Date: Fri, 28 Feb 1997 16:16:04 +1000
From: sjwright-AT-vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au (Steve Wright)
Subject: Re: Strategy, let us see


Just a few quick comments following on from Harald's post a week or so ago
on strategy and other matters. Harald raised a whole series of questions,
but I only have time and energy to take up a few of them.

>        With or without power Leninism and social democracy have been
>strategies
>that disciplined workers in ways that made workers more, not less, adaptable
>to capitalistic relations. The historical role of the left has mostly been
>to be the vanguard of new capitalistic strategies and adaptations.

While I agree with this, I wonder whether we don't need to explore further
why significant sections of the working class have supported these
strategies at different times, at the expense of those you mention like the
AAUD/AAUD-E and the syndicalists. After all, didn't the official German
unions hit their peak of membership at precisely the time (e.g. 1919-20)
when miners in the Ruhr were dissolving local union branches and setting up
locals of the AAUD and/or FAUD? Here I suspect Monty's original piece is on
the right track when it discusses the power over other proletarians which a
minority was granted with each of these deals.

Apropos of nothing, today I stumbled across this intriguing paragraph by
Immanuel Wallerstein:

'. . . neither in Eastern Europe nor anywhere else in the world is it
likely that people ever again will believe in the Leninist version of the
promises of rational reformism (under the appellation of socialist
revolution). This is of course a disaster for world capitalism. For the
belief in Leninism had served for 50 years at least as the major
*constraining* force on the dangerous classes in the world-system. Leninism
in practice had been a very conservative influence, preaching the
inevitable triumph of the people (and hence implicitly patience). The
protective cloak has now been lost to the dominant strata in the modern
world-system. The dangerous classes may now become truly dangerous once
again. Politically, the world-system has become unstable' - 'The end of
what modernity?', _Theory & Society_ 24/4, p.484.

 >        One thing I like with your piece is that it seems to be a
departure from
>the in some aspects "ultra-anarchism" of autonomist marxism which often have
>troubled me (as ananarchist), where the complex question of organization has
>been reduced - if not always - to the *circulation of struggles*, a term I
>suspect is derived from capitals own circulation.  In a way this contradicts
>the claim of the working class's ability to act autonomously. Not there has
>not emerged some important insights through this approach,  and it has had
>the advantage of being an open one - still it is wanting in something. I
>believe we agree on this.

I agree with Harald that talking of the 'circulation of struggles' without
addressing the limits imposed by the forms they assume is wrong-headed. And
for all my sense (blind hope?) that struggles continue in the subterranean
form mentioned by Henri in his recent post, I still envisage a hierarchical
order of struggles, at the pinnacle of which stands mass 'autonomous'
organs such as councils or assemblies. Perhaps that is wrong-headed too, an
attempt to project my own desires outwards. After all, the 'Class in its
Autonomy' - or rather, the real live human beings who have nothing to sell
but their ability to work - is nothing if not perverse, regularly taking
revolutionaries, reformists and capital alike by surprise.

Could it be that some of us in English-speaking countries, where mass class
organisation independent of the official labour movement is still a rarity
(was the last instance the Poll Tax movement in Britain?), play down the
*form* of organisation because open struggles, when they do occur, continue
to involve a working class 'use' of that official labour movement? Whereas
in countries like Italy and France, where there are small but real
instances of such independent class organisation, efforts can be made to
hold these up as an alternative reference point?

Steve


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