The shadow of bureaucratic 'socialism'

The short explanation of this situation is that the political left is still in the shadow of the bureaucratic 'socialist' regimes of the 20th century and their fall — or, in the case of China and Vietnam, their evolution towards openly capitalist regimes. It is not merely that these regimes were murderously tyrannical. The point is that all the sacrifices, both of political liberty and of material well-being, which the regimes demanded of those they ruled, have only led back to capitalism. As long as the left appears to be proposing to repeat this disastrous experience, we can expect mass hostility to liberal capitalism to be expressed mainly in the form of rightism, that is, of nostalgia for the pre-capitalist social order.

Now the Trotskyists — and still more the 'Third Camp' Trotskyists — may argue that this does not affect them or, to the extent that it does, complain that this is unfair to them. After all, they opposed the bureaucratic regimes and called for their revolutionary overthrow. Some small minorities within this general trend — the Critique group, the Spartacists, the neo-Marcyites — even foresaw that the continued dictatorship of the bureaucracy would lead to a collapse, and/or back to capitalism.

The problem goes back to the point I made earlier. Humans have no guide to action in the future other than theorising on what has happened in the past. Experiment in the physical sciences is no more than a way of formalising reliance on past actions as a guide to future actions. In politics, there can be no laboratory. Our only experimental evidence is the evidence of our history. Trotskyism as theory — and here including Critique, the Spartacists and the neo-Marcyites — predicted that the working class in the countries run by bureaucratic 'socialist' regimes would resist the restoration of capitalism. Trotsky — and, following him, the Spartacists and neo-Marcyites — predicted that this resistance would find a political reflection in political splits within the bureaucracy. The majority of the 'orthodox' Trotskyists used this prediction to conclude that there could not be a restoration of capitalism. All of these predictions were categorically false. There has been no accounting for their falsity.

The point runs deeper. Under capitalism, there is an objective dynamic for the working class to create permanent organisations to defend its immediate interests — trade unions and so on. This dynamic is present even under highly repressive political regimes: as can be seen in apartheid South Africa, South Korea before its 'democratisation', and so on. These organisations tend, equally, to become a significant factor in political life. It is these tendencies which support the ability of the political left to be more than small utopian circles.

Under the Soviet-style bureaucratic regimes there was no objective tendency towards independent self-organisation of the working class. Rather, there were episodic explosions; but to the extent that the bureaucracy did not succeed in putting a political cap on these, they tended towards a pro-capitalist development. The strategic line of a worker revolution against the bureaucracy — whether it was called 'political revolution' as it was by the orthodox Trotskyists, or 'social revolution' by state-capitalism and bureaucratic-collectivism theorists — lacked a material basis.

This objection applies with equal force to those misguided souls who (like Tony Clark of the Communist Party Alliance) argue that the Soviet-style bureaucratic regimes were in transition towards socialism; that this inevitably "has both positive and negative features to begin with", but that the transition was turned into its opposite by the seizure of power by the bourgeoisie "gain[ing] control of communist parties and socialist states under the banner of anti-Stalinism".⁴

If we momentarily accept this analysis for the sake of argument, the question it poses is: why have the true revolutionaries, the Stalinists, been so utterly incapable of organising an effective resistance to this take-over, given that 'socialism' in their sense covered a large part of the globe and organised a large part of its population? This is exactly the same problem as the Trotskyists' 'political revolution' strategy, only with a different substantive line. The weakness of Stalinist opposition to the pro-capitalist evolution of the leaderships in Moscow, Beijing, and so on, reveals the same problem as that facing the advocates of 'political revolution'. There were neither institutional means in the regimes through which the 'non-revisionists' could resist revisionism, nor any objective tendency in the regimes towards ongoing mass working class self-organisation on which opponents of revisionism could base themselves.

Trotskyists of all varieties continue to put forward as positive socialist strategy a revolution in the image of 1917 in Russia. But, as everyone knows, what happened to the Russian Revolution was the emergence of the bureaucratic regime, which has now ended — or is in the process of ending — in capitalism. Trotskyists are therefore required to account for how the bureaucratic regime arose, and to offer reasons for supposing that the process would not be duplicated anywhere else which had a '1917-style' revolution.

Trotsky's explanation was — to give a bare outline of it — that the working class took political power in Russia and continued to hold political power — albeit "with bureaucratic distortions", as Lenin put it in 1921⁵ — into the 1920s. But the isolation of the Russian Revolution produced conditions of generalised scarcity in the country. These conditions required a state standing above the society to police distribution: and the state bureaucracy then became a new privileged stratum, which by the late 1920s took political power away from the working class. Variant accounts identify the new stratum as a new class, or in some cases as a new state-capitalist class. But the narratives of the rise of the bureaucracy and the causes of this rise remain the same.

There is a central strategic problem with this account. In 1917 the Bolsheviks led the soviets to take political power — a gamble on the Russian Revolution triggering a generalised socialist revolution in Central and Western Europe. The gamble failed. In all probability, it had already failed by January 1918. At that point it was clear that Red Guards and fraternisation attempts were unable to stop the renewed German advance, let alone trigger the German revolution. As a result the March 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk destroyed both majority support for the Bolshevik government in Russia, and any serious prospect of a German revolution before the military victory of the Entente powers on the Western Front.⁶ Certainly it had failed by 1921. Revolutionary movements in Germany, Hungary and Italy, had been defeated. Further, the image of the Soviet regime had already begun to be a problem for leftists in the countries with powerful working classes, as a result of the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt and the adoption of the ban on factions in the Communist Party. This problem was reflected in the three-way split in the Comintern in 1921 between 'centrists', Cominternists and 'left'/'council' communists.

After this failure, the longer the Bolsheviks attempted to hold political power, the more bureaucratic the regime became, and the more clearly it became an obstacle to the working class taking power elsewhere — as the Trotskyist theory itself explains.

Given the failure of the gamble, the Trotskyist account does not explain why any attempt to repeat a revolution in the image of 1917 would not end in the same way. It is ridiculous to imagine that the global imperialist-led system of states would not bend every effort to isolate a 'new 1917'. Countries which are more 'developed' than the Tsarist empire in 1917 (now most countries) are more deeply integrated in the global division of labour, and isolation would therefore produce more scarcity and hence more need for a state-bureaucratic 'policeman'.

Some Trotskyists would respond that Trotsky could and should have made a military coup in the period shortly after the death of Lenin.⁷ But even assuming that the result of such a coup would not have been to collapse the Soviet state (the most probable outcome), the problem is: what would Trotsky and his associates have done with political power? After the 'left turn' of the Stalin leadership in 1928-29, the overwhelming majority of the former left oppositionists went over to supporting this leadership.⁸ This shift expressed the fact that the practical alternative to the policy of mixed economy, 'alliance with the peasantry' and 'peaceful coexistence' followed in 1921-27, so far as it could be carried into practice, was: for the Soviet state to step up the exploitation of the peasantry at home, while the Comintern pursued a more aggressive policy abroad in the hope of triggering a revolution which would break the isolation of the Soviet regime. This was the line actually adopted by Stalin and his co-thinkers in the 'left turn' of the 'Third Period'. A Trotskyist-led USSR and Comintern would thus — in the absence of revolution in western Europe — have been driven towards the policy actually followed by the Stalinist-led USSR and Comintern, and would have lacked the material wherewithal to prevent the political rise of the bureaucratic caste.

To put the matter bluntly. Once the gamble on the European revolution had failed by 1921, the outcome which actually materialised — the bureaucratic dictatorship, itself irreversibly on the road back to capitalism, and standing as a road-block against the working class taking power in the central capitalist countries — was by a long way the most probable outcome of the Bolsheviks' decision to attempt to hold on to political power.

Once we recognise that this is true, we can no longer treat the strategy of Bolshevism, as it was laid out in the documents of the early Comintern, as presumptively true; nor can we treat the several arguments made against the Bolsheviks' course of action by Kautsky, Martov, and Luxemburg (among others) as presumptively false.⁹ I stress presumptively. In relation to each and every element of Bolshevik strategy there may be independent reasons to accept it; in relation to each and every argument of Kautsky, etc, there may be independent reasons to reject it. But the 'victory of the Russian revolution' on its own, or the course of the revolution after late 1917-early 1918, can no longer be taken as evidence for Bolshevik strategy as a package. What it led to was not a strategic gain for the world working class, but a 60-year impasse of the global workers' movement and the severe weakness of this movement at the present date.

Probably most people who come into contact with the organised left don't think about the issue at this level of analysis: i.e., that the left has failed to account properly for Stalinism. What they see is something much simpler: that the left groups are massively divided; and if they are familiar with the groups or pass through membership of them, that the groups are not really democratic, but either no more democratic than the capitalist parliamentary constitutional regime — as is true of the Mandelite Fourth International and its larger sections — or that they are characterised by bureaucratic tyranny just like Stalinism (as is true of the British Socialist Workers Party and numerous other far-left groups). In reality, the division is to a considerable extent the product of bureaucratic centralism, and both are at least in part produced by the failure to account properly for Stalinism.

Half-rethinking

The global political dynamics discussed above have led in the far left in most countries to a half-recognition that its disunity is undesirable; and a connected half-recognition that it is necessary to rethink the strategic assumptions of the last 80 years of its history.

'Half-rethinking' is a loose phrase intended to cover a wide range of related features. A few examples only. In the first place, although there are substantial groups which are rethinking or have rethought their strategy to some extent in various ways, there is a significant minority which simply blames the fall of the USSR and all the rest on the moral incapacity of individual leaders (whether these are to be 'revisionists' or 'Stalinists') and the absence of resistance similarly on the moral incapacity of individual leaders of the far left ('revisionists' or 'Pabloites') and maintains that it is sufficient for the left to go on in the old way (or one of the 57 varieties of old way). The existence of this trend means that only part of the left is rethinking.

Second, there is a very common phenomenon of accepting that some degree of unity is necessary for now, but at some point in the future 'the revolutionary party' in the Comintern sense will become necessary and possible. Hence we should now be for a provisional practical form of left unity — perhaps, as the Mandelite Fourth International has suggested, a 'party not programmatically delimited between reform and revolution' — but one which has a 'revolutionary Marxist faction' within it. The Mandelites have argued for parties of this type, the Socialist Workers Party for 'united fronts of a special type' which are not parties, enabling the SWP to remain a party within the broad unity. Several Trotskyist groups have argued for 'non-liberal' Labour or workers' parties with an affiliate structure (which imagines the British Labour Party in its early history as further left than it actually was). This is a half-rethinking, in the sense that it poses changed current tasks, while leaving largely untouched existing strategic ideas.

Third, a wide range of authors address one or some strategic issues by way of rethinking, and propose unity on a new basis. Commonly this approach involves claims that the world has changed so profoundly that most of the history of the workers' movement is no longer relevant. For example, István Meszáros argued in Beyond capital (1996) that 1917 failed because the logic of capital had not reached its global limits; today it has reached its global limits, and these limits pose a different form of strategy. Meszaros' arguments have recently been cited by Hugo Chávez, and have been adapted in very different ways by Michael Lebowitz and by Cliff Slaughter.¹⁰ I call this sort of writing a half-rethinking because it asserts that some fundamental error has vitiated the whole history of our movement, and this is therefore to be discarded altogether in order to begin again on the basis of a theoretical construction applied directly to immediate conditions, rather than systematically addressing the full range of the history.

Not uncommonly the 'new basis' turns out, in fact, to be an old idea repackaged or reinvented. Thus, for example, John Holloway's Change the world without taking power (2002) and Hardt and Negri's Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005) are all in different ways repackagings of the ideas of the 1970s 'spontaneists' and 'autonomists'; and these were, in turn, repackagings of the ideas of the 'left' or 'council' Communists of the 1920s — which were themselves, at least in part, a repackaging of the ideas of the post-Bakunin Bakuninists. "Those who will not learn from history are condemned to repeat it" (Santayana).

This book began life in response to a particular instance of this sort of 'half-rethinking': a debate on questions of revolutionary strategy in the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR, or 'Ligue'), with an intervention by Alex Callinicos of the SWP.¹¹ The French strategy debate was intimately connected to the immediate question which was debated at the LCR's 2006 congress: Should the LCR participate, without preconditions, in discussions whose aim was to try to achieve a single candidate of 'the left' in the presidential elections in 2007? (In the event, unity was not achieved, and there were five far left candidates.)

But this, of course, is a part of larger debates. In the first place an agreed candidate for the presidency in France would quite clearly have meant a coalition to create a government. This is usually true of electoral agreements for elections to parliaments or legislative assemblies, but it need not be. A non-aggression agreement in parliamentary or legislative elections might not involve commitment to join in creating a government. This has been done in the past. However, a French president is not a figurehead, but has direct governmental responsibilities.

The French debate was thus part of one being conducted more widely. Should socialists participate in coalition governments controlled by 'social-liberals' — i.e., people with politics not dissimilar to the Blairites — in order to keep out the open parties of the right? Rifondazione Comunista in Italy joined Prodi's Unione coalition government, with disastrous results. The German Die Linke is in a social-liberal regional government in Berlin. The Brazilian Workers' Party succeeded in electing Lula as president and as a result has been participating as a minority in a 'centre-left' coalition.

The question was even posed, not as fancifully as it might now seem, to the Scottish Socialist Party before its recent crisis. Suppose that "pro-independence parties": i.e., the Scottish National Party, the Greens and the SSP, had won a majority in the May 2007 Scottish parliament elections. Should the SSP have joined a coalition executive with the SNP in order to create Scottish independence?

Secondly, the LCR is a section of the Mandelite Fourth International — in fact, its strongest section. And since the early 1990s, the Fourth International has been promoting the idea of creating unitary left parties that, in Callinicos's phrase, "leave open the question of reform and revolution". The original example was the Brazilian Workers' Party; then the Italian Rifondazione Comunista; the closest to home in Britain is the SSP.

In a series of exchanges with the LCR and its Fourth International, the SWP and its International Socialist Tendency have argued that there is still a fundamental divide between "reform and revolution", and that it is necessary to build a "revolutionary" party (i.e., a party like the SWP). Broader unity projects should be "united fronts" or "coalitions", like the British Socialist Alliance and Respect.

The experience of Brazil showed — and, in different ways, so do the debates in Rifondazione Comunista and those in the process of Die Linke — that there are present-day choices facing the left about policy, government and coalitions. And these choices still leave sharp differences.

On the one side are those who are willing, for the sake of lesser-evilism or of absolutely marginal advantages to the oppressed, to administer the existing capitalist state as part of the existing international system of states, without fundamental changes. They are therefore prepared to form coalitions with supporters of these systems, in which these supporters can veto policies which are 'too leftwing'.

On the other side are those who insist that this policy is an illusion that merely prepares the ground for demoralisation among the masses, the advance of the far right, and new further-right centre-right governments. From this perspective, making fundamental changes is the priority of any socialist government. Some, like the SWP, argue that such a government could only come to power through a 'revolutionary rupture'. Only small and dispersed minorities refuse any coalitions at all, but a significant minority would hold the view that a coalition in which Blair, Schroeder, Prodi or Fabius calls the shots is not worth having and a stance of militant opposition — even if it means militant opposition to a government of the right — is preferable.

Since 2006 the debate in the LCR has moved on. The LCR at its most recent congress voted by a large majority to attempt to construct a new party which is to be a "party of resistance, for a break with the system, for socialism" and which would "counterpose, against the management of existing institutions, the perspective of a workers' government".¹² This is ambiguous, but a substantial step forward from the terms of the 2006 debate, and there is no point in engaging directly — as I did in the Weekly Worker series — either with the stale Eurocommunist crap produced by some of the LCR writers in 2006, or with Alex Callinicos's use in his intervention of the idea that a 'forcible confrontation' is unavoidable to justify the SWP's bureaucratic-centralism. But the broader issues in the debate are still live. How far are the fundamentals of Marx and Engels' political strategy still relevant to us today? What should we maintain, and what should we throw out, from the subsequent elaboration of strategy by socialists and communists from the late 19th to the late 20th century?

This book

The rest of this book is an attempt to tackle these issues. It does not present a CPGB 'party position', but one comrade's attempt to tackle the problem. Chapter one begins to address the problem through the differences between Marxism as a political strategy and the various 'utopian socialist' alternatives. Chapters two and three address the three lines of strategic debate in the late 19th and early 20th century workers' movement and in particular in the Second International. Chapter four addresses the question of war and defeatism, chapter five — the split in the Second International and the 'party of a new type', chapter six — the Comintern policy of the united front, chapter seven — the 'workers' government' slogan, and chapter eight — the problem of international working class unity. Chapter nine returns to practical conclusions for the present.

To summarise the argument very much in outline, in the first place I argue that there are solid grounds to maintain the fundamentals of Marx and Engels' political strategy:

• of the self-organisation of the working class;
• for independent political action, not just in trade unions and/or cooperatives;
• independent both of the capitalist parties and of the capitalist states;
• on both national and international scales.

As between the strategic lines offered in the Second International, I argue that the 'strategy of patience' of the Kautskyan centre was and is preferable to either the strategy of cross-class 'left' coalition government favoured by the right, or the 'mass strike strategy' favoured by the left. What was wrong with the Kautskyans, and led in the end to them being subsumed in the right, was their nationalism and their refusal to fight for an alternative to the capitalist state form.

The remainder of the book addresses the split in the Second International in 1914-18 and the ideas of the early Comintern — and those of the Trotskyists to the extent to which they grow from the ideas of the early Comintern.

I leave on one side the question of imperialism, in spite of its importance. On the one hand, I have discussed it elsewhere in a series of articles in the Weekly Worker;¹³ on the other, a full analysis would involve so much political economy as to unbalance this discussion. I also leave on one side the question of 'permanent revolution'. Insofar as this was a strategy for dealing with pre-capitalist states and social formations, it is now effectively moot. Insofar as it is connected to the idea of 'transitional demands' and 'transitional programme', I have discussed the issue in another Weekly Worker series in 2007.¹⁴

The issues therefore come down to: Lenin's policy of 'revolutionary defeatism' in World war I; the split in the Second International and whether (and why) it was justified; the idea of the 'party of a new type'; the policy of the united front; the slogan of a 'workers' government'; and the question of international political organisation, its tasks and nature.

I argue that Lenin's policy of 'revolutionary defeatism' in World War I made sense, but has to be grasped accurately and in its context as a proposal for the coordinated action of the workers' movement on both sides of the war for the immediate struggle for power. The 'generalisation' of this policy in the context of colonial wars and its transformation from a strategic line for the immediate struggle for power into a moral imperative, and in particular a moral imperative of 'wishing for the victory of the other side', has turned it instead into a new argument for nationalism and class-collaborationism.

I argue that the split in the Second International was justified — generally because the right wing labour bureaucracies, with the backing of the capitalist state, blocked the left wing from organising openly and fighting openly for their political ideas; and specifically because the individual leading supporters of the war within the workers' movement, who controlled the main parties, were personally scabs who should have been driven out of the movement and war criminals who should have been arrested and jailed. But the reasoning offered at the time to justify the split — the ideas of the split as 'purifying' the movement, and of the 'Bolshevik' 'party of a new type' which was necessarily a minority party — has been used ever since to justify sect politics.

The concept of a 'party of a new type', I argue, as it developed in 1920-21, reflected the conditions of the civil war in which the Russian CP (Bolshevik) became a political representative of the peasantry, and crushed and replaced the organisational forms of Bolshevism in the period of the political struggle for power in which it came to represent and lead the proletariat. The generalisation of these conceptions in the Comintern had the effect of sterilising the struggle for unity in action through the united front, since it stood as a block against the idea that there could be effective unity in diversity.

The idea of the leading role of the (necessarily minority) party in the dictatorship of the proletariat had the effect of dissolving the fundamental political content of the minimum programme and replacing it with a demand for 'trust' in the communist party's individual leaders. The result was that the slogan of a workers' government, which the Comintern advanced in connection with the idea of the united front, became politically empty.

The bureaucratic, top-down 'party of a new type' similarly sterilised the Comintern itself as an international organisation. The end result has been the production of the swarm of Trotskyist international sects. Most of the left has reacted against this form by retreating into nationalism; but, I argue, we do need a genuine organised workers' international.

The final chapter attempts a summary of the main strategic line of the pamphlet and attempts to address the question of 'reform or revolution': I argue that the way in which much of the far left poses this question draws a false line of divide, while failing to address the real line of divide, which is whether to aim for participation in government, or to aim to build a movement of principled opposition.

A couple of general points should be made at this stage, since they have caused confusion in the related debate on 'Marxist party' in the Weekly Worker in 2006-07. The first concerns terminology.

In this book I use 'Marxist' in a core sense of meaning the political strategy outlined in chapter one, below: that socialism, a.k.a. communism, can only arise through the self-emancipation of the proletariat, and that the proletariat can only emancipate itself through fighting for socialism (a.k.a. communism); that this activity is at least in some sense international in scope; and that it involves political action of the working class. By the 'Marxist left' I mean that part of the left which in some broad sense adheres to these ideas, or self-identifies as 'Marxist', thus including Kautskyites, 'official' communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, 'left' and 'council' communists.

Another distinct sense of 'Marxist' is the theoretical presuppositions which must be true if the strategy is to be defensible. An example: the Mandelites are 'Marxist' in the broad sense, but since the 1980s they have defended a concept of 'alliances' between the proletariat and other sections of the oppressed which is inconsistent with the conception of the proletariat as the whole social class dependent on the wage fund. If the proletariat is not the whole social class dependent on the wage fund, but only waged workers (or, worse, 'industrial' or 'productive' workers), any variant of Marxist political strategy is indefensible.

I use 'Trotskyist' more consistently to denote individuals or groups who adhere to the body of ideas which is, broadly, common to the organised Trotskyist movement: that is, 'Bolshevik-Leninism' or the ideas of the first four congresses of Comintern, together with world revolution, 'permanent revolution', and revolution against the bureaucracy in the Stalinist regimes. This category includes some groups which would not quite self-identify as Trotskyist (notably the British SWP and its international co-thinkers).¹⁵ I do not use it in the sense of 'any leftist opponent of Stalinism'. Nor do I use it in the sense of the ideas of the early Trotsky in 1904-07, nor of any hypothetical theoretical elaboration which might be made of Trotsky's ideas without accepting the main body of 'Trotskyism'.

I avoid as far as possible using 'Leninism', and where I do use it, it is put in scare-quotes. The reason is that the expression refers to three radically different bodies of ideas. The first is the variant Kautskyism of What is to be done?, One step forward, two steps back and following texts, and the distinctive theorisation of the Russian Revolution in Two tactics of social democracy in the democratic revolution and following texts; and the associated course of action, that Lenin and his co-thinkers (largely) refused to accept the claim of the Mensheviks that they were 'really' the majority and (commonly) insisted on acting on the basis that the Bolsheviks were the majority. This was what Lenin's opponents called 'Leninism' down to October 1917. The second is the actual course of action of the Russian Bolsheviks in the Revolution and Civil War, as seen by their opponents. The third is the package of retrospective reinterpretation of Lenin's ideas in the light of the actual course of the Russian Revolution down to his death. Of this latter 'Leninism', self-identified Stalinists, official communists who have taken distance from Stalin, Maoists, and Trotskyists all have their own versions, and to call 'Leninist' the set of Stalinists, Trotskyists and Maoists begs too many questions. I judge that the word simply carries too much freight of approval and disapproval (and of cult of the personality) to be used without question-begging.

In connection with the issue of the 'party of a new type' (chapter five below) it is unavoidable: here 'Leninist' — in scare-quotes — means bureaucratic centralism, or the limited common elements of the concept of the 'revolutionary party' shared by self-identified Stalinists, official communists who have taken distance from Stalin, Maoists, Trotskyists and Bordigists.

The second general point is that this book from beginning to end attempts to discuss the history of the movement's strategic ideas with the benefit of hindsight. For example, later in the book when I criticise the arguments and decisions of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, I do not intend by this to pass some sort of moral judgment on the decisions they took under extremely difficult circumstances.

I do not even necessarily mean that any superior alternative was open to them. For example, I said above that October 1917 was a gamble on revolution in Western Europe, which failed. But the alternative to this gamble put forward by Martov and Kautsky — a Menshevik-SR government based on the Constituent Assembly — was unreal: the real alternative available was either the policy the Bolsheviks actually followed, including the coercion of the peasantry to supply food, 'Red Terror', and so on, or a government of the 'White' generals and 'White Terror'. The problem here is not the actions the Bolsheviks took: it is their over-theorisation of these actions, which has been inherited by the modern far left.

The use of hindsight is justifiable and necessary, because the point of the whole exercise is to study history for what it can tell us about where we are now, how we got here and where we should (try to) go next. In this sense it is loosely analogous to the sort of exercise that has to be undertaken if a bridge falls down. Why did the bridge fall down? If it was hit by a meteorite, we may well rebuild it in exactly the same form. But if the collapse was caused by problems which will predictably recur in future (like severe storms or an increased weight of traffic) we should redesign the bridge, in the light of hindsight, to meet these problems. The fact that the problems which caused the collapse may not have been originally predictable affects the moral responsibility of the original designers, but it does not in the least alter our present tasks.