Maximist-Constructivist Debate

The **Maximist-Constructivist** debate refers to an underlining current political, social and intellectual conflict within the European socialist states and to an extend North American, its a reaction to the shift in politics toward tendencies of social patriotism and pragmatist politics of these countries and coming into the new found position as a world power out of the pariah decades.

## Origin

After the electoral victory of the Jacobins coalition in the BGT in 1937, the international politics of the Workers International changed their appearance accordingly, similarly repeated trends of national consolidation and centralisation occurred in Britain and Italy as well, the age of the Jacobinist states replaced the decentralised parliamentary dictatorships of the old days. Chiefly still the spotlight of this new politics would center around the French Revolutionary Workers Party, or the Jacobin Party, at the Congress of Tours 1932, the Party adopted the working programme known as the **Practical Construction of Socialism in France** in which it denounced the half-hearted, idealistic, utopian, ineffectual and declining prevailing ideological foundation of industrial democracy as it was implemented in the Federation, calling for "pragmatic" policies that really could build a foundation of socialism and resist foreign counter-revolutionaries rather than the paralysing bureaucratic superstructure of the Travaileurs model of industrial democracy that saw not only the French industrial capacity hammered, production of commodities also declined and the sharp conflicts between the rural communes and urban syndicates led to outdated agrarian productions that could jeopardy both them and the British who rely on the French for their foods supply. A much sharp change in rhetoric also occurred around this time, in the new party doctrine of appealing to French republican patriotism, which intensified in the war years as the fate of the Fatherland and socialism as a whole is on the battleground. This development constrated much with the younger generation after the French Proletarian Revolution who became grown up in the changing political atmosphere, from the confused period of the Federation, the strong hand of the state in the Social Republic and its authoritarian and nostalgia filled republicanism in contrast with the Marxist orthodox and cultural liberation found under the post-war Social Republic. This phenomeon eventually spread across the Western European bloc through the intellectual circles.

One of the earliest critic of Jacobinism and nostalgia politics came from Jean-Paul Sartre in his much controversal book *The Silent Republic*, in which the philosopher discuss the declining of the political, cultural and philosophical life in France, its quietness after the long years of the Social Republic, where the Federation was chaotic noises, the Social Republic shows a repressed silence. In a more political work, Sartre wrote "*The Maximum Programme and the Problems of French Socialism*" in the daily *Paris Libre,* the philosopher and at the time General Secretary of the BGT's Youth and Culture Commission in the first Jacobin unity cabinet drawn parallel between the abandoned practice of the Second International of the Maximum and Minimum Programme with the Practical Declaration's its limitation and complications as contrary to the party's 1927 Founding Political Programme explaining its necessary but also the trap that which the republic might not recover from, the second part titled "Problems of French Socialism" was published in 1949 under a pen name when he was already Minister of Culture and chairman of the Union des Valiant et Valiantes, in which he outline recall back the problems and bureaucratic downfalls in 1939 have not been fully addressed and clamored that the party and the regime needs a rejuvenation of its political life and rectifying its "eternal minimum programme". This political discourse gave name to two tendency: "***Constructivist***" and "***Maximist***"

## Maximist

### France

Natural representatives of this political trend is the Valiant Clique of Jean-Paul Sartre but also often including members of the Reformist Jacobins as a whole.

### America

The Orthodox Syndicalist and the a majority of the Industrial-Syndicalist faction follows this position, althought in America characteristically its still ideological bound rather than the mean like in France.

## English Maximism

Its a strong debate subject if the english Mosleyite "Maximist" Movement falls into both continental political trends. Mosley appears to be the most radical man in the British TUC in 1937, and by the Act of Wartime Government, he enforced the ban of political parties and the complete nationalisation of the economy into national syndicates. But otherwise, the politics of the Mosleyite follows the same pattern as the Practical Programme in France, thus most classified the Molseyite "Maximists" as "Constructivists".