File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-04.021, message 5


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


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