“The fact that arms were brought out so quickly in response to the Stalinist provocation says a lot for the Catalonian massesʼ immense capacities SITUATIONISTS ON for autonomy; but the fact that the order to surrender issued by the anarchist ministers ANARCHISM, MARXISM AND was so quickly obeyed demonstrates how THE WORKING CLASS much autonomy for victory they still lacked. Tomorrow again it will be the workersʼ degree of autonomy that will decide our fate.”

In this pamphlet: p1 ..... “The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation” Chapter 8 of “The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord (1967) p25 ... “Preliminaries on Councils and Councilist Organization” by René Riesel (1969)

prole.info The Proletariat TRANSLATORʼS NOTES as Subject and Representation 1. What happened next: i.e. Mussoliniʼs fascist coup (1922). from “Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord (1967) 2. Olivier, Blanco and Montseny: anarchist leaders who became ministers in the republican government during the Spanish civil war. Anarcho-trenchists: Kropotkin and other anarchists who supported World War I. “Equal right to all the goods and pleasures of this world, the destruction of all authority, the negation of all moral restraints — in the fi nal analysis, Translated by Ken Knabb these are the aims behind the March 18th insurrection and the charter of the fearsome organization that furnished it with an army.”

—Parliamentary Inquest on the Paris Commune

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The real movement that transforms existing conditions has been the dominant social force since the bourgeoisieʼs victory within the economic sphere, and this dominance became visible once that victory was translated onto the political plane. The development of productive forces shattered the old production relations, and all static order crumbled. Everything that was absolute became historical.

74

When people are thrust into history and forced to participate in the work and struggles that constitute history, they fi nd themselves obliged to view their relationships in a clear and disabused manner. This history has no object distinct from what it creates from out of itself, although the fi nal unconscious metaphysical vision of the historical era considered the productive progression through which history had unfolded as itself the object of history. As for the subject of history, it can be nothing other than the self-production of the living — living people becoming masters and possessors of their own historical world and of their own fully conscious adventures.

75

The class struggles of the long era of revolutions initiated by the rise of the bourgeoisie have developed in tandem with the dialectical “thought of history” — the thought which is no longer content to seek the meaning of what exists, but which strives to comprehend the dissolution of what exists, and in the process breaks down every separation.

1 38 the infi ltration of other organizations is exactly the contrary of the ends they 76 are pursuing, and because they refuse any incoherence within themselves, councilist organization will prohibit any dual membership. As we have said, For Hegel the point was no longer to interpret the world, but to interpret all the workers of a factory must take part in the council, or at least all those the transformation of the world. But because he limited himself to merely who accept the rules of its game. The solution to the problem of whether to interpreting that transformation, Hegel only represents the philosophical accept participation in the council by “those who yesterday had to be thrown culmination of philosophy. He seeks to understand a world that develops out of the factory at gunpoint” (Barth) will be found only in practice. by itself. This historical thought is still a consciousness that always arrives Ultimately, the councilist organization will stand or fall solely by too late, a consciousness that can only formulate retrospective justifi cations the coherence of its theory and action and by its struggle for the complete of what has already happened. It has thus gone beyond separation only in elimination of all power remaining external to the councils or trying to make thought. Hegelʼs paradoxical stance — his subordination of the meaning of itself independent of them. But in order to simplify the discussion right off all reality to its historical culmination while at the same time proclaiming that by refusing even to take into consideration a mass of councilist pseudo- his own system represents that culmination — fl ows from the simple fact that organizations that may be simulated by students or obsessive professional this thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth militants, let us say that it does not seem to us that an organization can centuries sought in his philosophy only a reconciliation with the results of be recognized as councilist if it is not comprised of at least 2/3 workers. those revolutions. “Even as a philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, it does As this proportion might pass for a concession, let us add that it seems to not express the entire process of this revolution, but only its concluding phase. us indispensable to correct it with this rider: in all delegations to central In this sense it is a philosophy not of the revolution, but of the restoration” conferences at which decisions may be taken that have not previously been (Karl Korsch, “Theses on Hegel and Revolution”). Hegel performed the provided for by imperative mandates, workers must make up 3/4 of the task of the philosopher — “the glorifi cation of what exists” — for the last participants. In sum, the inverse proportion of the fi rst congresses of the time; but already what existed for him could be nothing less than the entire “Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party.” movement of history. Since he nevertheless maintained the external position It is known that we have no inclination toward workerism of any of thought, this externality could be masked only by identifying that thought form whatsoever. The above considerations refer to workers who have with a preexisting project of the Spirit — of that absolute heroic force which “become dialecticians,” as they will have to become en masse in the exercise has done what it willed and willed what it has done, and whose ultimate goal of the power of the councils. But on the one hand, the workers continue to coincides with the present. Philosophy, in the process of being superseded by be the central force capable of bringing the existing functioning of society to historical thought, has thus arrived at the point where it can glorify its world a halt and the indispensable force for reinventing all its bases. On the other only by denying it, since in order to speak it must presuppose that the total hand, although the councilist organization obviously must not separate other history to which it has relegated everything has already come to an end, and categories of wage-earners, notably intellectuals, from itself, it is in any that the only tribunal where truth could be judged is closed. case important that the dubious importance the latter may assume should be severely restricted: not only by verifying, by considering all aspects of their 77 lives, that such intellectuals are really councilist revolutionaries, but also by seeing to it that there are as few of them in the organization as possible. When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that this historical The councilist organization will not consent to speak on equal terms thought has not been forgotten, its refutation of that thoughtʼs conclusion is with other organizations unless they are consistent partisans of proletarian at the same time a confi rmation of its method. autonomy; just as the councils will not only have to free themselves from the grip of parties and unions, but must also reject any tendency aiming to 78 pigeonhole them in some limited position and to negotiate with them as one power to another. The councils are the only power or they are nothing. The Historical thought can be saved only by becoming practical thought; and means of their victory are already their victory. With the lever of the councils the practice of the proletariat as a revolutionary class can be nothing less plus the fulcrum of the total negation of the spectacle-commodity society, the than historical consciousness operating on the totality of its world. All the Earth can be raised. theoretical currents of the revolutionary working-class movement — Stirner The victory of the councils is not the end of the revolution, but the and Bakunin as well as Marx — grew out of a critical confrontation with beginning of it. Hegelian thought. 37 2 79 and not having the time or the means to rectify them. But they know that their fate is the product of their own decisions, and that they will be destroyed by The inseparability of Marxʼs theory from the Hegelian method is itself the repercussions of any mistakes they donʼt correct. inseparable from that theoryʼs revolutionary character, that is, from its truth. Within councilist organizations real equality of everyone in making It is in this regard that the relationship between Marx and Hegel has generally decisions and carrying them out will not be an empty slogan or an abstract been ignored or misunderstood, or even denounced as the weak point of what demand. Of course, not all the members of an organization will have the same became fallaciously transformed into a doctrine: “Marxism.” Bernstein talents (it is obvious, for example, that a worker will invariably write better implicitly revealed this connection between the dialectical method and than a student). But because in its aggregate the organization will have all the historical partisanship when in his book Evolutionary Socialism he deplored talents it needs, no hierarchy of individual talents will come to undermine the 1847 Manifestoʼs unscientifi c predictions of imminent proletarian its democracy. It is neither membership in a councilist organization nor revolution in Germany: “This historical self-deception, so erroneous that the the proclamation of an ideal equality that will enable all its members to be most naïve political visionary could hardly have done any worse, would be beautiful and intelligent and to live well; but only their real aptitudes for incomprehensible in a Marx who at that time had already seriously studied becoming more beautiful and more intelligent and for living better, freely economics if we did not recognize that it refl ected the lingering infl uence developing in the only game thatʼs worth the pleasure: the destruction of the of the antithetical Hegelian dialectic, from which Marx, like Engels, could old world. never completely free himself. In those times of general effervescence this In the social movements that are going to spread, the councilists infl uence was all the more fatal to him.” will refuse to let themselves be elected to strike committees. On the contrary, their task will be to act in such a way as to encourage the rank-and-fi le 80 self-organization of the workers into general assemblies that decide how the struggle is carried out. It will be necessary to begin to understand that The inversion carried out by Marx in order to “salvage” the thought of the absurd call for a “central strike committee” proposed by some naïve the bourgeois revolutions by transferring it to a different context does not individuals during the May 1968 occupations movement would, had it trivially consist of putting the materialist development of productive forces succeeded, have sabotaged the movement toward the autonomy of the in place of the journey of the Hegelian Spirit toward its eventual encounter masses even more quickly than actually happened, since almost all the strike with itself — the Spirit whose objectifi cation is identical to its alienation committees were controlled by the Stalinists. and whose historical wounds leave no scars. For once history becomes real, Given that it is not for us to forge a plan for all time, and that one it no longer has an end. Marx demolished Hegelʼs position of detachment step forward by the real movement of the councils will be worth more than a from events, as well as passive contemplation by any supreme external dozen councilist programs, it is diffi cult to state precise hypotheses regarding agent whatsoever. Henceforth, theoryʼs concern is simply to know what the relation of councilist organizations with councils during a revolutionary it itself is doing. In contrast, present-day societyʼs passive contemplation situation. The councilist organization — which knows itself to be separated of the movement of the economy is an untranscended holdover from the from the proletariat — must cease to exist as a separate organization in the undialectical aspect of Hegelʼs attempt to create a circular system; it is an moment that abolishes separations; and it will have to do this even if the approval that is no longer on the conceptual level and that no longer needs a complete freedom of association guaranteed by the power of the councils Hegelianism to justify itself, because the movement it now praises is a sector allows various parties and organizations that are enemies of this power of a world where thought no longer has any place, a sector whose mechanical to survive. It may be doubted, however, that it is feasible to immediately development effectively dominates everything. Marxʼs project is a project of dissolve all councilist organizations the very instant the councils fi rst appear, conscious history, in which the quantitativeness that arises out of the blind as Pannekoek wished. The councilists should speak as councilists within the development of merely economic productive forces must be transformed into council, rather than staging an exemplary dissolution of their organizations a qualitative appropriation of history. The critique of political economy is the only to regroup them on the side and play pressure-group politics in the fi rst act of this end of prehistory: “Of all the instruments of production, the general assembly. In this way it will be easier and more legitimate for them greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself.” to combat and denounce the inevitable presence of bureaucrats, spies and ex- scabs who will infi ltrate here and there. They will also have to struggle against 81 fake councils or fundamentally reactionary ones (e.g. police councils) which will not fail to appear. They will act in such a way that the unifi ed power Marxʼs theory is closely linked with scientifi c thought insofar as it seeks 3 36 of the councils does not recognize such bodies or their delegates. Because advantage of this to try to have it believed that any theoretical work — which a rational understanding of the forces that really operate in society. But it they avoid as if it were a sin — is an ideology, among the situationists exactly ultimately goes beyond scientifi c thought, preserving it only by superseding as in the PSU. But their gallant recourse to the “dialectic” and the “concept” it. It seeks to understand social struggles, not sociological laws. “We which they have now added to their vocabulary in no way saves them from an recognize only one science: the science of history” (The German Ideology). imbecilic ideology of which the above quotation alone is evidence enough. 82 If one idealistically relies on the council “concept” or, what is even more euphoric, on the practical inactivity of ICO, to “exclude all ideology” in The bourgeois era, which wants to give history a scientifi c foundation, the real councils, one must expect the worst — we have seen that historical overlooks the fact that the science available to it could itself arise only on experience justifi es no such optimism in this regard. The supersession of the foundation of the historical development of the economy. But history the primitive council form can only come from struggles becoming more is fundamentally dependent on this economic knowledge only so long as conscious, and from struggles for more consciousness. ICOʼs mechanistic it remains merely economic history. The extent to which the viewpoint of image of the strike committeeʼs perfect automatic response to “necessities,” scientifi c observation could overlook historyʼs effect on the economy (an which presents the council as automatically coming into existence at the overall process modifying its own scientifi c premises) is shown by the vanity appropriate time provided that one makes sure not to talk about it, completely of those socialists who thought they had calculated the exact periodicity of ignores the experience of the revolutions of our century, which shows that economic crises. Now that constant government intervention has succeeded “the situation itself” is just as ready to crush the councils, or to enable them in counteracting the tendencies toward crisis, the same type of mentality to be manipulated and coopted, as it is to give rise to them. sees this delicate balance as a defi nitive economic harmony. The project of Let us leave this contemplative ideology, this pathetic caricature transcending the economy and mastering history must grasp and incorporate of the natural sciences which would have us observe the emergence of the science of society, but it cannot itself be a scientifi c project. The a proletarian revolution almost as if it were a solar eruption. Councilist revolutionary movement remains bourgeois insofar as it thinks it can master organizations will be formed, though they must be quite the contrary of current history by means of scientifi c knowledge. general staffs that would cause the councils to rise up on order. In spite of the new period of open social crisis we have entered since the occupations 83 movement, and the proliferation of encouraging situations here and there, from Italy to the USSR, it is quite likely that genuine councilist organizations The utopian currents of socialism, though they are historically grounded in will still take a long time to form and that other important revolutionary criticism of the existing social system, can rightly be called utopian insofar situations will occur before such organizations are in a position to intervene as they ignore history (that is, insofar as they ignore actual struggles taking in them at a signifi cant level. One must not play with councilist organization place and any passage of time outside the immutable perfection of their image by setting up or supporting premature parodies of it. But the councils will of a happy society), but not because they reject science. On the contrary, the certainly have greater chances of maintaining themselves as sole power if utopian thinkers were completely dominated by the scientifi c thought of they contain conscious councilists and if there is a real appropriation of earlier centuries. They sought the completion and fulfi llment of that general councilist theory. rational system. They did not consider themselves unarmed prophets, for In contrast to the council as permanent basic unit (ceaselessly they fi rmly believed in the social power of scientifi c proof and even, in the setting up and modifying councils of delegates emanating from itself), as the case of Saint-Simonism, in the seizure of power by science. “Why,” Sombart assembly in which all the workers of an enterprise (workshop and factory asked, “would they want to seize through struggle what merely needed to councils) and all the inhabitants of an urban district who have rallied to be proved?” But the utopiansʼ scientifi c understanding did not include the the revolution (street councils, neighborhood councils) must participate, a awareness that some social groups have vested interests in maintaining councilist organization, in order to guarantee its coherence and the authentic the status quo, forces to maintain it, and forms of false consciousness to working of its internal democracy, must choose its members in accordance reinforce it. Their grasp of reality thus lagged far behind the historical reality with what they explicitly want and what they actually can do. As for the of the development of science itself, which had been largely oriented by the councils, their coherence is guaranteed by the single fact that they are the social requirements arising from such factors, which determined not only sole power; that they eliminate all other power and decide everything. This what fi ndings were considered acceptable, but even what might or might practical experience is the terrain where people learn how to become conscious not become an object of scientifi c research. The utopian socialists remained of their own action, where they “realize philosophy.” It goes without saying prisoners of the scientifi c manner of expounding the truth, viewing this that their majorities also run the risk of making lots of momentary mistakes 35 4 truth as a pure abstract image — the form in which it had established itself at a much earlier stage of social development. As Sorel noted, the utopians — was akin to the Marxist KAPD-AAUD in its organizational arrangements. took astronomy as their model for discovering and demonstrating the laws In the same way as the German Communist Workers Party, the Iberian of society; their unhistorical conception of harmony was the natural result Anarchist Federation saw itself as the political organization of the conscious of their attempt to apply to society the science least dependent on history. Spanish workers, while its AAUD, the CNT, was supposed to take charge They described this harmony as if they were Newtons discovering universal of the management of the future society. The FAI militants, the elite of the scientifi c laws, and the happy ending they constantly evoked “plays a role proletariat, propagated the anarchist idea among the masses; the CNT did in their social science analogous to the role of inertia in classical physics” the practical work of organizing the workers in its unions. There were two (Materials for a Theory of the Proletariat). essential differences, however, the ideological one of which was to bear the fruit one could have expected of it. The fi rst was that the FAI did not strive 84 to take power, but contented itself with infl uencing the overall policies of the CNT. The second was that the CNT really represented the Spanish The scientifi c-determinist aspect of Marxʼs thought was precisely what working class. Adopted on 1 May 1936 at the CNT congress at Saragossa, made it vulnerable to “ideologization,” both during his own lifetime and two months before the revolutionary explosion, one of the most beautiful even more so in the theoretical heritage he left to the workers movement. programs ever proclaimed by a revolutionary organization was partially put The advent of the historical subject continues to be postponed, and it is into practice by the anarchosyndicalist masses, while their leaders foundered economics, the historical science par excellence, which is increasingly seen in ministerialism and class-collaboration. With the pimps of the masses, as guaranteeing the inevitability of its own future negation. In this way García Oliver, Secundo Blanco, etc., and the brothel-madam Montseny, the revolutionary practice, the only true agent of this negation, tends to be pushed antistate libertarian movement, which had already tolerated the anarcho- out of theoryʼs fi eld of vision. Instead, it is seen as essential to patiently study trenchist Prince Kropotkin, fi nally attained the historical consummation of its economic development, and to go back to accepting the suffering which that ideological absolutism: government anarchists. (2) In the last historical battle development imposes with a Hegelian tranquility. The result remains “a it was to wage, anarchism was to see all the ideological sauce that comprised graveyard of good intentions.” The “science of revolutions” then concludes its being fall back into its face: State, Freedom, Individual, and other musty that consciousness always comes too soon, and has to be taught. “History has ingredients with capital letters; while the libertarian militians, workers and shown that we, and all who thought as we did, were wrong,” Engels wrote peasants were saving its honor, making the greatest practical contribution in 1895. “It has made clear that the state of economic development on the ever to the international proletarian movement, burning churches, fi ghting Continent at that time was far from being ripe.” Throughout his life Marx on all fronts against the bourgeoisie, fascism and Stalinism, and beginning to had maintained a unitary point of view in his theory, but the exposition of create a truly communist society. his theory was carried out on the terrain of the dominant thought insofar as it Some present-day organizations cunningly pretend not to exist. took the form of critiques of particular disciplines, most notably the critique This enables them to avoid bothering with the slightest clarifi cation of the of the fundamental science of bourgeois society, political economy. It was bases on which they assemble any assortment of people (while magically in this mutilated form, which eventually came to be seen as orthodox, that labeling them all “workers”); to avoid giving their semimembers any account Marxʼs theory was transformed into “Marxism.” of the informal leadership that holds the controls; and to thoughtlessly denounce any theoretical expression and any other form of organization 85 as automatically evil and harmful. Thus the Informations, Correspondance Ouvrières group writes in a recent bulletin (ICO #84, August 1969): The weakness of Marxʼs theory is naturally linked to the weakness of the “Councils are the transformation of strike committees under the infl uence revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. The German working of the situation itself and in response to the very necessities of the struggle, class failed to inaugurate a permanent revolution in 1848; the Paris Commune within the very dialectic of that struggle. Any other attempt, at any moment was defeated in isolation. As a result, revolutionary theory could not yet be in a struggle, to declare the necessity of creating workers councils reveals a fully realized. The fact that Marx was reduced to defending and refi ning it councilist ideology such as can be seen in diverse forms in certain unions, in by cloistered scholarly work in the British Museum had a debilitating effect the PSU, or among the situationists. The very concept of council excludes on the theory itself. His scientifi c conclusions about the future development any ideology.” These individuals clearly know nothing about ideology of the working class, and the organizational practice apparently implied by — their own ideology is distinguished from more fully developed ones those conclusions, became obstacles to proletarian consciousness at a later only by its spineless eclecticism. But they have heard (perhaps from Marx, stage. 5 34 perhaps only from the SI) that ideology has become a bad thing. They take the revolutionary factory organizations to the Allgemeine Arbeiter Union 86 Deutschlands (AAUD, General Workers Union of Germany), a schema not far from traditional syndicalism. Even though the KAPD rejected the The theoretical shortcomings of the scientifi c defense of proletarian Leninist idea of the mass party, along with the parliamentarianism and revolution (both in its content and in its form of exposition) all ultimately syndicalism of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands — German result from identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with respect to the Communist Party), and preferred to group together politically conscious revolutionary seizure of power. workers, it nevertheless remained tied to the old hierarchical model of the vanguard party: professionals of Revolution and salaried propagandists. A 87 rejection of this model (in particular, a rejection of the practice of separating the political organization from the revolutionary factory organizations) led in As early as the Communist Manifesto, Marxʼs effort to demonstrate the 1920 to the secession of some of the AAUD members, who then formed the legitimacy of proletarian power by citing a repetitive sequence of precedents AAUD-E (the ʻEʼ for Einheitsorganisation — Unifi ed Organization). By the led him to oversimplify his historical analysis into a linear model of the very working of its internal democracy the new unitary organization aimed development of modes of production, in which class struggles invariably to accomplish the educative work that had until then devolved on the KAPD, resulted “either in a revolutionary transformation of the entire society or in and it simultaneously assigned itself the task of coordinating struggles: the the mutual ruin of the contending classes.” The plain facts of history, however, factory organizations that it federated were supposed to transform themselves are that the “Asiatic mode of production” (as Marx himself acknowledged into councils at the revolutionary moment and take over the management of elsewhere) maintained its immobility despite all its class confl icts; that no the society. Here again the modern watchword of workers councils was still serf uprising ever overthrew the feudal lords; and that none of the slave mixed with messianic memories of the old revolutionary syndicalism: the revolts in the ancient world ended the rule of the freemen. The linear schema factory organizations would magically become councils when all the workers loses sight of the fact that the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that took part in them. has ever won; and that it is also the only class for which the development of All that led where it would. After the crushing of the 1921 the economy was both the cause and the consequence of its taking control of insurrection and the repression of the movement, large numbers of workers, society. The same oversimplifi cation led Marx to neglect the economic role of discouraged by the waning prospect of revolution, abandoned factory the state in the management of class society. If the rising bourgeoisie seemed struggle. The AAUD was only another name for the KAPD, and the AAUD- to liberate the economy from the state, this was true only to the extent that the E saw revolution recede as fast as its membership declined. They were no previous state was an instrument of class oppression within a static economy. longer anything but bearers of a councilist ideology more and more cut off The bourgeoisie originally developed its independent economic power during from reality. the medieval period when the state had been weakening and feudalism was The KAPDʼs evolution into terrorism and the AAUDʼs increasing breaking up the stable equilibrium between different powers. In contrast, involvement in “bread and butter” issues led to the split between the factory the modern state — which began to support the bourgeoisieʼs development organization and its party in 1929. In 1931 the corpses of the AAUD and through its mercantile policies and which developed into the bourgeoisieʼs the AAUD-E pathetically and without any sound or explicit bases merged own state during the laissez-faire era — was eventually to emerge as a in the face of the rise of Nazism. The revolutionary elements of the two central power in the planned management of the economic process. Marx organizations regrouped to form the KAUD (Kommunistische Arbeiter was nevertheless able to describe the “Bonapartist” prototype of modern Union Deutschlands — German Communist Workers Union). A consciously statist bureaucracy, the fusion of capital and state to create a “national power minority organization, the KAUD was also the only one in the whole of capital over labor, a public force designed to maintain social servitude” movement for councils in Germany that did not claim to take upon itself — a form of social order in which the bourgeoisie renounces all historical the future economic (or economico-political as in the case of the AAUD-E) life apart from what has been reduced to the economic history of things, and organization of society. It called on the workers to form autonomous groups would like to be “condemned to the same political nothingness as all the other and to themselves handle the linkups between those groups. But in Germany classes.” The sociopolitical foundations of the modern spectacle are already the KAUD came much too late; by 1931 the revolutionary movement had discernable here, and these foundations negatively imply that the proletariat been dead for nearly ten years. is the only pretender to historical life. If only to make them cry, let us remind the retarded devotees of the anarchist-Marxist feud that the CNT-FAI — with its dead weight of anarchist ideology, but also with its greater practice of liberatory imagination 33 6 88 terms, those who in the name of some sub-anarchist spontaneism proclaim their opposition to any form of organization, and who only reproduce the The only two classes that really correspond to Marxʼs theory, the two pure defects and confusion of the old movement — mystics of nonorganization, classes that the entire analysis of Capital brings to the fore, are the bourgeoisie workers discouraged by having been mixed up with Trotskyist sects too long, and the proletariat. These are also the only two revolutionary classes students imprisoned in their impoverishment who are incapable of escaping in history, but operating under very different conditions. The bourgeois from bolshevik organizational schemas. The situationists are obviously revolution is done. The proletarian revolution is a yet-unrealized project, born partisans of organization — the existence of the situationist organization on the foundation of the earlier revolution but differing from it qualitatively. testifi es to that. Those who announce their agreement with our theses while If one overlooks the originality of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, one crediting the SI with a vague spontaneism simply donʼt know how to read. also tends to overlook the specifi c originality of the proletarian project, Organization is indispensable precisely because it isnʼt everything which can achieve nothing unless it carries its own banners and recognizes and doesnʼt enable everything to be saved or won. Contrary to what butcher the “immensity of its own tasks.” The bourgeoisie came to power because Noske said (in Von Kiel bis Kapp) about the events of 6 January 1919, the it was the class of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot create masses did not fail to become “masters of Berlin on noon that day” because its own new form of power except by becoming the class of consciousness. they had “fi ne talkers” instead of “determined leaders,” but because the The growth of productive forces will not in itself guarantee the emergence of factory councilsʼ form of autonomous organization had not yet attained a such a power — not even indirectly by way of the increasing dispossession suffi cient level of autonomy for them to be able to do without “determined which that growth entails. Nor can a Jacobin-style seizure of the state be a leaders” and separate organizations to handle their linkups. The shameful means to this end. The proletariat cannot make use of any ideology designed example of Barcelona in May 1937 is another proof of this: the fact that arms to disguise its partial goals as general goals, because the proletariat cannot were brought out so quickly in response to the Stalinist provocation says a preserve any partial reality that is truly its own. lot for the Catalonian massesʼ immense capacities for autonomy; but the fact that the order to surrender issued by the anarchist ministers was so quickly 89 obeyed demonstrates how much autonomy for victory they still lacked. Tomorrow again it will be the workersʼ degree of autonomy that will decide If Marx, during a certain period of his participation in the proletarian struggle, our fate. placed too great a reliance on scientifi c prediction, to the point of creating the The councilist organizations that will be formed will therefore not intellectual basis for the illusions of economism, it is clear that he himself did fail to recognize and appropriate, as indeed a minimum, the “Minimum not succumb to those illusions. In a well-known letter of 7 December 1867, Defi nition of Revolutionary Organizations”, adopted by the 7th Conference accompanying an article criticizing Capital which he himself had written but of the SI (see Internationale Situationniste #11). Since their task will be to which he wanted Engels to present to the press as the work of an adversary, work toward the power of the councils, which is incompatible with any Marx clearly indicated the limits of his own science: “The authorʼs subjective other form of power, they will be aware that a merely abstract agreement tendency (imposed on him, perhaps, by his political position and his past), with this defi nition condemns them to nonexistence; this is why their real namely the manner in which he views and presents the fi nal outcome of the agreement will be practically demonstrated in the nonhierarchical relations present movement and social process, has no connection with his actual within their groups or sections; in the relations between these groups and analysis.” By thus disparaging the “tendentious conclusions” of his own with other autonomous groups or organizations; in the development of objective analysis, and by the irony of the “perhaps” with reference to revolutionary theory and the unitary critique of the ruling society; and in the extrascientifi c choices supposedly “imposed” on him, Marx implicitly the ongoing critique of their own practice. Maintaining a unitary program revealed the methodological key to fusing the two aspects. and practice, they will refuse the old partitioning of the workers movement into separate organizations (i.e. parties and unions). Despite the beautiful 90 history of the councils, all the councilist organizations of the past that have played a signifi cant role in class struggles have accepted separation into The fusion of knowledge and action must be effected within the historical political, economic and social sectors. One of the few old parties worth struggle itself, in such a way that each depends on the other for its validation. analysis, the Kommunistische Arbeiter Partei Deutschlands (KAPD, German The proletarian class is formed into a subject in its process of organizing Communist Workers Party), adopted a councilist program, but by assigning revolutionary struggles and in its reorganization of society at the moment of to itself as its only essential tasks propaganda and theoretical discussion revolution — this is where the practical conditions of consciousness must 7 32 — “the political education of the masses” — it left the role of federating guides, from being muscles are transformed into minds and wills” (Ordine exist, conditions in which the theory of praxis is confi rmed by becoming Nuovo, 1919). The tune may change, but the song of councilism remains the practical theory. But this crucial question of organization was virtually same: Councils, Party, State. To treat the councils fragmentarily (economic ignored by revolutionary theory during the period when the workers power, social power, political power), as does the councilist cretinism of movement was fi rst taking shape — the very period when that theory still the Révolution Internationale group of Toulouse, is like thinking that by possessed the unitary character it had inherited from historical thought (and clenching your ass youʼll only be buggered half way. which it had rightly vowed to develop into a unitary historical practice). After 1918 Austro-Marxism also constructed a councilist ideology Instead, the organizational question became the weakest aspect of radical of its own, in accordance with the slow reformist evolution that it advocated. theory, a confused terrain lending itself to the revival of hierarchical Max Adler, for example, in his book Democracy and Workers Councils, and statist tactics borrowed from the bourgeois revolution. The forms of recognizes councils as instruments of workersʼ self-education which could organization of the workers movement that were developed on the basis end the separation between order-givers and order-takers and serve to form of this theoretical negligence tended in turn to inhibit the maintenance of a homogenous people capable of implementing socialist democracy. But he a unitary theory by breaking it up into various specialized and fragmented also realizes that the fact that councils of workers hold some power in no disciplines. This ideologically alienated theory was then no longer able to way guarantees that they have a coherent revolutionary aim: for that, the recognize the practical verifi cations of the unitary historical thought it had worker members of the councils must explicitly want to transform the society betrayed when such verifi cations emerged in spontaneous working-class and bring about socialism. Since Adler is a theorist of legalized dual power, struggles; instead, it contributed toward repressing every manifestation and that is, of an absurdity that will never be capable of lasting as it gradually memory of them. Yet those historical forms that took shape in struggle were approaches revolutionary consciousness and prudently prepares a revolution precisely the practical terrain that was needed in order to validate the theory. for later on, he inevitably overlooks the single really fundamental element of They were what the theory needed, yet that need had not been formulated the proletariatʼs self-education: revolution itself. To replace this irreplaceable theoretically. The soviet, for example, was not a theoretical discovery. And terrain of proletarian homogenization and this sole mode of selection for the most advanced theoretical truth of the International Workingmenʼs the very formation of the councils as well as for the formation of ideas and Association was its own existence in practice. coherent modes of activity within the councils, Adler comes to the point of imagining that there is no other remedy than this incredibly moronic rule: 91 “The right to vote in workers council elections must depend on membership in a socialist organization.” The First Internationalʼs initial successes enabled it to free itself from the Leaving aside the social-democratic or Bolshevik ideologies confused infl uences of the dominant ideology that had survived within it. about the councils, which from Berlin to Kronstadt always had a Noske But the defeat and repression that it soon encountered brought to the surface or a Trotsky too many, councilist ideology itself, as manifested in past a confl ict between two different conceptions of proletarian revolution, each councilist organizations and in some present ones, has always had several of which contained an authoritarian aspect that amounted to abandoning general assemblies and imperative mandates too few. All the councils that the conscious self-emancipation of the working class. The feud between have existed until now, with the exception of the agrarian collectives of the Marxists and the Bakuninists, which eventually became irreconcilable, Aragon, saw themselves as simply “democratically elected councils,” even actually centered on two different issues — the question of power in a future when the highest moments of their practice, when all decisions were made revolutionary society and the question of the organization of the current by sovereign general assemblies mandating revocable delegates, contradicted movement — and each of the adversaries reversed their position when they this limitation. went from one aspect to the other. Bakunin denounced the illusion that classes Only historical practice, through which the working class must could be abolished by means of an authoritarian implementation of state discover and realize all its possibilities, will indicate the precise organizational power, warning that this would lead to the formation of a new bureaucratic forms of council power. On the other hand, it is the immediate task of ruling class and to the dictatorship of the most knowledgeable (or of those revolutionaries to determine the fundamental principles of the councilist reputed to be such). Marx, who believed that the concomitant maturation of organizations that are going to arise in every country. By formulating some economic contradictions and of the workersʼ education in democracy would hypotheses and recalling the fundamental requirements of the revolutionary reduce the role of a proletarian state to a brief phase needed to legitimize movement, this article — which should be followed by others — is intended the new social relations brought into being by objective factors, denounced to initiate a genuine and egalitarian debate. The only people who will be Bakunin and his supporters as an authoritarian conspiratorial elite who were excluded from this debate are those who refuse to pose the problem in these 31 8 deliberately placing themselves above the International with the harebrained scheme of imposing on society an irresponsible dictatorship of the most for brains — as long ago as 9 November 1918, when the Social Democrats revolutionary (or of those who would designate themselves as such). Bakunin combated the spontaneous organization of the councils on its own ground did in fact recruit followers on such a basis: “In the midst of the popular by founding in the Vorwärts offi ces a “Council of the Workers and Soldiers tempest we must be the invisible pilots guiding the revolution, not through of Berlin” consisting of 12 loyal factory workers along with a few Social- any kind of overt power but through the collective dictatorship of our Alliance Democratic leaders and functionaries. — a dictatorship without any badges or titles or offi cial status, yet all the more Bolshevik councilism has neither Kautskyʼs naïveté nor Ebertʼs powerful because it will have none of the appearances of power.” Thus two crudeness. It springs from the most radical base — “All power to the soviets” ideologies of working-class revolution opposed each other, each containing — and lands on the other side of Kronstadt. In The Immediate Tasks of a partially true critique, but each losing the unity of historical thought and the Soviet Government (April 1918) Lenin adds enzymes to Kautskyʼs setting itself up as an ideological authority. Powerful organizations such as detergent: “Even in the most democratic capitalist republics in the world, the German Social Democracy and the Iberian Anarchist Federation faithfully poor never regard the bourgeois parliament as ʻtheirʼ institution. . . . It is the served one or the other of these ideologies; and everywhere the result was closeness of the Soviets to the ʻpeople,ʼ to the working people, that creates very different from what had been sought. the special forms of recall and other means of control from below which must now be most zealously developed. For example, the Councils of Public 92 Education — periodic conferences of Soviet electors and their delegates convoked to discuss and control the activities of the Soviet authorities in The fact that anarchists have seen the goal of proletarian revolution as this fi eld — deserve our full sympathy and support. Nothing could be sillier immediately present represents both the strength and the weakness of than to transform the Soviets into something congealed and self-contained. collectivist anarchist struggles (the only forms of anarchism that can be The more resolutely we have to stand for a ruthlessly fi rm government, for taken seriously — the pretensions of the individualist forms of anarchism the dictatorship of individuals in certain processes of work and in certain have always been ludicrous). From the historical thought of modern class aspects of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its constant methods of control from below in order to counteract the slightest hint of any harping on this conclusion is accompanied by a deliberate indifference to any potential distortion of the principles of Soviet government, in order tirelessly consideration of methods. Its critique of political struggle has thus remained and repeatedly to weed out bureaucracy.” For Lenin, then, the councils, abstract, while its commitment to economic struggle has been channeled like charitable institutions, should become pressure groups correcting the toward the mirage of a defi nitive solution that will supposedly be achieved by inevitable bureaucratization of the stateʼs political and economic functions, a single blow on this terrain, on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. respectively handled by the Party and the unions. The councils are the social The anarchists have saddled themselves with fulfi lling an ideal. Anarchism component that, like Descartes soul, has to be hooked on somewhere. remains a merely ideological negation of the state and of class society — the Gramsci himself merely cleanses Lenin in a bath of democratic very social conditions which in their turn foster separate ideologies. It is the niceties: “The factory commissioners are the only true social (economic and ideology of pure freedom, an ideology that puts everything on the same level political) representatives of the working class because they are elected under and loses any conception of the “historical evil” (the negation at work within universal suffrage by all the workers in the workplace itself. At the different history). This fusion of all partial demands into a single all-encompassing levels of their hierarchy, the commissioners represent the union of all the demand has given anarchism the merit of representing the rejection of workers in various levels of production units (work gang, factory department, existing conditions in the name of the whole of life rather than from the union of factories in an industry, union of enterprises in a city, union of standpoint of some particular critical specialization; but the fact that this production units of mechanical and agricultural industries in a district, a fusion has been envisaged only in the absolute, in accordance with individual province, a region, the nation, the world), whose councils and system of whim and in advance of any practical actualization, has doomed anarchism councils represent the government and the management of society.” (Article to an all too obvious incoherence. Anarchism responds to each particular in Ordine Nuovo.) Since the councils have been reduced to economico-social struggle by repeating and reapplying the same simple and all-embracing fragments preparing the way for a “future Soviet republic,” it goes without lesson, because this lesson has from the beginning been considered the saying that the Party, that “Modern Prince,” appears as the indispensable be-all and end-all of the movement. This is refl ected in Bakuninʼs 1873 political mediation, as the preexisting deus ex machina taking care to ensure letter of resignation from the Jura Federation: “During the past nine years its future existence: “The Communist Party is the instrument and historical the International has developed more than enough ideas to save the world, form of the process of internal liberation thanks to which the workers, from if ideas alone could save it, and I challenge anyone to come up with a new 9 30 being executants become initiators, from being masses become leaders and true that this was during the time it was continuing the general strike despite one. Itʼs no longer the time for ideas, itʼs time for actions.” This perspective the Russian troopsʼ having already crushed the armed resistance. But even undoubtedly retains proletarian historical thoughtʼs recognition that ideas before the second Russian intervention the Hungarian councils had called for must be put into practice, but it abandons the historical terrain by assuming parliamentary elections: that is to say, they themselves were seeking to return that the appropriate forms for this transition to practice have already been to a dual-power situation at a time when they were in fact, in the face of the discovered and will never change. Russians, the only actual power in Hungary. 93 Consciousness of what the power of the councils is and must be arises from the very practice of that power. But at an impeded stage of that The anarchists, who explicitly distinguish themselves from the rest of the power it may be very different from what one or another isolated member workers movement by their ideological conviction, reproduce this separation of a council, or even an entire council, thinks. Ideology opposes the truth in of competencies within their own ranks by providing a terrain that facilitates acts whose fi eld is the system of the councils; and such ideology manifests the informal domination of each particular anarchist organization by itself not only in the form of hostile ideologies, or in the form of ideologies propagandists and defenders of their ideology, specialists whose mediocre about the councils devised by political forces that want to subjugate them, but intellectual activity is largely limited to the constant regurgitation of a also in the form of an ideology in favor of the power of the councils, which few eternal truths. The anarchistsʼ ideological reverence for unanimous restrains and reifi es their total theory and practice. A pure councilism will decisionmaking has ended up paving the way for uncontrolled manipulation inevitably prove to be an enemy of the reality of the councils. There is a risk of their own organizations by specialists in freedom; and revolutionary that such an ideology, more or less consistently formulated, will be borne by anarchism expects the same type of unanimity, obtained by the same means, revolutionary organizations that are in principle in favor of the power of the from the masses once they have been liberated. Furthermore, the anarchistsʼ councils. This power, which is itself the organization of revolutionary society refusal to take into account the great differences between the conditions of a and whose coherence is objectively determined by the practical necessities minority banded together in present-day struggles and of a postrevolutionary of thishistorical task grasped as a whole, can in no case escape the practical society of free individuals has repeatedly led to the isolation of anarchists problem posed by specialist organizations which, whether enemies of the when the moment for collective decisionmaking actually arrives, as is shown councils or more or less genuinely in favor of them, will inevitably interfere by the countless anarchist insurrections in Spain that were contained and in their functioning. The masses organized in councils must be aware of this crushed at a local level. problem and overcome it. This is where councilist theory and the existence of authentically councilist organizations have a great importance. In them 94 already appear certain essential points that will be at stake in the councils and in their own interaction with the councils. The illusion more or less explicitly maintained by genuine anarchism is All revolutionary history shows the part played in the failure of the its constant belief that a revolution is just around the corner, and that the councils by the emergence of a councilist ideology. The ease with which the instantaneous accomplishment of this revolution will demonstrate the spontaneous organization of the proletariat in struggle wins its fi rst victories truth of anarchist ideology and of the form of practical organization that is often the prelude to a second phase in which counterrevolution works from has developed in accordance with that ideology. In 1936 anarchism did the inside, in which the movement lets go of its reality in order to pursue the indeed initiate a social revolution, a revolution that was the most advanced illusion that amounts to its defeat. Councilism is the artifi cial respiration that expression of proletarian power ever realized. But even in that case it should revives the old world. be noted that the general uprising began as a merely defensive reaction to Social democrats and Bolsheviks are in agreement in wishing the armyʼs attempted coup. Furthermore, inasmuch as the revolution was not to see in the councils only an auxiliary body of the party and the state. In carried to completion during its opening days (because Franco controlled half 1902 Kautsky, worried because the unions were becoming discredited in the country and was being strongly supported from abroad, because the rest the eyes of the workers, wanted workers in certain branches of industry to of the international proletarian movement had already been defeated, and elect “delegates who would form a sort of parliament designed to regulate because the anti-Franco camp included various bourgeois forces and statist their work and keep watch over the bureaucratic administration” (The Social working-class parties), the organized anarchist movement proved incapable Revolution). The idea of a hierarchized system of workersʼ representation of extending the revolutionʼs partial victories, or even of defending them. Its culminating in a parliament was to be implemented most convincingly by recognized leaders became government ministers, hostages to a bourgeois Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann. The way this type of councilism treats the state that was destroying the revolution even as it proceeded to lose the civil councils was defi nitively demonstrated — for anyone who doesnʼt have shit 29 10 war. 95 refused to print the appeal of the Turin socialist section (see Masini, op. cit.). The strike, which would clearly have made possible a victorious insurrection The “orthodox Marxism” of the Second International is the scientifi c in the whole country, was vanquished on April 24. What happened next is ideology of socialist revolution, an ideology which identifi es its whole truth well known. (1) with objective economic processes and with the progressive recognition In spite of certain remarkably advanced features of this rarely of the inevitability of those processes by a working class educated by the mentioned experience (numerous leftists are under the mistaken impression organization. This ideology revives the faith in pedagogical demonstration that factory occupations took place for the fi rst time in France in 1936), it that was found among the utopian socialists, combining that faith with a should be noted that it contains serious ambiguities, even among its partisans contemplative invocation of the course of history; but it has lost both the and theorists. Gramsci wrote in Ordine Nuovo (second year, #4): “We see Hegelian dimension of total history and the static image of totality presented the factory council as the historic beginning of a process that must ultimately by the utopians (most richly by Fourier). This type of scientifi c attitude, lead to the foundation of the workersʼ state.” For their part, the councilist which can do nothing more than resurrect the traditional dilemmas between anarchists were sparing in their criticism of labor unionism and claimed that symmetrical ethical choices, is at the root of Hilferdingʼs absurd conclusion the councils would give it a renewed impetus. that recognizing the inevitability of socialism “gives no indication as to what However, the manifesto launched by the Turin councilists on 27 practical attitude should be adopted. For it is one thing to recognize that March 1920, “To the Workers and Peasants of All Italy,” calling for a general something is inevitable, and quite another to put oneself in the service of congress of the councils (which never took place), formulates some essential that inevitability” (Finanzkapital). Those who failed to realize that for Marx points of the council program: “The struggle for conquest must be fought with and for the revolutionary proletariat unitary historical thought was in no way arms of conquest, and no longer only with those of defense (SI note: this is distinct from a practical attitude to be adopted generally ended up becoming aimed at the unions, which the manifesto describes elsewhere as “organisms victims of the practice they did adopt. of resistance . . . crystallized into a bureaucratic form”). A new organization must be developed as a direct antagonist of the organs of the bossesʼ 96 government; for that task it must spring up spontaneously in the workplace and unite all the workers, because all of them, as producers, are subjected The ideology of the social-democratic organizations put those organizations to an authority that is alien (estranea) to them, and must liberate themselves under the control of the professors who were educating the working class, and from it. . . . This is the beginning of freedom for you: the beginning of a social their organizational forms corresponded to this type of passive apprenticeship. formation that by rapidly and universally extending itself will put you in a The participation of the socialists of the Second International in political position to eliminate the exploiter and the middleman from the economic and economic struggles was admittedly concrete, but it was profoundly fi eld and to become yourselves the masters — the masters of your machines, uncritical. It was a manifestly reformist practice carried on in the name of of your work, and of your life . . . ” an illusory revolutionism. This ideology of revolution inevitably foundered The majority of the Workers and Soldiers Councils in the Germany on the very successes of those who proclaimed it. The elevation of socialist of 1918-1919 were more crudely dominated by the Social-Democratic journalists and parliamentary representatives above the rest of the movement bureaucracy or were victims or its maneuvers. They tolerated Ebertʼs encouraged them to become habituated to a bourgeois lifestyle (most of them “socialist” government, whose main support came from the General Staff had in any case been recruited from the bourgeois intelligentsia). And even and the Freikorps. The “Hamburg seven points” (calling for the immediate industrial workers who had been recruited out of struggles in the factories dissolution of the old Army), presented by Dorrenbach and passed with a were transformed by the trade-union bureaucracy into brokers of labor- large majority by the Congress of Soldiers Councils that opened December power, whose task was to make sure that that commodity was sold at a “fair” 16 in Berlin, were not implemented by the “Peopleʼs Commissars.” The price. For the activity of all these people to have retained any appearance councils tolerated this defi ance, and the legislative elections that had been of being revolutionary, capitalism would have had to have turned out to be quickly set for January 19; then they tolerated the attack launched against conveniently incapable of tolerating this economic reformism, despite the Dorrenbachʼs sailors; fi nally, they tolerated the crushing of the Spartakist fact that it had no trouble tolerating the legalistic political expressions of insurrection on the very eve of those elections. In 1956 the Central Workers the same reformism. The social democratsʼ scientifi c ideology confi dently Council of Greater Budapest, constituted on November 14 and declaring affi rmed that capitalism could not tolerate these economic antagonisms; but itself determined to defend socialism, demanded “the withdrawal of all history repeatedly proved them wrong. political parties from the factories” while at the same time pronouncing itself 11 28 in favor of Nagyʼs return to power and free elections within a short time. It is the ordinary workers, who for the most part themselves belonged to one or 97 another socialist fraction. Trotsky seems to be quite unjustifi ed in writing that “one of the two social-democratic organizations in St. Petersburg took the Bernstein, the social democrat least attached to political ideology and most initiative of creating an autonomous revolutionary workersʼ administration” openly attached to the methodology of bourgeois science, was honest enough (moreover, the “one of the two” organizations that did at least immediately to point out this contradiction (a contradiction which had also been implied recognize the signifi cance of this workersʼ initiative was the Mensheviks, by the reformist movement of the English workers, who never bothered not the Bolsheviks). But the general strike of October 1905 in fact originated to invoke any revolutionary ideology). But it was historical development fi rst of all in Moscow on September 19, when the typographers of the Sytine itself which ultimately provided the defi nitive demonstration. Although full printing works went on strike, notably because they wanted punctuation of illusions in other regards, Bernstein had denied that a crisis of capitalist marks to be counted among the 1000 characters that constituted their unit of production would miraculously force the hand of the socialists, who wanted payment. Fifty printing works followed them out, and on September 25 the to inherit the revolution only by way of this orthodox sequence of events. Moscow printers formed a council. On October 3 “the assembly of workersʼ The profound social upheaval touched off by World War I, though it led to deputies from the printers, mechanics, carpenters, tobacco workers and other a widespread awakening of radical consciousness, twice demonstrated that guilds adopted the resolution to set up a general council (soviet) of Moscow the social-democratic hierarchy had failed to provide the German workers workers” (Trotsky, op. cit.). It can thus be seen that this form appeared with a revolutionary education capable of turning them into theorists: fi rst, spontaneously at the beginning of the strike movement. And this movement, when the overwhelming majority of the party rallied to the imperialist war; which began to fall back in the next few days, was to surge forward again up then, following the German defeat, when the party crushed the Spartakist to the great historic crisis when on October 7 the railroad workers, beginning revolutionaries. The ex-worker Ebert, who had become one of the social- in Moscow, spontaneously began to stop the railway traffi c. democratic leaders, apparently still believed in sin since he admitted that The council movement in Turin of March-April 1920 originated he hated revolution “like sin.” And he proved himself a fi tting precursor of among the highly concentrated proletariat of the Fiat factories. During the socialist representation that was soon to emerge as the mortal enemy of August and September 1919 new elections for an “internal commission” (a the proletariat in Russia and elsewhere, when he accurately summed up the sort of collaborationist factory committee set up by a collective convention essence of this new form of alienation: “Socialism means working a lot.” in 1906 for the purpose of better integrating the workers) suddenly provided the opportunity, amid the social crisis that was then sweeping Italy, for a 98 complete transformation of the role of these “commissioners.” They began to federate among themselves as direct representatives of the workers. By As a Marxist thinker, Lenin was simply a faithful and consistent Kautskyist October 30,000 workers were represented at an assembly of “executive who applied the revolutionary ideology of “orthodox Marxism” within the committees of factory councils,” which resembled more an assembly of conditions existing in Russia, conditions which did not lend themselves to shop stewards (with one commissioner elected by each workshop) than an the reformist practice carried on elsewhere by the Second International. In organization of councils in the strict sense. But the example nevertheless the Russian context, the Bolshevik practice of directing the proletariat from acted as a catalyst and the movement radicalized, supported by a fraction of outside, by means of a disciplined underground party under the control of the Socialist Party (including Gramsci) that was in the majority in Turin and intellectuals who had become “professional revolutionaries,” became a new by the Piedmont anarchists (see Pier Carlo Masiniʼs pamphlet, Anarchici e profession — a profession which refused to come to terms with any of the comunisti nel movimento dei Consigli a Torino). The movement was resisted professional ruling strata of capitalist society (the Czarist political regime by the majority of the Socialist Party and by the unions. On 15 March 1920 was in any case incapable of offering any opportunities for such compromise, the councils began a strike combined with occupation of the factories and which depends on an advanced stage of bourgeois power). As a result of this resumed production under their own control. By April 14 the strike was intransigence, the Bolsheviks ended up becoming the sole practitioners of the general in Piedmont; in the following days it spread through much of northern profession of totalitarian social domination. Italy, particularly among the dockers and railroad workers. The government had to use warships to land troops at Genoa to march on Turin. While the 99 councilist program was later to be approved by the Congress of the Italian Anarchist Union when it met at Bologna on July 1, the Socialist Party and With the war and the collapse of international social democracy in the face of the unions succeeded in sabotaging the strike by keeping it isolated: when that war, the authoritarian ideological radicalism of the Bolsheviks was able Turin was besieged by 20,000 soldiers and police, the party newspaper Avanti 27 12 to spread its infl uence all over the world. The bloody end of the democratic illusions of the workers movement transformed the entire world into a naturally waged against it by the ruling class. The purpose of the council Russia, and Bolshevism, reigning over the fi rst revolutionary breakthrough form is the practical unifi cation of proletarians in the process of appropriating engendered by this period of crisis, offered its hierarchical and ideological the material and intellectual means of changing all existing conditions and model to the proletariat of all countries, urging them to adopt it in order making themselves the masters of their own history. It can and must be the to “speak Russian” to their own ruling classes. Lenin did not reproach the organization in acts of historical consciousness. But in fact it has nowhere Marxism of the Second International for being a revolutionary ideology, but yet succeeded in overcoming the separation embodied in specialized political for ceasing to be a revolutionary ideology. organizations and in the forms of ideological false consciousness that they produce and defend. Moreover, although it is quite natural that the councils 100 that have been major agents of revolutionary situations have generally been councils of delegates, since it is such councils which coordinate and federate The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and the decisions of local councils, it nevertheless appears that the general social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration assemblies of the rank and fi le have almost always been considered as mere of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacleʼs domination: assemblies of electors, so that the fi rst level of the “council” is situated the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working above them. Here already lies an element of separation, which can only be class. surmounted by treating local general assemblies of all the proletarians in revolution as the ultimate, fundamental councils, from which any delegation 101 must derive its power. Leaving aside the precouncilist features of the Paris Commune “In all previous revolutions,” wrote Rosa Luxemburg in Die Rote Fahne of that so enthused Marx (“the fi nally discovered political form through which 21 December 1918, “the combatants faced each other openly and directly the economic emancipation of labor can be realized”) — features which, — class against class, program against program. In the present revolution, moreover, can be seen more in the organization of the Central Committee the troops protecting the old order are not fi ghting under the insignia of the of the National Guard, which was composed of delegates of the Parisian ruling class, but under the banner of a ʻsocial-democratic party.ʼ If the central proletariat in arms, than in the elected Commune — the famous St. Petersburg question of revolution was posed openly and honestly — Capitalism or “Council of Workersʼ Deputies” was the fi rst fl edgling manifestation of an socialism? — the great mass of the proletariat would today have no doubts or organization of the proletariat in a revolutionary situation. According to hesitations.” Thus, a few days before its destruction, the radical current of the the fi gures given by Trotsky in his book 1905, 200,000 workers sent their German proletariat discovered the secret of the new conditions engendered delegates to the St. Petersburg Soviet; but its infl uence extended far beyond by the whole process that had gone before (a development to which the its immediate area, with many other councils in Russia drawing inspiration representation of the working class had greatly contributed): the spectacular from its deliberations and decisions. It directly grouped the workers from organization of the ruling orderʼs defense, the social reign of appearances more than 150 enterprises, besides welcoming representatives from 16 where no “central question” can any longer be posed “openly and honestly.” unions that had rallied to it. Its fi rst nucleus was formed on October 13; The revolutionary representation of the proletariat had at this stage become by the 17th the soviet had established an Executive Committee over itself both the primary cause and the central result of the general falsifi cation of which Trotsky says “served it as a ministry.” Out of a total of 562 delegates, society. the Executive Committee comprised only 31 members, of which 22 were actually workers delegated by the entirety of the workers in their enterprises 102 and 9 represented three revolutionary parties (Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Social Revolutionaries); however, “the representatives of the parties The organization of the proletariat in accordance with the Bolshevik model had only consultative status and were not entitled to vote.” Although the resulted from the backwardness of Russia and from the abandonment rank-and-fi le assemblies were presumably faithfully represented by their of revolutionary struggle by the workers movements of the advanced revocable delegates, it is clear that those delegates had abdicated a large part countries. These same backward conditions also tended to foster the of their power, in a very parliamentary way, into the hands of an Executive counterrevolutionary aspects which that form of organization had Committee in which the “technical advisors” from the political parties had an unconsciously contained from its inception. The repeated failure of the enormous infl uence. mass of the European workers movement to take advantage of the golden How did this soviet originate? It seems that this form of opportunities of the 1918-1920 period (a failure which included the violent 13 26 organization was discovered by certain politically aware elements among destruction of its own radical minority) favored the consolidation of the Preliminaries on Councils Bolshevik development and enabled that fraudulent outcome to present and Councilist Organization itself to the world as the only possible proletarian solution. By seizing a state monopoly as sole representative and defender of working-class power, the by René Riesel (1969) Bolshevik Party justifi ed itself and became what it already was: the party of the owners of the proletariat, owners who essentially eliminated earlier forms “The Workers and Peasants Government has decreed that Kronstadt and of property. the rebelling ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. I therefore order all who have revolted against the socialist 103 fatherland to lay down their arms at once. Recalcitrants should be disarmed and turned over to the Soviet authorities. The commissars and other members For twenty years the various tendencies of Russian social democracy had of the government who have been arrested must be liberated at once. Only engaged in an unresolved debate over all the conditions that might bear on the those who surrender unconditionally can expect mercy from the Soviet overthrow of Czarism — the weakness of the bourgeoisie; the preponderance Republic. I am simultaneously giving orders to prepare for the suppression of the peasant majority; and the potentially decisive role of a proletariat which of the rebellion and the subjugation of the sailors by armed force. All was concentrated and combative but which constituted only a small minority responsibility for the harm that may be suffered by the peaceful population of the population. This debate was eventually resolved in practice by a factor will rest entirely on the heads of the White Guard mutineers. This warning that had not fi gured in any of the hypotheses: a revolutionary bureaucracy that is fi nal.” placed itself at the head of the proletariat, seized state power, and proceeded —Trotsky, Kamenev, Ultimatum to Kronstadt to impose a new form of class domination. A strictly bourgeois revolution had been impossible; talk of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” “We have only one answer to all that: All power to the soviets! Take your hands was meaningless verbiage; and the proletarian power of the soviets could off them — your hands that are red with the blood of the martyrs of freedom not simultaneously maintain itself against the class of small landowners, who fought the White Guards, the landowners and the bourgeoisie!” against the national and international White reaction, and against its own representation which had become externalized and alienated in the form of a —Kronstadt Izvestia #6 working-class party that maintained total control over the state, the economy, During the fi fty years since the Leninists reduced communism to the means of expression, and soon even over peopleʼs thoughts. Trotskyʼs electrifi cation, since the Bolshevik counterrevolution erected the Soviet State and Parvusʼs theory of permanent revolution, which Lenin adopted in April over the dead body of the power of the soviets, and since “soviet” ceased 1917, was the only theory that proved true for countries with underdeveloped to mean council, revolutions have continued to fl ing the Kronstadt demand bourgeoisies; but even there it became true only after the unknown factor of in the face of the rulers of the Kremlin: “All power to the soviets and not to bureaucratic class power came into the picture. In the numerous arguments the parties.” The remarkable persistence of the real tendency toward workers within the Bolshevik leadership, Lenin was the most consistent advocate councils throughout this half-century of efforts and repeated suppressions of concentrating dictatorial power in the hands of this supreme ideological of the modern proletarian movement now imposes the councils on the representation. Lenin was right every time in the sense that he invariably new revolutionary current as the sole form of antistate dictatorship of the supported the solution implied by earlier choices of the minority that now proletariat, as the sole tribunal that will be able to pass judgment on the old exercised absolute power: the democracy that was kept from peasants by world and carry out the sentence itself. means of the state would have to be kept from workers as well, which led to The essence of the councils must be more precisely delineated, not denying it to Communist union leaders and to party members in general, and only by refuting the gross falsifi cations propagated by social democracy, fi nally to the highest ranks of the party hierarchy. At the Tenth Congress, as the Russian bureaucracy, Titoism and even Ben-Bellaism, but above all by the Kronstadt soviet was being crushed by arms and buried under a barrage of recognizing the insuffi ciencies in the fl edgling practical experiences of the slander, Lenin attacked the radical bureaucrats who had formed a “Workersʼ power of the councils that have briefl y appeared so far; as well, of course, Opposition” faction with the following ultimatum, the logic of which Stalin as the insuffi ciencies in councilist revolutionariesʼ very conceptions. The would later extend to an absolute division of the world: “You can stand here councilʼs ultimate tendency appears negatively in the limits and illusions with us, or against us out there with a gun in your hand, but not within some opposition. . . . Weʼve had enough opposition.” which have marked its fi rst manifestations and which have caused its defeat 25 14 quite as much as has the immediate and uncompromising struggle that is 104 social life while refusing to compromise with any form of separate power anywhere in the world. In the organizationʼs struggle with class society, After Kronstadt, the bureaucracy consolidated its power as sole owner the combattants themselves are the fundamental weapons: a revolutionary of a system of state capitalism — internally by means of a temporary organization must thus see to it that the dominant societyʼs conditions of alliance with the peasantry (the “New Economic Policy”) and externally separation and hierarchy are not reproduced within itself. It must constantly by using the workers regimented into the bureaucratic parties of the Third struggle against its deformation by the ruling spectacle. The only limit to International as a backup force for Russian diplomacy, sabotaging the entire participation in its total democracy is that each of its members must have revolutionary movement and supporting bourgeois governments whose recognized and appropriated the coherence of the organizationʼs critique — a support it in turn hoped to secure in the sphere of international politics (the coherence that must be demonstrated both in the critical theory as such and in Kuomintang regime in the China of 1925-27, the Popular Fronts in Spain the relation between that theory and practical activity. and France, etc.). The Russian bureaucracy then carried this consolidation of power to the next stage by subjecting the peasantry to a reign of terror, 122 implementing the most brutal primitive accumulation of capital in history. The industrialization of the Stalin era revealed the bureaucracyʼs ultimate As capitalismʼs ever-intensifying imposition of alienation at all levels function: continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of makes it increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own market society: commodifi ed labor. It also demonstrated the independence impoverishment, putting them in the position of having to reject that of the economy: the economy has come to dominate society so completely impoverishment in its totality or not at all, revolutionary organization has that it has proved capable of recreating the class domination it needs for its had to learn that it can no longer combat alienation by means of alienated own continued operation; that is, the bourgeoisie has created an independent forms of struggle. power that is capable of maintaining itself even without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian bureaucracy was not “the last owning class in history” in Bruno 123 Rizziʼs sense; it was merely a substitute ruling class for the commodity economy. A tottering capitalist property system was replaced by a cruder Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the fi rst version of itself — simplifi ed, less diversifi ed, and concentrated as the time, theory as understanding of human practice be recognized and lived collective property of the bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped type of by the masses. It requires that workers become dialecticians and put their ruling class is also a refl ection of economic underdevelopment, and it has no thought into practice. It thus demands of its “people without qualities” agenda beyond overcoming this underdevelopment in certain regions of the more than the bourgeois revolution demanded of the qualifi ed individuals it world. The hierarchical and statist framework for this crude remake of the delegated to carry out its tasks (because the partial ideological consciousness capitalist ruling class was provided by the working-class party, which was created by a segment of the bourgeois class was based on the economy, that itself modeled on the hierarchical separations of bourgeois organizations. As central part of social life in which that class was already in power). The Ante Ciliga noted while in one of Stalinʼs prisons, “Technical questions of development of class society to the stage of the spectacular organization of organization turned out to be social questions” (Lenin and the Revolution). nonlife is thus leading the revolutionary project to become visibly what it has always been in essence. 105 124 Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression of revolutionary ideology; it was a coherence of the separate, governing a reality that resisted it. With Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology, and it the advent of Stalinism, revolutionary ideology returned to its fundamental knows it. incoherence. At that point, ideology was no longer a weapon, it had become an end in itself. But a lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane. The totalitarian ideological pronouncement obliterates reality as well as purpose; nothing exists but what it says exists. Although this crude form of the spectacle has been confi ned to certain underdeveloped regions, it has nevertheless played an essential role in the spectacleʼs global development. This particular materialization of ideology did not transform the world 15 24 equal to the practical organization they have chosen for themselves because economically, as did advanced capitalism; it simply used police-state this consciousness has become inseparable from coherent intervention in methods to transform peopleʼs perception of the world. history.

117 106

With the power of the councils — a power that must internationally supplant The ruling totalitarian-ideological class is the ruler of a world turned upside all other forms of power — the proletarian movement becomes its own down. The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its product. This product is nothing other than the producers themselves, whose power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on goal has become nothing other than their own fulfi llment. Only in this way this one point, however, because this offi cially nonexistent bureaucracy can the spectacleʼs negation of life be negated in its turn. simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the 118 bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane. The social organization of total falsehood stems from this fundamental The appearance of workers councils during the fi rst quarter of this century contradiction. was the most advanced expression of the old proletarian movement, but it went unnoticed, except in travestied forms, because it was repressed and 107 destroyed along with all the rest of the movement. Now, from the vantage point of the new stage of proletarian critique, the councils can be seen in Stalinism was also a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. The terrorism their true light as the only undefeated aspect of a defeated movement. The on which this classʼs power was based inevitably came to strike the class historical consciousness that recognizes that the councils are the only terrain itself, because this class had no juridical legitimacy, no legally recognized in which it can thrive can now see that they are no longer at the periphery of a status as an owning class which could be extended to each of its members. movement that is subsiding, but at the center of a movement that is rising. Its ownership had to be masked because it was based on false consciousness. This false consciousness can maintain its total power only by means of a 119 total reign of terror in which all real motives are ultimately obscured. The members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of ownership over A revolutionary organization that exists before the establishment of the society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental lie: they have to power of workers councils must discover its own appropriate form through play the role of the proletariat governing a socialist society; they have to be struggle; but all these historical experiences have already made it clear that actors faithful to a script of ideological betrayal. Yet they cannot actually it cannot claim to represent the working class. Its task, rather, is to embody a participate in this counterfeit entity unless their legitimacy is validated. radical separation from the world of separation. No bureaucrat can individually assert his right to power, because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would have to demonstrate that he was the 120 opposite of a bureaucrat, while to prove himself a bureaucrat is impossible because the bureaucracyʼs offi cial line is that there is no bureaucracy. Revolutionary organization is the coherent expression of the theory of praxis Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent on the central seal of legitimacy entering into two-way communication with practical struggles, in the process provided by the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation of becoming practical theory. Its own practice is to foster the communication in its “socialist regime” of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate. Although and coherence of these struggles. At the revolutionary moment when social the bureaucrats are collectively empowered to make all social decisions, the separations are dissolved, the organization must dissolve itself as a separate cohesion of their own class can be ensured only by the concentration of their organization. terrorist power in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth of the ruling lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable boundary 121 line which is nevertheless constantly being adjusted. Stalin decides without appeal who is and who is not a member of the ruling bureaucracy — who A revolutionary organization must constitute an integral critique of society, should be considered a “proletarian in power” and who branded “a traitor in that is, it must make a comprehensive critique of all aspects of alienated 23 16 the pay of Wall Street and the Mikado.” The atomized bureaucrats can fi nd their collective legitimacy only in the person of Stalin — the lord of the world No quantitative amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation who thus comes to see himself as the absolute person, for whom no superior in a hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, spirit exists. “The lord of the world recognizes his own nature — omnipresent because the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any particular wrong it power — through the destructive violence he exerts against the contrastingly has suffered, nor in the righting of any particular wrong. It cannot recognize powerless selfhood of his subjects.” He is the power that defi nes the terrain of itself even in the righting of many such wrongs, but only in the righting of the domination, and he is also “the power that ravages that terrain.” absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life.

108 115

When ideology has become total through its possession of total power, and New signs of negation are proliferating in the most economically advanced has changed from partial truth to totalitarian falsehood, historical thought has countries. Although these signs are misunderstood and falsifi ed by the been so totally annihilated that history itself, even at the level of the most spectacle, they are suffi cient proof that a new period has begun. We have empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. Totalitarian bureaucratic society already seen the failure of the fi rst proletarian assault against capitalism; lives in a perpetual present in which whatever has previously happened is now we are witnessing the failure of capitalist abundance. On one hand, determined solely by its police. The project already envisioned by Napoleon anti-union struggles of Western workers are being repressed fi rst of all by of “monarchically controlling memory” has been realized in Stalinismʼs the unions; on the other, rebellious youth are raising new protests, protests constant rewriting of the past, which alters not only the interpretations of past which are still vague and confused but which clearly imply a rejection of art, events but even the events themselves. But the price paid for this liberation of everyday life, and of the old specialized politics. These are two sides of from all historical reality is the loss of the rational frame of reference that is a new spontaneous struggle that is at fi rst taking on a criminal appearance. indispensable to capitalism as a historical social system. It is well known how They foreshadow a second proletarian assault against class society. As the much the scientifi c application of an ideology gone mad has cost the Russian lost children of this as yet immobile army reappear on this battleground economy (one need only recall the Lysenko fi asco). This contradiction — the — a battleground which has changed and yet remains the same — they are fact that a totalitarian bureaucracy trying to administer an industrialized following a new “General Ludd” who, this time, urges them to attack the society is caught between its need for rationality and its repression of machinery of permitted consumption. rationality — is also one of its main weaknesses in comparison with normal capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot resolve the question 116 of agriculture as ordinary capitalism has done, it also proves inferior to the latter in the fi eld of industrial production, because its unrealistic authoritarian “The long-sought political form through which the working class could planning is based on omnipresent falsifi cations. carry out its own economic liberation” has taken on a clear shape in this century, in the form of revolutionary workers councils which assume all 109 decisionmaking and executive powers and which federate with each other by means of delegates who are answerable to their base and revocable at any Between the two world wars the revolutionary working-class movement moment. The councils that have actually emerged have as yet provided no was destroyed by the joint action of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of fascist more than a rough hint of their possibilities because they have immediately totalitarianism (the latterʼs organizational form having been inspired by the been opposed and defeated by class societyʼs various defensive forces, totalitarian party that had fi rst been tested and developed in Russia). Fascism among which their own false consciousness must often be included. As was a desperate attempt to defend the bourgeois economy from the dual threat Pannekoek rightly stressed, opting for the power of workers councils “poses of crisis and proletarian subversion, a state of siege in which capitalist society problems” rather than providing a solution. But it is precisely within this saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose of rationalization in the form form of social organization that the problems of proletarian revolution can of massive state intervention. But this rationalization is hampered by the fi nd their real solution. This is the terrain where the objective preconditions extreme irrationality of its methods. Although fascism rallies to the defense of historical consciousness are brought together — the terrain where of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative active direct communication is realized, marking the end of specialization, (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the hierarchy and separation, and the transformation of existing conditions into petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by “conditions of unity.” In this process proletarian subjects can emerge from economic crisis or disillusioned by the socialist movementʼs failure to bring 17 22 their struggle against their contemplative position; their consciousness is American and European bourgeoisie, a local bourgeoisie constitutes itself about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself (usually based on the power of traditional tribal chiefs) through its possession as what it is — a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a of the state. Foreign imperialism remains the real master of the economy community defi ned by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is of these countries, but at a certain stage its native agents are rewarded for a technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes their sale of local products by being granted possession of a local state — a are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of state that is independent from the local masses but not from imperialism. conditioning and illusion. It is thus a signifi cant factor in the formation of Incapable of accumulating capital, this artifi cial bourgeoisie does nothing the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old working-class but squander the surplus value it extracts from local labor and the subsidies movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day society. it receives from protector states and international monopolies. Because But since it is also the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order, of the obvious inability of these bourgeois classes to fulfi ll the normal it has generally ended up being replaced by the major capitalist states, which economic functions of a bourgeoisie, they soon fi nd themselves challenged represent stronger and more rational forms of that order. by oppositional movements based on the bureaucratic model (more or less adapted to particular local conditions). But if such bureaucracies succeed 110 in their fundamental project of industrialization, they produce the historical conditions for their own defeat: by accumulating capital they also accumulate When the Russian bureaucracy has fi nally succeeded in doing away with the a proletariat, thus creating their own negation in countries where that negation vestiges of bourgeois property that hampered its rule over the economy, and had not previously existed. in developing this economy for its own purposes, and in being recognized as a member of the club of great powers, it wants to enjoy its world in peace 114 and to disencumber itself from the arbitrariness to which it is still subjected. It thus denounces the Stalinism at its origin. But this denunciation remains In the course of this complex and terrible evolution which has brought the era Stalinist — arbitrary, unexplained, and subject to continual modifi cation of class struggles to a new set of conditions, the proletariat of the industrial — because the ideological lie at its origin can never be revealed. The countries has lost its ability to assert its own independent perspective. In a bureaucracy cannot liberalize itself either culturally or politically because fundamental sense, it has also lost its illusions. But it has not lost its being. its existence as a class depends on its ideological monopoly, which, for The proletariat has not been eliminated. It remains irreducibly present all its cumbersomeness, is its sole title to power. This ideology has lost within the intensifi ed alienation of modern capitalism. It consists of that the passion of its original expression, but its passionless routinization vast majority of workers who have lost all power over their lives and who, still has the repressive function of controlling all thought and prohibiting once they become aware of this, redefi ne themselves as the proletariat, the any competition whatsoever. The bureaucracy is thus helplessly tied to an force working to negate this society from within. This proletariat is being ideology that is no longer believed by anyone. The power that used to inspire objectively reinforced by the virtual elimination of the peasantry and by the terror now inspires ridicule, but this ridiculed power still defends itself with increasing degree to which the “service” sectors and intellectual professions the threat of resorting to the terrorizing force it would like to be rid of. Thus, are being subjected to factorylike working conditions. Subjectively, however, at the very time when the bureaucracy hopes to demonstrate its superiority this proletariat is still far removed from any practical class consciousness, and on the terrain of capitalism it reveals itself to be a poor cousin of capitalism. this goes not only for white-collar workers but also for blue-collar workers, Just as its actual history contradicts its façade of legality and its crudely who have yet to become aware of any perspective beyond the impotence maintained ignorance contradicts its scientifi c pretensions, so its attempt and mystifi cations of the old politics. But when the proletariat discovers to vie with the bourgeoisie in the production of commodity abundance is that its own externalized power contributes to the constant reinforcement stymied by the fact that such abundance contains its own implicit ideology, of capitalist society, no longer only in the form of its alienated labor but and is generally accompanied by the freedom to choose from an unlimited also in the form of the trade unions, political parties, and state powers that it range of spectacular pseudoalternatives — a pseudofreedom that remains had created in the effort to liberate itself, it also discovers through concrete incompatible with the bureaucracyʼs ideology. historical experience that it is the class that must totally oppose all rigidifi ed externalizations and all specializations of power. It bears a revolution that 111 cannot leave anything outside itself, a revolution embodying the permanent domination of the present over the past and a total critique of separation; and The bureaucracyʼs ideological title to power is already collapsing at the it must discover the appropriate forms of action to carry out this revolution. 21 18 international level. The power that established itself nationally in the name of an ostensibly internationalist perspective is now forced to recognize that presented this same organizational form as the long-sought link between it can no longer impose its system of lies beyond its own national borders. theory and practice, in which proletarians cease being mere “spectators” of The unequal economic development of diverse bureaucracies with competing the events that occur in their organization and begin consciously choosing interests that have succeeded in establishing their own “socialism” in more and experiencing those events, he was describing as merits of the Bolshevik than one country has led to an all-out public confrontation between the Party everything that that party was not. Despite his profound theoretical Russian lie and the Chinese lie. From this point on, each bureaucracy in power work, Lukács remained an ideologue, speaking in the name of the power that will have to fi nd its own way; and the same is true for each of the totalitarian was most grossly alien to the proletarian movement, yet believing and giving parties aspiring to such power (notably those that still survive from the his audience to believe that he found himself completely at home with it. As Stalinist period among certain national working classes). This international subsequent events demonstrated how that power disavows and suppresses its collapse has been further aggravated by the expressions of internal negation lackeys, Lukácsʼs endless self-repudiations revealed with caricatural clarity which fi rst became visible to the outside world when the workers of East that he had identifi ed with the total opposite of himself and of everything Berlin revolted against the bureaucrats and demanded a “government of he had argued for in History and Class Consciousness. No one better than steel workers” — a negation which has in one case already gone to the Lukács illustrates the validity of the fundamental rule for assessing all the point of sovereign workers councils in Hungary. But in the fi nal analysis, intellectuals of this century: What they respect is a precise gauge of their this crumbling of the global alliance of pseudosocialist bureaucracies is own degradation. Yet Lenin had hardly encouraged these sorts of illusions also a most unfavorable development for the future of capitalist society. about his activities. On the contrary, he acknowledged that “a political party The bourgeoisie is in the process of losing the adversary that objectively cannot examine its members to see if there are contradictions between their supported it by providing an illusory unifi cation of all opposition to the philosophy and the party program.” The party whose idealized portrait existing order. This division of labor between two mutually reinforcing forms Lukács had so inopportunely drawn was in reality suited for only one very of the spectacle comes to an end when the pseudorevolutionary role in turn specifi c and limited task: the seizure of state power. divides. The spectacular component of the destruction of the worker-class movement is itself headed for destruction. 113

112 Since the neo-Leninist illusion carried on by present-day Trotskyism is constantly being contradicted by the reality of modern capitalist societies The only current partisans of the Leninist illusion are the various Trotskyist (both bourgeois and bureaucratic), it is not surprising that it gets its most tendencies, which stubbornly persist in identifying the proletarian project favorable reception in the nominally independent “underdeveloped” with an ideologically based hierarchical organization despite all the historical countries, where the local ruling classesʼ versions of bureaucratic state experiences that have refuted that perspective. The distance that separates socialism end up amounting to little more than a mere ideology of economic Trotskyism from a revolutionary critique of present-day society is related to development. The hybrid composition of these ruling classes is more or less the deferential distance the Trotskyists maintain regarding positions that were clearly related to their position within the bourgeois-bureaucratic spectrum. already mistaken when they were acted on in real struggles. Trotsky remained Their international maneuvering between those two poles of capitalist power, fundamentally loyal to the upper bureaucracy until 1927, while striving to gain along with their numerous ideological compromises (notably with Islam) control of it so as to make it resume a genuinely Bolshevik foreign policy. stemming from their heterogeneous social bases, end up removing from these (It is well known, for example, that in order to help conceal Leninʼs famous degraded versions of ideological socialism everything serious except the “Testament” he went so far as to slanderously disavow his own supporter police. One type of bureaucracy establishes itself by forging an organization Max Eastman, who had made it public.) Trotsky was doomed by his basic capable of combining national struggle with agrarian peasant revolt; it then, perspective, because once the bureaucracy became aware that it had evolved as in China, tends to apply the Stalinist model of industrialization in societies into a counterrevolutionary class on the domestic front, it was bound to opt that are even less developed than Russia was in 1917. A bureaucracy able to for a similarly counterrevolutionary role in other countries (though still, of industrialize the nation may also develop out of the petty bourgeoisie, with course, in the name of revolution). Trotskyʼs subsequent efforts to create a power being seized by army offi cers, as happened in Egypt. In other situations, Fourth International refl ect the same inconsistency. Once he had become an such as the aftermath of the Algerian war of independence, a bureaucracy that unconditional partisan of the Bolshevik form of organization (which he did has established itself as a para-state authority in the course of struggle may during the second Russian revolution), he refused for the rest of his life to seek a stabilizing compromise by merging with a weak national bourgeoisie. recognize that the bureaucracy was a new ruling class. When Lukács, in 1923, 19 20 Finally, in the former colonies of black Africa that remain openly tied to the