UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Party and Strategy in Postwar European Marxist Theory Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0ng3q7j0 Author Haider, Asad Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ PARTY AND STRATEGY IN POSTWAR EUROPEAN MARXIST THEORY A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the degree requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS by Asad Haider June 2018 The Dissertation of Asad Haider is approved: ____________________________ Professor Christopher Connery, co- chair ____________________________ Professor Massimiliano Tomba, co- chair ____________________________ Professor Deborah Gould ____________________________ Professor Robert Meister ____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Asad Haider 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The Problem of Organization 1 1. Interventions: Theoretical Dissent within the Parties 43 2. Ruptures: Organization Outside the Party 84 3. Infiltrations: Inside and Outside the Party 112 4. Retreats: Decline of the Party Form 154 iii ABSTRACT Party and Strategy in Postwar Marxist Theory Asad Haider Unlike other terms in the discourse of social movements – power, democracy, citizenship – “organization” is rarely granted the status of a philosophical concept. My dissertation seeks to trace an underground current of political theory that focuses on the issue of organization, by examining certain aspects of the European Marxist debates over the party form and revolutionary strategy in the 1960s and 1970s. I focus on the development of Marxist philosophy in France and Italy countries by situating it not only in the debates over Communist Party strategy, but also in relation to the formation of new organizations that challenged the parties’ hegemony. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to my committee, Chris Connery, Deborah Gould, Robert Meister, and Massimiliano Tomba. I would also like to thank Carla Freccero and Margaret Wuerth for facilitating the completion of this dissertation. v Introduction The Problem of Organization I became interested in the problem of organization as a participant-observer of the Occupy movement. Those who followed this unexpected course of events will recall that organization was an absolutely central – I would argue the central – axis of strategic debate. On one side were voices from the classical socialist and labor left, along with a new generation of neo-classicists, who argued that the Occupy movement needed to “get organized” to overcome its diffuse and ineffectual character. They convincingly pointed out that without some structure to orient the movement’s activities and ensure its continuity, it would simply disintegrate – as it eventually did. On the other side were those who argued for the embrace of spontaneity, conceived as the very opposite of organization, since the latter was always imposed by leaders and hierarchies which would ultimately become obstacles to the realization of the movement’s aims. Though their underlying theoretical approach varied widely, from autonomist horizontalism to ultra-left catastrophism, these critics pointed out that the classicists were operating on an ahistorical conception of organization, failing to understand the wide-ranging transformations that separated our present moment from the history of the workers’ movement (a history far more contradictory than the various forms of socialist nostalgia imagined). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have summed up the history of debates 1 leading to this antinomy and the concomitant indecision in their recent Assembly: For more than a half century activists have rightly criticized how centralized, vertical forms of organization, including charismatic figures, leadership councils, party structures, and bureaucratic institutions, become fetters to the development of democracy and the full participation of all in political life. Gone are the days, on the one hand, when a political vanguard could successfully take power in the name of the masses; the claims of political realism and the presumed effectiveness of such centralized leadership have proved completely illusory. And yet, on the other, it is a terrible mistake to translate valid critiques of leadership into a refusal of sustained political organization and institution, to banish verticality only to make a fetish of horizontality and ignore the need for durable social structures.1 However, as this debate was resurging during the Occupy movement, a massive disavowal lay beneath the abstract fixation on organization. Both sides of the debate failed to recognize that the Occupy movement was organized, sometimes in the most ornate and complicated ways. Its organizational forms were effective for some goals and in certain contexts; they were inadequate for other goals and in other contexts. They emerged from the very specific circumstances that gave rise to the Occupy movement in the first place: a layer of highly educated unemployed or precariously 1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), xiv. 2 employed young people; an economic crisis which had changed not only living conditions but also longstanding parameters of mainstream political ideology; a prehistory of movements against globalization, privatization of universities, and police violence; the international examples of the Arab Spring and the Indignados; the widespread diffusion of digital communication technology and therefore social media networks. General assemblies and spokescouncils, kitchens and libraries, building occupations and black bloc vandalism – all of these represent intricate forms of organization formulated by participants from the ground up. However, these organizational forms ran up against important limits. General assemblies disintegrated into interminable and unproductive arguments, and participatory democracy was undermined by the “tyranny of structurelessness.”2 Street fights with police brought some media attention, and even popular support, but were ultimately powerless against the evictions and arrests which led progressively to the movement’s defeat. Self-help and mutual aid went some way towards reproducing the camps – at least for those willing, by ideology or necessity, to sleep in tents and eat vegan food – but did literally nothing to slow the deepening of economic inequality, much less alter the underlying economic and political system. Historical examples served as an invaluable guide for thinking through these questions, and like many others I entered into an intensive study of the political 2 See Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” surely one of the most perceptive texts to address organization as a theoretical and political question; accessed June 21, 2018. http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm. 3 theory of the workers’ movement. I had already developed an interest in the innumerable theoretical debates among the small but fervent organizations of the 20th century, usually dismissed as sectarian nonsense even by the aging erstwhile participants. I was convinced that a symptomatic reading of this tradition and its peculiar combination of blindness and insight would reveal new questions to answer about our own history, questions that we had been heretofore unable to articulate. But it became clear as I extended this research alongside the trajectory of the Occupy movement that this history provided no solutions to today’s dilemmas. In fact, the debates over organization throughout the history of the workers’ movement were just as complicated, just as equivocal as those of the present day. This in itself is no revelation, even if our memory often eludes us, or yields readily to a comforting repression. More unexpected is that reading these texts through the prism of organization presents us with a transformed image of the most obvious questions of Marxist theory; debates over the nature of the state, the category of class, and the course of the socialist transition, are all tied up with a sometimes esoteric, sometimes apparent discourse on organization. Every social movement practices a determinate form of political organization, which it represents to itself with varying degrees of theoretical efficacy. Yet unlike other primary terms in the discourse of social movements – power, democracy, citizenship – “organization” is rarely granted the status of a philosophical concept. Here we will set out to trace an underground current of political theory, as a step towards producing the concept, by examining certain 4 aspects of the European Marxist debates over the state and revolutionary strategy in the 1960s and 1970s, which for us in the 21st century hold an incredible fascination – close enough to us to promise the possibility of a mass movement in our contemporary society, yet far enough to live within a world of Communist Parties in parliament and workers occupying factories. Unions and Parties Our difficulty in identifying and reckoning with this history is compounded by the fact that we have never really come to terms with the historical situation in which the party form experienced both consolidation and crisis: the “Golden Years” – the period, alternately described as “Fordist” or “Keynesian” which ran from the end of the Second World War up to the crisis and restructuring of the 1970s. For the workers’ movement