The Political Process

A collection of political writings from across the world

Kapil Arambam http://kapilarambam.blogspot.com March 2009

Capitalism and socialism

Maurice Brinton of Solidarity outlines his view of traditional socialists, and libertarian socialists. December 1968

hat is basically wrong with capitalism? Ask a number of socialists and you will get a number of different answers. These will depend on their vision of what social ism might be like and on their ideas as to what political action is all about. Revolutionary libertarian socialists see these things very differently from the trad left. This article is not an attempt to counterpoise two conceptions of socialism and political action. It is an attempt to stress a facet of socialist thought that is in danger of being forgotten. When one scratches beneath the surface, progressive capitalists, liberals, Labor reformists, communist macro-bureaucrats and Trotskyist mini-bureaucrats all see the evils of capitalism in much the same way. They all see them as primarily economic ills, flowing from a particular pattern of ownership of the means of production. When Khrushchev equated socialism with more goulash for everyone he was voicing a widespread view. Innumerable quotations could be found to substantiate this assertion. If you dont believe that traditional socialists think in this way, try suggesting to one of them that modern capitalism is beginning to solve some economic problems. He will immediately denounce you as having given up the struggle for socialism. He cannot grasp that slumps were a feature of societies that state capitalism had not sufficiently permeated and that they are not intrinsic features of capitalist society. No economic crisis is, for the traditional socialist tantamount to no crisis. It is synonymous with capitalism has solved its problems. The traditional socialist feels insecure, as a socialist, if told that capitalism can solve this kind of problem, because for him this is the problem, par excellence, affecting capitalist society. The traditional left today has a crude vision of man, of his aspirations and his needs, a vision molded by the rotten society in which we live. It has a narrow concept of class consciousness. For them class consciousness is primarily an awareness of non-ownership. They see the social problem being solved as the majority of the population gain access to material wealth. All would be well, they say or imply, if as a result of their capture of state power (and of their particular brand of planning) the masses could only be ensured a higher level of consumption. Socialism is equated with full bellies. The filling of these bellies is seen as the fundamental task of the Socialist revolution. Intimately related to this concept of man as essentially a producing and consuming machine is the whole traditional left critique of laissez-faire capitalism. Many on the left continue to think we live under this kind of capitalism and continue to criticize it because it is inefficient (in the domain of production). The whole of John Stracheys writings prior to World War II were dominated by these conceptions. His Why You Should Be a Socialist sold nearly a million copies - and yet the ideas of freedom or self-management do not appear in it, as part of the socialist Objective. Many of the leaders of todays left graduated at his school, including the so-called revolutionaries. Even the usual vision of communism, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, usually relates, in the minds of Marxists to the division of the cake and not at all to the relations of man with man and between man and his environment. For the traditional socialist raising the standard of living is the main purpose 2

of social change. Capitalism allegedly cannot any longer develop production (Anyone ever caught in a traffic jam, or in a working class shopping area on a Saturday afternoon, will find this a strange proposition.) It seems to be of secondary importance to this kind of socialist that under modern capitalism people are brutalised at work, manipulated in consumption and in leisure, their intellectual capacity stunted or their taste corrupted by a commercial culture. One must be soft it is implied, if one considers the systematic destruction of human beings to be worth a big song and dance. Those who talk of socialist objectives as being freedom in production (as well as out of it) are dismissed as Utopians. Were it not that misrepresentation -is now an established way of life on the left, it would seem unnecessary to stress that as long as millions of the worlds population have insufficient food and clothing, the satisfaction of basic material needs must be an essential part of the socialist program (and in fact of any social program whatsoever, which does not extol the virtues of poverty.) The point is that by concentrating entirely on this aspect of the critique of capitalism the propaganda of the traditional left deprives itself of one of the most telling weapons of socialist criticism, namely an exposure of what capitalism does to people, particularly in countries where basic needs have by and large been met. And whether Guevarist or Maoist friends like it or not, it is in these countries, where there is a proletariat, that the socialist future of mankind will be decided. This particular emphasis in the propaganda of the traditional organisations is not accidental. When they talk of increasing production in order to increase consumption, reformists and bureaucrats of one kind or another feel on fairly safe ground. Despite the nonsense talked by many Marxists about stagnation of the productive forces bureaucratic capitalism (of both the Eastern and Western types) can develop the means of production, has done so and is still doing so on a gigantic scale. It can provide (and historically has provided) a gradual increase in the standard of living - at the cost of intensified exploitation during the working day. It can provide a fairly steady level of employment, so can a well-run gaol. But on the ground of the subjection of man to institutions which are not of his choice, the socialist critiques of capitalism and bureaucratic society retain all their validity. In fact, their validity increases as modern society simultaneously solves the problem of mass poverty and becomes increasingly bureaucratic and totalitarian. It will probably be objected that some offbeat trends in the Marxist movement do indulge in this wider kind of critique and in a sense this is true. Yet whatever the institutions criticized, their critique usually hinges, ultimately, on the notion of the unequal distribution of wealth. It consists in variations on the theme of the corrupting influence of money. When they talk for instance of the sexual problem or of the family, they talk of the economic barriers to sexual emancipation, of hunger pushing women to prostitution, of the poor young girl sold to the wealthy man, of the domestic tragedies resulting from poverty. When they denounce what capitalism does to culture they will do so in terms of the obstacles that economic needs puts in the way of talent, or they will talk of the venality of artists. All this is undoubtedly of great importance. But it is only the surface of the problem. Those socialists who can only speak in these terms see man in much less than his full stature. They see him as the bourgeoisie does, as a consumer (of food, of wealth,

of culture, etc.). The essential, however, for man is to fulfill himself. Socialism must give man an opportunity to create, not only in the economic field but in all fields of human endeavor. Let the cynics smile and pretend that all this is petty-bourgeois utopianism. The problem Marx said, is to organise the world in such a manner that man experiences in it the truly human, becomes accustomed to experience himself as a man, to assert his true individuality. Conflicts in class society do not simply result from inequalities of distribution, or flow from a given division of the surplus value, itself the result of a given pattern of ownership of the means of production. Exploitation does not only result in a limitation of consumption for the many and financial enrichment for the few. This is but one aspect of the problem. Equally important are the attempts by both private and bureaucratic capitalism to limit -- and finally to suppress altogether, the human role of man in the productive process. Man is increasingly expropriated from the very management of his own acts. He is increasingly alienated during all his activities, whether individual or collective. By subjecting man to the machine - and through the machine to an abstract and hostile will - class society deprives man of the real purpose of human endeavor, which is the constant, conscious transformation of the world around him. That men resist this process (and that their resistance implicitly raises the question of self-management) is as much a driving force in the class struggle as the conflict over the distribution of the surplus. Marx doubtless had these ideas in mind when he wrote that the proletariat regards its independence and sense of personal dignity as more essential than its daily bread. Class society profoundly inhibits the natural tendency of man to fulfill himself in the objects of his activity. In every country of the world this state of affairs is experienced day after day by the working class as an absolute misfortune, as a permanent mutilation. It results in a constant struggle at the most fundamental level of production: that of conscious, willing participation. The producers utterly reject (and quite rightly so) a system of production which is imposed upon them from above and in which they are mere cogs. Their inventiveness, their creative ability, their ingenuity, their initiative may be shown in their own lives, but are certainly not shown in production. In the factory these aptitudes may be used, but to quite different and non productive ends! They manifest themselves in a resistance to production. This results in a constant and fantastic waste compared with which the wastage resulting from capitalist crises or capitalist wars is really quite trivial! Alienation in capitalist society is not simply economic. It manifests itself in many other ways. The conflict in production does not create or determine secondary conflicts in other fields. Class domination manifests itself in all fields, at one and the Same time. Its effects could not otherwise be understood. Exploitation, for instance, can only occur if the producers are expropriated from the management of production. But this presupposes that they are partly expropriated at least from the capacities of management - in other words from culture. And this cultural expropriation in turn reinforces those in command of the productive machine. Similarly a society in which relations between people are based on domination will maintain authoritarian attitudes in relation to sex and to education, attitudes creating deep inhibitions, frustrations and much unhappiness. The conflicts engendered by class society take Place in every one of us. A social structure containing deep antagonisms reproduces these antagonisms in variable degrees in each of the individuals comprising it. There is a profound dialectical inter-relationship between the social structure of a society and the attitudes and behavior of its members. The dominant ideas of each epoch are the ideas of its ruling class, whatever modern sociologists may think. Class society can only exist to the extent that it succeeds in imposing a widespread acceptance of its norms. From his earliest days man is subjected to constant pressures designed to mould his views in relation to work, to culture, to leisure, to thought itself. These pressures tend to deprive him of the natural 3

enjoyment of his activity and even to make him accept this deprivation as something intrinsically good. In the past this job was assisted by religion. Today the same role is played by socialist and communist ideologies. But man is not infinitely malleable. This is why the bureaucratic project will come unstuck; its objectives are in conflict with fundamental human aspirations. We mention all this only to underline the essential identity of relations of domination - whether they manifest themselves in the capitalist factory, in the patriarchal family, in the authoritarian upbringing of children or in aristocratic cultural traditions. We also mention these facts to show that the socialist revolution will have to take all these fields within its compass, and immediately, not in some far distant future. The revolution must of course start with the overthrow of the exploiting class and with the institution of workers management of production. But it will immediately have to tackle the reconstruction of social life in all its aspects. If it does not, it will surely die.

Theses On the Chinese Revolution and Cultural Revolution

By Cajo Brendel Solidarity (U.K.) Pamphlet # 46 (1974)
Preface to the Second English Edition

he Theses on the Chinese Revolution were written during the spring and summer of 1967, when China was in the threes of the so-called Cultural Revolution. Information concerning these historic events was insufficient at the time. The author nevertheless made an attempt at a social analysis, that brought him to certain conclusions concerning the Chinese Revolution as a whole. The authors views differ fundamentally not only from those of the Maoists, but also from those of all sorts of Leninists (Trotskyists included). Unlike what they think-and in contradistinction too to bourgeois appreciations-the Theses dont accept that the political aims of the Chinese Communist Party determined the Chinese events. On the contrary, those political aims and the events that really occurred were both aspects of the stage of development of the Chinese Revolution. This revolutionary process is none other than the transition from precapitalist forms of production into a modern society, based on wage-labour, and on its way to something like state- capitalism. The Theses on the Chinese Revolution were first published in Dutch in the monthly Daad en Gedachte (Act and Thought). in the spring of 1969 they were published in France in Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils. In 1971 the first English edition appeared as an Aberdeen Solidarity pamphlet. In 1973 an Italian edition was published in Caserta. In one respect this second English edition is like the first; in the Theses proper, nothing has been changed. Although the author resorted to several sources, among them some well known sinologists, outstanding Chinese communist writers (such as Mao himself), pamphlets (published in English in the Peoples Republic of China) and articles from Peking Review, he desisted from footnotes. He preferred to convince, not by mentioning names or titles, but by the inherent logic of the series of events that have been recorded. True enough, many explanations could now be expanded on the basis of greater knowledge. But to do so would have taken us far beyond the original character of the Theses, although it would not have meant any fundamental reappraisal. The new facts at the authors disposal have not basically transformed his views. On the contrary, as he sees it the latest developments in China have only confirmed them. This is best understood if one looks at two of his other writings, added here to the primary text by way of introduction. The first deals with some aspects of Chinese foreign policy. It was finished shortly after the restoration of diplomatic relations between the Peoples Republic of China and the USA. The main point is a critical look at Chou-En-lais attitude to the Ceylon and Bangladesh revolutions. The second point-specially dealt with for this edition-describes the conflicts within the Chinese Communist Party as they became apparent at its Tenth Congress and through the anti-Confucius campaign. Both essays must be considered as a link between the seven year old Theses and the present state of affairs. The author hopes that they will contribute to making current events more easily understood. 4

Introduction (1974)

1) Some Reflections on the Counter-Revolutionary Nature of Chinese Diplomacy

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century the USA, under George Washington, threw off the British colonial yoke. Even before the French people had made their own middle-class revolution, the Americans had sent to the courts and governments of a predominantly feudal* (*The British Kingdom (since the revolutions of 1641 and 1688) and the Dutch Republic were the sole exceptions.) Europe their own diplomatic representatives. To the Paris court of Louis XVI there came in this role one of Americas most able ambassadors: none other than Benjamin Franklin. In the preceding years he had not only been a red-hot champion of American independence, but he had also acquired an international reputation as a physical scientist. In his person two things found themselves combined. He was enveloped in the lustre of the young Transatlantic Republic which, by its very existence, announced to the absolutist princes that their reign had come to an end. On the other hand, Franklin was the personification of pure science, unobstructed by ecclesiastical dogma. Technical progress, based on the new science, had enabled the rising bourgeoisie to build up its own forms of` production in countries that were still dominated by the nobility and clergy. The fact that it was Benjamin Franklin who had set foot on the French shore as the ambassador of the despised American Republic, had to be tolerated by the worn out order. It also stimulated the self-consciousness of the French Third Estate. The stimulus was made even stronger by the behaviour of this diplomatic representative of the early. American employers. Benjamin Franklin had always led a simple life. This was, on the one hand, the result of puritanism (the product of rising capitalism). On the other, it was explicable by the demands of thrift, created by the problem of accumulation in a country of middle-class pioneers. Franklin would never have dreamt of giving up his way of life, after moving to the extravagant neighbourhood of the French royal household. He went about Paris and Versailles in a dress readily recognised by all as Third Estate garb. He wore his clothes with the same pride with which the marquesses and dukes of France wore their silk coats. Deeply convinced that his middle-class country-and the republican form of government-represented the future, Franklin forced, by his appearance, the French nobility to honour his personality. In the process, he also forced it to recognise a new class, that was laying an increasing claim to its rightful position in society. Acting in this manner, Franklin gave an example of revolutionary diplomacy that the world has never seen since. He could be characterised as a middle-class prove. He daily defied his detested class enemy and put new heart into his French class-comrades. Later (after the bourgeois revolution had triumphed in France and elsewhere) such a conduct totally lost its meaning. The bourgeoisie, itself

becoming the ruling class, was no longer engaged in revolutionary practice. It started imitating the manners and style of its former class enemy. Nothing could be found anymore of revolutionary diplomacy. Much later, the world was led for a moment to believe that the Russian Bolsheviks (in different circumstances but in a similar way) had repeated what Benjamin Franklin had done to intimidate the nobility and to activate the Third Estate. In March 1918, when the Soviet government was negotiating at Brest-Litovsk with German imperialism, the Muscovite representatives came to this Polish town with working-class caps and peasant fur coats. Bolshevik Russia had barely introduced the New Economic Policy, had scarcely taken the road to statecapitalism, than its diplomats started behaving just as the official representatives of a state-capitalist republic might be expected to do. The delegation that sat at Brest-Litovsk, in front of the German imperial generals, was composed of political idealists. When idealism had gone, and the bourgeois character of the Russian Revolution had become obvious, the suits of the Russian diplomats became as starched and conventional as one can imagine. At the same time, the thoroughly bourgeois character of Russian foreign policy and the bourgeois traits of Russian diplomacy appeared. It is not hard to illustrate this with some examples. In feudal, pre-revolutionary France, Benjamin Franklin would have guarded himself against the smallest gesture that might have been understood as a sign of alliance or sympathy with those in power. On the other hand, the diplomats of state- capitalist Russia (at the time of Lenin and Trotsky, as well as at the time of Stalin and his successors) displayed day after day their inner affinity with capitalism and with the bourgeoisie. Chicherin, as a Peoples Commissar for foreign relations, expressed his warm sympathy towards the liberal German Secretary of State, Dr. Stresemann, over the death of President Ebert (a man who once declared that he hated revolution like sin). Later on there were many expressions of sympathy at the death of other dignitaries of the European middle-class. The Kremlin diplomats kept up very friendly relations with Chiang Kai-Shek and with Kemal Pasha, while the latter respectively massacred Chinese and Turkish communists. Representatives of the Kremlin honoured Mussolini, Churchill, and Roosevelt. They entered into a pact with Hitler. In the early thirties they made their way into the League of Nations, which in their revolutionary heyday they had called the thieves kitchen. From where did these clear and important differences with the revolutionary diplomacy of Benjamin Franklin arise? The explanation is simple. Franklin in eighteenth century France was surrounded by his class enemies. The diplomats of state- capitalist Russia moved in middle-class Western Europe, among people of a similar political and social background. Far from having made diplomatic or psychological mistakes, the Russian representatives did just what they were expected to do. For some time the Russian (bourgeois) revolution seemed to have great consequences for similar bourgeois developments in Asia and Africa. Bolsheviks, like the previously mentioned Chicherin, or like Borodin (who in the twenties was the political adviser to the Chinese Kuo Min Tang) were political idealists. They dreamed of an anti-colonial struggle in which Eastern peoples would strike a heavy blow at Western capitalism. But this dream had one pre-condition: the political idealists in Russia needed the reassurance that they would not suddenly and horribly be awoken from another dream, the dream that they werent living, anyhow, in a capitalist country. As soon as the capitalist nature of Bolshevik society came to the fore, the time for political dreams came to an end. The political idealists made way for the realists. Instead of illusions about revolutionary support for Asia or Africa there came 5

the reality of bestowing favours upon that particular class in Eastern society that tended to slow down the break- through of modern capitalism (with the aid of western imperialism). This harmonised better with Russias own interests and with the foreign policy which the Kremlin had opted for ever since 1921. So it is today with Chinese foreign policy and Chinese diplomacy. The Chinese Revolution had essentially (not in details) the same character as that in Russia in 1917. There may indeed be differences between Moscow and Peking, but China just like Russia is on its way to state-capitalism. Just as Moscow does, Peking pursues a foreign policy that has little to do with revolution elsewhere in Asia (not even middle-class revolution). Like Russia in the thirties, modern Maoist China has for over 20 years been seeking membership of the United Nations. Chinese foreign policy is not directed at the stimulation of the bourgeois revolution throughout the rest of Asia and in Africa. It is directed at obtaining alliances. It is a policy in which Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai display as little finesse as Stalin and Litvinov displayed in their time. The true character of Chinese foreign policy and of Chinese diplomacy can be seen in the light of two examples drawn from very recent history. We mean Pekings attitude to the revolutionary events in Ceylon and Pakistan respectively. In Ceylon, where the coalition government of the so-called United Left Front under Prime Minister Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike clashed with the revolutionary movement that stood for a state-capitalist future, Peking did not take the side of the revolutionaries. It gave full support to Mrs. Bandaranaike. The same happened in Pakistan when a civil war broke out between the reactionary feudal dictatorship of General Yahya Khan and the population of East Pakistan. The armed revolt in East Pakistan was the desperate answer to the colonial exploitation of the country by the West Pakistan clique. It was directed against the pattern of large landownership and against social conditions that intentionally kept the country backward. Sheik Mujibur Rahman headed the uprising for a short time. Even if the insurrection had not been beaten down, he never could have maintained that position. Behind him (and behind the social forces that he represented) more radical forces were looming up, just as in Russia. The Bolsheviks had loomed up behind those political forces that had emerged after the February Revolution. However, the coming to power of Sheik Mujibur would have meant progress compared to the brutal rule of Yahya Khan, who was linked with imperialism. (We speak of course of progress within the framework of bourgeois development.) Mujibur called himself` a socialist. Neither he nor those who are called on to complete the East Pakistan revolution deserve any such denomination. Neither in East nor West Pakistan was socialism on the agenda. Sheik Mujibur represents the East Pakistani bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie is weak, just as it is in most Asian countries. That explains why middle-class revolution in this part of the world tends to be enacted in forms that first manifested themselves in Russia, and later in China. If-and for convenience only-anyone wanted to give names to the actors in the Pakistan drama, one might call Sheik Mujibur a Menshevik. One might designate as Bolsheviks the revolutionary forces in the background, to which Tariq All, the London political writer, belongs. General Yahya Khan could be compared to some Tsarist general or other, perhaps to a Kornilov (a Kornilov successful in the western part of Ids bi-partite country but who ran up against serious resistance ill its eastern half). Peking-whose policy is our subject-didnt support the Pakistan Bolsheviks. It didnt even support the Menshevik Sheik Mujibur. Peking gave diplomatic, political and military aid to the Pakistan Kornilov, General Yahya Khan. The Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs, Chou En-lai, sent a message to Yahya Khan that was first published in the Peking Review, then in the Pakistan Times (the

mouth-piece of the reactionary West Pakistan government). In this message Chou En-lai declared: Your Excellency and leaders of various quarters in Pakistan have done a lot of useful work to uphold the unification of Pakistan and to prevent it from moving towards a split. We believe that through the wise consultations and efforts of Your Excellency and leaders of various quarters in Pakistan, the situation in Pakistan will certainly be restored to normal. In our opinion the unification of Pakistan and the unity of the people of East and West Pakistan are the basic guarantees for Pakistan to attain prosperity and strength. The meaning was clear enough: Peking was opposed to the national, middle-class uprising in East Pakistan. The Peoples Republic of China considered the East Pakistan (bourgeois) revolutionaries as a handful of persons who want to sabotage the unification of Pakistan(1) Hence Chous words in the quoted message. China, as we have said, did more. She supplied the counter-revolutionary government of Yahya Khan with weapons and equipment. These weapons-tanks made in China-were not only used against the East Pakistan insurgents. They were also used against West Pakistan workers, fighting a class-struggle against their rulers. In other words Chinese policy towards Pakistan was just like Moscows policy towards China in the late twenties. At that time Russian aid enabled Chang Kaishek to massacre the workers of Shanghai. General Yahya Khan massacred the Pakistani workers with Chinese aid. At a public meeting in Amsterdam the West Pakistani Trotskyist, Tariq All, pointed out these facts. The Dutch Maoists present were scandalised. Evidently they hadnt yet read Chou En-lais letter to Yahya Khan, a letter that had appeared in the Peking Review. They behaved like Stalinists in the thirties, unaware of Stalins latest changes of line. A Maoist sympathiser, writing in the British paper New Society(and much better informed about what had really happened), suggested that the Chinese might have backed Yahya for long- term motives, namely to enable him to smash the (Menshevik)Awarmi League of Sheik Mujibur and pave the way for the Bengal left. (2) One might ask such a simpleton why Lenin in 1917 didnt back Kornilov, thereby Enabling him (Lenin) to settle with the Kerensky government, after a successful coup! Tariq Ali doesnt talk such nonsense. He considers Chinese foreign policy towards Ceylon and Pakistan as wrong policies. We reject his Bolshevik opinions. We see the policy that we denounce as the logical consequence of the state-capitalist character of the Chinese Republic. The latest example of this-strictly logical-policy is the Chinese approach to the United Nations and the USA. Peking wants to keep up good relations with both. (3) When a number of young supporters of the American left (and sympathisers of Mao) were recently in Peking, Chou En-lai made it clear to them that their resistance to Nixon was, of course, just their own problem. China was looking for friendly relations with the White House. Such an attitude is similar to Moscows attitude to Hitler and to Mussolini. It is the cynical policy of diplomatic zig-zags in front of the worst enemies of the working-class. Neither Mao nor Chou En-lai can be blamed for it, for they are not in office to promote the interests of the Chinese working-class. They are in office to promote the interests of Chinese state-capitalism. It is not they, the Chinese leaders, who are going the wrong way. Those who are on the wrong path are those who expect a revolutionary policy or revolutionary diplomacy from Maoist China.

would feel like another Duke Solinus who, surrounded by two pairs of twins, didnt know which was which. Wasnt there the Chinese Foreign Secretary, Chou En-lai, declaring that the struggle of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples to obtain or defend national independence was deepening and enlarging as the result of an irresistible historical trend? Didnt Chou simultaneously express his solidarity with oppressed nations all over the world, those countries that were exposed to tyranny and domination and deplore what he called the mutilation of Pakistan caused by (a fact, of course, which he didnt mention) a social uprising for autonomy, a social uprising that he (Chou En-lai himself) had vainly helped to suppress? From such words ordinary people might conclude that by Chinese standards solidarity with the oppressed doesnt mean what it means to the oppressed themselves. They might conclude that behind the walls of Peking reigns a confusion of tongues. That first impression would be strengthened by everything the Congress revealed about what was logically its main concern: the Chinese scene itself. On that score the Congress attached the greatest possible importance to the doings of the late Lin Piao, once Chairman Maos close comrade in arms. Killed in a plane crash as he was flying to Russia on September 13 1971 (and consequently dead for two years), Lin Piaos ghost overshadowed the Peking conference. The meeting so remembered him, and was so dominated by his personality, that the 1249 delegates even proceeded to expel him from the party once and for all, as if he were still in the world of the living. Wasnt it confusing that this man, Lin Piao, who as recently as a year before had been posthumously charged with leftextremism, was now being called a right-wing criminal who had always (!) had a bourgeois outlook and who had aim- ed at the restoration of capitalism in China. (Incidentally, the forms of production existing in China, based on wage-slavery, didnt need such a restoration, being in their very essence capitalist. Wasnt it even more confusing that Lin Piao (a fervent champion of the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution),whose rise to power had taken place during and immediately after that political tempest that had strengthened the Partys position, could have been described as the leader of an anti-Party group? Liu Shao-chi, Lin Piaos opponent in those crucial years from 1966 to 68, and against whom the whole weight of the Party had been launched, was on the other hand merely described as a revisionist, serious as such a charge may be. Wasnt it embarrassing that Wang Hung-wen, a young Shanghai worker who played an important role in the battle against that former head of state, Liu Shao-chi, was chosen as one of the five (instead of one) Vice-Chairmen of the Party, and as a member of its Central Committee, only to be confronted outside the meeting by former political friends of Liu, like Teng Chiau-ping, rehabilitated as were many others of his kind, despite a frontal attack on Liu Shao-chi by Chou En-lai? One cant avoid asking what, in the Chinese jargon, terms like socialism and capitalism, revisionism and anti-Party clique really mean. Can it be that the confusion of tongues in Peking is as great as it was in state-capitalist Russia in the early sixties, when the Moscow leaders were fighting out their differences hidden behind deceptive definitions? Didnt the same abuse of anti-Party groups indicate on that occasion something very different from what one might have expected? Indeed, a short but close examination of those mimic-battles is very useful to clarify their present Chinese counterpart. The spectacular Russian play had been preceded by another. In the twenties and thirties the contradiction between social reality and Bolshevik reality had given rise to a theoretical discussion about Leninist thought, the real issue of which was the class structure of the so-called soviet state. In the early sixties the interpretation of Leninism wasnt at issue. Though Leninism (whatever that happened to be) remained the official Bolshevik theory, its special social function (namely, to hold back the truth about state-capitalist exploitation by discussing it in socialist phraseology), had become less urgent. Of course Leninism still supplied this ideological need, but 6

2) The Tenth Congress of the Chinese Party and After

If anyone wishes to characterise the play acted behind closed doors in Peking last summer (under the title of Tenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party) he would have to define it as a Comedy of Errors. Although a mere spectator, he

at the same time another need had come into being. In the past the theoretical battles mainly reflected developing contradictions between Russian workers and a new rising ruling class. By the second half of the century, these contradictions had become a widespread reality. The new ruling class was in the process of becoming a dominant and influential factor in society. Against this social background Party traditions, born in entirely different social circumstances, were felt to be theoretical humbug, a stumbling block in the new classs way to genuine development. The new ruling class could no longer collaborate with a bureaucracy that indulged in practices in no way adapted to the new situation, practices that hindered the development of production. What the new class wanted was a more or less new Bolshevik Party adapted to the current situation, a Party that would recognise the new classs powerful position. The requirements of the new class led to an interesting struggle between the old Party bureaucracy and the representatives of the factory management that had come into being, and that formed the basis of the new class. The struggle lasted many years. Both factions balancing one another, the outcome was for a long time undecided. At one time the old Party held the strongest positions, at other times the managerial faction did. All this started in darkness, before Stalins death. It became visible in the postStalin era. It reached its culminating point in the days of Khruschev, who won power because he was the right man at that particular time. His personality-as his biographer, George Paloczi-Horvath, wrote-was just as enigmatic as the Soviet world. The true content of this enigma was that the Russian situation had produced the unstable character of Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschev, and that conversely, an unstable man like Khruschev (more than anyone else among government notables), was suited to a situation in which neither the bureaucracy nor the new ruling class could claima final victory. Khruschev was a misfit in the bureaucracy to which he formally belonged. But he didnt identify himself with the Russian management, nor did the managerial strata regard him as a reliable supporter. Perhaps just because of these qualities, Khruschev had an unmistakable feeling about what was up. When his adversaries boxed his ears with quotations from the dead Lenin. Kruschev pointed out that people were living in another time: what was valid then had lost its value. With those words he accurately divulged what was going on behind the scenes. With Khruschev in office, the struggle between the new class and the old Party reached its final stage. Lengthy trench warfare made way for a war of movement. So often and so quickly did positions in the Kremlin change that when Suslov and Mikoyan returned to Moscow from a short visit to Budapest (where, as representatives of the new class, they were prepared for a flexible attitude towards the government of Imre Nagy, to whom they had guaranteed the withdrawal of Russian troops) they were confronted with an entirely different mood.* (*Background information given by Tibor Meray in one of the most interesting books on the Hungarian Revolution: Thirteen Days that Shook the Kremlin (Thames & Hudson, 1958).) During this period the attack from the new management on the Party traditionalists became fiercer. The embarrassment provoked by its mystifying slogans was greater than ever before. Those who favoured the domination of the new ruling class over the old bureaucracy never tired of proclaiming their legal heritage from the Party. At the same time the defenders of the Party (old style) were stigmatised as the anti-Party group. What lay behind the slogans and stigmatisations was clear enough in the debate (though it wasnt carried on in plain Russian but in a language one might define as Party-Chinese). We here give some quotations with (in brackets) translations into everyday speech. <em> KOSYGIN (member of the Presidium of the Central Committee, defending 7

management): Members of the anti-Party group opposed everything that was new or progressive. By such an attitude, in fact, they wrecked the economic policy of the Party and of the country ... (The anti-Party group opposed the rise of the new class of managers and wrecked its economic policy).They were against any proposal that could have improved the soviet economy (They opposed proposals not in accordance with the policy of the new class). Molotov opposed the new economic and agricultural policy (Molotov was an adversary of management). MIKOYAN (the most outstanding champion of the new class): They-the members of the anti-Party group-cling to conservative, dogmatic points of view that prevent the introduction of innovations (They stood for the past and opposed any accommodation to the reality of the growing power of the new class). Molotov is the ideologist of bygone times (Molotovs thought is adapted to yesterdays reality. That reality does not exist any longer because of the increasing influence of the managerial class). MOLOTOV (in defence of the anti-Party group): The Partys new programme is a revisionist and counterrevolutionary one (The Partys new programme aims to make the Party a tool of the new class. It transforms the principles of Stalinism. It is directed against everything the old Party represented). SATJUKOV: Molotov has always been a bungler in home affairs (Political knowledge is strictly reserved for the class that has power and rules). KHRUSCHEV: The Soviet Union is in great need of capital (The accumulation of capital doesnt keep pace with the needs of the new managerial class). Joining the debate in this way, Khruschev in fact took the victors side.Long live the new ruling class was the true meaning of his belated intervention. Before long he found out that he had acted too late. He was dismissed as soon as the new ruling class no longer felt itself seriously threatened. With Kosygins appointment as Prime Minister there started a new chapter in Russian history. Could it be that last years happenings in China resemble in some way what we have described as happening in Russia? In present day China, too, there are forces at work more or less favourable to the rise of a new class. Attempts to analyse these forces have been made in the Theses. There is no need to repeat the argument. Nor is it necessary again to explain-as was done in the Theses-why the Great Cultural Revolution can be regarded as the response to social developments similar to those that, in Russia, had strengthened managerial positions. There have been many subsequent indications suggesting that the Cultural Revolution wasnt as successful as Chou En-lai would have had the delegates to the Tenth Congress believe. Those social forces in the background which even if they didnt give rise to a new class nevertheless prepared its way (pushing forward individual managers), still exist. They proved themselves stronger than the violence of the Red Guards and appeared to be totally interwoven with Chinese social relations. However, unlike the new class in Russia, its Chinese counterpart has not so far proved stronger than the Chinese Party. In the course of the Cultural Revolution the Party was transformed for the purpose of better resistance. Such facts should be a warning against too simplified an analogy. Things in China are not what they had previously been in Russia. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of a (future) managerial class holds the key to every Chinese problem. For instance, Chou En-lai was very clearly criticising the managerial point of view in his speech to the Tenth Congress when he addressed himself to those who pretended that after the Ninth Congress (held in April 1969) the development of production should be the Partys main task and to those who claimed that it was not the antagonism between the working class and the bourgeoisie that was the most important contradiction in China, but the contradiction between the advanced socialist system and the backward productive forces in society. But in China things are far more complicated than this. The same Chou En-lai, in the same speech, underlines the necessity for a transformation of all parts of the superstructure that are not co-ordinsted with the economic foundation. That sounds like a concession to managerial demands. Apparently matters were not

pushed to extremes. The forementioned presence of rehabilitated adherents of managerial champion Liu Shao-chi and the fact that some of those men had again been able to obtain influential positions in the country point in the same direction. The only possible explanation is that hitherto the pro- managerial and probureaucratic forces were balanced. One must not forget that these are not the only social forces in China, where there is also a very large peasantry. Finally, if the Party was reformed during the Cultural Revolution, partly in response to the views of the peasants, it was just to take the wind out of the managements sails. To conclude: the antagonism between the Party and the new class in China hasnt by a long way reached the point that had been reached in Russia some fifteen years earlier. This is the situation that accounts for various declarations about perfect Party-unity applauded by the delegates in Peking. How does one reconcile the fact that this unity has been so loudly trumpeted with the fact that delegates were pro- claiming, in the same breath, the inevitable necessity for many more struggles in the future? And why, if unity was as solid as one was made to believe, were the deliberations strictly secret, with only the texts of the speeches and the new constitution published, together with a meaningless official postscript? The implied contradiction is nothing but a paradox. The appearance of unity stands out because Party and management are equally strong. Hampered by the peasantry, they dont face each other in the same way as they did in Russia. This is why the Cultural Revolution remained unfinished. Behind the scenes, managerial tendencies (the forces that led to the development of the new class) are still at work. Sooner or later the equilibrium will be upset. The Partys new constitution stressed classic Leninist democratic centralism as the basic organisational principle, while at the same time adding that it would be absolutely impermissible to suppress criticism and to retaliate and that, on the contrary, the Party should encourage other views and great debates. This was an attempt to delay the clash for as long as possible. Nevertheless the officials are well aware that such a postponement cannot be permanent. The downfall of the anti-Party group Chou En-lai told the delegates, doesnt end the struggle between the two Party lines. It wasnt unity that characterised the Tenth Congress but the sound judgment that the tendencies representing the new class could not be made to disappear and that the fight against them would decide the Partys future. To put it in Maos words:within a number of years another revolution will probably have to be carried out. Demons and devils will break the surface. Since then, history has borne out that if one talks of the devil he is sure to come. Before concerning ourselves with the devil, let us talk of the demons. Just as Molotov in Russia, the ghost of Lin Piao was hammered with the charge of defending an anti-Party line. What strikes one is the formal resemblance of the indictments. True enough, the Chinese at their Congress were speaking PartyRussian just as the Russians had been speaking Party-Chinese. This doesnt automatically imply that words in Party Chinese have the same meaning as in Party-Russian. In Russia the anti-Party group defended the (old) Party. It was therefore attacked by the new class. In China the new class was attacked by the reformed Party that sought new strength through its self-reform. Did Lin Piao resist? If so, his position would have been the opposite to that of Molotov. Instead of defending the Party against the management as Molotov had done, Lin Piao would have stood at the side of the new class. He would have stood at the side of Liu Shao-chi, who was his bitter enemy in the Cultural Revolution. Though their names were linked at the last Congress, such a conclusion isnt strengthened by Lin Piaos speeches. 8

None of them contain the least indication to such a change of front. At most, it might be remembered that it was Lin Piao who jammed the brakes on the Red Guards when the Cultural Revolution threatened to plunge the country into economic disaster. But he did so with the full agreement of Mao himself, and of the Party. Could it be that Lin Piao didnt agree with this moderate policy? If so that might explain why the Party first accused him of left extremism. It doesnt explain however why such a reproach was only heard three years later. Or was Lin Piao really as moderate as he showed himself to be? Hadnt he been on the Partys left long before the Cultural Revolution, whose fruits didnt prove to be as red as many people had expected? What supports this view is the position of his alleged number one accomplice, Chen Po-ta, another head of the Cultural Revolution draft and a faithful transmitter of Mao-thought at every moment of his life. There are good reasons for the view that Lin Piao was a tempered radical and that this led him to being seen as on the left when the Party, withdrawing from the Cultural Revolution line, veered to the right. After Lin Piaos death, his position seemed to be on the right because the pendulum had oscillated and because the Party, in reaction to another new class danger, had undergone a radicalisation. Against this view one might quote Lin Piaos more or less managerial position concerning production. But this is rather uncertain as Chou En-lais reproaches on this point were directed rather against Liu Shoa-chi, with whom Lin Piao was linked only by means of a political manoeuvre. In favour of this view, on the other hand, are Chous own words, that the so-called anti-Party line had been and still was one of the two lines inside the Party. Be this as it may, the Partys radicalisation was obvious. The appointment to its leadership of Wang Hung-wen, who had had to be called to order because he had gone too far during the Cultural Revolution, was therefore symptomatic. But let nobody think that the radicalisation in question has anything to do with the working-class struggle against capitalism. At the Tenth Congress no word was spoken either about the exercise of power by the workers themselves or about the abolition of the wages system, or of a society based on production. Chou En-lai commented with satisfaction about the stability of prices and the markets prosperous position. His statement was characteristic both in its lack of any working-class analysis and because of what it revealed concerning the true nature of Chinese economic and social relations. These basic economic and social relations are evidently not at stake. Consequently the real issue is not the choice between a proletarian or a bourgeois alternative. Everything depends on whether the transformed (or even more transformed) Party or whether management will rule the roost. That is what lies behind the Partys radicalisation, whatever Chou may have been saying about a conflict between proletarian and bourgeois interests, in which one would have to distinguish false communists from sincere ones. Speaking thus, Chou was just churning out Partyjargon, whose deceptive appearance masked real differences. When the process of radicalisation had started, where did the traditional and outstanding leaders like Mao and Chou really stand? At the Congress the latter never tired of quoting Mao and of stressing his hostility to Lin or Liu. But that doesnt necessarily argue his real position ** (**Chou told the delegates, that the officialReport to the Ninth National Congress, delivered by Lin Piao, had actually been written by Mao; that Lin himself, in collaboration with Chen Po-ta, had drafted another document (that had been cancelled); and that Lin didnt agree with the text he was delivering. Whatever the truth of this story may be (and whatever it may not be) it remains that what could be true for Lin, might also be true for Chou.) What exactly Chou represents is unclear. This is partly due to the fact that, since some time before the Tenth Congress, everything in Chinas social and political life has again been on the move. Firm positions will become visible as time goes by. That applies to everyone on the Chinese scene. Concerning Mao for instance, Chou informed the delegates that after the Ninth

Congress the Chairman had given several warnings to Lin Piao, all of them in vain, seeking to save him. Does this mean that Mao Tse-tung, Lin Piao and Chen Po-ta hadnt such fundamental differences after all? Was it only.at a later date that the rift widened? In that case, it isnt only the official statement about Lin Piao that stands contradicted. It is also suggested that Mao wasnt heading the radicalisation but merely tail-ending it. How, in connection with all this, should one seek to under- stand the three attempts on Maos life, in which Lin Piao is said to have been closely involved as the main conspirator? Were these attempts made because the Chairman tended to an even more managerial point of view? Or were they made because Mao firmly refused to adopt such a position? Listening to the Party-jargon, looking at the Chinese smoke-screen, happenings remain obscure. Nevertheless, conclusions can be drawn that go far beyond the commonplace fixations about a power battle. Such descriptions dont tell us anything of the social forces that drive the actors to appear before the footlights. It is far more important to understand this fact than to know who is who. From the historical point of view it doesnt matter so much whether this one or that one represents the Party or the management. The actors are of secondary interest. The play: thats the point. The battle for power is not important. What are important are the economic and social frameworks that determine its limits and by which it is characterised. It is for this reason that we have placed in the centre of our analysis the struggle between the new class and the Party bureaucracy, quite apart from actual questions of policy. The correctness of this method is confirmed when we examine the anti-Confucius campaign, a campaign that reached its full development after the Tenth Congress. The campaign was launched on August 7 1973 by an article in the Peking Peoples Paper. The author was Yang Chung-kuo, deccan of the Philosophy Faculty of the Canton Sun Yat-sen University (and since referred to as the No. 1 theorist of anti- Confucianism). The campaign did not start as a pure philosophical discussion. Philosopher Yang said, the battle of words with Confucius has a very actual meaning. To criticise his reactionary thoughts can be useful whenever one participates in present-day class struggle ... What sort of class struggle could Yang be referring to? Neither in his article nor in the debate that followed was the subject touched upon. Nowhere was it treated from the point of view that human thought is connected with society, and therefore is right as long as the society exists that gave birth to it, becoming incorrect to the extent that a given society is lost in its successor. Such a treatment, linked with the con- viction of the oppressed that neither society nor thought are invariable and eternal, doesnt suit any ruling class. Ruling classes never have an eye for the relativity of their own mastery. From the mere fact that things were not put in this way one can draw some plausible conclusions. Confucius wasnt interpreted as a child of his time, who reflected the social relations and contradictions of the Chou dynasty in Chinese antiquity. His ideas were considered apart from their soil. They were described as intrinsically reaction- ary. No attempt was made to understand Confucius from within Chinese society. On the contrary, Chinese society was explained by stressing Confucius influence. This method naturally led to the substitution of social comprehension by moral judgement. Consequently the anti-Confucius campaign wasnt a philosophical attack on the essential roots of class power. That remains unchallenged. The discussions became moral condemnations of certain politicians on behalf of others. For this purpose, Confucius, who had died 2000 years previously, was raised from his grave and criticised. Whether all this was really being aimed at the dead Lin Piao, or at his living competitors, is less clear. But once again this is of secondary significance. For our purpose, it is more important to realise that there is a direct connection 9

between the anti-Confucius campaign and the issues of the Cultural Revolution. Confucius, we are told by Philosopher Yang, reserved absolute wisdom for the monarch. The reformers of his time however wanted freedom of thought on behalf of a hundred philosophical schools, with different and opposite opinions. Confucius promised his monarch all the land. The reformers on the contrary were fighting for private landed property and for individual farming. The themes hardly need further explanation. Yang, whose origin was the nonBolshevik Democratic League of China (which had once taken an intermediate position between the Communist Party and the Kuo Min-tang) seems to be a clear voice of the new class. When he speaks of a less important philosopher, dispatched at Confucius command, one might believe that he is not only pointing at Lin Piaos murder plot against Mao but that-from an opposite position-he is also referring to the rumour that Lin didnt die in a plane crash but was done away with by Chou En-lai. If Yang condemns Confucius for calling back those who were already buried in oblivion, aiming to restore the old order, that too seems to concern Chou. Chou, after all, was the man who for many years had been the architect of the new class policy. Moreover, he had his own responsibility for the rehabilitation of those who had been sacrificed in the Cultural Revolution. Yang can thus be interpreted in different ways, possibly because his philosophical contribution to an actual struggle suffers from the contradictions of the struggle itself. Another possibility is that these contradictions are either the pure consequence of the special Party-philosophical jargon, or that they have been created deliberately, for reasons of safety in turbulent times. For times are turbulent in China. Quoting Confucius, bureaucrats and managers march against each other. The devil that looms up is a second Cultural Revolution, as predicted by Chairman Mao. Whose future is at stake? That of Chou or that of Mao? Time will tell. Nonetheless, one thing seems certain: the outcome of the struggle will not in the least change the (state) capitalist nature of Chinese society. The rule of the Party-bureaucracy or managerial rule? That is the question for the years to come. Whatever the answer, in the long run the new class seems to have the best testimonials. On to the Thesis on the Chinese revolution

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Autonomy

by Gilles Dauve In a text written for a Vr Makt seminar - held in Malm, Sweden on 1-2 November 2008 - Dauve surveys the various theories of democracy and their limits.
Its very difficult to force into obedience whoever has no wish to command. J.-J. Rousseau
No critique beyond this point This is where we bump into a logical flaw. Any critique of democracy arouses suspicion, and even more so if this critique is made by those who wish a world without capital and wage-labour, without classes, without a State. Public opinion dislikes but understands those who despise democracy from a reactionary or elitist point of view. Someone who denies the common mans or womans ability to organize and run himself or herself, logically will oppose democracy. But someone who firmly believes in this ability, and yet regards democracy as unfit for human emancipation, is doomed to the dustbins of theory. At the best, he is looked down upon as an idiot; at the worst, he gets the reputation of a warped mind wholl end up in the poor company of the archenemies of democracy: the fascists. Indeed, if the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, it seems obvious that in order to emancipate themselves, the exploited must not only do away with the power structures that enslave them, but also create their own organs of debating and decision-making. Exercising ones collective freedom, isnt that what democracy is all about ? That assumption has the merit of simplicity: to change the world and live the best possible human life, what better way than to base this life on institutions that will provide the largest number of people with the largest freedom on speech and decision-taking ? Besides, whenever they fight, the dominated masses generally declare their will to establish the authentic democracy thats been so far lacking. For all these reasons, the critique of democracy is a lost or forgotten battle. Set the controls for the heart of the matter Democracy claims to be the most difficult objective to achieve, and also the most vital, the ideal that all human beings desire : the theory and practice of collective freedom. Democracy is equated with organizing social life by common decisions which take into account everybodys needs and desires as much as can be. But that ideal also claims that to be more than just an ideal, this process of common decision-making should happen in conditions of equality between us all. Mere political equality gives each citizen rights but not effective powers: real democracy implies socio-economic equality, with no more rich and poor, no more master and servant, no more boss and employee. So a fair total reorganization and sharing of riches will enable each of us to get a fair share in decision-making on big issues as well as on minor ones. Well have a democracy thats not just formal, but real. 10 Sharing is a basic and elementary necessary human attitude, but no-one seriously expects it to solve the social question. At best, it can alleviate it. No moralist or prophet has ever convinced the rich and the mighty to divide their wealth and power fairly between all human beings. Were entitled to ask where this social (and not just political) fairness is going to come from ? Democracy cant achieve it on its own. This so-called real democracy lacks reality. Democracy is a contradiction: it pretends to give and guarantee something essential which inevitably evades it. Still, while most people go on at length about the failings of democracy, very few are willing to discuss its nature, because it appears as the best framework for human emancipation, and the only way to get it. Any resistance to exploitation, and any endeavour to create a world without exploitation, is faced with the hard fact of the exploiters control over the exploited. The endless struggle against factory despotism, against boss rule on the shop floor and outside the factory, and also the struggle for rank and file control over a strike, go beyond the mere refusal to depend upon a boss, a local politician, or even a union or party leader. That negative has a positive dimension. Its the first step to direct, non-competitive, solidarity relations, which entail new ways of meeting, discussing and making decisions. No social movement, big or small, can evade the issue: Who rules ? Otherwise, without procedures and structures different from top-down ones, the lower classes will eternally be treated as inferior. Be they called a commune, a committee, a collective, a soviet, a council, or a simple general meeting, every participant in these bodies realizes his individual freedom as well as his collective existence. Liberty and fraternity are lived through acts. Now, do these forms create the movement or just express and structure it ? Its no use disclaiming our question on the grounds that these forms do both because the nature of democracy is to treat the space-time of debate and decision, not as what it is, a component of social life (and therefore of all positive change), but as the prime condition of social life (and therefore of all positive change). Thats what well be discussing On the way, well also have to show how this blinding light is even more attractively deceptive because the word democracy itself is confused and confusing. But first, a little historical meandering, to see what critique is not ours.

The traditionalist or reactionary critique In spite of their differences, the opponents of the French Revolution like Burke, late monarchists like Ch. Maurras, or the German thinkers of the Conservative Revolution in the 20th century, shared a common distaste for the Rights of Man, because they all dismiss the notion of the universality of the human species. In my life, Ive seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; as for Man, I must confess Ive never met him (..) (J. de Maistre, 1796) They prefer the supposedly real abstraction of the soil, the nation, the people, the Volk, the natives, etc., to the more obviously abstract abstraction of the modern voting citizen. To them, human beings can only be brothers and sisters if they belong to a certain group or origin. That group can even be (German) labour in E. Jungers The Worker (1932), but its still limited. Communism, on the contrary, is the possibility of the universal. Our critique addresses the State, democratic or dictatorial. Reactionary critique addresses the democratic State. Fascism has a deep hatred of democracy and, if it comes to power, it does away with political competition, but what he hates about the democratic system is parliamentary procedures, not the State institutions which fascists seduce, conquer, occupy and fortify, thereby taking to their extreme potentials which exist in all parliamentary regimes. Communism opposes democracy because it is anti-State. Fascism only opposes democracy, because it is pro-State. We take on democracy as a form of the State, whereas reactionaries take it on as a political form they consider too feeble to defend the State. Mussolini and Hitler destroyed parliamentarianism in order to create an almighty central executive and administrative power. Communists have had to deal with parliamentarianism as one of the forms (and not a feeble one) of government and repression. Reaction denounces free will and bourgeois individualism to replace them with (old or new) forms of oppressive authority. They want less than individuals. The communist perspective aims to realize the individuals aspirations to a freedom that is both personal and lived with others. It wants more than the individual. Nietzsches critique

more ridiculous than looking for truth in numbers (..) the ballot box is only the way to create a police force. And in the 20th century, Karl Kraus: Democracy is the right for everyone to be the slave of all. Whatever element of truth this point of view may contain, the partisans of democracy have their answer ready. They do not deny the pressure of democracy over the individual. They say the democratic system gives everyone a larger scope for freedom than he would get if his individuality was locked within itself, or if it had to go into an unpredictable congregation of individual atoms. Some individualists are more social than others. They suggest an association of freely consenting individuals. This is precisely one of the variant of the democratic contract, perhaps one of the most progressive. Ignoring democracy Before 1848, large sectors of socialism did not expect anything from democracy, because they stood outside politics. In spite of their quarrels, these schools of thought agreed on the generalization of associations, as a remedy to the dissociation (P. Leroux) brought about by the triumph of industry and money. All that was needed was to combine passions (Fourier), creative minds and productive abilities (Saint-Simon), or mutual bonds (Proudhon). Unlike the neobabouvists whod inherited Babeufs experience and advocated the seizure of political power by organized mass violence, all the above mentioned thinkers believed in the supremacy of morals: a new world would be born less out of necessity than by an ethical impetus. Some even hoped that socialism could be founded (funded, actually) by generous enlightened bourgeois, on a small scale at first, and then develop as the bulk of society would follow its example, political power having little or nothing to do about it: therefore there was no need for revolution. This is neither a critique of politics nor of democracy. The communist perspective is anti-political, not a-political. The Revolutionary Syndicalist critique : circumventing democracy

In the eyes of Nietzsche, a society of masters ruling over slaves has been succeeded by the society of the average man, the man of the masses, where only slaves are to be found. Zarathustras author stood for a new aristocracy, no longer based on birth, nor on money, nor (as the Nazi interpretation would have it) on power, even less on race, but on the free /mind/spirit/ whos not afraid of solitude. Its because he would like every one of us to rise above himself and above the herd that Nietzsche is hostile to socialism (he sees any collectivism as another type of gregariousness), and to anarchism (an autonomous herd, as he calls it in Beyond Good & Evil). For what concerns us here, the flaw in Nietzsches vision does not lie in his elitism, which is undeniable (in that respect, the Third Reich did not distort his writings too much). More basically, a solution which is neither historical nor political, but mythical and poetic, can only have meaning and value as an artists morals. Nietzschean politics cant be recuperated because it does not exist. He was not dealing with the social question. His ethics is only to be lived by the individual, at the risk of losing ones mind, as happened to the philosopher himself. The individualist critique The democratic system is often blamed for crushing the individual under the collective. The poet and dandy Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) wrote: Nothing 11

Though it may seem to have only a historical interest, this critique is still active today, in a different way from 1910 of course. The idea to absorb politics into the economy, i.e. to have a directly social democracy, is surfacing again in the current utopia of a seizure of local power so generalized that it would take away the substance of central political power (the State), and thus relieve us from the necessity of destroying the State. In Changing the World Without Taking Power (2002), J. Holloway argues that radical transformation is now so embedded in our daily lives that were gradually transforming the fabric of society, without the need for a potentially dictatorial break. Evolution instead of revolution, what else ? The slow revolutions notion, recently theorized by A. Bartra, partly inspired by the situation in Mexico and taken up by some radicals, amounts to no revolution. In the mid-19th century, too, instead of addressing democracy, some hoped to go round it. Proudhon believed that work gave the toiling masses a political capacity : lets find a new way of producing goods, lets make the bourgeois useless, the rest will follow, and the workshop will replace government. Democracy was neither accepted nor fought against, but directly realized by work, without any mediation. About fifty years later, revolutionary syndicalism had a loathing for parliamentary

democracy. The vehicle for change was to come from labour organized in industrial (as opposed to trade) unions, which would unite the whole class, skilled and unskilled. Proudhon had been the ideologue of craftsmen and small industry. Anarcho-syndicalism was adapted to the age of trusts and huge factories, but the principle was similar: a fusion between industry and government. After acting as an egalitarian body fighting the bosses and police, the union would later manage the economy during and after the revolution. Some syndicalists, like De Leon in the US, wanted parallel political and industrial action, but to them politics was clearly outside and against parliament. Revolutionary syndicalism has been reproached for its elitism. Its true it emphasized the role of active minorities that would /spur/push/ the less advanced into action. But most revolutionary syndicalists aimed at an active class conscious mass elite, utterly different from what they saw as the passive mass of sheeplike social-democrat voters. Georges Sorel (1847-1922) thought that the labour union, unlike parliament and party life, bred a fair and real organized equality, as all members were wage-labourers and in solidarity with each other. The new political principle of the proletariat is the government by vocational groups self-organized in the work place. Resistance bodies will finally enlarge their scope and range so much that they will absorb nearly all politics in a successful struggle to suck bourgeois political organization dry of all life. On one essential point, Sorel had a point : Marx believed that the democratic regime has the advantage that as workers are no longer attracted to fighting the monarchy or the aristocracy, the notion of class becomes easier to grasp. Experience teaches us the opposite; democracy is quite good at preventing the advance of socialism, by diverting workers minds toward trade-unionism under government protection. (1908) Sorel, however, only scored a negative point against Marx, because experience was also teaching the opposite of what he was expecting: the union failed as well as the party, and union self-organization was often sucked dry of all life by bourgeois democracy. You cant destroy a society by using the organs which are there to preserve it (..) any class who wants to liberate itself must create its own organ, H. Lagardelle wrote in 1908, without realizing that his critique could be applied as much to the unions (including a supposed revolutionary syndicalist French CGT on a fast road to bureaucratization and class collaboration) as to the parties of the Second International. Revolutionary syndicalism discarded the voter and preferred the producer: it forgot that bourgeois society creates and lives off both. Communism will go beyond both. Anti-parliamentarianism Understanding universal suffrage as the act by which that the workers swap their potential violence for a voting paper, is part of the essentials of social critique. Attacking elections has been a constant theme for the anarchists, and was not uncommon among socialists before 1914. All left factions and parties in the Second International agreed that any parliament remains under the control of the ruling class, and election day is always a set back for radicalism. After 1917, this remained a fundamental tenet of all varieties of communists. Even those who advocated tactical use of elections regarded the soviets, and not the Parliament, as the political basis and organ of a future revolution. That being said, and it must be said, rejecting parliament does not sum up nor define our perspective, no more than despising the rich or hating money. Mussolini also wanted to bring down old bourgeois institutions, and he succeeded, up to a point. 12

The Bolshevik critique : dictatorship versus democracy In 1920, against Kautskys Terrorism & Communism published a year before, Trotsky wrote a book with the same title. Kautsky opposed democracy and mass freedom to civil war and systematic use of violence. Trotsky distinguishes between democracy as universal suffrage, and democracy as the mass of the people itself : to understand what is meant by people, one has to go into a class analysis. Before parliamentarianism as weve known it since the end of the 19th century, Trotsky explains, there were examples of early conservative democracy: the agrarian democracy of the farmers in the New England town meeting, the Swiss self-government of the urban lower middle classes and the rich peasantry (praised by Rousseau in The Social Contract, 1762). Then, as capital and labour became the polar classes of society, bourgeois democracy developed as the weapon of defence against class antagonisms. Trotsky reminds the reader what Western civilized democracy has led to : a world war. As for Russia, Trotsky justifies terror and coercion methods on the grounds that theyre the only methods available if the proletariat is to defend itself against a far more terrorist and bloodthirsty counter-revolution. When the civil war is over (..) (B)y means of a systematically applied labour service, and a centralized organization of distribution, the whole population of the country will be drawn into the general system of economic arrangement and self-government. Knowing that Trotsky was at the same time advocating forced militarization of labour, one can only read those lines as statesman talk justifying his own power over the common people. For what concerns us here, Trotsky only targets democracy because of what its become under capitalism: an imperialist democracy. So, (..) we repudiate democracy in the name of the concentrated power of the proletariat. He is interested in the forms taken by democracy (and claims Bolshevism will later achieve a superior form), not in the democratic principle. The anarchist critique : dispersing power Leninism is haunted by the seizure of power, anarchism by its obsessive fear. As a reply to authority and dictatorship, anarchism stands for the collective versus leadership, bottom v. up, horizontal v. vertical, commune v. government, decentralization v. centralization, self-management v. top management, local community v. mass electorate: a plurality of true democracies instead of a false one, and ultimately the State will be destroyed by universalized democracy. Lots of small scale production and living units will be dynamic enough to get together without any of them alienating its autonomy. Like the polis of Ancient times, the modern metropolis falls prey to oligarchic tendencies: myriads of federated coops, collectives and districts will be able to run themselves, and thus remain democratic. If power is split between millions of elements, it becomes harmless. We wont solve the problem of power by spreading little bits of it everywhere. Bordigas critique: the opposite of democracy Amedeo Bordiga is one of the very few who took democracy seriously: he didnt look at its methods, but at its principle. However, he likened so much proletarian democracy to bourgeois democracy that he ended up missing the principle itself. His starting point is that democracy consists in individuals regarding themselves as equals, each making his own opinion according to his free will, then comparing it with the opinion of others, before taking a decision (usually after a vote and according to majority rule: this is important, yet not essential to the

definition). Parliament stifles the proletarians by forcing them into a political partnership with the bourgeois. Nothing original in that last statement, but the deduction that follows is not so common : Bordiga thinks worker democracy is also to be rejected, because it decomposes the proletarian fighting spirit into individual decisions. Democracy means a reunion of equal rights and wills, which is impossible in bourgeois parliamentarianism, and pointless in proletarian class activity: revolution does not depend on a mass of individual decisions getting together, nor on majority or proportional procedures, but on the ability of the organized proletariat to act as a centralizing body and a collective mind. (Bordiga calls it a party, but his party is very different from the Leninist one, since it is not based on socialist intellectuals introducing socialism into the working class from outside. To make things more complicated, Bordiga never openly criticized Lenins conception of the party.) (..) the principle of democracy has no intrinsic value. It is not a principle, but rather a simple mechanism of organization (..) revolution is not a problem of forms of organization. On the contrary, revolution is a problem of content, a problem of the movement and action of revolutionary forces in an unending process (..) (The Democratic Principle, January 1922) Indeed communist revolution is the creation of non-profit, non-mercantile, co-operative and fraternal social relations, which implies smashing the State apparatus and doing away with the division between firms, with money as the universal mediator (and master), and with work as a separate activity. That is the content. What Bordiga fails to see, is that this content wont come out of any kind of form. Some forms are incompatible with the content. We cant reason like the end was the only thing that mattered: the end is made out of means. Certain means get us closer to the end we want, while others make it more and more remote and finally destroy its possibility. The content of communism (which Bordiga was right to emphasize) can only be born out of the self-organized action of the vast majority of the proletariat (Communist Manifesto). The communist movement is not democratic: neither is it dictatorial, if the dictator is one part of the proletariat oppressing the rest. Soon enough that part loses whatever proletarian character it had and turns into a privileged group telling people what to do. This is what happened in Russia, as some like Otto Rhle understood as early as 1920-21. Bordiga lacks a critique of politics. He perceives of revolution as a succession of phases: first it would replace bourgeois power, then it would create new social relations. This is why he has no trouble believing that the Bolsheviks could have ruled Russia for years and, even without being able of transforming the country in a communist way, still promote world revolution. Yet power is not something revolutionaries can hold on to with no revolution happening in their country or anywhere else. Like many others, Bordiga equates power to an instrument. When Jan Appel was staying in Moscow as a KAPD delegate in the Summer 1920, he was shown factories with well-oiled machines that could not be operated for lack of spare parts: when the revolution breaks out in Europe, the Russian workers would tell him, youll send us spares and well be able to operate these machines again. After October 1917, the Bolsheviks must have thought of themselves as something similar: a machinery still partly idle but preparing for world revolution. Unfortunately, power (and even more so State power) is not a tool waiting to be properly handled. Its a social structure that does not remain on stand-by for long. It has a function: it connects, it makes people do things, it imposes, it organizes what exists. If what exists is wage-labour and commodity exchange, even in the original and makeshift existence it had in Russia in 1920, power will manage that kind of labour and that kind of exchange. Lenin died a head of State. On the contrary, a revolutionary structure is only defined by its acts, and if it does not act it soon withers. 13

Like Trotsky, Bordiga theorizes the necessity to do violence to particular proletarians in the name of the future interests of the proletarians in general: as late as 1960, he would still justify the Bolshevik repression of the Kronstadt rising in February-March, 1921. He never understood that at the time he was writing The Democratic Principle, the Russian experience that he extensively used to back up his thesis was eliminating whatever revolution was left in Russia. Bordiga was attacking democratic formalism on behalf of a revolution that was already more formal than real. Dictatorship is the opposite of democracy. The opposite of democracy is not a critique of democracy. Council communism : the quest for non-violence The German Communist Left agreed with the Italian Left on the rejection of bourgeois democracy. The disagreement focused on worker democracy. What has come to be known as council communism was one of the earliest critics of the failure of Bolshevism, and remains one of the best. But as time passed, council communists have tended to be wary about anything that might be a constraint upon the working class. Their critique of bureaucracy as the main obstacle to revolution led them to democracy. Not bourgeois democracy, needless to say, worker democracy, but in that respect both bourgeois and worker forms proclaim the same purpose: to prevent or limit encroachments on personal freedom. We wont reply (as Bordiga would) that individual freedom is an illusion and is irrelevant to communism. We only say that in any case such freedom cant be guaranteed by the democratic principle. What this quest for non-pressure boils down to is the desire to avoid the ill effects of conflicts. As it happens, the protection provided for by democracy only works in the absence of any serious crisis among the persons concerned, be they proletarians instead of bourgeois. As soon as debate is not enough to result into a decision willingly accepted by the group as a whole, the group cant carry on as a mere confrontation of free wills (unless its only a friendly debating society). Either the group thinks that maintaining the community matters more than the disagreement. Or it splits. Or it forces a decision unto the participants. In all cases, the democratic principle has been suspended. The ultimate result of turning free will into an absolute would be for a radical group to do nothing but circulate data and information : no theory, except the theory of exchange, the theory of the necessity of autonomy. No theory, except the theory that no theory must be imposed onto the working class. Such a nontheory would of course be inaccessible to criticism, which would help the group developing its own informal bureaucracy. Bordigas theory of the party denies the problem. Councilism evades it by waiting for such an overwhelming proletarian majority that all conflict will be resolved without any verbal or physical violence. The party or autonomy alternative was born out of our past failures. A future revolutionary movement will have to go beyond that alternative. The critique of formal democracy Traditional Marxist analysis has the merit /of stressing/to stress/ that democracy gives possibilities that only become realities for those able to use them: in a class society, the members of the ruling class will always be in a much better position to do so. Everyone is (nearly) free to publish a paper, but the ads necessary to finance a daily or a magazine wont go to an anti-capitalist press. The ballot paper

of Henry Ford is counted as one vote like the ballot paper of one of his workers, but Mr Ford will hold more sway on public affairs than any of his workers, or even of thousands of them. Like some previous critiques, this one points to an essential feature of democracy, but its shortcoming is to treat democratic forms as if they lacked reality, whereas they are real, with a reality of their own. Its often said that the liberties allowed by a democratic regime are only cosmetic: that is true, but only part of the truth. Everybody knows that freedom of speech favours the business lawyer more than his cleaning lady. In an unequal society, knowledge, culture, politics and access to the public scene are also unequal. Yet, today as yesterday, by using and enlarging possibilities left to them, the workers, the common people have been able to better their lot, and thus theyve given some content to liberties that arent just empty shells. True, this betterment was caused more by direct often violent action than by democracy properly speaking: nevertheless, legal unions, litigation bodies, as well as local authorities, members of parliament or even governments favourable to labour have helped channel these demands, moderating them and pushing them forward at the same time. Democracy and reformism have led a couples life for nearly 150 years now, although theyve often been strange bedfellows. Explaining that a workers ballot paper only formally weigh the same as his bosss, only proves that so-called political equality does not make for social inequality. Yet reformists have never said the opposite. They say: Since Mr Fords ballot paper weighs a million times more than one of his workers, lets get together the votes of millions of workers and well be stronger than the Ford family. Well turn into reality the appearance of power that the bourgeois have granted us. Against the might of capital, labour has the strength of numbers: speaking in public, having papers independent from the bosses press, organizing in the workplace, meeting and demonstrating in the street, are after all easier in democracy, as the exploited and oppressed have experienced. In general, the mass of the population has more ways to improve its conditions of work and life with Adenauer than Hitler, with De Gaulle than Ptain, with Allende than Pinochet, with Felipe Gonzales than Franco, etc. If parliament was only a sham, and freedom of speech only a deception, there wouldnt be any more parliaments, parties or political campaigns, and they wouldnt still rally voters, and even stir passions. (Unless we think this is due to continuous crafty bourgeois conditioning: but surely over a century of democratic regime should have acted as an eye opener...) Democracy is not a show,- not just a show. So Churchill was right ?...

Lets go back to the word itself. Westminster is not on the Acropolis If we put back in its place, i.e. in history, this reality commonly called democracy, we realize how poorly the word is adapted to what it has labelled for a couple of centuries. Modern times have given an utterly new usage to a notion born in Ancient Greece. Nowadays, the man in the street, the academic or the political activist, everyone uses the word democracy for 5th century B.C. Athens and 21st century Italy or Sweden. The people who would never dare talk about a prehistoric economy or work among New Guinea tribesmen see no anachronism in applying the same term to a system where citizenship meant an ability (theoretical but also partly effective) to govern and be governed, and to a system where, for 99% of the citizens, citizenship comes down to the right to be represented. This gap was more readily admitted in the early days. James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the US Constitution, differentiated between democracy, where the people meet and exercise their government in person, and republic (a term of Roman and not Greek origin), where they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. With the passing of time and the rise of the modern bureaucratic State (which Madison opposed), democracy has become a mere synonym for power vested in the people. Common wisdom bemoans the limits of a Greek democracy closed to women, slaves and foreigners, and rejoices over the openness of modern democracy to larger and larger sections of the population. The ideal of radical democrats is a demos that would welcome all human beings living on a given territory. They forget that the Ancient Athenian fortunate enough to enjoy citizenship was not a citizen because he was a human being, but because he happened to be a co-owner of the polis : he was a landowner, small or big. The democratic system emerged as a way to manage as smoothly as possible the contradictions within a community of male family heads, inexorably divided by a growing unequal distribution of fortune. Its only because it was limited to a group that shared something vital (a superior social position, albeit undermined by money differences) that Greek democracy could afford to be participatory (which did not save it from periodic crises). In Europe or the US today, nothing can be compared to the demos of Pericles time. When its applied to societies ruled by the capital-labour relationship, the word democracy tells us more about what these societies think of themselves than about their reality. A question of words ?

This brief survey seems to leave us with only one option, summed up by W. Churchill in the House of Commons on November 11, 1947: Democracy is the worst form of government except for all other forms, that have been tried from time to time. Its significant that the best known definition of democracy should be based on a paradox, even a play on words. In fact, everybody makes fun of Churchills phrase, and yet everybody accepts it, with one reservation: everybody thinks he has the solution to really get the best out of this lesser evil. (Its also significant that the famous British statesman should have added cynicism to pragmatism in another phrase: The best argument against democracy is a fiveminute conversation with the average voter. This second sentence is less often quoted: the scorn it displays for the actors extras would be more appropriate of democracy might discredit the first definition.) 14

If we wish to stick to the word communism and object to democracy, its not for traditions sake, but for historical motives. In spite of its imperfections, communism expresses the endeavour of the exploited and of the human species to liberate itself. The word and the notion were meaningful (that is, debatable and debated) in 1850 or 1900. The revolution that failed in Russia, and Stalinism later, loaded the term with a totally different meaning. As the S.I. once explained, captive words become like prisoners put to hard labour: they too are forced to work for the benefit of those whove captured them. Communism is not bureaucratic by nature. On the contrary, democracy has been a distorted word ever since its return in the mouth of bourgeois revolutionaries from the 18th century onwards, and of most (but not all) socialists in the 19th and 20th centuries. The distortion does not consist in an outright lie like the Maoist descriptions of life in China, but in

a mental displacement of reality: as it identifies modern parliaments to Ancient agoras, and the 21st century citizen to a 5th century B.C. Athenian citizen, and as it suggests the modern one has a lot more power, it compresses history and confuses us. Exploitation and / or domination ? Do inequality, poverty and misery exist because a few privileged ones make decisions for us all ? Or have these happy few got a near monopoly over decisions because they already are rich and therefore powerful ? The question is sterile. Mountains of books and articles have been and are still written to refute the alleged Marxist claim that the economy explains next to everything. Who ever made such a claim ? According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining factor is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. (Engels, letter to J. Bloch, September 21, 1890) The economy surely does not explain power. Profit-making strictly speaking does not account for (local or world) wars. A similar socio-economic infrastructure can coexist with very different and opposed political forms. Capitalist Germany was successively run by a monarchist caste, by bourgeois, by the leaders of a nationalist-racist one-party State, then after 1945 by bourgeois in the West and by bureaucrats in the East, then again by bourgeois when the country was reunified. History provides us with many examples of non-coincidence between economic might and political authority, and of a modern State occasionally ruling against the bourgeois, forcing the general interest of the system upon reluctant industrialists or businessmen. Faced with a large strike in the Ruhr, Bismark himself compelled the bosses to grant a wage rise. Although usually in Europe money brings about power, in Africa and in the East, power is often the quick way to fortune, with family or clan misappropriating public funds or siphoning off foreign trade. Also, its not uncommon for political rulers to dispossess the rich, as weve seen in Russia over the last ten or twenty years. Yet, in the vast majority of cases, political leaders and masters of the land, of trade and of manufacturing go hand in hand or come down to the same thing. Commanding men usually goes together with putting them to work. The two forms of control can clash with one another, but not for long: one consolidates the other. Power does not create itself. Political rule and possession of the means of production rarely coincide, but in modern society theres neither exploitation without domination, nor domination without exploitation: the same groups have direct or indirect control over wealth and power. The exploiter needs to be able to put pressure on the person he exploits: he only exploits what he has supremacy over. Domination is a precondition and a necessary form of exploitation. Lets not try and decide which one logically or chronologically comes first. Exploitation is never just economic (I have someone work for me, in my place and for my benefit), but also political (instead of someone making decisions about his life, I take the decisions myself, for instance I decide when to hire and fire him). Society is not divided, as Castoriadis thought in the 1960s, between order-givers and order-takers. Or rather, this division exists, but these orders have to do with what structures todays world: the capital-wage labour relation (which does not mean it determines everything). There is no need to oppose exploitation to domination. Human societies in general, and capitalism in particular, can only be understood by the link between exploitation and domination. Firms are not just profit makers: they are also power structures, but they remain in business as long as they create and accumulate value, otherwise they go bankrupt. 15

Politics as the foundation of democracy If politics means taking into account society as a whole (including the reality of power), and not just as an addition of local or technical issues, then any social change is political, any social critique is political, and revolution has to do with politics. Politics, however, is something else than this concern for the global, the general, the total, because it turns this totality into a new specialization, into an activity removed from direct social interests. That special dimension cannot ignore socioeconomic hierarchies and oppositions. But it deals with them by shifting them on a level where the roots of these conflicts will never be changed, only their consequences. Ancient Greeces real contribution to history was not the principle of democracy as a set of rules and institutions by which citizens make collective decisions. The innovation went deeper. It invented what democracy is based upon: a special time-space reserved for confrontation, and distinct from the rest of social life. In that specific sphere, a person is taken away from his private interests, from fortune and status differences, from his social superiority or inferiority, and placed on an equal footing with all the other citizens. Equality of rights alongside social inequality: that is the definition of politics. Society is fully aware of its inability to suppress group or class antagonism, so it transfers the antagonism onto a parallel level thats supposed to be neutral, where conflicts are acknowledged and softened in the best possible interest of the continuation of the system as a whole. Its this separation that Marxs early writings were dealing with. Direct or worker peoples democracy maintains the separation while it claims to go beyond it by involving everyone in the democratic process, as if popular empowerment could solve the problem of power. Unfortunately, getting everybody inside a separate sphere does not suppress separation. Any human group thinks of and reacts to the whole of its situation. But class societies, in a thousand ways and through trial and error, have divorced debating, managing and decision-making from the rest. Logically, these societies regard this dissociation as the natural and universally desirable best possible way of solving human conflicts. Class divisions, in certain conditions, have created politics: doing away with class divisions will entail going beyond politics. Democracy is not to be denounced and smashed, but superseded. Like other essential critiques, the critique of democracy will only become effective by the communizing of society. As long as people content themselves with a fair redistribution of wealth, they inevitably also go for a fair redistribution of power. Only an altogether different world will no longer be obsessed with power, with taking it, sharing it, or scattering it. Well solve the political question when we stop treating it as the prime issue. Manufacturing consent and dissent When writers like N. Chomsky expose the conditioning of public opinion by the State, media and lobbies, they fail to ask themselves what is being conditioned. Opinion is thought of as a collective motley and fickle spirit that sometimes determines events and sometimes is tossed about by them, as if these events were within its reach one day, and out of reach the next. For instance, German opinion is reported to have been indifferent or hostile to Hitler in 1923, then to have listened to him after 1929, before moving away from him for good after the fall of the Third Reich. Its like these successive points of view had been taken

regardless of what German individuals, groups, classes, unions, parties, etc., were doing each time. Another example is the day there was a reversal of French opinion in 1968: the huge rightwing demonstration on the Champs Elyses, May 30, is described as the death knell for the rebellion in the streets and in the factories. Yet this shows what public opinion really is. In April, most future rebels had no idea they would be soon marching in the street or stopping work. A few days later, pushed on by the early street fighting and the initiative of a minority of workers, millions of people discovered what they wanted to do and could do. A couple of weeks later, the ebb of the strike wave (and for many, the satisfaction of seeing their demands at least partly met) wore out the revolt and enabled conservative forces to get a grip on themselves. Thus, from beginning to end, the shock of the largest general strike in history determined the flow of events, and successively made people aware of possible changes, enabled law and order supporters to resurface, and created despair among the rebels but also numerous rebounds over the next ten years. Mens social being determines their consciousness. Admittedly, it works both ways, but certainly a lot more this way than the other. After 1945, in France as elsewhere, the workers at the Billancourt Renault plant near Paris had been fed with Stalinist slander depicting (real or /invented/imagined/) Trotskysts as fascists and agents provocateurs in the pay of the boss and the police. The CPled union, the CGT, had unrelentingly and usually successfully prevented work stoppages: The strike is the weapon of big business In the Spring 1947, the Billancourt workers went on a two-week strike, partly managed by the rank and file, and elected a well known Trotskyst, Pierre Bois, on the strike committee. Yet theyd been conditioned by years of propaganda, and the tiny revolutionary minority could only answer back by poorly distributed leaflets, with the risk of being beaten up or sacked, as the CGT held sway over the running of the plant. If in such negative circumstances, a substantial number of workers dared lay down tools and designate a Trotskyst to represent them, its not because they would have had access at last to Trotskys Revolution Betrayed or other critical analyses of the bureaucracy. More simply, the pressure of their conditions of work and life, and their own resistance to exploitation led them to disobey union orders, to fight alongside persons like P. Bois, and treat as comrades those they distrusted before. In some ways, there was more militancy on the premises in 1947 than in 1968: in 47, a few strikers debated about manufacturing firearms, and the union van was turned over by rebellious workers. By the same logic, when the strike was over, with the CP being expelled from government and the beginning of the Cold War, the CGT took on a tougher antibourgeois line. One reason (or pretext) for the government getting rid of its CP ministers was the Stalinists getting on the bandwagon and siding with the strikers. The worker bureaucracy got back its influence over the mass of the workforce. Not entirely, though: the Trotskysts tried to take advantage of the strike to launch a small union (called Syndicat Dmocratique Renault), which struggled along for a couple of years before dying away. If very few workers had confidence in it, its not because Stalinist slander would have retrieved the efficiency it had lost in the Spring 1947. The reason is more down to earth: the CGT was better in tune with the needs of the proletarians, pressed some of their demands and structured their struggles. The CGT defended and represented them better than a union which was a small minority in Renault and had hardly any support in the rest of the country. From propagandist to educationist Opinion is a set of (individual or group) ideas about the world. Representative democracy wishes each of us to form his ideas on his own, and only afterwards to compare them to other persons ideas. Direct democracy prefers a collective 16

making of ideas. But both think the only way to free thought is to be correctly educated or even better, self-taught, this self being here again preferably collective. Because of the rise and fall of totalitarianism in the 20th century, the word and the reality of propaganda are now commonly looked down upon. In 1939, S. Chakotin published The Rape of the Masses (translated into English in 1940; new edition by Haskell House, 1982): a disciple of Pavlov, he argued that totalitarian (especially Nazi) methods of mind control were based on the use of emotional urges to create conditioned reflexes. Chakotin was theorizing his own practice: hed been in charge of anti-fascist propaganda for the German SPD in the early 1930s. He said he appealed to reason, not to the senses as the Nazis did, but that did not prevent him from devising crowd conditioning techniques for mass meetings. Chakotins failure to beat the Nazis at their own game is a sign that Hitlers success was only marginally caused by crowd manipulation techniques. Germany turned to Hitler when the Weimar republic proved incapable of offering any other (radical, reformist or conservative) solution to its crisis. Ed. Bernays, perhaps the first professional advertiser on public relations, had already described in Propaganda (1928) how an invisible government ruled democratic society. He claimed to be able to act on the collective subconscious with a combination of Freudism and crowd psychology, and invented advertising techniques that he sold to big business as well as politicians. In 1954, he was instrumental in destabilizing the (democratic) government of Guatemala that the US finally toppled. In those days, it was still a novelty to sell a candidate to the White House like a soft drink, and by similar methods. Unpalatable Bernays was ahead of his time, and heralded ours, when no party dares engage into propaganda: it communicates. Commercials dont sell goods, they sell lifestyles. Parties dont promote programs, they promote meaning and imagery. Unlike the simplistic agit-prop of yesteryear, todays most advanced political advertising does not pretend to change our views : it presents itself as a helping hand that will allow us to make up our own opinions. Advertising now calls itself information, needless to say interactive information. Everything is supposed to be bottom up. Modern management has become the ideal model of all relations. The progressive boss gives the staff a large margin of self-organizing in their work as long as they reach the objective set by the company. The teacher aims at bringing out his students autonomy. The psychologist (counsel, sorry...) repeats to his patient : Be Yourself !The contradiction remains the same in every field of activity and ends up in more control over staff (particularly thanks to computerization), more bureaucratic guidelines in schools, and more counselling. How could it be otherwise ? The critique of education first (or self-education first) was expressed as early as 1845: The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society between two parts, one of which is superior to society. (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, III) Nobody believes much of what commercial or political advertising says, yet it works. No driver watching a Peugeot TV commercial regards the new SW 407 as the best estate car ever made, and no voter expects the presidential candidate to keep all his promises, but people buy cars, take part in elections, and thats what matters. The content of the message is far less important than popular participation in and acceptance of the whole system. The more information and discussion there is, the better

Democrats, moderate or radical, all think that the inadequacies of democracy come from the fact that there is never enough of it: not enough good schooling, no enough quality papers, no enough serious talks on TV and our information resources are never wide and varied enough. Democracy is indeed based on (individual and/or collective) free will, but this freedom must be properly fuelled by the largest possible information and discussion. This vision is to be expected from party professional organizers, teachers, media people, publishers and all those who make a living (and a sense) out of communication. But it is surprising that so many revolutionaries also should regard getting and exchanging ideas as the prime mover of history. In Orwells 1984, Winston is watched by a telescreen forcibly installed in his livingroom and which he is forbidden to switch off. In the early 21st century, television is no longer the main popular screen it was in 1960 or 1990. On the Internet, at home or on portable cell phones, people have direct access to forums where thousands of talks take place between a government minister, an ecologist, a businesswoman, a gay activist, an unemployed, an antiglobalizer, or sometimes an anarchist. At the click of a mouse, I can get loads of data and differing views on whats going on today in Peking or La Paz. A few more clicks, and I challenge these data and views in the company of an Internaut from Sydney or Montreal, and have my own views on these events circulated worldwide in a matter of minutes. This instant and universal availability also applies to the past. Unless I have a special fondness for the canals in Amsterdam, I no longer visit the International Institute of Social History to know about the Ruhr Red Army in 1920. Not everything is available on-line, but theres more on the Internet now than on any single public library or of course newspaper kiosk. Most of all, its not just there to be read, but exchanged and debated. Since everything is made measurable these days, its likely someone will invent a system that monitors and quantifies all verbal exchange (including conversations on the web, on phones, etc.) taking place at one particular moment on this planet. Even taking into account the growth in population, the figure is likely to be higher than in 1970. Modern man is a paradox. He keeps repeating he is increasingly being dispossessed (and he puts the blame on entities he calls the economy, finance or globalization) and yet, when his workday is over, he feels he is repossessing his existence by reading about dispossession in the paper, or (better and more interactive) by chatting about it in cyberspace. The less power we have over our lives, the more we talk about it. The contemporary citizen is dissatisfied with heavy and remote traditional democratic mechanisms. At the same time, he is given a continuous instant democracy made of opinion polls, webtalk, participatory radio and TV, and tele-reality shows. Hes not just asked his political preferences every four or five years: every day is now election day. Mixing Latin and Greek, we could say we now live in a home centred domocracy which gives us the liberty to change things from our own home : I help solve environmental world problems by buying energy saving light bulbs for my living-room. People used to make fun of Speakers Corner at Hyde Park as a symbol of socially harmless free speech. Todays generalized self-managed speech is universally and immediately circulated. In the workplace, in the classroom, in a couple, in a family, between professions, between performers and spectators, between cultures, religions, media, among neighbours, everywhere, everything ought to be discussed and all information to be shared, so that power should constantly 17

flow and never crystallize, so no-one could monopolize it. The 1999 Kosovo war was the first with mass Internaut involvement. Everyone of us becomes a selfappointed reporter : Dont hate the media: Be the media ! To impose us what to think, democracy tells us what we have to think about. When Habermas extolled the virtues of the public sphere in 1962, he also bemoaned its undermining by commercial mass media. He could be more optimistic today, when universal debate seems to revive the openness he favours : a citizen is now a person with access to the press, to the media and to the Internet. Yet this new citizenship amounts to the liberty to voice our views on world affairs, i.e. on what is currently being said on world affairs by the press, the media and on the Internet. The public sphere passes off as a reality that can put a check on State power, but when did it really determine the course of events, or was able to stop the descent into catastrophes like 1914, Hitler, the second world war, or colonial and post-colonial massacres ? Giving ones opinion is as relevant as opinions are decisive, and theyre not decisive, not much. The liberal conservative Tocqueville was more to the point : (..) it is an axiom of political science in the United States that the only way to neutralize the impact of newspapers is to multiply them (Democracy in America,1835) Most of all, democracy triumphs by telling us where to think. The 1900 paper reader could choose to buy a socialist or a rightwing daily, but he had hardly any influence on the structure and evolution of the press. The organization of the Internet is equally beyond the reach of a website browser or writer : for a start, he was never asked about the birth of the web itself. Saying the Internet was created by (and would not exist without) millions of Internauts, is as true as saying that millions of drivers are responsible for the development of the car industry. Making a principle of maximum information and discussion, is inevitably prioritizing the framework where information circulates and discussion takes place. Of course, everyone wishes the channels of communication to be as much bottom up as possible, but how could they be if the whole life of the communicators is top down organized ? Society is not the addition of millions of publicly shared experiences or views. The idea of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: this is as much true as in 1845. The difference is that billions of ideas are now being circulated and (nearly) universally available. But who has the power ? The political system is still tuned to general and presidential elections, and the rest is an accessory to the rhyme. In 1900 or 1950, politics was talked about but not made in village hall debates. Neither is it made today on the Internet. Spectacle-induced passivity (as analysed by the S.I.) has taken the form of a constant show of activity. How about taking direct democracy at its word ? According to its supporters, here is what direct democracy is aiming at :

[1] The respect of a majority. [2] The expression of minorities, which are granted a large latitude of action. [3] The possibility of free speech, in order to avoid pressure and violence: Lets talk first. [4] The primacy of a collective will, not the will of an individual or of a handful of persons. [5] The respect of decisions taken in common.

Lets take them one by one. [1] Majority rule. A lot of social movements have been launched by a minority, often a very small one. In the 1930s, at the time of large strikes by unskilled labour in the US, two sit-downs involving about 10.000 people were started in Akron by half a dozen workers. In 1936, at Goodyear, while the union was negotiating with the boss about wages, 98 unskilled workers laid down tools, followed by 7.000 others, which forced the management to yield after 36 hours. One might object that in all such cases, a minority only initiates actions soon taken up by a majority. True, but this very fact shows how little relevant the majority criterion is. The participants in a picket line put their interests (and the interest of labour as whole) above the interests of the non-strikers: they do not respect the right to work of those who want to work. Democrats might argue that the strike is supported by a great majority of the workforce : that would be forgetting that democracy is also the protector of minorities. By the way, what is a majority ? 51% ? 60% ? 95% ? We are faced with the inadequacy of the self principle. Let the workers themselves decide Wholl decide when a minority ceases to be a minority and starts becoming a majority, and when a majority gets big enough to be considered as the common will ? [2] Minority rights. Any deep movement, whether for simple demands or more, will pull along in its wake a number of yet undecided persons and ask them to do what they did not previously feel like doing. When piqueteros go round the neighbourhood and ask for 50 people to come and reinforce their road block, the picket members are not acting as a boss summoning his personnel, or an army officer calling his soldiers to order : they expect other proletarians to fulfil their obligation to the piqueteros as well as to themselves. There are differences between the bulk of the rank and file and its most active elements: for these elements to turn into a new ruling elite in the plant and possibly in society, it takes more than them initiating unrest on the shop floor. Bureaucratization is nearly always the result of reformism, not the other way round, and it can rise out of activist minorities as well as of consenting majorities. The existence of a majority and a minority is not a valid enough indicator helping us to assess a situation and to deal with it. The majority/minority duality functions in combination as well as in opposition. Nobody ever thinks about this in a vacuum. If you agree with a decision, you naturally tend to believe it comes out of a sufficient number of people. Those who disagree are inclined to believe the opposite: to them, this majority is not enough of a majority, theyd like another, a more numerous one [3] Free speech. Its pointless to wonder if speech takes place before, after or during the act of rebellion. In 1936, in the General Motors plant at Toledo, all the work force gathered for a general meeting but, as a participant said, it was like everyone had made up his mind before a single word was uttered, and a sit-down strike started. Those workers were not brainless robots. Exchanging words then was unnecessary because it had taken place before, in hundreds of informal discussions and small meetings. The action that was born out of them spoke for itself. If we equate democracy with exchange, these encounters can be called democratic, but it was not the democratic principle that made it possible. On the other hand, in many conflicts, urging the participants to get together and speak can result in the movement becoming more aware of itself and stronger, or losing its momentum when it was just starting to gather speed. An expression which ceases to be action and experience dissolves into free-wheeling talk. In the same way, looking for more information can be an excellent way of forgetting the essential information: the common determination to fight on. 18 Unlike Gods Word that was turned into flesh, human words express ideas, partake of events, strengthen (or sometimes weaken) our behaviour, but they do not create. A strike or a riot is forced to take action and to choose between options. But it does not relate to them like a philosopher or scientist testing a set of hypotheses and then, by mere reasoning and with no outside interference, opting for the best. In a social movement, speech helps sort out what has been maturing in the participants mind, in relation to their past and present. Social critique usually rejects the secret ballot paper in favour of open public voting that does not cut up the continuity of the voters action. The election moment separates each voter from the others and from the rest of his life (the polling booth is called an isolator in French). One of Thatchers main anti-strike measures was to make it illegal to go on strike without a secret ballot procedure. Nevertheless, history provides us with a many examples of people and workers being manipulated by a public show of hands, a game in which Stalinists had become experts. The point we are making is that historical evolution is not the result of a majority rule based on a confrontation of opinions and on the maximum availability and sharing of information. This is NOT saying that information and discussion are pointless. No act is sufficient in itself, nor is its meaning so obvious that it would require no expression at all. In the General Motors, 1936, example mentioned above, verbal exchange did occur, but before the decision to strike, and it contributed to the decision. In such a case, respecting democracy would have meant forcing a discussion upon the workforce: this may have revealed the determination of the workers, or it may have deflected it. Debate is never good or bad in itself. [4] Common will. Democracy always presents itself as a protection, as the means to secure non-violence among its participants, because democrats treat each other as equals. Acting on behalf of others does not necessarily turn anyone into a leader. Most bureaucrats do not build up their authority by positioning themselves above the mass, rather by sheltering behind the mass. A bureaucrat pretends to have no personal ambition and to serve the interests of the rank and file. While were certainly not looking for charismatic figures, theres no need to be afraid of individual initiatives either. Insisting on community as a principle leaves us stuck with the majority versus minority intractable dilemma already discussed. Among those who share a common perspective, someone often becomes aware of an opportunity before the others: trying to convince the others that this opportunity must be seized wont be a purely intellectual exercise. Arguments are going to be thrown about and its likely there will be a conflict of wills at some point. Ideas wont meet on neutral ground until one is recognized as the best because of its inner logical superiority. Truth belongs to no-one. It rushes and shoves. Truth is as immodest as light (..) It possesses me (Marx, 1843). Consistency-reaching is not a peaceful process. An essential idea shatters my certainties and does not come to me without some violence. If democracy means choosing between options with the only guidance of individual free will and not outside interference, then truth is not democratic. Making it a principle of having any action decided upon by the whole group, and then any change of action also debated and re-decided upon by a new group meeting (or some general consultation), means no action. Those groups who say they operate on such a total self-management basis only self-manage their own speech.

[5] Everybodys all for respecting common decisions unless or until the decision is deemed wrong. In France, 1968, the Peugeot plant at Sochaux (at the time, one of the biggest concentrations of skilled workers in that country) went on a sit-down strike on May 20. When a great majority of the labour force voted to return to work on June 10, a minority re-occupied the premises, and was violently expelled by the police in the early hours of the 11th. At that moment, thousands on non-strikers were arriving by bus for the morning shift: instead of resuming work as they had intended to, they immediately joined the ex-occupiers and fought the police with them for the whole day. Two workers got killed. Rumours later said that some rioters had used guns, and that cops had been killed but the police would not admit it. True or (probably) false, these rumours show how tough the fighting was. The local working class lived the event as an outright confrontation with bosses and State. The return to work only took place on June 20, and labour got a better deal than had been granted nationally. In other words, after voting to go back, a large proportion of the labour force not only decided not to go back, but rallied what had been until then a minority of isolated extremists. The first occupation had involved between 100 and 1.000 persons, out of a workforce of over 35.000, with 3.000 union members. True, the general meetings could be called non-democratic: they took place under the combined pressure of the CGT and the media. But the very fact of contradicting ones vote, and whats more, without having had a proper meeting, shows that, unlike what the democratic principle maintains, the debating and voting spacetime is not decisive. What happened was not simply a reflex of instinctive worker solidarity. At the Billancourt Renault plant, in 1972, the murder of a Maoist worker by a security guard hardly caused any reaction among his work mates, who were indifferent to what they saw as useless leftist troublemaking. In 1968, the Peugeot workers felt they had something in common with a radical minority that was not alien to them. Besides, a few years before, wildcat strikes had broken out at Sochaux, often initiated by young workers. Also, during the first 1968 occupation, a hundred radicals had set up a short lived forum that served as a medium for open discussions on a variety of controversial issues. The June 11 eruption did not come out of the blue : it had been prepared by past informal debates and unofficial meetings, which (better than democratic procedures) paved the way for an apparently spontaneous outburst. Faceless resistance is not just canteen or coffee machine conversations: it serves as a springboard for open conflict. Assessing these five criterions shows first that a lot of positive events have happened without or against them, secondly that they have often failed to prevent what they were supposed to prevent. None of the standards of direct democracy really works. Actually, a defender of direct democracy wont ask for them to be fully implemented. He might even agree with most of the points weve been making, but hell say democratic standards are not to be taken as absolutes: its the guideline behind them that matters, the motive, the impetus: But if ye be led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law. (Saint Paul, Galatians, 5 : 18) Thats the whole point : this tricky interplay between the letter and the spirit, the law and the Spirit. There was no contradiction for Saint Paul. There is one for democracy, because it is indeed the quest for formal criterions: it pretends to give us rules of conduct that provide the best possible freedom. So this sudden non-formality goes against how democracy defines itself. Democracy is not the ad hoc running of social life. Its communism that relies on the ability of fraternal (non competitive, non profit-seeking, etc.) social relationships to 19

create the organization best fitted to them. Democracy is the exact opposite: it sets procedures and institutions as a prerequisite and a condition of the rest. It says society is based on its political organization (top down or bottom up). And then, when experience proves democratic standards dont work, democracy says we can do without them or even that we must do without them. Democracy is there to solve conflicts, yet when theyre too serious, it cant solve them any more. Whats the use of a principle that can only be applied when social life runs smoothly and we dont need the principle ? Democracy functions as far as society can remain democratic. This letter versus spirit is a contradiction for democracy, but democratic rulers left or right can manage it. They know perfectly well that democracy has to be and will be suspended in times of crisis. Suspended partly, when Britain fought the IRA. Or totally, when the Algerian army cancelled the 1991 elections after the first round had been won by the Islamists, and took over power, with full support from Western countries. The bourgeois have no qualms provisionally turning into dictators in the long-term interest of democracy: no democracy for the antidemocrats. Being a lesser evil, democracy sometimes ceases to be democratic to avoid a worse evil. For radicals who believe in direct democracy, however, this contradiction is a trap: they wont get a full and permanent reality out of a system that cant provide it. Prioritizing direct democracy does not produce direct democracy. Whatever positive content democracy (if we wish to keep the word) may have, cant be the result of democracy. Contradiction in communist theory Even a cursory reading of Marx is enough to realize he was at the same time a staunch supporter and an enemy of democracy. As his texts can be found in paperback or on the Internet, a few very short quotes will suffice here. Marx argues that democracy is the culmination of politics, and that a political emancipation is partial, selfish, bourgeois emancipation, the emancipation of the bourgeois. If, as he writes, the democratic State [is] the real State, assuming we want a world without a State, weve got to invent a life with neither State nor democracy. However, when Marx presents democracy as the resolved mystery of all constitutions, whereby The constitution appears as what it is, the free product of men (Critique of Hegels philosophy of Right, 1843), he is opposing real democracy to the existence of the State, and therefore supporting democracy. Besides, Marx was only indirectly addressing democracy through a critique of bureaucracy, and targeting politics through the critique of the State, particularly through its theorization by Hegel: All forms of State have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democratic. (Id.) One last quote, interesting because its written decades after the early works, and by someone who was coming close to admitting the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism: One must never forget that the logical form of bourgeois domination is precisely the democratic republic (..) The democratic republic always remains the last form of bourgeois domination, the form in which it will die. (Engels, letter to Bernstein, March 14, 1884) Intuitions leave much room for interpretation, and the context often blurs the message. To understand these conflicting views, we must bear in mind that, in the mid-19th century, a groundswell of social movements, from Ireland to Silesia, was pressing for radical democratic demands and social demands, both at the same time, combined and opposed, and this confrontation resulted in a critique

of politics as a separate sphere. Lets not idealize our past. The same thinkers and groups often mixed these demands and that critique. The purpose of The German Ideology was to prove that history cannot be explained by the conflicts of ideas or political platforms, but by the social relations by which human beings organize their lives and, above all, by the material conditions of their lives. Those pages are to be read in connection with The Jewish Question, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, Contribution to the critique of Hegels Philosophy of Law, The King of Prussia & Social Reform, the Theses on Feuerbach and other similar texts which address the democratic bourgeois revolution, but also the Rights of Man, and reject a revolution that would only have a political soul. For example, Marx sees 1789 and especially the 1793-94 Terror in France as the culmination of political will that deludes itself into believing it can change the world from the top. Theres little doubt that Marx wished to apply his materialist method not only to history, religion, philosophy and the economy, but also to the question of power and to politics as a field of special knowledge, as separate science and technique. Yet at the time he was describing the political sphere as another form of alienation, he was also pressing on with the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution, and a few years later he became the editor of a liberal progressive paper, the Neue Reinische Zeitung, subtitled Organ Of Democracy. The deeper the communist movement goes, the higher its contradictions are. Marx happens to be among the few thinkers who come closest to a synthesis and therefore inevitably combine its most opposing elements, the dimensions our movement is at most pain to reconcile. Its no accident that Karl Marx should have given one of the best approaches of communism (in particular, but not only, in his early works) and welcomed the advent of capitalism as a world system. and contradiction in proletarian practice

capitalism. For whats it worth, democratic reunion is enough for the bourgeoisie. The proletariat needs something else. Proletarian self-organization which fails to develop into a self-critique of wage-labour reinforces labour as the partner of the capital-labour couple: the forced coupling goes on and so does the management of the couple, hence the peaceful coexistence of opposites called democracy. The partial, confused yet deep communist movement that developed in the first half of the 19th century initiated an equally confused yet persistent critique of democracy. Both movement and critique were soon pushed in the background by the rise of organized labour that tried to make the most of bourgeois democracy. Yet every time the movement re-emerged, it got back to basics, and revived some aspects of the critique of democracy. Theres no need to be an expert in Marxology to know that most of these fundamentals fell into oblivion: some texts got hardly any response, while others were put aside by Marx and Engels and published much later. The real movement, as Marx called it, seemed to have very little use for these writings. In the first half of the 20th century, new proletarian shock waves led to a reborn critique that (re)discovered these long-forgotten intuitions, but failed to be up to them. Indeed, Bolshevik practice after October 1917 could fall within Marxs critique of the French revolution and of Jacobinism. As for the worldwide 1960-80 earthquake, in spite, or rather because of its anti-bureaucratic stand, it turned out to be a zenith of democracy (though, unlike the post-1917 period, there was no revolutionary attempt to take over political power in the 1960s and 70s). The theoretical inroads made over 150 years ago have yet to be taken up. The democratic appeal

If Marx was perhaps the writer who went the furthest in extolling and rejecting democracy, its because he was a concentrated expression of the forced situation in which the proletariat used to live and still lives. Intellectual discrepancies mirror a practical dilemma which the proletarians have to solve to emancipate themselves. Like others in his time, like R. Luxemburg later, like the German Left after 1914-18, Marx reflected a contradiction: the self-awareness and the community culture (Selbstverstndigung and Versammlungskultur, as they were called in Germany around 1900), in the workplace and in the workers district, confront bourgeois democracy with proletarian community. But using ones condition as a major weapon is a double-edged sword for the proletarians. Guy Debord may not be the most acute critique of democracy, but he points to something essential in The Society of the Spectacle, theses 87 & 88. The bourgeoisie was able to use its socioeconomic power as the main instrument of its political ascent. The proletarians cant use their social role to emancipate themselves, because this role is given to them by capital. So their only radical weapon is their negative potential closely linked to the positive part they play in the reproduction of capital. The bourgeois won by asserting themselves on the basis of what they already socially were. The proletarians can only win by fighting against themselves, i.e. against what they are forced to do and be as producers (and as consumers). Theres no way out of this contradiction. Or rather, the only way out is communist revolution. It was enough for the bourgeois to get together and find the means to run society: so creating suitable decision-making institutions was enough (though it took centuries). It was not only for the sake of culture and knowledge that from the 18th century onward the ascending elites promoted networks of debating and scientific societies, clubs, public libraries and museums, and of course a growing press : the rising merchant and industrial classes were building up a new type of sociability that helped them challenge monarchs and aristocrats. The proletarians also need to get together : but for them, just getting together is staying within 20

Democracy is attractive because it gives more than the right to select leaders now and then. Its appeal is to provide everyone with the means to go beyond the restricting circles of family, neighbourhood and work, and to interrelate, to meet others, not just those who are close, but all those living on the same territory, and possibly over the borders too. The democratic dream promises a potential universality, the earthly realization of a brotherhood and sisterhood that religion offers in its own way. Marx was not the only one to emphasize the intimate connection between Christianity and the modern State: the former sees each man as the bearer of an individual soul that makes him equal to others in spirit (everyone can be saved); the latter sees each man as politically equal to others (every citizen has a right to vote and be elected). To fully appreciate the democratic appeal, we should bear in mind what existed before, when formal (i.e. political) equality was unheard of. Not just the ruling elite, but many thinkers and artists showed open contempt for the mass of peasants and workmen that were thought of as an inferior species. Most famous French writers treated the Paris Commune fighters as if theyd been outside or below human standards. Until the mid-20th century, hatred of the workers was widespread among the middle and upper classes, in Germany for instance. 1939-45 was the definitive taming of the rabble: with few exceptions, the toiling masses of the world behaved in a patriotic way, so the bourgeois stopped being scared of a populace that looked like it was accepting law and order at last, and now nearly everyone in a Western-type democracy accepts at least verbally the notion that one human being is worth another. Yet this equivalence is achieved by comparing quantified items. In democratic capitalism, each human person is my fellow being inasmuch as his vote and mine are added and then computed. Modern citizenship is the bourgeois form of freedom.

A system which is not its own cause nor its own cure Democracy is not responsible for what is or what might be regarded as its positive aspects. Universal franchise never created itself. Civil rights rarely came out of elections or peaceful debates, but out of strikes, demonstrations, riots, usually violent, often with bloodshed. Later, once installed, democracy forgets about its origin and says the source of power is not be found in the street where indeed it came from. Politics claims to be the basis of social life, but it results from causes that it merely structures. The advent of the Spanish republic in 1931 was caused by decades of strife, rioting and class war that the new regime proved incapable to control, and it took a civil war and a dictatorship to restore order. After Francos death, the cooling down of social conflicts made possible the transition to a parliamentary system that (unlike in the 1930s) could work as a pacifier and conciliator. Democrats contend that, contrary to dictatorship, democracy has the merit of being able to correct itself. This is true so long as the mere balance of power is upset. If the structure of political rule is in jeopardy, its a completely different matter. As democracy has not got its cause in itself, neither has it got the remedy: the solution has to come from outside electoral procedures and parliamentary institutions. The subtleties of Capitol Hill political bargaining were unable to solve the crisis between North and South in the 1860s: it took no less than a bloody civil war, a forerunner of 20th century industrialized slaughter. It was not forums or ballot papers that toppled Mussolini in 1943, but a succession of uncontrollable strikes. It was not a return to the Weimar republic that put an end to Nazism, but a world war. It was only when the French army illegally took over civilian power in Algiers, May 1958, that in Paris politicians were forced to institute a more stable political system, and started realizing the colonial era was over. Democracy is a remarkable violence filter. But because it is born out of violence, it only overcomes its tragedies by giving way to more violence. Biologists say that one of the definitions of a life form is its ability at reproduction, organization and reorganization. How politically, socially (and intellectually) valid is a phenomenon thats unable to explain itself and to cure itself ? How consistent is it ? What sort of reality are democracy supporters talking about ? And yet it holds out After nearly two centuries of electoral and parliamentary experiences, including endeavours to make some revolutionary use of the universal franchise by radicals from Proudhon to Lenin, and in spite of a thousand betrayals and renunciations of its own principles, modern democracy still soldiers on and thrives. In a large part of the world, and in what is known as the developed or rich countries, democracy remains a reality, and a desirable one, because it fits in with the inner logic of the industrial, merchant and wage-labour civilization, therefore with capitalism. Not all capitalism is democratic, far from it, as is shown by Stalins Russia and Hitlers Germany, and now by China. But the Third Reich and the USSR yielded to their democratic rivals, and pluto-bureaucratic Chinas boom will only go on if it accepts substantial doses of freedom of speech. Capitalism is economic competition and there can be no efficient competition among capital (as well as an efficient labour market) without some competition in politics too. Democracy is the most adequate political capitalist form. Whether we like it or not, democracy is an excellent expression of life under capitalism. It helps maintaining the degree of liberty and equality required by capitalist production and consumption and, up to a point, also required by the necessary forced relationship between labour and capital. While democracy is one of the obstacles that stand in the way of communist revolution, it does serve the interests of labour in its daily inevitable reformist action. 21 To put it bluntly, theres no practical critique of democracy unless theres a critique of capitalism. Accepting or trying to reform capitalism implies accepting or trying to reform its most adequate political form. Theres no point in sorting out bad (bourgeois) democracy and good (direct, worker, popular) democracy. But theres no point either in declaring oneself an anti-democrat. Democracy is not the Number One enemy, the ultimate smokescreen that veils the proletarian eyes, the unveiling of which would at long last clear the path to revolution. There are no anti-democratic specific actions to be invented, no more than systematic campaigns against advertising billboards or TV - both closely linked to democracy, actually. The participants in millions of acts of resistance or of attack, be they strikes, demonstrations, flying pickets, insurrections, are well aware that these practices have little to do with parliamentary games, and indeed that theyre the exact opposite of parliamentary games. Knowing it does not stop them from calling such practices democratic, and from regarding these practices as the only true democracy, because the participants consider as identical democracy and collective freedom, democracy and self-organization. They say they are practising true democracy because they self-manage their struggle, do away with the separation between those represented and their representatives, and because the general meeting (unlike parliament) is an assembly of equals: so they often believe they are at last giving reality to what is /a sham/make belief/ in the bourgeois world. Each of them regards democracy as the fact of treating his workmate, the person marching beside him, erecting a barricade with him, or arguing with him in a public meeting, as a fellow human being. It would be pointless for us to go into a head-on confrontation with him to try and persuade him to stop using the word democracy. Democracys shortcoming is to treat an indispensable element of revolutionary change as the primary condition of change, or even as its essence. So, in future troubled times, our best contribution will be to push for the most radical possible changes, which include the destruction of the State machinery, and this communization process will eventually help people realize that democracy is an alienated form of freedom. If democracy means giving priority to form over content, only a transformation of the social content will put back form where it belongs. Whenever a movement keeps moving forward and confronting boss and State power, it is not democratic. Democracy is the separation between action and decision. When, however, and this is bound to be often the case, the content of the movement is compatible with industrial dispute arbitration and conciliation, then its normal that form and procedure should come to the fore. In the eyes of nearly all participants, organizing the general meeting according to rules becomes more important than what the meeting decides. The meeting is seen as a cause of the strike, more exactly as the cause of its continuation: because it can put an end to the strike, it is now perceived of as its detonator. Reality is put on its head. Democracy is the supremacy of means over the end, and the dissolution of potentialities in forms. So when these workers ideologize their own behaviour as democratic, they are not wrong: they reason according to the actual limits of their behaviour. When the fact of asking the rank and file for its opinion breaks the determination of the rank and file, its usually because this determination has already declined. In 1994, in one of its French plants, the energy and transport multinational Alstom terminated a strike by calling for a referendum : the personnel voted to return to work. The unions retaliated by having a second referendum: it confirmed the first. Company (or plant) democracy was not killing the conflict, it was finishing it off.

In fact, after an initial militant phase, the strike had lost its vigour. By submitting to an individual secret ballot, the workers confirmed they had ceased to think of themselves as an acting collective. A community that agrees to give only individual opinions no longer exists as a community. Communism as activity Equality is a vital tenet of democracy. Its starting point is the existence of individuals: it compares them from a criterion, and wonders if each of them is either inferior or superior to the other according to the chosen criterion. Old time democracy contented itself with One man, one vote. Modern democrats will ask for equal pay, equal rights in court, equal schooling, equal access to health service, equal job offers, equal opportunity to create ones business, equal social promotion, some would say an equal share of existing wealth. As soon as we get into real social and daily life, the list becomes endless and, to be comprehensive, it has to be negative at some point : equality implies the right not to be discriminated against on account of ones sex, colour, sexual preferences, nationality, religion, etc. The whole political spectrum could be defined by how much is included in the list. Rightwing liberals might limit equality rights to electoral rights, while far left reformists extend equality to a guaranteed substantial income, a home, job protection, etc., in an endless debate between personal freedom and social fairness. The rejection of, and the search for social (and not just political) equality are two sides of the same coin. The obsession with equality is born out of a world laden with inequality, a world that dreams of reducing inequality by giving more to each individual, more rights and more money. Equality protects individuals. Wed rather start by considering what the members of society are doing together, and what they have and dont have in common. Human beings lose their mastery over the running of their personal and group life when they lose the mastery over their conditions of existence, and first of all over the production of the material basis of these conditions. Our problem is not to find how to make common decisions about what we do, but to do what can be decided upon in common, and to stop or avoid doing whatever cannot be decided upon in common. A factory run according to Taylors methods, a nuclear power station, a multinational or the BBC will never come under the management of its personnel. Only a bank that confines itself to micro-credit can remain under some degree of control by the people working there and by those who receive its micro-loans. When a co-op operates on a scale that enables it to rival large companies, its special democratic features begin to fade. A school can be selfmanaged (by staff and schoolkids) as long as it refrains from selecting, grading and streaming. That is fine, and its probably better to be a teenager in Summerhill than at Eton, but that wont change the school system. Whoever does not situate the problem of power where it belongs, is bound to leave it in the hands of those who possess power, or to try and share it with them (as social-democracy does), or to take power from them (as Lenin and his party did). The essence of political thought is to wonder how to organize peoples lives, instead of considering first what those to-be-organized people do. Communism is not a question of finding the government or self-government best suited to social reorganization. It is not a matter of institutions, but of activity. Self is not enough It seems only die-hard party builders could object to autonomy: who wants to be a dependant ? Yet we may wonder why autonomy has become a buzzword lately. Trotskysts are not authoritarian any more. Any leftwinger now is all for autonomy, like nearly every politician looking for working class vote talked of socialism in 22

1910. The popularity of this notion may be a sign of growing radicalism. It certainly also has a lot to do with contemporary daily life and the spaces of freedom it grants us: more open communication channels, new types of leisure, new ways of meeting, making friends and travelling, the network society, the Internet, etc. All these activities have one thing in common: everyone is at the same time constantly on his own and constantly relating to everyone and everything. No revolution without autonomy: quite ! Autonomy is necessary. But its not enough. It is not the principle on which everything can or must be based. Autonomy means giving oneself ones own law (nomos). Its based on the self (auto). Is this what happens in real life ? Everybody wishes collective decisions. So do we. And the best way to get it is for each of us to take part in the decision-making. But once you and I are part of it, we still have to make the decision. Is this self strong enough ? Autonomists have their answer ready; the individual self may be weak, but the collective self is strong. Whos being nave here ? Adding individual wills only transforms them into something qualitatively different if and when they act differently. So were back to where we started. Aggregating selves widens the scope of the problem without solving it. The solution can only come, not from what autonomy is supposed to give us, but from what it is founded upon. Autonomy in itself is no more creative than any form of organization. Many radicals believe in the equation autonomy + anti-State violence = revolutionary movement and see it vindicated for instance in the Oaxaca protracted insurrection. While this event is one of the strongest outbursts of proletarian activity in the recent years, it demonstrates that autonomous violence is necessary and insufficient. A revolutionary movement is more than a liberated area or a hundred liberated areas. It develops by fighting public and private repression, as well as by starting to change the material basis of social relationship. No self-managed street fighting and grassroots district solidarity, however indispensable they are, inevitably contain the acts and the intentions that bring about such a change. So its the nature of the change weve got to insist upon: creating a world without money, without commodity exchange, without labour being bought and sold, without firms as competing poles of value accumulation, without work as separate from the rest of our activities, without a State, without a specialized political sphere supposedly cut off from our social relationships In other words, a revolution that is born out of a common refusal to submit, out of the hope to get to a point of no return where people transform themselves and gain a sense of their own power as they transform reality. P.S. 1 The best concise pamphlet on the subject that we know of is Communism Against Democracy, Treason Press, Canberra, Australia, 2005, composed of two texts by Wildcat (Britain) and Against Sleep And Nightmare (US). Available on the Treason website. See also J. Camatte, The Democratic mystification, 1969. P.S. 2 for (possible) political correctors. Most of the time, this essay uses he and man as a means to say he & she, man & woman. This is not out of neglect of the other half of our species. This he does not mean male. Its the grammatical neuter which encompasses both masculine and feminine. Were well aware that no grammar is socially or sexually neutral. A better society will create better words. For the time being, the old fashioned neuter form has at least the advantage of not giving us the illusion of false equality in speech. The reader whos gone that far would not expect us to believe in democracy in language.