the revolutionary project - new intro for my website - comments please!

Towards a better understanding of the world, in order to change it.

The world we live in is a world of contradictions. The environment is in a state of decline, yet industry continues to pump pollutants into the atmosphere whilst non-polluting technologies are neglected. Thousands starve in one region whilst there is a food surplus in another. We can communicate with strangers from all around the globe, yet no-one knows their neighbour. Automation could free us from labour, yet we are chained to the machine. We live amongst vast material possibilities, yet poverty is the universal experience (not just in the narrow economic sense but also in terms of the quality of lived experience).

“Never in history has there been such a glaring contrast between what could be and what actually exists.” [1]

Central to all these contradictions and reshaping all previous antagonisms is the global commodity-capitalist system. A system characterised by the production of commodities, wage labour and the market economy. A commodity is what is produced by the worker under capitalist conditions, its purpose to reproduce and enlarge capital (stored surplus value). To the capitalist it is but a happy coincidence if any other human need is met along the way.

Commodities are only available in exchange for other commodities, money being the universal commodity and measure of all others. Since all goods have been turned into commodities and access to non-commodified materials restricted, those without the means of producing anything to exchange must sell the only thing they have, their physical or mental labour. The logic of the market economy treats this labour like any other commodity; to be bought, sold and discarded as the market dictates. In effect the worker becomes a commodity. This transformation of living activity into an object creates an alienated or estranged world in which humankind does not recognize or fulfil itself, but is overpowered by the dead things and social relations of its own making.

Capitalist society is split into two camps, the bourgeois or capitalist class (those whose material interest lies with the continuation of the present system) and the proletariat[2] (those with “nothing to lose but their chains”). While the rag wearing classical proletariat of Marx’s time has all but disappeared, at least in the developed countries, the fundamental division remains; power and wealth are becoming more rather than less concentrated under the control of a small minority. However, our concern is with the social relation capital not the individual capitalist - the functionaries of capitalism are more and more disposable as individuals . The modern proletariat is almost everyone; it is the working class which must destroy both work and class.

At various points in history the struggle against capital has given us a brief glimpse at the new forms of social organization which could replace the commodity-economy; the power of the workers and neighbourhood councils (a.k.a. popular assemblies, anti-work committees, revolutionary collectives etc.). Unlike "workers control" which seeks the self-management of the world as it already exists, the true movement for generalised self management seeks the qualitative transformation of all areas of life, not just work. These councils vest all decision-making and executive powers in themselves and federate with one another through the exchange of delegates answerable to the base and recallable at any time. In this way the possibility of the emergence of a new ruling class of bureaucrats or specialists is avoided.

Not to be confused with the so-called “communist” revolutions of the USSR and its imitators; which in fact gave birth to a form of state-capitalism. We are concerned with lesser known, more radical struggles; Russia 1905, Germany 1918-19, Italy 1920, Kronstadt 1921, Spain 1936-37, Hungary 1956, France 1968, Czechoslovakia 1968, Portugal 1974-75, Poland 1980-81 and Argentina 2001-2003.

The first project of the councils will be the abolition of forced labour and the commodity economy. This abolition will pass the point of no return when the councils have seized the centres of distribution and production and organized the sharing of goods and free access to technological facilities.

If we are to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past it will be necessary to develop a theory of revolutionary practice, a theory which seeks to “get to the root of all things” and improve them. It is not a matter of choosing from one of the pre-existing ideologies of the old workers movement and basing our world view around it. But a matter of finding the “moment of truth” in all the theories of the past and synthesising this with our experience of the present.

“The victory of the councils is not the end of the revolution but the beginning of it”. [3]

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footnotes
1. Ken Knabb “The Joy of Revolution”
2. “Proletarian”: broadly speaking “modern working class” including the un-employed and unemployable. However the proletariat is not to be understood as a sociological category of people in such-and-such income group and such-and-such occupations, but as a social relation of capitalism. It is all those who have little or no means of support other than selling their physical and mental labour. The proletariat is the only class capable of ending class society, as it produces the material conditions of its own enchainment.
3.René Riesel “Preliminaries on Councils and Councilist Organization”