Revolutions (2009)

Book Review from the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Endnotes #1 – Preliminary Materials For A Balance Sheet Of The Twentieth Century. 216 pages. Available from Endnotes, 12 London Road, Brighton, BN1 4JA. £10

The opening issue of this new journal is based around a dialogue between contemporary French ultra-left groups Troploin (Gilles Dauvé & Karl Nesic) and Théorie Communiste (who remain anonymous). Of the contributors Dauvé is probably most well known to English speakers for his tracts written under the pseudonym ‘Jean Barrot’ – Eclipse and Re-emergement of the Communist Movement, Critique of the Situationist International and Fascism / Anti-fascism.

As Endnotes state in their introduction “…we have no wish to encourage an interest in history per se. [..] We hope [..] to undermine the illusion that this is somehow “our” past, something to be protected or preserved. [..]We would go so far as to say that with the exception of the recognition of the historical break that separates us from them, that we have nothing to learn from the failures of past revolutions — no need to replay them to discover their “errors” or distil their “truths” — for it would in any case be impossible to repeat them.”

Both groups, and presumably Endnotes, are tied to the concept of “Communisation” – communism is not something that happens after the revolution, it is the “immediate production of communism; the self-abolition of the proletariat through its abolition of capital and the state.” Notions of both a “transitional society” and “workers self-management” are rejected. Capitalism is a system of production, value accumulation can as easily be managed by workers as by private capitalists or state bureaucrats.

The structure of the journal - each chapter is a critique of the one preceding it - makes for a stimulating and engaging read. A wide range concepts and historical events are covered and subject to lively criticism. From the Paris Commune to Argentina 2002 via the Russian and German revolutions, Italian “Red Years”, the Spanish tragedy, Paris 68 and the Italian “Hot Autumn” we are taken on a radical train journey of revolution and counter-revolution, though the spirit isn’t one of nostalgic reminiscence but firmly rooted in the possibilities of the present moment.

   

Whilst the politics of both Troploin and Théorie Communiste don’t converge with the Socialist Party on all counts there is certainly plenty of food for thought on offer here and a good opportunity to become acquainted with a not overly well known current of contemporary European thought.

DJP

Communism Now (1973)

Book Review from the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Le Mouvemente Communiste. by Jean Barrot. Editions Champ Libre.

We in this country have consistently argued the need for Socialism as a classless, wageless, Stateless world community. On the continent of Europe some groups have claimed to hold the same idea, even if our and their ideas as to how to achieve Socialism are quite different. Jean Barrot has been influenced by one such continental group, which necessarily raises the question whether he really does see Socialism as we do.

For him the aim of the working class movement is the sort of society we call "socialism" or "communism". He sees this as an immediate possibility. The world as a whole, he says, is "communisable", that is, ready for the establishment of Communism. There is no longer any need, as there was in Marx's day, for a period during which the means of production are further developed to the stage where they can provide abundance for all. This stage has already been reached. The immediate task of the Communist (-Socialist) revolution is to re-organise production with a view to eliminating waste and creating interesting and pleasant jobs. To do this, insists Barrot, involves the immediate abolition of production for sale, money, wages, prices and all the other manifestations of the social relation of "value".

Barrot argues that Marxian economics is not simply an explanation of how capitalism works but a social critique of the whole system; that for Marx capital and value are not things but social relations: the relation between stored-up dead labour (and its controllers) and living working labour (and those who embody it, the producers). Barrot maintains that an accurate description of a capitalist, is not simply (or rather, not necessarily at all) a legal owner of the means of production but any group, whether legal owners or not, which "manages capital". Capital is here to be considered of course as a social relation not a thing, so Barrot is not talking about technical factory managers and the like but about whoever actually controls dead labour with a view to exploiting living labour. He points out that at different times and different places, a great variety of people have performed this fucntion from cigar-smoking Victorian capitalists to ascetic army officers. Barrot says that this at least has the advantage of making clear to the working class that what they must abolish is not just "the capitalists" but the whole capitalist system of wage-labour and production for profit.

When it comes to how to establish Socialism our disagreement with Barrot begins, though even here he expresses views worth considering. For instance, he argues that since about 1914 capital has no longer had any progressive role to play in developing the means of production so that Socialists need not support, as Marx did in his day, the spread of capitalism at the expense of pre-capitalist economic and political systems. Their task is to strive for Communism (-Socialism).

But how? Barrot is emphatic in denying that the establishment of Socialism is at all a question of consciousness. According to him, it will be the result of a spontaneous revolutionary outburst which could occur at any time and which will sweep the workers on, almost in spite of themselves, to suppress commodity-production and inaugurate instead production-for-use. It would be nice if it would be as simple as this. But in our view, Barrot seriously underestimates the extent to which workers must understand and want Socialism before it can be established. Of course this is not a question, as Lenin taught, of some outside group "bringing consciousness" to the workers. Socialists consciousness will be the outcome of the practical experiences of the working class under capitalism, including hearing the case for Socialism from Socialist fellow workers (whose Socialist consciousness in turn will have emerged from earlier working class experiences). It's a two-way process in which experiencing the problems of capitalism and hearing the Socialist case interact, eventually producing a mass Socialist consciousness amongst the working class. Until this stage has been reached Socialism just cannot be established. Any attempt to do so, even if successful in dislodging the sitting ruling class, would soon give rise to some other group to take their place as the "managers of capital".

Barrot's book is difficult reading as he makes no concessions to the reader's possible difficulty in immediately grasping the difficult concepts he employs. Nevertheless it is encouraging to see in others the apparent agreement about what Socialism is, even if they're still mistaken as to how to get it.

Adam Buick 

Radical critique (1996)

Book Review from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

What Is Situationism? A Reader edited by Stewart Home (AK Press, 1996, £9.95)

This is an occasionally interesting though somewhat repetitive collection of writings about the strand of revolutionary opinion which emerged out of Lettrist and other avant-garde artistic groups, principally in France in the 1950s. With their radical critique of bourgeois consumer society the situationists influenced to a greater or lesser degree both the May events in France of 198 and then, nearly a decade later, the punk rock movement.

Famously, in 1966, a group of situationist-inspired students at Strasbourg University were elected to positions of responsibility in the moribund Students' Union and immediately set up a Society For The Rehabilitation of Karl Marx. They also published various radical tracts including Khayati's On The Poverty of Student Life using unions funds, for which they attracted public outrage and eventually the attention of the police. At their trial the judge summed up situationist philosophy as well as anyone had hitherto ever done, stating "these cynics do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with 'unlicensed pleasure' as its only goal".

Though lacking a coherent revolutionary strategy, the situationists stood out clearly against the market economy, commodity production and wage labour, advocating the creation of a socialist society of common ownership where production would be undertaken solely to satisfy needs and desires. This book doesn't explore this concept as well as it might do, however, and nothing is as well-rounded as Mark Shipway's presentation of the subject in the book Non-Market Socialism edited by Rubel and Crump. Probably the best chapter in this collection of writings is "The End of Music" by Dave and Stuart Wise, dealing with Malcolm McLaren's Sex Pistols, the rise and fall of punk rock and its relationship with situationist politics—the other writings range from the quirky (Jim Martin on Wilhelm Reich and situationism) to the near pretentious (Jean Barrot's text being the most obvious example). This said, there are far worse books around that you could add to a collection on radical politics.

DAP

Letter From Europe: Interpreting Marx (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the books the Socialist Party recommends to those wanting an introduction to Marx's ideas is Karl Marx: Selected Writings on Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited and introduced by T.B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel. First published as a hardback in 1956, it has since gone through many Pelican paperback re-editions and is, as its title suggests, a collection of extracts from Marx's writings. What does not come out in the introduction is the extent to which Rubel (as opposed to Bottomore) endorses our interpretation of Marx on a number of key points. However, in a later work, Marx Without Myth (1975), also written jointly in English (this time with M. Manale), Rubel clearly spells out that Marx stood for a classless, stateless and moneyless society.

   

Rubel himself is not from Britain but is a professor (maitre de recherche) in France and in fact one of the leading continental Marxologists, or experts on Marx. Besides editing a French edition of Marx's works, he has done considerable scholarly research on Marx's writings and sources. He describes himself as an independent researcher on Marx (which is true), but his sympathy for Marx's social and political ideas is only thinly disguised. His contribution to Marx-studies is his view that Marx was not a Marxist and his interpretation of Marx's commitment to socialism as ethical.

   

Marx himself of course is on record as saying half-seriously that he wasn't a Marxist. Rubel's theory is that Marx did not regard himself, and is not to be regarded, as the founder of a new philosophical school or ism. Marx, Rubel points out, himself described communist (socialist) theory as in no way based on ideas and principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from an historical movement going on under our very eyes (Communist Manifesto). It is thus quite contrary to Marx's own ideas to call socialist theory Marxism as this is to suggest that it was the invention of some Great Thinker and would not have existed had Marx never been born. Rubel is right here and all we can say in defence of our use from time to time of the word Marxist is that we need some way of indicating our agreement with the theory first clearly formulated by Marx as a reflection of working class experience under capitalism. Rubel gets round this problem by using the adjective marxien (literally Marxian but perhaps more accurately Marxs).

   

But Rubel's objection is not to Marx's ideas or even to their systematisation, but to those who have called themselves Marxists, from Kautsky and the German Social Democrats to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, and the rest. In Marx Critique du Marxisme, a collection of essays he wrote between 1957 and 1973 (published together as a book in 1974), Rubel traces the origin of Marxism, as a new ism, back to Engels who, he says, after Marx's death eventually gave in to the temptation to make his lifelong friend the founder of a new theoretical school. Rubel also objects to Marxism, that is, to those who call themselves Marxists, on the grounds that they have forgotten Marx's commitment to a classless, moneyless, stateless society.

   

Rubel first developed his theme that there is an ethical, or moral, element in Marx's commitment to socialism in 1948 in the introduction to his Pages de Karl Marx pour une ethique socialiste (the French equivalent of the Bottomore and Rubel selection mentioned earlier and just as good).

   

Rubel's argument is that Marx became a socialist out of a moral objection to what money and the state were doing to human dignity, before he began his scientific study of capitalism and the working class. Historically this cannot be challenged: Marx became a socialist sometime in the winter of 1843-4 and only later interested himself in economics; Capital, written in the 1850s and 60s, was in fact not published till 1867. Although in the end Marx's motivation is really quite irrelevant (or no more relevant than the motivations of the rest of us), Rubel's work on the so-called early Marx does back up our insistence that Marx used the word socialism as we do by showing that, right from the start, Marx stood for a society without class conflict, without State power and without monetary fetishism (Pages).

   

Rubel is not saying that Marx's objection to capitalism was just ethical, but only that this was one element in his position. According to Rubel, Marx was both a man of science (his studies of capitalism) and a revolutionary who saw the working class having the ethical, or historical, mission to abolish capitalism and to take mankind on to socialism. Actually, apart from the use of the word ethical, Rubel's position here is very similar to ours: the abolition of capitalism is not mechanically inevitable, but can only come about as a result of a conscious choice by the working class; if they don't make this choice or ethical decision, as Rubel would put it then capitalism will continue or (Rubel's view) be replaced by something worse; indeed, capitalism has continued precisely because the working class has not yet chosen to establish socialism.

   

This position of Rubel's leads to the same conclusion that we have reached: that the task of socialists is to make socialists, to get the working class to reject capitalism and to choose socialism. Rubel does not shrink from this conclusion and this has led to him being criticised, along with us, for educationnisme (see La Gauche communiste en Allemagne 1918-21 by Denis Authier and Jean Barrot, p. 199 on us and p. 372 on Rubel). Rubel also points out that this was Marx's position too and that Marx held that socialism could not be established unless a majority of workers had come to want and understand it:

Without the hypothesis or the premise of an acquisition of revolutionary consciousness by the victims of capitalist exploitation, the abolition of the wages system, the condition sine qua non of a socialist economy, is inconceivable for Marx (Marx critique du marxisme, p. 220).

Rubel also frequently quotes, with approval, from Engels Preface to the 1890 German edition of the Communist Manifesto:

For the ultimate triumph of the ideas set forth in the Manifesto Marx relied solely and exclusively on the intellectual development of the working class, as it necessarily had to ensue from united action and discussion.

Rubel even concedes (we say concedes since, as we shall see, he does not entirely agree with Marx here) that Marx held that the working class should take political action to end politics and the state and that one of the forms this could take was democratic electoral action:

The economic and social barbarism brought about by the capitalist mode of production cannot be abolished by a political revolution prepared, organized and led by an elite of professional revolutionaries claiming to act and think in the name and for the benefit of the exploited and alienated majority. The proletariat, formed into a class and a party under the conditions of bourgeois democracy, liberates itself in the struggle to conquer this democracy; it turns universal suffrage, which had previously been an instrument of dupery, into a means of emancipation (Marx critique du marxisme, p. 56).

   

As this quotation suggests, Rubel has no time for Lenin and Bolshevism; in fact when it comes to analysing Russia and the Russian revolution there is complete agreement with us. Not only does he regard Russia as state capitalist (now a fairly commonplace view) but he also talks about the myth of socialist October with regard to the Russian revolution. But let him speak for himself:

In 1917 none of the conditions needed for Russia to enter into the way to socialism were present: the economic conditions and class relationships within an essentially peasant society as well as the social weight and level of maturity of the proletariat forbade this, barring a miraculous intellectual and moral change at all levels of Russian society (pp. 140-1).

In Russia Lenin, his party and the bureaucracy took up the social role which everywhere else had fallen to the bourgeoisie, and performed it with great efficiency. And when we speak of the bourgeois revolution carried out by the Bolsheviks, we mean that this revolution took place in the closed field of capitalism and not within socialism (p. 115).

We mentioned earlier that Rubel does not agree with Marx's view that the working class could gain control of political power through universal suffrage. Referring to events since Marx's day, he wonders whether universal suffrage can still, as Marx believed (and as is our view), be converted into an instrument of emancipation. He feels that the working class has in the meantime found a new and better instrument: their own self-organisation into councils, as in Russia in 1905 and 1917, in Germany after the first world war, in Spain in 1936 as well as the so-called revolutionary trade-unionism of pre-1914 France.

   

Universal suffrage has not failed, however. What has failed is the reformist (Labour and Social Democrat) use of universal suffrage, but socialists have been saying this would happen ever since our foundation in 1904. For capitalism simply cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the wage-earning majority; as a system based on the exploitation of wage-labour for profits, it is constitutionally incapable of being made to do this. Therefore any government which tries, whether elected by universal suffrage or not, is bound to fail. To reject universal suffrage because reformist electoral action has failed is to throw out the baby with the bath water.

   

We fully understand Rubel's criticism of political parties calling themselves socialist or Marxist: their aim has been state capitalism and they have essentially only sought to exploit working class discontent with a view to coming to power and installing themselves as a new ruling class in place of the private capitalists. They have always seen the working class as playing a subordinate, following role, either as passive electors (Social Democrats) or as material to be manipulated by a vanguard party (Bolsheviks and Leninists of all hues). But how can this be held against our (and Marx's) position of working class democratic self-organisation into a political party based on socialist understanding, with a view to taking political, including electoral, action to abolish capitalism?

   

In theory, workers, once they had come to want and understand socialism could, we suppose, organise in some sort of workplace committees or councils; but they would be ill-advised to do so without at the same time organising politically, since this would be to invite a violent head-on clash with a state machine still controlled by the supporters of capitalism. But why take this risk when the existence of universal suffrage and limited political democracy make it unnecessary? Why not organise, democratically and without leaders, with a view to using the potential weapon that is the vote to win control of the state, so neutralising it? This is our policy based on an analysis of todays political circumstances and not on a dogmatic adherence to Marx's view. On other questions we are just as prepared to criticise Marx as Rubel is on this-which we think is, in todays circumstances, the most appropriate and most intelligent way of proceeding to establish socialism. 

Adam Buick