Date: 06 Jun 97 01:45:01 EDT
From: neil <74742.1651-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: left-communism VS. spontaneity


Dear friends,

Below is a good  response  which deals with the problems 
of just relying on 'spontaneity'  in the day to day struggles 
of workers against the capitalists & shows the need to build 
from the base , a revolutionary  internationalist political party
from the life of actual industrial  class combat in the fight 
to eventually overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie.

Neil
---------- Forwarded Message ----------

From:	CWO, 106361,1743
TO:	Raqs Media Collective, INTERNET:raqs-AT-giasdl01.vsnl.net.in
CC:	A Smeaton, INTERNET:smeatoaj-AT-uwec.edu
	Curtis Price, INTERNET:cansv-AT-igc.apc.org
	Mauro, INTERNET:batcom-AT-poboxes.com
	Neil C, 74742,1651
	Rahim, INTERNET:eraramo-AT-pc-mail.ericsson.se
DATE:	6/5/97 12:36 PM

RE:	Message from Internet

Dear Comrades


You've missed the main point of our criticism which is that your 'Ballad' has
nothing political to say.

To take the most important point first, the question of revolutionary
organisation for the emancipation of the working class.  We entirely agree that
the future communist society will not "be the product of the imagining of a few"
with the rest of the working class ("others") following and acting on the" basis
of that imagining".  However, you say that this is unacceptable to you.  We say
that this is unacceptable because it is IMPOSSIBLE . It is idealist utopianism.
The world is not changed by the dreams of intellectuals being taken up by the
masses.  Nor will it be changed by every wage worker "imaginatively inventing"
his/her own utopia.  We who are living under capitalism today can't possibly
predict what the future global community will be like precisely because it will
be shaped by the human 'collectivity' as it responds to material and practical
problems.  Unlike our pre-marxian forebears, we are not concerned with drawing
up more or less imaginatve blueprints for the future. That is not what we meant
when we said that your document lacks a vision of communism.

To our mind it's confusing to speak of communism simply in terms of  a
"non-hierarchical" society and to present the struggle for communism as as a
struggle against hierarchies and leaders. [In a strict sense it is also wrong,
since  exceptionally  talented or skilled individuals in particular fields will
always be recognised and admired by their fellow creatures, albeit that in a
communist world DIFFERENT talents will be appreciated.]  But to return to the
point.  You know; we know; that communism means a stateless, classless society
where wage labour, commodity production and money do not exist and where
everyone who is physically and mentally able contributes to the communal effort
of producing society's needs and to the equally communal process of deciding
what those needs are.  [Although it doesn't mean the abolition of work
altogether as your Ballad implies.] How do we know this?  Is it because each of
us has responded to our own experience of wage labour and happened to have
'imaginatively invented'  a similar 'non-hierarchical global community'?   Or is
it because we, in our own political 'collectivities', have (even indirectly)
absorbed, read, discussed and criticised the ideas in key political texts -
notably, in this case, the Communist Manifesto?  When it comes to HOW wage
workers can transform their implicit resistance to capitalism into an outright
revolutionary struggle for its overthrow and replacement with communism we
entirely agree that this is a "historically derived" path; i.e. it is not a path
which is naturally revealed by the continuous workplace skirmishes which occur
daily under capitalism but rather requires an appreciation of the historical
lessons of previous struggles of our class, an understanding of the nature of
capitalist society and the capitalist state, and in fact a [historically
conditioned] vision of a communist alternative to existing society.  In other
words, communist consciousness does not arise directly from the immediate
struggle of 'wage workers' but is the collective product of theoretical
analysis, historical experience and reflection on that experience.  Now, at
least the CWO and the International Bureau make no bones about the lessons we
draw from past experience and apart from our regular press these are summed up
in the IBRP Platform and the CWO's Socialism or Barbarism.  Despite our long
relationship KK has never "critically evaluated" either of these texts.
However, this is not our current preoccupation.  Our concern is that KK
currently says less and less about what it has derived from history about the
path to communism and that the Ballad Against Work doesn't say anything at all,
at least not clearly and explicitly.  

Your letter, however, is more revealing and confirms that KK is becoming more
and more subject to what you yourselves once termed the "fetishising of
spontaneity" (as opposed to the "fetish of the party").  [In a KK text ..."for
discussion on 'Challenges before the communist movement' at Nagpur, 15-16 Feb
1992"] Five years or so ago KK could state that "Between these two extreme
views, there is the possibility of an approach which synthesises both the
objective and subjective factors.  There is an urgent need for marxists to join
on a broad international platform."  With this we could only concur, but we did
take issue with your view of the Russian Revolution, summed up in the sentence
that followed, viz: "With all its limitations the Bolshevik practice between
Feb. 1917 and Oct. 1917 provides a direction to a productive relationship
between a marxist organisation and the working class."  Without going into the
details, we argued that this revealed an essentially anarchistic view of October
as a Bolshevik coup d'etat, the beginning of an attempt to establish a party
dictatorship over the working class.  You didn't accept this and evidently saw
no need to re-examine the strange conclusion you had drawn that the party which
had raised the watchwords which best articulated the immediate aspirations and
way forward for the working class [Down with the War and All Power to the
Soviets], which had encouraged the Russian proletariat to see their revolution
as the first step in the world revolution, which had organised and led the
insurrection, that on the morning afterwards should no longer have  "a
productive relationship" with the working class.  This is an untenable position.
Either you have to recognise that the most class conscious workers, those most
clear and active in the revolutionary struggle,  were Bolsheviks (hence the
Party's enormous following and influence over the working class as a whole) and
that this didn't change the morning after the insurrection; or you have to
conclude that somehow the working class was duped into allowing soviet power to
be substituted by a vicious party dictatorship.  In the latter case, you have to
immediately imply a separation between the party and the working class and
downplay the significance of the political leadership accorded by the Bolsheviks
[particularly Lenin with the April Theses] in the initial success of the
revolution.  Moreover, as you found, it is difficult to explain how "the writer
of 'State and Revolution' came as you put it, to "actively particpate(s) in the
formation of a standing army and secret police ..." only 3 or 4 months after
October if you see the road to communism in idealist terms, simply as acting in
consonance with communist philosophy, and ignore the fact that before the
proletariat in Russia could get on with enjoying life in the transitional
'semi-state' they had to confront the armed reaction of their own bourgeoisie
backed up by the military might of over a dozen imperialist powers.  If the
formation of the political police and the red army were mistakes they were
mistakes forced on the proletariat by the exigencies of the situation. Granted,
the Bolshevik Party ended up as the executor of a brutal state capitalist
dictatorship in a society where the word 'soviet' was emptied of all meaningful
content but this was after more than 2 years of absolutely devastating civil war
and famine, not to mention the failure of the revolution in Germany and the rest
of Europe.  Literally hundreds of thousands of workers, particularly the most
class conscious, BOLSHEVIK workers, died.  Many more were forced by starvation
to 'drift back to the countryside' .  The rest of the working class in Russia
was on its knees. The influx of new members into the party in 1921 at the same
time as factions were officially banned is, we think, symptomatic of what had
happened to the Bolshevik Party: from the guiding light of the revolution to
conservator of the Russian state.  Excuse us dwelling on what you probably know
very well but what we are trying to emphasise is that essentially the Bolshevik
Party became what it did as a result of the process of defeat of the revolution.
It was not the cause of that defeat.  On the contrary, the initial victory of
the proletariat in Russia would have been impossible without the Bolshevik
Party.  Don't you agree?  And don't you agree that this is the crucial lesson we
have to learn today in the face of the bourgeois version of history which tells
us that  all revolutions end up with reactionary terror and dictatorship, that
all power corrupts and that political parties per se are 'anti-democratic' and
bureaucratic (the 'iron law of oligarchy').  In other words, any attempt at
revolutionary political organisation will end up as a reactionary force.   This
scenario is of course echoed by the anarchists and in the case of the Russian
Revolution by the heirs of Hermann Gorter and the German Left, the council
communists. (And the so-called libertarian communists who may not even be aware
of their historical precursors.) The CWO began its political existence by
thinking it could follow in Gorter's footsteps and  build a "party of a new
type"  "hard as steel and clear as glass" and without  hierarchies.  However, we
had to break from this legacy, not only in order to have a consistent analysis
of the Russian Revolution (whose defeat the German Left explained essentially in
terms of the hierarchical Bolshevik Party) but in order to explain our own
existence as an organised, class conscious minority.  Most importantly, we had
to accept the necessity of the existence of such a 'precocious' minority of the
class in the development of a wider class consciousness and the practical
building of a revolutionary movement.  Once we did that (and again, this was a
process shaped by practical experience not an instantaneous intellectual
conversion) the difficult responsibility of building a clear political nucleus
capable of  influencing and politicising the daily class struggle has remained
our central aim.  Without, we hope, having a grossly exaggerated sense of our
own importance, we accept that without a two-way relationship between
revolutionary organisations and the wider class movement any sparks of class
consciousness generated from day to day clashes between capital and labour will
be dampened down by the unions and the capitalist left or simply burn themselves
out through lack of political oxygen.  

Our task, surely, is to encourage those sparks of consciousness to become
revolutionary flames by drawing them together in the political organisation, or
collectivity if you like, where they can develop into something more permanent
that is fired by the process of political education.  What worries us frankly,
is that KK does not accept this responsibility out of a misguided fear that
political leadership would disarm workers in struggle, would undermine their
self-reliance and ability to organise independently and so on.  In other words
your trajectory is  the self-contradictory path of 'libertarianism': a political
organisation which rejects the need to organise politically because all
supposedly proletarian organisations are hierarchical rackets designed to
"abduct" the struggle (like Jacques Camatte and his heirs, several of whom you
claim to "have gained immensely from") and undermine the self-confidence of
workers.  If this is the case, then what becomes of Kammunist Kranti?  Answer  -
limit your role to recognising and disseminating news of small independent
struggles from which "new forms of organised activity and resistance could
emerge".  Laudable as this is, disseminating news of struggles is not the be all
and end all of revolutionary work. Moreover, although we readily accept that
there is a distinction between the organisational forms workers create for
themselves when they begin to struggle outside the unions and a political
organisation or 'collectivity', we certainly don't accept that this means
political organisation is irrelevant to the class struggle.  (If this is what
you mean by the obtuse reference to "How some people in the name of the
proletariat can and do organise is fundamentally different from how wage workers
an do organised activity on a global scale.") The potentially class wide bodies
which emerge during struggles are in general temporary organs which disintegrate
or are diluted and co-opted by management as the struggle dies down. The
proletarian political organisation, on the other hand, is a permanent
acquisition OF THE WORKING CLASS (not a set of usurpers ready to act in the name
of and against the class) which not only disseminates news of struggles and
wherever possible is actively involved in them, but which also aims to generate
political consciousness by putting local struggles in the context of the
broader, long term struggle for communism.  And the best gauge of how successful
we have been in developing class consciousness is how far we are able to
strengthen the revolutionary political organisation.  A revolutionary
organisation which does not try to win over worker militants or, even worse,
which pretends that it is not really interested in doing so and when it does
pretends that it has nothing to teach them out of fear of being seen as just
another political racket is really leaving potential communists in the dark [and
arguably is one of the most dishonest of all].  

This is not a question of elitist intellectuals thinking they have all the
answers but of recognising that the struggle for communism is more than a
question of organisational forms.  By all means encourage workers to fight their
battles collectively without any illusions that the unions will do it for them
but we are in a better position to do this when we have communists in the
workplace - as we know KK has in Faridabad.  Now, are you saying that when
workers struggle autonomously there are no leaders?  This would be a complete
fantasy.  Of course the leaders are DIFFERENT leaders and are trusted by the
rest of their workmates because they haven't been part of previous union
sell-outs, management stooges or whatever.  It is the most clear sighted people,
with ideas about how to organise and the precise aims of the struggle who emerge
as leaders and who end up being delegated by their fellow workers to the strike
committee or whatever other collective body is created.  Naturally this is an
entirely different kind of leadership from the trade union official, with a
permanent job paid to act in the service of capital.  A genuine collective
struggle demands regular mass meetings and the participation of everyone
involved with worker delegates subject to recall.  As the strikes in the winter
of 1995/96 showed in France the steps towards such a struggle are not
necessarily going to be entirely outside the union mentality and framework.
(They are more likely to be if genuine communists are involved.) Unfortunately,
despite the undoubted widespread cynicism and mistrust of the trades unions that
exists today, it is not our experience at present that workers are itching to
break out on their own: they are either apathetic or still following the union
methods although with little expectation of success.  Evidently the situation is
different in India. In any case this does not alter our basic disagreement that
the anti-capitalist struggle is not about getting rid of leaders and hierarchies
as such.  On the contrary, communists have to be ready to put forward
alternative ways of organising and be prepared to take on the responsibility of
leadership.  Simply focussing on  'anti-hierarchical' forms of struggle is doing
a disservice to the working class and it is another fantasy to think that this
too cannot be co-opted by capital. [We are reminded of the plethora of
'self-management' struggles in the Seventies which ended up with workers taking
over bankrupt factories and self-managing their own, more intense, exploitation
and redundancies.  Today, for example, Japanese-style management techniques are
based on the concept of anti-hierarchy: apparently workers are more ready to up
productivity if they eat in the same canteens and think they are in the same
boat as management.] In short, we think that 'anti-hierarchy' is not the core
focus for communists.  Moreover, we think you are up a gum tree if you think
that the struggle is against work as such.  Against capitalist exploitation and
wage labour, certainly but communism will not mean the abolition of the
necessity to produce.  It WILL mean that everyone becomes a producer and an end
to the alienation of the majority of members of society from control over the
means to determine how and what is produced.

As for the details of the Ballad itself, it doesn't seem to us to be a very
concrete history. If you are talking about the history of the conditions of
exploitation over the last 200 years it's not true, at least here in Europe,
that things have steadily got worse since the inception of capitalism.
Certainly wages and living standards have been reduced since the onset of the
crisis in the early Seventies but conditions are still not the same as in the
early days of the industrial revolution.  The boom that followed the 2nd World
War gave workers in the metropoles an unprecedently high standard standard of
living: probably higher than the 'lucrative middle class market' that is
currently emerging in India, according to Financial Times reports.  The picture
is a much more complex one than you make out.  In our view it would have been
much more useful if you'd written a systematic article on the evolution of wage
labour in India with more conclusive evidence that living standards are worse
than under feudalism.  We'd also like to know to what extent globalisation
[notably the transfer of jobs from the metropoles] is affecting the structure
and conditions of the working class in India.  Is a relatively better-off
'workers aristocracy' being created?  More generally, we'd like to see you link
the worsening conditions of the working class to the capitalist crisis.  Is it
really simply that conditions have declined for 200 years?

However this is not the main criticism we would like you to address.  Our more
fundamental concern is that KK seems to have forgotten that to reach communism
both the soviets [workers councils] and the party [the organised expression of
communist consciousness] are necessary.  We are sorry to see how far you have
travelled down the spontaneist trajectory.  To our mind it means that the
efforts of KK will be increasingly wasted and irrelevant to the working class.

Internationalist greetings
ER
pp CWO/IBRP



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