still insulated from the movement.
Within the
left groups there are many admirable and dedicated workers. At the same time to
varying extents they have drawn distorted conclusions from the special
circumstances of the Bolshevik party in the Tsarist underground and of the
Russian revolution during the civil war and its aftermath, which have helped
foster a culture of lifelong mandates, an implicit tendency towards leadership
cults, resulting splits, the discouragement of dissent, even the outright
suppression of factions, and other blemishes. On a miniscule scale, the kind of
petty abuses that have scarred the left groups would never have been tolerated
if they had had an active mass working-class membership.
Within the old
left groups, attitudes and understanding of the role of women in the class
struggle was limited. WIN sees the struggles of women across the globe as a
fundamental aspect of class struggle.
As the class
struggle reawakens from its relative state of hibernation, it is to be hoped
that the healthiest elements from within the existing left groups will abandon
their obsolete pet shibboleths and join together with the fresh ranks of the
new mass movement.
Tell us
something about your own political background.
I was a
devoted member of Militant for more than thirty years, from the age of 18, and
the first full-timer for the CWI. I was instrumental in founding the CWI, for
which I worked full-time from 1973 to 1993, based for much of that time in countries
throughout Europe and Asia, having previously worked for a year in Russia.
Following the split in the CWI in 1991, in which I opposed the breakaway
faction but maintained a critical and independent attitude towards the
majority, I became in 1993 the earliest victim of the purges which were
subsequently to convulse and disfigure the CWI. In 1996 I wrote a balance sheet
of the history of the CWI which marked my definitive break with the tendency,
and soon afterwards linked up with other former CWI comrades in the USA and
elsewhere in an online discussion group, the precursor to the present socialist
discussion list. I consider my recent role in the development of WIN as my most
worthwhile political contribution to date.
No comments:
Post a Comment