Views From Near And Afar

Karl Korsch rightly emphasized the fact that any renewal of the marxian system as a whole would constitute a “reactionary utopia”. In respect to the present conditions of revolutionary criticism which begin for the most part even as an ideology to the left of traditional Stalinism and Maoism, one must also recognize the “reactionary” nature of every eclectic view which still preserves an attachment with either of the two main traditions of the revolutionary past. From the workerism expressed by the anarcho-syndicalists of Solidarity to the Marxism advocated by Socialist Revolution, there is nothing but a concession to some doctrine and a doctrine of concessions. The present critique of the totality cannot begin without abandoning the sides of both economism and ethics. The anarchist and marxist movements failed long ago. On the one hand, the mythical economic crisis of modern capitalism has never delivered the social revolution nor has the “Workers State” ever issued the emancipation from work according to its bureaucratic modalities. On the other hand, the pure will of the radical masses in spontaneous action has never led of itself to the destruction of hierarchical power, in the absence of revolutionary theory and precise democratic organization deployed by the masses themselves. The only critique of the modern world is unitary, a critique which refuses to tolerate any form of separate power in its combat against all aspects of alienation. The renewal of the revolutionary perspective is founded on one initial premise: the revolution itself must be totally reinvented. Every idea of the “inevitability” of the revolution must be overthrown in view of its authentic possibility. Accordingly, the critique of anarchism and marxism set the precondition for the negation of politics in our epoch, as the critique of the spectacular commodity and art forms the prelude to the positive reconstruction of everyday life.

“From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organised control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism--from this moment the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether. The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it becomes unnecessary. The more democratic the ‘state’ which consists of the armed workers, and which is ‘no longer a state in the proper sense of the word’, the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.”

-- Lenin

“A socialist society can therefore only be built from below. Decisions concerning production and work will be taken by workers’ councils composed of elected and revocable delegates. Decisions in other areas will be taken on the basis of the widest possible discussion and consultation among the people as a whole. This democratisation of society down to its very roots is what we mean by ‘workers’ power.’”

-- Solidarity

“...The overestimation of the State as decisive instrument of the social revolution;

“The mystical identification of the development of capitalist economy with the social revolution;

“The ambiguous future development of this first form of the marxian theory of revolution by the artificial graft of a theory of communist revolution as two phases; this theory, directed on the one hand against Blanqui, on the other hand against Bakunin, hides from the present movement the real emancipation of the working class, and pushes it into an undetermined future.

“Here the point of insertion of the leninist or bolshevik development comes; and under that new form marxism has been transferred to Russia and Asia...”

-- Karl Korsch

“The State, however popular it be made in form, will always be an institution of domination and exploitation, and it will therefore always remain a permanent source of slavery and misery. Consequently there is no other means of emancipating the people economically and politically, of providing them with well-being and freedom, but to abolish the State, all States, and once and for all do away with that which until now has been called politics.”

-- Bakunin

“Let us concede for the moment that the bureaucracy is a new “class” and that the present regime in the USSR is a special system of class exploitation. What new political conclusions follow for us from these definitions? The Fourth International long ago recognized the necessity of overthrowing the bureaucracy by means of a revolutionary uprising of the toilers. Nothing else is proposed or can be proposed by those who proclaim the bureaucracy to be an exploiting “class.” The goal to be attained by the overthrow of the bureaucracy is the reestablishment of the rule of the soviets, expelling from them the present bureaucracy. Nothing different can be proposed or is proposed by the leftist critics. It is the task of the regenerated soviets to collaborate with the world revolution and the building of a socialist society. The overthrow of the bureaucracy therefore presupposes the preservation of state property and of planned economy. Herein is the nub of the whole problem.”

-- Leon Trotsky

“Nevertheless, the majority of workers will strike for higher wages and continue to be preoccupied with quantitative issues until they understand fully that they are producing their own needs themselves, needs that they might not want to have. Only when they are made conscious of the discrepancy between bourgeois thought and practice and of the radical dissociation of their own thoughts and feelings by the further expansion of material production and increased social impoverishment by the practice of a revolutionary party will the majority of the proletariat begin to transform its consciousness.”

-- Socialist Revolution

“Our cities must be decentralized into communities, or eco-communities, exquisitely and artfully tailored to the carrying capacity of the ecosystems in which they are located. Our technologies must be readapted and advanced into eco-technologies...The administration of humans must be replaced by the administration of things. The revolution we seek must encompass not only political institutions and economic relations, but consciousness, life style, erotic desires, and our interpretation of the meaning of life.”

-- Murray Bookchin

“But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes...At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organised for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. After every revolution marking a progressive phase in the class struggle, the purely repressive character of the state power stands out in bolder and bolder relief.”

-- Marx

“The Workers Councils are in the times to come the form of self-government which will replace the forms of government of the old world. Of course, not for the entire future; no form as such is for eternity. When life and work as a community have become customary and man controls his own life entirely, necessity gives way to freedom and the strict rules of justice established before dissolve in spontaneous behavior. Workers Councils are the organizational form for the transition period in which the working class is fighting for power, at once destroying capitalism and organizing social production.”

-- Anton Pannekoek

“The greatest revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is neither urbanistic, technological, nor esthetic. It is the decision to rebuild the entire territory according to the needs of the power of the Workers Councils, of the anti-state dictatorship of the proletariat, of executory dialogue. And the Councils’ power, which can only be effective if it transforms existing conditions in their entirety, cannot settle for less a task if it wants to be recognized and recognize itself in its world.”

-- Guy Debord

“Lenin always did his best to guard against being misunderstood. We especially of the underdeveloped countries should not misunderstand his views. We may claim that they are utopian, visionary, unrealistic, unworkable, a fantasy. We should bear in mind that these were exactly the charges that the majority of the colleagues made against him in March, 1917, when he arrived in Russia, and, almost alone, hurled the masses of Russia at the bourgeois regime and initiated a new epoch in world history, with the slogan, ‘All power to the Soviets.’”

-- C.L.R. James

“The councils are the transformation of strike committees under the influence of the situation itself, and in response to the very necessities of the struggle, in the very dialectic of this struggle. Any other attempt to formulate at any moment in a struggle the necessity to create workers councils rises from a councillist ideology such as one sees under diverse forms among certain unions, the P.S.U., the Situationists. The concept itself of the council excludes all ideology.”

-- I.C.O., Workers Information Correspondence

“We have had a long discussion about it, and I have always considered self-management to be a genuine revolutionary institution in the aftermath of the revolution, but not before. Because if it occurs before the revolution--apart from the fact that I don’t see how it can occur from within a functioning capitalist system--if it succeeds, the result of self-management would be with all probability that in one specific plant the workers would develop interests created by the better functioning of that said plant. That is to say it would create an autonomous self-interest within the established system. But by self-management one understands that to mean workers control in the majority of factories; at least in key industries. I say that this is already the revolution. One hardly presumes for example that if a corporation such as General Motors is taken, the powers that be are going to look on peacefully as the corporation is transferred to workers control.”

-- Herbert Marcuse

“Granting, as Lenin wants, such absolute powers of a negative character to the top organ of the party, we strengthen, to a dangerous extent, the conservatism inherent in such an organ. If the tactics of the socialist party are not to be the creation of a Central Committee but of the whole party, or, still better, of the whole labor movement, then it is clear that the party sections and federations need the liberty of action which alone will permit them to develop their revolutionary initiative and to utilize all the resources of a situation. The ultra-centralism asked by Lenin is full of the sterile spirit of the overseer. It is not a positive and creative spirit. Lenin’s concern is not so much to make the activity of the party more fruitful as to control the party--to narrow the movement rather than to develop it, to bind rather than to unify it.”

-- Rosa Luxemburg

“If one ideally counts only on the “concept” of Council or, what is even more euphoric, on the practical inactivity of I.C.O., to “exclude all ideology” in the real Councils, one must expect the worst: we have seen that historical experience does not justify an optimism of this kind. The transcendence of the primitive form of the Councils will be able to develop only from struggles becoming more conscious, and struggles for more consciousness. The mechanistic image of I.C.O. about the perfect automatic response of the strike committee to “necessities,” (which shows that the Council will do very well all by itself in its hour, on the condition above all that no one speaks about it), completely mistakes the experience of the revolutions of our century, which shows that “the situation itself” is also quick to make the Councils disappear, or to capture and recuperate them, as it is to make them rise.”

-- Rene Riesel

“The next revolution will only recognize as Councils sovereign general assemblies of the base in the shops, plants, and neighborhoods, whose delegates are always subject to recall, depending entirely upon the assemblies. A councilist organization will never stand for any other goal: it must translate into acts the dialectics which supersede the static and one-sided terms of spontaneism and of openly or insidiously bureaucratized organization. It must be an organization thrusting revolutionarily towards the revolution of Councils; an organization that neither disperses at the moment of declared struggle, nor institutionalizes itself.”

-- Internationale Situationniste

Text from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jon-horelick-diversion-number-1#toc36