The following article, written in 1930 by American author Sherwood Anderson lays bare the essential nature of exploiting society – the utter subordination of human beings to an alien will in the process of production.
Political ‘sophisticates’ will no doubt argue the superior merits of ‘planned production’ and ‘state control’ as opposed to the ‘anarchy’ of competitive capitalism. For such people Socialism has been drained of all human content and hence of all meaning. They are obsessed with the legal forms of property, as if these were the fundamental reality and not the social relations between men at the point of production.
What Anderson describes here are the relations of production prevailing in a class divided society. He bases his story on an American plant; but who can doubt that similar relations exist in the nationalised British coal mines or in the tractor factories of Stalingrad. Anderson’s article points implicitly to the primary and most urgent task confronting the socialist revolution: the domination of the producer over the labour process, and the end to the degrading division between rulers and ruled.

It is a big assembly plant in a city of the Northwest, They assemble there the Bogel car. It is a car that sells in large numbers and at a low price. The parts are made in one great central plant and shipped to the places where they are to be assembled. There is little or no manufacturing done in the assembling plant itself. The parts come in. These great companies have learned to use the railroad cars for storage.

At the central plant everything is done to schedule. As soon as they parts are made they go into the railroad cars. They are on their way to the assembling plants scattered all over the United States and they arrive on schedule.

The assembly plant assembles cars for a certain territory. A careful survey has been made. The territory can afford to buy so-and-so many cars per day. .

‘But suppose the people don’t want cars ?’
‘What has that to do with it ?’

People, American people, no longer buy cars. They do not buy newspapers, books, foods, pictures, clothes. Things are sold to people now. If a territory can take so-and-so many Bogel cars, find men who can make them take the cars. That is the way things are done now.

In the assembly plant everyone works ‘on the belt’. This is a big steel conveyor, a kind of moving sidewalk, waist-high. It is a great river running down through the plant. Various tributary streams come into the main streams the main belt. They bring tyres, they bring headlights, horns, bumpers for cars. They flow into the main stream. The main stream has its source at the freight cars where the parts are unloaded, aid it flows to the other end of the factory and into other freight cars. The finished automobiles go into the freight cars at the delivery end of the bolt. The assembly plant is a place of peculiar tension. You feel it when you go in. It never lets up. Men here work always on tension. There is no let-up to the tension. If you can’t stand it, get out.

It is the belt. The belt is boss. It moves always forward. Now the chassis goes on the belt. A hoist lifts it up and places it just so. There is a man at each corner. The chassis is deposited on the belt and it begins to move. Not too rapid. There are things to be done.

How nicely everything is calculated. Scientific men have done this. They have watched men at work. They have stood looking, watch in hand. There is care taken about everything. Look up. Lift up thine eyes. Hoists are bringing engines, bodies, wheels, fenders. These come out of side streams flowing into the main streams. They move at a pace very nicely calculated. They will arrive at the main stream at just a certain place at just a certain time.

In this shop there is no question of wages to be wrangled about. These men work but eight hours a day and are well paid. They are, almost without exception, young, strong men. It is however, possible that eight hours a day in this place may be much longer than twelve or even sixteen hours in the old carelessly run plants.

They can get better pay here than at any other shop in town. Although I am a man wanting a good many minor comforts in life, I could live well enough on the wages made by the worker in this place. Sixty cents an hour to begin and then, after a probationary period of sixty days, if I can stand the place, seventy cents or more.

To stand the pace is the real test. Special skill is not required. It is perfectly timed, perfectly calculated. If you are a body upholsterer so many tacks driven per second. Not too many. If a man hurries too much too many tacks drop on the floor. If a man gets too hurried he is not efficient. Let an expert take a month, tow months to find out just how many tacks the average good man can drive per second.

There must be a certain standard maintained in the finished product. Remember that. It must pass inspection after inspection.

Do not crowd too hard. Crowd all you can. Keep crowding.

There are fifteen, twenty, thirty, perhaps fifty such assembly plants, all over the country, each serving its own section Wires pass back and forth daily. The central office – from which all the parts come at Jointville – is the nerve centre. Wires come in and go out to Jointville. In so-and-so many hours WIlliamsberg, with so-and-so many men, produced so-and-so cars.

Now Burkesville is ahead. It stays ahead. What is up at Burkesville? An expert flies there.

The man at Burkesville was a major in the army. He is the manager there. He is a cold, rather severe, rather formal man. He has found out something. He is a real Bogel man, an ideal Bogel man. There is no foolishness about him. He watches the belt. He does not say to himself ‘I am the boss here’. He knows the belt its boss.

He says there is a lot of foolishness talked about the belt. The experts are too expert, he says. He has found out that the belt can be made to move just a little faster than the experts say. He has tried it. He knows. Go and look for yourself. There are the men out there on the belt, swarming along the belt, each in his place. They are alright, aren’t they ? Can you see anything wrong ?

Just a trifle more speed in each man. Shove the pace up just a little, not much. With the same number of men, in the same number of hours, six more cars a day.

That’s the way a major gets to be a colonel, a colonel a general. Watch that fellow at Burkesville, the man with the military stride, the cold steady voice. He’ll go far.

* * *

Everything is nicely, perfectly calculated in all the Bogel assembling plants. There are white marks on the floor everywhere. Everything is immaculately clean. No-one smokes; no one chews tobacco; no-one spits. There are white bands on the cement floor along which the men walk. As they work, sweepers follow them. Tacks dropped on the floor are at once swept up. You can tell by the sweepings in a plant where there is too much waste, too much carelessness. Sweep everything carefully and frequently. Weight the sweepings. Have an expert examine the sweepings. Report to Jointville.

Jointville says: ‘Too many upholsterers’ tacks wasted in the plant at Port Smith. Bellevile produced one hundred and eleven cars a day, with seven hundred and forty-nine men, wasting only nine hundred and six tacks.’

It is a good thing to go through the plant occasionally, pick out some man, working apparently just as the others are, fire him.

If he asks why, just say to him, ‘You know’.

He’ll know why alright. He’ll imagine why.

The thing is to build up Jointville. This country needs a religion.
You have to build up the xxxxx of a mysterious central thing, a thing working outside your knowledge.

Let the notion grow and grow that there is something superhuman at the core of all this.

Lift up thine eyes, lift up thine eyes.

The central office reaches down into your secret thoughts. It knows, it knows

Jointville knows.

* * *

Do not ask questions of Jointville. Keep up the pace.

Get the cars out.
Get the cars out.
Get the cars out.

The pace can be accelerated a little this year. The men have all got tuned into the old pace now.

Step it up a little, just a little.

• * *
This have got a special policeman in the Bogel assembling plants, They have got a special doctor there A man hurt his finger a little. IT bleeds a little, a mere scratch. The doctor reaches down for him. The finger is fixed. Jointville wants no blood poisonings, no infections.

The doctor puts men who want jobs through physical examination, as in the army. Try his nerve reactions. We want only the best men here, the youngest, the fastest.

Why not?

We pay the best wages, don’t we ?

The policeman in the plant has a special job. That’s queer. It is like this: Now and then the big boss passes through. He selects a man off the belt.

‘You’re fired.’
‘Why ?’
‘You know.’’

Now and then a man goes off his nut. He goes fantoed. He howls and shouts. He grabs a hammer. A stream of crazy profanity comes from his lips.

There is Jointville. That is the central thing. That controls the belt. The belt controls me.
It moves. It moves. It moves.

I’ve tried to keep up . I tell you I’ve been keeping up.

Jointville is God. Jointville controls the belt. The belt is God.
God has rejected me.

‘You’re fired.’

Sometimes a man, fired like that, goes nutty. He gets dangerous.
A strong policeman on hand knocks him down. Takes him out.

* * *

You walk within certain definite white lines.

It is calculated that a man, rubbing down automobile bodies with pumice, makes thirty thousand and twenty-one arm strokes per day. The difference between thirty thousand and twenty-one, and twenty-eight thousand and four will tell a vital story of profits or loss at Jointville.

Do you think things are settled at Jointville, or at the assembling plants of the Bogel car scattered all over America ? Do you think men know how fast the belt can be made to move, what the ultimate, the final pace will be, can be ?

Certainly not.

There are experts studying the nerves of men, the movements of men. They are watching. Calculations are always going on. The thing is to produce good and more goods at less cost. Keep the standard up. Increase the pace a little.

Stop waste. Calculate everything.

* * *

A man walking to and from his work between white lines saves steps. There is a tremendous science of lost motion, not perfectly calculated yet.

More goods at less cost.

Increase the pace.

Keep up the standards.

It is so you advance civilisation.

From http://forworkerspower.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/sherwood-anderson-life-up-thine-eyes/

For instance, the first act of the Bolshevik hierarchy was to publicly lie about the nature of the revolt, both to loyal party members and to the rest of society; they claimed that it was a revolt of the White generals to restore the old regime. This was the first lie of many about the rebellion that have been perpetuated ever since by Bolshevik apologists. In the final part of the article, Serge also gives a brief analysis of Marxist social-democracy, the Bolshevik party internal structure, and its relationship to the authoritarianism of the the Bolshevik state. This excerpt was reprinted in a US socialist magazine, Politics, in 1945, and in the UK by Solidarity as a pamphlet in 1961. We have retained here the brief introduction by Solidarity.

======================

Solidarity introduction;
Kronstadt '21
(Victor Serge, 1945)

The following text, hitherto unpublished in Britain, first appeared in the American socialist paper POLITICS, over 16 years ago. It describes the tragic Russian events of March, 1921.

The working-class had taken power three and a half years earlier, in the greatest revolution of all time. But it had seen that power slowly slip from its hands, first in the factories, later in the Soviets. A new bureaucracy was emerging. Its core was the Bolshevik party, whose patronage was becoming essential for accession to all important posts, both in the economy and in the state.

With the final victories of the Civil War, working class discontent, which had been smouldering for months, broke out in the great Leningrad strikes of January and February 1921, and in the Kronstadt uprising.

Serge describes an event in working class history concerning which Stalinists, Trotskyists and sundry others have indulged in a systematic campaign of misrepresentation and distortion. He shows how certain ideas concerning 'the Party' worked. out, in practice. The article also exposes the hypocritical pretensions of those who claim the struggle against the developing bureaucracy as some kind of private mantle.

Serge's testimony concerning Kronstadt is of great historical value. It is the testimony of a revolutionary who was in Leningrad during those fateful days, who actively participated in the scenes he describes, and who endorsed, at the time, the actions of the Russian leaders.

==============

DURING THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 28-29, I was awakened by a phone call. 'The Whites have taken Kronstadt', an anxious voice told me. 'We are fully mobilized'. It was Ilya lonov, Zinoviev's brother-in-law. This was an appalling piece of news. If true, it meant that Petrograd itself would soon be lost.

'What Whites? Where did they come from? I can't believe it!'

'A general by the name of Kozlovski -'

'But what about our sailors? What about the Soviet? The Cheka? The workers at the Arsenal?'

'I've told you all I know.'

Zinoviev was in conference with the Revolutionary Council of the Army, so I rushed over to the headquarters of the Third District Committee. Everybody was looking pretty grim. 'It's fantastic. But it's true.' 'Well,' I said, 'we must mobilize everyone able to walk. Immediately!' Someone replied, evasively: 'Yes, we must mobilize.' But nothing could be done without instructions from the Petrograd Committee. Several comrades and I spent the rest of the night poring over a map of the Gulf of Finland. We got word that small-scale strikes were spreading through the suburbs. Whites in front of us, famine and strikes behind us! I left at dawn, and on my way out of the hotel I ran into one of the maids, quietly leaving the building with packages under her arm.

'Where to so early in the morning, grandmother? And with such a load?'

The old woman sighed:

There's going to be trouble. You can feel it in the air. They will slit your throats, my poor boy, yours and the others' too. They'll steal everything that isn't nailed down, just as they did last time. So I'm packing off my belongings.'

At intervals along the deserted streets there were little wall posters announcing treacherous seizure of Kronstadt by the counter-revolutionary general Kozlovski and his accomplices, and summoning the workers to arms. But even before I reached the District Committee headquarters I ran into several comrades who had already turned out, mauser in hand, and they told me that the Kozlovski business was a contemptible lie: the Kronstadt sailors had mutinied, and what we were up against was a naval rebellion led by the Kronstadt Soviet. If anything, that was still more serious; and the worst of it was the paralyzing effect of the official lie upon us. For the party to lie to us this way was something new. 'They had to do it because of the mood of the people,' some of my acquaintances explained. But they were frightened too. The strike had become almost general. Nobody even knew whether the street-cars would run.

Later that day I had a talk with my friends in the French-speaking Communist group (I remember that Marcel Body and Georges Hellfer were both present). We decided not to take up arms - to fight neither against the hungry strikers nor against the exasperated sailors. In Vassili-Ostrov, in a street white with snow, I saw a crowd gather, mostly women. I watched it push its way slowly forward to mingle with the military-school cadets sent there to open up the approaches to the factories. Patiently, sadly, the crowd told the soldiers how hungry the people were, called them brothers, asked them for help. The cadets pulled bread out of their knapsacks and divided it up. Meanwhile, the Mensheviks and the Left Social Revolutionaries were blamed for the strike.

Leaflets distributed in the suburbs put forward the demands of the Kronstadt Soviet. They added up to a program for renewing the revolution. In brief: new elections for the Soviets, with secret ballot; freedom of speech and freedom of press for all revolutionary groups.and parties; liberty for the trade-unions; liberation of all revolutionaries being held as political prisoners; no more official propaganda; no more requisitioning in the rural districts; freedom of employment for artisans; immediate withdrawal of the street patrols which were preventing free purchase of food supplies by the general public. The Kronstadt Soviet, the Krontstadt garrison, and the sailors of the First and Second Squadrons had rebelled to get that program accepted.

THE PARTY REFLEX : LIES AND THREATS
Little by little, the truth broke through the smoke screen laid down by the press, whose mendacity now knew no bounds. And that was our press, the press of our revolution, the first socialist press in history, therefore the first incorruptible, unbiased press in history. Even in the past, to be sure, it had now and then laid itself open, to some extent, to the charge of demagogy (of a warm, sincere kind, however) and had used violent language about its opponents. But in doing so it had stayed within the rules of the game, and had, in any case, acted understandably. Now, however, lying was its settled policy. The Petrograd Pravda informed its readers that Kouzmin, Commissar for the navy and the army, had been manhandled during his imprisonment at Kronstadt, and had narrowly escaped summary execution - on written orders from the counter-revolutionaries. I knew Kouzmin, an energetic, hard-working soldier, a teacher of military science, grey from tip to toe; his uniform, even his wrinkled face were grey. He 'escaped' from Kronstadt and turned up at Smollny.

'It is hard to believe.' I said to him , 'that they intended to shoot you. Did you really see any such order?'

He looked embarrassed, and did not answer for a moment.

'Oh, one always exaggerates a bit. There was a threatening note.'

In short, he had let his tongue run away with him. That was the whole story. The Kronstadt rebels had spilledd not a single drop of blond, had gone no further than to arrest a few Communist officials, all of whom had been well treated. Most of the Communists, several hundred in all, had gone over to the rebels, which showed clearly enough how weak the party had become at its base. Nevertheless, someone had cooked up this story about hairbreadth escapes from the firing squad!

Rumors played an ugly part in the whole business. With the official press carrying nothing but eulogies of the regime's successes, with the Cheka operating in the shadows, every moment brought its new, deadly rumor. Hard upon the news about the Petrograd strikes, word reached Kronstadt that the strikers were being arrested en masse, and that the troops were occupying the factories. That was untrue, or at least greatly exaggerated, although the Cheka, running true to form, had undoubtedly gone about making stupid arrests. (Most of these arrests were for short periods.) Hardly a day passed passed without my seeing Serge Zorin, the secretary of the Petrograd Committee. I knew, therefore, how many worries he had on his mind, and how determined he was not to adopt repressive measures against workers. I also knew that, in his opinion, persuasion was the only weapon that would pove effective in a situation of this kind, snd how, to back up his opinion he was bringing in wagon-loads of foodstuffs. He told me, laughingly, that once he had found himself in a district where the Left. Social Revolutionaries had popularized the slogan: 'Long Live the Constituent Assembly!' - which clearly was another way of saying 'Down with Bolshevism!'. 'I announced', he went on, 'the arrival of several wagons full of food. In the twinkling of an eye it turned the situation upside down.'

In any case the Kronstadt uprising began as an act of solidarity with the Petrograd strikes, and as a result of rumors (about repressive measures) which were mostly without foundation.

Kalinin and Kouzmin, whose stupid blundering provoked the rebellion, were chiefly to blame. Kalinin, as chairman of the Republic's Executive, visited Kronstadt, and the garrison received him with music and shouts of welcome. But when the sailors stated their demands he called them traitors, accused them of thinking only of their own interests, and threatened merciless punishment. Kouzmirn bellowed at them: the iron hand of dictatorship of the proletariat would strike down all infractions of discipline, every act of treason! The two of them were booed and kicked out - and the damage was done. It.was probably Kalinin who, back in Petrograd, invented 'the White general, Kozlovski'. From the very first, when it would have been easy to patch up the differences, the Bolshevik leaders chose to use the big stick. We were to learn later that the delegation sent from Kronstadt to explain the issues at stake to the Soviet and people of Petrograd had got no further than a Cheka prison.

Some American Anarchists - Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and a young man named Perkus, the secretary of the Russian Workers Union in the United States - had arrived a short time before. A scheme for mediation took shape in the course of some talks I had with them on several successive evenings. When I told some of the party comrades about it, they countered:

'That won't do any good. We're bound by party discipline, and so are you'.

I protested: 'One can get out of a party'.

Cool, unsmiling, they replied: "No Bolshevik deserts his party. And, anyway, where would you go? Ours is the only party, to put it mildly.'

The Anarchist mediation group used to meet at the home of my father-in-law, Alexander Roussakov. Since the Anarchists had the ear of the Kronstadt Soviet, it had been decided that only Anarchists would take part in the negotiations, and that the American anarchists alone would assume responsibility vis-a-vis the Soviet government; so I was not present. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman had an interview with Zinoviev. They were received cordially, for they were still able to speak authoritatively in the name of a section of the international proletariat. Their mediation scheme, nevertheless, was a complete failure. As a sop, Zinoviev offered them every facility for seeing Russia from a private railway car. 'Think it over and you will understand'. Most of the Russian members of the mediation group were arrested. I was not - an indulgence which I owed to the good opinion that Zinoviev, Zorin and a few others had of me, and to my position as a militant in tthe French workers' movement.

WHY I SUPPORTED THE BOLSHEVIKS
After much hesitation, my Communist friends and I finally sided with the party. It was a painful step to take, and this is why we did it: the Kronstadt sailors, we reasoned, were right. They had begun a new freedom-giving revolution which would lead to popular democracy. Certain Anarchists who had not outgrown the illusions of childhood gave it a name: the 'Third Revolution'. The country, by this time, was in bad shape. Production had come virtually to a stop. Reserves of all kinds had been used up, including even the reserves of nervous energy which sustain popular morale. The workers' elite, formed in the course of the struggles under the old regime, had literally been decimated. The party, its membership swollen by the influx of bandwagon riders, inspired little confidence. And there was nothing left of the other parties but tiny cadres, of doubtful ability. Some of them, to be sure, might in a few weeks' time have put on flesh, but only by admitting en masse the soured, the bitter, the exasperated - very different types from the 1917 enthusiasts of the young revolution. Soviet democracy had lost its vitality. lt lacked leadership. It had no organisational basis. And it had no defenders, except among the hungry and desperate masses of the people.

The popular counter-revolution translated the demand for freely-elected Soviets into the slogan 'Soviets without Communists!' If the Bolshevik dictatorship were to fall, we felt, the result would be chaos: peasant putsches, the massacre of the Communists, the return of the emigres, and, finally, another dictatorship, of necessity anti-proletarian. The dispatches from Stockholm and Tallinn showed that the emigres were thinking in precisely these terms. (These dispatches, by the way, strengthened the determination of the leaders to put down the Kronstadt rebellion quickly, and without regard to the cost.) Our thinking about all this, had, furthermore, a factual basis. We knew of fifty rallying-points for peasant insurrections in European Russia alone. We knew that Antonov, the proponent of Revolutionary Socialism of the Right, was active in the area south of Moscow, and that he was preaching both the destruction of the Soviet regime and the reinstatement of the Constituent Assembly. He had at his command, in and around Tambov, a skillfully organized army made up of several tens of thousands of peasants, and he had negotiated with the Whites. (Tukachevsky liquidated this Vendee towards the middle of 1921.)

In these circumstances, the party should have beat a retreat by admitting that the existing economic set-up was indefensibe. It should not, however, have given up power. 'In spite of its faults, in spite of its abuses, in spite of everyrthing,' I wrote at the time, ' the Bolshevik party, because of its size, its insight, its stability, is the organized force to which we must pin our faith. The Revolution has at its disposal no other weapon, and it is no longer capable of genuine renewal from within'.

COMRADE AGAINST COMRADE

The Political Bureau finally made up its mind to enter into negoiations with Kronstadt, lay down an ultimatum, and, as a last resort, attack the fortress and the ice-bound battleships. As it turned out, no negotiations ever took place. But an ultimatum, couched in revolting language, appeared on the billboards over the signature of Lenin and Trotsky: 'Surrender or be shot like rabbits!'. Trotsky, limiting his activities to the Political Bureau, kept away from Petrograd.

Meanwhile the Cheka had declared war on the Menshevik Social-Democrats by publishing an ourageous official document accusing them of 'conspiring with the enemy, planning to sabotage the railways,' etc. The Bolshevik leaders themselves were embarrassed; they shrugged the charges aside: 'More of the Cheka's ravings!'. But they let the charges stand all the same and promised only that there would be no arrests and that everthing would come out alright. Even so, the Menshevik leaders Dan and Abramovich were arrested (in Petrgrad): and the Cheka (led at this time, as I remember, by a red-headed worker named Semionov, a hard, ignorant little man) wanted to have them shot - on the grounds that they had organized the strike, which was now almost general (and at least 75% spontaneous). I had just had a run-in with Semionov over two students the Cheka had arbitraily seized. I got word to Lenin through Gorky (who was also at that moment intervening to save the Menshevik leaders). Once Lenin had been informed, we knew our friends were out of danger.

Early in March, Red Army troops advanced across the ice against the Kronstadt fortress and fleet. The rebel artillery opened fire on the assailants. Infantrymen wearing long white parkas advanced in waves, and in some places the ice cracked under them. Here and there a huge block of ice would break loose and, turning slowly over, would carry its human cargo with it into the black depths of the water. And then, comrade against comrade, the shameful slaughter began...

'WE'LL BE OUR OWN THERMIDOR' Meanwhile, in Moscow, the Tenth Congress of the party, on Lenin's motion, had abolished the requisitioning system ('War Communism'), and put the NEP into effect. All the economic demands of Kronstadt had been met! The Congress had, at the same time, gone out of its way to heap abuse upon all the opposition groups. The Workers' Opposition, for instance, had been described as an 'anarcho-syndicalist deviation with which the party cannot make terms', although it was not Anarchist in any sense, and had advocated nothing but trade union management of production (which, incidentally, would have been a big step in the direction of workers' democracy). Finally, the Congress had drafted its members, many of whom belonged to opposition groups, for the battle against Kronstadt. The extreme Left winger Dybenko, himself once a Kronstadt sailor, and the writer and soldier Bubnov, leader of the group in favor of 'democratic centralisation', went to do battle on the ice - against insurgents with whom, deep in their hearts, they had no quarrel. Tukachevsky was now preparing the final assault.

On one of these black days, Lenin said to a friend of mine (I use his exact words): 'This is Thermidor. But we shall not let ourselves be guillotined. We'll be our own Thermidor.'

The Orianienbaum incident is never mentioned; but in my opinion it brought the Kronstadt rebels within reach of a victory which they did not want - and might easily have resulted in the fall of Petrograd. Serge Zorin, the blond Viking who was secretary of the Petrograd Committee, noticed something peculiar about the orders being given by one of the infantry commanders. For instance, certain arbitrarily chosen cadets were kept standing guard close to the artillery emplacements, and regroupings were being effected for which there was no evident reason. After a couple of days there was no longer any doubt that a conspiracy was afoot. As an act of solidarity with Kronstadt, an entire regiment was going to switch sides and call upon the army to rebel. Zorin immediately ordered into the regiment men who could be counted upon, doubled the number of sentry posts and the compliment of soldiers assigned to each, and arrested the regiment's commanding officer, a man who had spent many years as an officer in the Imperial Army. He was brutally frank: 'For years I had looked forward to that hour. I hate you, you murderers of Russia. Now I've lost, life means nothing to me.' Along with a considerable number of his accomplices, he was shot. His regiment, by the way, had been withdrawn from the front in Poland.

THE CHEKA TAKES OVER
The rebellion had to be liquidated before the thaw. The final assault was launched by Tukachevsky on March 17 and resulted in an audaciously-won victory. The Kronstadt sailors, fighting without competent officers (one of their number, to be sure, was an ex-officer named Kozlovski, but he played an unimportant role and had no authority), made poor use of their artillery. Some escaped to Finland; some fought a savage defensive battle, from fort to fort and street to street, and died shouting. 'Long live the World Revolution!'. Some even died with the cry: 'Long Live the Communist International!'. Several hundred were taken into Petrograd and turned over to the Cheka, which months later - criminally, stupidly - was still shooting little groups of them. These prisoners belonged body and soul to the revolution; they had given expression to the sufferings and will of the Russian people; and there was the NEP to show that they had been right! Furthermore, they had been taken prisoner in a civil war, and by a government which for a long while had been promising an amnesty to those of its adversaries who were willing to become its supporters. Dzerjinski presided over this endless massacre - or at least let it happen.

The Kronstadt leaders, men unknown up to the uprising, were drawn from the ranks. One of them, Petrichenko, escaped to Finland and may still be alive. Another, Perepelkin, turned up later among some friends I used to visit at the old prison in Shpalnernaya Street - through which so many revolutionaries, Lenin and Trotsky, among others, had passed in days gone by. From the depths of his cell, before disappearing finally from sight, Perepelkin told us the whole story of Kronstadt.

That dismal March 18! The morning papers had big headlines in honor of the proletarian anniversary of the Paris Commune. And each time the cannon fired on Kronstadt, the window panes rattled in their frames. In the offices at Smolny, everyone felt uneasy. Conversation was avoided, except between close friends and even they spoke sharply to each other. The vast Neva landscape had never before seemed to me so bleak and desolate. (By a remarkable coincidence, there was a Communist uprising in Berlin on that same March 18, one whose defeat marked a turning-point in the strategy of the International, from the offensive to the defensive.)

THE GREAT IDEAS DIE Kronstadt inaugurated a period of doubt and dismay inside the party. In Moscow, a Bolshevik named Peniuchkin, who had distinguished himself during the Civil War, pointedly resigned from the party to found a new political movement - to be called, if I remember correctly, the Soviet Party. He set up his party headquarters in a street lined with workers' homes, and for a while nothing was done about it. Then he was arrested. Several comrades came to me and asked me to intervene on behalf of his wife and chlld, who had been evicted from their home and were sleeping in a hall somewhere. I was unable to do anything for them. The worker Miasnikov, another old Bolshevik - he had taken part in the revolt in the Upper Volga in 1905, and there was a close personal tie between him and Lenin - spoke out in favor of freedom of the press 'for everybody, from the Anarchists at one extreme to the Monarchists at the other'. After a sharp exchange of letters he broke with Lenin, and before long he was deported to Erivan, in Armenia. From there he went to Turkey. I was to run into him in Paris some twenty years later. The 'Workers' Opposition' seemed to be heading towards a definite break with the Party.

As a matter of fact, we were already well on the way towards being overwhelmed by a nascent totalitarianism. The word 'totalitarianism' itself had not come into existence yet; but the thing it stands for was ruthlessly making itself our master without our knowing it. I belonged to the ridiculously small minority which did know. But the majority, both of the party's leaders and of its militants, had come to regard 'War Communism' as a merely temporary economic adjustment analogous to the highly centralized productive arrangements which Germany, France and England had worked out during the war.These centralization schemes had been called 'War Capitalism'. So the majority believed that once peace was restored the state of siege would automatically dissolve, and that we would then get back to some kind of Soviet democracy - what kind it was no longer possible to say.

The great ideas of 1917, the ideas which had enabled the Bolshevik party to sweep along with it the peasant masses, the army, the working class and the Marxist intelligentsia, were certainly dead. Had not Lenin, in 1917, argued in favor of a Soviet press so free that any group able to muster 10,000 supporters would be allowed to publish its own newspaper, and at public expense? Had he not written that the transfer of power from one party to another within the Soviets could be accomplished peacefully, without sharp conflicts? Had he not held out, in his theory of the Soviet State, the promise of a form of political organization entirely different from the old bourgeois States, with 'no functionaries and no policemen, apart from the people themselves'? - a State in which the workers would exercise power directly through their own militia system? What with the monopoly of power, the Cheka, and the Red Army, all that was left of this dream of a 'State-Commune' was a myth, of interest only to theologians. War, measures of internal defense against counter-revolution, and famine (leading to creation of a bureaucratic machine to take care of rationing) had put an end to Soviet democracy. How and when would it be reborn? The party nourished itself precisely on the belief that the slightest relaxation of its grip on power would give the reaction the opportunity it was waiting for.

THE TOTALITARIAN POTENTIAL In addition to these historical factors, there were important psychological factors. Marxism has meant different things in different periods. The child of bourgeois science and philosophy on the one hand and the revolutionary aspirations of the proletariat on the other, it makes its appearance at a time when capitalism is entering upon its decline. It puts itself forward as the natural heir of the society which gave birth to it. Just as capitalist-industrialist society tends to draw the entire world into its orbit, and to bring each and every aspect of life into conformity with its value, so the Marxism of the beginning of the twentieth century seeks to re-make everything - the system of property holding, the way production is organized, the map of the world (abolition of frontiers), even man's inner life (displacement of religion). Since its objective was a total transformation it was, etymologically speaking, totalitarian. It included within itself both aspects of the society that was coming into being: the democratic and the authoritarian. The German Social-Democratic party, largest of the Marxist parties through the period 1880-1920 adopted a bureaucratic form of organization modelled upon the State itself. It devoted itself to the conquest of power within the bourgeois State, and wound up thinking in terms of State Socialism.

Bolshevik thought takes it for granted that truth is its peculiar possession. To Lenin, to Bukharin, to Trotsky, to Preobrajensky, to many another thinker I could mention, the materialist dialectic of Marx and Engels was at one and the same time the law of human thought and the law of the natural development of societies. The party, quite simply, is the custodian of truth; any idea at variance with party doctrine is either pernicious error or backsliding. Here, then, is the source of the party's intolerance. Because of its unshakable conviction of its exalted mission, it develops astonishing reserves of moral energy - and a theological turn of mind which easily becomes inquisitorial. Lenin's 'proletarian Jacobinism', with its disinterestedness, its discipline in both thought and action, was grafted upon the psychology of cadres whose character had been formed under the old regime - that is to say, in the course of the struggle against despotism. It seems to be unquestionable that Lenin chose as his co-workers men whose temperament was authoritarian. The final triumph of the revolution eased the inferiority-complex of the masses - the always bullied and always downtrodden masses. At the same time, however, it awakened in them a desire for retaliation; and this desire tended to make the new institutions despotic also. I have seen with my own eyes how a man who only yesterday was a worker or sailor gets drunk on the exercise of power - how he delights in reminding others that from now on he's giving the orders.

'THE DANGER WAS WITHIN' These same considerations explain some of the contradictions with which the leaders themselves (despite the verbal and sometimes demagogic solutions which the dialectic enables them to put forward) have wrestled in vain. On a hundred different occasions Lenin paid democracy high praise, and insisted that the dictatorship of the proletariat is both 'a dictatorship against the expropriated expropriators' and 'the broadest workers' deromracy'. He believed it, wanted it to be true. He went into the factories to give an account of his stewardship. He wanted to face all-out criticism from the workers... But he wrote in 1918 that the dictatorship of the proletariat was by no means incompatible with personal power, and by doing so justified in advance some kind of Bonapartism. When his old friend and co-worker Bogdanov came forward with embarrassing objections, Lenin had him locked up. He outlawed the Mensheviks on the grounds that they were 'petit-bourgeois' socialists who made themselves nuisances by always being wrong. He welcomed the Anarchist spokesman Makhno, and tried to convince him of the validity of Marxist doctrine; nevertheless, Anarchism was outlawed too - if not on Lenin's initiative, at least with his consent. He ordered a hands-off policy towards the churches, and promised believers a truce; but he kept on saying that 'religion is the opium of the people'. We were advancing towards a classless society, a society of free men; but the party never missed an opportunity to remind people that 'the reign of the workers will never end'. Over whom were the workers to reign then? And that word 'reign' - what does it mean anyhow? Totalitarianism - and within ourselves!

Libcom note: This text was subsequently also published as a pamphlet by Solidarity. Cover below, PDF attached.

Introduction by Solidarity (1962)

Comrade C. Lahr, of the ILP, has very kindly given us a number of back issues of ‘SOLIDARITY’, some of them nearly fifty years old. The paper first appeared in September 1913. Subtitled ‘A Monthly Journal of Militant Trade Unionism’ ‘SOLIDARITY’ was first produced by the Industrial Democracy League (more information about the League at the end of this article).

This first version of ‘SOLIDARITY’ should not be confused with another paper of the same name which appeared during the second half of the First World War, was at one time edited by Jack Tanner1 and became the organ of the Shop Stewards and Workers’ Committees movement.

We are pleased to reprint the following passage from the very first issue (September 1913) of ‘SOLIDARITY’ No.1

[hr]

FELLOW TRADE UNIONISTS, – The widespread strikes occurring in recent years have had very mean results. We have failed to make any inroad upon the capitalist preserves owing to our foolish and criminal sectionalism. This state of things should claim our serious attention and careful consideration, and should create a desire in the militant members of the unions to get to work in order to make our organisations a fighting force and a power to be feared.

Trade is booming. In spite of such favourable circumstances we find sections of the workers being defeated in their struggles with the capitalist. One has only to recall to mind the Transport Workers’ Strike of last year, the London Plasterers’ Strike, and, more recently still, the Leith Dock Strike. It is true that some sections of our class have received a meagre rise in prices of the necessities of life and the relative fall in the purchasing power of wages. Our share of the increase in wealth production is a lower standard of living. The increasing centralisation of power by the capitalists enables them to fight the class war with ruthless ferocity. Speeding up, the introduction of the bonus system, the displacement of labour-power by machinery, and victimisation have caused fiercer competition among the workers and the sapping of the spirit if their manhood. The extension of the tentacles of the State into the vitals of organised labour by the establishment of Labour Exchanges and the National Insurance Act, the further bondage which that Act imposes, the desire of politicians to make our burden still more grievous by means of Compulsory Arbitration, the vicious use of the coercive forces of the State – all these factors create a demand for a more efficient form of industrial organisation than our present-day Trade Unions provide. It is just as feasible to oppose a maxim gun with bow and arrow, as to fight the modern capitalist combinations with our Craft Unions. Our weakness lies in our sectionalism, our methods of fighting, the bureaucratic control of our unions, and our objective.

We have 1,700 separate Trade Unions; this results in competition for membership, overlapping, and demarcation quarrels between Union and Union, making us an easy prey to our enemy. There is a desire for Solidarity in the rank and file, but these defects will remain so long as they are split up into so many different unions, each having a separate agreement with the masters, who make use of this fact to prevent unity of action. To remedy these defects we advocate Industrial Organisation along the line of class, instead of craft; the amalgamation of all existing Trade Unions into Industrial Unions; the formation of a National Council of Industrial Unions. Thus we should have a fighting force to secure that much-needed improvement in our conditions.

A change in spirit is just as necessary as a change in form. Conciliation has failed; arbitration has failed; their only use has been to damp our fighting ardour, to make us pawns in the class struggle – pawns sacrificed to protect rooks, queens and bishops. The capitalist hits hard; we turn the other cheek. He acts at once; we tell him when and where we are going to try and hit him. He moves quickly and intelligently; we move slowly and timorously. We must fight boldly and spontaneously, unhampered by separate agreements, unfettered by long notices; organised on a class basis, permeated by a class spirit we should become a force to be feared by the strongest.

The most amazing spectacle in the recent industrial upheavals has been that of the leaders brining up the rear. They have utterly failed to lead. They have often been in harmony with our masters in settling the strike at any price, in getting the workers back to work, even without consulting those who risked their jobs. The attitude of a large number of prominent officials more resembles that of a manager of a limited liability company than an elected official of a working class organisation. It happens far too often that the unionist has to fight not only the tyranny of the boss, but also the bureaucracy of his own officials. This must cease, the control of the unions must be transferred to the rank and file. That is where their destiny should lie. Bureaucracy is inimical to initiative; the workers must be allowed to develop collective initiative if they are ever to better their conditions and finally win their freedom. Labour produces all wealth, and to labour all wealth rightly belongs. The strife in society is over the division of wealth between owners and workers. It is the historic mission of the Working Class to end this struggle by obtaining control of the means of production and distribution.

With that end in view we have not to look to Parliament, but to the building up of an Industrial Organisation that will be capable of securing and controlling industry by the workers and for the workers. Labour must accomplish its own emancipation, and in order to march forward to our final conquest we must perfect our Industrial Solidarity.

Let our battle-cry be ‘One Industry! One Union! One Card! An injury to one is the concern of all’. Let us change our demand from ‘A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ to the abolition of the wages system.

[hr]

Afterword by Solidarity (1962)

The objects of the Industrial Democracy League were ‘to carry on an educational campaign among Trade Unions, Trade Councils and other working class organisations in favour of Solidarity and Direct Action’.

The League advocated a) ‘industrial organisation upon the basis of class, instead of craft; b) the amalgamation of all existing trade unions into industrial unions; c) the formation of a National Federal Council of Industrial Unions.’

The I.D.L. sought ‘to stimulate the formation of Amalgamation Committees in every industry and every industrial centre throughout Great Britain; to inspire the existing organisations with a fighting spirit so as to improve the material conditions of the wage workers; to facilitate joint action of the workers in the furtherance of their interests, nationally and internationally; and ‘to prepare the workers for their economic emancipation by taking possession of the means of production and distribution through an economic organisation outside the control of any Parliamentary Party’.

Many rank-and-file militants supported these objectives of the ‘industrial unionists’. Contributors to our witty and hard-hitting predecessor included Tom Mann, George Hicks, Norman Young (of the NUT), Jack Wills (of the Builders), T.E. Naylor (of the Compositors), W.F. Watson and Jack Tanner (of the Engineers), Fred Bower (of the Stone Masons) and George Barker (of the Miners).

The League lacked however a clear understanding of why the traditional organisations of the working class were becoming both increasingly reformist and increasingly bureaucratic. It sought to get round this process by purely organisational means. Union amalgamation proceeded apace… but so did the growth of giant bureaucracies. We shall return to this whole subject in a future issue.

• 1Present address: c/o I.R.I.S. News (Witch-hunters Incorporated), 404, Maritime House, Clapham, SW4.

AGAINST ALL BOMBS

The campaign in Britain against nuclear weapons is beginning to turn towards the working class. As it does so, it will create an increasing challenge to the capitalist state.

This marks a development both in the activities and in the consciousness of the Campaign. It is a genuine turn to the masses of ordinary workers, not the bureaucracies of the Labour and Trade Union movements. Already, as a result of this emphasis, we have seen the beginnings of industrial action against the bomb. Workers directly involved have refused to handle nuclear cargoes. Others have held token strikes.

THE BOMB IN CLASS SOCIETY

More and more people in the campaign are seeing the deeper implications of working class action against the bomb. The class which dominates production controls society. It decides policy and, despite the democratic facade, enforces it through its state apparatus. Until the ordinary people are free in production, they cannot have any effective say in the decisions of war and peace, life and death. Only a society with inhuman relations in production could produce these monstrous weapons.

But the USSR has the same monstrous weapons. Should this not be different if your society is fundamentally different from ours? We know the means of production are nationalised. But Marx himself insisted that it is the `relations of production` (the relations between men and men at work) which determine the class nature of society1 . The property relations might reflect these relations of production or might serve to mask them.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

What has happened to your Revolution that your leaders should threaten the workers of other lands with these weapons? What has happened to the internationalist ideals of October?

The Revolution made sweeping changes in the property relations. But it did not solve the central contradiction of class society, that between rulers and ruled in production.

It was never the policy of the Bolsheviks to allow the workers to take over power in production itself. In 1921 Lenin wrote: `It is absolutely essential that all authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management. Under these circumstances, any direct intervention by trade unions in the management of enterprises should be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible`. This typifies the whole ideology and practice of the Party in this period. Here were the roots of Stalinism.

From this viewpoint, the USSR has essentially the same relations of production as Britain or America. The Russian worker has to get up in the morning when the alarm clock rings. The time is not of his choosing. Someone else has decided what he shall produce, how much, and at what cost to himself. Has he chosen to have Sputniks rather than butter?

Both and East and West management makes all the plans, and seeks to reduce the worker to a standard unit in them. It consciously removes variety and decision making from his job, and subjects him to the ruthless tempo of machines. In Marxist terms, he is alienated. And any opposition to this system brings him up against the forces of the State, which, again, are beyond his control.

Is this a State that is `beginning to whither away from the moment of Revolution`? Or is it a kernel of the Socialist programme that has withered away?

INTERNATIONAL ACTION

In Britain our protests bring us up against our State forces too. When a mass demonstration tried to immobilise a NATO base at Wethersfield last December, six of our members were gaoled for long periods. Many others have been arrested on similar demonstrations.

We have also protested against the Russian H-tests, which threaten workers all over the world with `socialist` leukaemia. Our bourgeois police have protected your Embassy against us, and arrested hundreds of demonstrators.

Our struggle is the struggle for new relationships in production and in society. Both East and West, privileged protected by their State machines manage production and parcel out the social product. They try to protect these privileges against their greedy neighbours.

That is what the H-bomb defends. But workers gain nothing by assisting in protecting their own rulers against others. We must have faith only in ourselves, in our ability to transform society. We extend our hands in solidarity with the working people of Russia, over the heads of our rulers and yours. We have already taken up this struggle: it is yours too. Together we must ACT – OR WE SHALL PERISH TOGETHER.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

The Committee of 100 exists to organise mass civil disobedience and resistance against the production, testing and threatened use of nuclear weapons. Its basis is in rank-and-file action, not in politicians’ manoeuvres.

Its Industrial Sub-Committee seeks to develop these ideas among ordinary workers. Its first leaflet stated: `Workers make the weapons of mass destruction, transport them, handle them, install them. They supply and equip those who use them. When they no longer accept to do so, the politicians will have to fight their own wars`.

The Sub-Committee is composed of workers in the Docks, in road and rail transport, and in the Engineering, Building and Printing industries.

Published on behalf of the Industrial Sub-Committee of the London Committee of 100, by Ken Weller (Engineering Shop Steward), 37, Queens Mansions, North Road, London N.7

• 1`The sum total of the relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arise legal and political superstructures`. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol.13, p. 6-7, Moscow 1959.

THAT LEAFLET

`Solidarity` feels the full text of the leaflet distributed (in Russian) at the recent World Disarmament Congress in Moscow, should go on record, in view of the widespread repercussions (and deliberate lies) it has evoked.

The following notes are based on a report by Dave Picton, one of the members of the London Committee of 100, who took the leaflets to Moscow.

On July 10, two of us gave out the first batch of leaflets in Gorky Street. They were taken eagerly and folded away in inside pockets…. Because of the litter laws. After we had distributed quite a number, we were stopped by three `volunteer auxiliary militia`, who only became friendly after a passer-by that we were Congress delegates. The first (administrative) reflex had been to arrest us. The second (equally administrative) reflex had been to be friendly to an official foreign delegation. Obviously a dialectical contradiction. Neither reflex was related to the content of what we were distributing. That kind of response only took place later, at a higher level.

We also distributed the leaflet at a factory gate. It was an engineering works, in the suburbs. We distributed as the workers were returning from dinner break. The leaflets were again all taken and pocketed.

We also distributed the leaflet through letter boxes in a nearby block of workers’ flats. A second `block of flats` we entered turned out to be a police station. We decided not to stay.

Certain members of the British delegation became quite hostile after reading the leaflet. Late one night, one of the delegates found a woman in his room. His opinion of the Conference Arrangements Committee soared… till he found she was English – and that she was tearing up his leaflets. `Any method is justified against you people!`, she claimed. Unfortunately for her, she had found the wrong leaflet.

The Chairman of the Soviet Peace Committee (Mr. Korneichuk) at one point asked for an assurance that the leaflets would no longer be distributed, despite an earlier agreement that we could put our case by any means we chose.

`The Guardian` gave the best coverage. A front-page article titled `Heresy in Moscow` by Victor Zorza (12.7.62) quoted nearly all of the text which it called `the most direct challenge to official Soviet policies and ideas to have been presented to the Soviet man in the street since freedom of speech died under Stalin`. The article referred with glee to the `blasphemy of blaming Lenin, the best refuge of the reformed Khruschevites, for ideas Stalin put into practice`.

In general the Press reports on the leafleting and on the demonstration in Red Square were remarkably sympathetic. Only Peter Simple, in the `Daily Telegraph` (13.7.62) objected to a `direct incitement to revolution in the Communist world`. He believed that `a campaign of illegal opposition to one government, on one issue, was being exploited by those who want to organise illegal opposition to all governments, on all issues. The anarchist face of the CND is beginning to show`.

This enthusiasm for the Committee’s activities in Moscow was only matched by the same newspapers’ hostility to the Committee’s activities in England. This discrepency was quickly pointed out by `The Daily Worker` (16.7.62), by Arnold Kettle in a letter to `The Guardian`(20.7.62), etc.,etc. There was however another side to this particular coin. Committee of 100 demonstrations in this country have been praised to the skies by the Soviet Press and Radio. The `The Daily Worker` had also offered encouragements, from a safe distance. But now `Pravda` (18.7.62) screamed at the `people who act like thieves`, the `smart Alecks` who discussed `offensive subjects` and `thrust provocative, slanderous, leaflets` at passers-by. And the `Daily Worker` had hysterics about the `insulting, anti-socialist diatribe` and `the distribution of such outrageous lies` by an `irresponsible group`. Readers of both papers had to contain their curiosity about the nature of the lies so violently denounced. Not a line, not a single word of the leaflet was quoted.

During the Congress the text of the leaflet was beamed into Russia in twelve different Soviet languages. Many journals of the socialist and peace movement quoted it extensively. The full text has been republished and circulated by various organisations, including an (intendedly!) private employers’ information service. It has been translated and distributed in France and circulated in Japanese by members of the Zengakuren1 . Copies have gone to Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy and other countries. At least 3 batches have been used in different parts of Yugoslavia. In Helsinki, at the `World Youth Congress`, there was a punch-up on the distributors of the leaflets by members of the Rumanian delegation. Zengakuren representatives, including their President, Itoshi Nemoto, later demonstrated in Red Square, on August 6. Their bulletin No.3 (September ‘62) states this was `inspired by the activities of the Committee 100` and was `our first attempt to appeal to and unite with the workers and people of the USSR`. They attempted to distribute leaflets and were `beaten and dragged behind the Lenin mausoleum, and detained there for an hour`.

• 1All-Japan Federation of Autonomous Student Bodies.

ZENGAKUREN, the All-Japan Federation of Autonomous Student Bodies is a mass revolutionary organisation, with a militant tradition of struggle against American Imperialism and the Japanese ruling class. In 1960, it organised strikes and continuous demonstrations, in which many were wounded, outside the Tokyo Diet, against the Ratification of the Japanese – US Security Treaty. These reached such an intensity that the US Government thought it advisable to cancel a proposed Eisenhower visit to Japan.

The Zengakuren have recently called for the establishment of an anti-war International. They are supported in this by the Committee of 100, the Student Peace Union in the US, the Socialist Students Organization of West Germany and many other organizations opposed to both American and Russian tests. On August 17, 1962, representatives of the Zengakuren, including Nemoto, their President, attended the Leningrad Conference of the International Union of Students. On their way, they had demonstrated in Red Square against all nuclear tests. They had been arrested, then released and `closely watched during the remainder of their stay`.

We publish below an extract from Zengakuren Information Bulletin No.3, describing their discussions with representatives of the Soviet Student Council (SSC):

Soviet Student Council (SSC): Are you fighting against the nuclear testing of any nation other than the USSR? Do you realize that the Soviet Union is not the first country to engage in nuclear tests?

Zengakuren: We are engaged in a militant mass struggle against American nuclear tests. Our slogan in this struggle is, `Against tests of USA and USSR`. We oppose any nuclear activity by any country, be it England, France or China. Of course, we are fighting against the nuclear armament of Japan. You who sponsor the I.U.S. Congress should have known such a well-known fact.

SSC: Granted, but what country began the first nuclear tests and how many times were such tests carried out before the Soviet Union began?

Zengakuren: That is of no consequence. We accuse all countries engaged in testing of promoting the arms race and of suppressing the working class and people.

SSC: We are glad to hear that you oppose the American nuclear tests and can appreciate your stand against these tests. We lost millions of lives in World War II. This tragedy was due to the fact that our military forces were weaker than those of the Fascists. We do not want to be the second Hiroshima. If during the war Japan had had nuclear weapons at their disposal, the tragedy of Hiroshima would not have occurred.

Zengakuren: We oppose your dangerous view. According to your logic, you encourage the Japanese Imperialists to arm themselves with nuclear weapons. Do you really think that this is an effective way to stop the nuclear race and to prevent nuclear war?

SSC: The best way to prevent war is obviously total disarmament, but the next best procedure is to continue Soviet nuclear tests.

Zengakuren: Your policy, based on such a philosophy, wields an immeasurably harmful influence on the anti-war struggle of the working class. Do you know the slogan that is being used in Tokyo, New York and London to fight N-tests? `Against tests by the US and USSR`. These students and workers attempt to obtain peace not with nuclear weapons but by their own struggles.

SSC: You believe that if the Soviet Union stopped its tests, the working class movement would increase in strength and the imperialists’ tests would stop. We cannot be sure of such an outcome.

Zengakuren: Are you suggesting that the workers of the world stop their struggles and support Soviet testing? By holding such a view, you cause dissension among the workers of the world and make them oppose each other. The workers must unite. Soviet nuclear testing does not support peace. It provides America with an excuse to continue their tests and intensify the arms race. Any nuclear testing suppresses the workers of the world and subjects them to the domination of the ruling class. Aren’t you yourselves the slaves of nuclear weapons?

SSC: We can appreciate your point of view, but we are of totally different opinions.

Zengakuren: The justice of our views will be borne out by the continuation of the world-wide struggle against N-tests.

SSC: Your opinion sounds quite sincere; continue your work as you like, but don’t forget that you are in the USSR now.

One of the greatest problems facing the revolutionary movement today is that of bureaucracy. What is it? Is it a rootless "thing," floating between the working class and their rulers? Is it a "new class"? No other issue more clearly shows up the bankruptcy in ideas of the traditional "left" than its inability seriously to grapple with this problem.

The traditional "left" is incapable of looking at reality as it is, of analysing it here and now. Instead it gazes at society from the standpoint of political doctrines expounded a century ago, doctrines in many cases relating to very different social conditions and class alignments.

The contributions of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and other "giants" of the past have been reduced to "sacred scriptures." They are quoted as "divine authority" on the assumption that "nothing has changed." The term "revisionist" has become a term of abuse. That the "giants" themselves constantly revised their ideas in the face of the constantly developing experience is conveniently forgotten.

This "religious" attitude to the past is a complete rejection of dialectical thinking. With such tram-lines firmly laid in their brains it is little wonder that so many self-styled revolutionaries fail to see that Russia today, for instance, is as much a class society as any Western country.

The traditionalists, for instance, are all obsessed with the legal status of property, as if this were the fundamental thing. They fail to see that the bureaucracy in Russia has assumed the role of ruling class because it dominates production, manages it in its own interests and decides, through the exclusive control of the State, all about the distribution of the social product. State capitalism hadn't developed in Marx's day. His doctrines must be brought up to date in this respect.

Marx's dream of state ownership, centralised [1] and rapidly increasing productive forces, has been fulfilled with a vengeance in Russia today. But is this socialism? The Russian workers are never consulted in the important, everyday decisions that concern them most: hours or tempo of work, wages, consumption and leisure. They were never consulted about the resumption of nuclear tests (any more than ordinary people in the West were). Sometimes they are not even informed of such facts. And in the arts, what the Party says, goes.

Marx defines capitalism as a society based on commodity production and wage labour and in which "surplus value" is extracted from the workers. Part of this surplus value goes to capitalisation and part goes to the unproductive consumption of the rulers themselves. But many "marxists" fail to see that from this standpoint the Russian worker is exploited just as much, if not more, than his American counterpart.

The mere assertion that the State is "owned" by the workers has about as much relevance to the Russian worker as the fact that British Railways are "publicly owned" has for the rank-and-file member of the NUR. The abolition of private ownership is clearly not enough. Private ownership is only one "legal form" for the power of the ruling class. The ruling class has certainly perceived this. It is high time the revolutionaries did too.

The more far-sighted sections of the ruling class are beginning to realize that only by introducing State ownership can they effectively rationalize their economics, overcome the old type of economic difficulties, and thus maintain their rule. [2]

At the same time the rulers have learned that they need the Labour bureaucrats to discipline the workers, to tie them ever more closely to the job. They need the traditional unions as an outlet for grievances. In parallel with the increased State intervention in the economy, the Labour leaders and the unions have become increasingly integrated into the political structure of capitalism.

For the worker, these developments have meant increasing domination from above, both in work and in leisure. More and more the employer tries to fashion his employees along the lines so accurately depicted by Charlie Chaplin in Modem Times.

Many other "doctrines," unquestioningly accepted by the "left" today, are equally contradictory. For instance, some people pay lip service to the idea that "the liberation of the working class can be achieved only by the working class itself." But the same people act and speak as if the working class is an unintelligent herd, incapable of achieving socialism without an "elitist" party, "steeled in struggle," "disciplined," "centrally controlled," a party which would lead the class to revolutionize society by capturing political power.

Socialism to us means the maximum freedom for the worker in all his activities. It is the very opposite of the massive bureaucratic control which has developed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The germ of socialism, i.e. maximum participation of the workers themselves, existed in the Paris Commune of 1871, in the Soviets or Workers' Councils of 1905 and 1917, in Spain in 1936 and 1937, and for a few weeks in Budapest in 1956. What has happened to that germ?

Millions of words have been written about the "degeneration" of the October Revolution and of the Bolshevik Party. The writers invariably miss the crucial point, namely that the seeds of the degeneration lay in the dual (and typically capitalist) conceptions of an elitist party and of the authoritarian management of industry. These ideas - or rather this mentality - was to govern all decisions on political and economic questions.

The elitist theory finds its highest expression in the works of Lenin. In What Is To Be Done, written in 1902, he argues that the working class is incapable of independently developing "socialist consciousness," which has therefore to be injected from outside. "Socialist consciousness," he wrote, "arose quite independently of the spontaneous growth of the working class movement. It arose as a natural and inevitable development of ideas among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia." [3]

From here it is a logical step to the overall conception of the ignorant herd of workers on the one hand, and the leading "cadre" of intellectuals on the other. The "cadre" do all the "thinking." The workers "test" the resultant "theories" in their everyday struggles with the boss. The division of labour between manual and intellectual, which capitalism developed, has now affected the ranks of the would-be "revolutionaries." Here is the ideological justification for bureaucratic politics.

Once these premises are accepted it matters little how opponents are fought, so long as workers "believe" the facts given them. In describing how one should deal with opposing factions (i.e. members of the same party) Lenin advocated "the spreading among the masses of hatred, aversion and contempt for the opponents." "The limits of the struggle based on a split are not Party limits, but general political limits, or rather general civil limits, the limits set by criminal law and nothing else." Modern "Leninists" [4] certainly seem to have learnt this part of the message!

In the field of production, this philosophy found expression in the doctrine of "one-man management," the militarization of labour and the determination to prevent the rank-and-file bodies from taking over the factories. It was presumed, in a typically bureaucratic way, that only those possessing technical knowledge were entitled to impose decisions concerning production. "In the interests of socialism, the revolution demands," Lenin wrote as early as 1918, "that the masses unquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process." Writing in Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky echoed: "The unions should discipline the workers and teach them to place the interests of production above their own needs and demands." Trotsky continued: "That free labour is more productive than compulsory labour is quite true when it refers to the period of transition from feudal to bourgeois society. But one needs to be a liberal to make that truth permanent and to transfer its application to the period of transition from the bourgeois to the socialist order."

These quotations show the contemptuous attitude held by the Bolshevik "vanguard" for the working class. It was to have disastrous results. It led for example to the bloody suppression of the Kronstadt mutiny in 1921, when workers demanded that the power stolen from the Soviets by the Bolshevik Party be returned to them. The mutineers were massacred by the Bolsheviks. Significantly, both Lenin and Trotsky publicly claimed that it was a counter-revolutionary rebellion, led by Tsarist officers. They both knew this to be a lie, but truth did not matter. Political expediency did.

The culmination of these doctrines was the introduction of completely capitalist methods into Russian production: speed-ups, piecework, unpaid "voluntary" overtime, permanent labour control, time and motion study, and the open advocacy of a drive for "American efficiency." Engels could have been foreseeing modern Russia when he wrote: "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, proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head." [5]

"Being determines consciousness" is an oft-quoted marxist truism. Related to a bureaucrat it means that any man possessing power over others cannot fail but to see society through the eyes of a master. So long as political power exists, class society will exist. So long as a specific social stratum manages production, the ruler and ruled relation ship will persist. The political power held by Lenin and his elite over the rank and file of the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik Party was simply transformed, by the October Revolution, into State power. The Party appointed the industrial managers. It opposed workers' management of production. Its members took up key positions in the State apparatus. The Party built a society in its own image.

The trade union and Labour bureaucrat in this country plays the same role as his Russian counterpart. His prime concern is to maintain himself. This he has no difficulty to do as he is an essential cog in the whole edifice of bureaucratic capitalism. Socialism and workers' power would mean his extinction.

It is no accident that trade union and Labour bureaucrats, of every political colouring, instinctively and inevitably must oppose any form of rank and file activity. The bureaucracies are fully integrated into the structure of capitalism. Independent action by the working class is the greatest threat to their existence. To talk, therefore, of these leaders "selling out" the membership is absurd. There is no other way in which they could act. They differ with one another only in respect to the kind of class society they would choose: the Western, based to an ever-diminishing degree on private ownership, or the Russian brand, organized through total State ownership.

As capitalism develops, the State bureaucracy "takes over" managerial functions to an increasing degree until it becomes the ruling class. The economic basis for this new bureaucracy is the enormous concentration of capital and power and the increasing intervention of the State in all economic transactions, and finally in every aspect of social life. The old "property-owning bourgeoisie," which characterized the capitalism of the days of Marx, is dying together with the era of laissez-faire. It now has to share its power with the new bureaucracy. It will eventually be eliminated altogether, either gradually and piecemeal (as in the West) or suddenly, as the result of a violent struggle (as in Russia and China). In this respect the only difference between East and West is that the former has already achieved total centralization in the hands of the State, while in the West the process still continues. It is a quantitative difference...not one of quality.

In their attitude to rank and file ("unofficial") activity, the organizations of the "left" reveal most clearly their bureaucratic make-up. The great Frank Foulkes, then "Communist" President of the ETU, could say to the power workers (November 14,1960) that "Unofficial bodies are not in the best interests of the industry." The Stalinist weekly World News devoted a major article, in May 1958, to attacking the "unofficial" attempts of sections of the London busmen to extend their strike. Even the ultra "r-r-revolutionary" S.L.L. declares its policy in all strikes is to make them official. [6] This is a permanent call for workers to leave control of the disputes in the hands of the bureaucrats. It goes hand in hand of course with calls for "better leadership" (i.e. themselves).

Experience has shown that movements relying on leaders can achieve nothing of fundamental benefit to the working class. Bureaucratic parties can only build bureaucratic societies. Socialism cannot be built with capitalist tools. The only saviour of the working class must be the working class itself - a statement that must be taken in its most literal sense.

Bob POTTER

[1] "...to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of proletariat organized as ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible." Manifesto of the Communist Party, Foreign Languages Publishing House edition, Moscow 1957, p. 85.

[2] Bismarck and Churchill were advocates, in their time, of nationalisation. Even the Nazis put forward the following economic demand, in 1923: "We demand the abolition of unearned incomes and the abolition of the thraldom of interest. We demand the nationalisation of all industrial trusts." History of Nazi Germany, Pelican Books, p. 199.

[3] What Is To Be Done, Foreign Languages Publishing House edition, p. 51.

[4] Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. Ill, Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 493 and 494.

[5] F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Foreign Languages Publishing House edition, Moscow 1954, pp. 105-106.

[6] Gerry Healy, letter to The Guardian, October 26, 1961.

From London Solidarity, 1963
OCRed by lurdan, 2013

Solidarity Introduction

On February 9 and 10, 1963, the Committee of 100 held an important conference in London to plan the way forward in the struggle against the Bomb. A number of individuals and ad hoc groups submitted documents for discussion. One such document, called 'BEYOND COUNTING ARSES' was signed by eight active Committee members. It called on the Committee to initiate, amongst other things, a campaign of civil disobedience in print. It was distributed to the 150 or so people attending the conference from various regions, We understand the text has since been discussed in a number of CND and Committee of 100 groups.

Immediately after the Aldermaston March, with its great demonstration at RSG 6, the signatories were 'visited' by the Special Branch - then busy looking for the 'Spies'. Their homes were thoroughly searched, but we understand the authors were unable to help the police in their enquiries. 1

Some time later copies of 'B.C.A.' even reached Fleet Street. In mid-April the Daily Herald mysteriously referred to it and did its (modest) best to scare its dutiful readers with gruesome tales of delinquent disrupters. On April 28, the Sunday Telegraph reprinted certain passages out of context, the better to incite sundry retired colonels, police brass and other top people against the young pamphleteers. It mentioned nothing of course of the careful analysis which had preceded the 'blood-curdling' conclusions.

In reprinting this four-month old text in full, we hope to help redress the balance. The police have copies, We are therefore telling them nothing. The press have already quoted the more 'disruptive' passages in full. But only in order to smear. We feel a wider public is entitled to know the full argument and to judge for itself.

Beyond Counting Arses

At a time when support for unilateralism is certainly not falling off, the anti-war movement is suffering from a general malaise.

In this document a group of members and supporters of the London Committee of 100 criticise the two unilateralist organizations in Britain, and try to suggest a way forward.

CND

Bureaucracy

CND nationally is dominated by a bureaucratic and largely self-perpetuating leadership, and is more and more resembling the traditional political parties of 'left' and 'right'. Its recent document 'Three Steps to Peace' is a classical instance of a leadership, without reference to its own supporters, betraying the very principles on which its movement was based. The Campaign has done a useful job developing a mass awareness of the danger of nuclear war. But its whole emphasis on 'pressurising' politicians, on winning Conference majorities, on calling for summit conferences, etc, is based on a profound illusion and condemns the movement to an impotence now perceived by thousands. We live in an increasingly authoritarian society, in which the powers that be are quite capable of coping with opposition directed through the traditional channels. These traditional channels of protest have themselves become built-in stabilisers of the whole society.

Annual Conference

The introduction of an annual policy-making conference, long opposed by the National Executive, has proved to be a dead letter. At the first such conference in 1961 a resolution demanding Russian and American unilateralism was carried. The Executive took no notice and succeeded in getting it reversed the following year. In 1962 the resolution on industrial action against the Bomb was first played down by the Executive and then misinterpreted so as to make it quite innocuous.

Red Square

The opposition of the CND leadership towards the demonstration in Red Square is typical of a hatred of any radical action. Sidney Silverman and Canon Collins, breaking off their 'valuable' discussions with Khruschev, flew back from Moscow a day early in order to denounce the wreckers. They refrained from criticising the demonstration only when they realized the favourable impression it had created at home.

Sterility

People steeped in traditional political thought (and this includes the C.P.) are increasingly dominating CND at policy-making levels, helping the trend towards bureaucratisation. Although many CND groups remain active and in many cases extremely radical, CND has degenerated as an organization beyond the point where it is worth trying to reform it. Some of the proposals now being voiced to convert CND into a membership organization (presumably giving the Executive the power to expel dissident members and control local policy) illustrate the extent to which CND is following the path of the Labour Party and the official Trades Unions structure into political sterility.

THE COMMITTEE OF 100 AND ITS ILLS

The Return to Tradition

All radical groups have a tendency to revert to traditional forms of action and thought. This is due to the all-pervading influence of the environment in which they try to work. It can only be countered by an awareness of the danger and a constant resistance to it. In the Committee of 100 recent proposals to lobby local councils about Civil Defence, hold fasts and vigils, put pressure on the churches and work through CND are all examples of this trend.

The day after Wethersfield the Daily Worker urged the peace movement to follow the Committee's revolutionary challenge by sending telegrams: to the Foreign Ministers' Conference. After the Cuban demonstrations the London Committee did in fact send telegrams to K, K and Mac. The contrast between traditional and revolutionary politics could hardly be more striking.

Lack of common ground

The Committee's basic weakness is the lack of common ground among its members and supporters. When it was formed in October 1969 apart from its unilateralism it was agreed on one thing only: a specific form of action - the mass sit-down. Two and a half years later is doubtful whether even this remains to unite us.

Meaningless compromise

Another weakness of the Committee, again arising from its basic lack of common ground, is that it has taken its libertarian methods of organization to absurd extremes. The way in which a determined minority can prevent any decisions being reached has paralysed the London and National Committees for some months. The result has usually been compromises that have pleased few and satisfied none. The Committee's continual production of innocuous leaflets is a case in point.

Chaotic Organization

There is a dangerous tendency for the Committee to leave its decisions to be implemented by others, and to pass pious resolutions. The very process of decision-making has become ridiculously diffuse: one proposal may be flung back and forth between the National Committee its Planning and Working Groups Regional Committees; Area Working Groups, and so on. This allows splendid opportunities for minority blocking, and people become so sick of the original idea that nothing eventually gets done. Both the Red Square and the London demonstrations over Cuba took place in spite of rather than through the Committee's normal structure.

Leadership or Democracy?

The do-it-yourself philosophy which the Committee has developed is in flat contradiction to its reliance on Big Names. The Committee of 100 has become mesmerised by Bertrand Russell as its spokesman. In August 1962 a press statement from him, saying that he wished the 9th September demonstration cancelled, had the effect of an ultimatum: an ultimatum that was accepted by the Committee in the face of enormous opposition its own Militants.

The way in which the Committee has been damaged by the resignations of Vanessa Redgrave and Bertrand Russell is a measure of the extent to which we have used the publicity value of Big Names rather than carefully formulating our own collective ideas.

Back to the Womb?

Within the Committee of 100 important conflicts are never resolved. We prefer to paper them over. Those who see the Committee purely as being against the Bomb are returning to traditional forms of ideas, action and organization. Others want the Committee to develop along wider and more radical lines. In this situation the result is stagnation, and we are even beginning to set up and adhere to our own traditions. The perennial back-to-the womb suggestion for a mass sit-down in Whitehall is one example. The Committee of 100 today has perhaps three real assets: a rapidly diminishing reputation, a valuable fund of experience in the technique of illegal demonstration, and a body of supporters prepared to take radical action.

Resting on our history

The Committee of 100 has made history. The first sit-down, September 17th and the Public Order Act, Wethersfield and the Old Bailey trial, the Red Square demonstration and the leaflet 'Against ALL bombs' are solid bases for future action. But we can no longer afford to rest on this history. There are few examples of radical action initiated by the Committee's central structure in the last twelve months.

A CLARIFICATION OF OBJECTIVES

We don't want to get blown up

We started off as a movement against 'The Bomb'. This struggle has led us to realise that our opponent is the state itself, and the social and economic interests it protects.

The Warfare State

We discovered (some of us with surprise) that our rulers, their government, their police, their courts and their press, act as a team to smash any real challenge to their bomb. We realised that the Labour Party and the Trades Union hierarchies are not alternatives to the established order. They are as much parts of the machinery of preservation as is Parliament itself.

We have had to learn, slowly and painfully and incompletely, that a solution to our problems can only come from ourselves. Neither Parliament, the knights of the TUC or the National Executive of CND can succeed on our behalf.

Pilgrimage

The annual pilgrimage from Aldermaston should surely be welcome to the government, for it ensures that our energies are not diverted into more 'dangerous' paths. (Let us hope that Aldermaston 1963 will change this tradition).

Other struggles

The discovery that the Bomb is not an isolated cancer within an otherwise healthy society. but is in itself an example of society's basic rottenness, gives us common ground with those who are reaching similar conclusions about society from their involvement in other struggles.

Direct action in industry

The shop stewards' movement and groups of militants in industry daily face misrepresentation by the mass media, the obstruction of their 'officials', the Special Branch, and even court action in much the same way that we have. We have both heard the same kinds of screams from the establishment and the traditional left: 'undemocratic! subversive! Beatnik! Wildcat!' We are both drawing; tentatively, the same sorts of conclusions about society.

An ultimate expression

We cannot know which particular struggle will open the most eyes. We do know that each partial struggle is a part of the same fight. It is the involvement of people in many different issues that will finally raise the consciousness of the majority to the point where it can effectively challenge the state. Thousands of people are already involved in the fight against the Bomb, because it is the ultimate expression of the way the state prevents us from living our own lives,

A MASS MOVEMENT?

Self-hypnosis

We have allowed the expression 'mass movement' to hypnotise us. Certainly, there is little to be achieved as a traditional small pressure group. But mass action does not have to mean a yearly orgasm in Whitehall or public conscience-washing in Trafalgar Square. We have been bedevilled by two contradictions. We have demanded mass action, and only seen this in terms of masses of people acting at one place and at one time. We have looked for new ideas, and yet imprisoned ourselves in the mass sit-down.

Towards a real mass movement

We believe that a mass movement means a continuous day-to-day struggle waged by vast numbers of ordinary people against the state in all its forms. We do not say that same-place-same-time mass action has no further part to play in our movement. We cannot see it as an end in itself.

BEYOND COUNTING ARSES

A ritual pas-de-deux

Although the Committee of 100 has been extremely radical in its time, we now seem reduced to demonstrations consisting of a ritual pas-de-deux with the police. The Committee accepts its role, and the authorities impose their own very tangible control over how far resistance gees. ('All right son. You've made your point, Now walk along nicely into court'.)

At Wethersfield the state was so scared that it brought out the troops. At Greenham Common, we queued up to be arrested. In the past our yardstick of success has usually been the total column inches in the Guardian or the number of arrested arses. We need new criteria on which to judge our actions.

Some valid criteria

We must attempt to hinder the warfare state in every possible way. A strike at a rocket factory, although not an immediate prospect, would succeed in this respect. The demonstration against Polaris caused the U.S. Navy to press for the Proteus' withdrawal. Secondly, we must make clear the relationship between the Bomb and other issues. The Industrial Sub-committee's leaflet on the rail strike shows what can be achieved in this direction, and the recent demonstration at Newington Lodge by the S.E. London Committee is a further welcome departure.

Thirdly, we must make clear the relationship between the Bomb and the state as a whole. At Wethersfield the state used armed troops and barbed wire. As Pat Pottle said, the mask was off. Fourthly, we must try to capture the imagination of ordinary people, as did the Honington slogan 'Plough Up All Bases!'.
.
Most important of all, our actions must always be of the do-it-yourself type. We must understand that a victory won as a result of a struggle is valuable in itself. It heightens the self-confidence and self-reliance of those who have participated in it. This is part of our general thesis that means adopted profoundly influence the ends achieved.

SOME PROPOSALS

Civil disobedience in print

The Committee of 100 should announce that it intends to unmask and publicise the most secret preparations of the Warfare State. We should publicly urge people to send us such information in confidence. We should undertake to publish the location of rocket bases and what goes on in the germ warfare centres. We must give details about the secret hide-outs of 'civil' defence - and the secretly kept lists of those who will be catered for in the event of nuclear war. We should publish the names of the emergency government 'gauleiters' and details of phone-tapping and of the activities of the Special branch, The campaign against the Bomb must be linked to a great struggle for the protection and extension of our civil liberties.

Off with the lid

As recent events have shown, the Official Secrets Act does not really function to prevent espionage, but to keep the facts from the people of this country. There can be little information that a foreign power cannot obtain by bribery blackmail or plain observation. We propose that the Committee should deliberately take the lid off these facts, and let people know what the state does in their name. It is clear that activities of this sort would have to involve certain measures of secrecy, analogous to those practised by V.N.D.2

Resistance

Secondly, we should declare ourselves in favour of all action that disrupts and hinders the nuclear state. We must attempt to weld into a mass campaign individual acts of resistance in the armed forces, in industry or in everyday life. This should include a campaign to form anti-militarist groups and to agitate within the armed forces.

Civil Defence

We should organise mass disruption and exposure of the fraud of civil defence. This could be done by joining civil defence and working from within. The Committee should try to simulate war conditions during civil defence exercises. This might be by means of columns of 'refugees' blocking up the roads, or by mass dislocation of radio and telephone communications. We believe this to be more relevant than sitting outside the Home Office or lobbying local councillors.

Conscription

The possibility of the reintroduction of conscription is a challenge we may soon have to face. We could organise resistance on a scale far exceeding the campaign in France during the Algerian War, and using much of their experience.

Thirdly, we should publicly try to link up with locally organised struggles over conditions of work, increases in rent, etc. This is one case where a simple press statement, a leaflet or a public meeting could have a big impact. Although our ultimate aim should be a recognition of a common cause, we should realise that this is hardly an immediate prospect.

These three proposals we have thought about in some detail, In addition, there are a number of actions large and small which could form part of a campaign such as we envisage. Thousands of people could be involved at varying levels of commitment in activities which are both meaningful in themselves and suited to our present organization and strength.

Illegal publicity (saturation flyposting, stickering and slogan-stamping) can be used to ram home a particular issue, 200 copies of a whitewashed slogan all over a town in one night could have an immense impact.

V.N.D. should be used more aggressively, breaking into or jamming BBC programmes on specific occasions.

From coin-boxes3 dislocation of military all over London people could be involved in the mass and government telephone systems.

A demonstration at parliament could involve several months action by direct participation in debates or the aerial distribution of leaflets. This could also be done to local councils.

The disruption of the opening of Fylingdales by even the threat of entry into the forbidden danger-zone would cause more consternation in Whitehall than a dozen sit-downs.

We believe that these ideas - fragmentary as they are - can give a purpose to small localised action that at present seems pointless. We must weld into a sustained and coordinated campaign actions within the capabilities of ordinary people.

WE DO NOT BELIEVE IN PASSIVE MARTYRDOM. WE ARE NOT IN THIS MOVEMENT TO OPT OUT OF A BURDEN ON OUR CONSCIENCES BUT TO FIGHT FOR WHAT WE BELIEVE IN.

Signatories:4

Douglas Brewood Jr.
Robin Davis
Ian Hutchison
Mike Lesser
Nick Ralph
Jon Tinker
Mary Tinker
Ken Weller

• 1Libcom note: background to all this and Spies for Peace is included in "The Spies for Peace and After" by Nicolas Walter in The Raven #5 http://libcom.org/library/raven-05-1988
• 2Libcom note: VND was "Voice of Nuclear Disarmament" - a pirate radio station run by folk singer, physicist and anti-nuclear campaigner John Hasted and others. https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/radical-objects-covert-broadcasts-and-the-nuclear-disarmament-campaign/
• 3Libcom note: I.e. public coin operated telephone boxes, which could be used with reasonable anonymity
• 4Libcom note: Signed the original document, not included in the version reprinted by Solidarity.

Between 1961 and 1965 ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ published (in its issues 36-40) an important article by Paul Cardan entitled ‘Marxisme et ThÈorie RÈvolutionnaire’. Part I dealt with ‘the historical fate of marxism and the notion of orthodoxy’ and this pamphlet is based on that section. Part II went on to discuss ‘the marxist theory of history’. We published it under the title ‘History and Revolution’ in August 1971. Further sections, not yet translated, deal with ‘the marxist philosophy of history’, ‘the two elements in marxism and what historically became of them’, ‘the balance sheet’, and ‘the nature of revolutionary theory’.

The present text first appeared in Solidarity (London) vol.IV, no.3 (August 1966). A later reprint was produced by Solidarity (Clydeside).

which marxism?
For anyone seriously concerned with the social question, an encounter with marxism is both immediate and inevitable. It is probably even wrong to use the word ‘encounter’, in that such a term conveys both something external to the observer and something that may or may not happen. Marxism today has ceased to be some particular theory or some particular political programme advocated by this or that group. It has deeply permeated our language, our ideas and the very reality around us. It has become part of the air we breathe in coming into the social world. It is part of the historical landscape in the backgrounds of our comings and goings.

For this very reason to speak of marxism has become one of the most difficult tasks imaginable. We are involved in the subject matter in a hundred different ways. Moreover this Marxism, in realizing itself, has become impossible to pin down. For with which marxism should we deal? With the marxism of Khruschev or with the marxism of Mao Tse Tung? With the marxism of Togliatti or with that of Thorez? With the marxism of Castro, of the Yugoslays, or of the Polish revisionists? Or should one perhaps deal with the marxism of the Trotskyists (although here too the claims of geography reassert themselves: British and French trotskyists, trotskyists in the United States and trotskyists in Latin America tear one another to pieces, mutually denouncing one another as non marxist). Or should one deal with the Marxism of the Bordighists or of the SPGB, of Raya Dunayevskaya or of CLR James, or of this or that of the still smaller group of the extreme ‘left’? As I well known each of these groups denounces all others as betraying the spirit of ‘true’ marxism which it alone apparently embodies. A survey of the whole field will immediately show that there is not only the abyss separating ‘official’ from ‘oppositional’ marxisms. There is also the vast m plicity of both ‘official’ and ‘oppositional’ varieties each seeing itself as excluding all others.

There is no simple yardstick by which this complex situation could be simplified. There is no ‘test of events which speaks for itself’. Both the marxist politician enjoying the fruits of office the marxist political prisoner find themselves specific social circumstances, and in themselves these circumstances confer no particular valid to the particular views of those who expound them. On the contrary, particular circumstances ma] essential carefully to interpret what various s men for marxism say. Consecration in power gives no more validity to what a man says than does the halo of the martyr or irreconcilable opponent. For does not marxism itself teach us to view with suspicion both what emanates from institutionalized authority and what emanates from oppositions that perpetually fail to get even a toe hold in historical reality?

a return to the sources.
The solution to this dilemma cannot be purely and simply a ‘return to Marx’. What would such a return imply? Firstly it would see no more, in the development of ideas and actions in the last eighty years, and in particular in the development of social democracy, leninism, stalinism, trotskyism, etc, thann layer upon layer of disfiguring scabs covering a healthy body of intact doctrine. This would be most unhistorical.

It is not only that Marx’s doctrine is far from having the systematic simplicity and logical consistency that certain people would like to attribute to it. Nor is it that such a ‘return to the sources’ would necessarily have something academic about it ( at best it could only correctly re-establish the theoretical content of a doctrine belonging to the past – as one might attempt to do, say, for the writings of Descartes or St. Thomas Aquinas). Such an endeavour could leave the main problem unsolved, namely that of discovering the significance of Marxism for contemporary history and for those of us who live in the world of today.

The main reason why a ‘return to Marx’ is impossible is that under the pretext of faithfulness to Marx – and in order to achieve this faithfulness – such a ‘return’ would have to start by violating one of the essential principles enunciated by Marx himself. Marx was, in fact, the first to stress that the significance of a theory cannot be grasped independently of the historical and social practice which it inspires and initiates, to which it gives rise, in which it prolongs itself and under cover of which a given practice seeks to justify itself.

Who, today, would dare proclaim that the only significance of Christianity for history is to be found in reading unaltered versions of the Gospels or that the historical practice of various Churches over period of some 2,000 years can teach us nothing fundamental about the significance of this religious movement? A ‘faithfulness to Marx’ which would see the historical fate of marxism as something Un important would be just as laughable. It would in fact be quite ridiculous. Whereas for the Christian the revelations of the Gospels have a transcendental and an intemporal validity, no theory could ever have such qualities in the eyes of a marxist. To seek to discover the meaning of marxism only in what Marx wrote (while keeping quiet about what the doctrine has become in history) is to pretend – in flagrant contradiction with the central ideas of that doctrine – that real history doesn’t count and that the truth of a theory is always and exclusively to be found ‘further on’. It finally comes to replacing revolution by revelation and the understanding of events by the exegesis of texts.

All this would be bad enough. But there is worse. The insistence that a revolutionary theory be confronted, at all stages, by historical reality 1 is explicitly proclaimed in Marx’s writings. It is in fact part of the deepest meaning of Marxism. Marx’s marxism did not seek to be – and could not be – just one theory among others. It did not seek to hide its historical roots or to dissociate itself from its historical repercussions. Marxism was to provide the weapons not only for interpreting the world but for changing it. 2 The fullest meaning of the theory was, according to the theory itself, that it gave rise to and inspired a revolutionary practice. Those who, seeking to exculpate marxist theory, proclaim that none of the historical practices which for 100 years have claimed to base themselves on marxism are ‘really’ based on marxism, are in fact reducing marxism to the status of a mere theory, to the status of a theory just like any other. They are submitting marxism to an irrevocable judgment. They are in fact submitting it, quite literally, to a ‘Last Judgment’. For did not Marx thoroughly accept Hegel’s great idea: ‘Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht’. 3

marxism as ideology
Let us look at what happened in real life. In certain stages of modern history a practice inspired by marxism has been genuinely revolutionary. But in more recent phases of history it has been quite the opposite. And while these two phenomena need interpreting (and we will return to them) they undoubtedly point to the fundamental ambivalence of marxism. It is important to realise that in history, as in politics, the present weighs far more than the past. And for us, the present can be summed up in the statement that for the last 40 years Marxism has become an ideology in the full meaning that Marx himself attributed to this word. It has become a system of ideas which relate to reality not in order to clarify it and to transform it, but on the contrary in order to mask it and to justify it in the abstract.

It has become a means of allowing people to say one thing and to do another, to appear other than they are.

In this sense marxism first became ideology when it became Establishment dogma in countries paradoxically called ‘socialist’. In these countries ‘marxism’ is invoked by governments which quite obviously do not incarnate working class power and which are no more controlled by the working class than is any bourgeois government. In these countries ‘marxism’ is represented by ‘leaders of genius’ – whom their successors call ‘criminal lunatics’ without more ado. ‘Marxism’ is proclaimed the ideological basis of Tito’s policies and of those of the Albanians, of Russian policies and of those of the Chinese. In these countries marxism has become what Marx called the ‘solemn complement of justification’. It permits the compulsory teaching of ‘State and Revolution’ to students, while maintaining the most oppressive and rigid state structures known to history. It enables a self-perpetuating and privileged bureaucracy to take refuge behind talk of the ‘collective ownership of the means of production’ and of ‘abolition of the profit motive’.

But marxism has also become ideology in so far as it represents the doctrine of the numerous sects, proliferating on the decomposing body of the ‘official’ marxist movement. For us the word sect is not a term of abuse. It has a precise sociological and historical meaning. A small group is not necessarily a sect. Marx and Engels did not constitute a sect, even when they were most isolated. A sect is a group which blows up into an absolute a single side, aspect or phase of the movement from which it developed, makes of this the touchstone of the truth of its doctrine (or of the truth, full stop), subordinates everything else to this ‘truth’ and in order to remain ‘faithful’ to it is quite prepared totally to separate itself from the real world and henceforth to live in a world of its own. The invocation of marxism by the sects allows them to think of themselves and to present themselves as something other than what they are, namely as the future revolutionary party of that very proletariat in which they never succeed in implanting themselves.

Finally marxism has become ideology in yet another sense. For several decades now it has ceased to be a living theory. One could search the political literature of the last 30 years in vain even to discover fruitful applications of the theory, let alone attempts to extend it or to deepen it.

We don’t doubt that what we are now saying will provoke indignant protests among those who, while professing to ‘defend Marx’, daily bury his corpse a little deeper under the thick layers of their distortions and stupidities. We don’t care. This is no personal quarrel. In analysing the historical fate of max we are not implying that Marx had any kind of moral responsibility for what happened. It is marxism itself, in what was best and most revolutionary in it, namely its pityless denounciation of hollow phrases and ideologies and its insistence on permanent self-criticism, which compels us to take stock of what marxism has become in real life.

It is no longer possible to maintain or to rediscover some kind of ‘marxist orthodoxy’. It can’t be done in the ludicrous (and ludicrously linked) way in which the task is attempted by the high priests of stalinism and by the sectarian hermits, who see marxist doctrine which they presume intact, but ‘amend’, ‘improve’ or ‘bring up to date’ on this or that specific point, at their convenience. Nor can it be done in the dramatic and ultimatistic way suggested by Trotsky in 1940 4 who said, more or less: ‘We know that marxism is an imperfect theory linked to a given period of history. We know that theoretical elaboration should continue. But today, the revolution being on the agenda, this task will have to wait’. This argument is conceivable – although superfluous – on the eve of an armed insurrection. Uttered a quarter of a century later it can only serve to mask the inertia and sterility of the trotskyist movement, since the death of it’s founder.

a marxist 'method'?
Some will agree with us so far, but will seek final refuge in the defence of a ‘marxist method’ allegedly unaffected by what we have just discussed. It is not possible, however, to maintain ‘orthodoxy’ as Lukacs attempted long before them (in 1919 1 precise), by limiting it to a marxist method, which could somehow be separated from its content and which could somehow be neutral in relation to its content. 5

Although a step forward in relation to various kinds of ‘orthodox’ cretinism, Lukacs’ position is basically untenable. It is untenable for a reason which Lukacs forgets, despite his familiarity with dialectical thinking, namely that it is impossible, except if one takes the term ‘method’ at its most superficial level, to separate a method from its content particularly when one is dealing with historical and social theory.

A method, in the philosophical sense, is defined by the sum total of the categories it uses. A rigid distinction between method and content only belongs to the more naive forms of transcendental idealism (or ‘criticism’). In its early stages this method of thought sought to separate and to oppose matter or content (which were infinite and undefined) to certain finite operative categories. According to this permanent flux of the subject matter could not alter the basic categories which were seen as the form without which the subject matter could not be grasped or comprehended.

But this rigid distinction between material and category is already transcended in the more advanced stages of ‘criticist’ thought, when it comes under the influence of dialectical thought. Formerly the problem arises: how do we determine which is the appropriate analytical category for this or that type of raw material? If the raw carries within itself the appropriate ‘hallmark’ allowing it to be placed in this or that it is not just ‘amorphous’; and if it is genuinely amorphous then it could indifferently be in one category or in another and the distinction between true and false breaks down. It is precisely this contradiction which, at several times in the history of philosophy, has led from a ‘criticist’ type of thinking to thinking of a dialectical type. 6

This is how the question is posed at the level of logic. When one considers the growth of knowledge as history, one sees that it was often the ‘development of the subject matter’ that led to a revision of the previously accepted categories or even to their being exploded and superseded. The ‘philosophical’ revolutions produced in modern physics by relativity theory or by quantum theory are just two examples among many. 7

The impossibility of establishing a rigid separation between method and content, between categories and raw material becomes even more obvious when one passes from knowledge of the physical world to understanding of history. A deeper enquiry into already available material – or the discovery of new material – may lead to a modification of the categories and therefore of the method. But there is, in addition, something much more fundamental, something highlighted precisely by Marx and by Lukacs themselves. 8 This is the fact that the categories through which we approach and apprehend history are themselves real products of historical development. These categories can only become clear and effective methods of historical knowledge when they have to some extent become incarnated or fulfilled in real forms of social life.

Let us give a simple example. In the thinking of the ancient Greeks the dominant categories defining social relations and history were essentially political (the power of the city, relations between cities, relations between ‘might’ and ‘right’, etc.). The economy only received marginal attention. This was not because the intelligence or insight of the Greeks were less ‘developed’ than those of modern man. Nor was it because there were no economic facts, or because economic facts were totally ignored. It was because in the social reality of that particular epoch the economy had not yet become a separate, autonomous factor (a factor ‘for itself’ as Marx would say) in human development. A significant analysis of the economy and of its importance for society could only take place in the 17th century and more particularly in the 18th century. It could only take place in parallel with the real development of capitalism which made of the economy the dominant element in social life. The central importance attributed by Marx and the marxists to economic factors is but an aspect of the unfolding of this historical reality.

It is therefore clear that there cannot exist a ‘method’ of approaching history, which could remain immune from the actual development of history. This is due to reasons far more profound than the ‘progress of knowledge’ or than ‘new discoveries’ etc. It is due to reasons pertaining directly to the very structure of historical knowledge, and first of all to the structure of its object: the mode of being of history. What is the object we are trying to know when we study history? What is history? History is inseparable from meaning. Historical facts are historical (and not natural, or biological) inasmuch as they are interwoven with meaning (or sense). The development of the historical world is, ipso facto, the development of a universe of meaning. Therefore, it is impossible radically to separate fact from meaning (or sense), or to draw a sharp logical distinction between the categories we use to understand the historical material, and the material itself. And, as this universe of meaning provides the environment in which the ‘subject’ of the historical knowledge (i.e. the student of history) lives, it is also necessarily the means by which he grasps, in the first instance, the whole historical material. No epoch can grasp history except through its own ideas about history; but these ideas are themselves a product of history and part and parcel of the historical material (which will be studied as such by the next epoch). Plainly speaking the method of the biologist is not a biological phenomenon; but the method of the historian is a historical phenomenon 9 .

Even these comments have however to be seen in proper perspective. They don’t imply that at every moment, every category and every method are thrown into question. Every method is not transcended or ruined by the development of real history at the very instant it is being utilized. At any given moment, it is always a practical question of knowing if historical change has reached a point where the old categories and the old method have to be reassessed. But this judgment cannot be made independently of a discussion of the content. In fact such an assessment is nothing other than a discussion on content which, starting with the old categories, comes to show, through its dealings with the raw material of history, that one needs to go beyond a particular set of categories.

Many will say: ‘to be marxist is to remain faithful to Marx’s method, which remains valid’. This is tantamount to saying that nothing has happened in the history of the last 100 years which either permits one or challenges one to question Marx’s categories. It is tantamount to implying that everything will forever be understood by these categories. It is to take up a position in relation to content and categories, to have a static, non- dialectical theory concerning this relationship, while at the same time refusing openly to admit it.

conclusions
In fact, it is precisely the detailed study content of recent history which compelled us to reconsider the categories – and therefore the method of marxism. We have questioned these categories not only (or not so much) because this or that particular theory of Marx – or of traditional marxism – had been proved ‘wrong’ in real life, but because we felt that history as we were living it could no longer be grasped through these traditional categories, either in their original form 10 or as ‘amended’ or ‘enlarged’ by post-marx marxists. The course of history, we felt, could neither be grasped, nor changed, by these methods.

Our reexamination of marxism does not take place in a vacuum. We don’t speak from just anywhere or from nowhere at all. We started from revolutionary marxism. But we have now reached the stage where a choice confronts us: to remain marxists or to remain revolutionaries. We to choose between faithfulness to a doctrine which, for a considerable period now, has no longer been animated by any new thought or any meaningful action, and faithfulness to our basic purpose revolutionaries, which is a radical and total formation of society.

Such a radical objective requires first of all that one should understand that which one seeks to transform. It requires that one identifies what elements, in contemporary society, genuine challenge its fundamental assumptions and are in basic (and not merely superficial) conflict with its present structure. But one must go further. Method is not separable from content. Their unity, namely theory, is in its turn not separable from the requirements of revolutionary action. And anyone looking at the real world, must conclude that meaningful revolutionary action can no longer be guided by traditional theory. This has been amply demonstrated for several decades now both by the experience of the mass parties of the ‘left’, and by the experience of the sects.

P. Cardan, The Fate of Marxism (London: Solidarity)
Marky b's blog

• 1 By ‘historical reality’ we obviously don’t mean particular events, separated from all others. We mean the dominant tendencies of social evolution, after all the necessary interpretations have been made.
• 2 K. Marx. Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.
• 3 ‘Universal History is the Last Judgment’. Despite its theological form, this statement, expresses one of Hegel’s most radically atheistic ideas. It means that there is nothing transcendental; that there is no appeal against what happens here and now. We are, definitively, what we are in the process of becoming, what we shall have become.
• 4 In his ‘In Defence of Marxism’.
• 5 See the essay ‘What Is Orthodox Marxism?’ Lukacs’ book ‘History and Class Consciousness. An English translation of this essay was recently published by ‘International Socialism’, Nos. 24 and 25 (obtainable from 36 Gilden Rd., London NW6 ) C. Wright Mills adopts a rather similar viewpoint in his book ‘The Marxists‘.
• 6 The classical example of such a transition is the passage from Kant to Hegel, via Fichte and Schelling. But the basic pattern can be discerned in the later works of Plato, or among the neo-Kantians, from Rickert to Last.
• 7 It is obviously not just a question of turning things upside down. Neither logically nor historically have the categories of physics been ‘simply a result’ (and even less ‘simply a reflection’) of the subject matter. A revolution in the realm of categories may allow one to grasp raw material which hitherto defied definition (as happened with Galileo). Moreover advances in experimental technique may at times ‘compel’ new material to appear. There is therefore a two-way relationship – but certainly no independence – between categories and subject matter.
• 8 See Lukacs ‘The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’ (loc. cit.).
• 9 These considerations are developed mo on p. 20 et seq. of the French text.
• 10 In the present article we cannot enter into a detailed discussion as to which of the concepts of classical marxism have today to be discarded for a real grasp of the nature of the modern world and of the means of changing it. The subject is discussed in detail in an article ‘Recommencer Ia Revolution’ (published in January 1964 in issue No.25 of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’) of which we hope to publish extracts in forthcoming issues.