Keeping us down (1970)

Book Review from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Irrational in Politics by Solidarity. 2s.

This short pamphlet largely consists of verbatim extracts from, and summaries of, the works of Engels, Freud, Reich, Michael Cattier and others, and it would be better to read their works yourself to draw your own conclusions. For those without the time or inclination to do this, however, the pamphlet is quite useful.

It sets out to give a partial explanation of why, given the availability of revolutionary propaganda and the logic of establishing Socialism, workers in general still reject, often violently, this alternative to the insoluble mess of capitalism. The smallness of revolutionary propaganda set against the capitalist monopoly of the mass media is accepted as a major factor in the conditioning of workers , but further reasons are sought to explain the contradiction between the self-evident economic logic of abolishing capitalism and the acceptance of this system by the mass of the people.

The crude outlook of many "left-wingers", who see a working class naturally revolutionary being thwarted by incompetent and bureaucratic leaders and the physical repression of the state machine, is from the start rejected:

It is obvious that if large sections of the population were constantly questioning the principles of hierarchy, the authoritarian organisation of production, the wages system, or other fundamental aspects of the social structure, no ruling class could maintain itself in power for long. For rulers to continue ruling it is necessary for those at the bottom of the social ladder not only to accept their condition but eventually to lose even the sense of being exploited. Once this psychological process has been achieved the division of society becomes legitimised in people's minds. The exploited cease to perceive it as something imposed on them from without . . . Only at times of occasional insurrectionary outbursts do the rulers have to resort to force, as a kind of reinforcement of a conditioning stimulus.

According to Solidarity it was left to Wilhelm Reich to explain " . . . the lag between class consciousness and economic reality, and the tremendous social inertia represented by habits of deference and submission among the oppressed". The explanation lay in the sexual repression of people and in the whole authoritarian upbringing of children associated in particular with the patriarchal family. Reich expressed it this way:

As the economic basis (of the family) became less significant, its place was taken by the political function which the family now began to assume. Its cardinal function, that for which it is mostly supported by conservative science and law, is that of serving as a factory for authoritarian ideologies and conservative structures.

From this examination of family relationships Reich concludes pessimistically that revolutionary propaganda seeking to explain the social injustice and irrationality of the economic system falls on deaf ears, because if people realised they were wasting their lives in the service of an absurd system they would either go mad or commit suicide:

To avoid achieving such anxiety-laden insight they justify their existence by rationalising it. They repress anything that might disturb them and acquire a character structure adapted to the conditions under which they live.

The writer of the pamphlet is aware of the inadequate nature of this conclusion since it implies totally malleable individuals in whom total sexual repression has produced total conditioning. It does not allow for the possibility (dictated by man's sexual needs themselves)  that a fight against sexual repression may well loosen this "character-structure". We might say furthermore that the choice depicted by Reich between madness and submission to capitalism's authority would only be real to the extent that the individuals who have begun to break loose remained isolated. The socialist organisation would enable a group-identity to be formed as a force against this. There are now also healthy signs that young people in struggling to achieve free-sex life are denting the repressive ideology of capitalism. The pamphlet outlines two main reactions to this movement. One is open, outward opposition, the other is an attempt at absorption and control through commercialising sexuality. Solidarity correctly describe the process whereby this is done but appear to attribute to it the status of a conscious capitalist policy which it definitely is not. Making profits from "consumer sex"  is not done for ideological reasons.

The last part of the pamphlet is an attack on the inner conservatism of Bolshevik ideology in relation to sex and family relationships. Unfortunately Solidarity are still handicapped in their examination of this subject by their acceptance of the myth that the 1917 Russian revolution was socialist. The material provided can nevertheless be used to the greater advantage by others.

Michael Bradley

A Great Exaggeration (1972)

Book Review from the October 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control by Maurice Brinton. Solidarity. 25p.

Built-in to capitalism is a conflict between the capitalists who own the means of production and the wage-earning or working class who operate them. This conflict goes on without its participants being necessarily or fully aware of its nature and its most obvious signs are strikes over wages and working conditions. However, this is not just a wages struggle; it is a struggle between the two classes for control over the means of production. In its highest form the workers consciously organise to win political power with the aim of transferring the ownership of the means of production from the capitalist class to the community as a while.

This stage has yet to be reached, but incidents in working class history already show that the class struggle is more than mere wage bargaining. When, under exceptional circumstances such as occur after wars, the capitalists' control over their factories has broken down the workers have themselves on a number of occasions taken over the means of production and through trade unions or factory committees tried to keep production going. Such "workers' control" was not Socialism nor could it have led to Socialism because most of the workers involved had never been convinced socialists. The State has always been able to re-assert capitalist control.

The classic example of this was the occupation of the factories in Northern Italy in 1921, but before that in Russia in 1917 something similar had happened. Engineering workers in Petrograd in particular took over control of the factories where they worked. Brinton's book is an account of how between 1917 and 1921 the Bolshevik government suppressed this "workers' control" and instituted instead their own state (capitalist) control.

This process of suppression began soon after the Bolsheviks had seized power in November 1917 which clearly showed up right from the start (rather than from the death of Lenin) their anti-working class character. These facts have long been known to Socialists but will probably be new to Trotskyists and their ilk.

The book suffers from a number of defects, not least that when he conies to theorise Brinton shares the illusions of the anarchists, syndicalists and dissident Bolsheviks he quotes. He does not bring forward any evidence to show that "workers' control" enjoyed the general support of the workers he seems to suggest it did. He ignores the problems the partisans of "workers' control" would have faced had they triumphed, in view of the economic backwardness of Russia as a whole where four-fifths of the population were peasants who had never been near a factory.

To see, as Brinton does, the Russian Revolution as essentially an unsuccessful attempt to establish "workers' control" is a great exaggeration. The occupation of the factories was only incidental to the seizure of political power by the Bolsheviks and their use of it to sweep away out-dated obstacles to the development of capitalism in Russia — and was only made possible by the same breakdown of law and order which allowed the Bolsheviks to seize power.

The attempt to maintain "workers' control" was doomed to fail not only because of Russia's economic backwardness but also because of the lack of understanding of the Russian workers. Oddly enough at one point Brinton comes very near to expressing our view — and almost in our own words — of events in Russia in 1917:

"The year 1917 certainly saw a tremendous social upheaval. But it was a utopian dream to assume that socialism could be achieved without a large proportion of the population both understanding and wanting it. The building of socialism . . . can only be the self conscious and collective act of the immense majority."

We do not mind people making the analysis we pioneered but we would prefer this to be openly acknowledged rather than disguised by the kind of inaccurate account of our position given by Brinton in his introduction.

Adam Buick

Solidarity for Twenty-Five Years (2005)

Book Review from the June 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

For Workers' Power. The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton, edited by David Goodway. (AK Press. £12)

One of the features of the radical political scene in the 1960s and 70s was a magazine called Solidarity which used to publish long and rather boring accounts of factory life and of particular and now long forgotten industrial disputes. There were also translations of equally long articles by someone identified as "Paul Cardan" (later revealed to be the French intellectual Cornelius Castoriadis) offering a replacement critique of capitalism to that of Marx judged outdated and wrong. Those behind it had been in the Communist Party and, though for a short while only, in the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. One of them was Maurice Brinton (also known as Martin Grainger and Chris Pallis), a selection of whose articles over the period 1960 to 1985 has just been published (For Workers' Power. The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton, edited by David Goodway. AK Press. £12), and who appears to have been its leading theoretician. Born in 1923 he died earlier this year.

What characterised Solidarity was its complete rejection of Leninism and the concept of the Vanguard Party and its advocacy of Workers Councils (as opposed to parliament as well as the vanguard party) as the way to socialism. In their view, a revolutionary organisation should not seek to lead the working class but simply to be an instrument that workers could use to transform society; at the same time it should try to prefigure in its organisation and decision-making what future society should be like, practising "self-management" and encouraging workers to rely on their own efforts rather than trust in leaders. So, some of what Solidarity was saying was more or less the same as we were. For example: "If the working class cannot come to understand socialism - and want it - there can be no socialist perspective. There can only be the replacement of one ruling elite by another" (March 1969).

"For us, revolutionaries are not an isolated elite, destined to any vanguard role. They are a product (albeit the most lucid one) of the disintegration of existing society and of the growing awareness of what it will have to be replaced by" (February 1972). "We consider irrational (and/or dishonest) that those who talk most of the masses (and of the capacity of the working class to create a new society) should have the least confidence in people's ability to dispense with leaders" ("As We Don't See It", 1972).

Like us, they mercilessly denounced Leninism, Trotskyism and Vanguardism as not only mistaken but as positively dangerous, as the ideology of a new would be ruling class based on state capitalism.

There were differences of course, particularly over Workers Councils as opposed to Parliament as well as over the continuing relevance of Marx's analyses and over the content of a socialist society. Because we saw the basic division in capitalist society as being between owners and non-owners we saw common ownership, and the consequent disappearance of buying and selling, money and the market, as a necessary feature of socialism. Solidarity was not so clear on this. Following Castoriadis it saw the basic division in capitalist society as being between order-givers and order-takers and so the basic feature of future society as being "self-management" (which would of course be one such feature, what we call "democratic control"). From this angle, the disappearance of money and the market was regarded as secondary: whether or not to use them being a mere policy option open to those around at the time.

This became clear in the translation published in 1972 under the title Workers' Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society of a long article by Castoriadis, written in 1957, which was basically a blueprint for the workers self-management of a market economy. Brinton was aware that this was controversial and in the introduction (reproduced in this book) he wrote (in a thinly disguised reference to us) that "some will see the text as a major contribution to the perpetuation of wage slavery - because it still talks of 'wages' and doesn't call for the immediate abolition of 'money'".

He was right. Some did, and not only us. Such "councilism" (management of a market economic by workers' councils, which we denounced as "workers' self-exploitation") led to the breakaway of groups which later became the "left communist" CWO and ICC of today, which despite their partial return to Leninism, at least adhered to the view that socialism/communism had to be a moneyless, wageless society.

This, in fact, is not the only place where Brinton looked over his shoulder at us. As early as 1961 he was explaining that "whilst rejecting the substitutionism of both reformism and Bolshevism, we also reject the essentially propagandist approach of the Socialist Party of Great Britain", a theme he returned to in 1974 in a review of a book on the sexual revolution which advocated achieving this through education: "to confine oneself to such an attitude would be to restrict oneself to the role of a sort of SPGBer of the sexual revolution".

In fact, in his two main writings, both published in 1970, The Irrational in Politics and The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control he felt the need to have a go at us. In the former he suggested that the Socialist Standard only discussed economic and political topics and ignored the problems of everyday life (not true as a look through the issues of the time will show). In the latter he wrote that we, like some anarchists, took the view that nothing particularly significant had happened in 1917: "The SPGB (Socialist Party of Great Britain) draw much the same conclusion, although they attribute it to the fact that the wages system was not abolished", adding in a wild caricature of our position "the majority of the Russian population not having had the benefit of the SPGB viewpoint (as put by spokesmen duly sanctioned by their Executive Committee) and not having then sought to win a Parliamentary majority in the existing Russian institutions". Of course, our analysis was much deeper than that.

To be quite honest such criticisms did find some echo amongst some of our members in the 1970s who eventually got themselves expelled for publishing material advocating workers' councils rather than parliament as the way to socialism. But this was later to cause a problem for Brinton and Solidarity since the ex-SPGBers in question became the "Social Revolution" group which, as Goodway records in his introduction, merged with Solidarity to become "Solidarity for Social Revolution".

For all their other disagreements with us, these ex-members still retained the conception of socialism as a moneyless and wageless as well as a classless and stateless society, and insisted on the new merged group adopting this position. Brinton eventually went along with this, though reluctantly, and afterwards revealed (see his 1982 article "Making A Fresh Start") that he regarded this merger - which didn't last - as bringing to an end Solidarity's golden age of 1959 to 1977. Ironically, something seems to have rubbed off on him, as the last-dated article in this collection (from 1985) ends: "A socialist society would therefore abolish not only social classes, hierarchies and other structures of domination, but also wage labour and production for the purpose of sale or exchange on the market".

Brinton is a good writer, so this book reads well and stands as a record of one strand of radical thinking in the 1960s and 70s. It goes well with the part of our own centenary publication Socialism Or Your Money Back that also reproduces articles from this period.

Adam Buick