Date: Sat, 01 Mar 97 22:30:53 EST From: Walter Daum <WGDCC-AT-CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU> Subject: M-I: benighted workers? On Thu, 27 Feb 1997 01:50:58 +0200, Zeynep Tufekcioglu <zeynept-AT-turk.net> wrote: >The workers in this society are not just exploited in terms of their labour, their minds are faced with enormous pressure and oppression. There are ways that socialists and revolutionaries act as catalysts to bring about a revolution in workers consciousness and action before "the revolution". I think history shows on that without such a catalyst, workers are first to create personality cults, first to obey orders from strongman. A great majority of them don't have the experience of ruling for themselves, thinking for themselves, acting for themselves. > This wasn't the last word on this subject on this list, but I'd like to get back to it. It reflects an all too common view on the left, that workers need the input of non-working class socialists in order to come to revolutionary or simply advanced consciousness. In the same spirit, Louis P posted some time ago, on Sat, 28 Dec 1996 08:04:52 -0500 (EST): >Lenin had a totally different concept of a vanguard, but his idea was nothing new. It merely represented mainstream thinking in Russian and European Social Democracy. George Plekhanov, eighteen years before the publication of "What is to be Done?" stated that "the socialist intelligentsia ... must become the leader of the working class in the impending emancipation movement, explain to it its political and economic interests and also the interdependence of those interests and must prepare them to play an independent role in the social life of Russia." > The idea that the working class can be won to socialism only by a socialist intelligentsia from outside the class was indeed Plekhanov's (and Kautsky's, too). Lenin adopted it for a while, but then corrected himself when he saw the capacity of the revolutionary working class in 1905. It is unfortunately all too common for leftists to retain this conception, very convenient for people who don't see themselves as part of the working class. Lenin later wrote very differently. After 1905 he understood that revolutionary consciousness develops *within* the working class, through the vanguard *of* that class. "At every step the workers come face to face with their main enemy the capitalist class. In combat with this enemy the worker becomes a *socialist*, comes to realize the necessity of a complete reconstruction of the whole of society, the complete abolition of all poverty and all oppression." (Collected Works vol.16, p. 302.) "The working class is instinctively, spontaneously Social Democratic, and more than ten years of work put in by Social Democracy has done a great deal to transform this spontaneity into consciousness." (CW, vol. 10, p. 32.) Lenin operated on this understanding for the rest of his life. The key to success in 1917 was the vanguard party within the working class that fought for the revolutionary program. Reform- ism may indeed be an outlook within the working class at any time, even the predominant one. But it does not represent the historic outlook of the proletariat as it comes face to face with the drive for surplus value of its capitalist enemy. On the other hand, the petty bourgeoisie does have material interests deeply rooted in bourgeois society. Its perspective is to reform the system's inequities and work for class peace through class collaboration. Rosa Luxemburg summed the point up neatly in her polemic against Bernstein: "The question of reform and revolution, of the final goal and the movement, is basically, in another form, only the question of the petty-bourgeois or proletarian character of the labor movement." A fairly recent example of workers' consciousness running ahead of that of their intellectual advisers was the struggle in Poland in 1980 that created the Gdansk Inter-factory Strike Committee and was eventually detoured into the Solidarity union movement. The workers seized the factories, in effect establishing dual power in the region, and made far-reaching demands on the government for union rights and equality, abolition of censorship, a sliding scale of wages to resist inflation, workers' control of production, etc. Their ideology was reformist; their actions, however, created a revolutionary situation in which the proletariat was potentially challenging for state power. A major factor contributing to the workers' ideology remaining reformist was the role of the strike leadership around Lech Walesa and the "advisers" supplied by the Church and oppositional organs of the intelligentsia, all of whom campaigned for a "self- limiting" movement that would not challenge the official Party's "right" to rule. The advisers promoted economic demands and downplayed the political demands as too provocative against the Stalinist regime; the workers wanted both. There was indeed a personality cult around Walesa, established more by his intellectual hangers-on than by the workers themselves -- who almost threw him out of the leadership at the start when he was ready to end the strike far short of victory. The advisers were instrumental in creating a "strongman" to keep the workers under control. On a lesser scale, a current example of workers' consciousness advancing well ahead of their petty-bourgeois "adviser" is the recently ended newspaper strike in Detroit. The workers were told by their union leaders, local and national, to return to work unconditionally. The leaders argued that this decision was not a surrender but the way to save jobs. Yet the predominant feeling among strikers, to the extent that it can be gauged, seems to be the opposite. One of the striking locals held an advisory vote that unanimously rejected the return-to-work offer; but the decision had already been made over their heads. For all their better access to information, their supposed ability to think independently (which the workers allegedly lack), etc., the union bureaucracy -- the petty bourgeoisie within the workers' movement -- stabbed in the back the workers in whose interest they allegedly speak. The workers, despite -- more likely, because of -- the "enormous pressure and oppression" they indeed face (the loss of their jobs), wanted to continue the fight. Their petty-bourgeois leaders make every effort to deprive them of the "experience of ruling for themselves, thinking for themselves, acting for themselves." But the workers have other ideas. They don't always win. But their class interest and instinct pushes far ahead of the petty-bourgeois spirit of compromise with capital. Walter Daum --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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