Communism, Organization, and Consciousness

Reading Barrot and Martin's Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement is a refreshing experience. The authors have clearly got a new grip on some vital elements in revolutionary theory, and have, consequently, a new perspective on the revolutionary movement and on the nature of capitalism. One of the most pleasant aspects of reading this book is the authors' willingness to give credit where credit is due (unlike some other ultra-left and "post-situ" groups) — to Pannekoek, to Bordiga, to the Situationist International (S.I.). Barrot's introduction in particular acknowledges this latter debt, emphasizing the anti-political nature of the real communist movement, and the reactionary attitude of the Leftist militant who experiences a separation between "his real needs, the reasons why he cannot stand the present world, (and) his action, his attempt to change this world." Thus, revolutionary activity becomes reified, an external, moral cause to be served, and hence, ceases to be revolutionary. Barrot here grounds the origin and terrain of revolutionary theory and practice directly in the everyday life of the revolutionary, as did the S.I.

In common with the S.I., also, Barrot and Martin stress repeatedly that the central social relation of capitalism is wage-labor, and that its central characteristic as a mode of production is the division between use-value and exchange-value, which, while it has its origin in pre-capitalist commodity exchange, nonetheless only becomes fully developed under capitalism. The sale or alienation of labor, i.e., the separation of the producers from the means of production, and the conferring of an abstract quantitative value upon their product, are but two aspects of the social relation known as Capital. In cornmon with the S.I., Barrot and Martin emphasize that the "minimum program" of communism is the immediate abolition of wage-labor, and therefore, of exchange-value and production according to the dictates of exchange-value and its accumulation in the form of surplus-value. Finally, Barrot and Martin acknowledge, together with the S.I. and the council-communists, that the so-called socialist and communist countries are, in fact, capitalist (state-capitalist), since wage-labor and capital accumulation continue to exist there, as in the "capitalist world."

Here, however, the difficulties begin. Substantial parts of the book are devoted to a critique of the ultra-left, that is to say, of the movement that began with Gorter's resignation from the Third International in 1920, continued in Germany with the KAPD and the AAUD, and, after its defeat by Stalinism, persisted as a theoretical tradition in the writings of Pannekoek, Korsch, Mattick, and others. It is represented at present by such groups as ICC, Revolution Internationale, Internationalism, and Root & Branch.

It is not my chief intention here to "defend" these groups: such a defense is best left to the groups themselves. But some aspects of Barrot's critique apply directly to my own theory and that of my comrades, and it is these that I will try to counter, in the main, while touching on what I believe to be serious errors on his part regarding his interpretation of council-communist theory.

The main charges that Barrot levels at the councilists, from Pannekoek on, can be summarized as follows:

"The theory of the management of society through worker's councils does not take the dynamics of capitalism into account.... The sort of socialism it proposes is nothing other than capitalism — democratically managed by the workers."
— Leninism and the Ultra-left (page 104)

All very well, if one means by this theory the theory of anarcho-syndicalism, the French CFDT, or of Yugoslavian "self-management" (which, curiously, Barrot never mentions).

However, there are theories and theories of "self-management". It may very well be that many ultra-left groups have not seriously confronted the questions of wage-labor and exchang-value, and their determinate negation. On the other hand, some, like Internationalism, most definitely have. Barrot even refers approvingly to an article dealing with them, "State-Capitalism and the Law of Value", which appeared in their journal; and yet, he does not give them credit for having stated repeatedly that the abolition of wage-labor is among the first tasks of the communist revolution. Similarly the British left-communist group World Revolution states: "We workers have one program: the abolition of wage-labor." To confuse, willfully or otherwise, the theory of such groups with various syndicalist or "council-capitalist" ideologies is to commit calumny.

The question of exactly how value relations will be eliminated after the overthrow of the capitalist state and breaking down of the enterprises into social property, is, as usual, left very vague in Barrot' s texts. To read Barrot one would think that Marx had never even considered the difficulties involved in this "transitional stage". Such, however, is not the case. Let me cite one among many such passages from Marx's work:

"In the case of socialized production, the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labor-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supply of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labor-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate.
— Marx; Capital (volume II); page 358, New World Paperbacks (1967); emphasis added by LM

Such a system might be adapted, perhaps as a form of "overtime" to ensure the carrying out of particularly dreary, dirty, or unpleasant tasks that have not yet been eliminated by automation or other forms of human inventiveness. It might then entitle the producers in question to, say, extra computer time, rare goods (such as a wine that grows only in one French village), or some other enjoyment that is still scarce in the first few years of communist society.

Fortunately for us, the development of the productive forces since Marx's time has provided us with part of the solution to the problem. In the period of the formal domination of capital (described by Invariance, Negation and other post-Bordigist groups as lasting up until around the turn of the century) production became more and more social while consumption remained largely individual and based on the famil unit. However, as capital came to dominate not only production but circulation, consumption also came to be socialized. For example, the mid-nineteenth century worker had to purchase and consume individually (or with his or her family) not only food and drink but also information, medical care, the means to heat and light his/her home, ice to preserve food, etc. In modern capitalist society these necessities are consumed collectively via the schools and colleges, radio and TV networks, the hospitals and clinics, and the utilities networks that provide water, gas and electricity. In addition, means of communication have been developed and socialized to a far greater extent than in Marx's day (mass transit, autos, telephone). When one further considers that rent will be among the first manifestations of the capital-relation to disappear, one realizes that nearly all of consumption is socia1ized already, and hence, requires no labor vouchers to facilitate distribution. As I said above, such a system need only be used for goods and services that are still scarce and must be consumed more-or-less individually.

In any case, a terror of even talking about labor time in communist society will not get us anywhere; this amounts to a kind of "anti-value" moralism. What I will try to show is that generalized self-management and its historical embryo in the councils are by no means tied to value, and, in fact, may offer the best formal means so far of superceding it.

Barrot claims that a councilist position may once have been valid but that to hold such a position now is necessarily to be guilty of "formalism" and "superficiality":

"In a period when the proletariat was still unable to act as a class, council communism was still positive. The fundamental contradiction did not appear. Hence, the search for another solution on a superficial level. It It is now increasingly reactionary. Communism will have to defeat pseudo-workers' management (UCS) and its ideology."

This statement is astonishing in the number of questions it manages to beg. For example, it totally ignores the fact that ALL the councilist groups, including non-Marxist ones like Solidarity, denounced the Upper Clyde Shipyard "work-in" as a counter-revolutionary and defeatist action. They did not do so because it was led by the CP, but because the workers in question were aiding capitalism by continuing to sell their labor-power at a decreased wage until a new capitalist could be found to take over the enterprise! [See Solidarity's bulletin for that period. — LM] But this is only the tip of Barrot's self-contradictory iceberg. The chief question that is begged is exactly why a stand in favor of workers' councils as the form of social transformation is "increasingly reactionary".

Now, I would be the first to agree that capitalism is not, as [Paul] Cardan would have it, primarily a "system of management". As I said before, I agree with Barrot and with Marx that capital is a social relation of production whose "underside", as it were, is wage-labor. Capital is only another name for wage-labor if wage-labor is understood in its totality, in all of its implications. Therefore, the content of the communist revolution must indeed be expressed negatively as the abolition of wage-labor in all its implications.

But the positive expression of the revolution must include the form by which social life is administered and by which social production is managed. Barrot says:

"The revolutionary analysis of capitalism started by Marx does not lay stress on the question: who manages Capital?"
— "Leninism and the Ultra-left" (page 88)

But, while it is true that Marx did not "lay stress" on this question, it is also true that when the question of management arose, he dealt with it.

In 1871, the workers of Paris, in response to the paralysis of the Theirs regime in the face of the Prussian invasion, took over the administration of social life in the city. The Paris Commune was the first occasion in history in which the proletariat seized power for itself and began to carry out the very transformation of society that Marx and Engels had predicted that it would. These two gentlemen, far from being unconcerned with the "mere" form of the Commune, proceeded to analyze it in great detail; much of Marx's The Civil War In France is devoted to an analysis of the "form" of the Commune and its program for the proletarian revolution in France which was so tragically cut short. Engels went so far as to recommend: "Look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat!" He and Marx also laid great stress on such "formal" points as the revocability of all Commune officials and the resolute insistence of the Communard program on this principle of revocability throughout all of social administration.1 Marx called the Commune "The political form, at last discovered, of the economic emancipation of labor."2

Since that time, the principle of strictly mandated, revocable delegates has been rediscovered in practice again and again by the proletariat. It is simply the obvious formal way of preventing a bureaucracy from developing and of making sure that one's decisions are accurately carried out. It is also vital to "council-communist" theory, and subsequently to the theory of the Situationist International.

"Marx's analysis and his scientific socialism as a whole are not the product of 'bourgeois intellectuals' but of the class struggle on all its levels under capitalism."
— "Leninism and the Ultra-left" (page 84)

Quite so. But so was the theory of Pannekoek and the council-communists, as Barrot admits in "Notes on Trotsky, Pannekoek, Bordiga" (page 119 ff.). Barrot here seems to be ignorant of the fact that "Marx's scientific socialism as a whole" by 1872 included a critique of the bourgeois State and the recognition of the Commune as a first step in the negation of that State, including the form of that negation. Most councilists since have done no more than follow Marx in deriving their theory from "the class struggle in all its levels under capitalism". They recognize in the Soviets of 1905 and the German Arbeiterrate of 1919-20 a further development of proletarian self-organization. They press for workers' councils as a minimum formal requirement for the communist revolution, just as the abolition of wage-labor is its minimum content.

Barrot, in "Communism and Capitalism", goes much further than this latter minimum, pointing out that communism implies the suppression of the economy as a separate realm, since production will no longer be a separate, alien activity cut off from the rest of social life. From this it follows that many other separations will be abolished, such as that between "work" time and "free" time, work and play, etc.

Clearly, the form of social organization through which this organization will be carried out cannot be determined precisely in advance. However, I see no reason why revolutionaries should not begin discussing it immediately, and every reason why they should. For example, as a revolutionary I am continually asked, "Well, that all sounds very nice, but how are you going to organize it?" At this point, confronted with the doubts and anxieties of a worker or other proletarian who is perhaps on the point of becoming revolutionary, nothing could be more stupid than to say only "We can't predict that", or "That bridge has to be crossed when we come to it." Contrary to what Barrot says about the modern proletariat being unconcerned with questions of communist social administration, such questions are being brought up with increasing frequency, and for us to put them off "until the revolution starts" is to be cowardly and self-defeating. Above all, proletarians who see the need to transform the world are looking for a practicable, workable way to do it. In denying this, Barrot is succumbing to the very spontaneism he criticizes in ICO. The program of workers' councils, not as syndicalist bodies confined to "the factories" — as if even half of the U.S. proletariat worked in factories — but as a class-wide, society-wide system, seems to me an excellent "working hypothesis". Obviously, the revolutionary process will begin with proletarians in workplaces coming together, most likely in a mass strike and occupation, and holding assemblies that will then link up by means of delegates. As in Russia in 1905 and to a lesser extent in France during "May", assemblies of workers and other proletarians will also be constituted outside of any specitic workplace, e.g., in neighborhoods. If the revolutionary process is to continue, a central assembly or "Soviet" must be formed to administer social life in the entire city. Similar bodies must be created at the regional and, ultimately, at the global level. In all these coordinating bodies, delegates must be strictly mandated and revocable; otherwise, how is the proletariat as a whole going to administer social life as a whole? [Which is what Barrot says he wants....]

Modern means of communication adapted to practical dialogue, such as radio and television, will make the task of coordination a great deal easier and could lessen the onus otherwise placed on the coordinating bodies. Furthermore, computerized data transmission and processing will facilitate the planning of production to an extent that Pannekoek could not have foreseen. But, coordination is necessary, planning is necessary; and the councilist model seems to me, in general, the most logical and efficient way of planning and coordinating the communist program, of putting it into effect.

At the level of the individual capitalist firm or enterprise, the system of management is indeed of secondary importance compared to the social relations of production; it may be substantially altered as long as the accumulation of capital continues unimpaired. The translation within capitalism from one-man management to corporate management, and from corporate management to state management show this clearly, as does the possibility of "co-participation" or mitbestimmung as is now widely practiced in Europe. But to call for self-management, not of the enterprise, but of world production, is to call effectively for the abolition of wage-labor. If world production were self-managed my means of the system I outlined above, wage-labor would be an absurdity. Wage-labor implies the extraction of surplus-value from the worker and its subsequent disposal by a "capitalist", whether this "capitalist" has the form of a corporation, a state bureaucracy, or a Yugoslavian "workers' council". When world production is planned collectively, surplus-value ceases to exist because there is no longer any separate surplus.3 All production is according to need, world need, which need is decided upon by everyone and which includes creating the necessary reserves (in agriculture, for example).4 At this level, the apparent distinction between systems of management and social relations of production is ended. Generalized self-management contains the abolition of wage-labor; the abolition of wage-labor contains generalized self-management.

In "Capitalism and Communism", Barrot makes a remark that may be at the root of his "anti-management-system" polemic. Having quite correctly observed that "communism is the end of the economy as a separate and privileged field on which everything depends while despising and fearing it", he goes on to say, "Communism dissolves production relations and combines them with social relations." In my view, this distinction between production relations and social relations is false; production relations have never been other than social. They cannot be, by definition. The characteristic of production relations within capitalism is not that they are not social, but that they are simultaneously social and anti-social — destructive of social relations other than commodity relations. This is owing to the dual nature of capitalist production, to the contradiction between use-value and value. This dual nature makes production relations appear as separate from other relations, because in capitalist society production is first and foremost production of capital — the production of use-value, of the totality of use-values that comprise social life, is secondary to the imperative of capital production. But, in fact, social reproduction continues and develops; it expands to the point where the dominant social relation, capital' becomes a fetter on its development. This is the point of revolutionary crisis.5

The various systems of management under which capital-production is carried out are a part, though not the most essential part, of capitalist production relations. They alter according to the development of capital-production, and in accordance with its needs. The growth of state-capitalism is not an arbitrary phenomenon; it is necessary to the continued existence of capital. The same is true of "workers' control" and co-participation schemes. They are forms taken by capitalist production relations at a given stage, integral to the unfolding of those relations. Generalized self-management is nothing other than the form of communist production relations, where social production has broken the fetters of the capital relation and has lost the appearance of a separate realm. Instead of self-expanding value, we now have as the only value the expansion of selves, that is, of human beings and their self-powers. The various categories into which human production is divided under capitalism — mental or manual, material or spiritual, scientific or cultural, philosophical or artistic — cease to be so divided and become part of a unitary process, self-production, or, as the Situationists put it, "the infinite multiplication of real desires and their gratification", for and by social individuals.

Barrot and Martin's other chief criticism of the council-communists or ultra-leftists is the failure of many of them adequately to come to grips with the question of revolutionary organization. This is by no means always true — there have been many short lived formations in the history of the ultra-left which tried to develop a revolutionary organization, such as the United Workers' Party in the U.S. to which [Karl] Korsch, [Paul] Mattick and others contributed. Other groups, whether in the Cardanist tradition like Solidarity, or coming from a more coherent perspective, such as Workers' Voice or Revolution Internationale or Internationalism, have attempted and are continuing to attempt organized revolutionary activity.

Barrot suggests in "Leninism and the Ultra-left" that the ultra-leftists merely placed themselves in an antithetical relation to the Kautsky-Lenin ideology which came to dominate the entire workers' movement in the late '20s and early '3Os. In other works, while Lenin propagated the conception of the "vanguard party" that would introduce the doctrine of revolutionary socialism into the "trade-union conscious" working class from the outside, the ultra-leftists opposed to this a theory according to which revolutionaries must not try to form any organization outside of the general movement of the working class, since such an organization would inevitably wind up trying to lead the workers.

As Barrot observes, both these ideologies miss the point, which is that "revolutionaries and their ideas originate in the workers' struggle" ("Leninism and the Ultra-left", page 85). The difference between the Marxian concept of "scientific socialism" and previous socialist ideas, including the various Utopias and the conspiratorial communism of Babeuf and Blanqui, is not that the former is derived from the class struggle and that the latter are not, but that the former is self-consciously so-derived. No ideas come from the void; they are the active reflection in the human mind of human sensuous practice, which, in turn, is shaped by previous mental conceptions. But Marx and Engels were the first theoreticians to put this knowledge to use as a critical method, the "science of history" (cf. The German Ideology).

Barrot concludes:

"It is wrong to say that the "theoreticians" must lead the workers. But it is equally wrong to say ... that collectively organized theory is dangerous because it will result in leadership over the workers. ... The revolutionary process is an organic process, and although its components may be separate from each other for a certain time, the emergence of any revolutionary (or even pseudo-revolutionary) situation shows the profound unity of the various elements of the revolutionary movement.
— Ibid (pages 85-86)

As it stands, this is fine; I entirely agree. However, a little earlier in the same article Barrot also says:

"Capitalist society itself produces a communist party, which is nothing more than the objective movement ... that pushes society towards communism... ."
— "Leninism and the Ultra-left" (page 86)

And later on, he expands on this theme:

The driving force of revolution, and the sign of the strength of the proletariat, are not to be found in any "consciousness" nor in the pure "spontaneity" of the workers (as if they were "free") but in the growth of productive forces, which includes social struggles."
— "Leninism and the Ultra-left" (page 104)

Barrot, in fact, says of the proletariat that "... it is compelled by capital to be the agent of communism." (Ibid., page 39). Hence, in describing the role of revolutionaries he writes:

"They do not try to tell the workers what to do; but they do not refrain from intervening under the pretext that 'the workers must decide for themselves'. For on the one hand, the workers only decide to do what the general situation compels them to do; and on the other, the revolutionary movement is an organic structure of which theory is an inseparable and indispensable element (Ibid., pages l07-108 — emphasis by LM).

This is a curious conception. On the one hand, "the workers only do what the general situation compels them to do", and on the other, revolutionaries "intervene" to make proposals that are presumably intended to suggest to these workers what they should do. "In all situations, (revolutionaries) do not hesitate to express the whole meaning of what is going on, to make practical proposals", says Barrot two sentences later. But, no matter what, the workers only do what they are "compelled" to do by the "general situation."

Let's look at this in the context of, say, a wildcat mass strike, such as have been taking place all over the world in the past six years. Suppose there is an assembly of all the employees of a factory, including technicians and clerical workers, as well as production operatives. Let's also suppose that some of the workers are communists — not Leninists, but real communists like you and me. Also present are a couple of shop stewards and a business-agent from the union hall down the street, along with their "faithfuls" among the workers who play goon for them.

First of all, someone stands up and moves that the factory be occupied until all of the demands of the strike are met. There is general approval of this, expressed by applause, etc. Then one of the communists gets everyone quieted down long enough to say, "Yes, comrades, good, let's occupy. But let's not stop there. There are other plants on strike in this area — let's link up with them, and rotate shifts on the occupation so that some of us can be on the outside spreading the strike. Otherwise we could get cut off. Also, let's throw the union out — they've never done anything much for us, and they'll fuck us up if they can."

There is a lot of racket, and then, the shop stewards get out a bullhorn and start yelling for everyone to ignore these extremists, who are just trying to use the majority for their own ends, and all the usual crap. They tell everyone that "their" union is doing the best for them, that they should leave the plant in an orderly manner, while the negotiations are being carried out.

The result of this is that about half the workers do what they are told and leave the plant, to the boos and jeers of the other half. The remaining workers then attack the union bureaucrats and beat the living shit out of the one they happen to catch. After this, they act on the suggestion of the communists.

All right, now tell me, which workers did what the "general situation" "compelled" them to do? To the workers that left, the "general situation" was that there was a strike and that they would do what they had always done before, i.e., go home and sit it out until "their" demands were either met or not met. To the workers who stayed, the "general situation" was that there was a mass movement going on around them which they wanted to join — because it was more fun than staying home, because they knew the union would sell them out, or in some cases (such as the case of the communists) because they saw a chance of the movement spreading and overthrowing class society.

How come capital compels some proletarians to be the agents of communism and not other proletarians? Is capital God, that it can choose so Calvinistically the Elect and the Damned? The answer is, of course, precisely that capital doesn't "compel" anybody to be the agents of anything; and that, furthermore, the difference between the workers that left and those that stayed was indeed a difference in consciousness, that chimera which Barrot puts between quotation marks with such easy scorn. Barrot's apostrophes are rather like the lines drawn by medieval mapmakers around unknown territories that were left blank or overlaid with the inscription "Terra Incognita". Here, indeed, "there be dragons", and Barrot doesn't want to meet them.

Barrot's initial insistence, in his introduction, on understanding the subjective (individual) side of the revolutionary process is thus negated by his failure to link it concretely to the objective (social) side. All very well to say that revolutionary activity begins with the revolutionaries' inability to tolerate the misery of his/her life, but what allows all those other non-revolutionaries to go on tolerating the same misery meanwhile?

The little story I used to exemplify the problem is a fairly mild taste of what I believe us to be up against. Similar events took place in many German factories around 1919-1920, but the question posed was far more serious; whether to elect a representative National Assembly that would found a state-capitalist constitution, in which the workers' councils held some subsidiary role, or else to unify the councils autonomously by means of an All-German conference of council delegates, and thus, to begin overthrowing capital. We know what happened: the workers loyal to the Social Democratic government were generally in the majority, and where they weren't, the Social Democrats crushed the revolution. Fifteen years later, those workers and their sons were abandoning the SPD and the KPD in droves and joining the Nazis. Did the "general situation" compel them to grovel before Hitler? Did it compel them to adopt a monstrously irrational ideology composed of national chauvinism, racism, misogyny, pre-Christian religion and hero-worship? Did it compel them to sacrifice millions of their own and other peoples' lives in the name of "the Fatherland" and "racial purity?"

The plain fact is, that no amount of "objective conditions", if by this we mean social and economic crises, will force the proletariat to carry out a revolutionary transformation, or to become fascist. The objective socialization of production carried out through capitalist development forms a necessary pre-condition; so does the recurring and deepening crisis of that development. Necessary, but insufficient.

If we accept the basic premise of Marxian theory, we cannot believe that it is simply "misinformation" or "bad leadership" that leads workers to become reactionary. We must look for a material, i.e., sensuous base to these ideologies. But we cannot find a material base in the sense of a rational cause, although there may once have been such a cause, e.g., anti-Irish sentiment among English and Scottish workers originating in a period when starving Irish workers were shipped in as scabs by the British capitalists. However, the persistence of such ideologies, long after the circumstances that gave rise to them are altered, is another matter.

The material base for ideology is located in the individual, as well as in society at large. From infancy, individuals are conditioned by their parents, by the educational system, by churches, and by the organs of mass communication, to be guilty about their own desires. This begins with the repression of infantile sexuality and is driven home through continual psychic and physical violence directed against any signs of rebellion or "dissidence". The result is that within every supposed adult there resides a "child" cringing before the anger of internalized parent-images and teacher-images. The adult has learned systematically to conceal his or her real feelings, to give way to authority and peer-group pressure, and to be incapable of running his or her own life except according to the dominant image of normality.

Painful awareness of unfulfilled or unexpressed desires leads to the formation of an armored character, a non-self, to protect the self from the pain following each thwarted attempt at self-realization. To the extent that the nature of the non-self as a protective device is suppressed (the better to function as such), i.e., to the extent that it replaces the self, an individual may be said to be integrated into a life of wage-labor. Character-armor is, in this sense, the integument of exchange-value around the individual, since without it the individual would not be able to sell his or her labor-power; such self-estrangement would otherwise be utterly intolerable. In turn, the character-armor of each individual reinforces that of those around her/him and is reinforced by it. Positive self-consciousness is retarded or arrested altogether; individuals become invisible to themselves in terms of any accurate perception of their relation to their own everyday lives, i.e., to production and to society at large.

Hence the peculiar phenomenon of fascism. Fascism is organized mass schizophrenia, that is, it systematically exploits both sides of the contradiction between self and non-self. On the one hand, objective conditions, as cited above, tend to drive the workers towards rebellion and communism. On the other, their character-armor, based in guilt and fear and the need for authority that this guilt and fear engender, prevents their rebellion from becoming fully self-conscious. It is then relatively easy, according to the strength of their conditioning, to succumb to ideologies like Nazism which mingle rebellion with authoritarianism. The power of the "Fatherland" and the "Leader" provide an individual with illusory compensation for his own impotence, which impotence s/he reproduces by projecting his/her own self powers into these fetishes.

It is no accident that Hitler came to power in Germany at the head of the National Socialist German Workers' Party. Hitler knew how to exploit the rebellious yearnings of the workers and dispossessed petty-bourgeoisie far better than did the Stalinists or the Trotskyists, whose appeal was only a diluted form of the same thing, since these parties were also authoritarian and state-capitalist. They were helpless before Hitler, because they could not allow themselves to know his "secret" which is that fascism is only the extreme paroxysm of the contradictions inherent in every worker under capitalism.

We are not so unfortunate; we realize that revolution is not a matter of a "vanguard party" that injects the proletariat with "socialist consciousness" and then hauls it aff to the barricades in a drugged stupor. But knowing this does not mean we can ignore the question of consciousness and its relation to sensuous practice. On the contrary, it means that we must investigate the question intensively if we are to avoid the fate of the revolutionaries of the 1920s and 193Os.

In his critique of Feuerbach, Marx makes an observation that Barrot and Martin paraphrase repeatedly throughout their book. It is as follows:

"Communism is for us not a state of affairs to be established, an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."6

Barrot goes further — he attributes to "communism" all sorts of powers, thoughts and activities, such as, "communism does not even know what value is", "communism does not try to do away with value", and so forth. One is tempted to ask: "Who is this communism, anyway?" Barrot has taken an historical predicate and turned it into an historical subject.

I would have taken these reifications to have been mere turns of phrase were it not for Barrot's attitude to the movement itself, which is triumphalist, determinist — sooner or later, capital will once and for all compel the proletariat to be the agent of communism and everything gonna be ALL-right. (Alleluia, brother!) As I have tried to show above, there is no guarantee at all that the movement will triumph, which Barrot should know by looking at history. What, then, is the origin of his error?

A little further on in "Feuerbach", Marx writes:

In history up to the present, it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become more and more enormous, and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market. ... All-round dependence, this natural form of the world-historical cooperation of individuals will be transformed by (the) communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien to them.7

This is what Barrot has forgotten — that capital only appears to be a subject (as does communism at times) and that, in fact, the proletariat is the agent of both. What a communist revolution means is the re-owning of subjectivity by the masses of workers and other proletarians, self-organized as a class. It means that the proletariat has ceased to reproduce itself unconsciously, as the proletariat, through the mediation of capital and has begun to transform itself consciously, according to its own needs and desires, into the community of producers. In doing so, it ceases to be the proletariat.

Communism is indeed the "real movement", but it cannot be, by definition, solely an objective movement. In one of those flashes of dialectical clarity that make his and Martin's book so very useful, in spite of its faults, Barrot says:

"The proletariat is not the working class; it is a social relation. It is the ever-present destruction of the old world, but only potentially; it becomes real only in a moment of social tension."
— "Capitalism and Communism" (page 39)

Or, as Marx put it, "the proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing." By this, he not only meant that capitalist society denies proletarians their humanity, renders them "nothing" but masses of living labor whose sole function is to produce surplus-value, [but] he also meant that the proletariat does not fully exist until it begins the task of abolishing itself. Like a photon of light, the proletariat exists (as a subject) only in a state of motion. As Hegel would have said, it exists only "in-itself", and thus, "for another", i.e., for capital. When it starts existing "for-itself", it must also negate itself, since its individual members cannot exist really for themselves except by abolishing all classes, and therefore, their own.

To do this, the class must become conscious of itself. Communism is real, as the proletariat is real. It is not a "force" over and above human individuals, but a subjective and objective human tendency engendered by the way in which they produce their lives. Communism has existed as such a tendency ever since the dissolution of the primitive tribal community ("primitive communism"). It has re-emerged again and again throughout history, but it now re-emerges with this difference: whereas among the peasants of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, communism had a dual nature as both a progressive and a conservative movement, against the beginnings of wage-labor, modern communism has no such conservative aspect. The agrarian commune of the Millenarian peasants could not possibly have been realized at the level of development of the productive forces at that time, since it would have been to a great extent a communalization of scarcity, an equality of misery.

Now, however, as the imperatives of use-value and of value diverge more and more sharply, capitalism is less-and-less able to develop the productive forces which it initially engendered, at such human cost. The productive forces of society, by which I mean, not merely "technology" but human productive powers of all sorts, have so developed under capitalism that communism is now the only possible means of organizing and fully deploying these productive forces — or even, given the possibility of a third world war, of preserving them. Nevertheless, the movement of the proletariat only becomes fully communist when the proletariat becomes conscious of this contradiction. Character-armor inhibits individual proletarians from becoming conscious of their social and historical position. Their action in the class struggle is a reflex against the intolerable conditions of their lives, but it must become more than a reflex, it must become a self-subsisting positive. It must move beyond negating capital's negation of their humanity, and begin the project of realizing their humanity in full.

Marx, writing nearly a cen tury and a half ago, said, in Private Property and Communism:

"Socialism... begins from the theoretical and practical sepnse perception of man and nature as essential beings. It is positive human self-consciousness...."8

This is not a self-consciousness that can be introduced "from outside". But "outside" forces, the forces that originally engender character-armor and that reproduce it through ideology, prevent self-consciausness from emerging out of the class struggle. Character-armor is like the steel casing of a diving bell. On the one hand, when the bell is submerged at a depth of thousands of fathoms, the pressure of the water would crumple the steel like paper if it were not for the tremendously-high equivalent pressure of the air within the bell. On the other hand, this same pressure, if maintained at sea-level, would cause the bell to explode. In exactly this way, it is only the force of our desires and our will to live that keeps our character, and with it our whole psychic structure, from collapsing under the weight of misery within capitalist society.

However, when this weight is lightened or removed, the armoring bursts outward in a welter of rage and passion. Anyone who has withnessed or experienced either an individual lightening (such as a bioenergetic therapy session) or a collective one (such as a mass strike like the French one in 1968) will know exaclty what I mean. Yet, even this analogy, like all analogies, only goes so far — character is in fact a social relation reproduced daily by individuals in themselves and each other. One cannot rid oneself of character-armoring altogether within capitalist society because, like the diving bell, it is necessary for survival. One can, however, alter one's character to the extent of facilitating a more self-conscious and efficient practice. One can begin to make one's defenses against misery conscious defenses by attacking one's misery at the source: capitalist social relations. As we become more armed we will need less armor; we begin to see that the armor that locks out pain also locks out pleasure.

The task of revolutionaries is to develop their own self-consciousness, their own radical subjectivity, at the same time as they assault the obstacles to its development in others. They can do this in a number of ways. They can do it as Barrot advocates, by intervening in situations "to express the whole meaning of what is going on, and to make practical proposals." But this is only one aspect of the assault on ideology. They must also, as I said above, demonstrate to self-doubting people the real and practical possibility of social transformation by developing and spreading the communist program, which includes theorizing on the form of organization necessary to accomplish the transformation.

They must recognize and criticize signs of conditioning in themselves and others: blocks to clear thinking, fetishes and projections, and so forth. They must use all the weapons at their disposal — reason, shock, humor, insult, insult, tenderness — to overcome fear and guilt and destroy false consciousness. They must be shameless about their own desires for a rich, variegated and pleasurable life, and continually contrast these desires to the narrow, restricted desires permitted satisfaction under capitalism. Above all, they must always turn their own and others' attention back to their lives and away from the fragmenting "issues" of alienated politics. Self-consciousness begins with consciousness of one's own self-alienation, and goes on to discover the origin of this self-alienation in capitalist social relations. This, in turn, means situating oneself and one's life within those relations.

Barrot and Martin begin their book with this understanding, albeit in a confused form. But, by succumbing to reification, by momentarily forgetting the apparent reversal of subject and object in capitalist society, and thus, ignoring the element of individual consciousness, they make serious errors. We cannot afford to be complacent about the triumph of our movement, nor can we afford to underestimate the strength of the enemy, which strength chiefly is our weakness. Thus, although communism may eventually be triumphant, this eventuality will not do me the slightest good if it does not occur in my lifetime. I, for one, am greedy enough to want to taste the fruit of the plant we are all tending. I hope to encourage this greed in others, since the greedier we are, the better our chances of success. Hence, this critique. I look forward greatly to hearing whatever Barrot, Martin, and others have to say in response.

• 1F. Engels; "Introduction" to The Civil War In France; New World Paperbacks (New York: 1968); page 20.
• 2Karl Marx; Ibid.; page 60.
• 3Karl Marx; Capital (volume I); New World Paperbacks (New York: 1967); page 530.
  "Only by suppressing the capitalist form of production could the length of the working-day be reduced to the necessary labor-time. On the one hand, because the notion of the 'means of subsistence' would considerably expand, the labourer would lay claim to an altogether different standard of life. On the other, because a part of what is now surplus-labour, would then count as necessary labour; I mean a fund for reserve and accumulation."
• 4See Karl Marx; "Critique of the Gotha Programme" in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy; edited by Feuer; Anchor Books (1959).
• 5Karl Marx; Capital (volume III); page 250.
• 6Marx and Engels; The German Ideology (volume I); Progress Publishers (Moscow: 1968); page 48.
• 7Ibid.; page 49.
• 8Karl Marx; Early Writings; translated and edited by Bottomore; McGraw-Hill Paperbacks (1964).