Review: Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative
Jan 30 2009 03:55
I am writing a review for a local paper and wanted some feed back:
Review: Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative By Daniel Cohn-Bendit
Overall this was an excellent book, first and foremost it is an account of the May 68’ uprising in France by one of it’s leaders. In this it excels, the book explains the students and workers roles in the uprising. It also analyzes the reactions of the State and the counter-revolutionary role played by the trade unions and the Communist Party. At the end of the book is an analysis of the Russia Revolution in which the author argues structure and methods of the Bolshevik Party were counterproductive and that the Party flagged behind the masses, that the authoritarian nature of the bureaucracy that developed was due to the organization of the Party not solely due to Stalin’s efforts, as some have claimed. Ironically, many of the facts cited to back up his claim are quoted directly from Trotsky’s “History of the Russian Revolution” (Trotsky was a prominent figure in the Party during the Revolution). I do have a number of criticisms of the book however. First, scattered throughout the book are phrases like: we are against authority, or against power, or leaders etc. If you take the time to define these terms then holding positions such as those becomes absurd. If authority is defined as the imposition of our will on another, then a revolution, a riot, or even a protest makes use of authority. Certainly we are not against these things; therefore it doesn’t make sense to say that we are against authority. The same sort of logic could be applied to power, or leaders. This way of framing our ideas is a problem that is rampant in the anarchist movement, and it seems, among the left-communists as well. My second criticism of the book is its rejection of the vanguard. Don’t mistake me here I am not embracing Lenin's tyrannical notion of the party, the vanguard is merely that segment of the population which acts first. Revolutionary organization's role, in my opinion, is to initiate popular struggle and to act as a sustaining force when the initial popular enthusiasm has subsided, to prevent the revolution from being taken over by totalitarian elements within the revolutionary milieu. Perhaps the greatest gem of insight contained within the book, and perhaps the only new theoretical idea presented in the book is the analysis of the universities role under capitalism namely, the production of a managerial elite. Well worth picking up.
Jan 30 2009 15:21
#2
Angelus Novus wrote:
FWIW, Daniel Cohn-Bendit is now a member of the neo-liberal, pro-war wing of the German Greens. His politics have been consistently shitty since the late 1970s.
He also admitted to having sexual experiences with young children.
Jan 31 2009 22:21
#3
weeler wrote:
Angelus Novus wrote:
FWIW, Daniel Cohn-Bendit is now a member of the neo-liberal, pro-war wing of the German Greens. His politics have been consistently shitty since the late 1970s.He also admitted to having sexual experiences with young children.
He has since claimed that these were fantasies. The children involved have also publicly denied that he is a paedophile.
Feb 4 2009 21:26
#4
No one has any disagreements? I think that's a first.
Feb 9 2009 18:12
#5
Just to compare reviews , here is the SPGB take on the book.:-
"Books written by participants in events are always interesting if only because they are part of the documentary evidence as to what happened. The book by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was prominent in the student movement which led to the "May events" in France in 1968, and his brother Gabriel (who wrote the theoretical parts) is no exception. Written in 1968 shortly after the events, and now republished by AK Press, it gives a good insight into what many of the radicalised students thought.
The Cohn-Bendits called for a revolution without leaders to abolish the wages system. They were therefore implacably opposed to Leninism and its concept of a centralised vanguard to lead the working class. A large part of the book in fact is devoted to exposing, on the one hand, the French Communist Party (PCF) and its claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the French working class and, on the other, how the Bolsheviks, under Lenin and Trotsky, introduced state capitalism into Russia, with their vanguard as the new managerial ruling class imposing one-man management in the state-owned factories and bloodily suppressing working-class resistance in Krondstadt in 1921. In fact the English title does not convey the full anti-Leninist significance of a literal translation of the original French title – Leftism: Remedy for the Senile Disorder of Communism – which was an obvious play on the title of Lenin's 1920 pamphlet Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
The rest of the book is devoted to describing and analysing the events themselves – student occupation of the universities, street battles, followed by a general strike with many factory occupations involving at its height some 10 million workers – and including a good analysis of the role of universities under capitalism (to train cadres to run industry and the state on behalf of the capitalist class).
A revolution without leaders to abolish the wages system? Implacable opposition to Leninism and all its works? We can go along with that; in fact it's what we have always said and done. But that's as far as our agreement can go. The Cohn-Bendits envisaged "the revolution" as involving the overthrow of the government by mass street demonstrations and the occupation, and then the running, of workplaces by the workers. They argued that this could be sparked off by a "militant minority" provoking the state to drop its mask, as the students did by occupying the universities and provoking the police to try to dislodge them. In fact, they imagined that they nearly sparked off such a revolution, if only the students and others had taken over the finance and education ministries on the night of 24 May and if only the workers had had the self-confidence not just to occupy their workplaces but to have restarted production under their own control and management.
If only. Such a scenario would only have had any chance of working if workers were already socialist-minded; but they weren't. This is not to say that the workers in France in 1968 were not discontented, nor that they should not have gone on strike. But it was discontent with their treatment under capitalism, not with capitalism as such.
The Gaullist regime, installed in 1958 following a mutiny by the army in Algeria, had imposed a virtual wage freeze for ten years and the employers had managed their businesses in a particularly authoritarian way. The PCF and the trade union federation it controlled, the CGT, tried to keep the issue as one of economic demands (higher wages and benefits, more consultation of workers, etc). The Cohn-Bendits criticised them severely for this but, ironically, when the PCF did finally introduce a political element by calling for a change of government (not what the Cohn-Bendits wanted of course) they played into De Gaulle's hands. He immediately called an election on the theme "Who governs: Me or the Communists?" and got the answer he wanted.
Ironically too, although views such as those expressed here by the Cohn-Bendits got a boost, the main conclusion that most of the "militant minority" drew from the failure of May 1968 to overthrow capitalism was that this was because there hadn't been a strong enough vanguard party to direct the events. After 1968 Leninism, in the form of Trotskyism, Maoism, Castroism, Guevaraism, Ho Chi Minhism, flourished as never before and, although such views are now not as popular as they became in the 1970s, we are still suffering from this legacy.
While his brother Gabriel remained an anarchist, Daniel Cohn-Bendit eventually abandoned the claim to be a revolutionary to become an open reformist. He now sits as a Green Party member of the European Parliament. Clearly he was wrong to have gone reformist, but at least he now recognises that a "militant minority" cannot provoke a non-socialist-minded working class into carrying out a socialist revolution."
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/nov01/booksnov.html
Another more sympathetic review by the SPGB is as follows :-
"....Actually, this was a bit of an exaggeration as May l968 also gave an impetus to anarchist and “spontaneist” ideas including those of Rosa Luxemburg. It was true, however, that May 1968 did lead to a spread of the Leninist doctrine of the need for a disciplined and centralised vanguard party to lead the workers. Leninist groups of all sorts, not just Trotskyists but also the followers of Mao or Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh or Che Guevara or even Enver Hodja in Albania, all found a ready audience amongst radical students for their view that a revolution had not happened in France for want of a vanguard party.
But not everybody fell for this. One who didn’t was Daniel Cohn-Bendit who, as Danny-the-Red, had been the most prominent of the student revolutionaries in France. With his brother Gabriel he wrote a book, called in English Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative whose final section on “The Strategy and Nature of Bolshevism” is a devastating attack on Leninism in theory and practice.
Leninists, they wrote, “no less than the capitalist state, all look upon the proletariat as a mass that needs to be directed from above”:
“This disdain for the working class and its capacity for self-emancipation can be heard most clearly in Lenin’s a theoretical justification of the leadership principle” (p. 213).
“The Leninist belief that the workers cannot spontaneously go beyond the level of trade union consciousness is tantamount to beheading the proletariat, and then insinuating the Party as the head” (p. 215).
“The most forceful champion of a revolutionary party was Lenin, who in his What is to be done? argued that the proletariat is unable by itself to reach a ‘scientific’ understanding of society, that it tends to adopt the prevailing, i.e. the bourgeois ideology. Hence it was the essential task of the party to rid the workers of this ideology by a process of political education from without. Moreover, Lenin tried to show that the party can only overcome the class enemy by turning itself into a professional revolutionary body in which everyone is allocated a fixed task. Certain of its infallibility, a Party appoints itself the natural spokesman and sole defender of the interests of the working class, and as such wields power on their behalf – i.e. acts as a bureaucracy”. (p 250)
The Leninists were outraged. Reviewing the Cohn-Bendit’s book for the bourgeois readers of the Sunday Telegraph IS member Paul Foot wrote:
“I doubt whether even the Cohn-Bendit’s revolutionary readers will be satisfied with their conclusions – that the working class itself, unpolluted by parties and vanguards, can and will seize power for itself and throw up the democratic organisations necessary for an egalitarian, libertarian society. Revolutionaries should, they argue, do no more than ‘support, encourage and clarify the struggle’. To establish their faith in the spontaneity of workers’ action, the Cohn-Bendits must necessarily explain how it was that the only even partially successful socialist revolution in history was carried out under the leadership of a party” (Sunday Telegraph, 18 December l968).
Actually, the Cohn-Bendits had answered this in their book by arguing that the so-called workers’ revolution of October 1917 had not been this at all, but the successful seizure of power by a vanguard party which had then proceeded to suppress the workers. And so the argument went on, and not just between the Cohn-Bendits and Foot. The point at issue was: How should “non-proletarian revolutionaries” relate to the industrial working class whose mass action alone they considered could bring about a new society? Should they seek to serve them or to lead them?..."
FWIW, Daniel Cohn-Bendit is now a member of the neo-liberal, pro-war wing of the German Greens. His politics have been consistently shitty since the late 1970s.