In Portugal — Capital Confronts the World Proletariat (1974)

And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spiritis of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

— Karl Marx; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Workers of the World!

At this time in Portugal the fate of one of the first of today's battles between capital and the world proletariat is being decided. In the face of the workers' strikes and wage demands which have continued to develop in a spontaneous fashion since the coup d'etat of April 25th, capital is beginning to flex its muscles.

The 'executive committee' of capital, the government, has denounced "disproportionate" wage rises as "contrary to the efforts of the political parties who are trying to make the workers see reason", and declares that it will "act without hesitation against any sort of economic sabotage".

Capital's leftwing, the party of those who shot down the Spanish workers in 1937, the Hungarian workers in 1956, and the Polish workers in 1970, and have been shooting down Russian workers for 50 years, the so-called 'Communist' Party, declares for its part that it "finds itself up against a conspiracy of reactionary elements" who, with the conscious or unconscious assistance of "adventurist groups of the so-called left" are trying to "provoke a situation of economic chaos and to destroy the democratic conquests already won". And this party, which still calls itself the party of proletarian revolution, is exhorting the workers to "use the strike weapon with prudence". These "irresponsible", "adventurist" workers, these "saboteurs of the national economy" are thus being warned: if they are not "realistic", the army will soon make them see reason!

What the Holy Alliance of capital, Spinola, Soares (Socialist Party boss), and Cunhal (Communist Party boss) are saying to the workers, who are struggling against the lowest living standards in the whole of Europe, is that their actions are putting the national economy in danger. But where does the current catastrophic situation of the Portuguese economy come from? Is it not the combined result of 50 years of a regressive regime and of a phenomenon which goes far beyond the confines of Portugal: the world economic crisis — for which the workers have no responsibility at all?

The current crisis is much more than a simple monetary crisis or a crisis of raw materials or oil. It has its roots in the insurmountable contradictions of a system which for fifty years has enly survived through enacting its deadly cycle of crisis, war, reconstruction, new crisis and so on.

The difficulties which have assailed world capital for the last 6 or 7 years (monetary crisis, galloping inflation, growing unemployment) signify the end of the euphoric boom created by the last period of reconstruction, a boom which made the capitalists forget the very word 'crisis' and which lulled the workers into a false sense of security.

Today the system is at the end of its tether. The ruling classes are looking more and more like rats in a cage: they run in all directions, they hurl themselves against obstacles, they squabble among themselves. The endless coups d'etat in the underdeveloped countries (Uganda, Chile, Greece, Thailand, Niger, Portugal) have their echo in the 'Watergates' of the advanced countries. The disintegration of the Common Market and of other attempts to establish a 'community' between capitalists is accompanied by growing rivalries between imperialist blocs, who find in the inhabitants of the Third World suitable cannon fodder for so-called 'national liberation' wars (as in Cambodia, the Middle East, and Portuguese Africa), wars which serve as a testing ground for more important military confrontations between the blocs themselves.

Inexorably the capitalist system is compelled by its own inner laws towards a third world war, a holocaust compared to which the first two world wars will seem like children's games.

What is at stake today, of which the wars in Indochina, Pakistan, the Middle East, and Africa are merely small warning signals, is destruction on such a scale that it could mean the end of humanity.

But capital does not have a free hand to impose its solution to the crisis. Before it stands a proletariat, which has responded to the attacks of the bourgeoisie on a scale unknown for more than half a century. May '68 in France, '69 in Italy, Poland in '70, and Barcelona in '71, are so many signs of a revolutionary reawakening of the giant which everyone thought had gone to sleep forever: the world working class. And it is this that the bourgeoisie fears most. Even before the proletariat has developed an awareness of its own strength, its reawakening is already haunting its mortal enemy, the bourgeoisie. More and more, the order of the day for the capitalist class is "the proletariat menace must be nipped in the bud".

And in order to do this, capital is putting into operation, consciously or unconsciously, the double strategy which has served it so well in the past: to hide behind its "left-wing" parties, those in whom the workers have the greatest illusions; and to pick the proletariat off in one country after another, so as to be able to subsequently mount a world-wide attack on it.

It was with its left-wing (Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries) that the bourgeoisie tried to muzzle the proletariat in Russia in 1917, and succeeded in doing so in Germany in 1919, where the "socialist" Noske was the bloodhound of the counter-revolution. It was the left-wing government of the "Popular Front" which in 1936 tamed the armed Spanish workers before beginning their massacre in 1937, a massacre ably finished off by Franco in 1939.

Today, in the face of the international upsurge of the proletariat, there has never been so many left-wing "teams" in power. In Britain, the Labour Party has been put in power with the specific task of damping down the workers' agitation. In France, the left clearly presented itself at the last elections as the only force capable of guaranteeing "social peace".

Now capital is doing the same thing in Portugal. Unable, while still fighting an exhausting colonial war, to deal with the most serious economic decline in the whole of Europe (50% inflation) and confronted by a more and more determined working class resistance, it is trying, by getting rid of a senile regime, to disentangle itself from the war and to "restore" the economy by destroying the workers' struggles. For the latter task, the "Socialist" and "Communist" parties are its most precious instruments, just as they served Allende's Popular Unity government in Chile in the work of politically demobilizing and disarming the workers in the face of Pinochet's army.

As in the past, the 1eft is re-emerging today as the last bastion of capital against the proletariat. The left in government is not a "semi-victory", a "gain" for the workers, as is claimed by the left's miserable watch-dogs and tireless electoral pimps, the so-called "extreme left" of all shapes and sorts (Trotskyists, Maoists, etc.). The left in power, the "workers' government" with their "Socialist" and "Communists" parties, is, in fact, the most dangerous weapon of capital against the proletariat: the weapon with which the bourgeoisie attempts to divert the struggles of the workers before massacring them or allowing them to be massacred by others.

The other aspect of this capitalist strategy, the crushing of the proletariat section by section is also nothing new. It has been put to good effect with the blood of the working class from the Paris Commune of 1871 via the German revolution in 1919, the crushing of the Warsaw and Budapest uprisings at the end of the Second World War to the defeat of the East European insurrections of 1953 and 1956.

Today, once again, faced with the new proletariat threat to its very existence, the capitalist class is bringing out this weapon from its arsenal. For the bourgeoisie there is only one task: to divide the working class, to fight the working class everywhere, in order to break its spirit, to demoralize it before it gets too powerful.

Already the Chilean workers have gone through the tragic experience of this double strategy of capital. Today, in Portugal, capitalism is ready to strike again. Spinola, the ex-fascist general, the right hand man of Salazar, the butcher of Guinea, has promised the workers a "firm hand" if they do not calm down: and that is the only one of his promises which he will be able to keep.

Portugal must not become another Chile!

Capital today is going over the testing ground for its counter-revolutionary offensive, just as it made Spain in 1936 a testing ground for its strategy of world war.

Because the situation in Portugal has direct repercussions on Spain, and thus, on the whole of Europe, the result of the confrontation between capital and proletariat in that country is of the utmost importance.

Workers of the World!

If we were to allow our brothers in Portugal to be massacred, we would not only share in the responsibility for their deaths and oppression, but the chances of further massacres in other countries would be greatly increased — massacres for which we would also share responsibility. Perhaps we would ultimately share responsibility for our own massacre for not responding as a revolutionary class to the crisis before capitalism applied its own solution — world war — which this time could signify the end of any other revolutionary possibility, or even the destruction of humanity.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD!

Confronted with this situation, there is only one position we can take up:

• Vigilant solidarity with the Portuguese workers, not the "solidarity" touted by the Trotskyists with their joint processions with the "Socialist" and "Communist" murderers, but class solidarity; not the fake solidarity of the unions, with their hypocritical campaigns against other rival capitalist factions — but the solidarity of the proletariat against all exploiters.
• International class struggle — strengthening the struggle in all countries, and deepening it to a struggle not only against this or that aspect of capitalism, but against capitalism itself — against the unions, the leftists, national frontiers, the state, wage labor and the whole world market.
• Intransigent denunciation of all manoeuvres of capital — and of its "left-wing" and "extreme left wing" toadies, of all their attempts to tie the workers to their respective bourgeoisies.

To all those Social Democratic, Stalinist and other crooks who denounce your lack of attachment to the "national interest", the national economy, and the country, reply as the "Communist Manifesto" replied in 1848:

THE WORKERS HAVE NO FATHERLAND!
THEY HAVE NO NATIONAL ECONOMY TO DEFEND!
THEY CANNOT LOSE WHAT THEY NEVER HAD!

And against the strategy of capital which attempts to divide you in order to fight you separately, take your watchword from the same manifesto:

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

Internationalism  (USA)
Revolution Internationale  (France)
World Revolution  (Britain)
Internacionismo  (Venezuela)
Accion Proletaria  (Spain)
Pour une Intervention Communiste  (France)
Social Reproduction  (Britain)

Critique by For Ourselves

Our initial response to this document was one of considerable excitement. It carries the energy of an immediate and sensuous manifestation of the real movement as it re-emerges after its fifty-year recession. The document is, further, the combined expression of an interantional proto-alliance of revolutionary organizations. It is on these grounds that we associate ourselves with it and the groups that sponsored it, and on these groonds that we choose to further its distribution.

However, our initial positive response was tempered by certain disagreements. Thus we felt that the inclusion of a critical appendix was a necessary condition for our distribution. On attempting this task we soon realized that our disagreements grew out of what we consider to be a root inadequacy. This postscript to the document is therefore general clarifIcation from our perspective. It is presented as a part of the process of self-correction of the theory of the communist movement.

Why must a critique of the short political statement reproduced here take more words than that statement itself? The answer brings attention at once to the content of our critique: the Ultra-leftists have not made concrete their fundamental break with the Left they criticize. They are comfortable with conceptual habits and conventions which it is precisely our task to overthrow. We see the need for a new and radical conceptual analysis; a theoretical revolution against the Left, and not mere conceptual reform. The negation of old and the building of new conceptual habits requires extensive and systematic elaboration.

We are not the Left, neither of the Ultra-left. Does that leave us nowhere? Hardly. [This fear of "nowhere-ness", of historical non-existence if one does not back up oneself and one's organization with some theoretical authority of the past, is one of the most marked symptoms of authoritarian structure in the new workers' movement.] This leaves us right where we really are. We are proletarians working in the worldwide communist movement. We take whatever we find valuable, and in an integral fashion, from every past theorist, and from the entire recorded stream of human thought and practice. But we stand on ourselves. We need no other authority than that of the coherence of our own practical thought and feeling, as reproducible in the consciousness of other proletarians with whom we communicate and deliberate. Any other authority would only stand in our way, and will be burst asunder.

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively.

— Karl Marx; Thesis 1 in Theses on Feuerbach

The core of the interlocking network of confusions in this document is the same error that Marx criticized in Feuerbach: the authors do not conceive human activity as itself objective activity. They never manage to understand the objective world (History, The Working Class, Capital, etc.) as the total living sensuous activity of the individuals who compose it. Thus, it is essentially the underdevelopment of their own subjectivity (i.e., subject-hood) as their own expanding self-conscious activity — that leads them to fall short in theory.

The result of their "objectivism" is necessarily a failure to be objective enough. Because they fail to locate human sensuous activity at the center of the "objective world", their critique of the latter is reduced to an abstract critique of a sum of random, a-centric parts. Nowhere in the text, for instance, do the authors suggest or even refer to definitions of such essential concepts as "Capital(ism)", "Communism", "Socialism", and the "proletariat", as if these terms were somehow "given", and "everyone knows what they mean". But, clearly, everyone does not know what they mean. If everyone did, then the Left ideologues (described in the text), would have been swept aside long ago! The root of the authors' inadequacy is their failure to think subjectively.

If we fail to put our subjective existence at the center of our thought (and practice), we are up against a contemplated world of objects. All our activity, in so far as it is not self conscious, immediately and necessarily becomes lost to us. Even our own words (such as the terminology in the above text) cease to be our own subjective tools, and, instead become independent objects, beyond our control, that can only augment mystification.

Let's get this one straight: "Capital" is simply something we do every day. If our analysis fails to approach it from this perspective — as merely the flow and congelation of our own activity — then where do we begin? On the other hand, if we begin by thinking subjectively, it becomes immediately clear that the essence of capital(ism) is nothing other than the daily alienation (i.e., sale) of the use of our lives — wage-labour. The congelation of this activity is then accumulated as an entity from which we are separate and yet on which we are totally dependent for all or most of our objective activity — whether it be the conscious pursuit of creative pleasure, or merely the reproduction of ourselves as biological beings. Communism can only be the synthesis of this past unconscious activity (i.e., the existing productive forces which presently take the form of Capital) with the conscious desire made concrete through this activity, and the supersession of this activity into the realization of this desire.

But, indeed, nowhere in the text do the authors define or locate themselves in relation to the revolutionary epic they expound upon. Do they consider themselves proletarians? If not, what class do they belong to? For us, the proletariat is the class of those who are separated from the means of social production, and hence, have nothing to sell but their labor-power. This includes not only industrial workers, but also technicians, clerical and "service" workers, most students, unemployed and "non-employed", housewives, etc.. In other words, the proletariat now comprises the great majority of the population.

Further, if the authors are not proletarians — and nowhere do they claim to be — why should they be interested in proletarian revolution? Out of altruism? Merely to prevent a world war? Thus, the authors fail to define what it is that they want, and what it is that they do not want (though they do an admirable job of describing the latter). They fail to define themselves.

Given these failings, it is a matter of course that "the battles between capital and the world proletariat" and the "struggles of the workers", are also not defined. What is the purpose of these struggles? Higher wages? Less inflation? We are not being facetious. Nowhere in the text do they talk explicity about ending wage-labor and capital. Nowhere, that is, save one sentence, and even there it is merely a descriptive demand. They call for "a struggle not against this or that aspect of capitalism, but against capitalism itself", and then proceed (presumably as a definition of capitalism itself) to list this and that aspect of capitalism, one after another in (at best) random order. Given all this, what could we expect but that they fail to come up with any kind of tangible revolutionary strategy. Their "one position we can take up" is three-fold, as follows:

1. "vigilant solidarity" with the Portuguese workers" [What does this consist of? Are we just supposed to become vigilantly solid or something?];
2. "International class struggle" [... the nature, goals and trajectory of which are left completely unclear];
3. "Intransigent denunciation of all manoeuvres of capital", etc. [This last proposal brings us to another important point. Just what are these "manoeuvres of capital" etc.? The authors fail to define capital as a social relation with a particular and essential inner logic to its functioning. As a result, by default, their critique turns into a moralistic condemnation based on a melodramatic battle between good guys and bad guys — between innocent workers and guilty capitalists. Because they believe the workers are good guys, and, thus, should be exonerated from guilt, it follows that "the workers have no responsibility at all" for the world economic crisis, as responsibility would imply blame and guilt. But, who then, is responsible for the crisis? Clearly the capitalists don't want one.].

Here appear the vestiges of a moralistic (ideological)1 and reactionary conception of class. This is undoubtedly a secular throw-back to the old Christian world-view which still forms the unconscious and incompletely overcome conceptual atmosphere of the entirety of the Left. The proletariat is portrayed here, in part, as the innocent victim of an evil oppressor, the bourgeoisie, "capital", etc., which apparently demonically and sadistically seeks to immiserate "it" as an end in itself.

But the class struggle is not a Morality Play.

Most important of all for us, if the workers are not in some sense "responsible" for the crisis, in what sense can they be in any position to be responsible for averting the global disaster which it impends?

The traditional Leftist answer is that the "laws" of capitalism create the crisis. But what precisely are these "laws." Are they mysterious subjects with arms, legs, and "invisible hands" of their own which somehow "govern" us? On the contrary, these laws, like the totality of the global society which their formulation describes abstractly, are social products; products of human labour. Who produces the capitalist law of value? We do! Who else but we ourselves — the world proletariat — produces and reproduces the invariants of the capitalist mode of production which are nothing but our own behavior? The "law of value" is only the unconscious structure of our only daily social practice, the capital-praxis itself.

Since we don't cooperate consciously in our production, we cooperate unconsciously, in producing a depression. The "law of value" which is the law of the capitalist cycle — the law of crises, of international war and revolution — is simply the technical name for this unconscious global cooperation.

The world proletariat is indeed responsible for the law of value, for the crisis, and for the production and reproduction of capital in general, of the capitalist class, and of the power of the capitalist state. The power of capital and of its state is only the dis-owned (labor-) power of the proletariat.

But the concept of responsibility must be distinguished here from the moralistic concept of blame. We use "responsibility" as a process-concept. To assign responsibility is to locate the subject of a process.2 To impute responsibility to the proletariat is not identically to attribute guilt and moral culpability to it, nor to argue for the use-value or meaningfulness of such an attribution. [It is probably such moralistic blockage that has led to the obscuration or repression of this aspect of revolutionary theory to date.] It is merely to locate the source of an action, and of a possible change of action, which still leaves open questions of choice and coercion; will and constraint; freedom and necessity. Nor will mechanistic and linear (undialectical) concepts of "responsibility" suffice to comprehend the situation of the proletariat. Taken atomistically, any given proletarian is forced, by the overwhelming momentum of the self-disowning of the rest of his class, to disown himself. No less is his wage-labour a component of the social force which compels the self-alienation of every other proletarian, again taken individually. But taken as a whole — as a class — the proletariat oppresses itself, and reproduces its own oppression. As a member of a class-in-itseIf, each proletarian is helpless in any immediate sense before the social conditions in whose reproduction he participates infinitesimally. As a member of a class-for-itself, s/he is a conscious co-planner and co-producer of those conditions, limited only by the existing development of the powers of the social individuals themselves.

Later, the authors tell the "workers of the world" that:

If we were to allow our brothers in Portugal to be massacred, we would... share in the responsibility [our emphasis] for their deaths and oppression.

... and [responsible also] for whatever further massacres would occur in other countries. But how can this class of people who have "no responsibility at all" for the world economic crisis simultaneously "share responsibility" for its consequences, these massacres? Clearly, their concept of "responsibility" is a moralistic one. This is manifest when, after failing to locate either themselves or the reader concretely in relationship to the Portuguese situation, the world crisis, or to world history in general, they, in an attempt to establish somehow such a relationship, make a moralistic plea to the reader based on the dreadful plight of these innocent workers. Interestingly, this passage is the only part of the entire text where they use the pronoun "we" while speaking of the working class. Here, it rings of the priestly, moralistic "we" which is frequently used as a method of representing people to themselves. But in this case, it is not done consciously or diabolically. It is merely a makeshift way of dealing with their failure to establish themselves and the reader as subjects of world history, because of which their motivational appeal can only be moralistic.

The critique of political economy, the critique of capital, must be transformed by us into the self-critique of the proletariat; of our own daily repeated social practice. The precise work of revolutionary proletarians is to catalyze the self-preparation of our class to assume the management of society at the historical moment of the general crisis of self-destruction of capital, and thereby to abolish ourselves as proletarians. The problem we face. in carrying out this work is also a subjective problem, and, in particular, a characterological 3 problem. The great majority of our class are still characterologically armored against facing the fact that we — the world proletariat — and we alone are capable of taking over responsibility for social reproduction in the coming depression-crisis; that we and we alone are capable of emancipating ourselves.

The traumatic events which are coming in the next weeks, months, and years will partially and forcibly dissolve some of this armor. The fact that the present system cannot continue as we know it will become glaringly obvious. But it is precisely in this historical moment that our work as revolutionaries enters a crucial phase. We will have to combat the various strategies of disowning which will thereupon begin to gain ground within our class, and which every ruling class ideologue and crack-pot megalomaniac will be rushing to pander to, in the mad scramble to "represent" the proletariat. Our only chance is to defeat within our class all tendencies to project social responsibility — out of anxiety, lack of collective self-confidence, lack of experience, and authoritarian conditioning — onto a bureaucratic party and a new state, Fascist, "Communist", or whatever. Otherwise, crisis and aborted revolution will only result in a global system of fiercely competing state-capitals and, therefore, quite possible, in a global nuclear war. We must tirelessly and precisely locate the responsibility of our class, and demonstrate that the alienation of this responsibility can only result in a totalitarian nightmare for all of us, and that no matter how frightening and difficult it may be at times (at other times it can only be supremely rewarding), social self-management we will have to learn.

The authors' statements about the Left contain some of the most strikingly apt descriptions we have ever seen. Indeed, when they speak of "capital's left-wing" and of the Leftist recuperation as "the last bastion of capital against the proletariat" it seems that, they are clearly aware of the existence of what we have elsewhere labeled "the united Front Against Subjectivity". But, they never get beyond this stage. What is the left? What is its inherent tendency? Why does it do what it is doing? Is it just a bunch of sadists who enjoy shooting workers? Further, the authors fail to make themselves clear on just whom this force consists of — they condemn the CP's, "Trotskyists", "Maoists", etc., without establishing a general criterion for this category (perhaps beginning by establishing just what it is that all these groups have, at root, in common). Hence the reference to C.P. as "the party of those who... have been shooting down Russian workers for fifty years". That would take us back to 1924 — seven years after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and also several years after Lenin-and-company's murder of the Kronstadt Soviet and of the Makhnovists. Later they assert: "It was with its left-wing (Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries) that the bourgeoisie tried to muzzle the proletariat in Russia in 1917." What we are getting at is: what about Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and quasi-Bolsheviks and neo-Boisheviks all as such? Are these part of the Left they reject? There is much need of clarity on these points. Further, what essentially is it that makes the Leftist groups so bad? We assert that it is because they are, one and all, in their essence, agents of state-capitalism; a system and an ideology which (in its left-wing form) is today enforcedly confused with socialism and communism.

The "Communist" and "Socialist" parties and the Trotskyist and Maoist groups equate socialism or communism with integral state-capitalism, i.e., a state-capitalism in which domestic competition and the old bourgeoisie have been largely suppressed by a unitary bureaucracy. There is a difference between this and hybrid or fascist state-capitalism, in which the state bureaucracy collaborates with the big bourgeoisie in managing the economy and carrying out nationalizations when necessary, while domestic competition continues in altered forms. In Portugal, the Communists (and to some extent, the Socialists) hope at best to push forward the hybrid state-capitalism of the old regime into a "socialist" integral state-capitalism. Up to now, collaboration between fascist and "Communist" state-capitalist parties has been semi-conscious and has often flared into genuine conflict (e.g., the Spanish Civil War, the conflict between Mussolini's party and the Communists in Italy). However, the Portuguese situation, this sudden wedding of the Left with the extreme Right in the form of the Spinola government, presents the workers of Portugal and the world with a clear picture, an X-ray as it were, of what has been true all along: that state-capitalism is a single movement, the dominant and inevitable tendency of world capitalist development:

"In any case... the official representative of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production.... But, the transformation... into state ownership does not do away with the capitalist nature of the productive forces.... The modern state, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the individual capitalists as of the workers. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist; the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarlans. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head."4

In the United States we stand at the hub of world capitalism. The actions of the proletariat in North America are crucial to the entire revolutionary movement. But the overwhelming majority of the American workers are not yet revolutionary, despite their increasing aggressiveness in the current strike wave and their similarly-increasing awareness that their standard of 'living' is being savagely cannibalized by Capital. As a tiny, indeed infinitesimal fraction of the proletariat, it would be pointless for us to try to aid the Portuguese struggle directly. We cannot agitate successfully for, say, a general strike and embargo of arms to the Spinola government in the event of a military assault on the workers unless this assault leads to an expansion of the movement in Europe and elsewhere. This is no frozen "historical necessity" but is rather our comprehension of present possibilities. Thus, our ability to aid the Portuguese workers depends to a great extent on them — on their ability to subvert the military, to arm themselves, to spread their struggle into Spain, Italy, France and the other countries of Europe and the world. If they go down more or less passively, having failed to throw off the fetters of the various parties that try to represent them, as in Chile, they will go down alone. They must make themselves visible as an awakening toward the class-for-itself; they must make clear to the rest of our class throughout the world that they are fighting for nothing less than the abolition of wage-labor and the total transformation of social life. Fortunately for them, and for us, they will have at their disposal, at the moment of a general expropriation, not merely a few typewriters and presses, but the apparatus of modern mass communication, by means of which they can broadcast their actions to the world-at-large. Imagine the effect of the faces of the Portuguese workers appearing directly on the TV screens in the homes of millions of other proletarians to express their aims and tendencies — without 'representatives' — and to explain their actions as conscious steps in the direction of a new world!

We have joined in this distribution, and expressed this critique, not to dissociate ourselves from the authors and sponsors of the text, but to commence our association with them; to open a dialogue on the vital points which still separate us, precisely because of and premised upon the larger basis we have in common. The wide-open confrontation of these points of divergence is precisely the only possible way to accelerate our real convergence. We find much to agree with in the perspectives outlined in the various journals of this tendency which we have reviewed; concerning the theory of state-capitalism, the nature of trade unions and of the Left, and the history of the world proletarian movement to date. We are sure that, if asked specifically, these groups could articulate a more precise response to the questions we raised in this critique, than was provided in this particular document. We have a high regard for their theoretical capabilities. We feel that their distribution of this document has contributed to the morale and self-awareness of the rising international communist movement, even if not directly to its practical theory. We wouldn't have bothered with a critique such as this, if we didn't value these comrades, and see in this critical exchange the opportunity for our mutual development for our common benefit. If our critique inplaces sounds strident, it is only because at those points we feel we know what they want more clearly than they do, and furthermore, because we want the same thing. We don't expect every leaflet to contain a treatise on revolutionary theory, although reference to fuller elaborations, especially with regard to highly-contested (with the Left) and publicly-mystified concepts such as 'capita!', 'the proletariat', and 'communist society', are vitally necessary. It is self-defeating to use concepts recuperated and expropriated in highly-popularized state-capitalist and bourgeois ideologies alike, except in the explicit process of winning them back. So far, it is largely in this that the authors of the text we have criticized, have fallen short.

Their practical perspective remains unclear because they seek it through the cobwebs of the past. For all their excellent and valuable awareness of what is still as true of the renewed communist movement as it is of the old, expressed in the thunderous closing notes of the Manifesto, they fail to a great extent to see what is new, what is unique, about the present historical moment. Our task now is to shift, permanently the weight of the tradition of the dead generations from the minds of the living. The social revolution of the twentieth century must draw its poetry from the present.

It is time, comrades, for us not only to make our own history, but to make history our own. Once and for all: Let the dead bury their dead!

FOR OURSELVES
July 29, 1974

Correspondence

FOR OURSELVES
Council for Generalized Self-Management
P.O. Box 754
Berkeley, California 94701 U.S.A.

• 1See The Right To Be Greedy: The Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything; For Ourselves; 1974; Section X; Thesis #101, "Morality", et passim.
• 2Of course, relative to our interest in that process. Otherwise the chain of reaction, the, analysis interminable, finding its rest only in the concept of self-movement, self-change; the totality which works upon itself.
• 3See The Right To Be Greedy: The Practical Necessity of Demanding Everything; For Ourselves; 1974; second note to Thesis #3.
• 4Frederick Engels; Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; Part III in Selected Works in Three Volumes; Progress Publishers (Moscow: 1969); pages 144-145. [The same statement appears almost verbatim in Frederick Engels' Anti-Dühring, Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (New World Paperbacks, New York) on pages 303-304.]