From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: What could "proletarian socialism" possibly mean?
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 22:25:14 -0600


Harald.

> Greg, thanks for your reply but I have been busy with other things,
> and have not manged to keep up with the speed of posting on
> the aut-op-sy recently. Though I have felt tempted to intervene on
> the thread of unions, where I no doubt have a different perspective
> than Chris for instance ... (and also some strong doubts concerning
> the accuracy of historical outline, at least if we look beyond the
> particular  history of unionism in the U.S.)
>
C'mon Harald, I laid out some pretty tempting bait to get you into this :)
Seriously though...

I want to get your take on this, in part because I feel that a fairly
serious difference exists between trade and craft unionism versus
anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism, etc.  For example, I take
the IWW to be both a union and something much more than a union and so I do
not include it within the discussion at some level, though to be fair I
would have to.  I also did not include Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, or
Italian and French revolutionary syndicalism or other strains I am even less
familiar with outside of Europe and the US.

However, maybe you do not see a qualitative difference between
anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism and unionism.  On some level,
I do and I do not, since I think that all types of syndicalism have seen
their day and had serious limitations in the earlier period anyway
(different from Social Democracy, but no less crippling for that.)

Please, given your experience and dedication to anarcho-syndicalism I would
appreciate your thoughts on this, regardless of our level of disagreement.

> How ever you bend and twist it, within the realm of modern
> production, the question of whether we will be able to
> create a classless socity will be termined by our capability
> to create non-hierachical organisational structures,
> not at least of the horisontal, borderless kinds. This is
> a fundamental socio-material precondition for a classless
> society within the realm of modern production that Marx, and
> even less Englels never quite understood, which made
> them turn to idealism and silly, stupefying polemical tricks
> of the kind repeated again on this list about not having
> a committee steering an airplane. (Surprise, surprise, this
> was presiely the kind of "natural authority" also explicitely
> supported by Bakunin.)  Communism means to gain
> power over our own lifes and destinies or it means nothing,
> or at best an enlightened despotism, with the idealism of
> "serve the people" of social democracy of Maoism.
>
I actually find myself sympathetic to this idea as a critique of Marx and,
even more so, Engels.  One of the worst things written by Engels in Marx's
lifetime is the little piece of drivel 'On Authority'.  Marx's own ideas at
least partially reflected this as he supported Engels' political use of this
and the critique of 'The Bakuninists' in Spain, though I think that when not
addressing his feuds with Bakunin and anarchism, both he and Engels actually
were much better than this (see Engels' letter to August Bebel in 1874 on
the Commune and 'the dictatorship of the proletariat'.)

The critique of the Critique of the Gotha Program is more serious.  I wonder
why Marx presented the issue as having two phases here, but nowhere else.  I
wonder in part if he was not being a bit pedagogical, since these were
extended margin notes and Engels in his letter to Bebel does not engage in
this kind of 'two-stage' thinking.  It may be that Marx here formalizes a
process which will in fact be much less 'stagey' in order to be explicit
that even after a short (at most a few years, in part predicated on the pace
of international revolution/class struggle) 'dictatorship' (the period where
more than anything the power of the capitalist class is still being broken
materially in revolution, civil war, etc., NOT a specific state form), the
whole process of the elimination of the filth of thousands of years of class
society will not simply be over, presto-change-o.

Anyway, cheers,
Chris



     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---