Cajo Brendel

Sad news. I had a great deal of respect for him.

Cheers for those links Volin. Unlike you, I agree with the majority of the arguments presented by Brendel against DD in these specific instances, but your spirit in presenting both sides of the argument isn’t mere ‘democracy’ but a necessary part of proletarian debate, and that for me is the best mark of the man, his era, and his politics.

I have my own disagreements with Brendel, certain positions that he defended, as Ret Marut says, to the end of his life.

But before the bunfight to claim his ‘heritage’ begins in earnest, while he’s still warm in his shroud, here’s to a revolutionary, probably the last link with the left/council communist tradition, now broken. We are on our own. We are in continuity.

He describes himself as both, and you're right, the debate continued with the intervention of another councilist, Theo Sander, followed by Douglass' book, 'All Power to the Imagination'. In all, I think we can also take a lot from Brendel's position as well as find glaring discrepancies in DD's. But I'd be happy to elaborate on my support for the latter in general, albeit on another thread.

I have a feeling we've got the whole thing on libcom (except All Power to the Imagination) - if someone can piece it together and in what order, that'd be good. We got an e-mail about it before I think.

Douglass' work here is a bitty dated, such as the statement above, but he is clearly right on this one.

The statement, here, below encapsulates all that really needs to be said about the issue:-

"Namely that the intervention of people themselves into organisations will transform, amend, or destroy those organisations - not what formally is written in the rule book, not what Lenin said was the classic role of the trade union, but how can we transform and improve our lives. This is the watchword of the worker in the trade union, an organisation he sees both as an obstacle at times , and a means to his/her progress."

Aye and that's where I met you, Alf.

Which is a tautology and one that removes him from having any meaningful perspective?

He defended the following: nationalisation was an improvement - albeit one that was neither the desired goal of the militant working class (which was for full workers' control) nor something they didn't equally fight against in terms of management; non-unionised workplaces were and are markedly less safe, more boss-controlled with lower wages and more hours; organisation is needed in the here and now but the capacity for root struggle must relate to the reality of workers' lives as they are, including their labour movement. Or in another words raising an anti-union line, at a time - say, of the Miners' Strikes in the '70s, when many people did not associate the union with a distant bureaucracy but with an often close-knit community, and where any real example of 'independent' class struggle was actually happening within it (throught it and indeed often against its over-arching structures) was of absolutely no use to anyone. All this was common sense, but apparently rejected out-right by contemporary councilists.

How much of it is relevant to today of course depends. My criticisms of Douglass would be that he's very stuck in this union tradition and even though he himself would say he's spent most of his life fighting the bureaucracy he never really criticises the limits of this structure per se, instead going back to the analogy of the membership as basis. He's quick to point out the number of people still a member of a trade union, but exaggerates their power - something which my generation knows nothing of. Whilst the rank-and-file potential is still there, in comparing them to an inanimate object like a bus (which isn't 'revolutionary' but could be used for revolutionary ends) he doesn't ask what effect it has on those who use it, where it can go etc.

sorry to be ignorant, but i assume that state capitalism isn't being equated the ussr. i certainly don't think the ussr was more progressive than say now!

The SWP isn't substitutionist. That would be like berating Tony Blair for wanting to substitute himself for the working class. They are bourgeois. But I don't want to get into that discussion on this thread. Or about Douglass, although it would be worth taking up his ideas elsewhere, since he has long been touted as a radical critiic of those who call for struggle outside the unions. My main point is that he isn't worthy of being compared to Cajo Brendel.

Not at all, but it's a nice twist. They should be criticised - in a practical sense that addresses the underlying problems of their existence: how we can raise working class independence whilst collectively challenging the imposition of work and attacks on our quality of life. We need to offer alternatives. It doesn't help either to revise history and pretend that for example, nationalisation, however inadequate, didn't save lives or that we'd all rather have some free healthcare provision and not, say, be battered for speaking out. 'Progressive', I think carries a quite different meaning however.

Douglass recognises this - the ICC doesn't.

Indeed, and one who shared the same principles anarchists do in his rejection of Leninism from the beginning.

"That Bolshevism in March 1918, only five months after October 1917, robbed the Soviets from their already minimalized power was - as the Council Communists said - a logical consequence of the October Revolution. Soviets were not suitable with a system that was the political superstructure of state capitalist productive relations.

What the council Communist movement mean by communism is a completely different thing from that system. The dictatorship of a party doesn't fit with social relations based on the abolition of wage-labour and the end of exploitation of the workers. A society in which the producers are free and equal can't be something different from the democracy of the producers."

Anyway, here is a report of what I think was our last public debate with Cajo (1999), although comrades of our Belgian and Dutch sections had some contacts with him until quite recently:

http://en.internationalism.org/wr/228_cajo.htm

It's an account of a public meeting in Germany where Cajo spoke and in which we participated. It gives a pretty good summary of where we stand on his contribution to the movement, both strengths and weaknesses.

Did the British army ever have the mass effect on people's day to day lives that nationalisation had? What a rediculous comparison! Or take the Welfare State that's struggling on to this day, to a great extent determined where most people stand 'as a class' (their class consciousness) and is now one of the main areas of struggle? It's perfectly correct to say that the reforms of the post-war years were part-and-parcel of the social democratic appeasement of working people, that they were completely undermining and yet rolled back ever since.That recognition has to be 'translated' in organisation for moving forward from present circumstances; "how we can raise working class independence whilst collectively challenging the imposition of work and attacks on our quality of life". We shouldn't want to 'Defend the NHS' (referring to a past thread), nor do we want to alienate or be spectators in future disputes which will inevitably still involve unions. In other words the union rank-and-file will still have to have in place.

On Douglass, I certainly don't defend his full-time position nor his views on national liberation. What's important however is that we can see past this and still find (a good deal) of insight where he's coming from - which at least Spikeymike acknowledges.

It was just a wee dig, where I very much agree with Brendel and where you obviously wouldn't.

Hi,

Our tribute to Cajo Brendel has been translated into English and is on the ICC's site here:
http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2007/cajo-brendel-1915-2007

B.

'he qualified our position on the decadence of capitalism in 1981 in a debate in Amsterdam as "humbug"'

Thanks.