Kasama

“I think that the issue of insurrection, the basic reason to take Lenin seriously, is an essential element of a revolutionary perspective right now. …

“The ebbs and flows of the revolutionary process…combined with the different ruling class policies of suppression and incorporation make it unlikely that any political perspective can incrementally advance towards a revolutionary transformation without there being moments where only an exercise of collective will, a leap into the realm of the possible with no guarantees, will prevent an effective reversal of the process.

“As this dilemma emerges globally in open spaces and across boundaries, with different stages of development and different rates of change forming a complex mosaic where no one element can be treated in isolation, the issue of whether to take power when it appears possible, but also problematic, will inevitably emerge and we will either have a prepared – or an unprepared, and therefore certainly inadequate – response.”

This is the second and final part of this piece — which is excerpted from Sketchy Thoughts blog.  Replies are added from  Gathering Forces and Kersplebedeb.  Don Hamerquist was a leading figure in the Sojourner Truth Organization (during 70s and 80s). Kasama is posting this in two parts (Part 1 is here) — and the subtitles of those parts are ours.

* * * * * *

Lenin and Leftovers Part 2

by Don Hamerquist

MLM Options

“Socialist Revolution does not require that conscious self-identification by sociological class be a defining feature…and what led… [the revolutionary process]…were radical political forces (the communists generally) who saw themselves as representatives of the working class (and its objective interests) – and who won the allegiance of important sections of that class (often minorities, but significant sections none the less).”

Mike Ely, “Class Against Class? Real World Alignments for Revolution,” Kasama, August 19, 2009

Relying with quite amazing historical myopia on the positions Lenin advances at the beginning of “Left Wing Communism” despite almost a century of experience, most, but not all M.L. tendencies still deny or disregard any strategic problems that might emerge from the representation of the working class by a minority segment of that class or by a vanguard party. The discussions on the (generally) Maoist Kasama site tend to be much more thoughtful, however, I think, they often wind up in a similar position.

I opened this section with some comments from a recent Kasama discussion titled “Class against class vs. Revolutionary People”. These same selections are also in earlier Kasama discussions that I haven’t looked over carefully. There are similar statements in some extended responses to the Antaeus post of 4/27/09 “Why did Post-Maoist China restore capitalism?” I am quite sure they represent a considered position in that tendency and are not casual polemical formulations.

In my opinion, although quite possibly not in that of the author, the logical conclusion from these comments is that the revolutionary overthrow of the state power of the capitalist class will necessarily be accomplished by a movement that in no sense can be seen as the working class organized “in and for itself”. Indeed, that appears to be seen as a somewhat dysfunctional and utopian conception, a simplistic example of a class reductionist perspective. Therefore any emergence of that working class capable of achieving universal liberation in the process of its own self-emancipation, is pushed down the road and presented as an objective to be achieved with the assist of the authoritarian tools provided by the prior capture of the state, if it even remains as a programmatic objective at all.

Before getting to my differences, I’d like to indicate two areas of agreement with features of this position that may not be adequately expressed in the selections that I have cited.

The position certainly has a basis in history and has the merit of raising important issues in what Gramsci called the “war of maneuver”–issues of qualitative leaps, revolutionary breaks, and adequately preparing for and responding to “events” in the Badiou sense. Certainly the complexity of popular movements of resistance and refusal are as unlikely to reduce to a simple class polarization as the entire system is to reduce to domination by the economic element “in the last instance”. I intend to come back to this point from the other side in criticisms, possibly mistaken ones, of some incrementalist and evolutionary features that I see in class struggle social anarchist perspectives.

Gramsci also has a conception of a “war of position” in which the development of a “counter-hegemonic social bloc” plays a central role. I think that this notion has similarities to certain aspects of Ely’s conception of the ‘Revolutionary People’ – particularly when the consideration is of conditions prior to the seizure of state power. Of course, that is for Ely to say, not me.

However, to stick with Gramsci categories, the Ely position appears to completely break with the conception of the “directive (dirigenti) class” which accords a unique role in the revolutionary process to the working class as such. Gramsci’s position has the further merit of more clearly emphasizing the distinctions in this ‘directive’ role between “leadership” and “domination” (command), an area of confusions that are very relevant to the errors of actually existing socialism – the errors that underlie Binod’s “…something wrong somewhere…” that I cited at the beginning of this paper.

Basically, I think that any capacity for these particular M.L. politics to respond to the rapid, but temporary and reversible shifts in political potentials in epistemological break situations, is overshadowed by the massive problems when communists see “…themselves as representatives… of the ‘objective interests…” of a class without prioritizing a social practice that can develop a genuine democratic legitimacy for such a representation and ultimately render it superfluous. The problems become even more intractable when the vanguard party sees itself as the representative, not only of an underdeveloped working class, but of an entire “revolutionary people” composed of a number of classes and strata and encompassing a bewildering array of internal contradictions; and when it then proposes to utilize the instrumentalities of state power to implement its – often quite subjective – conception of the objective interests of (other) people.

I’m not arguing that revolutions or major steps towards them can’t be accomplished by vanguards with only minority segments of the working classes in active and conscious support. They can, but only with real limitations that cannot be talked away. The seizure of the state by vanguards that claim to be acting in the objective interests of social classes does not answer the question about whether they actually are implementing such interests and whether they will continue to do so when they possess the instrumentalities of state power. These issues will only be displaced to the conception of “Socialism” where they will predictably confound any assertion that some short-on-workers “worker’s state” or short on popular participation “New Democratic” people’s state actually is “their state” for either workers or the people.

This displacement of the problem is quite clear in the history of all those “socialist revolutions” that are captained by a self-proclaimed proxy for the working class (or for a coalition of progressive classes). The real test of whether a seizure of power has initiated a trajectory towards socialism is whether working class and popular self organization and self rule is expanding. By that test these regimes fail and so – to a substantial degree – did the movements, fronts and coalitions that led to them. They don’t meet the essential requirement that there be significant concrete steps towards replacing the administration of people with the administration of things. None of them have led to increasing democracy, to authentic and expanding popular participation or to any discernable “withering away” of the functions of the bureaucratic state – at least not over any appreciable time span.

While many modern Maoist positions appear to be oblivious to these issues, there are some substantial arguments – also evident in Kasama discussions – that elements of the Chinese revolutionary experience may provide some answers to these problems, and not just illustrations of them.

The thrust of these arguments is that Mao’s approach to contradictions among the people, in combination with the general radical and anti-bureaucratic thrust of the Cultural Revolution could have provided a workable alternative to the failed trajectory of the Soviet Union – if it had gained hegemony in the Chinese Communist Party and had successfully reversed some seriously mistaken policies in that party.

This argument deserves to be considered on its merits, even though the showing of some applicability to Chinese circumstances wouldn’t necessarily demonstrate it has a more general validity.

The argument has two elements as I understand it: First, it presents Mao’s approach to contradictions among the people as a model that would limit rule by command, mandate the expansion of open critical debate, and criticize the subordination of these priorities to “efficiency”, most notably including efficiency in the expansion of material production. Second, at certain points the Maoist Cultural Revolution called for establishment of a Commune State with all elected officials subject to immediate recall. This was a direct confrontation with the emerging bureaucratic nomenclatura that culminated in a call for a mass movement to “bombard the party headquarters”.

According to this scenario, these features of Maoism show a different version of democratic centralism, one that recognizes the dangers of the bureaucratization of the post-revolutionary state, as Lenin did also, but that makes a much more significant attempt to reverse the process through continuing popular class struggle. In this view it is not the party centric model itself that is the problem. The problem is the mistaken line that various parties have adopted. But the hegemony of that mistaken line is not an inevitable outcome, since a clear alternative developed in China and was almost victorious in that country. While the Cultural Revolution was ultimately unsuccessful, it could conceivably have succeeded and replaced the perspectives that had captured the Chinese party with categorical alternatives. So goes the argument.

This history isn’t my field, but I was active during the crucial moments and paid some attention to what was happening. I can remember the impact of the piece on “…Contradictions among the People.” The notion that disagreement wasn’t necessarily always treason to the revolution and betrayal of the party, and that it could, and should, be handled through open democratic discussion was certainly refreshing. So was the “…hundred flowers…” campaign presented in the same document. It all appeared to be a much more balanced and comprehensive response to the issues that had finally emerged (for Communists, that is, who were well behind the awareness curve as usual) with the secret denunciation of Stalin’s “cult of the personality” at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. It was also a welcome break from Peking Review’s implausible “Great Leap Forward” economic stories about backyard steel production and Mao’s ability to grow record size melons in his window box.

Some believe that this piece on non-antagonistic contradictions embodies an actual alternative conception of revolutionary organization, one that was partially employed in China, but eventually defeated. In retrospect, I certainly don’t agree. The issue is important because there are revolutionary perspectives and groups that adhere to what they understand as this rectified Chinese model–a centralized vanguard (party, movement, charismatic leader) with a correct mass line leading a “revolutionary people” to state power as the platform for constructing a “socialism” – perhaps a “21st Century socialism.”

We should be way past the point where we accept best readings of these historic documents and expect that there were or will be good faith applications of them in practice. So let me try a more skeptical “worst” reading of Mao on “…Contradictions among the people.” Here is a key passage:

“But this freedom is freedom with leadership and democracy is democracy under centralized guidance, it is not anarchy …”

(Note: this and the following citation are from internet sources that lack adequate page references. This passage can be found relatively early in the first section. d.h.)

Proceeding further into the argument we reach Section VIII, containing the “…hundred flowers bloom…hundred schools contend” injunction. This still sounds good as I remember it from the time. However, relatively quickly we encounter a set of the rules for dividing the “flowers” from the “poisonous weeds.” Most of these rules raise questions. Consider, for example, nos. 2 and 5 that Mao indicates are the most important: Number 2 stresses that “weeds” include ideas and criticisms that will not be “…beneficial to socialism.” So who decides what is beneficial and what is not? Number 5 provides a good clue to this answer: (Flowers d.h.) “…should help to strengthen and not shake off or weaken the leadership of the Communist Party.” (These rules are in the middle of Section VIII. d.h.)

This clarifies a more plausible interpretation of the content of the “democracy under centralized guidance” and a better framework for understanding the limits of nice sounding positions about reasoned discussion, patient persuasion, open contention of different ideas, and the necessity to avoid arbitrary command and coercive tactics. Unfortunately, we have a near century of collective experience that demonstrates that such “worst” interpretations are the ones most likely to shed light on what actually happened.

In this particular case, the historical backdrop is significant. Mao presented the “Contradictions among the People…” speech to a major Chinese political meeting in November of 1957 – after Khruschev’s secret speech to the Soviet 20th Congress; after the Hungarian and Suez events; and well after tensions had mounted with the Soviet Union over industrial aid and economic policy, over the pending Soviet reversal of the excommunication of Yugoslavia, over the Sino/Indian border conflict, over the Sino Russian border, over the Quemoy Matsu incidents, and over the increasing centrality of the “Three Peacefuls” in Soviet ideology and Russian state policy.

When these factors are introduced – and there also are others more related to internal Chinese problems, particularly the voluntarist and highly mystified approach to economic growth of the “Great Leap Forward” – a subtext of real issues is apparent for virtually every element of Mao’s discussion. However, these actual issues that should have been commonly understood and democratically discussed, certainly in the Party, and, I think, generally in the society, remained mystified and, in some cases, as with the need for socialist unity, deliberately falsified. In the actual practice, the “leadership” and “centralized guidance” role that Mao endorsed for the party in this speech provided an effective barrier that denied the masses of people – and probably the bulk of the party cadres as well – any opportunity for informed and timely participation in a debate over the real alternatives that would determine the future of “their” society.

It’s a bit of a diversion, but a loosely related personal experience might highlight how the M.L. approach to democratic and participatory discussion on “serious” issues actually works. By the close of the 1950s there was ample evidence in this country, some of which was widely reported in the capitalist press, that the divisions between China and the Soviet Union were growing larger and more antagonistic. Nevertheless, this was not acknowledged in the CPUSA and was definitely not a permitted topic for membership speculation.

The official Sino/Soviet break came at the 81 Party meeting in the fall of 1960. The N.Y. Times immediately carried a detailed report despite the fact that the meeting was supposed to have been closed. The Times reporting had substantial credibility, since a couple of years earlier it had also printed Khruschev’s “Secret Report” to a closed session of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and forced that report to be made public before the Communist apparatus was prepared to deal with the repercussions.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Joe Hill’s “rebel girl,” was the chairwoman of the U.S. Communist Party and had headed the delegation to the 81 Party meeting. (The U.S. delegation also included the Chicago jeweler, Morris Childs – aka “Solo” – a long time FBI asset, who we now know was the source for both N.Y. Times reports.) Immediately after the Moscow meeting, Gurley Flynn toured the country to report back to the party. I was at two such meetings. The first was for a definitely atypical group of rank and file communists including my parents. The meeting included a number of knowledgeable activists who were not docile receptacles for anyone’s line and who read the N.Y. Times. Gurley Flynn was asked about the reports of a split between China and the Soviet Union and categorically denied that it had happened, launching into a heavy attack on; “comrades who rely too much on the capitalist press and its lies and distortions.”

At a meeting of the district leaderships of Washington and Oregon the very next day, a meeting largely populated by hacks who would never think to raise embarrassing questions or to question anything that came from party authority, Gurley Flynn began her report quite differently. I still remember the words quite well:

‘Comrades, I regret having to report that the Chinese comrades have fallen into complete adventurism and petty bourgeois leftism and have split with the international communist movement and the working class.”

Why the difference in reports? I asked at the time and was told that it was important to organize and plan such discussions carefully in order to “maintain morale and discipline.” That is what “centralized guidance” meant to me in the U.S. communist party, and it looks remarkably like what Mao is pushing in the Chinese Party in this period. The discussion only happens in a managed framework after the party leadership decides what is a “flower” and what is a “weed” for a cadre of slow-witted gardeners prone to fits of depression.

The Cultural Revolution period in the middle of the next decade is a more complicated situation. It is still hard to separate the truth from various different propaganda spins about the Cultural Revolution, particularly given the fact that very diverse tendencies all claimed to represent Maoist politics. There were certainly aspects of the movement that were anti-intellectual and presented a crude moralistic class reductionist perspective with cultish aspects. But there were also extremely important revolutionary strands centered on the Shanghai Commune experience. These were attempts to implement the directly democratic commune state – modeled on the Paris Commune – and on Lenin’s “State and Revolution.” They included a frontal attack on the domination of the society by the leading cadres of the party, an attack expressed in the slogan of “bombard the party headquarters” and made more concrete in the position that some 90% of the cadre of the Chinese Communist party should be removed from any position of authority.

It does not take much investigation to find that Mao was very ambivalent towards this element of the Cultural Revolution, specifically because of its attitude towards the merged party/state bureaucratic leadership group. Mao clearly held the position that the real problems within the party were limited to a “handful in positions of authority following a capitalist road.” The “handful” of capitalist-roaders (less than 10% was the way it was frequently quantified d.h.) was a constant theme in Mao’s centrist response to the left tendencies that were demanding a complete dismantling of the party/state apparatus. When the disagreement proved intractable, Mao supported the use of the army against the more radical segments of the Cultural Revolution movement and they were quickly crushed. Mao’s erstwhile allies among the more centrist elements in the movement shortly capitulated to similar fates providing what proved to be only a quite manageable disruption to the party structure

(Read the full piece by Antaeus on Kasama (4/27/09) and the ensuing discussion thread to see how this struggle developed – also how its suppression and failure is explained and rationalized in terms of “objective conditions” and a de-emphasizing of the point that the Shanghai Commune raised that the working class must emancipate itself.)

After the fact, there is little doubt that the left elements in Cultural Revolution had a more accurate understanding of the situation in China than Mao, assuming, as I find it very hard to do, that Mao genuinely believed all that he was saying. It is less clear, and definitely not the position of Antaeus, but I think that it is also true, that this experience demonstrates that no basic reform of the Chinese party/state was possible without calling the party-centric model into question, which specifically would include a critique of the last three words in Mao’s conception of “…democracy under centralized guidance.”

Transitions

The results of these workerless “worker’s states,” governing “for” the working class while ruling on the backs of actual working people, have been increasingly bureaucratized, repressive and exploitative societies

Such societies may be “socialist” (of either 20th or 21st century variant) in some superficial public relations branding sense, but that are certainly still part of human prehistory and of the realm of necessity. There is no evidence that these displacements of the representation dilemma to the post-revolutionary society has illuminated any path that is clearly in the direction of communism. This is notwithstanding a good deal of quickly forgotten propagandistic apologetics that claim this is exactly what is happening – think Venezuela currently, another demonstration of the infinite elasticity of left naiveté, a characteristic that in this and other cases is certainly not unique to the Leninists and Maoists.

There is no shortage of stubborn, thick-headed self-deception in every segment of the left, although some promote it more aggressively. But it is hard for anyone to deny that the new types of authoritarian and exploitative social formations that have emerged out of major revolutionary struggles, rather than being transitional steps to communism, have been seed beds for both evolutionary and counter-revolutionary reversions to the most barbaric capitalist archetypes. This process, combined with the futile attempts to rationalize and justify it, compound the cumulative disastrous impacts on revolutionary morale and further muddy any popular liberatory revolutionary vision.

One short side point here: I would be much more open to hopeful possibilities in the situation in Nepal, than, for example, in Venezuela, that more popular current blindspot for the left that forgets Peronism and the Monteneros, discounts the relevance of “post-democracy” positions linked to the strengthening of the state not its withering away, and hopes that the existing state will provide the impetus and resources to build from the top a dual power against it from the bottom. Good luck. In my opinion, the struggle in Nepal isn’t receiving the attention it merits. It may eventually provide a catalyst for a strategic reorientation within the M.L. left towards the problems I have been describing. I don’t see Venezuela functioning that way for anybody.

I opened this piece with a remark from a recent interview with a leading Maoist in Nepal identified as Comrade Binod.

Of course, there is a lot in the interview that stays with the traditional party-centric formulas, although these predictable left Maoist positions seem a bit at odds with the plaintive “…something wrong, somewhere…” comment that casts its shadow over growing questions about the model of revolution that had been accepted. Comrade Binod makes it clear that his concerns revolve around popular participation, individual freedom, and the legitimacy of the exercise of power under circumstances where the strategic task of a popular insurrection is on the order of the day.

So back to the original Kasama quote:

“Without State Power, all else is illusion.”

One actual illusion is that the capture of a state by a self proclaimed leadership is necessarily a step towards communism – whether its “leadership” is of the working class, the class “dirigente”, or of a broader and vaguer “revolutionary people” that incorporates the working class. For it to be a step towards communist society, there must be discernable movement towards the administration of things, not people. The substitution of “re-education” for the physical elimination of “class enemies” is not such a movement. Neither is it a significant revolutionary advance to replace the capitalist state with a different external authority that continues to administer people, but as if they were things – or maybe potentially wayward children.

What is needed is genuinely democratic participation in all major social decisions, as opposed to fabricated after-the-fact near-unanimities that hide the real dominance of technocratic notions of efficiency. There must be real steps towards expanding the individual freedom and autonomy necessary to make these changes real and substantive, not merely decorative. These are radically incompatible with all personality cults and near deifications of leaders or leaderships. Only with these changes will the outcome possibly be a different kind of state, a “Commune State” that will conceivably “wither away,” and only then is there real hope to establish a society where the “freedom of each is the condition for the freedom of all,” a society that is comprehensively and conclusively liberated from the domination of capital.

This does not stand in opposition to any possible need to exercise state power against the former ruling class – but it does indicates some limits on the methods this can employ without deforming our ultimate objectives.

Leaving aside those radicals that see separate communist organization as inherently authoritarian, the modern attempts to reconcile the Manifesto roles for communists with the notion that the working class must emancipate itself have led to this dilemma: On the one side, as Alonzo Alcazar said recently, “we are almost afraid to say ‘we’” and, on the other side, as the Kasama selection above demonstrates, the self-emancipation of the working class is put on the back burner until the “Socialist Revolution” is won by an internally disciplined party leading a disparate and only partially self conscious constituency – a constituency that lacks all capacity to provide the needed external discipline over “its” vanguard, except possibly if evolutionary reformism becomes the strategy – and that is hardly a good thing.

Radicals must determine what to do and how to do it somewhere between these equally inadequate alternatives, recognizing that we will probably not stumble into insights that resolve all dilemmas. The issues will have to be constantly reinvestigated and the proposed solutions reinvigorated in the light of changing conditions and developing potentials. This need for constant reexamination of premises based on a working feedback loop between the development and the implementation of policies is another argument for a critical, but also an organized and disciplined structure for revolutionary political work. It is also, however, an argument against a structure that substitutes its own processes – even if they are qualitatively better than what we have come to expect – for the emancipation of the working class in and for itself.

Democracy?

“From the point of view of ‘organized anarchism with a class struggle perspective,’ two kinds of organization are needed: (1) forms of mass organization through which ordinary people can grow and develop their collective strength, and (2) political organizations of the anarchist or libertarian socialist minority, to have a more effective means to coordinate our activities, gain influence in working class communities and disseminate our ideas.”

“Dual organizational anarchists often say that the role of the anarchist political organization is to ‘win the battle of ideas’, that is, to gain influence within movements and among the mass of the population by countering authoritarian or liberal or conservative ideas. Bakunin had said that the role of anarchist activists was a ‘leadership of ideas’.”

“But disseminating ideas isn’t the only form of influence. Working with others of diverse views in mass organizations and struggles, exhibiting a genuine commitment, and being a personable and supportive person in this context also builds personal connections, and makes it more likely one’s ideas will be taken seriously.”

“The idea of a ‘vanguard party’ is that a political organization is to try to draw to it the layer of the working class that has these sorts of leadership qualities and to use this ‘human capital’ to achieve a hegemonic position within mass movements. Its aim is to use this position of dominant influence to eventually achieve power for its party. And along the way it also thinks in terms of achieving power within the various union or mass movement organizations. This means congealing the party’s power through various methods of hierarchical control. This is formal leadership power and not just influence.”

“…the aim of libertarian socialism is that the masses themselves should achieve power, through mass direct democracy, not that a leadership group should do so through a party gaining control of a state. Reflecting this, the aim of the libertarian left activists should be to encourage self-management of movements/organizations.”

I’m citing selected excerpts from pages 4-5 of Wetzel’s article, “Anarchism, Class Struggle and Political Organization”. I found the article on Z-Net, but it is available from a number of sources. The selections indicate elements of his conception of anarchist political organization and strategy and contrast them with those of a “vanguard party.”

Presumably Wetzel has other writings on the subject since, for example, these say nothing about the various questions of internal unity and organizational discipline that Gambone treats in some detail. I also should note that all competent advocates of the vanguard party position would regard Wetzel’s description of it as a caricature – although I find it to be a reasonable interpretation that accurately presents the way most such groups function once they reach a certain threshold of size and influence and internalize the resulting hubris.

I have a fairly wide area of agreement with this perspective – as I understand it – but there are questions, there are gaps, and perhaps there are significant differences. Accordingly, I’d like to use the final sections of this discussion to consider some class struggle social anarchist positions on organization and strategy; including issues of democracy and participation within mass struggle; the element of capitalist class power and class policy with respect to legality, legitimacy and the potentially military dimensions of the struggle; the concept of “social insertion”; some approaches to workplace organizing; ending – at last – by returning briefly to the question of insurrection. None of this will be done adequately and I again apologize in advance.

This is the major problem that I see in these selections and in my understanding of the general approach. It posits an organization of revolutionary anarchists that relates to mass struggles in a collective and organized way; it recognizes that this organization should advance distinctively anarchist ideas; it provides a list of things that “vanguard parties” supposedly think and do which revolutionary anarchist organizations should not think and do. But there’s still not enough here to answer some very basic questions facing any revolutionary strategy – what are the potentials; how do we proceed; what are the appropriate standards for evaluating our work?

I mentioned earlier the importance of recognizing that we have a collective radical history, and that it is important to have a good handle on the facts of this history before making major judgments on its implications and motivations. I want to spell this out in a little more detail since I think it has particular relevance to anarchist critiques of Leninism that, in turn, are relevant to some of these questions of current approaches to work.

Although I have no overriding compulsion to defend major Leninist political interventions, past or present, general or specific, I do think we can only learn from criticizing such experiences if two conditions are met. The nature and significance of the issues that were/are addressed should be evaluated independently of the actions taken to address them. The actions taken to address them should be evaluated separately from the justifications offered for these actions, and both actions and justifications should be evaluated separately. This should provide an adequate factual groundwork before provisional judgments become hardened – which is particularly important when these are judgments that may assume a moralistic aspect.

The anarchist alternative to vanguardism in the selections cited above present greater democratic participation as the generic answer to most of the problems of revolutionary strategy. This same tendency is evident in the historical criticisms that don’t consider the possibility that the immediate issues of democracy and participation – and their limitations or restrictions – weren’t the only questions, or even necessarily the pivotal ones in various episodes of struggle. This has two consequences: it reduces the responsibility for revolutionaries to collectively formulate and advance their own positions and confront the underlying issues within various struggles in their own name – and the necessity to consider whether or not this was done properly in historical situations. It promotes the tendency to make premature and exaggerated moral judgments about matters that haven’t been adequately considered on a political level.

When current struggles are the focus – consider, for example, the recent anarchist exchanges over the English Oil Workers job actions that had some undeniably popular, but anti-internationalist elements – the discussions tend to be more realistic, but still not sufficiently centered on what can and should be done in situations where something must be done.

There can be a cost for being too quick to conclude a political analysis and draw moral conclusions. The accounting may come in the increased likelihood that in some marginally different circumstances parallel mistakes of commission will be made. It may also come as collateral damage from failures to confront real issues in an organized and collective way, not as external commentators and not as undifferentiated individual participants. Such errors of omission can result in important lost opportunities and even major setbacks.

There are crucial and complex issues of democracy, participation and militance where mass democratic struggles intersect with revolutionary groups that are attempting to intervene in them. It seems to me that class struggle anarchism tends to gloss over the tensions, contradictions and conflicts that are a necessary part of this intersection, although their general possibility is implied by Wetzel’s notion of “unevenness” – at least in my understanding of it.

Let me paraphrase another well known Marxist proposition: the “…ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas…” (taking “ideas” in the strongest sense of the term to include a range of cultural norms many of which are not really “thought”). These ruling ideas are supported by the tremendous institutionalized momentum of historical inertia, reinforced continuously by the exercise of both repressive and incorporative aspects of capitalist state power. “Normally” in most areas of the globe, even when they are resisting, working people and the working class are thinking, believing, and acting within some variant of capitalist ideology and capitalist culture. And, almost by the definition of normalcy, in “normal” times, no accurate index of popular opinion will show that the masses of people are with the revolutionaries, because, in a very basic sense, they are not. (Wetzel understands this, see p. 5, op cit) This is an aspect of reality that actually does matter, notwithstanding various spontaneists who discount the impact of this subordinated working class consciousness, since they see the working class always doing exactly what is possible in the given circumstances–no more and no less.

The ruling class ideas are not simply mirrored in the subordinated classes. The “high culture” of the actual rulers does not apply clichéd homilies like “Be all that you can be” or “With hard work, you can accomplish anything” to their own privileged lives. The ruling class does not question its own potential for class solidarity because “people won’t stick together,” although it certainly promotes such notions among the overwhelming majorities that are oppressed and exploited.

The primary manifestation of the dominance of the ruling ideas on popular attitudes is the mass buy-in to the “There Is No Alternative” mantra; the acceptance of the inevitability and essential rightness of the major features of the status quo and the ultimate folly and futility of collective resistance to it. For the majority of people, most of the time, this attitude predominates even while they are engaged in struggles and resistance that may test the framework of capitalist legitimacy in a given capitalist society and state. While these ruling ideas are never the only ideas and cultural patterns within the oppressed and dominated working classes, they determine the important segment of working class consciousness that Gramsci characterizes as “common sense,” or that consciousness that is constituted as “common sense” in periods of capitalist stability and normal routine.

Looking at the same issues in a slightly different framework, most episodes of mass and class struggle include elements of a struggle for “better terms” within capitalism, for reforms, as well as at least an implicit struggle against the capitalist system. Clearly, then, moments will occur in mass struggles when participatory majorities tacitly or explicitly acknowledge their subordination in exchange for selective concessions and a circumscribed security. Struggles that de-emphasize or that oppose concrete issues of internationalism or defer possibilities to expand the opposition to white supremacy frequently take on this character in this country.

Revolutionaries have no particular interest in any reinforcement, “democratic” or not, of this subordinated working class consciousness that is neither “in itself” nor “for itself,” but is distinctly “for another.” When revolutionaries cave in to such popular opinions, which certainly can be expressed in democratic decisions, the results can be just as damaging as any authoritarian manipulation. I don’t see how Wetzel deals with such situations where the revolutionary group should confront and challenge strongly held positions within the class and among the people.

For revolutionaries and revolutionary organizations including anarchist ones, certain principles constitute operating hypotheses–across all types of borders, an injury to one is an injury to all; under all circumstances, it is good and therefore “right to rebel.” The validity of these principles will be determined in the long run through revolutionary political practice, and not, typically, by decisions of the moment, no matter how participatory and democratic the decision process may have been. Periodic democratic reaffirmations of our principles are certainly welcome, but with or without such validation, they will remain our operating assumptions. Unless there are basic changes in the strategy and the conception of the purposes and objectives of the struggle, revolutionaries must persist in attempts to win broader support for them whatever the polling indicates. Of course there are some extremely stupid and counter-productive ways of doing this that should be avoided.

Where I agree with the anarchist perspective is that no thinking head and acting body notions and no mystified embodiment of the prospects for revolution in some individual “genius” can substitute for actual changes in the collective understanding of what is and what is possible. This understanding can only develop and become a real social force through the experience of active resistance to the power of capital and from the construction out of this resistance of a popular cultural alternative to capitalist “civilization.” The introduction of notions of general “objective” interests of some broader social group can sometimes be helpful to this process, and sometimes it can be needed even though it might not be helpful, but no such intervention substitutes for decisions that the actual participants in the struggle can recognize as their own, and none should be used as a club against such decisions.

This essential function of participatory democracy in the course of struggle is degraded by the nested structures of Third International organizational centralism; an inner ring where the Party leadership is the general staff and the cadre are the disciplined soldiers; an outer ring where the party is the general staff and the working classes are the grunts – or maybe the collateral damage.

Revolutionaries will normally encounter the issues of democracy and participation in complex situations where the issues of who should decide and who should participate are not clear cut. In most cases we will be a minority working with and within larger minorities, although frequently not that much larger, under conditions where the domination of capital is at least potentially under challenge; where some resistance to its command has developed; and where there is a need to internalize and generalize a deeper understanding of the collective experience of struggle to most effectively continue and expand it, making the break with the “ruling ideas” as categorical and durable as is possible.

An expectation that greater democratic participation will provide the best answers to all questions can obscure the real possibility that it can also substitute lowest common denominator approaches that accept the logic of capital for much less comfortable and less popular initiatives that might prove out to be more productive. It is not at all unlikely that a formally democratic and participatory approach will result in decisions that will not move the struggle forward, at least not in the opinions of the revolutionary grouping and the organized militants. So there may be moments in a struggle when a confrontation with democratically expressed “common sense” is important.

Participatory majorities in this operational context will frequently be different from statistical “majorities” in any broader quantitative sociological view. But even internally, there is no guarantee that formal democratic procedures will promote the expansion and intensification of the struggle. In fact, there will almost always be some arenas and occasions for decision making where “democracy” would certainly end or cripple the continuing struggle. Such contradictions will be reflected in tensions between the rank and file including its effective leadership in “normal” conditions and the organizing projects of revolutionary groups. It will be reflected in tensions between emergent mass vanguards and the elements tied to the security of the existing class compromises.

Of course, this is not an argument against rank and file democracy and participation and in favor of leadership and guidance of the struggle by organized groups of revolutionaries. M.L. formations also capitulate to such lowest common denominator tendencies more often than not. As Luxemburg had forecast for socialist parties in general, they are typically an organized drag on revolutionary potentials, the setters and enforcers of bureaucratic limits at times when masses of people are breaking with them. They are seldom the excessively Jacobin insurrectionists or the “dare to struggle, dare to win” kooks – on balance, unfortunately I would say.

This doesn’t mean that revolutionaries must always urge the fight forward. Many of us have experienced strikes or comparable insurgencies which have broken out of the institutionalized scripted routines and have seen a flowering of new leadership with new experiences of militant success and different conceptions of what success actually means. This upsurge of participation in a struggle, along with the more inclusive and substantive democratic discussion among the participants can lead towards more basic confrontations with capitalist economic and political power. These waves of enthusiasm can promote tactics that are not sustainable and objectives that are not attainable. This is not always a bad thing, but neither is it always good. It can result in significant and predictable setbacks and even lead to that “Revolutionary Suicide” that some Black Panthers perversely presented as a goal, or maybe a prediction.

As a willing participant in the sixties, I can provide numbers of examples of such situations, and they still flare up regularly at moments like the height of the anti-globalization struggle. This can result in militant majorities that do not properly calculate the gaps and unevenness between what they are willing to do at a given moment and what they and others, possibly not so directly involved, will support over time. Frequently the root cause is that the experience of ruling class repression is also “uneven” and more significantly it is very unevenly understood. Popular struggles can create militant operational majorities that do not appreciate that they have an enemy with the demonstrated willingness to kill hundreds of thousands to maintain power–at times with actions that are barely rational in terms of the stakes in particular struggles. They don’t understand that they have an enemy that is also able to fine tune repression, making its impact maliciously selective and compellingly divisive.

So there will be (and have been) points where it may be necessary and important to retrench, to consolidate advances and accept necessary losses, even while additional victories still seem attainable to many participants in the movement. It will certainly be unpopular, but it may be right to question or even challenge a militant majority under such conditions. Of course, this should be done with the greatest of care because nothing is more important than the willingness to fight collectively for important objectives although they may appear to be “unrealistic” within the hegemony of capital. The very worst position for revolutionary groups is to be behind the struggle when the action starts, counseling caution and timidity–patience and the long view.

Organized revolutionary groups have made mistakes in all areas and in every conceivable direction, However, no listing of past or potential mistakes takes away the need for an organized activist project, a project that is more than a stance and a vision; one that raises the need to take risks, including the risk of being quite wrong, to help transform the political context and balance of forces.

When mass insurgencies develop they transform popular consciousness and existing institutional frameworks, but never permanently. After everything is considered, revolutionaries must also act because there is no underlying dynamic that guarantees advances will be cumulative and irreversible. I don’t see this understanding anywhere in Wetzel’s arguments. But without it, we will be always lost: either just waiting for the “event,” pretty much guaranteeing that it will impact us more than we impact it; or bogged down in a deadening march through the institutions that ties us tighter and tighter to them and to the modes of operation that are realistic within them, not to mention, frequently binding ourselves to people that will almost certainly fall on the wrong side in an upsurge.

Beyond the issue of whether revolutionaries must organize themselves separately as a base from which to participate in class and popular mass struggles, there is the issue of the political content of that work. I agree with Gambone that the revolutionary group should be disciplined and that it should be politically unified along critical and coherent ideological lines. The questions still remain: What does it do? How does it do it?

Ruling Class Power & Policy

The vagueness of Wetzel’s answers extends to another problem. A potentially revolutionary working class movement is a mortal threat to the ruling class that controls the system of laws and deploys the bodies of armed men and women. A revolutionary grouping that attempts to implement a perspective towards this end will also be seen as a threat as it begins to have some impact. In fact, we cannot assume there will always be space for open legal political advocacy of the revolutionary supercession of capital, just because it is possible now when we are a feeble challenge – not unless we also assume that very low ceilings mark the limits of our potential.

How is it proposed to contend with the power of the capitalist state and develop the capacity to deal with and within repression and illegality? The space for “legal” struggle has been much more constricted in this country at times in the past; it is essentially absent right now in many other countries. This must be taken into account. Will these issues never materialize because the U.S. left is destined to remain a tolerated nuisance at the margin providing a fig leaf of tolerance and openness to support the hegemonic power? I don’t think so. And further, in my experience, these are issues that can develop and have developed almost overnight in the past -and could again.

The questions of “legality” lead directly to the problems/potentials of military forms of struggle and these also must be treated in a clear fashion. We know that these are immediately issues in much of the world, how can they be off the table in the center of capitalist power. Is the assumption – as appears with Alcazar – that the problems are so overwhelming that we should put them out of our head and operate on the premise that legality will be the norm and not the exception, since no forms of illegal activity, specifically including armed struggle, are viable in this country? This is a risky assumption for a number of obvious reasons. One that is less obvious is the growing presence of other revolutionary tendencies, neo-fascist to national anarchist, that explicitly do not accept it and are increasingly attracted to modern theories of “a-symetric” “4th Generation Warfare.”

Wetzel doesn’t pursue these issues in what I’ve read as I don’t intend to pursue them here. I have to assume that he might think it is a discussion for another time and place–and another method and format – as I do also.

However, we are left with the situation where, to an unfortunate degree, Wetzel’s approach appears to rely on a cooperative capitalist state standing aside until it is too late to successfully defend itself, allowing us to develop an effective counterpower contending only with our own bumbling and with working class inertia. We are left with no indication of any responsibilities of revolutionaries to prepare for insurrection, for the forceful destruction of the state apparatus of capitalism when and where political circumstances make it possible. Not to mention the opposite responsibilities – including work to prevent premature or otherwise problematic military initiatives.

Instead, Wetzel offers a gradual and prolonged process of creating a dual power alternative through incremental steps which will “wither away” the capitalist counterpower. This does not take adequate account of the very “unevenness” of struggle that Wetzel raises. It doesn’t consider how today’s advances can obstruct tomorrow’s struggles – how concessions in one area can facilitate repression in another. It doesn’t take account of other political players with other agendas that are not going to be content to sit back and watch. In short, I think it is a perspective with serious utopian downsides, one that will have a great difficulty transcending the “unevenness” of the struggle and developing a mass revolutionary constituency that will not live in the old way any longer.

Conclusion

This will be brief.

I recently read a report by an Irish class struggle social anarchist about a tour he took around the U.S. and his impressions of the anarchist movement overall and in specific localities.

One point that I noted with more than a little consternation was that he treated “insurrectionist anarchism” as little more than the anti-working class anarchist primitivism of the Eugene variant. It does seem that class struggle social anarchists tend to discount the politics of insurrection, ceding the issue to various “post-left” elements, including the “crazies” among the life style anarchists, where it becomes little more than an element of generational extremism, a theatrical pose that will evaporate in the face of any real repression, if not at the mere possibility of repression such as followed after 9/11.

I think that the issue of insurrection, the basic reason to take Lenin seriously, is an essential element of a revolutionary perspective right now. I don’t think that Wetzel or much of the class struggle social anarchist tendency agree. But I think it is hard to apply his concept of “unevenness” without reaching this conclusion. The ebbs and flows of the revolutionary process in different geographical and social spaces, combined with the different ruling class policies of suppression and incorporation make it unlikely that any political perspective can incrementally advance towards a revolutionary transformation without there being moments where only an exercise of collective will, a leap into the realm of the possible with no guarantees, will prevent an effective reversal of the process. As this dilemma emerges globally in open spaces and across boundaries, with different stages of development and different rates of change forming a complex mosaic where no one element can be treated in isolation, the issue of whether to take power when it appears possible, but also problematic, will inevitably emerge and we will either have a prepared – or an unprepared, and therefore certainly inadequate – response.

The development of mass revolutionary sentiment is not an extended and uniform process, but the result of sharp breaks and new normals that produce a strata of revolutionaries today that may not even have been the reformists of yesterday. These are not people who are discovered through a process of patiently arguing and convincing, but people who create and discover themselves through the unexpected leaps in perception and self conception that happen in actions, fights, struggles.

Alain Badiou, who I must get around to reading instead of reading about, has this conception of the “event”; sharp epochal changes that can transform potentials and problems – opening up new vistas for revolutionaries, if they recognize what is happening in time, if they have a program to capitalize on it in time, if they are not trapped in old paradigms until the time is passed. There are problems that I see with my limited understanding of Badious’s argument. It looks like there is little worthwhile doing until the event occurs, but we don’t know its coming and we may miss it, so we must be content with mulling over the “idea of communism.”

I think, alternatively, that revolutionary organization should work to precipitate the “event” because that is the course most likely to leave us prepared to capitalize on it. I think this involves developing organizational forms that are mobile and flexible, and that are looking to intervene, not because they have the truth, but as a part of the development of the will to create new truths.

I think further that we should be aware of the specific liabilities that are tied to our ultimate goals as communists. We look to promote a universalistic liberatory future. But the very “unevenness” of the political circumstances creates obstacles to our perspective that are advantages to certain of our radical rivals. Rivals who also look to take advantage of an “event”, but in ways that threaten to unleash a centrifugal spiral into barbarism.