Contribution by Communist Workers' Organisation comrades to the Midlands Discussion Forum's April meeting

It is thought that in pre-historic times, the 'keeper of the fire' tended a pot of embers even as the group moved from place to place; they carried it with them because they considered this preferable to the alternative of starting a fire from scratch. The idea of the 'keeper of the flame' seems entrenched in certain forms of thought and probably relates to the habituation of thinking from a position defined primarily by its isolation.

'Such a party has to exist before any wider revolutionary outbreak in order to combat all the tricks and obstacles etc'; there is literally no evidence for this 'has to'; there is no evidence that such a party would remain 'revolutionary'; nor are there any proofs that it is able to escape the determinations of its conditions and remain autonomous in its decision making; finally, there is no evidence that such a party, as it reintroduces bourgeois forms of representation, will not attempt to lead the working class into counter-revolution.

In any case, such a party does not, and can not, exist until revolutionary events are well under way. Historically, 'the party' has tended to coalesce when spontaneous revolutionary events have lost much of their heat – the party/organisation exists literally as a moment of formalisation, and tends to fetishise a set of relations which has already past.

This contribution was made at the weekend midlands discussion forum as were others from the ICC, Internationalist Perspectives, the ex-Communist Bulletin Group comrades and 'The Commune' followed by a discussion in which others not from any of the groups contributed.

At the level of common polititical 'positions' in respect of independent class struggle, internationalism, anti-parliamentarianism, anti-trade unionism, opposition to leftism/state capitalism etc there was much in common between the groups and individuals present, with the exception in some areas of the comrade from 'the commune' group, (who none-the-less made a useful contribution).

However, as the CWO text suggests it was precisely in the area of our respective views on the nature, form and methodology of 'party' organisation and more broadly on the relationship in practice of pro-revolutionaries to the rest of our class that most divergencies occured.

My own position which I expressed in relation to 'the party' and to the left communist view of this as it relates back to their allegiance to bolshevism, is still close to that expressed in the early 'Wildcat (Britain)' text on 'The Hunt for Red October' in the LibCom library, which I distributed at the meeting. I also stressed the need for pro-revolutionaries to have some awareness of the 'psychological' problems of small group organisation in the context of our current isolation and some 'humility' in our claims to a 'vanguard' status/role in the emmerging struggles of our class.

In other respects I found sympathy with some of the views expressed, on the nature of the current crisis and pro-revolutionaries potential responses to it, by Internationalist Perspectives, who although from a Left Communist background seem to possess a more critical view of traditional left communist attitudes to 'the Party'.

Their most recent material on this can be accessed at:

http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-index.html

Despite these divergencies I still see potential for communist pro-revolutionaries (including some from outside the left and council communist tradition) to work more closely together in areas where we do have agreement to combat the ideological onslaught which is comming from a variety of capitalist organisations of left and right, secular and religious.

Some of the benefits of open discussion and cooperation, particularly around the drafting and circulation of leaflets, has already been shown in a small way through Libcom, particularly around the leaflets distributed on the Oil refinery dispute and the Israeli state attack on Gaza, as well as the earlier 'Dispatch' and 'Teabreak' bulletins. This trend needs to be strengthened and a better dialogue opened up both between groups and with workers in struggle.

Discussion Circles such as this one in the midlands which are open pro-revolutionaries (and potential pro-revolutionaries) from accross the marxist/anarchist divide can also have a useful role in this process.

This particular meeting probably wasn't the best for anyone new comming along. As one participant not familiar with the tortured history of many of the groups and individuals present explained, she struggled to really understand the differences being expressed. Still the meeting was mostly good humored and fraternal so there is some hope there.

My thanks to the comrades who organised this event.

Fort-da game says
In any case, such a party does not, and can not, exist until revolutionary events are well under way. Historically, 'the party' has tended to coalesce when spontaneous revolutionary events have lost much of their heat – the party/organisation exists literally as a moment of formalisation, and tends to fetishise a set of relations which has already past.

Which is why we have never succeeded in overthrowing capitalism. The nearest we got was in Russia where a nucleus of a real revolutionary party which opposed the imperialist war and which rejected the betrayal of the working class by social democracy was transfomed into an real instrument of the revolutionary consciousness of the working class and grew as such in 1917 (i.e. before the October Revolution. Even hundreds, if not thousands, of anarchists joined its ranks because they saw that it alone was a working class organisation which stood for working class independence. It however, in the conditions of the time, it made the error of becoming a government (as it followed the practice of the previous regime of establishing a cabinet called Sovnarkom) instead of making the Executive of the Soviets elected by the Congress of Soviets the pinnacle of a new form of semi-state. Had they understood this it would probably not have changed the ultimate outcome (given the objective situation) but it would have left us with a much clearer legacy.

And when the party has been absent even massive class struggles, even where the workers create autonomous mass organisations which potentially threaten the state, can end up in reactionary bourgeois movements like the Solidarity movement in Poland which in the absence of socailist alternative (again difficult in the condiitons of the time adopted the programme of the Catholic Church (with a bit of help from CIA money). These hisotrical examples may not be scientifically clinching proof but it is evidence which cannot be denied.

Spikymike - we ( ex CWO/ICC) have written in depth about the experience of the Party in Russia. You told me Saturday you can access those texts online. Can we debate that real experience of the working class? We have known you for a long time - we are still struggling to win the argument for centralised, internationalist politics.

More specifically here: http://cbg.110mb.com/Unity.pdf_10.pdf

If it seems that a principle cannot be denied then it is likely that it must be denied. My point is that although you personally have electively adhered to a particular set of principles, and you have worked out your worldview accordingl, this doesn’t grant you greater predictive abilities than anybody else.

Magical thinking is the threatened deployment of florridly non-existent forces which preoccupy minds in inverse proportion to the isolatation and powerlessness of the individual or group.

It is not for you to say what ‘must’ be, but rather, it is ok to contribute your proposal which you happen to think is quite good, i.e. ‘wouldn’t it be completely amazing if there was this executive soviet that actively represented all our human needs.’ Such proposals can be practically evaluated in the terms of both historical and present circumstances.

To such an evaluative end, I would argue that if there should be a social revolution it is certain that many variations on the formal revolutionary party will be established. However, it is equally certain that the critique of the limits of such an organisation will be activated at the same time. This ciritque will take many forms: from mass disinterest (and rapid disillusionment with the competing claims of proliferating ‘Listen to us, we are the real-true proletarian party’ rackets) to a careful analysis of The Party’s underlying bourgeois and Jacobinist formality.

This formality is characterised as the translation of the burgeoning qualities of struggles, their site specificity, their direct relations, into measured quantities which are expropriated as realisations of the ‘communist’ programme (as understood by) the Party’s leadership – in the place of actual relations, the Jacobins impose ‘realisations’ of their ideals and programmatic statements.

If a single Organisation is unlikely, it is inevitable that there will be organisations as there is a ‘natural’ tendency to organisation along lines of common interest; but equally, there will be concrete critiques made of such organisations. Up to this moment the ongoing critique of its alleged political structures has been conducted by the working class in terms of its disinterest in them. In the light of this, my alternative proposal is that the proletariat’s struggle withers at every juncture where it replaces its immediate relations with the formal proceedings of affiliating to a Political Party.

The concept of an international revolutionary party is not consistent with monolithism (and cannot be) but workers who are moving against capital will ask all those who are fighting with them to create one in order to unify our efforts against an enemy which will do anything to preserve its property. One of these no doubt is philosophical onanism of the fort-da game (out of the game?) type. Please keep contributing as you make our case for us!

The radical slippage from discussion to loss of cool follows the usual route and the same old accusations: ‘philosophy’ (i.e ideas that are in disagreement with a pre-established, non-negotiable big-t Truth), masturbation (i.e. non-selfless opinions deserving of C19th moral aprobation); ah yes, it is I who 'preserves' the 'enemy's' property – but grandma, how quick you are in your rush to externalisation.

However, the content of your remarks is clear enough, and there we can agree. In contradistinction to the claims of spikey mike above, the communist position is riven and there is no prospect at all of discussion within it. I don’t see many repercussions from this, it only means that whilst I don’t speak for anybody else, it also means you don’t either... you have no constituency.

Or, rather, I find I am not disheartened that millions are flocking to your group because of my contributions here – I am not trying to muster an army against you. In fact, I am happy to supply you with as much ammunition as you want... but it is quite strange that if I am the voice of enemy property that I am also your main recruiting sergeant.

Whether your group gains new members or not is totally irrelevant to me, and to everyone else, including your new members. Whether they support your party or any other equivalent group makes no difference to anything. Our little disagreement is objectively of less than marginal concern; it seems we must accept that the issue set up here is to be settled at an entirely different level, and in the million other locations where the working class subject will find itself incapable of adhering to a party programme, even if the thought occurred that it ‘should’ do so. We cannot alter the working out of this process of orientation towards need which occurs according to a much deeper motivation than superficial ‘communist’ consciousness, if there are many 'no's', there are equally many 'yes's'...

The struggle against the Party form appears at every point where that particular regression occurs, the context of such multiple rejections is always established in terms of need – fortunately, for the working class, capitalism has organised need far in advance of anything achievable by a restricted one-sided representational mechanism as embodied by a political party, and has therefore released the energy from this particular conundrum in advance.

"the Party form"

I would be interested to know what you mean by this - honestly. Perhaps counterposed to some other organisational form in which revolutionaries embody themselves? But I don't want to put words into your mouth.

Your phrase "a restricted one-sided representational mechanism as embodied by a political party." could do with some exposition/expansion. Please.

Hi 1ngram,

Ah, is this the old rough em up then butter em up routine? If so, here is my confession:

But then, it is difficult for me to put the case against something that does not exist unless you first put your case for something that does not exist but which you think ‘must’.

In order to help you tailor your response, I will give you a few pointers and references, I suppose Camatte’s critique, ‘On Organisation’ and Moss’s ‘On the impotence of revolutionary organisation.’

I should say here that if capitalism falls apart (which is feasible), if there is a social revolution (which is vaguely possible but unlikely), then the bourgeois elements within the working class (i.e. the proletarianised sectors of the bourgeoisie), the managers, professionals etc will establish some sort of network of government based on ‘need not greed.’ As far as I am concerned (I will come to that in a minute) this is the last (or just another) phase of capitalism in which professionals (teachers, doctors, social workers, and all other experts) attempt to run the same system we have now but ‘against’ the dominance of the commodity – but in which they preserve, and even realise to its fulll extent, their role. This dominance of the 3rd estate, expressed in a revanchist jacobinism, will try to identify some set of ideals such as liberty, equality, fraternity etc in which to organise production under the rubric of further labour and use. This, essentially, is what I call the ‘party’ form... a positive formulation concerning the last (or perhaps not last) gasp of the capitalist social relation in which the meritocratic plus the forces of production combine to achieve a legalist utopia.

I said this was my personal opinion, and it is true that I am psychologically attuned against that type of psychology which ‘organises’ revolutionary organisations, I also don’t like the psychology required of the members of these organisations.

But if we translate my prejudices into a ‘politics’, then the main point I think is that there is a fundamental break between the manner in which an organisation appears and is maintained under capitalist conditions and the ideas it upholds. Essentially, all organisations express in their reproduction the conditions of which they are an expression, thus they are dependent on cycles of accumulation, on brand loyalty, on producing commodities, on the alienated labour of their membership and on the managerialism of their leadership. All groups are capitalist groups and the closer they get to power, the more capitalising they become.

For this reason I (personally, and therefore it makes no difference) prefer not to get involved what I call organisationalism; I also prefer not to endorse what I call ‘solutionism’ by which I mean that tendency where a particular form, or panacea, is proposed in response to problems that evidently spill far beyond the limited terms of that solution (the terrible melancholy of the ‘Party’ as the seven maids with seven mops).

Therefore, damn, it seems I have to be a stupid anti-organisationalist. Just as the hedgehog dies if it should be deprived of its halo of flees so it is that the revolution will collapse into jacobinism if the communists do not attack the institutions of utilitarianism as they appear and from the outside.

In my opinion (therefore discount it immediately) the role of communists is not to ‘organise’, as organising occurs spontaneously in human beings and in response to changing conditions – the communists’ ‘role’ is rather to sting with flee bites the spontaneous formations of ‘self-management’, ‘workers councils’, ‘the party government’, the ‘transitional stage’ etc which will all spring up as self-evident ‘givens’ under critical conditions as people attempt to formulate direct social relations between themselves. It is not for communists to ‘support’ the working class, on the contrary.

The communists, if they are to make any contribution at all, must continue to assault that which has not yet achieved communism and in particular those political institutions which consider self-management of production (workerism) as the synonym for communism and therefore as an end in itself. The only reason for communists to join any group is to wrench that organisation’s hidden internal contradictions into the light so as to actively reset the problem of human relations.

But then, as they say, it takes all sorts.

"The communists, if they are to make any contribution at all, must continue to assault that which has not yet achieved communism and in particular those political institutions which consider self-management of production (workerism) as the synonym for communism and therefore as an end in itself".

Well at least we agree on something Fort da game. As to your anti-organisational bias I think your position is unassailable and absolutely outside the real discussion we are having. As the CWO documents makes clear the working class through its real experience has produced solutions to how to run a mass society which allows everyone to particpate. This is a great achievement (even if its practice so far has been limited). What its history also shows to those who think about our emancipation have to unite together gloablly to ensure that the ideas agiants capialism which spring up spontaneously continue to hold sections of the class. And this is why Spikepymike with his personal musings on "small group psychology" got the entire tone and purpose of the meeting wrong. Apart from IP (of whom he approves) no-one raised issues which could have led to recriminations about the past. The participants thought the issues too serious for that and that for starters was not a bad outcome. The key question is where do we go from here?

Don’t mind me, you carry on; my preference is to exist permanently outside the real discussion you are having.

The formal party, the programme, the councils, or that is to say the moment of formalisation and dictatorship in which the tenuous relation between communist ideas and the working class (as the embodied total of alienated needs), seem only to have appeared historically at the moment where direct lived relations are tending to drift from what ‘should’ happen according to the communist programme. In other words, formalisation has always occurred at the point where the revolution has reached its ‘natural’ limit of expansion – the point where many begin to feel nostalgia for what went before.

The institution of a formal programme at this juncture (with the intent to ‘defend’ the revolution) seems to redivide the populace along ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ party lines; even where it is the working class that opposes the dictatorship of ‘its’ party (as in its strikes against the Bolsheviks), it is still represented as ‘bourgeois’; and contrariwise, where bourgeois elements support the dictatorship role of the party, these are understood as ‘proletarian’.

The populace is thus divided, by the process of formalisation, into that fragment which is in favour of the party (in a minority) and that fragment which is against it (the vast majority). The formalisation is nonetheless imposed on all by military/political means – evidently formalisation, with its consequent division of the populace, has profound consequences, and perhaps more than anything expresses the reason why the revolution cannot proceed through, or even against the Party.

Where a populace becomes directly conflicted within itself along lines of adherence to opposing exclusive political programmes, the prospect of revolution disappears. It therefore seems reasonable to surmise that it is not the ‘nostalgia’ or reluctance to proceed with the revolution that is ‘counterrevolutionary’ (as this nostalgia is only an attempt to reintroduce needs that have recently been de-prioritised) but rather it is the party-form itself, the attempt to convert communism into a political platform, which impedes revolution by means of the limited set of reference points within its vision. The programme/platform automatically excludes huge areas of human existence from its definition of communism (all those existences that do not actively adhere) thus creating a set of conflicts within various proto-communisms along bogus lines of ‘authenticity’. We can break this down into a simple propositional argument:

1. The formal party is the stage at which the revolution gets stuck.
2. The coalescence of a formal party is inevitable within critical conditions and perhaps even a necessary moment.
3. Therefore, it is the role of communists to attack formalisation at critical junctures so as to increase the chances of a move to communism.

I don't know how you can get around at all fort da game. With all that weight of counter-revolution on your shoulders it must be difficult to act (hence why you are in the position you are in). You are a very picture of conservatism when you think you are the opposite. This is because you have not taken on board the specific nature of the proletarian revolution nor even a clear understanding of what has historically happened to us. The revolution we will make will be like no other in history (or it won't be a proletarian revolution). We have no property forms to defend and we are the negation of all nationality and other divisions dreived from class society. To arrive at communism it will take not the passive acceptance of a leadership but the active involvement of masses of workers all over the planet. However the process of revolution will not occur similtaneously everywhere (unfortunately) and the only weapons we have our our capacity for self-organisation and our consciousness. Revolutions can break out and will break out spontaneously but to carry them through to victory the proletariat needs a clear understanding of the enemy it is fighting (capitalist economic, political and social relations), and the goal it wants, otherwise the capitalists will find new forms (state capitalism or whatever) to reassert the system of exploitation. It has happened often enough in the past (though you seem to deny this). We do have an enormous problem in that Marx spotted that the "ruling ideas in any epoch are those of the ruling class" and so how do we explain how the proletariat can escape this domination? The answer Marx had was in the formation of a political party of the most class conscious workers who will be the first to fight against all the reformist and restorationist attempts of the capitalists BUT they are not outside the class and the fight is largely in those class wide organsiatiosn which the working class as a whole have given themselves in order to win the victory for communism. The emancipation of the proletariat is the task of the class itself (and by this Marx meant the formation of a political party of the working class). This party is not the government in waiting and its leading organs are not the leading organs of a new semi-state. This party is international so that it transcends any geographical area and works for world revolution although its members will fight inside any territorial organs for the communist programme and will be delegated in greater numbers to those organs as the communist programme becomes more defined. This perspective is based on the lessons of the proletariat's history from the last revolutionary wave after World War One. In belittling (or distorting) this experience you are denying the best example of proletarian initiative and unwittingly are providing useful ideological cover for the continuation of exploitation. I realise now that you are more sincere than your flippant first post but I also think that whatever you or I say to each other the growth of class political movement (if you don't like "party") is inevitable if we are to shake off the shackles of the present system.

I don't know how you can get around at all with the kind of leaden heart that abstains from paragraphs. tl;dr. btw with 'hence' 'why' is redundant. cheers.

I do not ‘act’, I live. ‘Action’ is impossible because I am not the in-itself/for-itself subject of history.

There is a constant drift in your arguments towards category type errors in which you stray from arguments that are pertinent to the class as a whole into moral suppositions concerning individual responsibilities. At times the invariants within your discussion indicate an inversion of Adelard of Bath’s recommendation that, ‘only when human knowledge fails utterly should there be recourse to god.'

No, I am attempting to express my ambivalence... My interest is in why the dog did not bark in the night, or more specifically why the working class is not interested in its ‘historic’ role. I am not the ‘voice of conservatism’ but I am conservative in that, like most proletarians, I immediately sense all change as being change for the worse. Our 'self' is more against revolution than for it, we are more likely to wish to live as best we can under present conditions than attempt to change them and thereby threaten the few cherished features of our existence.

Communism is not a programme of ideas, principles and practices that must be realised, it is rather an ‘environment,’ or eco-system of inter-dependent relationships, and must support within itself many aspects of human being including both ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ as commensurate elements with our basic nature – it must contain all sides of any argument within itself just as a natural environment holds in place an multiple sets of trophic dynamics.

Communism cannot be reduced to instituted agreement, or to adherence to a set of principles; the formulation of such principles immediately produce an almost infinite number of variations, divergences, interpretations and flat contradictions (all of which may truly be said to express a fragment of communism). Just as capitalism supports a massive variety of relationships within the wage/commodity form, so communism must contain, give life to, sustain, its own diverse and multiple communities.

This may or may not be true. I find myself unconcerned about my personal ability to achieve a true understanding of the world. My not taking on board what you have taken on board means that I am not subject to the pressures of orthodoxy – my unconcern is based on an assumption that human intelligence is defined by its divergences not its agreements. There is no requirement for either of us to agree with each other in order to achieve a step towards communism as communism should not be thought of as an achieved state of peaceful harmony following climatic conflictual events but rather as a complex and dynamic system of social relations in which disagreement is structurally encourgaged.

The proletarian revolution is like no other in history because its object is abolition of the proletariat. The proletariat is indistinguishable from capital, therefore the exteriorisations which you make concerning ‘enemies’ are extremely problematic. The main ‘enemy’ is ourselves. That is, it is ourselves in our condition of being dominated by dead labour which is truly ‘that weight of counter-revolution on your shoulders’ which impedes our ability to ‘act’ (i.e. relate communistically).

The liberation of human beings from their proletarianised state is constantly disturbed for the reason you set out below, i.e. when a capitalised community begins the critique of its conditions it cannot be certain at what levels it breaks free and at what levels it remains trapped:

There is no evidence that the ‘political party’ of the working class actually escapes determination by the social relation; on the contrary, all historical evidence suggests that the more formalised the level of revolutionary consciousness, the greater the tendency is to import class relations unconsciously in the attempt to institutionalise an image of that consciousness.

Men fought and died for us to enjoy our freedom? In fact, lots of sincere people have wasted lots of energy on futile wars... my intention is not to belittle the dead of any war, but I do not necessarily discover any historical trajectory between past and present events.

In any case, I am not convinced the revolutionary attempts of 1917/18 were definitively proletarian; evidently, they contained a proletarian fragment, but this was not decisive; of more strategic importance was communist ideology but I feel no special affinity for those who happen to attach that label to themselves.

Any lessons that may be learnt from specific events are of negligible worth simply because conditions are never exactly the same. On the other hand, it is possible to derive allegorical or illustrative examples from the entirety of human history, and even from nature. The communist project attempts to reconnect, but in differing registers, to all previous and present forms of human existence.

Flippancy is a rhetorical defence mechanism which we must use under insincere conditions; it is a means to counter-illuminate the conventions of left political ideologies and the socialist-realist aesthetics that they deploy. My non-flippant intention is to engage those early adoptors/mavens who are capable of utilising the energy from the decomposition of communist ideas... as it seems that these ideas become most communicable and adaptable by others on the threshold of their irrelevance.

No, I don’t like the word movement either, as it equally supposes a procedure of exteriorisation; those who are moving, those who are moved against. This personification of the capitalist relation falsely sets up a struggle between archetypal subjectivities, where the mover is imbued with heroic qualities whilst the moved against becomes the receptacle of all that is barbarous.

From what I perceive of human nature, communism cannot take the form of a movement towards the future at all, but rather, it must function as a complex of re-relations and processes which is directed towards untying the binds of past relations. Communism faces backwards in an attitude of vigiliance not forwards like some colonist/entrepreneur.

For this reason communism is not a realisable programme to which the earth’s entire population must conform but a ‘cleaned space’ in which the bindings of accumulated past forces have been released so as to allow the free development of relations which are not defined by their programmatic adherence to communism but, on the contrary, by their refusal to cleave to any inherited past form. These unbound relations will be characterised by the domination of the lived element (actually present existing individuals) over the dead element (history, technology, institutions etc) in society.

"For this reason communism is not a realisable programme to which the earth’s entire population must conform but a ‘cleaned space’ in which the bindings of accumulated past forces have been released so as to allow the free development of relations which are not defined by their programmatic adherence to communism but, on the contrary, by their refusal to cleave to any inherited past form. These unbound relations will be characterised by the domination of the lived element (actually present existing individuals) over the dead element (history, technology, institutions etc) in society."

So how do you believe it will be achieved?

Note I do not ask what you think is needed to make it happen or what you would like to see happen to make it happen. What I am asking is what in the current circumstances would lead you to believe that some process is likely which will lead to communism.