Introduction: Why the Spanish Revolution Today?

…anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism in general lacked a vision of the problems of political orientation, without which the most powerful and most heroic revolutionary surge is condemned to failure.
Helmut Rüdiger, AIT, Ensayo critico sobre la revolucion española (1940).1

For many years, I had held the classical left anti-Stalinist view that after the “events” of May 1937 in Barcelona—the crushing of the left-centrist POUM2 > and the further marginalization of the anarchists by the Stalinists and by forces in the sway of the Stalinists—the revolution begun in July 1936 was essentially over. My references were classic works such as Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Bolloten’s The Spanish Revolution. And “politically,” this dating is correct. However, Robert Alexander’s two-volume The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and Walther Bernecker’s study of the industrial and agrarian collectives3 show that the Spanish anarchists, who were the great majority of armed workers in Catalonia, who dominated considerable rural agrarian collectives in Aragon, and were also important in the Republican zones of the Levant, Extremadura and Andalucia, remained a social and military force to be reckoned with right up to the end of the Civil War in March 1939, even after losing out on the political terrain in May 1937. The eradication of the primarily anarchist social revolution occurring in July 1936, an eradication carried out by the Stalinists, Socialists, Left Republicans and Catalan nationalists, and finally completed by the fascists, was a work in progress right up until Franco’s final victory. The Spanish Revolution was, in light of this history, the richest and deepest social revolution of the twentieth century. I was rather startled to find Leon Trotsky, major figure of the Russian Revolution and no friend of anarchism, saying, in 1937, “From the first day of the revolution, thanks to its specific weight in the economy of that country, and to its political and cultural level, [the Spanish proletariat] has been, not below, but above the level of the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917.”4 Despite all the factors (international, political, military) working for their demise, the Spanish working class and parts of the peasantry in the Republican zones arrived at the closest approximation of a self-managed society, sustained in different forms over two and a half years, ever achieved in history. Catalonia in 1936 was more broadly industrial than Russia in 1917, and the Catalan, Aragonese and Levantine peasants who formed collectives in 1936 mostly supported the revolution wholeheartedly, in contrast to the grudging support of the Russian peasants for the Bolsheviks, as the little-loved but lesser evil to the Whites. This experience and its implications have not been fully absorbed by the contemporary revolutionary left. Currents describing themselves as anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist have emerged in parts of Europe and the United States in the past few decades, while hardly with the numbers and depth of the “historical” Spanish anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists from 1868 to 1939, nor above all with the same working-class and popular rootedness. For many of them, “Spain” is an historical reference (more often symbolic than seriously studied and absorbed) in the way that “Russia” has been such a reference for many Marxists. Spain was the supreme historical test for anarchism, which it failed, in the same way that Russia was, to date, the supreme test of, at least, Leninism, if not of Marxism itself. But dealing critically with contemporary anarchism is hardly my main concern5 except by ricochet from the failures of anarchism in Spain. The real lessons for today of the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39 are at least twofold: first, the concrete takeover of an incipiently modern industrial region, Catalonia, by workers’ factory collectives, which attempted, in very difficult circumstances and under attack from all sides, to move from the initial, spontaneous local level to regional and national coordination, and a simultaneous takeover of agriculture by peasant collectives with similar attempts at coordination beyond the local. Second, and closely related to the first, the political dimension of the “military question,” the defense and extension of the revolution against domestic and international counter-revolution. The revolution was lost both in the gradual destruction of the workers and peasant collectives and in the replacement of the initial armed militias and urban patrols by a traditional army and police forces. Some anarchist leaders were involved in both processes, and the eminently “pragmatic” reasons for this will be one focus of my study. Further, left-wing military theorists such as the “anarcho-Marxist” Abraham Guillén,6 have shown how politics was as much if not more important than firepower and sheer numbers in determining the outcome of different battles of the Civil War.Finally, I am not writing about Spanish anarchism for historical edification or from some antiquarian impulse, but rather to pose the question, raised by Abad de Santillan7 and generally ignored by most of the contemporary radical left, of how to prepare today, programmatically and practically, for a takeover of a modern capitalist economy where, in contrast to Spain in 1936, shutting down a large swath of socially useless and socially noxious activity will be a top priority from day one.

I. Part One: Theses

1. The history of the origins and development of the Spanish Revolution of 1936–39, and particularly of its anarchist majority, is as complex, if not more so, than that of the Russian Revolution. It is significantly less known globally because the Russian Revolution had a much greater global projection8
   and because anarchism’s defeat in Spain completed a decades-long eclipse of anarchism by the significantly more widespread impact of Soviet and other “socialisms.” Spain, as late as the final loss of its last colonies to the United States in 1898 and even in 1936, was still a predominantly agricultural country, with pockets of industrial development mainly in Catalonia and the Basque provinces, and mining in Asturias. Nonetheless, Spain had its first general strike in 1855, and the working class was an active force in the ephemeral First Republic of 1873–74,9 Spain was, in short, more directly influenced by developments in western Europe and at an earlier stage than Russia. Spain had a socialist party from 1879 onward with a working-class base in Asturias and Madrid, but it entered the twentieth century, and indeed the revolutionary crisis of the 1930s, with a far larger anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movement, dating from 1868, especially in Catalonia and Andalucia.

2. Understanding this “anomaly” of a mass anarchist movement in both Spanish industry and agriculture in 1936, when anarchism had been largely superseded by socialism and then communism in most of western Europe (starting with nearby France and Italy), is a key, if not the key, to understanding the special contours of the Spanish Revolution.10 Gerald Brenan’s classic11 emphasizes the historical decentralization of Spain with multiple regions in constant centrifugal opposition to the artificial centralism of Madrid, as a major factor in the ongoing appeal of anti-statist anarchism, above all where prosperous peasant smallholders were absent or weak. Socialism, in the form of the PSOE12
   was a pedestrian local copy of the more mature Second International French and German parties of northern Europe. If the historic split internationally between anarchism and Marxian socialism, in 1872, stemmed from the Marxian insistence on political activity and trade unionism, the lack of any sustained bourgeois democracy in Spain hardly provided conditions in which such reformist activity could take root. Spanish anarchism in its early decades was more propelled toward actions organized underground, such as innumerable local peasant uprisings in Andalucia, crushed in isolation, or lightning strikes against industrial firms where worker organizations had little sustained above-ground existence and few if any strike funds.

3. At the same time, anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism in Spain were quite impressive in their reach. (“Anarchism” refers to the earlier decades of Bakuninist local insurrectionism and then the demoralized individual terrorism of the early to mid-1890s, “anarcho-syndicalism” refers to the later focus on mass organization when these earlier forms showed themselves to be dead ends.) The movement placed great store in education, and had countless newspapers; it had “rationalist” schools and “ateneos,” or cultural centers; it produced numerous books and pamphlets, including translations of Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin and Reclus (among others). Brenan recounts peasants riding donkeys on back roads, reading anarchist literature, and Diaz del Moral’s classic13 describes illiterate peasants memorizing their favorite articles to recite them in front of enraptured audiences in remote villages. In 1918–1920, the mere arrival of the news of the Russian Revolution set off insurrections in some of these places in Andalucia, the south.

4. A survey of anarchist ideology shows common traits that persisted up to the revolution and civil war. Anarchism comes across as a rationalist theory, an extreme left version of radical Enlightenment. In part because of the break with “authoritarian” Marxism, anarchist theory shows no engagement with the post-Enlightenment development in German philosophy from Hegel through Feuerbach to Marx.14 Marxism, arguing for a transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat,” was for the anarchists a “statist” world view.15 and was indeed centralist; anarchism was decentralist and federationist. It was radically atheist, but lacked the supersession or realization of religion,16 the “heart of a heartless world” one finds in Marx. It has no notion of historical development or a strategy flowing from such development; the potential for a radical egalitarian society is always now, once the landowner, the priest, the police and the notary public are removed, regardless of the “development of the productive forces” which exercise Marxists. Hence anarchism did not see much use for concrete analysis of specific conditions,17 or for the critique of political economy as developed by Marx in the Grundrisse and Capital. “Anarchism has an ideal to realize,” as Guy Debord put it. Marx, by contrast, says in the Manifesto that communism is “not an ideal sprung from the head of some world reformer,” but rather emphasizes the immanence of the new society in this one, “the real movement unfolding before our eyes.” Words such as “the Idea,”18 “our ideal” and “justice” pervade anarchist ideology right through the Civil War. This echoes eighteenth-century Enlightenment theories of Man, abstracted from any historical development or specificity. Diaz del Moral reports Andalucian peasants asking the local latifundia owner when the day of equality for all will dawn. Anarchism in Spain also had much of the ideology of the “patria chica,” the excessive focus on the local that pervaded (and still pervades) much of Spanish life.19
   It was an easy step from rejection of the centralism of Madrid to rejection of the centralism of Marx. Anarchists inherited the federalism of Pi y Margall, briefly head of state in the First Republic, and disciple of Proudhon. Many anarchists looked down on socialist strikes for mere economic improvement,20
   the “school” of the working class in struggle, in Marx’s view. Their vision of the new society was austere. Their social centers banned alcohol, tobacco, and gambling; where they could, anarchists shut down brothels, preaching instead free love and free unions outside marriage. In some cases they shut down cafés as sites of frivolity and idleness. The anarchist Mujeres Libres (Free Women), founded in 1934, fought for full equality between the sexes but attacked “feminism” as an ideology of middle-class women. Brenan, who lived for long years in rural Andalucia and knew many anarchists, may have gone too far in characterizing them as latter-day “Lutherans,” reacting against the luxury of Spanish Catholicism, but captured something of their austere rejection of the sensuous decadence of the dominant culture around them. They had an uncritical faith in science and technology which would strike most people today as overblown. Some practiced nudism, vegetarianism or ate only uncooked fruit, and studied Esperanto as the universal language of the future.

5. Despite disclaimers, many of the divisions that have split the Marxist movement, such as reform vs. revolution, recurred in different guise within the anarchist movement. After a period of ebb during the 1880s, anarchism revived, and in 1888 a split took place between labor-oriented and insurrectionist currents. A long-term division existed between a Bakunin-influenced “collectivist anarchism” and the Kropotkin-inspired “anarchist communism.”21
   A new upturn in mass struggle in the 1909 “Tragic Week” in Barcelona led to the founding of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo) in 1910, focused, like many syndicalist movements in Europe at the time (Italy, France, Britain, the American IWW) on the strategy of the general strike to usher in the new society.22
   The CNT’s influence peaked initially (prior to 1936) in 1919, in the wave of general strikes following World War I, and it created the sindicato unico (single union) to deal with the antagonism between craft and industrial workers, much like the IWW.

   The defeat of the general strike (“La Canadiense”) in early 1919 began a downturn, and the following years of ebb were dominated by the “pistolerismo” of hundreds of tit-for-tat assassinations between employers and prominent union militants, a period ended by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923–1930) and years of underground illegality and exile for the CNT. In response to this difficult situation, and also to keep the reformist wing of the movement in check, the FAI (Federacion Anarquista Iberica) was founded in 1927 by radical elements, sometimes called “anarcho-Bolsheviks.” From 1917 until 1921–22, the Russian Bolsheviks had for their part courted anarcho-syndicalists in western Europe, but the experiences of the latter in the Soviet Union, and the repression of Kronstadt and of various Russian libertarians, alienated them definitively, reconfirming their suspicions of Marxist “statism” and centralism.

   Anarchist claims to “apoliticism” and “antipoliticism” were also belied by the electoral participation of the anarchist working-class base, when the CNT-FAI lifted the policy of abstentionism in the 1931 elections, providing the margin of victory for republican forces. Disappointed by the anti-worker and anti-peasant policies of the Republic, anarchists abstained in 1933, elections followed by the hard-right turn of the “biennio negro” (two black years). As a result, the CNT-FAI again lifted the abstention policy for the February 1936 elections—even Durruti called for a vote for the Popular Front—and anarchists provided the margin of victory for the left parties, though claiming they voted only in hopes of freeing some 9,000 anarchist political prisoners.23
   After the left won, the prisoners were freed by mass break-ins by crowds at the jails, which the Republican authorities did not dare repress.

6. Thus the stage was set for the crisis of the Second Republic (1931–1939), culminating in revolution and civil war after 1936. Spain had been spared participation in World War I, which tore apart the large socialist parties of France, Italy, and Germany, giving rise after 1917 to mass Communist Parties there, and also posing a severe test for other anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements, where important sections and figures (Hervé in France, Kropotkin in Russia) rallied to the nationalist colors. By contrast, the Spanish Communist Party,24
   having no “social patriot” majority to denounce, was a stillborn sect of a few thousand breaking away from the PSOE youth, then forced underground during the Primo de Rivera years and then with the return to legality from 1931 to 1934 practicing the sterile Third Period “social fascist” policy against the PSOE and the anarchists, thus being hardly larger or more rooted in the working class in 1936 than it had been at its founding.25 The CNT, despite the expulsion of thirty moderate (“Treintista”) union leaders, towered over both the PSOE, to say nothing of the PCE, in both numbers and rootedness in the Catalan working class and Andalucian peasantry.

7. Gen. Francisco Franco’s coup in July 1936 was aimed at ending the social chaos of the Second Republic in the form of strikes, land seizures by peasants, street battles between leftists and rightists, and parliamentary impotence. One should recall the European context of right-wing military governments throughout eastern Europe, the first fascist state, founded by Mussolini in 1922, Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany in 1933, and Austrian dictator Dollfuss’s bombardment of working-class housing in Vienna in 1934. The latter two especially emboldened the Spanish right and far-right, and strengthened the resolve of the PSOE, PCE and CNT-FAI on the left. The Stalinist Third International’s 1934–35 “anti-fascist” turn to alliances with social democrats (yesterday’s “social fascists”) and “progressive bourgeois elements” led to the electoral victories of the Popular Front in Spain in February 1936 and then in France in May, followed in the latter by mass factory occupations in May–June.

8. Franco’s coup was defeated by spontaneous, heavy street fighting over 3–4 days, above all in Barcelona and also in Madrid, and various forms of popular resistance in about 60 percent of Spanish territory. In Barcelona, the CNT and the FAI were the absolute masters of the situation, based on the armed working class. Wherever the coup triumphed, in some cases almost without resistance as in leftist bastions such as Zaragoza—the most anarchist city in Spain—and Seville (not to mention large parts of the anarchist Andalucian countryside) mass executions of militants (20,000 in Seville) followed immediately.26

9. It is here that we arrive at the nub of this text. The Spanish anarchists had made the revolution, beyond their wildest expectations, and did not know what to do with it. On the night of the victory in Barcelona, top leaders of the CNT-FAI, including Juan Garcia Oliver and Buenaventura Durruti, called on Luis Companys, a Catalan nationalist and head of the Generalitat, the Catalan regional government. The army had dissolved or gone over to Franco; the police had also largely disintegrated, and were being replaced by armed anarchist patrols; the bourgeois state in Catalonia at that moment was reduced to a few buildings. Companys told the CNT-FAI leaders that the power was theirs, and if they wished, he would resign and be a soldier in their army. The CNT-FAI leaders decided to leave standing the skeleton of the bourgeois state and its momentarily powerless head, Companys, and instead formed the Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias, which became for all intents and purposes the effective state power in the following months.27

   The anarchists, as they put it in their own words, had to either impose a “full totalitarian dictatorship” or leave the parties supporting the Popular Front intact. They chose the latter course, and through the door of the small, powerless edifice, which they did not dissolve, came, in the following months, under the cautious management of Companys, all the forces of the counter-revolution. Everything in the anarchists’ history militated against “taking power” as “authoritarian” “centralist” Marxist theory would dictate, and it hardly helped that “Marxism” in Spain at that moment was the lumbering reformist PSOE (albeit with a leftward-moving faction), the left-centrist POUM28
   and the small PCE, barely recovered from its 15 years of sectarian marginality and not yet pumped up into a mass party of the frightened middle classes by Soviet money, weapons and NKVD “advisors.”29
   30

III. The Anarcho-syndicalists after the revolution: political, economic and military considerations

I begin this section with a thought experiment. What if the CNT-FAI, instead of leaving intact the Catalan state under Companys, had decided to “go for broke” (“ir a por el todo” was the Spanish formulation, favored by an important number of anarcho-syndicalists such as Juan Garcia Oliver) and replace the skeletal bourgeois state with full working-class power in some approximation of immediately revocable delegates in “soviets” (class-wide institutions) as the ultimate “authority,” since worker control of industry and peasant collectives were already widespread? This is of course “history as if.” We know with 20/20 hindsight what really happened, and tracing in detail the destruction of the revolution by the forces of the Popular Front, led by the Communist Party and the PSUC31
is less our focus than the anarchist blind spots which facilitated it. (The role of the Communist Party in the internal counter-revolution is relatively well known,32
; how the anarchists were “taken,” and taken in, less so.) None other than Durruti told a Canadian radio interviewer in August 1936, commenting on the prospects in Spain outside Catalonia and in the rest of Europe: “We are alone.” Grandizo Munis, on the other hand, without mentioning the debate within the CNT and the FAI, says that

the working-class organs of power should have unified on a national level and formally proclaimed the dissolution of the government… The situation…was characterized by an incomplete atomization of political power in the hands of the workers and the peasants. I use the word “atomization” because duality is insufficient to give a complete picture of the real distribution of powers. Duality indicates two rival, contending powers, with a capacity and will to struggles on both sides. The bourgeois state was only in this position three months after the July days… In the meantime, the atomized power in the local government-committees was the only existing authority that was obeyed, limited solely by its lack of centralization and by the right-wing interference of the working-class bureaucracies… This great experiment of the Spanish Revolution offered the world the paradox of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists acting as the principle agent of the Marxist conception, and negating in fact the anarchist conception.33

The common slogan of the Popular Front was “win the war first, then make the revolution,” an argument still made by its apologists and its ideological heirs proposing similar strategies today.34
But three objections to such a formulation immediately come to mind, recalling Rosa Luxemburg’s remark that “who posits different ends also posits different means.” First is the failure of the Republic to offer independence or even autonomy to Spanish Morocco (the Rif area in the north), which would have had the potential of undercutting Franco’s rearguard, his base of operations, and, in the Moroccan legionaries, an important source of his best troops. Second was the failure of the Republic to conduct guerrilla warfare behind Franco’s lines, appealing to the many workers and peasants who were by no means pro-fascist but who, in July 1936, happened to find themselves in the territory that fell to the coup.35
The Moroccan question immediately illuminates the military limitations of a bourgeois republic which was not about to give up its Moroccan protectorate to save itself, especially since doing so would immediately alienate France, which controlled the larger part of Morocco36
and from which Republican leaders vainly hoped for material aid. (Juan Garcia Oliver proposed guerrilla activity behind Franco’s lines in 1938, but nothing came of it.) Third is the strategy of the “people in arms” as later theorized by Guillén, which had saved Madrid from Franco’s forces (including German and Italian personnel and equipment) in November 1936, something considered little less than a military miracle. The navy was also initially almost entirely in anarchist hands, but by summer 1937 it had been taken over by the Communist Party. The Republic never used the navy throughout the war, in spite of its potential to control the Straits of Gibraltar, entrance to the Mediterranean.

The international situation, dominated by the lengthening shadows of fascism on the march, was not favorable to revolution. The bourgeois democracies, Britain and France, declared a policy of “non-intervention” and blockaded Spanish ports, a policy which, especially since Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were actively supporting Franco with aircraft, weaponry and military personnel, was a mockery. In 1935, the Soviet Union under Stalin had made an alliance with France for mutual security after Hitler’s seizure of power, increasing Stalin’s interest in maintaining the European status quo, which was threatened by revolution on France’s borders. As inadequate as Soviet shipments of arms and supplies were (the common metaphor was an “eyedropper,” enough to prolong the war, not enough to win it), one can hardly imagine ongoing Soviet support for a full-blown revolution led by anarchists. On the other hand, some might argue, the French working class had just staged a major strike wave, with factory occupations, in May–June 1936, mere weeks before the war. That strike wave had been stopped in its tracks by the intervention of the French Communist Party, hewing to Soviet concern not to weaken its new ally. But the fact remains that during the ensuing 2 ½ years of war, neither the French nor any other working class in the “democracies” (Britain and the United States for starters) took any serious action to force governments to aid Spain, or even to lift the “non-intervention” policy,37
which was blocking shipments of food and weapons at the French border.

Prior to July 1936, the Republic had alienated parts of the peasantry and the rural landless workers by its insipid efforts at land reform. In September 1932, an Agrarian Statute was passed, establishing the Institute of Agrarian Reform (IRA), which by July 1936 had distributed very little land.38
The spread of land seizures in the last months before the coup and the establishment of agrarian communes on expropriated land afterwards reflected highly different landholding patterns: small proprietorship and fixed terms tenancy in Galicia and the Basque provinces; sharecropping in most of Catalonia; a mixture in Aragon; small and medium property and sharecropping in the Levante; vast semi-feudal large landholdings, with millions of landless laborers, west and south of Madrid in Extremadura and in Andalucia. The CNT was strongest in Aragon, the Levant, Andalucia and Galicia.

IV. Political, Military and Economic Situation

The CNT Congress of May 1936 was held in anticipation of the outbreak of mass action at any moment. The moderate “Treintistas” were readmitted. The Congress sketched outlines for an anarchist military and drew up an agrarian program. Diego Abad de Santillan and Joan Peiró, two anarchist economists, attempted to introduce concrete preparation for a revolutionary takeover. But

one cannot consider the [idyllic program]…as a guideline for the encounter with the questions posed. In the course of the war, the word “commune” almost completely disappeared and…was replaced by the expression “collective,” but the structural organization of the units of self-management also differed considerably from the model elaborated in Zaragoza. The lack of a sense of reality shown in May 1936 seems connected…above all to the lack of a well thought-out theory and to systematic projection on the macro-sociological and macroeconomic level of theories which possibly might be applicable to one isolated village.39

On July 17, Franco flew from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco, and from there launched the coup on the 19th, moving (with German help) thousands of Moroccan legionaries to key points. Faced with this situation and workers in various major cities demanding weapons, the Madrid government on July 20, its back to the wall, reluctantly agreed to arm the workers, whom it feared more than Franco. The rebellion failed in Catalonia, Madrid, the Levante, New Castile, the Basque region, Santander, Asturias and half of Extremadura. The rebels controlled most of Andalucia, southern Extremadura, Mallorca, Old Castile, Navarre and Aragon. The anarchists had been key in Catalonia, the Levante, Santander, and much of Asturias. On July 24, the first militia organized at the Paseo de Gracia in Barcelona, estimated at between 2,000 and 5,000 men. In next few days, 150,000 volunteered. The Durruti column left immediately, with the intention of liberating Zaragoza within the next ten days.

The most critical military question thrown up in the first year of the war, however, was that of transforming the militias into a professional army. This posed the political dimension of the war point blank. The strongest advocates of this professionalization were the Communists, who immediately set about building their 5th Regiment. By the fall of 1936, the CNT-FAI, after various reverses on the Aragon front and the failure to liberate Zaragoza, grudgingly came around to that view as well. To understand the backdrop of these clashes, it is necessary to keep in mind the profound social and cultural revolution which, for the first few weeks after July 1936, swept Barcelona. Not only were most factories occupied and expropriated, and their owners shot or run off, with armed CNT militias replacing the army and the police, and churches burned, but on a cultural level as well, it seemed that all hierarchy in daily life had dissolved; even rich bourgeois disguised themselves in worker clothing, the formal “usted” was replaced everywhere by the informal “tu,” “Señor” by “compañero,” and all the bowing and scraping and toadying of the old regime was replaced overnight by forthright waiters and shopkeepers and bootblacks looking clients in the eye. “Everybody is friends with everybody in a minute” wrote Borkenau, who arrived in August. By September, he noted that “revolutionary fever is withering away.” Visitors who had lived these weeks and returned mere months later already noticed a conservative change, and a few months after that, by early 1937, a further hardening.40

From July 1936 onward, when the CNT-FAI made its fateful decision to leave intact the Catalan Generalitat under Companys, all the parties of the Popular Frontin Catalonia, especially the PSUC (Communists), but also the PSOE (Socialists) and the Esquerra Catalan (Catalan Republicans, the party of Companys) began to move against it, slowly and stealthily at first, then more deliberately. Well before the CNT decided to join the national government in Madrid, it was already participating in regional and municipal state institutions; the decision to accept four ministerial portfolios in November 1936 was simply the culmination of a process. Virtually at the same time as the departure of the first militias for Zaragoza, on July 25 the central government in Madrid decreed the creation of a state committee to intervene in industry to “control” industrial companies and if necessary to “direct them.”

In Barcelona, workers took over most large factories, all important services and transport, hotels, and large warehouses. They did not touch the banks because of long-standing anarchist contempt for money, but left them rather (and fatefully) in the hands of the socialist UGT,41
which would soon be controlled by the Communists of the PSUC. In the port of Barcelona, longshoremen suppressed the hated middlemen who controlled access to jobs. In many places, where assemblies took over, technicians and sometimes even bosses, when willing, were integrated into them. All 745 bakeries in Barcelona were integrated into one socialized system. All of this resulted from a spontaneous popular wave, outside any organization. “Because of their contempt for the political dimension of power, the anarchists paid little attention to the institutionalization of its functions…”42
From the beginning, on the other hand, the CP pushed for centralization and single management. The anarchist economist Diego Abad de Santillan, now confronted, mere weeks after the May CNT Congress in Zaragoza, with a real revolution, based his organizational project on the individual enterprise. Communes, in his view, should be federated. “What was really new in Abad de Santillan’s project was the proposal for a Federal Economic Council with economic and administrative functions of coordination. [His] fundamental purpose was to overcome, as anachronistic, the economic conception based on local-communalist principles and to reach ‘the highest grade of coordination of all productive factors. He felt that the anarchist conception of the economy could not be immediately put into practice, and envisioned a period of economic transition in which ‘all social movements’ would have the right for ‘free experiments.’ But he envisioned no transition period in the political sphere and argued for the immediate suppression of the state.”43

On July 31, the Catalan government issued an order recognizing rights for factory committees created spontaneously, and to assure salaries for workers. This was followed on August 2 with a decree on state control of all industries abandoned by their owners. The anarcho-syndicalists viewed the economic policy of the Republic in Madrid as conservative and harmful to the revolution.44
The Catalan government, on the other hand, given the CNT’s overwhelming preponderance there, was obliged to sanction much more radical legislation.

On August 7, a collective of 800 firms for conversion to war production (non-existent in Catalonia at the time) was created. Some months later, even bourgeois politicians such as Companys underscored the extraordinary role of the industrial workers in the spontaneous construction of a previously non-existent armaments industry. The Communists, on the other hand, pushed for control from Madrid, leading to political appointments and a proliferation of bureaucrats. In the first months in industry generally, workers’ new sense of responsibility often led to increased productivity.45 The initial anarchist error, however, was neglect of a general overview of the economy and a tolerance for too long of blind “enterprise egoism.” Out of this tension, and many other “exogenous” factors, by late 1937 planning and centralized direction in the form of national firms had taken over.

In this accelerated flow of developments, virtually from day to day, it is impossible to separate the political, military and economic spheres which gradually crushed the initial euphoria of July; clearly, political and economic decisions influenced military strategy, as has already been seen in the questions of Morocco, guerrilla warfare behind Franco’s lines, and “professionalization” of the original militias. In early September 1936, Largo Caballero, the socialist politician and “the Spanish Lenin,” became prime minister and minister of defense of the Republic, and moved to create a centralized military command. In this context, the Communist Party extended its influence in the war ministry. The Stalinist commander “El Campesino,” after his break with the CP, said years later that the Russians had especially equipped his Fifth Regiment, which was a virtually independent force, and which attracted pro-Republican officers with its greater efficiency. On September 6, the anarchists in Asturias accepted militarization, as did Ricardo Sanz, Durruti’s successor. Militarization meant the return of hierarchy of rank, uniforms, saluting, and the end of democratic assemblies to elect commanders and to decide on strategy. Militarization began on September 29, and the first Soviet aid arrived in early October, further strengthening the PCE and the PSUC, which were growing rapidly, based on recruitment of frightened middle-class elements and land-owning peasants who feared for their property. As if to focus attention, in September 1936 Franco’s forces captured Irun and San Sebastian in the north.

In September 1936 as well, the CNT, the PSUC, and the POUM entered the Catalan Generalitat, and the CNT accepted the voluntary dissolution of Central Committee of Militias, which had been the de facto government of Catalonia since the revolution. Shortly afterwards, the CNT demanded socialization of the banks, Church property, large agrarian property, large commercial and transport companies, workers control in industry and private commerce, and the management of the means of production and exchange by the unions. From September 25 to December 17, Joan Fabregas, another CNT economist and proto-technocrat, accepted the post of “consejero de la Economia” for Catalonia, and during his tenure issued 25 decrees for regulation of the economy and 86 related orders. In his conception, production was to be coordinated through industrial councils constituted by the unions, and these in turn would be under a higher system of coordination, the Consejo de Economia, which not only “oriented” the economy but “regulated it” by different technical bodies. When Fabregas took over, the Catalan economy was in “disorder and chaos.” On October 2, he called on Catalan workers to halt takeovers until there were homogeneous guidelines for economic transformation, but this call was not heeded. Tension quickly arose in the Consejo de Economia between the left Republicans, the PSUC and the UGT on one hand, and the POUM, the CNT and the FAI on the other, over the collectivizations. Reflecting the growing influence of the conservative forces, the Republic on October 7 issued a land decree tilted toward landowners, and designed to control the collectives and slow their further diffusion. By spring 1937, Communist-controlled police and military units would begin attacks on collectives. Already in October 1936, in the Aragonese comarca (county) of Monzon, the CNT and the increasingly crypto-Communist UGT had faced off in a skirmish in which thirty people were killed.

Further, on October 23, the Catalan CNT and the UGT signed an action program which made no mention of socialization. In signing, the CNT was hoping (in vain) to obtain weapons for its unarmed militias on the Aragon front, to end the Stalinist campaign of calumny against it, and finally to calm the petty bourgeoisie, as well as the peasant middle classes, which were leaving the CNT for the more moderate UGT.

The next day, CNT leader Juan Garcia Oliver, who had been head of military affairs for the Comité Central de Milicias, pushed for creation of an officer training school. Abad de Santillan, on the other hand, was a strong opponent of militarization.46 Camillo Berneri, an important Italian anarchist fighting in Spain, was also opposed. Militarization meant not only (as previously indicated) uniforms, ranks, and saluting, but also the appointment of political commissars. The Catalan decree on collectivizations had been seen by the anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT as way to control them. For the moment, in the Consejo de Economia, there were anarchists, POUMistas, socialists and left Republicans. The UGT and the CNT had three delegates each; the PSUC, the POUM and the FAI two each; with one each for several other organizations. Its program was improvised in the onrush of events. For the CNT and the FAI, entry into the Consejo de Economia was yet one further step away from its “apolitical” stance. The Consejo announced the creation of the Caixa de Credit Industrial e Comercial (CCIC), designed to supply credit to the collectives. The Caixa grew out of the experience of the first collectivizations. In these early months, a firm-centered egoism (“egoismo de empresa”) had already become manifest. The Caixa was also created to circumvent the crypto-Communist UGT majority among bank employees and the dependence of most banks on their headquarters in Madrid. With a one-year delay in its creation, the CCIC was not formally opened until November 10, 1937, by which time anarchist influence generally was in serious decline, despite their large numbers. Matters were greatly complicated by the steady fall of Catalonian industrial production from July 1936 onward. In these deliberations, the CNT had seen its initial error and wanted to avoid workers thinking of themselves as the new owners of their individual factories instead of being motivated by solidarity with other sectors of the economy. On October 31, 1936, Fabregas issued orders developing the decree of October 24 to limit spontaneous actions of workers and to control production to the extent possible. Workers’ control in a firm henceforth required many documents, giving the state fuller control.

Throughout these efforts at the coordination of the Catalan economy, the long-standing anarchist “ascetic” concept of a new order was present. We have already mentioned the anarchists’ contempt for money and their lack of interest in collectivizing the banks because of this. Federica Montseny, a major CNT figure, said on the other hand that the old dream of the immediate abolition of money was “infantile revolutionism.” The CNT replaced the word “salario” (wage) with “asignación,” but in reality this often amounted to little more than semantics.

In the rural anarchism of Andalucia, the principle of “take what you need” from the collective store gave way to a differentiated family salary based on specific needs. Ration cards were supplemented by “pocket money” for personal “vices” (wine, cigarettes) and trips outside the village. In the Catalan collectives, money was rarely suppressed. In many “anarcho-communist” collectives, individualism re-imposed itself; the exit of a few small property owners led on occasion to the blow-up of the collective. “Libretas de consumo,” or consumption booklets, became the common practice. Milicianos at the front sent savings to their collective, not to their families. All in all, a general lack of accounting makes a judgment on the functioning of agrarian collectives difficult.

Franco’s offensive against Madrid was imminent. At the beginning of November, after highly charged internal debate, Juan Garcia Oliver and three other members of the CNT accepted ministerial portfolios in Largo Caballero’s cabinet in the central government of Madrid. This followed, as indicated, prior anarchist participation in municipal and regional governments. Garcia Oliver became Minister of Justice47 ; Juan Peiró, the “Treintista” economist, became Minister of Industry; Juan Lopez Sanchez, another Treintista, became Minister of Commerce, and Federica Montseny Minister of Health. The four CNTistas were surprised, at their first cabinet meeting, to find the top order of business the move of the capital from besieged Madrid to Valencia. They felt, in fact, that they had been invited into the government precisely to give their cover to this obvious retreat, which they opposed. Franco expected to be attending mass in Madrid within a week, but that mass was postponed for 2 ½ years. During the ensuing battle, however, the Largo Caballero government moved its capital to Valencia.

The Battle of Madrid began on November 6. Terror bombing by the Franco forces, far from cowing the population, actually brought them into the streets in the “people in arms” strategy later theorized by Guillén. The International Brigades arrived on November 10 and played an important role, as did the anarchists of the Durruti Column. On November 19, however, Durruti was killed, probably by a fascist sniper. He, more than any other single figure, was “the” symbol of the libertarian revolution in Spain. A few days later, a million people marched at his commemoration in Barcelona. The battle for Madrid continued into January 1937, before stalling in a standoff, one which would be broken only in March 1939. The statist institutionalization of the revolution proceeded apace. In December 1936, the Catalan Generalitat was reorganized with the CNT taking over the councillorship of defense. Soviet aid also peaked at that time, most of it going to its political and military supporters. The Soviet ambassador, Marcel Rosenberg, met with Largo Caballero daily, often for hours. In early 1937, the government decreed that regular municipal councils, which had been replaced by revolutionary committees, be reestablished. A plenum criticized the deficiencies of the collectives to date for poor organization, lack of technical management, extravagant economic ideas and little experience. New efforts at unity between the CNT and the UGT were broached. By the middle of January, the anarcho-syndicalists were calling for a centrally-planned economy, and on January 30, 1937, a statute aimed at concentration of all collectivized firms was passed. A further blow was the fall on February 8 of Malaga, whose anarchist commander was condemned to death under pressure from the Communist Party; he was later pardoned after an inquiry revealed the equal culpability of the CP in the debacle.This growing tension between the PCE-PSUC and forces to its left, the POUM and the CNT-FAI, came to a head in Barcelona in May 1937.48 For months, the Stalinist media had been inundating the Republic and the world with denunciations of the “Trotskyist-fascist” POUM; with the anarchists, on the other hand, they were forced to remain more circumspect, correctly assessing that they might well lose a direct military confrontation. May Day celebrations had been cancelled for fear of an outbreak of fighting between the CNT and the UGT. The telephone exchange in downtown Barcelona was dominated by the CNT since July 1936. The Communist police chief of Barcelona arrived there with the intention of taking over the building. The situation escalated, with the CNT, the POUM, the Friends of Durruti,49 and the Anarchist Youth building their barricades, facing off against the barricades of the PSUC and the UGT. (The Stalinists were also intent on the ouster of Largo Caballero as prime minister, with all his prestige, still intact, in the Spanish working class.) Largo Caballero, having tired of PCE-PSUC and Soviet pressure on his government, had issued a decree on April 21 requiring his personal approval of all commissars, and for the few further months until his orchestrated ouster, he moved closer to the CNT. The POUM and the POUM Youth had been rapidly moving to the left and were working with the Friends of Durruti. The standoff continued on May 4, and from Valencia, Juan Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny broadcast radio appeals to their comrades to lay down arms and return to work. The CNT daily Solidaridad Obrera echoed their appeal. Anarchist columns at the front, prepared to march on both Barcelona and Madrid, stopped in their tracks.50 The Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri was murdered by the Stalinists on May 5. British destroyers appeared just off the bay, rumored to be preparing to intervene. Fighting spread to the Barcelona suburbs and other towns along the coast. It was put down by 4,000 Republican Guardias de Asalto, the elite police force, arriving from Valencia. At dawn on May 7 the CNT issued another radio appeal for “normality.” By May 8, the city was finally quiet, with hundreds killed and thousands wounded. The gap between the anarchists in the streets and the CNT ministers in Valencia had become unbridgeable. Politically, the revolution begun in July 1936 was dead. There remained, however, the tasks of grinding down the industrial and agrarian collectives and dealing with the still considerable CNT-FAI regiments at the front, however professionalized they may have become.51
The four CNT-FAI ministers left the Republican government in the wake of the events in Barcelona, and Largo Caballero resigned shortly thereafter. The anarchists were under no illusions about the trail of errors they left in their wake, as reported to the workers in a balance sheet of their activity. The ex–Minister of Commerce Juan Lopez had been blocked in his projects because of the opposition of Largo Caballero and all defenders of the status quo: “We have to recognize the uselessness of our governmental participation in the economic sphere.” The CNT made a new unity overture to the UGT but it came to nothing. On May 25, 1937, the government issued a decree requiring collectivized firms to join a commercial register; they thus became legal “judicial personalities” continuous with the old firms they had replaced. “The legalization of collectivization led, through state control, to the undoing of the revolution; the final steps of this policy, which had been successfully pushed by the Communists, energetically supported and passively tolerated by the anarchists were openly visible after the crisis of May 1937…”52 On June 18, the government required registration of all radio stations and two months later prohibited all criticism of the Soviet Union.

In late June, the CNT was also expelled from from the Generalitat, and there was a temporary ban on its daily Solidaridad Obrera. In August, the Stalinist General Lister began his attacks on the rural collectives in Aragon, and the POUM was pushed out of Catalan Consejo de Economia. The Stalinist offensive in all institutions of the Republic continued unabated. In fall 1937 at the UGT Congress, the Catalan Stalinist Ruiz Ponseti, member of the PSUC, proposed the elimination of trade union delegates in all firms, attacking the “excess of the intervention of the democratic principle in the constitution of the enterprise councils.” Events were pushing the libertarians in the same direction; in September 1937, the Congress of the CNT, the FAI, and the Libertarian Youth demanded the immediate nationalization of all war industries, foreign commerce, mines and banking, as well as the municipalization of housing, public services, health and social assistance. They conceded the need for private enterprises in light industry, retail commerce and in small agrarian property. This was a real departure from the Zaragoza program and the “pure” anarchist line. As in the May events in Barcelona, the congress showed the emerging divorce between the base and the leaders of the CNT, a clear process of “oligarquization”53 The plenum declared: “The CNT has understood that there cannot be a prosperous economy, speaking collectively, without centralized control and coordination in its administrative aspects.”

On November 20, 1937, the Generalitat issued the “decree of special interventions” giving the government an override of worker-elected factory inspectors. In response to this and other developments, the anarchists attacked in particular the “multiplication of the army of parasites” and the impenetrability of the countless commissions. On December 1, Ruiz Ponseti, in the Consejo de Economia, said that directors named by workers lacked the necessary technical formation and were thus unfit to assume management positions.

A further CNT Plenum met in January 1938. “The tendency to centralization and concentration of forces in the leadership of the union was patent at this plenum…”54 It dispensed with previous assembly format and had instead a prepared agenda. In unprecedented fashion, the national committee intervened directly in all debates. “With the creation of labor inspectors, union committees of control, administrative and technical councils, people in charge of distributing work (in many cases with the power to lay off workers), and directors given full powers…the CNT was converted into a bureaucratic-centralist organization which gave up the principles of rank-and-file autonomy and responsible self-decision for a total hierarchical restructuring and economic planning. The process of centralization imposed by the war in every area did not stop at the doors of the union organization itself.” Vernon Richards, English anarchist, said these decisions meant the end of “the CNT as a revolutionary organization controlled by its members.” Bernecker concurred:

The abandonment…of the original anarchist economic program must be attributed on one hand to their interpretive weaknesses and a simplified conception of the economic process, which was not understood in the slightest, and on the other hand, because of the war, the unavoidable economic centralization and global planning advocated from the beginning by the Communists…the process which led from the “libertarian” economic configuration to the dirigist interventionism of the state, from the programmatic declaration of September 1936 to the Expanded Economic Plenum (1938), showed the adoption of “authoritarian” schemes of organization in industry and in the internal structure of the CNT.

This process was opposed by the Friends of Durruti.

The Friends of Durruti had an intransigent position close to the Trotskyist wing of the POUM. They called for struggle not only against the Communists of the PCE and the PSUC, against the bourgeois parties, the state, the government, etc. but also fought against the moderate line of the committees of the CNT and the FAI. They called for a new revolution.55

V. Agrarian Collectives

Nearly a year passed before the CNT created a competent agrarian organization for all Republican territory (the Federación Nacional de Campesinos). Its principles, by summer 1937, were in open contradiction with certain basic anarchist postulates. Mandatory decisions taken on a national level were incompatible with decisions coming “from below.” As Bernecker puts it, “after an initial period of sacrificial solidarity, mutual aid and aid given freely with nothing in return, the unions—as also occurred in industry—in many prosperous agrarian collectives had to fight against the ‘neo-capitalism’ of the latter which did not want to help other collectives in deficit…”56

1. Catalonia

   In Catalonia, initially, there had been only informal criteria for entry into rural collectives; the CNT repeatedly stated that small proprietors did not need fear for their property. Rent, electricity, water, medicine, hospices for elderly and infirm were free. But already in August 1936, the Catalan government created mandatory membership for independent peasants in the Catalan peasants’ union, a measure aimed at creating a counterweight to CNT influence in the industrial collectives. Tenant farmers were attracted to the PSUC (once again, the CP in Catalonia) for its propaganda aimed at small peasant landowners. By January 1937, the Catalan government was trying to sabotage rural collectives. A CNT regional plenum of peasants, however, placed collectives under the control of the CNT, the UGT and the rural growers union. It recognized the use of money for the foreseeable future. There were perhaps 200 rural collectives in Catalonia, but they were not as important there as were private farms. In July 1937, the Generalitat expropriated, without indemnity, rural fincas belonging to persons who supported the fascist uprising. In August 1937, following the events of May 1937, the Catalan government issued a decree providing for regulation and recognition of rural collectives, extending state control over them.

2. Aragon

   Much of Aragon had initially fallen to Franco’s coup. Many collectives were established there as militia columns clawed back lost territory on the way to liberate Zaragoza. The Durruti column spread collectivization, with about 450 collectives overall.57 In mid-February 1937, the Federacion de Colectividades de Aragon was established to “coordinate the economic potential of the region.” The federation drew up a standardized family rationing card, and made plans to create experimental farms, nurseries, and rural technical colleges. Comarcal (county) federations were set up to deal with radio, post, telegraphs, telephones, and means of transport. Weapons were distributed to collective members. Another federation established central warehouses. Electricity was spread to villages, and hospitals were built. One collective in April 1937 allowed individuals to abstain if they wished, as had occurred in the Levant. The collectives implemented mandatory work for those between 18 and 60, except for pregnant women or women with child care responsibilities. There were night classes in literacy. Plenary assemblies elected an executive committee, which was immediately revocable. Elections were held on the basis of one vote, one member, no matter how large or small the individual’s initial contribution of land, tools and animals to the collective.

   The CNT-FAI had in fact never spoken of “agrarian collectives” before the war. In Aragon, the CNT improvised new methods for exchange of goods without “money.” These forms often varied from village to village and were often incompatible. Borkenau emphasized the ethical dimension in anarchist collectives and in the suppression of money. In August 1937, Stalinist general Enrique Lister, as part of the Communist Party’s appeal to small landowners, attacked the majority of Aragon collectives. (Communist propaganda portrayed the collectives as created by violent compulsion (!) and inefficient.) Hundreds of anarchists were arrested, members of the CNT were excluded from participation in municipal assemblies, many collectives were destroyed, and their land was re-privatized. Granaries were opened and looted for military exactions. Some collectives, however, were later reconstituted. The Communist Party later backed off from its anti-collectivization campaign; it had frightened collective members who stopped work and returned to cultivating small parcels of their own, threatening the fall harvest.

3. The Levant

   On September 18–20, 1936, the Regional Federation of Levantine Peasants (Spanish initials FRCL) met in Valencia. At that point, 13.2 percent of the land in the Levant had been seized, and one-third organized into collectives. In some of them, there had been total collectivization and the abolition of money.58 All collectives had their own schools by 1938. The FRCL was the top of a pyramid of organizations, beginning with local sindicatos and collectives, moving up to the federation of each comarca (county), and thereafter to provincial federations. The FRCL had a sizeable number of accountants to coordinate efforts at a higher level. The congress also decided not to interfere with private plots if their owners did not interfere with the collectives.

   On October 7, however, there was a land decree tilted toward landowners, designed to control collectives and to slow their further diffusion. By the spring of 1937, the police and military would begin their attacks on collectives. Nonetheless, in 1938, there were 500 to 900 collectives in the Levante, involving 40 percent of the population.Separate from the Levantine collectives, in October 1936, the CNT and UGT created the CLUEA, a regional cooperative for orange exports, a major Levantine crop. The CLUEA was designed to eliminate middlemen and also raise foreign currency for the Republic. It nonetheless met with hostility from the central government. Borkenau also reported a battle between the CNT and the CP, with the latter defending rich peasants59

4. Elsewhere

   Also in July 1937, there were armed confrontations between anarchists and communists in rural Castile. This was one clear-cut case, among many, where apparently “economic” policy was inseparable from military strategy; Daniel Guerin, in his book Anarchism, argues that ambivalence on collectives of the government in Valencia contributed to the defeat of the Republic; poor peasants did not see point of fighting for it.

5. National coordination

   In June 1937, when the tide had turned against it in the wake of May 1937, CNT rural groups created a national organization, and held a National Plenum of Regional Peasant Organizations. The Law for Temporary Legalization of Agrarian Collectives was passed in the same month, designed to ensure harvests over the coming year before peasants bolted from them under government pressure. In 1936–37, the Institute for Agrarian Reform gave 50 million pesetas to those collectives accepting state intervention, thus cutting out the CNT. Many people who had been expropriated in the summer of 1936 were trying to get their land back. According to Bernecker, as of August 1938 there were 2,213 legalized collectives, but Robert Alexander places the number much higher.60 All in all, three million people of an agrarian population of 17 million were involved in the collectivized rural economy. Malefakis61 estimates that two-thirds of all cultivated land was taken over by collectives. There were, however, no collectives in the Basque Provinces, Santander and Asturias. According to Bolloten, a large part of the rural population resisted collectivization. Different collectives also had different rules. In general, however, they established schools, built many libraries and ateneos (social centers) some hospitals and senior homes. They set a formal retirement age and closed brothels. In July 1937, the FAI held a peninsular plenum in Valencia. It marked the end of “classical” Spanish anarchism. The plenum voted to give up the lax internal structure of “affinity groups” and replaced them with “territorial groupings.”

VI. More on Politics and Military Developments

We have to some extent bracketed the military developments that were simultaneous to the political and economic events described above, in order to underscore the steady process of anarchist accommodation to the institutions of the Popular Front. We now attempt to round out this picture from the military standpoint, after the decisive political turn of May 1937. In December 1937, Republican forces attacked Teruel and occupied it; it was unfortunately the coldest city in Spain, in the dead of winter, and, with tens of thousands of casualties on both sides, many from inadequate food and clothing in subzero temperatures, the fascists recaptured it in February 1938. It was, again, a clear case of military strategy inseparable from politics. The ex-Communist commander El Campesino wrote many years later that anarchist troops had been purposely sacrificed to discredit them and to oust PSOE member Indalecio Prieto as Minister of Defense.62 Also in February 1938, all collectives in Aragon were occupied by Franco’s troops, completing the work of demolition begun by Gen. Enrique Lister the previous August. On March 18, 1938, prompted by the collapse of the Aragon front, the CNT and the UGT signed a common program. It was described at the time as “Bakunin and Marx embrace in a big hug.” The program was widely touted by the PCE and the PSUC as a major step forward for trade union unity; it called for nationalization (as opposed to the earlier collectivizations) and underscored respect for individualist peasants. The real goal of the PCE-PSUC, however, was to exclude unions from the government, since the CNT was still the largest union. Further concessions by the CNT included the end of the federated system of “free municipalities” and the creation of more stratified entities. The pact was “the major abandonment of previous principles and ideals of in the ideological evolution of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism.”63 Shortly after the signing, the CNT and UGT did enter the cabinet of Juan Negrin64 But with ongoing military developments, the realization of the anarchist-socialist program passed to a very secondary plane. The CNT, the anarchist union with more than a million members, wound up affirming traditional national patriotism. On April 5, 1938, Franco’s troops drove to the Mediterranean, cutting the Republic in half. On April 30, the CNT, whistling in the dark, tried somehow to deduce a confirmation of its own agrarian policy from the Negrin government’s “thirteen points” of its war aims (apparently modeled on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points).65 In reality, despite having more than a million members, the CNT had been eliminated from all important centers of power.66 It had been compelled to renounce all demands for the “communalization” or “socialization” of land. Both the CP and the POUM had been for mere nationalization. The agreement reflected the Communist appeals to small and medium landholders, who had been 31 percent of all CP members in February 1937. Nonetheless, in May 1938, the anarchist press was still claiming that 2,000 firms had adopted terms of the collectivization decree. As Thomas puts it, “…before the spring [of 1938], Anarchist leaders had justified their acquiescence to so many humiliations before the Communists because they felt they would be able to come to terms after the war; but the disasters in Aragon had clearly suggested that the war might be lost. The crisis in the movement therefore grumbled on all the summer, even more intensely felt because members of the CNT still held positions in the government, from the Cabinet downwards.”67 (In fact, some Republican politicians favored dragging out the losing war in the belief that the impending outbreak of World War II would oblige the Allies to intervene on the side of the Republic. Stalin, meanwhile, was losing interest in Spain as he prepared overtures to Germany, resulting in the Stalin-Hitler Pact of August 1939.) As if to drive home the new balance of forces, in May 1938 5,500 of 7,000 promotions in the army were Communist Party members. In July 1938, the last major Republican offensive of the war began when its armies crossed the Ebro River in Aragon. Sixty percent of the troops on the front were from the CNT. Since virtually the entire offensive was carried out under Communist commanders, anarchist units were left on the front for long periods without rest, while CP units were rested. (Meanwhile, behind the lines, well-armed and well-fed Assault Guards and carabineros were not sent to the front until final phase of Franco’s attack on Cataluna.) On November 15, 1938, admitting defeat, Republican troops were withdrawn back over the Ebro. It was the beginning of the end. The final months of the war, up to Franco’s final victory on March 31, 1939, involved an endgame of Republican attempts to salvage a negotiated peace settlement, attempts which were contemptuously dismissed by Franco. These months were, however, marked by one curious episode, the Casado coup against Negrin, backed militarily by Cipriano Mera, the anarchist commander of the IVth Army Group.

Colonel Segismundo Casado was commander of the Army of the Center in Madrid. He was hardly an unambiguous figure, but was opposed to Negrin’s ostensible plan to fight to the bitter end, even as many people in his cabinet were already getting passports and preparing to leave for France. Casado argued with Negrin for surrender, pointing to the desperate material conditions in Madrid and in what was left of the Republican army. His real wrath was aimed at the Communists, also calling for a fight to the end, whom he had seen again and again meddle in military matters for their own advantage. On February 28, Britain and France had recognized Franco. Casado lined up support among top non-Communist military leaders, insisting that he could get a better peace from Franco than Negrin. CNT commander Cipriano Mera moved his troops to Casado’s headquarters in Madrid on March 4, and a manifesto announcing the coup was broadcast that night, arguing again for a negotiated peace. On the following day, Communist commanders moved on Madrid and by March 7, most of Madrid was under their control. Heavy fighting took place on the 8th. Mera’s troops captured the CP positions on the 9th. Casado’s cabinet, again whistling in the dark, drew up peace terms for further negotiations with Franco. These included no reprisals, respect shown for fighting forces, including officers, and twenty-five days to leave Spain for all who wished to do so. A truce was negotiated with both sides in the Casado coup returning to their positions of March 2. An estimated 5,000 Republican troops on both sides had died in the melee. In the view of many anarchists, it was a case of something that should have happened in May 1937. Casado, now in charge of negotiating surrender with Franco, tried to gain time to allow people to flee. “Franco expressed his pleasure that he was being saved ‘the trouble of crushing the Communists.’ ”68 Casado had achieved no more concessions than Negrin and had only won time for the Republican elite, but not ordinary people, to leave Spain. On March 31, 1939, the civil war was over.

VII. How the Working Class Takes Over Today

There slowly formed a magnificent unity of people from all classes and all parties who understood, like us, that the revolution is something different from the struggle in the streets and that, in a real revolution, those who have the spirit and will to contribute their manual, intellectual, administrative or technical help to the common project, have nothing to lose.
Diego Abad de Santillan, Porque Perdimos la Guerra (1940)

Our main purpose here has been to explore the consequences of the decades-long “apolitical” and “antipolitical” stance of the Spanish anarchist movement. We know what resulted from their decision to first allow the bourgeois state to remain standing69 and then to join it; we cannot know what would have resulted if they had “gone for broke” instead.

Clearly the Spanish revolution suffered even more than the Russian Revolution from its international isolation. In 1917–1921, not only were there mass radical movements in thirty countries, but the main capitalist powers themselves were weakened and discredited by four years of meaningless mutual slaughter. Without the readily offered counter-revolutionary services of Social Democracy in key countries, above all Germany, the capitalists would have been lost. We can, today, no more anticipate the concrete situation of a working-class takeover—a revolution—than did the Spanish anarchists at their somewhat idyllic May 1936 congress. Thanks, however, to the far greater interconnectedness produced by globalization, we can safely assume that such a development will not be limited to one country, at least not for long. Nonetheless, we can agree that for the moment (2013) the international radical left hardly pays more attention to Abad de Santillan’s call to think more concretely about what to do in the immediate aftermath of a successful revolutionary takeover than did its counterparts more than 75 years ago. Like the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists of that time (and, to my knowledge, today), no important militant current, Marxist or anarcho-syndicalist, has devoted serious energy to outlining a concrete transition out of capitalism. There is always the next meeting, the next street action, the next strike, the next riot, the next prison hunger strike, the next episode of police run amok, and these are of course real concerns. But such a typical conception of activism actually reproduces in different guise the old formulation of ill-famed reformist Edward Bernstein, in his debate with Rosa Luxemburg, that “the movement is everything, the goal is nothing.” The trick is to locate the “goal” within the daily life of the movement, but this requires a rethink of priorities. There have been very good reasons for this avoidance of a long-term vision, going back to Marx’s critique of the detailed schemes drawn up by the utopian socialists, Owen, Fourier, or the St-Simonians. (We have seen the link between this early nineteenth century kind of abstract utopian thinking and classical anarchism in thesis 4 of part 1 above.) In the Hegel-Marx tradition of an evolving self-acting totality, the answer is already implicit in the question, and the Manifesto warns against (again, as previously quoted) any “idea sprung from the head of a world reformer,” counter-posing to it the “real movement unfolding before our eyes.” And this insistence on the “immanence” of solutions, against any artificial standard imposed from outside the world historical process, is exactly correct. Our method is therefore different70 We begin precisely from an immanent “inventory” of world material production and above all the material reproduction of those who are engaged in it. We include in that the reproduction of nature, such as climate change, the solution to which, like the distribution of world resources, necessarily and obviously points beyond any “localist” solutions71 such as those which often held back the industrial and agrarian collectives in Spain. This is the concrete totality of the Hegel-Marx method, “acting upon itself” in the reproduction of the world, starting with the reproduction of labor power. We look at the concrete struggles of this “labor power in contradiction with itself” that is capital, from the Marikana miners in South Africa to the 120,000 “incidents” (strikes, riots, confrontations over land confiscation), a year in China, to the gas and water wars against privatization in Bolivia, to the strikes and riots in Greece against European Union austerity, to the militant attempts of Egyptian workers to find a path independent of both the Islamists and the military, to the mobilization of public employees in Wisconsin, Ohio or Indiana against assaults on their wages and benefits. Most of these upsurges, often quite impressive, are actions of the class “in itself,” however militant, on the way to becoming a class “for itself,” namely ready to pose an alternative social order, based on a (self) recognition that their protagonists, once aware of their tasks, are the incipient alternative. We seek in them clues to the future convergence of a class-for-itself, as for example in the growing recognition among transport workers of their special power in shutting down “choke points,” one Achilles heel of “globalization.” Spain in 1936 was a society in which the great majority of workers and peasants lived very close to the bone, and, as in the upsurges of the 1960s and 1970s (May–June 1968 in France, the wildcats in Britain from 1955 to 1972, the American wildcats ca. 1970 in auto, the Teamsters, the phone company, the post office, albeit recognizing a much transformed standard of living), democratic self-management of the existing means of production was the obvious programmatic next step. That obviously remains central today, but the galloping decay and proliferation of socially useless and socially noxious activities (already quite in evidence in 1970) has reached a level where as many workers would be voting to abolish their own jobs as would be placing them under workers’ control, in an overall strategy, with all the labor power thus freed, to radically shorten the working day. This is a fundamental point which a developing revolutionary movement must communicate to broader layers of society today. Those who labor in state and corporate bureaucracies, or the FIRE (finance–insurance–real estate) sector, or as cashiers and toll takers, or homeland security personnel, for starters, are in their ample majority wage labor proletarians, like those who produce material commodities such as cars, bread, steel, or houses but also nuclear submarines or weapons of mass destruction (e.g., drone bombers). While it is obvious that a society after the abolition of commodity production will no longer produce the latter, the important point is that, for the wage-labor work force as a whole, there is no bedrock “real” collection of use values separate from the forms currently imposed by capital, and all will be judged, and transformed, based on global needs once true production for use value, centered on the reproduction of the ultimate use value, labor power, is possible. The millions of cars and trucks produced annually may appear empirically as “use values” today, but we must consider their reality relative to the existing potential of mass transportation, both within cities and between them, to determine their true “use value” in the totality. Truth, as Hegel showed two hundred years ago, is in the whole, and the revolutionary movement has to start communicating the above realities to broader layers, above and beyond next week’s demo. The potential productivity of masses of workers, once embarked on the construction of a new world, is incredible. To return briefly to Spain: in 1936 in Catalonia, there was no war industry whatsoever. Following the July defeat of Franco’s coup, 800 factories in Barcelona, transformed into industrial collectives, pooled their resources to create one, under the pressing needs of the war. According to foreign military observers, the Catalan workers in two months achieved a greater transformation of factories for war production than France had achieved in the first two years of World War I. Hopefully our revolution will not be burdened by the same urgent needs of civil war (though that is not to be precluded). The point is rather that tremendous energies are bottled up in capitalist social relations today that can, in the right circumstances, totally transform what are perceived as “use values,” once ordinary working people see the “beach” under the “pavement,” as one slogan in France in May 1968 put it.

A revolutionary organization today, to conclude, must apply this “Hegel-Marx” sense of the totality to itself. This means first of all a modest appreciation of its own true stature, in the broader global development of the “class-for-itself.” It must recognize the primacy of the “real movement” and see its main goal as its own abolition as a separate grouping, once its tasks are accomplished. It must attempt to create within itself the closest possible approximation of the relations of a liberated humanity within its own internal life, which means the deepest possible involvement, above and beyond the indispensable daily tasks of militancy, with analysis of the world productive forces, and first of all of the world work force, to see the maturation of the methods of struggle. It must prioritize “internal education,” starting with the history and theory of the revolutionary movement. It must attempt to embrace everything valid in contemporary culture, science and technology, and appeal to those cultural and technical strata that see the need to link their fate to that of the communist revolution. It must acquaint itself with military strategy, in the different traditions of Engels, Trotsky, Makhno, or the Cipriano Meras (a former construction worker). It must prepare, in a word, the groundwork for the takeover of production and reproduction. The better prepared in advance the movement is, the smoother and less violent that takeover will be.

• 1Helmut Rüdiger was a German anarcho-syndicalist, associated with the AIT (Associacion International de Trabajadores), who was active in Spain from 1933 to 1939.
• 2Partido Obrero de Unificacíon Marxista, denounced as “Trotskyist” by the Stalinists and their fellow travelers, and denounced as “traitors” by Trotsky and his tiny group of followers in Spain.
• 3Walther Bernecker, Colectividades y Revolucíon Social: El anarquismo en la guerra civil Espanola, 1936–1939 (from the 1978 German original; unfortunately no English translation available).
• 4Quoted from Trotsky’s writings on Spain in I. Iglesias, Léon Trotski y España (1930–1939) (1977). Grandizo Munis, during the war a member of the very small (Trotskyist) Bolshevik-Leninist group, writing in 1948 when he was evolving away from Trotskyism, concurs: “To a certain extent the case of the Spanish organs of power was even more demonstrative than that of the Russian Revolution…the number of organs of working-class power was proportionally higher in Spain than in Russia during the first months of dual power.” Munis, Jalones de Derrota: Promesas de Victoria (1948), pp. 291–292.
• 5Take the recent, generally very good book Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, by Michael Schmitt and Lucien van der Walt (vol. 1, 2009). The authors fall all over themselves not to discuss Spain in depth, preferring to “de-center” anarchism in order to talk about anarchist movements elsewhere, primarily in Latin America. Yet Spain was the only country where anarchism made a revolution, and was confronted with the problem of state power over a 2 ½ year period. As the reader will see, the following text is anything but unsympathetic to the Spanish anarchist movement. But to write a book of 345 pages in which Spain gets only a few pages here and there, and in which preoccupation with its failures is referred to as “Spanish exceptionalism” is, to put it mildly, a long exercise in changing the subject, something tantamount to a history of Marxist movements which would scant the Russian Revolution as “Russian exceptionalism.” The evasion in the Schmitt/van der Walt view is underscored by one of the best recent surveys—one among many—of anarchist theory, practice and history, by an anarcho-syndicalist militant exiled in Mexico, B. Caño Ruiz, Que es el anarchismo? Mexico City (1985): “It is obvious that in no other country in the world did anarchism have the rootedness and influence that it had in Spain…In Spain anarchism was a mass movement integrated rated in diverse manifestations, from a workers’ movement embodied in the CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajo), which reached a membership of two million…the rationalist schools (of Francisco Ferrer)…the libertarian ateneos, the Libertarian Youth, Mujeres Libres (Free Women)…the FAI (Federación Anarchista Iberica), closely linked to the CNT…” p. 322.
• 6El error militar de las ‘izquierdas’: Estrategia de la Guerra Revolucionaria (1980). Guillén as a young man fought in one of the anarchist columns in the Civil War, then spent much of the rest of his life in Latin America, where he became a theoretician of urban guerrilla warfare.
• 7“Even in our revolutionary ranks we worked much more intensely and with more inclination preparing the insurrection than in really preparing for what we would build afterwards.” Diego Abad de Santillan, CNT, Porque perdimos la guerra — Why We Lost the War (1940).
• 8In 1935, Spain accounted for only 1.4 percent of world imports and 1.0 percent of world exports.
• 9The First Republic had already concretized the anarchist’s “localist” orientation. As Bernecker writes, “The localist tradition of Andalucia, whose maximum expression was the ‘cantonalist’ uprising of 1873, also in 1936–1937 prevented the linking up of committees and organs of local power which were operating without mutual coordination; the Andalucian anarchists obstinately refused to enter ‘legalized’ municipal councils and to abandon their powerful position in spontaneously created committees,” p. 384.
• 10I give it a shot in my little book Ubu Saved From Drowning, pp. 93–124. I also underscore uncanny echoes between Russia and Spain, the only countries in Europe where workers took power and held it for a few years.
• 11The Spanish Labyrinth, multiple editions from 1943 to 1974. Elsewhere, in a memoir (Personal Record, 1920–1972 (1974), p. 277) Brenan said of anarchism that “Probably it is only feasible in Spain, for everywhere else in Europe the seeds of social life have been destroyed.”
• 12Partido Socialist Obrero de España.
• 13Historia de las agitaciónes campesinas andaluzas (1929), and various later reprints.
• 14Or rather, when Hegel was mentioned, it was assumed that Marx, as his “successor” was also an admirer of the state.
• 15Marx and Engels were distressed that the very statist drift of Lassallean Social Democracy in Germany was taken by anarchists to be “Marxist,” when in fact they criticized the early SPD as harshly as the anarchists, both in the “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875) and in their private correspondence.
• 16“Mankind has long possessed a dream which it must first possess in consciousness in order to possess in reality.”
• 17As one comprehensive study of the anarchist world view puts it “the analyses of the social question studied here are impoverished. Nowhere more than on this point is the anarchist affinity for abstract and moralizing reasoning so clear; one begins from metaphysical principles such as natural harmony and justice—so favored by Proudhon, and so definitively critiqued by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy—or from social classes as supra-historical entities, and one never finds concrete studies of the Spanish situation as varied and changing,” in Jose Alvarez Junco, La ideologia politica del anarquismo español 1868–1910, p. 190 (1974). (The author goes on to point out that the “Marxists” of the day were no better.)
• 18Anselmo Lorenzo, the grand old man of nineteenth-century Spanish anarchism, in his memoir El Proletariado Militante (reprint 1974, p. 97), wrote of the “immense happiness, great hopes, the quasi-mystical veneration of the idea which animated us.”
• 19As Brenan said (Personal Memoir, p. 303): “This was the normal pattern—every pueblo hated its neighbor, but had friendly feelings for the next pueblo but one.”
• 20At the Fourth Congress of the First International (September 1869), the libertarian collectivists had opposed strikes. See Jean Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste en France, vol. 1 (1975), p. 50. Brenan wrote later (Personal Memoir, p. 277): “…Anarchists are the only revolutionaries who do not promise a rise in the standard of living. They offer a moral gain—self-respect and freedom.”
• 21On these divisions cf. Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936, pp. 29–31 and elsewhere.
• 22See Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the anarcho-syndicalist general strike strategy at the beginning of her pamphlet “The Mass Strike.” Between 1904 and 1911 there was a flood of translations of revolutionary syndicalists such as Pouget and Griffueles.
• 23Ironically, the estimated 1.3 million CNT votes seem to have been mainly for the as yet insignificant Communist Party, helping the PCE go from 1 deputy to 14 in the parliament (the Cortes).
• 24PCE, Partido Comunista de España. The communist party in Catalonia was known as the PSUC, Partido Socialista Unificado de Cataluña.
• 25The PCE had 400 members when it returned to legality in 1931, and 5,000 by May 1935, rising to 50,000 in June 1936. This in comparison with the anarchists’ one half million to 1,000,000 members. From Rafael Cruz, El Partido Comunista de España en la II. Republica (1987).
• 26The fascist uprising failed in Catalonia, the Levante, New Castile, the Basque region, Santander, Asturias and half of Extremadura. It won control of most of Andalucia, southern Extremadura, Mallorca, Old Castille, Navarre and Aragon. The anarchists were key in Catalonia, the Levante, Santander, and much of Asturias.
• 27As Bernecker puts it: “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this decision. It was the expression of a strong ‘revisionist’ current within the CNT, determined for months the course of the war and revolution in Catalonia and, at the same time, underscored the anarcho-syndicalists’ lack of strategic conceptions… To the moral scruples about taking over all power, another consideration prompted the anarchist and union leaders to allow the government to subsist: up to that time, the radical refusal of the established (state) order had had as its consequence a total lack of preparation to intervening in its configuration and improving it, i.e. the revolutionaries lacked all practical knowledge in the affairs of government and public administration. Thus they preferred to leave government and therefore official responsibility to the Republicans and liberals, while controlling them through a new ‘revolutionary’ organ of power,” pp. 386–387.
• 28Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, founded only in 1935, as a fusion of the Bloque Obrero-Campesino and the Izquierda Comunista. The POUM had a hard time of it, being denounced (as indicated in footnote #1) by the Communists as “Trotskyist-fascists,” and by the Trotskyists as “traitors.” On the POUM, cf. Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain (1938), pp. 43–44.
• 29On this Soviet-sponsored turnaround in the fortunes of the PCE, see above all the classic account of Burnett Bolloten, The Spanish Revolution.
• 30To be fair, one should not omit the 50-odd members of the Bolshevik-Leninist group, orthodox Trotskyists, which included the young Grandizo Munis, who in 1948 published one of the best books on what had happened: Promesas de Victoria, Jalones de Derrota: Critica y teoria de la revolución española, 1930–1939 (1948, 1977).
• 31Once again, the name of the Communist party in Catalonia.
• 32Again, the reader is referred to the books of Orwell and Bolloten.
• 33Munis, op. cit., pp. 294–295.
• 34Abad de Santillan, op. cit., p. 129, has an answer to such arguments: “We knew it was not possible to triumph in the revolution if we did not triumph first in the war, and we sacrificed everything for the war. We sacrificed the revolution itself, without realizing that this sacrifice also implied sacrificing the objectives of the war,” my emphasis–LG.
• 35Different groups exiled in France were able, after all, to conduct guerrilla warfare in Franco’s Spain until at least the early 1950s.
• 36In fact, Juan Garcia Oliver of the CNT-FAI did organize feelers to Moroccan nationalists in fall 1936, offering them independence. They did not want independence at that time, fearing absorption by either Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy; they asked for autonomy on the Catalan model. These efforts were squelched by the Socialist Largo Caballero, under pressure from Socialist Leon Blum, then head of state in France. Given widespread ferment and uprisings throughout North Africa at the time, as one commentator said, “One push and the whole French empire in Africa could blow sky high.” See the book of Abel Paz, La cuestión de Marruecos y la Républica Española (2000).
• 37It is true that a vast propaganda campaign by all concerned, except for the anarchists, successfully concealed the social revolution which had taken place in July 1936, turning the international perception of the war into one of “democracy versus fascism.” International anarchism was too weak to counter this barrage with the truth.
• 38As of July 1936, only 110,000 peasants had received land.
• 39Bernecker, p. 89.
• 40Quotes are from Borkenau’s book The Spanish Cockpit (1937 ed.), pp. 80, 83. When he returned to Barcelona in January 1937, he found that the, p. 175, “multicolored Robin Hood style of the militia men had completely disappeared…[there was a] definite attempt at uniformity…most did not wear any political insignia…petty bourgeois have made a strong impress on the general atmosphere.”
• 41Uñión General de Trabajo, historically the trade union federation of the PSOE, with strong roots among Asturian miners and in Madrid; by 1937 controlled by the PCE and the PSUC.
• 42Bernecker, p. 286.
• 43Ibid. p. 293.
• 44Diego Abad de Santillan’s book Porque Perdimos la Guerra (1940, 1975) recounts in excruciating detail how Madrid again and again overrode anarchist requests for material aid and foreign currency with which to acquire it, directly affecting the outcome of specific battles, such as the fall of Irun.
• 45Foreign military specialists said that Catalan workers and technicians in the new war industries had achieved more conversion in two months than France had achieved in two years during World War I. Cf. Abad de Santillan, op. cit., p. 134.
• 46See Alexander, op. cit., p. 267.
• 47Garcia Oliver’s contortions about joining the central government are described in his memoir, written in exile, El Eco de los Pasos (1978), pp. 291–293.
• 48count of events leading up to the showdown and the actual street fighting in Barcelona between May 3 and May 7, I refer the reader once again to the accounts of Orwell and Bolloten.
• 49A radical left anarchist current calling for a “new revolution” against the sellout of the CNT leaders in the Barcelona and Madrid governments.
• 50A Stalinist commander threatened to bomb the anarchist Ascaso Column if it marched on Madrid. Many of these details are taken from Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (1965), pp. 545–550.
• 51“Even after the days of May 1937—a defeat within the triumph—some elements of dual power were still resisting and often bases from which to reconquer the lost ground.” G. Munis, op. cit., p. 292.
• 52Bernecker, p. 339.
• 53Ibid., p. 298.
• 54Ibid., p. 300–301.
• 55Ibid.
• 56Ibid., pp. 131–133.
• 57Julian Casanova, Anarquismo y revolución en la sociedad rural aragonesa, 1936–1938 (1985), provides a more nuanced view of the Aragonese collectives. In his view, in Aragon as a whole, the respective weight of the CNT and the UGT was about equal, p. 31. He concurs with Bernecker, p. 315, that the May 1936 Zaragoza congress arrived at its agrarian resolution “without clarifying the most elementary economic concepts.” Where they later were in control, the anarchists did not implant a model of collectivization which would resolve the problems of production and exchange,” p. 318. “Those defending the ‘eternal aspiration to equality’ ignore numerous examples…of the marginalization social groups (women, unaffiliated peasants) and ignore the real conditions.”
• 58Robert Alexander, op. cit., pp. 394–402.
• 59Op. cit., p. 198.
• 60Ibid., p. 325.
• 61Edward Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant Revolution in Spain (1970).
• 62Indalecio Prieto was the most important leader of the right wing of the PSOE, and the long-time opponent of Largo Caballero. He was hardly sympathetic to the anarchists, but also considered insufficiently docile by the Stalinists. Using military defeat and setbacks, sometimes created intentionally to discredit those in charge, was a typical PCE-PSUC stratagem for replacing unwanted figures, socialist or anarchist, with more pliable people. A POUM commander, Mika Etchebehere, in her book Ma guerre d’Espagne a moi, describes similar episodes, such as when a POUM batallion was left in a hopeless position, without relief, during the defense of Madrid.
• 63Bernecker, p. 311. Borkenau, op. cit., p. 210, wrote that the “only difference with Russia is that the ruling bureaucracy belongs to three or four parties instead of one…”
• 64Negrin had taken over in May 1937 after the “events” of that month. He was also a right-wing Socialist, supported by the CP for lack of another candidate acceptable to others, but ultimately proved to be an independent figure.
• 65The thirteen points included absolute independence for Spain, expulsion of all foreign military forces; universal suffrage; no reprisals; respect for regional liberties; encouragement of capitalist properties without large trusts; agricultural reform; the rights of workers guaranteed; the “cultural, physical and moral development of the race”; the army outside politics; renunciation of war; cooperation with the League of Nations; an amnesty for all enemies. The CNT-UGT committee of collaboration approved the program, but the FAI denounced it as a return to the pre-July 1936 status quo. Thomas, op. cit., pp. 674–675.
• 66Bernecker, p. 140.
• 67Thomas, p. 675. Segundo Blanco of the CNT became Minister of Education and Health in March 1938.
• 68Ibid., p 751. A full account of the Casado coup is on Thomas, pp. 734–755.
• 69Speaking of the example of the judiciary, Abad de Santillan notes a CNT proposal to abolish lawyers. Why, he asks, was the Palace of Justice reopened? Old judges reappeared and “we put an instrument at the service of the counter-revolution which we ourselves had revalorized,” op. cit., pp. 80–81.
• 70Elaborated in “The Historical Moment that Produced Us,” Insurgent Notes, no. 1 (2010). See the final section of sixteen proposed points for global reconstruction, which are merely suggestions, and hardly definitive.
• 71For example, the oil workers in the Gulf will not, by themselves, decide where to ship the oil, while having as much control over their conditions of work as is possible within a global coordination.

All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.

Lenin

Yugoslav self-management is a unique historical experiment. Furthermore, it is one of the most interesting formations of, so called, real-socialism up to today, as Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet Union and initiated its own specific economic, political and ideological way. It was a system which publicly criticized “bureaucratic deviations” of the Soviet Union, which shouted “workplaces to the workers,” which “abolished” its own Communist Party and set its own path in Cold War politics. But it was also a system of its own contradictions, a system that criticized the bureaucracy of others while its own was growing, a system that stood for workers’ self-management only on paper while technocrats and managers ran the economy in practice, a system that “abolished” the One Party by just renaming it and a system that raged against imperialism while it took an active role in it. Also, if we take a look at questions of federalism and centralism or the national question(s) within Yugoslavia, we will get one really complex and interesting picture. Still, self-management, especially with the new social movements that spawned recently and that are attracted to such ideas, remains a crucial and relevant topic. For the same reason, it is a really big shame that in an era of the Fukuyamist “triumph of democracy,” few people study Yugoslavia and, on Croatian faculties, it is mentioned only through post-90s liberal-nationalist mythology.

The aim of this article is to give a Marxist critique of Yugoslav self-management. I think that Marxism is not “defeated” and that Marx’s critique of capitalism can be applied to so-called “socialist” countries. Because of that, I consider “socialist” Yugoslavia as a capitalist society. As a Marxist, I completely reject the Stalinist hoax of “socialism in one country,” but also, I analyze economic and political relations based on a Marxist analysis of capitalism instead of mere proclamations and documents that these systems published. In my critique of the Yugoslav economy, I’m relying on the works of Marxists such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Paresh Chattopadhyay and their analyzes of the Soviet Union, as there are a lot of similarities and useful approaches. Using Marx’s method, I accept that the fundamental criterion to characterize an economy is in its specific social relations in production. They reveal the specific ways in which workers and the means of production are combined for production—or in class society—“the specific form in which the unpaid surplus labour is pumped out from the immediate producer” (Marx in Chattopadhyay 1994:5). By using this method, as Dunayevskaya and Chattopadhyay did in the case of the Soviet Union, or as I’ll try in the case of Yugoslavia, we can notice specific social relations in production on which society is based, i.e. the ways of appropriation and use of surplus labour of that society. We can also mention the need of these economies for “enlarged reproduction of the relations of production that determined specific existential forms of ownership, exchange, and distribution” (Chattopadhyay 1994:6). For an analysis of capitalism, it is important to present the dual meaning of Marx’s concept of capital: economic and legal, upon which we will analyze relations within “socialist” Yugoslavia. Also, it is important to tackle the revision of Marxism by Marxist-Leninists such as Stalin and the Soviet intelligentsia, but also Yugoslav intelligentsia such as Tito, Edvard Kardelj, Boris Kidrič and economist Branko Horvat (see his book ABC of Yugoslav Socialism (1989).

In the discussion about workers’ self-management, I’ll also analyze its critique by Yugoslav intellectuals around the philosophical journal Praxis. In the #3-4 issue in 1971, Praxis presented its critique of Yugoslavia that in some works, like in Rudi Supek’s “Contradictions and ambiguities of Yugoslav self-managing socialism” (1971), marked Yugoslavia as a capitalist society, but still stood behind self-management as a path to communism.

This subject is too large to be adequately processed in such a short form. A lot of “episodes” and “moments” of the Yugoslav system will be left out. As this is my first serious article, I’m hoping that certain mistakes will be pointed out in critiques and comments I’ll receive upon individuals’ reading of this one. I’d like to thank all the people whose comments helped me to shape this article. Also, I’d like to express my gratitude to the editors of Insurgent Notes to allow me to contribute to this issue.

BIRTH OF SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA

It is impossible to talk about Titoism or Yugoslav self-management without knowing certain historical contexts which helped to spawn these ideas. In order to do that, we need to analyze the politics of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) and its national branches, working class self-activity, and the international official communist movement, which was by then heavily infected with post-October, now Stalinist, counter-revolution.

It is really important to state right away that communist revolution never happened in Yugoslavia. The CPY won power because it came out on the winning side after the Second World War, because of the strength of Soviet imperialism, i.e. the Soviet Red Army, which it supported and because it succeeded in securing its ruling position in the inner-Yugoslav power struggles with the royalists. Furthermore, during the Second World War, the CPY was the leading force in the National Liberation Movement (NOP)[1], an inter-class anti-fascist popular front movement, which allowed bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements to enter on an equal basis, unidentified with their old political banners. NOP was a broad movement and the Party recruited most of their militants, regardless of class affiliation, to form the cadre and the executive apparatus for a new stage of counter-revolution (James 1986:89). Even leftists like to repeat Yugoslav mythology about the NOP being a revolutionary movement; its documents, such as the February 1943 Statement of NOV i POJ and AVNOJ’s HQ [2] , prove otherwise. In that document, it is clearly stated how they consider “private property sacrosanct” and advocate the “full possibility of self-initiative in industry, trade and agriculture” (Petranović 1988:342).

One of the first tasks of the CPY was the reconstruction of Yugoslavia and establishing full control over Yugoslav territory. The number of victims of the Second World War was huge. The demographic loss was 1,706,000 people[3]; 3.5 million people lost their homes and production was only at 30 percent of its pre-war capacity. 36.5 percent of industry and 52 percent of railway tracks were destroyed in the War (Bilandžić 1974:16). Following the “Soviet model” of nationalisation and establishment of state property, the CPY thought it could reconstruct the economy and launch industrialisation which would help it to accumulate a vast amount of means of production.

When I say that the CPY “copied” the Soviet Union, it is really important to state that, back then, to most CPY members, the Soviet Union meant “socialism,” which is a reason why the masses and the rank-and-file of the CPY were really enthusiastic about the creation of a new society. It is really important to state that most members of the CPY did not actually know what was happening in the Soviet Union and that they idolised it as a symbol of proletarian victory and salvation. That cannot be said for the leadership of the Party which was very familiar with events in the Soviet Union, especially since most of the leaders of the CPY were agents of the NKVD[4]. According to various Yugoslav historians, the CPY—as the most loyal follower of the Communist International—thought that the Soviet Union had developed the “right experiences” in building socialist socio-economic relations and a political system which could be applied to all “socialist states” and which could be accepted by all communist parties. The CPY thought that the “Soviet model,” i.e., the “Russian way,” was the only possible right way to socialism, in the sense of building state property and an administrative-centrist system of managing society, especially the economy. The Yugoslav leadership declared that nationalisation meant socialism because all property was confiscated by the people’s authority and because that confiscated property had passed into the hands of a “working people’s state” which had become manager of that property. It is really interesting to mention here Tito’s interview in Borba (eng. Struggle ) from November 29th 1951 in which he talked about the development of the “revolution” in Yugoslavia. Through this interview we can clearly understand the ideological paradigms of Stalinism which were deeply rooted in the CPY’s policies. He talked about four revolutionary actions of Yugoslav communists: (i) the uprising against the occupiers, (ii) the struggle against domestic traitors, (iii) the destruction of the state apparatus which served the occupiers by the people, and (iv) the creation of a “popular government.” He also talked about the national question of the Yugoslav people and about the transfer of the means of production to the hands of “working people.” As we can read in C.R. James’s State Capitalism and World Revolution (1986), where he quoted the Yugoslav leadership, “nationalisation was well prepared organizationally and was carried out in such way that sabotage and damage were made impossible. All enterprises in the entire country were taken over on the same day and almost at the same time without the stopping of production” (James 1986:90). What we have here is classical example of “socialism in one country,” i.e., Stalinist state capitalism.

Long before coming to power, the CPY tried to destroy working class self-activity and to subordinate it under its banner. The CPY managed to become the one and the only representative of the working class in Yugoslavia and victory in the War only strengthened their position. For example, in the press of the Internationalist Communist Party (PCInt) from Italy, also known as Battaglia Communista, we can find interesting “moments” from the time when Titoist forces entered Trieste. These “moments” concern executions of anarchists and communists by Tito’s forces, but also they also show how Tito’s forces did not allow the Trieste proletariat to carry red banners, but only Yugoslav and Italian national flags (Battaglia Comunista 1947, 2012; Erba 2012). This pretty much demonstrates the anti-proletarian nature of popular front politics. When it comes to the CPY’s actions “at home,” militant trade unions were destroyed and sucked into the new state:

“Under the construction of the new Yugoslavia, after the nationalisation of industry, and as a result of the quick tempo of socialist building, the workers’ class is no longer a class of bare-handed proletarians which must fight a daily political and economic struggle, which must fight for more bread. This class today—in alliance with other working masses—holds the authority—holds the greater part of the means of production, and its future depends in the first place on itself, on its work, and on its unity with other toilers, on the mobilisation of all toilers in socialist building” (CPY in James 1986:80).

Also, one of the reasons for the destruction of unions was the unification of manual and intellectual workers in the Labour Front of the new “corporate state.” The new role of unions became to organise “socialist competition and shock work, rationalisation and innovation (…) fight for work discipline, to improve the quality of work, to guard the people’s property, to struggle against damage, against absenteeism, against careless work and similar things” (CPY in James 1986:81). They became the guard dogs of the “new” system, whose task was to secure work discipline and working class obedience. When it came to increasing the speed of production, the Yugoslav leadership used Soviet methods which had been proven in practice, such as Stakhanovism[5]. One such experience is described in a book Prvi radnički savjet (eng. First Workers Council; 1985) by Dragutin Grgurević, which describess how workers who raised production levels were rewarded much in the same way as Soviet Stakhanovites. Of course, production was organized on the principle of hierarchy in production. This continued with the 1947 First Five-Year Plan where Yugoslav leadership talked of “utilising working hours (…) progressive payments for work over and above the norm, as well as a system of premiums for engineering and technical staffs” (CPY in James 1986:84), incentive pay for the bureaucracy in order to inspire them to intensify exploitation of workers, etc.

In short, the CPY was a regular run-of-the-mill Stalinist party. And it was really one of the finest examples of Stalinist parties. As C.L.R. James put it, “Titoism has been able to achieve in a few short years the counter-revolutionary climax which it took Stalin nearly two decades to accomplish”(James 1986:79). According to him, Stalin had to struggle against the remains of the revolutionary Bolshevik tradition, while Tito and his followers had only to pledge their loyalty to him and they could easily justify all the policies for which Stalin had to struggle for decades. Good examples of that are the creation of “our people’s, our socialist intelligentsia” (James 1986:83), which Stalin managed to put into the 1936 Constitution of Soviet Union, while Tito did so after a few years in power.

Still, even today, many Marxists and different kinds of leftists deny the fact that Titosim was anything but a national version of Stalinism implied to Yugoslavia, as Maoism was Chinese Stalinism or Hoxhaism was Albanian. That pretty much puts the idea of “socialism in one country” under the eyeglass—especially its inability to bring communism as it, funnily enough, develops quite anti-communist sentiments. But to our Marxists and leftists, Titoism is something special and inspiring, because of the conflict between the CPY and CPSU in 1984 which resulted in the CPY being expelled from the Cominform and developing its “own” ideology of socialist self-management. In the next part of the article, I’ll examine the Yugoslav conflict with Stalin and the reasons for development of the ideology of socialist self-management which later become known as Titoism.

CONFLICT WITH STALIN AND BEGINING OF "DESTALINASATION"

After the Second World War, the CPY wasn’t the only party which followed the “Soviet model.” The Communist parties of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania followed the same policies after they conquered power in their countries. In September of 1947, the CPSU, in the absence of the Comintern which Stalin had shut down in 1940, created an international political body which consisted of nine communist parties called the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties (Cominform). At the founding congress of the Cominform, Andrei Zhdanov made a speech in which he said that today’s world was divided into two “camps”—the western imperialist, with the United States of America (USA) as its leader and the socialist, with the Soviet Union as its leader. When it came to the “other” side, the USA came out with the Truman Doctrine in March of 1947, according to which the USA would give to every country, which was threatened by communism, military, technical and financial help. The same year, the USA came out with the Marshall Plan, according to which the USA would give financial help to European countries in order to help them develop their defensive capabilities against the Soviet Union and in order to help them maintain stability, i.e. to destroy working class resistance.

In this early political polarisation, Yugoslavia stuck strongly to the Soviet Union. In the diplomatic battle for Trieste and Istria, the CPY was counting on strong Soviet support, as was also the case with the first Five Year Plan (1947–1951). The leadership of the CPY was so loyal to the Soviet Union that Edvard Kardelj once said to the Soviet ambassador that the Yugoslav leadership saw Yugoslavia as one of the Soviet Union’s future states, of course through economic and political contracts. This is why, when the CPY won power in Yugoslavia, the party leadership forced integration with the Soviet Union much faster and broader than the Soviet Union initially demanded. This integration had its statist, political-economic and cultural aspects, and the beginning of integration was confirmed with the Contract about friendship, mutual aid and post-war cooperation of Yugoslavia and Soviet Union [6] signed on April 11th 1945. Similar contracts were signed with all Soviet satellites. At the CPY’s demand, the Soviet Union had sent numerous experts to Yugoslavia, both civil and military, which were placed in important positions within the Yugoslav army, police, economy and state apparatus. But soon this “Soviet-Yugoslav idyll” would come to an end.

Tensions first rose during the Trieste crisis, in which Yugoslavia was in a dispute with Italy and the West on the delineation of borders in Istria and Slovenia and for the town of Trieste. On March 18th 1948, Stalin had withdrawn the Soviet experts who were working on resolving the dispute. Without Soviet backup, the Yugoslav political position was incredibly weakened. The day after, the Tripartite declaration was signed, in which the Free Territory of Trieste was assigned to Italy. The second tensions were related to Yugoslav support for the Greek partisans (1946–1949). Namely, the CPY wanted to create a so-called Balkan Federation and it was discussing it with the CP’s of Albania and Bulgaria. Greece was also supposed to be part of the Balkan Federation, which is the reason why Yugoslavia supported the Greek CP and its partisans in their uprising. This support was mainly logistical, but also economic and military. In this struggle, Yugoslavia was also counting on the help of the Soviet Union, but the leadership of the CPY did not know about an agreement between the Soviet Union and Great Britain from October of 1944. According to that agreement, Greece was part of the British interest zone and the British government helped Greek royalist forces in their fight against the communists. Also, this agreement meant that the Soviet Union was supposed to give up on “communist” Greece, by not helping the Greek communists—not even during their uprising against British and royalist repression—in exchange for other political and territorial compromises. Besides these two examples, tensions between Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were growing because Yugoslavia did not agree to create so called “associated companies.” “Associated companies” were the main component of Soviet imperialism towards its satellites. They were created from joint capital—i.e. Soviet capital plus capital of the satellite country in which an enterprise was opened—but most of the profits were sent for reconstruction of the Soviet Union.

Because of its objections to Soviet wishes, the Soviet leadership accused the leadership of the CPY of “lacking of internationalism.” This conflict hit the ceiling with a Resolution of the Cominform from July 28th 1948 which stated that Tito was “a champion of Western powers,” that there was a need for changing the leadership of the CPY and a return of the CPY to the line of Marxism-Leninism. In a state of quiet shock, at the 5th Party’s congress, the Yugoslav leadership gave its support to Tito and his clique and voted against the Resolution. This caused an escalation in the conflict between the Soviet Union and Bulgaria and Albania, on one side, and Yugoslavia, on the other. Just a few years after the Second World War, Yugoslavia found itself faced with another possible conflict. But for Stalin, military intervention was the last option. He tried to secure his hegemony through CPY cadre which still pledged its loyalty to him and which opposed decisions from the CPY’s congress and supported the Resolution. These people were known in Yugoslavia as “ibeovci” and “Stalinists”[7] and they were repressed and persecuted by the Yugoslav system, which culminated with the opening of two concentration camps for them called “Goli otok” and “Sveti Grgur”[8].

Conflict with the Soviet Union pushed Yugoslavia into isolation from the rest of the “communist” world. Soviet experts withdrew from Yugoslavia; the administrative system collapsed because of isolation; the economic crisis intensified, and there were great dangers of social unrest inspired by both ideological and economic reasons. The need for a theoretical explanation of the conflict, along with the greater economic and political crisis of Yugoslav system, resulted in what Yugoslav regime historians called “reviewing of Marxism-Leninism and organising of ‘socialism in one country’”(Bilandžić 1974). According to Bilandžić, the CPY’s intelligentsia turned to the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, especially Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune and Lenin’s State and Revolution. Through this, the CPY tried to “prove” how it was still on “the line” of Marxism-Leninism and how it was criticising “Stalinism” and the Soviet Union from that position. They argued that state ownership of the means of production is the lowest form of public ownership and it was really important to transcend it as soon as possible because it can lead to bureaucratism, i.e. the bureaucracy controlling surplus value and, by that, to the degeneration of “socialist society.” They saw the biggest problem in the Soviet Union precisely in bureaucratism, i.e., in the growth of a bureaucratic machinery, which allows bureaucracy to form quickly and to usurp the rights for which the working class struggled. To fight against this, the CPY’s intelligentsia proposed decentralisation of state power and repealing of hierarchical organisation inside of enterprises.

One of the first indications of the new ideological-political conceptions was Edvard Kardelj’s report On peoples democracy in Yugoslavia [9] (1949) submitted on May 28th 1949 to the National Assembly of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia during the envision of Peoples committee act [10]. In this report, Kardelj was wrangling with the “Stalinist” understanding of power in socialist countries and he was advocating further democratisation and a greater role of the masses:

“There’s no perfect bureaucratic apparatus, no matter what kind of genius leadership stood at the helm, which can build socialism. Socialism can only grow from the initiative of masses of millions with the right leadership role of a proletarian party. Thus, the development of socialism cannot go any other way than the way of constant deepening of socialist democracy in the sense of greater self-governing of the masses of people, in the sense of their greater attraction towards the work of the state machinery—from lowest organs to highest, in the sense of greater participation in direct managing in every single enterprise, institution etc.” (Kardelj in Bilandžić 1999:316).

Kardelj also emphasized Marx and Engels’ analysis of the Paris Commune which pointed out the danger of bureaucratism after the proletariat’s victory over the bourgeoisie in the revolution, but also the “methods” which the proletariat can use to secure itself against bureaucratism. These “methods” are electability and changeability of all officials, a wage system which will prevent fighting for leading positions and about attracting the masses towards the state apparatus, in the way, as Kardelj paraphrased Lenin, that everyone will be a “bureaucrat” for one period of time and by doing that nobody will be able to become a bureaucrat. This report gave a sketch for the idea of socialist self-management.

On November 23, 1949 Boris Kidrič and Đuro Šalaj signed Instruction on forming and work of workers councils [11] in which it was said that workers’ councils have to actively participate in the making of the most important decisions. However, this document stated that self-management should be introduced only in the biggest enterprises. On June 27th 1950, workers’ self-management was introduced by law with the Basic law on managing of state enterprises and higher economic associations by workers’ collectives [12] , popularly called Law on giving factories to workers to manage them or workers’ self-management act (Holjevac Tuković 2003:132) . The first section of this law gave us a vision of Yugoslav self-management: “Factories, mines, traffic, transport, trade, agricultural, forest, communal and other state enterprises, along with other people’s property, in the name of community are managed by workers’ collectives in the framework of state plan, according to rights and duties identified by laws and other juridical regulations” (Jugoslavija 1985a:1023). According to the law, worker collectives exercised their right to self-management through workers’ councils and steering committees of enterprises or so-called “higher economic associations,” which consisted of several associated enterprises. The council was elected on a one year mandate, while council members were able to be recalled before the expiry of their mandate. The workers’ council consisted of between 15 and 120 members, except in the case of enterprises which employed fewer than 30 workers, where the whole collective was the council. It had an elected and revolving steering committee, whose job was to run the enterprise and to answer to the workers’ council and competent state organs. The director was an ex officio member of the steering committee. Ana Holjevac Tuković claims in her article “Socio-economical reforms 1950–1952 and their reflection on administration of Peoples Republic of Croatia” (2003) that although the Workers self-management act officially acknowledged factory councils, their powers were still limited by the Party. Operational independence, in this period, was exercised only in the field of technological and expert questions, while all material questions were dependent on the state’s policy.

One more step towards socialist self-management was established with the General Law on People’s Committees from 1952. People’s committees were defined in the first section of the Law as “local organs of state power (…) organs of people’s self-management in boroughs, districts and towns” (Jugoslavija 1985c:1025). This law established units of local self-governance, so called people’s committees, which were supposed to enable self-management on a local level. These people’s committees did have certain powers, for example, they were able to make budgets on their own (Section 14). The highlight of these legislative changes was the Constitutional Law on Basics of Societal and Political Association of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia and Federal Organs of Power from 1953. The Constitutional Law constituted the political order in Yugoslavia which continued to develop in the next decades. Self-management became a fundamental part of the state. Self-management is mentioned in the 2nd section of the Law, which says that power in the FPRY belongs to “working people” who practice it through various organs of self-management. The 4th section states that the basis of the socio-political organization of Yugoslavia is “public ownership of the means of production, producers’ self-management in the economy and self-management of working people in boroughs, towns and counties” (Jugoslavija 1985d:1028). Producers’ self-management in the economy was further defined in the 6th section which states that working collectives have the right to manage the economy directly and through worker’s councils, agricultural cooperatives, assemblies, etc., and that workers have a right to choose and to be chosen in worker’s councils. A very interesting part is about the right of an economical organisation (enterprise, cooperative etc.) to set its own economical plans, that, after finishing its duty, it independently disposes of the organization’s income (the law even sets a minimum which must stay in the enterprise), that it can independently set the wages of its workers (the law even sets a minimum wage). Self-management of “working people” in boroughs, districts, towns etc. is established with the 7th section. Citizens choose and recall their representatives in the Producers’ Council of the People’s Committee of every town. Every citizen can choose and be chosen in People’s Committees and they have right to participate in the “exercising of power” through referendums, voters’ committees, citizen councils etc. Because of these two, economical and municipal, forms of self-management, the Yugoslav Federal National Assembly had two homes: the Federal Council and the Producers’ Council.

One of the best examples of the CPY’s theoretical explanation of the “new path” can be found in Bilandžić’s article “Self-Management 1950–1974” (1974) where he claims that, because of following the “Stalinist” model, the CPY found itself at a crossroads where it had to choose between a bureaucratic and centralist system of management and the “revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses.” According to him, the CPY took the side of the masses with its idea of the transformation of revolutionary socialist statism into self-managing socialism and with a resurrection of Marxist positions on the state. He wrote how the “new quality (…) was in the fact that the CPY switched from theory into revolutionary praxis by saying that the process of withering away of the state cannot be prolonged for the future—as Stalin used to say—but it must start right away, especially in the field of managing the economy” (Bilandžić 1974:23). Svetozar Stojanović, one of the members of the Yugoslav Marxist-Humanist[13] group Praxis, stated in his article “From Post-Revolutionary Dictatorship to Socialist Democracy” (1971) that “there is no real evidence that the historical process of the withering away of the state and transcending of politics as alienated power dominated by professional groups started [in Yugoslavia]” (Stojanović 1972:385), and he continued, “it is really naive to believe in that the state started to die out when the Party is still ruling” (Stojanović 1972:386). He claimed that the Yugoslav political crisis, which happened in the 60s and 70s, was rooted in the inability to radically “destalinise” Yugoslavia.

If we expand Stojanović’s critique with a little bit of Marxist class analysis, we can notice a certain “Yugoslav oxymoron.” On the one hand, we have the Yugoslav establishment’s attack on the bureaucratism of “Stalinism” and the alienation of the Soviet intelligentsia from its base, calls for de-professionalization of politics and the wider inclusion of the masses in the political process, especially in the economy, but at the same time the Party accumulated total political power, which strengthened its state apparatus, especially its repressive functions against the working class and political enemies. This “Yugoslav oxymoron” will be examined in a future text, along with the whole system of self-management and its class character.

YUGOSLAV SELF-MANAGEMENT IN PRACTICE

Charles Lindblom in his book Politics and Markets (1977) dedicates entire chapter to “Yugoslav innovations,” i.e. so called market socialism. Funnily enough, Lindblom explains why Yugoslavia developed market socialism by using Tito’s explanation where Tito is actually paraphrasing Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations regarding the division of labour in which he found the fundamentals of market socialism:

“backward, weak and small enterprises cannot participate in the international division of labour. That is why integration and complete specialisation in production are necessary so that production can be as inexpensive as possible, of the widest possible assortment, and of the highest quality” (Tito in Lindblom 1977:339).

Furthermore, Lindblom explains Yugoslav political reforms since 1952 when the Yugoslav leadership started to replace central direction with substantial central direction intermixed with market direction, until 1965 when a major reform was implemented. He claims that, since then, central administrative control in Yugoslavia has been “roughly of the same sort as is found in the market-oriented polyarchies[14]” (Lindblom 1977:340). Central administrative control is not achieved through a central production plan but by “ad hoc interventions through taxation, occasional subsidies, specific regulations binding on particular industries and both central and ‘national’ (that is, provincial)[15] control over major new investment” (Lindblom 1997:340). Yugoslav enterprises produced what they found profitable to produce. The enterprise bought inputs freely on the market – both national and international. When it came to the national market, of course, there were other enterprises which are selling certain commodities and inputs which were used in the production of certain goods. The enterprise rented land from the government, but also from private owners. Also, it hired labour, but it is important to point that, above the minimum wage, workers received income in the form of shares in profits, which, of course, depended on their work. Like every other capitalist enterprise, a Yugoslav enterprise must cover its costs, like the minimum level of wages. It was free to look for new markets, to establish diversity of production, to apportion its profits between wages, collective benefits to its workers or reinvestment in the growth of the enterprise. New enterprises could be started by any individual or a group; even though usually they were mostly opened by units of local self-government or existing enterprises. After founding, all enterprises – except those small private ones with less than five employees – were turned to “social ownership.” Also, certain Yugoslav enterprises were joined to certain foreign corporations and had mixed partial “social ownership” from the Yugoslav side and partial private ownership. To fight monopoly, the Yugoslav government used a whole spectrum of different methods, such as tariff reduction and removal of import restrictions. It is important to mention how Yugoslav legal formalism equalized producers and intermediary organisations (banks, markets, foreign trade companies), i.e. “those that produce surplus value and those that manage the disposal ofsurplus value in the shape of means of production” (Supek 1971:355). In conditions of market competition, that led to the monopoly of intermediary organisations.

It is also important to mention agriculture. Formerly collectivised, large parts of agriculture were now given to private holdings and farmers. 10–15 percent of arable land was in possession of state farms which were prominent in providing the supplies for domestic and foreign markets. This sudden turnaround from collective to private farming was justified, as Lindblom puts it, “as an expedient, necessary until such time as the development of the communist new man would once again make collective agriculture possible”(Lindblom 1977:341).

Trade unions were important participants in enterprises, often competing with workers’ councils. Yugoslav historians and ideologues often liked to emphasize, and so did Lindblom, that unions and workers’ councils were instruments “through which employees can defend their own occupational interests” (Lindblom 1977:341). Even Lindblom acknowledges how these institutions were “still also an instrument of party and government direction of enterprises and the work force” (Lindblom 1977:341). To justify this thesis, we can just take a look at statistics he presented. Between 1958 and 1966, almost 1400 strikes were reported, while none has been officially reported since 1968. Did workers’ struggles just stop because Yugoslav society reached the communist goal of a classless society or did unions just fulfil their institutional role in capitalist society—suppressing workers’ struggles?

Certain answers can be found in Tito’s text “On Workers’ Managing Economic Enterprises” (1950), where he writes that the state influence in the economy did not case to exist, but it was weakened and it calls on workers to take on its functions. Tito emphasizes how the state will wither away gradually and the speed of its withering depends on the advance of cultural development. Cultural development is necessary because before the “revolution” in Yugoslavia the working class did not exist (sic!) and after industrialisation of undeveloped parts of Yugoslavia was implemented peasants become members of the working class. Because of that, it is important that the Party and state educate and raise peasants according to “values of socialism,” so that they could evolve into a new working class and self-manage production. The leading role in this education of workers was up to the unions, which don’t have to struggle for workers’ rights like before because workers now “own the state,” but the new task of unions is to educate workers so that they can manage society through workers’ councils. Self-management is necessary so that bureaucratism could be avoided, because a system in which technocrats are managing the working class is “the greatest enemy of socialism” (Tito 1950:232). It is quite clear that the Yugoslav leadership used unions, as mass organisations of the working class, to establish systematic control deeply rooted in workplaces, so that any kind of industrial or class unrest was prevented. Unions were also allies of the political forces within the League of Communists of Yugoslavia[16] which were fond of extensive liberalisation of the market. For example, at 1957’s Congress, they’ve asked for removal of state regulations, lower taxes, greater autonomy of enterprise for investments, etc. Younger party cadres were also their strongest allies, since they did not have the experience of the Second World War or the revolutionary wave of the 20s and they were inclined to liberal ideas.

Hungarian anarchist Arpad Kovacs writes that behind the idea of self-management was the belief that workers should set their own work day and decide the ways they’d produce something, etc., because, according to Tito, that was the right way to reach communism from socialism. Kovacs also notes how the workers’ councils’ function was to make decisions on most of the aspects related to management of the enterprise, while managers were in charge of planning and implementing the plan. The workers’ council was superior to managers and it could choose and recall the steering committee or its individual members. Steering committees were made of experts that had previous management experience and the state would appoint them to certain enterprises. Being a manager in a steering committee was permanent employment, while workers’ councils exclusively consisted of workers employed in certain enterprises. When it came to the process of managing companies, if we look behind the ideological curtains unfolded by the LCY, enterprises were managed by managers and not workers. Managers were subject to party control and they were instructed to pursue profits. They were also subjected to control trough local government, banks, industrial chambers, professional associations and youth organisations. Even as the Yugoslav leadership denounced the Soviet Union for its bureaucracy and marked it as one of the biggest enemies of socialist development in almost every text, bureaucracy in Yugoslavia flourished with the “new course.” The workers’ council election of the steering committee was nothing but a mere formality and while, on paper, the Yugoslav leadership was calling for workers’ participation in the steering committees, in practice, steering committees were professionalised, employing only university educated lawyers and economists, making for greater differences between workers and managers. Hierarchical relations in productions still remained. Initially, wage differences between managers and workers were 1:3.5 but from 1967 they rose to 1:20. In spite of all this, Michael Lebowitz remained a fan of self-management.[17]

I’d like to quote a worker from a self-managed metalwork factory from the north of Croatia whom I interviewed regarding a struggle in which he and his workmates participated. When I asked him about power relations between the director and the workers’ council during Socialist Yugoslavia, he replied:

“In terms of managing, there was a workers’ council. Members of the workers’ council were elected from the list, and everything was according to the dictate of the LCY and every work unit had its branch. The League came with suggestions, which meant that nobody was allowed to protest against them. I remember how, in 1987, I was the first who protested in the front of workers against the League making decisions about who would represent us in the workers’ council or in the central workers’ council (…) It seemed that workers liked my protest so they elected me for our workers’ council, because I wasn’t a member of the League which until then were the only eligible people. Workers were motivated by this statement of mine as some kind of rebellion against the regime or who knows what, so they elected me and management had to accept that. That was the first time that workers chose who would represent them [in this factory]. It was presented to workers that they are managing, but they did not. (…) The director was, of course, the God – the law, and you couldn’t get to the director to complain, because the pyramid was structured in that way. You could only see the director if his driver drove by you, but otherwise they were Gods.” (ITAS 2012a).

All this is pretty much summarized by Susan Woodward:

“a primary goal of the introduction of workers councils in 1949–50 was to deprive the unions of their bargaining power (…) Elected representative of skilled production workers were to be consulted by managers on how to cut labour costs. The aim was to have workers accept limits on wages and benefits within enterprise net revenue, approve capital investment even if they cut into incomes and sanction dismissal of workers when required by budgets or modernisation programs. The essence of self-management (…) was this attempt to enforce incomes policies and financial discipline without state involvement or central regulation” (Woodward 1995:261).

The LCY, in order to impose better control over enterprises, over time evolved into an organization of managers and technocrats. That made workers really sceptical about joining the party. In 1960, half of the League consisted of bureaucrats while working class members were only one third.

Introduced in 1952, self-management was followed by extremely rapid growth and a rise of living standards. Between 1954 and 1964, GDP increased almost 9 percent a year, which put Yugoslavia among the very fastest growing economies in the world (Lindblom 1977:342). But what was behind this rapid growth? It was a rapid increase in means of production which was not followed by an increase in means of consumption. We could compare the extent of this growth with the USSR during the New Economic Policy (1921–1928). From the 60s, Yugoslavia was fully open towards the Western markets and it made several trade agreements. It is also important to note that Yugoslav decentralisation was highly supported by the International Monetary Fund (Musić 2010:180).

One of the big problems of the Yugoslav economy was unemployment. In 1965, unemployment in Yugoslavia was 8.8 percent which was around 326.000 workers. To solve this problem, Yugoslav leadership allowed workers to emigrate to Western Europe, mostly West Germany, which had work force shortages.

The 60s marked the crisis of “Yugoslav socialism.” Until 1972, there were big struggles inside Yugoslavia and attacks on Tito’s regime. The regime was attacked from different fronts. For example, inspired by the world’s revolutionary movements of 1968 and the writings of the Praxis group, Yugoslav students denied the communist nature of Yugoslavia and demanded “full communism”; in Kosovo, Albanians demanded to be treated as a “nation”[18] and demanded that Kosovo be acknowledged as a Yugoslav republic, instead of province; in Croatia, the 70s were marked by a “Croatian spring” nationalist movement which demanded further liberalisation and that more profits stay in Croatia, i.e., on the republic instead of the federal level. After these events, the Party was cleansed of nationalists, liberals and, more importantly, its left. 1974’s Constitution acknowledged the republics as the main body of political and economical discussion and negotiations within the Yugoslavia. This meant that, although rhetorically the Constitution made some changes in favour of “real workers’ self-management,” nationalist-liberals won a great victory in their battle for the greater political liberalisation of country. The really important thing is that unions and workers’ councils, especially in these times of great crisis in Yugoslavia, always sided with liberal-nationalists who advocated liberalisation of market. They did that because they were sceptical towards the LCY’s bureaucrats and directors they had to deal with in the everyday life of their enterprise and their attempts to reduce their rights and wages. While liberal-nationalists promoted ideas of market efficiency with their maxim “to each according to its work” (Musić 2010:185), workers believed that by giving greater economical autonomy to the republics and with greater profit staying in their republic, their wages would increase.

1980 was an essential year for Yugoslavia. Not just because of the world oil crisis, but because Marshall Tito died. Already in 1981, the Yugoslav government was on the verge of bankruptcy with more than 20 million dollars debt (Musić 2010:187). That led to “stabilisation programs” that increased competitiveness in the world market, but also led to a decline in wages of 30 percent. Considering “stabilisation programs,” it is important to note that between 1979 and 1988, Yugoslavia signed six arrangements with the IMF, which later called for austerity measures, lowering of wages, a fall in production and in living standards (Lončar 2012:12). In 1988, Yugoslavia managed to retrieve its 1960s standard, but the crisis of the system was still enormous. In an economy oriented towards efficiency instead of the satisfaction of human needs, the Yugoslav elite saw a way out of the crisis only in the sacking of two million workers, while Yugoslavia already had one million unemployed. Since the elite had never made such drastic measures before, the crisis caused industrial insurgency. In 1980, there were 247 registered strikes with 13.507 workers participating, while eight years later, in 1988, the number of registered strikes rose to 1851 with 386.123 workers participating. These strikes were not merely products of economic struggle, but also political ones, where workers were again allies of liberal-nationalists demanding liberalisation of economical and political system. Liberalisation of the political system, and consequently abandonment of the “no-minority-no-majority” principle, together with the demand for the greater economical autonomy of republics, lead to the disintegration and finally collapse of Yugoslavia.

SO, WHY CAPITALISM?

To claim that the Yugoslav economy was nothing but capitalism is not anything new. Stalinists all over the world were claiming that since Tito and Stalin broke up in 1948. One of the most popular texts on that subject is certainly Is Yugoslavia A Socialist Country (1963) written by editorial departments of the Chinese papers People’s Daily and Red Flag in 1963 after Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union moved towards more friendly politics when it came to Yugoslavia. The Chinese Stalinists wrote that: “all Marxist-Leninists hold that Yugoslavia is not a socialist country. The leading clique of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia has betrayed Marxism-Leninism and the Yugoslav people and consists of renegades from international communist movement and lackeys of imperialism” ( People’s Daily; Red Flag 1963:1). While this text is mostly directed towards the Soviet turn in politics and Khrushchev’s calling Yugoslavia an “’advanced’ socialist country” (PD; RF 1963:2), what makes Yugoslavia capitalist can be summed up in the existence of private property and the abandonment of agricultural collectivisation, Yugoslav dependency on US loans and US imperialism in general. While these accusations make sense and certainly are reflections of Yugoslavia’s capitalist nature, they represent a weak and superficial critique, whose only purpose was to defend Stalinism as a political ideology, but also, more importantly, as political praxis. In this analysis, I intend to put forward a more fundamental critique of Yugoslav capitalism, a critique that will also include other Stalinist regimes.

Regarding ideological justifications of Yugoslav economic realities, Yugoslav communists claimed that the “law of value was an ‘objective economic law,’ influencing socialist societies as equally as capitalist ones” (Musić 2010:176). According to them, every action against the law of value leads to bureaucratism. Consequently, they believed that the market played an essential role in “socialist distribution,” since “exchange through the market, grounded in the law of value, together with collective ownership (…) provided the only objective criterion for socialist distribution” (Musić 2010:177). Because of “social property,” the worker is no longer the one that gets a wage from the state, but he is a part of the enterprise he works for. We can find these ideas systematically developed in the works of Croatian economist Branko Horvat who is considered, although he expressed strong disagreements with Yugoslav development after 1970s, one of the most important economic theoreticians of self-management and market socialism. In his book ABC jugoslavenskog samoupravljanja (eng. ABC of Yugoslav Self-Management, 1989)[19], he criticized Yugoslavia for being “too statist” and proposed solutions for Yugoslavia to reach socialism. According to Horvat, statism, or “Stalinism,” is based upon a monopoly of political power and, in such systems, class exploitation comes mainly through political means, unlike in capitalism where this power is based on private property and class exploitation is mainly economic. His solution is socialism, which he defines as:

“order in which concentration of economical and political power is abolished and the possibility for abolishing economical exploitation is created. In that sense, socialism is a society of equal citizens. In an institutional sense, it means social property, a market controlled by a plan and a political system without the Party, i.e., radical political and economical democracy and division according to work” (Horvat 1989:12).

For Horvat, socialism cannot exist without self-management. In order for self-management to exist, the market, commodity production, division of labour, law of value etc. must exist or, as he puts it without any attempt at argument, the “[market] is necessary because without a market there’s no self-management, and without self-management there is no socialism” (Horvat 1989:16). While discussing the “socialist market” he claims that “commodity production is not creating capitalism, but the reverse” (Horvat 1989:15) and how “every socio-economical formation had its own type of market which generated socio-economical relations of that formation” (Horvat 1989:16). According to him, we shouldn’t ask ourselves if we should abolish the market, like old Marxists with “naive views” did, but what type of market fits socialism. In self-management, one of the most important things is the autonomy of workers’ collectives. The market is really important because it is a “tool” against monopoly as healthy market competition destroys it. Still, market competition produces a certain alienation, which Horvat sees as a negative but inevitable outcome of a market system. Another “naive” and “childish” idea is to abolish the labour market. In socialism, the labour force is an economic input and workers “associate their labour where it is the most productive, i.e. where is the biggest income” (Horvat 1989:17). “In order for the market to function, the institution of property is necessary, because the basic purpose of that institution is to regulate the market of economic values” (Horvat 1989:38). Social property is a form of property which is necessary for socialism. Horvat writes that there are three reasons why social property does not exploit the working class. First, “every member of society has a full right to work” (Horvat 1989:29). Second, “every member of society has a full right to compete for every workplace according to his capabilities and qualifications” (Horvat 1989:29). And finally, “every member of society has the right to participate in the managing of production” (Horvat 1989:29). Also, social property implies a division according to work where income belongs to society and an individual can only appropriate income from work. The worker is exchanging the fruit of his labour with society for products of the same value as products he used to produce that labour. The market is the mechanism which grades individuals’ work contribution. But although a self-managing socialist system is based upon social property, it doesn’t exclude other forms of property such as private “property, partnership, cooperative property, contractual organization of associated labour and communal and state property” (Horvat 1989:29). Of course, profit is not anything alien to socialism, because while the capitalist system tends to maximise profits, a socialist system uses profit to satisfy the needs of its citizens. “As a social category, profit is, the same as a market, defined by the socio-economic system. Looking at it analytically, profit, or income, is simply the difference between income and expenses, production’s value and its costs” and “needs can be maximally satisfied only with maximization of production” (Horvat 1989:17). Horvat’s maxim is “maximization of democracy with maximization of efficiency” (Horvat 1989:21), i.e., it is necessary to make decisions in democratic way in order to avoid sabotage and lower productivity. He is applying a liberal definition of democracy according to which democracy is decision making by the majority, but with the “acknowledgment of minority rights” (Horvat 1989:21).

The difference between a “liberal capitalist economy” and self-managing socialism lies in the existence of a social plan. The plan has four functions: it is an instrument of predictions (its function is to make the most economical movements accessible to producers); it is an instrument of coordination of economic decisions (it makes directives only for state companies while the rest can just follow it as an economic direction); it is an instrument for the direction of economical growth, and it is a commitment for body which made and it is a directive for all its organs. The Plan adds cooperation and solidarity to the market economy, limiting markets’ destructive functions. No wonder that Ernest Mandel wrote how Horvat “is much more an adept of the Cambridge school of welfare economics than a Marxist” (Mandel 1967).

But let’s compare the official positions of Yugoslav economic ideology, which are certainly not anything new, with official Soviet ideas about socialism in economic practice. In his text “Economic Problems of Socialism in USSR” (1952), which was actually a sketch for a Soviet economics textbook, Stalin debates with certain “comrades” who do not share his opinions on certain economic laws and solutions. In this text, Stalin claims that Engels’ formula from Anti-Dühring, according to which “the moment that society takes the means for production it its hands it abolishes commodity production and by that the rule of products over producers” (Engels in Stalin 1981:707), along with the abolition of certain economic laws, cannot be applied to the Soviet Union, because it had not developed the industrial capacities for “socialist production.” This is the main reason why the economic laws of capitalism, which Stalin, much like Horvat, is trying to present as universal laws of every economy, still exist in the Soviet Union. One of these laws is the law of commodity production, which shouldn’t, according to Stalin, be connected with capitalist production and which cannot be abolished.

“Capitalist production is the highest form of commodity production. Commodity production leads to capitalism only if there is private ownership of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of production, and if, consequently, the system of exploitation of wageworkers by capitalists exists in the country. Capitalist production begins when the means of production are concentrated in private hands, and when the workers are bereft of means of production and are compelled to sell their labour power as a commodity. Without this there is no such thing as capitalist production.” (Stalin 1981:710)

Also, since commodity production exists, the law of value also must exist, because, as Stalin says: “wherever commodities and commodity production exist, there the law of value must also exist. (…) It existed before capitalism, and it still exists, as commodity production, after the collapse of capitalism…” (Stalin 1981:713,727). In socialism, however, the law of value is limited by the “social” property of the means of production and by social planning of the economy. The law of value is, before all, a basic law of commodity production. The difference between capitalist and socialist commodity production is that “monopolistic capitalism doesn’t demand any profit, but maximum profit” (Stalin 1981:728), while the socialist law of value is defined by “securing the maximum satisfaction of constantly growing material and cultural needs of the whole society through continuous growth and perfecting of socialist production” (Stalin 1981:729).

The point of using Stalin here is not to call out the most notorious liberal boogieman, but precisely the opposite – to show the influence of bourgeois economics of capitalism on both Soviet and Yugoslav systems and their ideologies. In both cases, we face revisionism of Marx’s basic concepts and ideas because, if we look at Marx’s analysis, we would quickly conclude that both systems were capitalist. Or we could comment using a bit of Marx’s wit on Proudhon’s account, which fits so well in this case, “we may well, therefore, be astonished at the cleverness of Proudhon, who would abolish capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based on commodity production” (Marx 1947:516). In opening a discussion about the class nature of both the Soviet Union and – more importantly, at least for this article – Yugoslavia (was it a socialist or capitalist society, it is also necessary to comment on certain statements that come from the “Marxist camp” about how it is not possible to use Marxist analysis when analysing such systems. In his book Marxian Concept of Capital and Soviet Experience (1994), Paresh Chattopadhyay looks back on comments from theoreticians such as Louis Althusser, Paul Sweezy, John Roemer and Charles Bettelheim. These theoreticians, in their own way, tried to dispute the possibility of a Marxist critique of the Soviet Union and similar regimes. Besides insisting on a division between “Marx’s Marxism” and “Lenin’s Marxism,” as Raya Dunayevskaya has put it, i.e., the difference between Marx’s doctrine and the Eastern Bloc’s reality, Chattopadhyay points out that Marx’s method is quite applicable in the making of such analysis. Marx considered his method as dialectical. The main criterion in the characterization of a certain economy, according to this method, is an analysis of social relations in production—how is surplus labour “pumped out” from immediate producers. It is popular to use Cold War rhetoric about the division of the World into “communist” and “capitalist,” but if we apply Marx’s criterion for analysis of social relations in production, we don’t have reason to believe that “Western capitalism” represents the only way of capitalist production. Quite the contrary, “whatever the different forms of manifestation of an economy, if the latter is based on labourers’ separation from the conditions of labour, necessarily rendering labour as wage labour, then the economy in question is capitalist” (Chattopadhyay 1994:6). Also, unlike Roemer, and many more, who claims that “social,” i.e., state, property of the means for production implies socialism, when Marx talks about the abolition of private property he’s talking about the abolition of class property, instead of individual property. There’s no insinuation in Marx’s texts that, in the case of “social” property, exploitation is eliminated. Exploitation will exist as long as capital exists, and capital can exist under private and “social” property. This view is also shared by Raya Dunayevskaya, who notes that, in the case of “social” property, it is important to state that the means for production are capital and how workers’ labour is still alienated from them in the form of commodities and services which are available to the bureaucracy. She concludes, “the Soviet Government occupies in relation to the whole economic system the position which a capitalist occupies in relation to a single enterprise” (Dunayevskaya 1941). The bureaucracy did not create any new social mode of production – they’ve just continued to reproduce capitalist class relations.

Chattopadhyay also draws our attention to Marx’s concept of capital and its twofold existence—in a juridical and economic sense. When we are talking about the economic existence of capital, we are talking about social relations in production based upon the separation of labour from conditions of labour that bind wage labour and capital. The economic existence of capital has two sub-moments: an essential reality, where capital is a social totality, and a phenomenal reality, where capital exists as mutually autonomous individual capitals, i.e. fragments of capital as social totality. When we are talking about the juridical existence of capital, it is connected with proprietary relations of capital. Capital is here defined negatively, as non-property of workers, i.e. the private property of a class. This is a fundamental meaning of private property for Marx, even though jurisprudence doesn’t acknowledge it in that way. What jurisprudence acknowledges as private property is individual private property, as a specific form of private property of the capitalist class. Private property in its first, class sense exists, as long as capital exists.

Let’s look at Yugoslavia more deeply. Did wage labour exist in Yugoslavia? Surely it did. Workers were quite aware of the fact that they are working for wages, that someone else was taking surplus labour they produced and that the whole system was based upon wage earning. They were also quite aware of workplace hierarchy and wage differences between themselves and management and, in the end they saw themselves as wage earners. They were also aware that in other capitalist countries, such as West Germany where the majority of Yugoslav labourers immigrated to work, workers earned more than in Yugoslavia. If we take that into account, it is not so surprising that workers supported liberal fractions in the LCY which wanted to turn the Yugoslav economy into an image of the West. By recognizing that wage labour existed in Yugoslavia and concluding that the working class worked for wages, we have to ask the question of for whom did they work? Who paid the wages to workers? If we ask ourselves that question, we are assuming that Yugoslavia was a class society. This is of course the truth. The Yugoslav ruling class came from the technocracy and other bureaucrats that constituted the core of the LCY. Many leftists would say that we cannot talk about a Yugoslav ruling class because there was no private property over means of production. Well, they are quite wrong because private property, as class property, existed in Yugoslavia under the name of social property. The ruling class managed that property in the name of “working people” and appropriated its surplus value. When it comes to forms of private property, Yugoslavia is pretty much easier to analyze than Soviet Union, because its capitalist nature is quite easy to notice. In Yugoslavia different forms of private property existed, from social property, to individual private property in small enterprises, to joint property with multinational corporations, cooperative property in agriculture, etc.

What makes Yugoslavia easier to analyze is its dependence on the global market and movements of capital. As any other capitalist country, Yugoslavia was heavily affected by different capitalist crises (such as the oil crisis) and, especially towards late 80s, the Yugoslav ruling class responded to crisis much in the same way as other national bourgeoisies of the West: with austerity measures, sacking, privatization and bigger liberalisations of the market. Since Yugoslavia wasn’t part of the Eastern Bloc it had to have deeper connections with the West, not just because of military protection in case of possible Soviet intervention (for example in early 50s), but mostly because it is impossible to have a self-sufficient economy in capitalism. This is why Yugoslavia participated in the world market in a full sense, just like any other capitalist country.

If we have a class system, sooner or later there will be class struggles. Yugoslavia did not lack for workers’ struggles which mostly were economic struggles for better wages and work conditions. Even though some workplace struggles, especially after the 70s, were connected with support of the bourgeoisie and demanded more economic liberalisation or other nationalist goals that would benefit their position, workers’ struggles in Yugoslavia shouldn’t ever only be reduced to that. A lot of workplace struggles were motivated because workers wanted to have a stronger role in managing their enterprise, especially wages, or because management tried to lower workers’ wages to “save their skin.” Here it is once again important to say that, in every industrial action, workers had to rely on themselves and on wildcat strikes, because unions were part of the state machinery. Unions in Yugoslavia were designed as institutions where the official ideology was presented to workers and through which the Party could control workplaces. In other words, unions had the same functions as they have in other capitalist countries or in today’s countries of the ex-Yugoslavia, or anywhere in the world for that matter. Workers’ councils also had similar functions. Since the LCY nominated managers and even the workers who could be in councils, it is quite obvious that they’ve tried to control them as much as possible.

Usually when leftists in their studies acknowledge certain mistakes or oversights of Yugoslav self-management, they end up concluding how we need “the real self-management” which would mark a successful transformation from capitalism to socialism. Yugoslav self-management always serves, if not as inspiration, but then at least as one of the biggest examples of self-management in practice. We can see that in works of Lebowtiz, Kovacs, but also in some of the works about economic democracy and direct democracy that were products of student or Occupy movements from 2009 onwards. Such positions were also advocated in Yugoslavia at one time. Intellectuals from the Praxis group, although they were critical of Yugoslavia, never rejected self-management as a concept. For Rudi Supek, the concept of self-management is not wrong because.“. man-producer has the right to decide about results of his work, (…) state doesn’t alienate and arbitrarily disposes of surplus labour created by working class (…) that all workers have the real right of managing of work organisations in which they work” (Supek 1971:351). For him, self-management is the only model that can be used in developed Western countries—it is a balance between maximalism and statism; it is accepted by Marxist intelligentsia and academics around the World; it is the logical conclusion of working class offensives in Western countries and the logical conclusion of democratisation of conditions in production and chance for working class to get higher managing rights (Supek 1971:348–350). He accuses the Yugoslav leadership of choking self-management with a market economy and capitalist relations, for being Proudhonist and here he engages in an academic discussion about Proudhonist influences on the Yugoslav economy. But to attack the Yugoslav model for being Prudhonist, while defending the idea of “real” self-management at the same time, is an oxymoron. Is not the idea of gradual evolution from capitalism to socialism through networks self-managed workers’ cooperatives and enterprises the essence of Proudhonism? Proudhonism is essentially the idea of “socialism in one workplace,” an idea which proposes a local “solution” to a global problem. Actually, we can apply some aspects of the old Marxist critique of Proudhonism to Yugoslav self-management. Proudhon’s system was based on individual exchange, market and the free will of buyer and seller above all. In his critique of Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx analyzed how such a system is not anything but an apologia for and preservation of bourgeois economy. But, as Amadeo Bordiga notes, this individual exchange leads to exchange between factories, workshops and enterprises managed by workers and it is presented as a goal of socialism that the factory is run by local workers.

The idea of workers’ self-management was never a part of the Marxist tradition, but quite to the contrary, it was an ideology of various reformist currents within the workers’ movement, from anarchism, Bernsteinism, and syndicalism to the “new left.” Of course, behind the Marxist rejection of workers’ self-management stands Marx’s materialist analysis of the former, instead of “dogmatism” or “catechism” as “critics” of Marxism like to point out all the time. As Marx once said, and Engels and Lenin repeated so many times: revolution is not a question of forms of organisation. Therefore, to put form above content, to fetishise a certain form while neglecting its content, is one of the most dangerous, but yet classical mistakes that leftists make.

The ideology of self-management is based upon the idea of “force which struggles against the constituted power and asserts its autonomy by breaking all links with the central State, and sometimes as a form which manages a new economy”(Bordiga 1957). In the case of utopian socialists, the idea was to build “revolutionary communes” that would later spread to the whole society, while in the case of Yugoslavia, the idea was to set up a new interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and a new path to communism that would, in its opposition to the Soviet central state and bureaucracy, end up in a decentralisation of society masked under “withering away of the state.” Of course, this decentralisation, in an economic and juridical sense, was marked by liberalisation and market ideology, because there was no other mechanism to stick with, while real political and economic power was still concentrated—like in the case of any other class society—in the hands of its ruling class. A lot of leftists here, like the Praxis group, while pointing out the mistakes and defects of Yugoslav self-management, still advocate “the real self-management” which is based on a real autonomy of producers and where workers really manage production and their workplaces. But the answer to the problem of capitalism was never in greater “autonomy” of the working class through workers’ councils and management of production. The problem with workers’ councils is much the same as with trade or industrial unions, which are marked with rank-and-file restrictions in dealing with problems of one small sector of production, presented in a single enterprise, instead of society as whole. Therefore, we cannot expect that changes in individual workplaces, managed by workers’ councils, will lead us to a “latter stage” or communism. Communist society is not marked by workers’ control, workers’ management or giving power to producers. In communist society, there are no more producers or non-producers as there are no classes. The point of communism is the disappearance of the proletariat as a class, along with the wage system, exchange and in the end – individual enterprises. “There will be nothing to control and manage and nobody to demand autonomy from” (Bordiga 1957). Or in Marx’s words:

"In a future society, in which class antagonism would have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the social time of production devoted to different articles will be determined by the degree of their social utility.” (Marx 1959:52)

One of the big problems of the idea of self-management is reducing the historical conflict from national to local, communal or workplace level instead of extending it onto an international scale—onto the problem of the capitalist system as whole. In this moment, we can see the whole idea of self-management constantly returns to its ideal form of “autonomous commune,” the first capitalist form from the end of the Middle-Ages. While in Marxist circles, the term “petty-bourgeois” is too often used as an insult or denunciation in petty ideological discussions, in case of self-management that term would go pretty well with its class nature. Self-management is an ideology of the self-employed, craftsmen and peasants that want a market system without monopoly in which they can freely compete. Of course, in the case of Yugoslavia there were quite obvious monopolies and the market wasn’t as “free” as some would want. Also, the renaming of the CPY to the LCY wasn’t accidental. Its essence is the movement of the focus from “class” to “people,” i.e., declassing of the working class in the confusion of the term “people,” which made ideological excuses for the existence of classes, class society, but also of increasing nationalism. All together, it is really interesting how, unlike most of today’s left, the ultra-right neo-classical economist Ludwig von Mises, pretty much hit the spot in his analysis, of course in his own way:

“The syndicalistically organized state would be no socialist state but a state of worker capitalism, since the individual worker groups would be owners of the capital. Syndicalism would make all re-patterning of production impossible; it leaves no room free for economic progress. In its entire intellectual character it suits the age of peasants and craftsmen, in which economic relations are rather stationary.” (von Mises 1983:199)

CONCLUSION

Yugoslavia was a capitalist society. As I’ve pointed out, we cannot analyze an economic system by accepting its proclamations or documents, but by materialist relations in production. Capitalist systems are marked with the existence of class relations in production, wage, exchange, commodity production, etc., while communism is a movement which abolishes these relations. Yugoslavia had all the features of a capitalist system; no matter how much time its ideologues spent on masking them. For example, social property was nothing but property of a ruling class that appropriated its surplus value. Also, there was no socialist and/or communist revolution in Yugoslavia. Communist revolution is marked by an uprising of the proletariat which, together with its class Party, “abolishes the present state of things” (Marx). In the case of Yugoslavia, the CPY won power after war while relations in production didn’t change at all.

The idea of self-management was never part of the Marxist tradition and it never was and never will be able to tackle capitalism and to replace it. Quite the contrary, in the case of Yugoslavia, self-management only increased the power of the ruling class and integrated the working class into the state, just like the welfare state in the West. Furthermore, Yugoslav self-management kept capitalist relations safe, declared the law of value, commodity production and market exchange as mere “economic tools” that exist in every economy, and solved every economic and political crisis with broader liberalisation as the main austerity measure. If self-management was supposed to show “another way” of organization of a socialist state, it failed—as socialism in one country is a wasted project. Communist transformation is only possible on international scale.

Although one would have to be completely blind not to notice the difference between basic living conditions in Yugoslavia and today’s ex-Yugoslav countries, one shouldn’t fall into the trap of nostalgia or calling for the refurbishment of Yugoslav relations. Yugonostalgia in the political arena is nothing but an a-political populism or superficial analysis. Instead of feasting on Yugonostalgia, one should concentrate on understanding the conditions and relations that existed within Yugoslavia, their dialectical development in the ex-Yugoslav countries and how that affected the lives of the proletarians in order to strive for a classless society of tomorrow. We have to be constantly aware that struggle for a classless society involves understanding of present day relations in production, class dynamics but also historical lessons, where a resurrection of state socialist regimes isn’t a goal but an obstacle.

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NOTES

[1] Serb-Cro. Narodno oslobodilački pokret (NOP) was a Popular Front movement in Yugoslavia during the Second World War.

[2] Serb-Cro. Izjava Vrhovnog štaba NOV i POJ i AVNOJ-a; NOV i POJ stands for Peoples Liberation Army and Partisan Units of Yugoslavia and AVNOJ stands for Antifascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia.

[3] In his book Samoupravljanje 1950–1974 (eng. Self-Management 1950–1974; 1974, ) Yugoslav historian Dr. Dušan Bilandžić claims that 1,706,000 Yugoslav people were killed in the Second World War, i.e. every tenth citizen of Yugoslavia. Actually, he’s talking about demographic loss, i.e. the number which marked how many citizens the country lost. This number was presented as the number killed at the peace conference in Paris, so that Yugoslavia could maximize its sufferings.

[4] Rus. Народный комиссариат внутренних дел was the Soviet secret police.

[5] Stakhanovism was a “trend” among Russian workers, called after Alexei Stakhanov, miner which, inspired by Stalin’s speech from May 1935, excavated more than 102 tons of coal in just 6 hours, which was 14 times above his quota. Stakhanovists demanded that equal wages should be abolished and that workers should be paid on their merits. Appearance of this “trend” was followed with an increase in extreme wage differences, surcease in rationalisation and the beginning of production of luxury commodities. On November 15th 1935, the All-Russian Conference of Stakhanovists was held where they were declared, by Pravda, to be “leaders of the people” (Dunayevskaya 1942). Increase in Stakhanovist wages enabled them faster advance in society. Unlike them, regular workers found themselves in situation where it was harder and harder for them to buy goods they could afford during rationing. In Yugoslavia Stakhnovists were called “udarnici” (eng. outstanding workers).

[6] The Serbo-Croatian title is Ugovor o prijateljstvu, uzajamnoj pomoći i poslijeratnoj suradnji, Jugoslavije i SSSR-a .

[7] While in the most of the text I use Stalinism as another name for Marxism-Leninism, when I refer to “Stalinism” in quotes I’m referring to denunciations which the Yugoslav leadership used against Soviet Union’s ideology and its followers in Yugoslavia. I’m using quotes because, in the case of Yugoslav leadership, their denouncing of the Soviet Union as “Stalinist” doesn’t have any material explanation or argument and it does not question fundamental concepts of Marxism-Leninism, or Stalinism, as I’ve done so far and as I’ll continue in this article, since I don’t consider Marxism-Leninism as Marxism in the first place.

[8] “Goli otok“ (eng. Naked Island) was the most famous Yugoslav concentration camp for leftist ideological enemies of the regime, usually “Stalinists.” This camp was primarily for male prisoners, while “Sveti Grgur” (eng. Saint George) was for females.

[9] The Serbo-Croatian title is O narodnoj demokraciji u Jugoslaviji.

[10] The Serbo-Croatian title is Zakon o narodnim odborima.

[11] The Serbo-Croatian title is Uputstvo o osnivanju i radnu radničkih savjeta.

[12] The Serbo-Croatian title is Osnovni zakon o upravljanju državnim privrednim poduzećima i višim privrednim poduzećima od strane radnih kolektiva.

[13] Even if it is common to put the Praxis group in the Marxist-Humanist camp, I oppose such a classification. For me, Marxist-Humanism is a tendency which is based around works of Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James and the so called Johnson-Forest Tendency, which politically shares really little, if anything, with the Praxis group. Even though members of the Praxis group were highly critical of the Yugoslav system, they did not share the Marxist-Humanist analysis of the Soviet Union and similar regimes, i.e. they did not support the theory of state capitalism. Also, I believe that no-one can say that there was political and ideological unity among members of the Praxis group, which explains that while some were trying to articulate some sort of Marxist critique of Yugoslavia, others turned to liberal ideas of “democracy” and “democratisation,” completely abandoning historical materialism and class analysis. The fact that the second current won can easily been seen from the last issues of Praxis which were completely dedicated to liberal “civil society” theories and which were dominated by articles of Croatian liberal-nationalist philosophers.

[14] Polyarchy is a term invented by Robert A. Dahl, which he used to describe forms of rule where power is in the hand of three or more persons. Polyarchy is a nation-state which has certain procedures which are necessary to implement the “democratic principle.”

[15] With the term “national,” Lindblom is actually referring to individual Yugoslav republics, i.e. Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia or Montenegro. It is a mistake to refer to them as “provinces,” because Yugoslavia was a federation of “socialist” republics, but also because that could cause certain confusion since Serbia consisted of two “autonomous provinces”: Vojvodina and Kosovo.

[16] In 1952, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia renamed itself as the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The reason for changing the party’s name was Tito’s idea that in socialism there was no need for a Communist Party, since “working people” controlled the state. Once “working people” controlled the state, the Communist Party had fulfilled its historical task. Also, CP’s were vanguard parties of the proletariat, while “working people” were not just proletarians, but also craftsmen, peasants, etc—all of whom must participate in the construction of Yugoslav society.

[17] Lebowitz argues that while the party was imposing directors, workers’ councils had certain autonomy to accept or reject directors and they used it. He also pointed to other bodies involved in managing enterprises such as workshop councils and special commissions, stating how certain researches showed how one third of workers in enterprise participated in one of the councils or commissions, how people used to rotate on their functions and how functions were limited to two year mandates (Lebowitz 2004).

[18] In Yugoslavia, when it comes to the national question, the ideology of “brotherhood and unity” and “no-minority-no-majority” prevailed till its last days. Behind that policy was a division on “nations” and “nationalities.” “Nations” were Slovenians, Croats, Bosniacs, Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians, i.e. “nations” had their own republics. “Nationalities” were actually national and ethnic minorities such as Albanians, Czechs, Hungarians, Germans, Italians, Bulgarians, Turks, etc. Kosovo Albanians were actually a really big “minority,” which is why they have constantly demanded that Kosovo become republic, instead of being an “autonomous province.”

[19] ABC of Yugoslav Self-Management is a book that Horvat thought of as a short account on Yugoslavia for Yugoslavs as part of his greater study Political Economy of Socialism (1983) published in English. Political Economy of Socialism is probably the most important book when discussing market socialism.

Originally published in Insurgent Notes #9, October 3

Surveying C.L.R. James’s shifting and evolving views on the making of national liberation struggles, whether in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, Eric Williams’s Trinidad, or Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Haiti, which he was associated as anti-colonial activist and independent socialist historian, may lead observers to conclude he was either inconsistent in defending his most cherished ideals or, alternatively, strategically minded in specific historical moments. Most affirmations or rejections of James’s capacity for posing valid terms for evaluation of the qualities of political leadership, and tasks for colonial freedom movements, still neglect crucial evidence for this assessment. Deep archival research reveals James’s hidden quarrels, but also evidence James himself contributed to suppressing within the historical record of his life and work. We will examine some of these disputes here.

Aspects of direct democracy and labor’s self-emancipation, if not always as programmatic perspectives then as historical methodology and political criticism, were part of how James saw the making of colonial freedom. At some of his earliest junctures in the 1940s and 1950s, James tended to imply that direct democracy and workers’ self-management were synonymous with true national liberation, but in his later years beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s he began to suggest, with a strain of racial vindication, that the postcolonial Third World countries, whatever those society’s shortcomings, were as free as any other. By this he meant their nation-states and the relative merits of their authoritarian rulers. James, unlike subtly at times in some of his historical writing, which strived to capture the changing forms of spontaneity and organization in social movements, rarely held these conflicting perspectives at the same moment in time in political assessment of current events.

As a result, particularly in the last clashes during the Black Power movement, where there was mass interest in the Third World, there has been misunderstanding due to public silences, when both his intellectual legacies of workers’ self-emancipation and advising statesmen on national liberation could not be sustained together in public later and deeper into the post-colonial moment. We shall make these clashes visible by unearthing some of the many private debates James carried out over the years with a variety of interlocutors, including James Cannon and Max Shachtman of the American Trotskyist Movement; Eric Williams and Kwame Nkrumah before they achieved state power in Trinidad and Ghana respectively; George Padmore, the Pan-African activist and a childhood friend of James in Trinidad; Martin Glaberman, the chairman of the Facing Reality group, and a comrade of James for more than fifty years; and Walter Rodney, the outstanding Pan-African activist of the Caribbean New Left. These controversies are missing from the historical record and reveal contours of the political economic foundations of James’s understanding of the search for national identity.

The revelations regarding these disputes reflect, their relative hidden qualities, reflect James’s emerging desire to establish a representative canon of heroic men whose anti-colonial socialist thought appeared to complement each other in shaping a very particular radical tradition. Yet most scholars of James’s life and work have minimized the mastery of the disagreements within this framework is essential. In Party Politics in the West Indies James explained while there is a radical tradition of anti-colonial political thought, we cannot understand the heritage unless we understand the antagonisms within the tradition. Further, we must be able to compare the ideas and methods of creative individuals historically and politically.^[1] This requires restoration of these conflicts beyond rumor, hearsay or legend that, while there may have been difficult times, these internal battles within freedom movements were never grave or fundamental. Choosing sides in these debates is at the very intersection of post-colonial liberation and its suppression.

George Rawick’s Defense of James’s Third Worldism

In a February 25, 1968, letter to Marty Glaberman labeled “private and personal,” George Rawick disagreed that James’s political thought on the proletariat and peasantry was changing radically. Rawick felt that James’s public position on Cuba “follows out to the letter” analyses he had made elsewhere. He claimed that there was a continuity to be found in James’s speech to the Convention People’s Party in Accra, Ghana in 1960, the second edition of The Black Jacobins (with epilogue and new footnotes, 1938, 1963), Party Politics in the West Indies (1962), his “Nkrumah: Then and Now” manuscript (1964), which would later be published as Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), and “a dozen public speeches.” Rawick explained:

In these speeches and places he makes the following point: the mass political party cannot be dispensed with in the underdeveloped countries. The question is therefore how to tie these parties through devices like the workers and peasants inspection to the mass of the people so that the ever present pressure of bureaucratic distortions and worse are avoided.^[2]

Rawick summed up James’s unique optics on the Third World somewhat uncritically. He appeared to agree with James that the fight against bureaucratic distortion in colonized nations cannot be left solely in the hands of ordinary people. Sympathetic middle-class parties and leaders must facilitate opportunities for workers’ and farmers’ criticism of their regimes. The reference to a workers’ and peasants’ inspection by Rawick is consistent with James’s affirmation of Lenin’s last writings, which acknowledge projecting proposals in the context of a conclusion—that capitalism will not be defeated. This premise is central to James’s later anti-colonialism. Yet this stance is incompatible with a “merciless” disposition against the postcolonial national bourgeoisie. In fact, this stance suggests collaboration between insurgents and the aspiring administrative class, potentially to the detriment of popular self-management.

The very nature of this letter labeled “private and personal” reflects tensions in James’s small political organization, where, we can assume, the intricacies of these political questions could only be grappled with by the highest leadership. It also reveals silences in the history of James’s life and work. To disclose them publicly, as Rawick suggests in the letter, is to undercut and call into question the political reputation not just of James, but of the entire organization. Nevertheless, quarrels over the meaning of direct democracy and national liberation were central to every split in James’s small political organizations, including Martin Glaberman’s final dissolution of the Facing Reality group in 1970. Efforts were made even after the final dissolution to not have political differences undercut personal affinity. Similarly, these issues shaped James’s mature political thought as a break with American Trotskyism.

It is a mistake to view those quarrels as irrelevant to evaluating national liberation struggles on their own terms if, for most observers, self-determination of oppressed nations means the evaluation of peripheral nation-states’ approaches to governing from above society. As we will show, James broke with the Trotskyist movement not as a result of its overwhelming or unique “Eurocentric” disposition toward peripheral nations, but as a result of the movement’s inability to defend popular self-management as a prism for the entire world.

Trotskyism: The Balance Sheet for Direct Democracy and National Liberation

C.L.R. James’s quarrels within American Trotskyism (in particular 1947–1951) show us precisely how he came to the conclusion that direct democracy and workers’ self-management were “the way out.” James contested that Trotskyism, as a body of political ideas over time, had consistently been unable to hold an independent socialist position distinct from Stalinism and social democracy in practice. This seems so counter-intuitive for this was the major purpose and premise of the Leon Trotsky movement. Yet when one considers that the American and global minority tendencies that advocated various types of direct democracy and workers’ self-management within World Trotskyism, never became the majority of any party, and that the dominant trends tended to evaluate Russia as a deformed or degenerated workers’ state worthy of defense, while supporting an enhanced welfare state domestically, the claim to a type of “independent socialism” could become dubious.

Though James’s Balance Sheet (1947) and Balance Sheet Completed (1951) argued that the Trotskyists did not elevate the independent validity of movements and instincts toward Black autonomy and women’s autonomy in the United States to his satisfaction, for our purposes, we must underscore his quarrels with that movement over the status of national liberation struggles. Keeping in mind the dual nature of James’s state capitalist analysis we must carefully consider James’s grievances with American Trotskyism. James wields his vision of state capitalism in these debates as a one-world system that defies the easy bifurcation of First and Third worlds and stands in defense of the direct democratic capacities of peripheral nations. At the time he was writing, the theory of “three worlds” or global sectors of nation-states had barely emerged in world politics.

Though often characterized as a Eurocentric, sectarian, and marginally dissident world movement in its rigorous intellectual debates, Trotskyism actually anticipated many contemporary outlooks deemed social democratic, Stalinist, revolutionary nationalist, Third World, and “progressive.”^[3] The fact is that, without a pretense to a type of identity politics, the mistakes of most Trotskyist ideas up to 1951, that James and his colleagues examined critically, were quite similar to the ideals of most subsequent Maoist and Third World Marxist party politics.

James often criticized the inadequacy and dangerous qualities of these perspectives. In certain respects, these debates contributed to the sharp quality of his analysis of both imperial and peripheral nations both during and after his years in the Trotskyist movement. Yet we can also read these differences with the standard-bearers of American and international Trotskyism as an archive of possible avenues of retreat from what had formerly been James’s most cherished ideals. Such a reading would have disturbed close comrades like Martin Glaberman, who stayed loyal to James through the Facing Reality group, and Raya Dunayevskaya, who split with him to found the News & Letters group in 1955. Glaberman and Dunayevskaya were the co-authors of these balance-sheet documents with James, which summed up their experience together within American Trotskyism.

As an intellectual and political minority within James Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and Max Shachtman’s Workers Party (WP), James’s and Dunayevkaya’s Johnson-Forest Tendency witnessed the emergence of perspectives that began to shape the confidence in their own unique libertarian socialist outlook. First, certain SWP thinkers and activists began to sense that a “workers’ state without proletarian revolution” in peripheral nations was possible. The WP majority believed, however, that workers’ self-management in the United States was not “a realistic possibility,” and began to throw their lot in with the leadership of the trade union bureaucracy, especially Walter Reuther’s United Auto Workers, as representing something progressive.

These party politics, due to their incapacity to pose the socialist revolution from below at home and abroad and their inherent skepticism toward direct democracy and workers’ self-management, came to be content with being critical of one form of state bureaucracy only to advocate another form of political hierarchy in the interest of working people. Whether as cultural workers for trade union staffs (who were not rank and file workers) or aspiring to similar roles for radical nationalist and state capitalist regimes abroad, many Trotskyists wanted to constitute a loyal opposition to hierarchal regimes in the name of progress.^[4]

In the WP, James witnessed some thinkers emerge with a “blatant counter revolutionary pro-imperialist position,” with the “labor advisors to the State Department” being the only “international left” they could imagine aligning with. Not proposing military intervention by the United States abroad, they proposed economic “recovery” or “aid” to peripheral nation-states by imperialists as a key to strengthening democracy and the labor movement abroad.

The SWP’s defense of nationalized property as the “gains” of the Russian and other purported workers’ states in Eastern Europe was the mystification of another more crucial matter: they defended police states that had crushed forces of independent labor and libertarian socialism. With the SWP’s transition toward critical support of Tito’s Yugoslavia and Maoist China, though it was not a direct path over the years, it anticipated its future stance as loyal supporters of Third World one-party states in Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua.^[5]

Notably, James, upon permanently leaving the Trotskyist movement, proclaimed his disgust with those who speculated about the “personalities” of the “rulers of state and administrators of the proletariat.” His opponents within Trotskyism suggested that his theory of state capitalism was “a literary theory.” James’s feisty response was that “nothing can be further from the truth, and the final proof is the bankruptcy and degeneracy of those who think so.”

Personalities in bureaucratic positions, in the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s Marxist analysis, did not represent the destiny of the ordinary people.^[6] Rather, the shifting strategies of bureaucratic political leaders represented social tensions where the desires of ordinary people “pushed [ruling elites] from behind.”^[7] However, this nuance was difficult to implement in practicing solidarity with mass movements. In a populist fashion, one could easily defend a bureaucracy as facilitating the popular will or as consistent with ordinary people’s self-governing desires.

James was convinced that the American Trotskyist movement could not see the true potential of the working people’s capacity for self-governance. The SWP leadership spoke of “the coming American Revolution” while at the same time James noticed they needed to discourage its ranks from the instinct to support Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign of 1948. Wallace was the former Vice President of Franklin Roosevelt and a progressive very close to the Communist Party affiliated with Moscow.

The WP, on the other hand, promised a social democratic vision of “plenty for all” in economic terms through a larger welfare state for a future socialist United States. However, for James, something was wrong with these vistas. There was no evidence that socialism was a product of the common people’s self-emancipation. The WP majority did not present any proposals that allowed everyday people to take up matters of economic planning, foreign policy, judicial decisions, and educational affairs through their own popular councils and associations.

Despite quarrels with the Popular Front of American Communism over what type of culture should be promoted amongst the masses, James found that the American Trotskyists’ increasing preoccupation with what they imagined to be good books, art, and music, as well as social criticism of them in the party press, suggested a conceptual problem. They believed that working people needed exposure to more “culture” as a prelude to being fit for self-government. James was irate politically, if composed, austere, and detached in his personal argumentation.^[8]

Socialist visions promising ordinary people economic gains through welfare-state measures, electoral politics, trade union bureaucracy, alignment with one-party states abroad, or the State Department at home all conveyed the idea that the self-emancipation of everyday people had become beyond the ken of the Trotskyist movement, or a mere symbolic cultural adornment. As a result, James saw party politics become “cliquism,” where a small group of leaders decided on perspectives that seemed remarkably disposable and unstable. Behind the democratic appearance of endless discussion over ideological differences and the “willingness to agree to disagree” within party life, one finds a lack of confidence in any shared definition of the way forward. For James, this lack of assurance was bound to lead to nothing but retrogression or a complete disavowal of the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist vision.^[9]

The Max Shachtman–led Workers Party viewed the Johnson-Forest Tendency’s position that everyday people should be presented with the ideas and methods of their own self-emancipation through popular committees at the workplace, school, and neighborhood level as “sectarianism.”^[10] In contrast, James Cannon, the leader of the Socialist Workers Party, could not understand why James’s group collectively resigned without “provoking.” James, however, was never a sectarian, nor did he aspire to be disruptive or intend to grab power. Sectarianism implies a senseless and disruptive quarrel over a so-called absolute truth embodied in a proper political program. James, on the other hand, agreed with Grandizo Munis, a libertarian socialist active in the Spanish Revolution, who believed that “a lull in the offensive of the proletariat does not alter the validity” of a program of popular self-management:

There is not an ounce of sectarianism in this and people who in one place preach the approaching downfall of civilization and then reject as sectarian a program for the international mobilization of the proletariat are playing with revolution.^[11]

Yet while agreeing with Munis that the immediate objective of everyday people should be to establish a government of popular committees wherever possible, James also felt that Munis was sectarian in one particular way: perhaps as a result of his experience in the Spanish Civil War, Munis did not respect the slogan “the Communist Party to power.” It is surprising that James did not appreciate this since he was supportive of the same tendency in the Spanish Civil War with which Munis organized, but he insisted that until “we have the committees,” it was necessary to support political parties, which, on a certain level, “represent a profound mass mobilization.” Grandizo Munis anticipated James’s final break with the notion of the vanguard party. However, as we shall see, James’s outlook had implications for his advocacy of a mass party for peripheral nations.

One reason a factional dispute in radical party politics is provoked at times has to do with the idea that power and influence in the world is a function of a bureaucracy or a cultural apparatus above society. At this juncture, we could not imagine James as holding such a disposition during his years in the American Trotskyist movement. However, cultivating a cultural front for a mass party subsequently becomes an aspect of his Third World politics. Under the premise of guardianship and the development of ordinary people, what if it was possible to transform the meaning of national liberation and socialist revolution into no revolution at all? As peculiar as that sounds, the leadership of International Trotskyism began to do just that, a move that James staunchly opposed. Paradoxically, however, the Trotskyists who thought in this fashion actually anticipated the emergence of the symbolic meaning of non-aligned or Third World bloc of peripheral nation-states, which subsequently became a common staple of analysis by most political parties of aspiring international socialists.

The “Third World” Congress of International Trotskyism

The Third World Congress of International Trotskyism in 1951 was not named as such because it intended to deal with the “Third World” of colonized nations alone; it was, rather, the third international conference of the Trotskyist movement, intended to explore the philosophical trends that had emerged in the context of Trotskyist groups around the world over the course of the preceding few years. During the course of the meeting, though, the proceedings raised some ideas with profound consequences for the future of the leadership of International Trotskyism, which James vociferously opposed. This meeting’s majority positions critically anticipated how many socialists would read the national liberation epoch, or what was later termed “the Third World,” or non-aligned nations, as inaugurated by the Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 at Bandung, Indonesia four years later.

The discussion of countries as “non-aligned,” as a political concept, was pioneered to assess Tito’s Yugoslavia, as well as early Maoist China.^[12] The Trotskyist movement anticipated these concerns when American Communists were still overwhelmingly Moscow-centered and hostile to the possibility that another regime could provide socialist leadership in a global sector not in their own orbit.

Losing faith in the possibility of workers’ self-emancipation and the possibility of establishing “workers’ states,” International Trotskyist leaders, especially Michel “Pablo” Raptis, and to a lesser extent Ernest “Germain” Mandel, began to argue that nation-states could be defined as “workers’ states,” where no mass movement for socialist revolution ever took place.^[13] Not to be misread as mere Cold War propaganda by the United States, in fact, many nations in Eastern Europe had been militarily occupied and colonized by the Russian Red Army, yet these nations were termed “socialist” not merely by the leaders of those regimes or Stalinists abroad, but even by most Trotskyist analysis. This was paralleled by the desire to support future African, Asian, and Latin American police states as “progressive.”

“Deformed” worker states, Pablo explained, could be created without the participation of labor and even against their will. Capitalism, he imagined, could be overthrown without the masses’ revolutionary action. Stalinist forces could, in theory, overthrow capitalism and create “workers states” if these forces were treated as though they headed mass movements with insurgent aspirations. They could also be evaluated in this manner if Western capitalist nations launched a war against the Eastern European “workers states” and China.^[14]

In State Capitalism & World Revolution, James took issue with this type of “Pabloism.” He believed Pablo saw his unique critique of state capitalism as “the enemy” and was trying to minimize the Jamesian interpretation of Engels’s “invading socialist society.” Pablo didn’t see the direct democratic implications in Engels’s view of the contradictions of state ownership or nationalized property.^[15] After discrediting workers’s self-management of nationalized property, Pablo theorized about a transitional period, where bureaucratic regimes (nationalist, social democratic, and Stalinist) would act as keepers of the flame for workers during a period of “retrogression,” as a result of their having experienced fascism and colonial wars. This retrogression had been theorized a few years earlier by the IKD tendency of German exiles^[16] within American Trotskyism with which James quarreled, and as far back as the debate amongst American intellectuals over Leon Trotsky, who was fingered for his role in repressing the Kronstadt sailors, but was nevertheless upheld for his morals by a commission led by John Dewey.

In an odd turn for a Trotskyist, Pablo decided that Stalinism was “progressive,” adopting a political self-conception similar to the Popular Front, which James opposed as a non-radical framework. Further, for Pablo, anti-colonial revolutions led by middle-class nationalists and their one-party states could be part of a new reality termed “the anti-capitalist camp.” Subsequently, nationalist-led regimes were embraced as inherently “socialist” in their quarrels with Western imperialism. It helped that, on one level, white supremacy and capitalism were seen by many as one, which obscured the state-capitalist nature of people of color–led “socialist” states.^[17]

Pablo advocated liquidating Trotskyist parties and boring from within Stalinist and social democratic parties. The goal would not be to build explicit revolutionary factions, as with the SWP’s “French Turn” into the Socialist Party in the United States, in order to break away larger and more influential after a time. Rather, he suggested one should build the “centrist” tendencies and give organizational advice to the leadership of these parties.^[18] Pablo later functioned in this fashion for Ahmed Ben Bella’s Algeria, a society where a dependent form of participation was presented as “self-management.”

Pablo contended that the class struggle, as Marx understood it, had been replaced by struggles among nation-states or blocs, and that the “interests” of workers and oppressed nations were represented by a certain type of state—one not controlled by the workers. Instead of workers organized as “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” which James at his best considered a direct democracy, Pablo projected the notion that the state, contra Marx, existed neutrally above classes.^[19]

It is important to clarify that while Leon Trotsky thought nationalized property was a gain, and served as evidence that a working-class revolution had existed in a nation (an idea of which James was critical), Pablo claimed that the mere presence of nationalized property was enough to create a workers’ state, however deformed, even if there had never been a social revolution in that nation. Where some of Trotsky’s thinking could imply that history was determined by certain material laws—and, on some matters, he suggested that socialism could be created separately from the struggles of the working class—Pablo’s entire outlook at this juncture appeared to be based on those conceptions. This position was also entrenched among the majority of American Trotskyists.^[20]

Under the pressure of Western imperialism, state capitalist regimes were equivalent to social revolution for the Trotskyists. Ernest Mandel, agreeing with much of Pablo’s argument, merely wanted to reserve the right to speculate on the terms of critical support, based on the quality of the political economy of such regimes and the Stalinist, nationalist, or middle-class social democratic parties’ ability to actually lead rebellion against empire.

James rejected Pablo’s and Mandel’s political economy on the grounds that the end goal of revolutionary societies and the criteria for judging regimes that claim to be socialist were their actual social relations—not merely what the Western imperialists thought of them. Were direct democracy and workers’ self-management present, or did the capitalist law of value, even under state planning, dominate society? Centralized capital in a one-party state or in a welfare state was not progress, but was, rather, a form of institutionalized oppression. James emphasized this fact, saying “it was something entirely new in our movement to call the bourgeois police state the defender of the proletariat and its ‘gains’ ” [James’s emphasis].^[21] While these debates within Trotskyism were not couched in concern for the Pan African movement, and James never publicly placed such perspectives forward within anti-colonial solidarity circles, one must wonder why they were not, and how these perspectives may have informed private discussion.

In leaving American Trotskyism alongside his associates, James had definitively cast direct democracy and workers’ self-management as synonymous with the socialist society of the future; he would never again discipline and mute this vision within a centralized aspiring vanguard party. Though in the United States James was still the political leader of the Correspondence group and later the Facing Reality group, he began to attempt to project his personality more broadly as a public citizen in London and in the Caribbean, and later as a Black Studies professor in the United States, as these other groups dissolved. He would eventually become a public intellectual as a defender of national liberation struggles.^[22]

In the second half of the twentieth century, James began to theorize and practice a politics of direct democracy and national liberation that at times speculated about the representative meaning of the personality of Third World political leaders and their nation-states for broader social development. James still insisted that these representative men were being pushed by the self-mobilization of everyday people. However, he would also take up the difficult and dual stance of projecting political perspectives from above and below, through “a mass party” striving to tutor ordinary people about their capacities and responsibilities, and their governments who aspired to rule above them as well.

In James’s optics, there was, in the peripheral nations, a lack of cultural literacy among the masses, who he otherwise described as extremely creative. This lack of literacy was an obstacle to self-government. James practiced a certain type of “centrism” where he advised middle-class political leaders whose radical commitments were always dubious regardless of what Western imperialism’s level of opposition was to their regimes. At his most enchanting, James imagined the postcolonial masses as proposing programs and perspectives of their own, and transcending mere electoral and party politics, though he also equated everyday people’s destiny with their states and ruling elites.

James, as mass party impresario, political and economic advisor, or sympathetic international critic of national liberation leaders and movements, had to strategically subordinate his most cherished ideals to nation-states and ruling elites, in order to position his more critical principles against them when an opportunity presented itself. At times, through intrigue or popular demand, he even began to partially foment a type of insurgency, but the directly democratic character of this revolt had elusive contours that were not always clear. At other times, his vision of popular self-management disappeared entirely.

When discussions of “politics as an activity” did appear within his analysis of national liberation struggles, they seemed calculated not to topple the national bourgeoisie, despite the accompanying captivating rhetoric. However much this class and the public misunderstood, James strategized—in certain respects, guided by his Leninism—to help them retain state power at the expense of smoldering insurgent instincts of ordinary people.

In a climate of Third World politics, where the peculiar veneration of a peasantry (still viewed as inadequate by most middle class managerial vistas for self-reliance) was becoming so pervasive and perennial critiques of white chauvinism thought to be inherent in metropolitan workers was becoming bolder, James, as elder public mentor, could occasionally be silent. “Revolution” became a cultural discourse not rooted in popular self-management, but an enterprise to define political terms and identities to serve ultimately new hierarchal regimes. Still, he knew that in this period, Stalinist interpretations of socialism were finding a renewed popularity. James saw his authority as mentor of Black Power-era youth emerge, based on a body of work that was written years before their arrival on the political stage. The youth seemed satisfied because they perceived his views as uncompromising and crafted without any intention of pleasing or co-opting their own conceptions of Black freedom or anti-colonial revolt. Still, in the national liberation epoch, an intellectual trend began to emerge that disturbed James greatly. The relevant distinctions between Stalinism, Trotskyism, social democracy, direct democracy, workers’ self-management, and anarchism didn’t seem to matter for most radical youthful activists.^[23]

James’s early debates with Eric Williams, Kwame Nkrumah, and George Padmore on the transition to the Third World national liberation epoch revealed that these pillars of the Black radical tradition anticipated this trend of having little regard for the content of socialism, save for its opposition to racism and colonialism as a paradigm.

The Protégés Who Were “Not So Bright”: Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams

James’s mentoring relationships with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Trinidad’s Eric Williams, both as young anti-colonial intellectuals and later as postcolonial statesmen, have often come under scrutiny in the midst of gossip and hearsay. Rarely have scholars established succinctly where James disagreed with the early Nkrumah and Williams. Was James informally arrogant and tactless at times? The answer is most likely yes; James could take on a tone, in interacting with his protégées, which suggested that he regarded them as less than intelligent or even stupid on some political matters.

James was also prone to forgetting that those he mentored as a youth were not the same people once they arrived in state power on the terms of their own authority. James’s forgetfulness or lack of tact was present even as he most often praised them in private correspondence and in public life before, not just after, they were prominent people. In the early 1940s, James was a far more accomplished public intellectual and political activist. Even as an underground man in the American Trotskyist movement, writing under pen names as an illegal immigrant, James was still the author of the acclaimed The Black Jacobins and World Revolution. It is true that later James criticized their regimes at the postcolonial moment, but he was also asked in various manners to loyally advise for crucial periods even when his intellectual and political differences, he maintained, were always clear.

In a 1945 letter to George Padmore, unfortunately and boastfully made public often by James, he asked Padmore to mentor Nkrumah, famously saying that Nkrumah was “not so bright.”^[24] Counter-productive for understanding James’s intellectual legacies, this statement has become legend. Scholars who have criticized James for his arrogance have never tried to piece together why James made this assessment, even as he recommended Nkrumah to Padmore and praised his talents and his sincerity in wishing to “throw the imperialists out of Africa.” In later years, James realized that his early evaluation of Nkrumah was being misunderstood and began to clarify that he “didn’t mean [Nkrumah] was a fool.” “An ordinary person wouldn’t understand,” in contrast to Padmore, that overall he believed Nkrumah “sophisticated.”^[25] Similarly, James could speak about Eric Williams both lovingly, almost as a son, but also in a manner suggesting that James felt some sense of ownership over his younger colleague.^[26] For all Williams’ss and Nkrumah’s insights, James insisted they could be blind to crucial matters which would eventually obstruct their major contributions as anti-colonial thinkers.

James was, as history shows us, not always nice. It is as tiring to focus on this element of his interactions with others as it is to constantly read portraits impressed with his dynamic and affable personality and offering little else. At the same time, however, we must begin to reveal where James disagreed with Williams and Nkrumah, especially in the early years before they were approaching state power. A Black radical tradition or anti-colonial framework which sees them in a unitary paradigm, as merely opposed to capitalism and empire, misses the crucial mark. After the race factor is partially removed, and people of color ascend to state power in a peripheral nation at the postcolonial moment, a political thinker can be critical of the empire of capital and not be against subordinate social relations between labor and capital.

It has been widely acknowledged that James’s ideas helped shape the thesis of Eric Williams’s seminal Capitalism & Slavery. Sometimes the figure of James as mentor is used by scholars to discredit Williams for a lack of original initiative, but James thought the book made a great contribution to historiography, despite his criticisms of its limitations. James had a similar nuanced reaction to Williams’s The Negro in the Caribbean which appeared two years earlier. Less well known is James’s critical dialogue with Nkrumah on the draft that became Toward Colonial Freedom, the future Ghana premier’s first major political text, which James later praised when it was finally published.^[27] This Nkrumah text is, in formation, a crucial link to the “not so bright” story. Williams and Nkrumah together shaped much of how scholars now understand dilemmas of state and political economy for peripheral or colonized nations. What did James think they were leaving out?

James affirmed Williams’s Capitalism & Slavery as clarifying that the British and other Europeans did not civilize the Caribbean. The British did not create the foundation of modern capitalism all alone and abolish slavery out of the goodness of their hearts, only for people of color to reveal themselves underdeveloped and unfit to govern. Instead, slavery was abolished in the transition from mercantilism (a form of state capitalism) to a greater free-market capitalism, when it was no longer profitable for the Europeans.^[28] This core idea of Williams appears in James’s The Black Jacobins, where James speaks of French mercantilism, Haiti’s economic dependence on Paris as “the exclusive,” and the British shift from Caribbean slavery to cheap labor in India. Williams makes this central to what is essentially a narrower economic history of the Anglophone Atlantic World when contrasted with James’s Haitian narrative of global implications .^[29]

James, in a critical review of Capitalism & Slavery, argued Williams was more concerned with what the slaves did for British capitalism—the production of wealth and profits extracted from the Caribbean—than with the liberating activity of the slaves themselves. Williams’s framework can contribute to the more contemporary idea of reparations. That is one could glean from his historical methodology a way to imagine calculating the debt owed the descendants of ex-slaves. However, an oddity has been overlooked in Williams’s discussion of British mercantilism, how the outlawing of free trade among colonized entrepreneurs was the major insult of empire. Is it not peculiar that one would rigorously critique the empire of capital only to defend the aspirations of one’s own national capitalists? The James of the 1940s would appear to find this strange but the James of the 1960s placed this notion surprisingly central to his anti-colonial thought—even as he increasingly became critical of Williams after rupturing with him politically.^[30]

Another idea in Capitalism & Slavery appears isolated and is severely restricted. Thus, Williams added a notion never central to his own thought, which, as James later recalled, “he probably told” him, as he advised him on the Oxford doctoral thesis that became Capitalism & Slavery. James insisted the abolition of slavery came from above, from the British government, because otherwise it would have been done from below. James underscores the idea that the slaves in British colonies, if one read their self-governing potential and liberating qualities in their historical self-activity closely, would have emancipated themselves, just as they had in the French colony of Haiti.^[31] Williams presented the premise in this manner:

In 1833, therefore, the alternatives were clear: emancipation from above, or emancipation from below. But emancipation. Economic change, the decline of the monopolists, the development of capitalism, the humanitarian agitation in British churches, contending perorations in the halls of Parliament, had now reached their completion in the determination of the slaves themselves to be free. The Negroes had been stimulated to freedom by the development of the very wealth which their labor created.^[32]

Williams peculiarly suggested at the end of his book that in fact Black labor instinctively was arriving at self-emancipation though his study was overwhelmingly about economic strategies and parliamentary debates among elites. James was also not pleased that Williams did not appear to sufficiently appreciate abolitionism in Britain as a profound social movement.^[33] Yet James does make fun of the British Abolitionist movement in certain respects in The Black Jacobins.^[34]

James’s analysis revealed a larger problem in most radical anti-colonial thought, which appears on one level to be socialist. In a sense it diagnosed critically how capitalism worked but not from the perspective of self-emancipating labor. Williams pioneered this contradictory premise as part of a radical tradition in historiography which later would carry over into politics. James recalled trying to explain historical methods to Williams around the time both were in England while Williams attended Oxford University:

Some time about 1933 Williams came down to my apartment and was talking about the French Revolution, and he told me, now if Louis had at the time done that and he had listened to Mirabeau or something of the kind, then the revolution would not have taken place. I told him—we were walking along the street—I said Bill, when we get home I am going to talk to you. Don’t interrupt me please but listen and then afterwards you can do what you like. When we got home we had a little time and I put him to sit down and I told him [how] the French Revolution was and how it developed. I used the Marxist method—the feudal regime, the bourgeois regime, the attempt of the king, the constitution, the legislative assembly, the convention, and how stage by stage from 1789–1792 the tenth of August and so forth, and how the revolution mounted and how it declined, the full Marxist view. Williams listened to me very carefully. He never interrupted once and he said nothing afterwards. But the next morning, when we were talking together with some friends, he said to me James, you mean if so and so would have happened, it only happened because of so and so and there was no alternative? I say, that is it. He had been thinking about it the whole night and the next morning he had been thinking about it too, and he had grasped the historical materialist method. There was something that he didn’t grasp: he never grasped the intervention of the masses as a constituent part of history…^[35]

Williams believed the colonial insult of racism and capitalism to be one: Europeans extract wealth from African and Caribbean toilers, and this extraction has racial implications because African and Caribbean people do not control their own national wealth. Consequently, arguments are made by colonizers that suggest a cultural inferiority of the colonized for their technical incapacity to manage their own affairs. Yet Williams’s emphasis elides the distinction of social classes and obscures the fact that capital is extracted from labor, not, properly speaking, from nations, no matter whether the imperialist or the colonized middle classes manage it. James argued that those anti-colonial thinkers who thought like Williams, who believed in a thin conception of “democracy” where Black people would rule above society, had no proposals for true independence, and would never be able to successfully govern if they failed to understand the value of independent labor in opposing the empire of capital.^[36] James’s anti-colonialism, at its best, is simultaneously an anti-capitalist vision, and not merely a lamentation about, or rejection of, dependence on Europe’s empire of capital. James would evolve to be inconsistent on this matter but, in the 1940s, he was quite strident in his opposition to the national bourgeoisie and its blindness toward the self-directed liberating power of toilers.

James’s central criticism of The Negro in the Caribbean was that Williams failed to understand the idea of combined and uneven development in peripheral political economies. The growing and disciplined unity of toilers, who experienced a type of modern factory life through the plantation order and thus could instinctively arrive at the need for socialism, was absent in his work. This lack of attention to toilers’ self-activity is true even as Williams, a sincere nationalist, copiously documented the economic misery and exploitation of Caribbean workers and farmers. James took Williams to task for suggesting that what was needed in the Caribbean was a change in the methods of economic production and a greater sympathy toward the Caribbean by international law and social democratic politicians in imperial nations. As James suggested, “On that rock humanitarianism has broken its head for a century, and Williams breaks his also,” even as he valued Williams’s analysis of the Caribbean wage earner on its own narrower economic terms. We could interpret this as James being rude again, except that here an important distinction is being made. James argued that the idea of socialist revolution was “not remote” in the Caribbean, but rather “it is nearer than in other places,” if one observed the lives of these toilers properly.^[37]

While James agreed with Williams that social change was partially dependent upon the world market, and Caribbean wage earners and displaced ex-slaves and landless peasants were exploited, the epic general strikes across the Caribbean in 1934–39 (in Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados, and elsewhere) mirrored the independent labor action of the early alternative unionism of the Age of the CIO. Williams saw these events only as evidence of the need for a welfare state after colonial independence. Williams’s focus on labor as an exploited commodity, like other uneven exchanges in the world market under racial capitalism, revealed that he had no eye for independent workers’ self-activity as synonymous with a higher purpose for Black autonomy.^[38]

From 1942 to 1955 Williams was a civil servant of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC). This informs us of one reason why Williams’s The Negro in the Caribbean, as nationalist text, has a restricted vision of labor. At the same time, Williams’s employment at that juncture, tells us something about the contours and silences of James’s criticisms of the book that can seem harsh on the surface but which in fact are muted. Tony Martin has made a complex argument that Williams both strenuously made an effort to enter the AACC, which in affect was central to global coordination of subordinate Caribbean colonial government and economic planning, while at the same time he was not a stooge of imperialism. It is plausible that Williams fought within it to be heard and be compensated as an equal scholar and professional among white racist elites. Part of the degradation of a colonized nation is those who wish to participate in their own nation’s government must do so in institutions which are structurally subordinate. Yet every colonized person doesn’t define politics, which transcends state power, in such a constrained manner. It would seem radicals would work to overthrow colonial government not work within it. Perhaps, as opposition politicians, some attempted to speak for labor. But it was the pressure of radical labor in the Caribbean general strikes of 1934–39 which gave Williams this administrative opportunity.^[39] This dilemma, entering into a coalition with the colonizer with a transitional strategy in mind, would later face Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah.

James made his first critical evaluations of The Negro in the Caribbean and Capitalism & Slavery during the same period (1943–1945) he met and socialized with Nkrumah, whom he then knew as Francis, in the United States. If we read closely the many places James speaks boastfully about, and sometimes moderates and clarifies the controversy about his letter to Padmore about Nkrumah, one finds in these fragments a similar pattern to his criticism of Williams’s political economy. James believed Nkrumah talked a lot about the unequal exchange of capital and commodities, imports and exports on a world scale, in an awkward fashion. James suggested that Nkrumah misunderstood Marxism generally and Lenin’s Imperialism specifically at that early juncture. A marked typescript of what became Nkrumah’s Toward Colonial Freedom, from the period leading up the Pan African Congress of 1945 at Manchester, which Nkrumah carried with him from the United States, suggests these are the disputes in question.^[40]

How did Nkrumah’s early anti-imperialism misunderstand the meaning of unequal exchange of commodities on a world scale which makes peripheral nations’ economies dependent? James believed that Nkrumah was uncritically repeating the conclusions of Lenin’s Imperialism, without updating the analysis to account for the latest stage of global capitalism. James accused the Trotskyists of the same narrow economic view of empire, a view that was also the basis for his early criticism of Williams.

For James, the main goal of revolutionary anti-colonial politics, especially during the 1940s when he mentored Nkrumah and Williams, was not to strive to defend national capital from the imperialists. Such a focus searches for a national bourgeoisie in state power to take responsibility for defending a peripheral nation’s capital in the world system. James also argued that this focus would lead to fear of attacking state bureaucracy as the guardian of national independence, placing a greater responsibility for national independence in that class above society instead of within the reach of the insurgent toilers. Ever since George Padmore expressed his annoyance with James’s “Trotskyist” influence on Nkrumah for distorting what Padmore believed should be the proper balance between nationalism and socialism in a revolutionary anti-colonial perspective, a historical misunderstanding has marred this entire debate.

James’s internationalism during the Age of the CIO was in direct conflict with both Trotskyism and Stalinism as it related to colonial revolt. James believed that Nkrumah misunderstood the stage of world political economy just as Williams misunderstood the Caribbean slaves’ and wage earners’ essential modern proletarian experience in the global plantation order. In contrast to the early Nkrumah, James believed that the imperialists were not primarily seeking to export surplus capital to the colonies after World War II, but wished instead to centralize it.

They no longer were primarily concerned with “re-division of colonies,” but of “world mastery.” The imperialists did not always invade on the basis of a desire to control commodities like land, minerals, or oil. For example, imperialists did not seek to subvert Cuba for their cigars, or Grenada for their nutmeg, or Nkrumah’s Ghana for their cocoa, but rather to break up their perceived political example to the world.

Before the Age of the Third World, James believed, because elites of colonized nations had no perspective of self-reliance, the imperialists were ready to increasingly support them in taking on government administration. Whether the national bourgeoisie played a relatively intermediary or progressive role was not a crucial question for James in this earlier period when he mentored Williams and Nkrumah. For James, the only national capital the post-colonial middle classes in state power would manage would be the intensified exploitation of their own toilers.^[41]

A careful consideration of Toward Colonial Freedom, with Nkrumah’s muted intense discussions with James and Padmore in mind, is a rewarding endeavor. Nkrumah condemns both the UN and Paul Robeson’s and WEB Du Bois’ belief that African colonies cannot be self-governing right away. Yet Nkrumah, reveals the shifting influence of Padmore in the final draft when he says that while he rejects blind nationalism as a kindred spirit of empire building and “cut-throat competition,” Nkrumah disagrees with those who advocate no nationalism or more specifically no nation-state. Padmore perceived, even in James’s post-colonial vision in the 1940s, that he was an enemy of the state. Nkrumah speaks of the need to build a workers movement in the African colonies side by side with a movement for national liberation but this idea is underdeveloped. He desires to link up labor movements within imperial countries with movements for colonial freedom.^[42]

Consistent with James’s concerns, Nkrumah does seem to muddle the matter that, in an era that he distinguishes by “national aggressive self-consciousness,” how it is that increasingly multi-national monopolies are building up the strictly national power of singular mother countries and the enterprise of egotistical individual interests. Nkrumah does seem to over-emphasize imperialist desire to flood colonies with cheap consumer goods. As James suggests, the colonizers are not so much seeking to export surplus capital as they are investing in the infrastructure to extract raw materials to centralize capital in Europe.^[43]

Nkrumah, like Williams, believes mercantilism was “the basis of colonial economics,” restricting trade only with the “mother country,” even though Nkrumah acknowledged he was writing in the age of finance capital. He was concerned with the unfair balance of trade (between exports and imports) for colonized nations. From the high taxes imperial nations placed on imports, to their export of European manufactured goods, to their desire only to receive raw materials from other countries, their governments and Big Business interests make the colonized countries dependent. Dependency means something specific to Nkrumah: the prevention of colonized nations developing their own manufacturing bourgeoisie with mastery of the latest technology. This would become a conservative intellectual thread later in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa—where peculiarly it was African capitalism which was underdeveloped under the pretense of socialist criticism. Rodney was unevenly critical of Nkrumah. For Nkrumah, colonialism killed the potential of African artisans to become capitalists as a result of free competition not existing—for Africans were not able to sell competitive products in Europe. Finance capitalists extend mercantilism by avoiding investment in African industries in peripheral nations, which would raise the wages of colonized workers and compete with industries in the imperial metropoles. Monopoly capitalists also make it impossible for African entrepreneurs to purchase European goods at wholesale prices to be successful salesmen on the continent.^[44]

Nkrumah shared a similar diagnostic analysis of racial capitalism with Williams. However, Nkrumah, explicitly in the name of Marxist-Leninism defines socialist development and national liberation to be one—the evolving capacity for Black people to be capitalists. This was never a central preoccupation of James’s anti-colonialism in the 1940s. We can imagine why James in this period thought extensive discussion of trade imbalances of exports and imports was a ludicrous discussion for someone interested in world revolution. Nkrumah insisted in Toward Colonial Freedom this inequality of global capitalism would never be resolved until Africa was self-governing and independent and thus he emphasized the immorality of the European capitalists. Nkrumah proposes “economic plans and social legislation” after building a mass movement for colonial emancipation.^[45] In the 1940s, James probably thought the emphasis on the immorality of European capitalists, while seeking to prioritize theorizing how Black capitalists were held back and could prosper, was not a worthy preoccupation of an aspiring radical youth.

Nkrumah’s later book Neo-Colonialism, while discarding the insurgent rhetoric, was in some ways a re-organization with more data of the economic thought in Toward Colonial Freedom that elides these historical problems which James was concerned. For the later Nkrumah, the neo-colonial state (he called his regime “non-aligned” though its economic plans arguably were not much different) had all the trappings of independence and sovereignty, but was politically and economically determined from the outside by monopoly capitalism and its multi-lateral planning institutions. That Nkrumah emphasized in his definition of neo-colonialism—the state, and not ordinary people’s or the toiling classes’ capacities—reveals that James in the 1940s had been correct to caution against emphasis on unequal exchange of commodities as central to an anti-imperialist analysis.

Nkrumah’s diagnosis of how global capitalism works, with its subtle emphasis on inequality among capitalists in imperial and peripheral sectors and without a perspective of workers’ self-management in the post-colonial nation, leads to a justification of a bureaucratic state plan for the Third World. Nkrumah makes clear that his critique of “neo-colonialism” is not against capitalism or even foreign capital—as the theory has generally been misperceived in social movement usage:

The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under capitalism increases rather than decreases the gap between rich and poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding capital of the developing world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developing countries being used in such a way to impoverish the less developed.

Non-alignment, as practiced by Ghana and many other countries, is based on co-operation with all States whether they be capitalist, socialist or have a mixed economy. Such a policy therefore involves foreign investment from capitalist countries, but it must be invested in accordance with a national plan drawn up by the government of the non-aligned State with its own interests in mind. The issue is not what return the foreign investor receives on his investments. He may, in fact, do better for himself if he invests in a non-aligned country than if he invests in a neo-colonial one. The question is one of power.^[46]

Nkrumah’s formulations may be emotionally satisfying to some. However, a close look reveals that despite the luster of his moral philosophy, the “question of power” as he frames it does not have an alternative conception of economic progress to capitalist development. Nkrumah will allow for workers in his country to be compensated less and foreign capitalists more than in other countries with governments he deems more oppressive. He also sees the question of capitalism or socialism as the policy or identity of peripheral nation-states not what African workers may be doing to emancipate themselves.

While Williams’s approach to political economy in state power was more Fabian and free-enterprise oriented, the more authoritarian path of the one party state is what Nkrumah ultimately took. Both Williams and Nkrumah saw Black laborers as so degraded they could not emancipate themselves once they played a role in bringing themselves to state power.

James is widely lauded for his public challenges to Williams’s Trinidad in Party Politics in the West Indies (1962) and in his Workers and Farmers Party campaign of 1965–1966, and for his criticism of Nkrumah’s Ghana before its overthrow in 1966. However, as we will show, James retreated on some of his earlier principles of anti-colonial analysis when it had been one with his revolutionary socialist perspectives.

C.L.R. James’s George Padmore

George Padmore (1903–1959), C.L.R. James’s childhood friend from Trinidad, was the Moscow coordinator of international solidarity efforts with Black workers (1928–1935) for the Communist International, and editor of The Negro Worker, before working with James in the International African Service Bureau in London before World War II. James’s Notes on the Life of George Padmore, an unpublished manuscript, is the basis for many published essays and public lectures. Padmore, among the canon of heroic representative men which James began to manufacture, holds his place in historiography largely as a result of James’s singular effort to place narratives of his life as central to a Black radical tradition.^[47]

James often tried, with his Padmore narratives, to teach his audience lessons about problems of thin conceptions of democracy and national liberation, though his audiences frequently failed to understand all the facets of James’s Padmore stories. Though this shouldn’t be taken as a small matter, when James is misunderstood, he is generally assumed to be simply imparting lessons about Black autonomy in political organization.

Though James and Padmore became independent Marxists of a different variety, James constantly repeated a message of unity to younger Pan-African audiences. Despite the fact that he was initially a Trotskyist and Padmore had begun his political career as an adherent to Stalin’s Russia, they never “quarreled” or had “friction” between them in their dedication to African solidarity against empire. This silence in James’s public career is proven false by historical research.

In the original manuscript, these silences are slightly less muted: “Though there were difficult moments we never had any serious disagreements.”^[48] James and Padmore argued about the value of direct democracy and workers’ self-management for evaluating and building socialism, the very possibility of social revolution in modern industrial nations, and the terms for shaping national liberation struggles.

James presented Padmore as the embodiment of the selfless and disciplined cadre organizer of Pan-African solidarity, linking struggles in Mombasa, Lagos, Dakar, Fyzabad, and Port-au-Prince.^[49] Padmore pursued underground work in the Sudan, Congo, and, in 1930, organized a global conference of Black workers in Hamburg, Germany, where he would later be held as a political prisoner. Padmore wrote letters to editors of newspapers, lobbied government officials, provided hospitality and mentoring for anti-colonial activists, published books, and gave public lectures based on original material from his sojourns and extensive library. He educated Africans in the dynamics of modern party politics, trade unionism, and the art of crafting demands and programs for action.^[50]

James repeatedly shared this basic outline of Padmore’s life and work, while omitting details of Padmore’s actual politics, emphasizing his belief that Padmore provided critical ideological continuity for global Pan African and labor revolt.^[51] In pioneering this narrative of George Padmore’s life, James believed he was placing a crucial pillar in the framework of the Black radical tradition. With this cornerstone, James wished his audience to understand that one need not become a statesman to be considered a successful revolutionary, but merely a disciplined organizer with skills in education, agitation, and propaganda. Further, the terms of Black autonomy, socialism, and resistance to empire were more complicated than they first appeared.

It is clear James’s Padmore was an implacable foe of white supremacy and empire and an independent Marxist, but it was rarely apparent what this meant for Padmore’s actual practice of political teaching and advising. We know that James did not believe Padmore to be an exceptional orator; we also know that he felt that Padmore’s published works were often distinguished by dry economic details instead of epic ruptures in party politics or struggles of social classes. For Padmore, poor wages and the condition of Black working people revealed that the institutions of white supremacy and the empire of capital were synonymous on a global scale—this was essentially Williams’s and Nkrumah’s view.

Padmore propagandized against oppressive acts and institutions: the stealing of colonized peoples’ land, subordination of Africans through Pass Laws and other racial and anti-labor legislation in Africa, lynching, segregation, and mass unemployment in the USA. In 1959, James reflected, “Everybody says these things nowadays”; they are even “commonly heard, and play a role,” in elections in the United States and in Britain. In the early 1930s, James argued, “George was giving them currency.”

Padmore, however, beyond challenges to racism and empire, rarely offered vistas of self-emancipating labor in his writings—not even for people of color. Padmore’s Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers (1931), despite the title’s emphasis on resistance, can only partially be seen as an exception to this rule. For Padmore, socialism and democracy meant a type of economic radicalism, where social equality and material welfare were asserted through a constitutional republic. Labor mobilized to achieve these “rights” and then was loyal and subordinate to a post-colonial guardian state. This dependence on a progressive guardianship was consistent with Padmore’s reading of Leninism.

James’s Padmore, on the other hand, whether in Moscow or London, was single-minded in pursuit of his work. He made friends easily with people of many ideologies, but allowed no sectarian allegiances of party to stand in the way of coordinating African solidarity. Padmore, much more than James himself, embodied the “Black Marxist,” the radical of African descent who experimented with the inventory of European political traditions to arrive at his own authority for crafting vistas for Black freedom.

James’s Padmore was presented as global-minded, not merely “an Africa specialist” who concerned himself only with “colonial or African affairs.” This presentation is partially true. Padmore was concerned, as James indicated, with the plight of British workers, China, Latin America, and the Middle East as well.^[52] However, unlike James, who proposed to lead and theorize “a world revolution” and make contributions in many spheres, Padmore wrote and organized overwhelmingly on matters of race and colonialism, and sought to maintain a Black International or a Pan African Federation, of which he would be the chairperson. In contrast, James had a greater audacity. As a perpetual founder of small multi-racial revolutionary organizations, James was an aspiring leader on historical and political questions on many continents crucial to the destiny of imperial and peripheral nations.

Padmore’s and James’s attitude toward political organization for anti-colonial work were compatible. In fact, James gave credit to Padmore for teaching him about how the small radical political organization should and could function. However, their approaches to the multi-faceted dynamics of world politics were very different. This is obscured if we don’t comprehend the difference between an anti-colonial coalition and a revolutionary organization.

Padmore was received by many of James’s readers as someone who would not allow the chauvinism of the white Left and the intrigue of their party politics to undermine his organizing efforts for Black freedom. Some wondered why James appeared to allow the debates within the overwhelmingly white Trotskyist movement to preoccupy him—though many forget James was a leader and founder of that movement. Further, James was the leader of his own multi-racial collectives where American socialists, many of European descent, looked up to him as their teacher for insight on European, African, and Caribbean developments equally.

James did not intend Black autonomy to be the sole emphasis in his Padmore stories. He also tried to explain why the problems of Stalinism were relevant both to colonial independence and a socialist future. Padmore, formerly aligned with Moscow, became an independent Marxist as a result of Russia’s shift to the Popular Front strategy (which many people of color all over the world, not merely whites, accepted). By redefining the United States, Britain, and France as allies, and “democratic capitalists” or “democratic imperialists” on the eve of World War II, Stalinism revealed that for them, socialism and internationalism primarily meant defending their own nation, and really their own regime, above promoting independent workers’ power at home or abroad.

Moscow asked Padmore to refocus anti-colonial work on Italy, Japan, and Germany, although Italy had only one colony in Africa, Ethiopia, and the others had none. Padmore refused, in defense of Black autonomy, and was purged from the Communist International. He found it an “unspeakable betrayal.” James used this example to explain a further political lesson, which he felt could be gleaned from Padmore’s life.^[53] In contrast to Harold Cruse’s Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, which suggested that Jews and West Indians controlled African American politics through the Communist Party in the United States, James explained that in China, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, the top-down approach and political philosophy affiliated with Moscow was the same.^[54] For James, though he recognized the Communist Party was permeated with racism despite genuine struggles to root it out, Russia’s affiliates in the United States were not behaving in “a white chauvinist” fashion. Instead, Russia, the standard bearer of socialism for many, collaborated with the empire of capital.^[55] For James, this revealed another dilemma. The working class did not directly govern in the Soviet Union, and Popular Front-style politics in the United States didn’t seek to promote workers’ self-management either.

Notes on the Life contains two other George Padmore stories rarely told in public by James. In one, Padmore has tea with a Russian friend in his Kremlin apartment in Moscow in 1933, the same year as the great famine in the Ukraine. His friend stopped Padmore from cleaning the table of “small crumbs” of bread which he was about to throw away. Her family hadn’t seen white bread for months. Padmore began to “sneak” food to his friend to take to her family. He would occasionally courageously speak to ordinary Russians in the repressive environment, inquiring whether they knew of the privileged life of the Party hierarchy. This narrative, while plausible, suggests James’s own particular gloss.

Padmore had the privileges of the Kremlin bureaucracy and could purchase fine foods from the Torgsin, the Kremlin-subsidized shop, at the cheapest prices. Many told him they were aware and disturbed by the inequalities as represented by the Kremlin hierarchy, but feared German and Japanese imperialism more. James used this example to illustrate the fact that the Stalinists, who claimed to serve working people, lived like an aristocracy in the midst of severe poverty.^[56] Yet even in James rendering of this Padmore story, one can see through Padmore’s eyes, that Russians under Stalinism saw themselves in the midst of a national liberation struggle not a fight for workers self-management. More crucial to James was the cavalier negation of direct democracy, the erasure of the soviets (workers and popular councils) in Russia.

In another of James’s stories, Padmore, while working one day in the Kremlin, before the purges and show trials of the late 1930s, was asked by Dimitriy Manuilsky, a functionary of the Communist International, if he would like to stand for election with Stalin to the Moscow Soviet. Equivalent roughly to a city municipality, the Soviet was once a popular council, a directly democratic form of freedom, which had, by this point, long been suppressed by the Bolshevik State. Padmore, as described by James, was careful to not get caught up in “political intrigue.” He “knows nothing about the Moscow Soviet, does not speak Russian, and has enough work to do.” Manuilsky insisted he should run for this position, that it was not necessary to campaign, and that somehow Padmore was sure to attain this office. Should he win, Padmore would have no tasks to perform.

Sometime later, Padmore was informed that he had been elected to be a representative of the Moscow Ballbearing Factory (where he was surely not a worker) to the Moscow Soviet with Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich. James wrote that Padmore “does not care, attends no meetings,” and continued in his work for Black workers and anti-colonial revolt. Undoubtedly, on more than one level, Padmore was uninterested.

George Bernard Shaw later led a British delegation to the Soviet Union and Manuilsky introduced Padmore as an elected member of the Moscow Soviet. Padmore was held up before this British audience as an example of the anti-racism of the Russian regime. The British delegation was astounded. For James, their pleasure reveals a thin conception of socialism. People of color or immigrants, Manuilsky boasted, could never be elected to the British parliament or American Congress. The British social democratic-minded delegation and the USSR’s Stalinist bureaucracy believed socialism meant affirmative action. This dilemma foreshadowed the global Popular Front politics of the future.^[57]

Socialism or national liberation came to be synonymous for many, not with workers’ sovereignty or defeat of capitalist nation-states or ruling elites, with equal opportunity to enter the ranks of hierarchy. James recognized that Padmore was always careful to see that Bolshevism not be discredited in the world. For James, this recognition largely meant the need to defend the legacy of Lenin. For Padmore, the legacy of Bolshevism was the idea, even after he was purged from Moscow, that the Soviet Union was a progressive nation-state. In 1946, Padmore began to conclude that the defense of the Soviet Union was crucial to defending the viability of national liberation struggles as a whole.

In 1946, Padmore and his wife Dorothy co-authored How Russia Transformed Its Colonial Empire. They argued that whatever criticism could be made of Stalinist Russia from the point of view of the limits of “socialism in one country” or “world revolution,” Russia had still, in their minds, facilitated the self-determination of oppressed nationalities. James’s earlier volume World Revolution was not cited in this work, but the Padmores’ criticism was an allusion to his ideas which they disagreed. The Padmores recognized that the workers’ councils no longer had any meaningful sovereignty within Russia. But they blamed this on the failure of the revolutions abroad not suppression of the soviets by the state in Russia. They went on to emphasize, however, that any person in Russia, regardless of nationality or property qualifications, could be elected to office.^[58] James would have been disturbed by such an argument. If someone from Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary were elected to representative office in Stalinist Russia, or within their own national borders colonized by the Red Army, this would not have meant for James that their countries were autonomous from the Soviet Union. Strictly on the basis of national liberation without a concern for socialism this was wrongheaded. Further, James argued in this same period, in The Invading Socialist Society, there was no dual or progressive character of government bureaucracy. We must remember that both James and Padmore were silent about what Lenin’s concession of the Ukraine to Germany meant for the self-determination of oppressed nations.

In 1953, James and Padmore had a dispute triggered by the former’s study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways. James presented the multi-racial, multi-national motley crew of the whaling vessel as the site of global solidarity seeking unity and self-government at the point of industrial production against the tyranny of capitalist management. For James, this perspective was synonymous with the potential of the United States. Padmore was neither enthusiastic nor concerned with the potential of American workers as represented in James’s literary criticism.^[59]

However, the last chapter of the book, devoted to a recounting of James’s detention on Ellis Island as an independent radical immigrant who overstayed his visa, somewhat inexplicably touched off this dispute with Padmore. As James explains in the book, in the prison on Ellis Island, he encountered a genuinely friendly Communist Party member, who offered solidarity to all his fellow prisoners and even to James himself. The Communist likely knew that James had a Trotskyist background. However, James’s counterpart—and this is James’s emphasis—simply did not understand the perils of affiliation with Moscow. James wrote this in a book he circulated to many members of the United States government as part of his campaign to legally appeal his immigration status during the McCarthy era.^[60]

Increasingly, the politics of solidarity in American and world politics had little to do with working for the direct self-government of toilers. Rather, the Popular Front pursued an enhanced welfare state in Europe and the United States and peace with the Russian one-party state. James, instead, wished to see both types of regimes toppled, though he tactically, like Moscow affiliated Communists in this era, argued for his own peculiar brand of popular democratic politics in the United States.

In a letter of June 22, 1953, James responded to Padmore’s irritation, firmly insisting that, despite accusations, he had not changed. James emphasized that, unlike Padmore, he had never seen anything progressive in the Moscow regime and never would.^[61] On the lower frequencies, the 1950s correspondence between Richard and Ellen Wright and George and Dorothy Padmore revealed disputes the Padmores had with James over the years that are corroborated by muted aspects of Notes on the Life.

Padmore came to believe that James had been working for “a paper revolution,” that his political faction was irrelevant, and that James had been an abstract “ivory tower” elitist in his talk of the potential of Detroit’s industrial workers, whether black or white. James was “a dreamer” in his plans for an American Revolution.^[62] Dorothy Padmore believed James was partially seen as an “interloper,” “poseur,” and “carpet bagger” at Ghana’s independence celebrations for doing little to propagate anti-colonial revolt during his first American years, still feeling he was “instrumental” in bringing Ghana’s independence about, and seeing in Ghana “the permanent revolution.”^[63] This perspective is remarkable, as James referred Kwame Nkrumah to the Padmores and actually did have an impact as Nkrumah’s mentor. On some level, the Padmores detested Facing Reality, which James shared with them in draft form at Ghana’s independence celebrations. They saw no direct democracy or instinctive proletarian revolution in the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, nor in the shop stewards movement in Britain.^[64]

The Padmores sensed that James had wasted much of his political career theorizing about social revolutions in the United States and Europe. They could not understand why he was writing a book on American civilization and on the prospects for social revolution there. They also felt James spent too much time theorizing about the exact nature of the Soviet Union.^[65] Why had he not written more books like The Black Jacobins in the service of colonized nations? James was aware of this criticism and found it absurd. By 1959, James had written more on anti-colonial revolt (separate from his writings on revolution in other sectors of the world) than the entire London Pan-African circle. In discipline and productivity, he regarded only George Padmore as his peer, yet the Padmores, in their correspondence with Richard Wright, found James’s references to “world revolution” and “permanent revolution” as ridiculous. They believed they were working more concretely for Black revolution.

George Padmore confided in Richard Wright that James’s mentoring of Kwame Nkrumah in the United States was more influential than most realize, and from his point of view, very disruptive. The young Nkrumah, it appeared to Padmore, was too internationalist and not nationalist enough. Padmore attributed Nkrumah’s lack of primary preoccupation with the future of Ghana’s state to the influence of James’s “Trotskyism.”^[66] However, as we have shown, James did not view the followers of Trotsky as internationalist enough. They wanted to see nation-states as the embodiment of socialism, even where the working class did not govern. Frankly, the Trotskyists and Padmore saw the socialist state and political economy in very similar terms.

James and Padmore, who had previously exchanged marked-up political literature across the Atlantic, were growing apart, even as they celebrated independence in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. While James viewed the Hungarian Revolution as the culmination of the instinctive struggle against state power, Padmore was increasingly captivated by the wisdom of Mao Tse Tung. Mao viewed the Hungarian Revolt as a contradiction that had to be resolved on behalf of the supremacy of the one party state.^[67]

Interestingly, Padmore’s criticism of James did not reveal an excessive idealism on James’s part. It was more stratospheric for American Communists to view Britain, where the sun never set on their empire, and the United States, distinguished by Jim Crow and Japanese internment, as “democratic,” and the Soviet Union as a workers’ republic (with no soviets) that had abolished property relations and liberated Eastern Europe. Revolutionary socialists, one would think, should be genuinely concerned with the destiny of the working people all over the world, not merely as a cultural banner.

James did not believe it was internationalist to subordinate the destiny of one nation, or one working class, to another; this was a stance he never took, regardless of how this worker behaved or that government executed a deformed policy in one global sector or another. Yet the Padmores, partially as a result of an increasing disbelief that white working people in Europe or the United States would be part of making a social revolution, anticipated a type of Third World Marxist perspective that equated toilers of color with progressive nation-states and ruling elites. Concerns with white supremacy and empire increasingly collapsed the distinction between toilers and rulers in both imperial and colonized nations. Crucial for understanding the Padmore’s postcolonial vision is recognition, regardless of the blind spots of white workers in imperial centers, of its lack of content for Black labor’s self-emancipation.

At their best, James’s politics appear to have continuity. Was he not engaging the frustration and anger of the masses, and the new leaders they installed, so as to clarify the purpose of national liberation and socialism as he attempted to facilitate the popular will toward self-government? At the same time, James had to position himself strategically in order to minimize chances of his being perceived as an out-of-touch “old man” from another generation, even as Black Power activists and Third World regimes craved his mentoring. James was not always able to rigorously explain, save to the most attentive, where he came from politically. He began to recognize the fact that, for youth who wanted him to tell stories about the Black radical tradition, chronicles which included George Padmore, the distinctions of ideological and party affiliation among the Red and Black were irrelevant—it was all “communism” because the white racists and capitalists said so, and because conservatives appeared to be threatened by such ideas. They did not understand that many of the Old Left had also come to this conclusion, to the qualitative detriment of how one viewed white workers, imperial nations, and national liberation in colonized nations. This conflict between workers’ self-management (increasingly seen as a “white” idea) in metropolitan centers and national liberation struggles tore apart the last manifestation of James’s small revolutionary organization, as represented by the muted quarrel with his oldest and most loyal colleague, Marty Glaberman.

The Disputes with Martin Glaberman

Marty Glaberman was a partisan of a type of Jamesian state capitalist analysis whose “one world” outlook especially defended the direct democratic potential of workers in industrial nations. Such ideas, to the extent they were properly understood, were under attack in the epoch of Third World national liberation. In a drafted letter to James dated April 3, 1972, Glaberman reflected on one of the first conferences on James’s life and work at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, calling it “a most successful and impressive event.” Yet Glaberman’s archived letter is marked with a bold handwritten note just above the type: “Private: Not Sent.” He details his “disturbed” personal interactions with James, and his deep concern with the perspectives he expressed publicly at that gathering. Among those present were Walter Rodney, Trevor Munroe, Robert Hill, Archie Singham, Paul Buhle, Sylvia Wynter, Modibo Kadalie, and Ernie Allen, but Glaberman “felt there was a tremendous gap in the proceedings—the industrial proletariat was almost totally absent.” Remarkably this was so with former Detroit based League of Revolutionary Black Workers’ members Kadalie and Allen present. Both were purged just before the League imploded in 1971 in disputes about internal democracy and the League’s aspirations to be a vanguard party.^[68]

After Robert Hill inquired why Glaberman had not participated much in the three-day gathering, and did not want to be perceived as disruptive of Sylvia Wynter’s presentation on culture or James’s final speech where it might not be relevant, Glaberman courteously asked Archie Singham to make a brief comment. James apparently suggested publicly that he feared Glaberman might make an argumentative “statement” and wish to debate him. As “time elapsed,” Glaberman did not raise his perspective. In this unsent letter, he is livid.

Glaberman, as perhaps James’s most loyal disciple, should take pride of place in raising principled criticism of James. Nevertheless, out of loyalty and personal anguish, Glaberman could not bring himself to send this critical letter, in which he confessed:

That comment was totally unjustifiable politically, and extremely painful personally. What right had you to assume that I came to the conference to get into a debate with you? What I wanted to say was decided well before you made your speech. If Walter Rodney saying that the American proletariat was counter-revolutionary, and Trevor Munroe’s neo-Stalinism, and Archie Singham’s confusion did not move you to debate them, what did you think I might say about the proletariat that you would have to [see] as a hostile intervention? Let me say first, that I have studiously avoided taking issue with you in public. We have had enough differences over the years (Czechoslovakia, China, some organizational questions, etc.) But when [Paul] Buhle proposed that I make the main contribution to a proposed symposium evaluating the [early] work of James I declined on the grounds that I was a long way from making final evaluations of a body of ideas that was still current and viable and that I was not going to raise points of difference between us publicly. I was prepared to introduce, or explain, perhaps, but not to settle accounts with a body of ideas as if it was all over and done with.^[69]

In his letter, Glaberman makes clear that his contribution would have been to explicate the “basic theme” that “informs a major body of James’s work.” Beginning with World Revolution (1937), and continuing with The Invading Socialist Society (1947), Notes on Dialectics (1948), State Capitalism & World Revolution (1950), Facing Reality (1958), and Marxism & The Intellectuals (1962), “there is put forward the conception of the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat, without which it is impossible to understand Marx or James.” In later years, Glaberman would go on to make a major contribution to solidifying James’s intellectual legacies by maintaining his archive and reinforcing the legacy of this specific body of work.

In the letter, Glaberman continued: “I would have indicated awareness of the racism of American white workers and rejected the idea that they will rally to the support of blacks so long as capitalism existed. But there was plenty of evidence of their hostility to capitalism.” As the most recent evidence at hand, Glaberman cited articles in Paul Buhle’s magazine Radical America documenting revolts against automation at Pontiac and Chevrolet automobile factories in Michigan. Uncharacteristically, James had suggested in his speech at the conference at Ann Arbor that automation was slowing down the revolutionary instincts of industrial workers.

Glaberman contested James’s claim that in his speech the views he placed forward on the working class were “new.” He suggested that James was “taking the first tentative steps (at least I hope they are tentative) toward the views of Jim and Grace Boggs and [Herbert] Marcuse.”^[70] In 1962, Glaberman and James had broken with the Boggses over their analysis of automation, racism, and imperial consumption patterns in the American working class as an obstacle to workers’ self-management. They also had a deep disagreement over what James and Glaberman saw as the Boggses’s uncritical embrace of many national liberation regimes, such as those of Nkrumah’s Ghana and Mao’s China. James himself had just been transitioning toward a greater criticism of Nkrumah’s Ghana and later a silent ambivalence about Mao’s China where previously his criticism was more strident.

James always proposed that the basis of unity in his small political organizations in the United States should not be the nature of societies abroad such as Russia or China (or debates over them), but rather the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat as the basis of an American revolution. Yet in the Black Power era and the emergence of the Third World, such divisions became increasingly untenable, if they were ever consistent, logical, and practical in the first place.

It is interesting that George Rawick and Marty Glaberman, comrades in James’s Facing Reality group, suggest a distinction between Jamesian political texts that addressed imperial and peripheral nations differently. James did view Facing Reality (1958) and Party Politics in the West Indies (1962) as his definitive statements on political policy for modern and peripheral political economies respectively. Yet Facing Reality is a peculiar book as it is distinguished for its homage to the self-managing workers of Hungary and the claim that “the whole world lives in the shadow of state power.” Yet Facing Reality, marked by the most libertarian and anarchist sounding propositions James ever placed forward, was also characterized by an evaluation of Afro-Asian hierarchal regimes as facilitating “a new society.” As the Balance Sheet documents show James and Glaberman ruptured with the Trotskyists who claimed to be internationalists, for this essentially nationalist (if deformed and bureaucratic collectivist) politics that are still present in Facing Reality. These fatally flawed political frameworks under the guise of nationalism (even with James’s later criticism) became an acceptable standard for Trinidad and Ghana. Facing Reality perhaps presented a gathering of forces of the material reality of movements on the ground at that historical moment. But a discerning reader would have to see not just libertarian socialist ideals but a conflicted political philosophy by James which accepts less liberty and questions the potential self-emancipation for the working people of colonized nations.

Simultaneously, James—and this is often Marty Glaberman’s emphasis—explained that politics could only be understood as the pursuit of self-emancipation in “one world,” and that state capitalism, as an oppressive regime, was a world phenomenon. Glaberman repeatedly underscored his belief that James’s The Invading Socialist Society (1947) and State Capitalism & World Revolution (1950) spoke sharply to matters of workers’ self-emancipation in imperial and colonized nations. With these politics, James stood up to Padmore and challenged the early Williams and Nkrumah. Without them James entered historical narratives initially as a fragment of a man, merely a famous Pan African activist and historian who opposed colonialism, with little discussion of strategic or tactical nuance of his political thought. This is also how Walter Rodney has entered history. Glaberman suggested that James did not challenge Rodney, but should have, at the conference on his life and work in 1972. Did Rodney, the outstanding Pan African of the Caribbean New Left generation, have any major disputes with C.L.R. James?

The Arguments between C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney

Part of a link in a radical tradition, Walter Rodney (1942–1980) is generally understood as the most distinguished class struggle Pan African activist of his generation. Following C.L.R. James, George Padmore, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and A.M. Babu, he is the last link in a chain of representative men. Historical evidence suggests that James admired Rodney as the personification of struggle against the inadequacies of post-colonial regimes and “the brightest spark” of the post-World War II generation. Only after Rodney’s assassination in 1980, in the fight “for people’s power and no dictator” against Forbes Burnham’s regime in Guyana, did it appear that publicly James raised political criticism of him. Whether Rodney properly understood the strategies involved in the seizure of state power, or a dual power scenario, or comprehended the role of political leadership in an insurrectionary situation better than James, or not, will continue to be explored by future generations.^[71]

Re-examining such differences must be part of understanding the antagonisms within radical traditions, which university discourse tends to neglect, and that make such an archive a living heritage. It cannot be explored with rigor outside a radical political practice where the overthrow, seizure, or abolition of state power—not academic meditations—is central not only to the discourse but the practical ambitions and experiences of those who participate in the discussion. Certainly how we understand “Marxism” would have to be part of that dialogue.

James and Rodney had fundamental differences in how they understood Marxism. These are made obscure if we focus on what tends to bring their legacies together on a superficial level—their affinity for popular democracy and the need for revolutionary intellectuals to dialogue with ordinary people, and recognize their creativity and capacities.^[72] This does not clarify for revolutionary politics what are actually the terms of everyday people’s empowerment—whether it will come from an external authority which is imagined as progressive or whether it is conceived that they will arrive on their own authority through their own self-directed liberating activity.

In 1975, Rodney recalled that, during the famous London study group with C.L.R. and Selma James of 1964–1965, that included Richard Small, Wally Look Lai, Adolphe Edwards, Norman Girvan and others, C.L.R. and Selma contributed to Rodney having a more precise understanding of “Marxism, the Russian Revolution, and of historical formulation.” Rodney felt James was a master of historical situations, that one could not simply quote texts of Lenin or Trotsky, but one had to know the social movement context, the dilemmas of state and political economy they were grappling with when they wrote down certain positions. Many often pulled from radical texts and forged debates out of proper historical context and James was trying to warn against that.^[73] This is a good first principle. But this could lead to the assumption that James’ interpretation was always an accurate and portrayal of historical circumstances.

Rodney remembered that C.L.R. and Selma James had the habit of really “decisively dismissing bourgeois foolishness” but they could also equally tear to pieces perspectives of a serious Marxist or progressive that otherwise seemed credible.^[74] Rodney developed a reputation of being an independent socialist. His perspectives were not so much self-reliant as an innovator within fields of Marxist theory, for he developed no original perspectives on state power, political economy or the role of labor in their own emancipation. Rather, Rodney was someone who located himself in debates between Black Nationalists and Black Marxists, where, by the standards of his generation, he had credibility with both at a time where there were great ideological disputes between each grouping. He at once rejected the Euro-centrism of Marxism, and still defended that heritage as producing relevant paradigms for examination of the African world. While he rejected the latent racism of the Anglo-American Left, his criticism of Moscow oriented Communist Parties was very thin otherwise—he had no critique of Stalinist political economy. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa his analysis suggested the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist regimes were progressive political and economic developments that the African world could learn from. In contrast, he found that Trotskyists tended to be sectarian in the maintenance of their line. Rodney laughed at the notion that a handful of dissidents from the Leon Trotsky movement could maintain continuity of revolutionary ideas all by themselves.^[75] But where did James’s political thought come from that he claimed to value so much? These differences between James and Rodney had to come into conflict at some point.

In the 1964–65 London study group, in fact James and Rodney did come into conflict.

The standard narrative of Rodney’s contribution to the study group was that he produced a piece on the Atlantic slave trade he would later publish as a pamphlet. James recalled: “I was immensely struck by it. I was struck though I knew nothing about the subject.” James remembered after Rodney’s death that he “interested me particularly” and that Rodney “was socially a very quiet” young man.^[76] Yet James, at another juncture, asked Rodney to review Facing Reality for critical discussion. Rodney inquired whether the Hungarian workers had their consciousness raised by living under a progressive regime. James was irate. The Soviet Union, and its satellite one party state regime in Hungary, for James, was not a progressive regime. Hungary was militarily occupied and a regime claiming to be socialist attacked one of the greatest spontaneous expressions of self-managing workers the world had ever seen. This was not a minor disagreement but an emotional one for James. James raised his voice and his yelling embarrassed everyone present, causing everyone to step outside the apartment. Selma James told Norman Girvan, while she disagreed with Rodney, “Nello should not have treated that young man in that way.”^[77]

Harry Golbourne has suggested that the Walter Rodney, who emerged after being banned from returning to Jamaica after the 1968 Black Writers Conference in Montreal with the publication of Groundings with My Brothers (1969), while a charismatic young teacher and activist, had his historical identity and political platform partially invented for him subsequently. That is Groundings was edited by a committee, which included Ewart Thomas and Richard Small, in London from outlines of talks Rodney gave in Jamaica, transcripts of talks he gave in Montreal, and subsequent statements he made after the banning, which he left with Eric and Jessica Huntley’s Bogle-L’Ouverture Press as Rodney was leaving to go to Tanzania.^[78] While Rodney did ground with the ordinary people of Jamaica about African History, and his banning did allow for the lower working classes and unemployed to rise up in the famous ‘Rodney Riots,’ there is nothing in his perspectives in Groundings, from his speeches in Jamaica, which speak directly to working class self-emancipation in a people of color majority nation—unless we underscore the importance of Black people reconfiguring themselves in terms of identity and culture out from under white supremacy.

It is only with his “Statement on the Jamaica Situation,” co-written with Robert Hill and an introduction by Richard Small, both close associates of C.L.R. James, that he framed the Rodney Riots as revealing a vision in process which was exploding across the whole Caribbean—the self mobilization of Black working people and unemployed against the bankruptcy of Black “official society.” Richard Small’s essay in particular was a touchstone for the Caribbean New Left which inserted the humble persona of Walter Rodney as the spokesman for this self-mobilization. Small alluded to the methodology in James’ Facing Reality related to, but independent of, the Hungarian workers that Rodney never could embrace. It was here applied for the first time to a peripheral nation by the Caribbean New Left generation. Rodney’s personal conception of people’s power, despite his charisma, was always ambiguous, certainly in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa written after The Groundings, and even in his last Guyana years. Whatever spontaneous rebellions Rodney had the capacity to spark were not seen as having any direct democratic self-governing content by him which would call into question state power itself—though he would object to this or that statesmen. In 1974, Rodney was not someone open to a rejection of vanguard parties for Black or anti-colonial freedom movements.^[79]

In Groundings we find a charismatic speech he gave in Montreal, “African History in the Service of Black Revolution.” David Austin, in outstanding archival scholarship, has shown in another transcript of the same speech labeled “African History in the Service of Black Liberation” important material was left out of its original publication. Among the items missing was evidence of a dispute with James about the importance of the classical Greek city-state. Rodney disagreed with James, consistent with the Black Power era audience in a previous session, and claimed that there was something wrong with calling Greece the greatest civilization the world had ever known.^[80]

Rodney questioned if historians of the African world, given the slavery found in Greece could continue to accept Europe’s various historical claims to embody civilization given its centrality in enslaving people of color. Rodney also questioned if civilization, as a historical concept, had outlived its usefulness even for African history, given the exclusions the idea perennially papered over. James recalled Rodney’s facilitation of the meetings they shared at the Montreal Black Writers Congress after his death in this manner. “Rodney was often chairman of the meeting. He handled the post with the necessary firmness, but with genuine understanding of the requirements of people, all of whom wanted to speak whether they could speak or not.”^[81] This recollection, cryptic like many of James’ references to Rodney, could suggest there was in fact a comfortable unity between them at the conference and Rodney was merely mediating between James’s comments on Greece and less experienced scholars’ and activists’ discontented objections. But this would seem to clash with the editorial judgment of the original editors, who chose to take this implied reference to a dispute between Rodney and James out of the original printed speech.

Erasing evidence of conflict with James in Rodney’s publications happened more than once. Out of the same conference at the University of Michigan on James’s life and work, where Martin Glaberman was displeased with James unwillingness to challenge Rodney’s assessment of the American working class in one discussion, Rodney gave a conference paper subsequently published as “The African Revolution,” an analysis of James’s scholarly contributions in A History of Pan African Revolt.^[82] A tape recording of the actual speech revealed a significant part of this speech, the introduction, was edited out. Here can be found Rodney popularizing for the first time a new moniker for James, “Mzee,” which in Swahili meant revered elder.

Rodney introduced his speech by saying he once studied at the feet of Mzee James, that it was an African tradition for the youth to study at the feet of the elders. After a brief but awkward pause Rodney reminded it was also a tradition of Classical Athens to do so. Another brief pause followed which allowed for the recording to retain some uneasy breaths by perhaps knowing insiders in the audience. Rodney continued by saying in his distinctive voice he once had the “gumption” to disagree with James in one of his study groups. He reminded it is not an easy thing to try to stand up to such a learned revolutionary intellectual as James, who had mastered broad fields of knowledge, and that it was a humbling experience. As the years had gone by, seven had passed since the London study circle, Rodney admitted he was still learning to properly comprehend all the ramifications of James’s intellectual heritage and political thought and that he hoped his survey of James’s approach to Africa would be satisfactory.^[83]

Rodney’s disagreements with James on Hungary and Classical Athens represented two historical problems James faced as mentor of Black Power era activists. There was a declining capacity to appreciate in the era of Third World Marxism that there was an anti-Stalinist heritage which importantly contributed at times to a deeper understanding of workers self-management in contrast to state power. Further, the bold critique of white supremacy in this historical period made it increasingly difficult to draw on the heritage of flawed democratic experiments within Western civilization which nevertheless could provide insight for framing an enhanced or direct democracy. Almost all who dismiss James’s Eurocentric blind spots as periodically undermining creative analysis with something stale have not distinguished themselves in scholarship of either Hungary or Athens but accept confidently that these are nothing more than useless “white” signifiers. This is an unacceptable approach to the breadth of James’s intellectual legacies.

After all we have uncovered about some of the debates James participated in within Pan-African, anti-colonial, and socialist circles (and crucially their overlapping spaces), we must inquire not just about his role in these disputes and the different political viewpoints in contestation. We must become impatient with unitary paradigms which codify radical traditions that weave together purported irreconcilable threads, with James’s workers’ self-management and national liberation politics in mind. James’s intellectual legacies, as an aspiring “founder” of a polity distinguished by direct democracy and as part of an “illustrious” group of Third World radical intellectuals who had made significant contributions to “world politics,” have occasionally existed side by side but rarely in conversation. James becomes a constituent element of an anti-colonial tradition distinguished by talent that he partially theorized in a limited manner. Periodic silence about the direct democratic thread of his own intellectual legacy, as the Glaberman dispute discussed during the Black Power and Third World era reveals, is a significant reason why, as James’s concern elsewhere made clear, colonized people’s radical traditions are not “properly understood even by their own people.” There could be many reasons for such misunderstanding.

Those whom James thought “not so bright” (but did not think were “fools”), with whom he “never quarreled” (for the initial historical record but in fact did so), often disagreed with his most radical ideals. James, and his debate partners, were both comrades and offended each other, respected each other and alternatively saw unethical changes of perspective among themselves. There were blind spots, flawed egos, and opportunism distinguished by an unprincipled path to compromise. A radical tradition of political thought, however emotionally painful at times, without this internal contestation over principles, and only distinguished by institutionalized oppressions as external opponents, would be historically unrecognizable and further far less edifying.

Political ideals, once cherished, might be discarded tomorrow or two sets of politics might be maintained in public historical narratives, in private conversations, or for different audiences to maintain authority or craft a prestige. James and his colleagues not only debated and made each other angry but inspired each other, shared minimal financial resources, wrote recommendations for each other for various formal and informal endeavors, wrote each other into history, and underpinned each other’s authority.

On some level, a radical tradition, as scholarly framework or canon, must appear initially through a more narrow and reductive outline form. “One of the tasks” James “set [for him]self was to make people understand…” “the tradition of national talent” which made colonial freedom.^[84] While future scholars, if they do proper archival work, may find other case studies that may help clarify the making of national liberation and its intersection or tension with direct democratic possibilities and labor’s self-emancipation in peripheral nations, James’s own silences about his hidden quarrels and inconsistencies in his later life as a public intellectual, contributed to the ignorance of important debates within the radical anti-colonial tradition and how national liberation struggles came to be understood.

1. ^[1]C.L.R. James, Party Politics in the West Indies, San Juan, Trinidad: Vedic (1962), pp. 117–118.↩
2. ^[2]George Rawick. Letter to Martin Glaberman. February 25, 1968. George P. Rawick Papers. Western Manuscript Archive. University of Missouri at St. Louis.↩
3. ^[3]The claim, often heard from those sympathetic to Maoism, that suggests their adherents’ focus on people of color–led bureaucratic regimes, who would be guardians of the peasantry, meant that they were thus qualitatively less Eurocentric and more revolutionary, is a false one. Neither is it consistently accurate that most Trotskyists were more critical of bureaucracy as such than perspectives which could be found within Maoism. Both Maoism and Trotskyism were incomplete enemies of the state. Another way to think about these ideologies is they are enemies of the state, advocates of a new authoritarian state.↩
4. ^[4]C.L.R. James with Raya Dunayevksaya, The Balance Sheet Completed (1951), pp. 4–5, Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, Walter Reuther Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.↩
5. ^[5]Ibid., pp. 6–7; C.L.R. James with Raya Dunayevskaya and Martin Glaberman, The Balance Sheet (1947), p. 8.↩
6. ^[6]Balance Sheet Completed, pp. 8, 13.↩
7. ^[7]Balance Sheet, p. 15.↩
8. ^[8]Balance Sheet Completed, p. 16.↩
9. ^[9]Ibid., p. 4.↩
10. ^[10]Balance Sheet, p. 11.↩
11. ^[11]C.L.R. James with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, The Invading Socialist Society, Detroit: Bewick (1947, 1972), p. 41.↩
12. ^[12]In political discourse on peripheral nations, often without a loss of meaning, “non-aligned” and “Third World” are often conflated. Properly speaking, the first has its origins for the assessment of Eastern Europe, especially Tito’s Yugoslavia. In contrast, the latter first comes into the lexicon as a Francophone Pan-African cultural concept among Negritude intellectuals. Thanks to Anthony Bogues, professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, for discussion leading to clarification of this matter.↩
13. ^[13]Christopher Z. Hobson and Ronald D. Tabor, Trotskyism and the Dilemma of Socialism, Westport, CT: Greenwood (1988), p. 350.↩
14. ^[14]Hobson and Tabor, pp. 350–351.↩
15. ^[15]C.L.R. James with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, State Capitalism & World Revolution, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr (1950, 1986), p. 23.↩
16. ^[16]The International Communists of Germany (IKD), a tendency led by Josef Weber, argued that the German labor movement was barely breathing as a result of fascist suppression and that there would be a historical period of “retrogression” where revolutionary socialism would not be attractive to the working class. Instead coming out of the dark, German toilers would go through a period of affirming bourgeois civil liberties. In response, Weber advocated a vision of national liberation of Germany which proposed a coalition without regard to social class to take up the demands of all the oppressed. At times, the Trotskyist press suppressed publication of the IKD’s views, and at others reminded their perspective was wrong because workers organizations were in the forefront of anti-fascism in Germany. After breaking with the Trotskyist movement the IKD published a journal called Contemporary Issues which was innovative in taking up questions most socialists in the United States rarely explored. Ecology was among these issues. Emblematic of this creativity was one member of the IKD group, who was not from Germany, but was an American. Murray Bookchin went on to become a pioneer of social ecology and the most original anarchist theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. Bookchin evolved toward a creative methodology similar to C.L.R. James. He had an affinity for the direct democratic legacy of Classical Athens and the expressions of workers self-management in the French and Russian Revolutions and Spanish Civil War. These politics were not apparent in the retrogression thesis by the IKD that James’s circle opposed in 1947 but would emerge stronger later, just as it would become enlarged in James’s own work subsequently in the 1950s. See Janet Biehl, “Bookchin’s Trotskyist Decade: 1939–1948,” Platypus Review 52 (December 2012–January 2013); Marcel Van Der Linden, “The Pre-History of Post-Scarcity Anarchism: Josef Weber and the Movement of a Democracy of Content (1947–1964),” Anarchist Studies 9.2 (September 2001), pp. 127–145.↩
17. ^[17]Hobson and Tabor, p. 353.↩
18. ^[18]Ibid., p. 354.↩
19. ^[19]Ibid., p. 355.↩
20. ^[20]Ibid., pp. 356–357.↩
21. ^[21]C.L.R. James with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee, The Invading Socialist Society, Detroit: Bewick (1947, 1972), p. 36.↩
22. ^[22]Some may object that James never defined his public life narrowly as a defender of national liberation movements, and that he was always a defender of the proletariat in later years. While his public statements on Hungary 1956, France 1968, and Poland 1981 are evidence of this perspective’s validity, we must recall something crucial. First, James never made statements in defense of independent labor at the post-colonial moment in his African and Caribbean politics from a perspective of direct democracy and workers self-management. Second, at the height of his direct democratic theorizing, James did not lead a public life. James was a public intellectual in London from 1932–1938, where he wrote both The Black Jacobins and World Revolution. He disappeared from public life in his first American years (1938–1953). James was essentially, except for a brief period at the beginning, when he was on his lecture tour against World War II, and at the end when he lectured on Herman Melville, writing as an underground man using pen names while evading immigration authorities. There is no doubt he produced an extensive archive, some of which we have drawn on here. When he returns to London from 1953–1958 he is very poor and in frail health and has little opportunity to give public presentations or publish. Facing Reality (1958), is published between the splits from Raya Dunayevskaya’s News & Letters Group (1955 split) and James and Grace Lee Boggs, who kept the name of the Correspondence Group (1961–1962 split). The Boggses grew to be unfond of the interpretation of the Hungarian Revolution and ideas of workers’ self-management more generally. Facing Reality ‘s reception, especially its bold anti-state content, was also not helped by James immediately appearing doing political work in public as the editor of Eric Williams’s People’s National Movement’s publication The Nation from 1958–1962. A careful reading of Facing Reality shows something new not found explicitly in The Invading Socialist Society (1947) and State Capitalism & World Revolution (1950)—two separate political orientations for the First and Third Worlds. 1958 is twenty years after he went underground in the United States during the Age of the CIO. He also becomes public advisor and then critic of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana from 1957–1966. 1966 is essentially the first year of the Black Power movement—though historians in recent years, not unpersuasively, have argued for an earlier chronology. The interest in James’s direct democratic ideas, as interpreted from Notes on Dialectics (which was never printed and shared outside his political circle until 1966) and Facing Reality, by aspects of the American and Caribbean New Left in 1971—often took on a life of their own. That is while James was not adverse to others re-publishing the works like in Paul Buhle’s Radical America, where these ideas were found animating organizational initiatives, he often was lukewarm to political cadre of the 1970s who wished to build anti-vanguard factions based on his direct democratic thought. Particularly among peoples of African descent was this so. This did not stop that generation from running with these ideas against the emerging post–civil rights, post-colonial order. But it is a story largely yet to be told. For some indication of this tension in James’s intellectual legacies see the introduction by Modibo Kadalie and the afterword by Matthew Quest to Kimathi Mohamed, Organization & Spontaneity, updated edition, Atlanta: On Our Own Authority! (2013). Besides these historical essays, this edition has a never before published essay by Kimathi on C.L.R. James’s influence on Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Also see Matthew Quest, “Legislating the Caribbean General Will: The Later Political Thought of Tim Hector, 1979–2002,” C.L.R. James Journal 13.1 (Spring 2007), pp. 211–232; Walton Look Lai, “C.L.R. James and Trinidad Nationalism,” in C.L.R. James’s Caribbean, Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds., Durham, NC: Duke UP (1992), pp. 174–209.↩
23. ^[23]C.L.R. James, Letter to Frederick Warburg, January 10, 1969, Martin Glaberman Collection, Walter Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; see also C.L.R. James with Al Richardson, et.al., “C.L.R. James and British Trotskyism: An Interview,” London, Socialist Platform (1987).↩
24. ^[24]C.L.R. James, “The Rise and Fall of Nkrumah,” (1966), in The C.L.R. James Reader, Anna Grimshaw, ed., Cambridge, MA: Blackwell (1992), p. 355; C.L.R. James, “The Old World and The New,” (1971), in At the Rendezvous of Victory, London: Allison and Busby (1984), pp. 208–209.↩
25. ^[25]C.L.R. James, “George Padmore: Black Marxist Revolutionary,” (1976), in At the Rendezvous of Victory, p. 258.↩
26. ^[26]C.L.R. James, Letter to Constance Webb, May 5, 1939, in C.L.R. James, Special Delivery: The Letters of C.L.R. James to Constance Webb, 1939–1948, Anna Grimshaw, ed., Cambridge, MA: Blackwell (1996), pp. 50–51, 124–125; Farrukh Dhondy, C.L.R. James: A Life, New York: Pantheon (2001), pp. 143–160.↩
27. ^[27]Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery, Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press (1944, 1994); Eric Williams, The Negro in the Caribbean, New York: A & B Books (1994); Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro, New York: Vintage (1970); Kwame Nkrumah, Toward Colonial Freedom, London: Panaf (1973).↩
28. ^[28]C.L.R. James,“Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the Caribbean,” (1967), in You Don’t Play With Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James, David Austin, ed., Oakland: AK Press (2009), p. 123. Williams’s thesis, about the declining profitability of the Atlantic slave trade, became the subject of long dispute among scholars. For a seminal text which has shaped the other side of the debate see Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, Chapel Hill: UNC Press (1977, 2010).↩
29. ^[29]C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, New York: Vintage (1938, 1963), pp. 46–54.↩
30. ^[30]This is made even more complicated by an unexplored proposition. Whereas James is given credit for helping Williams write the thesis that became Capitalism & Slavery, Williams, though he was younger and more politically inexperienced at the time, helped in certain respects in the research for James’s The Black Jacobins. It is possible that before the 1940s their understanding of peripheral nations’ political economy was quite similar, though Williams was mentored by James in the implications of revolutionary perspectives on history as the latter understood them at the time. Both freely wrote edits and suggested additions to each other’s drafts.↩
31. ^[31]C.L.R. James, “Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the Caribbean,” p. 123.↩
32. ^[32]Capitalism & Slavery, p. 208.↩
33. ^[33]C.L.R. James, interview, Struggle (The newspaper of the National Association of Black Students), February 27, 1971, tape recording. Thanks to Ken Lawrence for providing me a copy of this interview.↩
34. ^[34]The Black Jacobins, pp. 52–54.↩
35. ^[35]C.L.R. James, “Eric Williams 1919–1957,” pp. 1–9, unpublished autobiographical manuscript, C.L.R. James Collection, West Indiana Collection, Alma Jordan Library, University of the West Indies Trinidad and Tobago.↩
36. ^[36]C.L.R. James, “Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the Caribbean,” pp. 124–125.↩
37. ^[37]C.L.R. James, “On The Negro in the Caribbean by Eric Williams” (June 1943), in C.L.R. James, C.L.R. James On ‘The Negro Question’, Scott McLemee, ed., Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press (1996), pp. 117–124.↩
38. ^[38]Ibid.↩
39. ^[39]See Tony Martin, “Introduction: Eric Williams and the Anglo-American Commission, 1942–1944,” E. Franklin Frazier and Eric Williams, eds., The Economic Future of the Caribbean, Dover, MA: The Majority Press (1944, 2004), pp. ix-xxxvii. One of the dilemmas of Martin’s interpretation of Williams in this manner sixty years later is the following. If we diagnose the global economy as “racial capitalism,” where “national capital” is permanently exploited by imperial nations, then African and Caribbean ruling classes who collaborate with empire yet display populist lamentations and regrets, can be permanently deemed as heroic.↩
40. ^[40]Kwame Nkrumah, “Towards Colonial Freedom,” 1945 manuscript, Michel Fabre Papers, MARBL, Emory University, Atlanta, GA; Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom, London: Panaf Books (1947, 1973). This manuscript is likely a copy of the one Nkrumah carried with him to London from the United States. It has markings by C.L.R. James. On page 5, Nkrumah wrote: “Under the influence of national aggressive self-consciousness and the belief that in trade and commerce one nation should gain at the expense of the other, and the further belief that exports must exceed imports in value, each colonial power pursues policy of strict monopoly of colonial trade, and the building up of a national power.” James marks this passage with the notation “The same thing!” next to Nkrumah’s redundant discussion of unequal exchange of commodities on a world scale and a “?” next to “national” which seeks to describe multi-national trust activity. On page 6, Imperialism is described as seeking colonies for the investment of surplus capital. James believes this is primarily an anachronism from Lenin’s time in a period where capital is increasingly being centralized in the metropolitan center. There in fact was no subsequent re-division of colonies, as Nkrumah suggested was coming, in the Cold War world though the United States increasingly played a more dominant if indirect role in Africa.↩
41. ^[41]State Capitalism & World Revolution, pp. 67–73.↩
42. ^[42]Kwame Nkrumah, “Toward Colonial Freedom” (1947), in Kwame Nkrumah, Revolutionary Path, London: Panaf (1980), pp. 18–19.↩
43. ^[43]Ibid., p. 35.↩
44. ^[44]Ibid., pp. 22–27.↩
45. ^[45]Ibid., p. 40.↩
46. ^[46]See “Introduction to Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,” in Kwame Nkrumah, Revolutionary Path, pp. 314–315.↩
47. ^[47]See a recent collection of essays on his life and work, Fitzroy Baptiste and Rupert C. Lewis, eds., George Padmore: Pan-African Revolutionary, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle (2009).↩
48. ^[48]C.L.R. James, Notes on the Life of George Padmore (1959), p. 18, unpublished manuscript, Melville Herskovits Africana Library, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.↩
49. ^[49]Ibid.↩
50. ^[50]Ibid. 9-12.↩
51. ^[51]Ibid., p. 16.↩
52. ^[52]Ibid., p. 29.↩
53. ^[53]Ibid., pp. 20–21.↩
54. ^[54]See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, New York: Quill (1967, 1984); Winston James, “Postscript: Harold Cruse and the West Indians, Critical Remarks on The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” in Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, New York: Verso (1998), pp. 262–290.↩
55. ^[55]C.L.R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student” (1969), in The C.L.R. James Reader; C.L.R. James, “Toward the Seventh Pan-African Congress” (1974), in At the Rendezvous of Victory, pp. 197, 241.↩
56. ^[56]C.L.R. James, “Notes on the Life of George Padmore,” pp. 19–20.↩
57. ^[57]Ibid., pp. 14–16.↩
58. ^[58]See George Padmore with Dorothy Pizer, How Russia Transformed Her Colonial Empire, London: Dennis Dobson (1946), pp. xii, 133.↩
59. ^[59]See C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, introduction by Donald Pease, Hanover, NH: University of New England Press (1953, 2001). For many years, when the book was published in small underground printings, the last controversial chapter was left off beginning with the 1978 edition.↩
60. ^[60]Paul Buhle, Gerald Horne, and Joel Kovel have raised particular concern about James “anticommunism” in this maneuver. Though aware of it, they have not registered the same disdain for many Moscow-affiliated Communists joining the American government during World War II, including the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), and calling for the repression of Trotskyists under the Smith Act. This is not understandable, as they are preoccupied with McCarthyism as repression of free speech and further they seem to identify inconsistently with enemies of the state. James’s tactic was an attempt, to get himself the same public platform before the state as Paul Robeson to speak about democracy in America. Further, the United States government was no less white supremacist, capitalist or imperialist during the Cold War as during World War II. See Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: The Artist as Revolutionary, 110-114, New York: Verson (1988); Gerald Horne, Communist Front?: The Civil Rights Congress, 63-64, 1946–1956, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press (1988), pp. 63–64; Joel Kovel, Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anti-Communism and the Making of America, New York: Basic Books (1994), p. 224; Joel Kovel, “C.L.R. James: An Episode in Anti-Communism,” undated, unpublished paper, Paul Buhle Papers, Tamiment Archive, Wagner Library, New York University.↩
61. ^[61]C.L.R. James, Letter to George Padmore, June 22, 1953, Richard Wright Papers, Bienecke Archive, Yale University, New Haven, CT.↩
62. ^[62]George Padmore, Letters to Richard Wright, May 24, 1954, and February 5, 1955, Richard Wright Papers, Bienecke Archive.↩
63. ^[63]Dorothy Padmore, Letter to Ellen Wright, April 9, 1957, Richard Wright Papers. Bienecke Archive.↩
64. ^[64]Ibid.↩
65. ^[65]Dorothy Padmore, Letters to Richard and Ellen Wright, November 2, 1953, and July 28, 1959, Richard Wright Papers.↩
66. ^[66]George Padmore, Letter to Richard Wright, October 19, 1955, Richard Wright Papers.↩
67. ^[67]C.L.R. James, “Notes on The Life of George Padmore” (1959), p. 47, unpublished manuscript, Melville Herskovits Africana Library; See Matthew Quest, “C.L.R. James’s Conflicted Intellectual Legacies on Mao Tse Tung’s China,” Insurgent Notes, issue 8 (March 2013).↩
68. ^[68]For a new perspective on the rise and fall of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers see Modibo Kadalie’s introduction to the updated edition of Kimathi Mohammed, Organization & Spontaneity. Kadalie, inspired by James, was opposed to the LRBW aspiration to become a vanguard party. Ernie “Mkalimoto” Allen, essentially a Maoist, was not opposed to building a vanguard party. But in internal debate, he used some of James’s direct democratic ideas to argue for more democracy within the LRBW.↩
69. ^[69]Martin Glaberman, Letter to “Dear Nello,” April 3, 1972 (Private: Not Sent), James and Grace Lee Boggs Collection, Walter Reuther Archive, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.↩
70. ^[70]Ibid., p. 2.↩
71. ^[71]C.L.R. James, “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power,” in Pierre-Michel Fontaine and Edward A. Alpers, eds., Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar, Los Angeles: University of California (1982).↩
72. ^[72]See Horace Campbell, “C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, and the Caribbean Intellectual,” in Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain, eds., C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, Amhert, MA: U. of Massachusetts (1995), pp. 405–434.↩
73. ^[73]Walter Rodney, Walter Rodney Speaks, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press (1990), pp. 28–29.↩
74. ^[74]Ibid.↩
75. ^[75]Ibid., pp. 30–31.↩
76. ^[76]“C.L.R. James on Walter Rodney,” Race Today 12.4 (November 1980), p. 28.↩
77. ^[77]Norman Girvan, interview with author, summer 2012.↩
78. ^[78]Harry Golbourne, Caribbean Transnational Experience, London: Pluto Press (2002), pp. 140–148.↩
79. ^[79]In 1974 in Atlanta, Georgia, Walter Rodney discussed with Modibo Kadalie and Kimathi Mohammed, author of Organization & Spontaneity. Mohammed’s booklet originally published that same year was a basis of discussion with Rodney, as was Mohammed’s critique of elitist aspects within How Europe Underdeveloped Africa—a challenge Rodney partially conceded. Yet Rodney was unrepentant about the need for a vanguard party to cohere Black freedom struggles. I thank Modibo Kadalie for sharing a copy of this privately held recording.↩
80. ^[80]Walter Rodney, “African History In The Service of Black Liberation,” introduced by David Austin, Small Axe 5.2 (September 2001), pp. 66–80.↩
81. ^[81]“C.L.R. James on Walter Rodney,” Race Today 12.4 (November 1980), p. 28.↩
82. ^[82]Walter Rodney, “The African Revolution,” in Paul Buhle, ed., C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, London: Alison & Busby (1986), pp. 30–48.↩
83. ^[83]Walter Rodney, “The African Revolution,” tape recording of a symposium at University of Michigan Ann Arbor.↩
84. ^[84]Martin Glaberman, ed., Marxism for Our Times: C.L.R. James On Revolutionary Organization, Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi (1999), p. 78; C.L.R. James, “Black Power,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, p. 363.↩

Madagascar is a country still too little known today and yet, in many ways, it is an emblematic victim of contemporary capitalist pillage. Set in the Indian Ocean, the size of France, with a population of more than 20 million people, Madagascar shows symptoms of advanced general degradation. It is a true catastrophe, including an Ubuesque political situation, a disintegrating state apparatus, the unhinged looting of both raw materials and the overwhelming majority of the population, environmental devastation (deforestation, for local reasons as well as for trafficking in rare woods, confiscation of land and the toxic extraction of minerals); rampant insecurity in the capital, with an unprecedented explosion of a particularly bloody and previously unknown criminality, and finally massive poverty. In short, Madagascar is an island plummeting to the bottom of the capitalist abyss, ranking today as the poorest country on the planet. Per capita economic growth of the past forty years has been negative, and more than 92 percent of the population today lives below the poverty level.

The so-called “red island,” nonetheless, has exceptional potential: colossal natural resources, an extraordinary biological and mineral diversity, a refined and very composite culture, and a young and dynamic population.

But in this upside-down world, Madagascar is poor, due to its wealth!

In effect, in a context of exacerbated international competition, further intensified as the older world powers are squeezed by emerging countries, and also because the capitalist mode of production cannot transform its fossil fuel–based energy system, the access to raw materials has become, for states as well as for transnational companies, a crucial point of conflict. As a result, the “great island,” weakened by decades of social and political crisis, is an unprotected jewel, beset by a crowd of gangsters.

The political swamp into which Madagascar has been sinking since 2009 is the latest in a long history of suffering and setbacks inflicted on its population by local elites and foreign powers. Becoming independent in 1960 after 64 years of French domination (a period marked by the terrible repression of 1947 and its 89,000 dead), Madagascar lived through fifteen years of political instability before being pulled into the orbit of the former eastern bloc in 1975. The local Stalinist regime, led by Didier Ratsiraka, quickly broke off diplomatic relations with France. Ratsiraka, a naval officer, then established an economic dirigisme, propped up by Third Worldist nationalism. Most contracts with foreign multinationals were terminated. But economic difficulties piled up, and they eventually forced Madagascar to turn to the IMF and to renegotiate its debt with the Club of Rome in the mid-1980s. In 1992, the “socialist” experiment was officially abandoned. The dictator gave up power a year later. Two years earlier, we might recall, his troops, using bullets and grenades, had killed several dozen demonstrators in an enormous crowd demanding his resignation. This was hardly the first incident: in July 1985, Ratsiraka, using assault tanks and flame throwers, had razed a Kung-fu temple whose members had stood up to government militias spreading terror in the capital. In 1996, riding the popular discontent fueled by rampant poverty and by the disappearance of the IMF loans into the pockets of corrupt politicians, Ratsiraka, supported by one-time enemy France, regained the presidency. Six years of stability and economic growth followed. Nonetheless, inequality, already enormous, continued to deepen, and the people sank irremediably into poverty. In 2002, against the backdrop of a struggle for influence between France and the United States, Ravalomanana, the American candidate, managed to push Ratsiraka aside following several months of conflict, including military skirmishes between the two camps. This “Malagasy Berlusconi,” as he is called, progressively took over the most lucrative markets in the most diverse economic sectors. The regime slipped rapidly into autarchy and dispensed with the secular nature of the state, tilting to the Reformed Church of Madagascar. English was promoted as a public language. The personalization of power was relentless. Ravalomanana, at the end of 2008, ceded half of Madagascar’s arable land, or 1.3 million hectares, to Daewoo Logistics, a South Korean company, to produce corn for South Korea. This agreement (canceled a few months later) greatly angered the islanders, and became a major basis for a popularly supported uprising. Andry Rajoelina, helped by mutinous elements in the military, overthrew Ravalomanana in March 2009 with a coup in which 28 civilians were killed by government forces. While France, along with the international community, condemned the “putsch,” it actually orchestrated the operation to preserve its local interests. Rajoelina, age 34, a former master of ceremonies at evening dances for the gilded youth of Tananarive (the capital), had worked for a time in advertising and then became mayor of the capital, albeit with the political stature of a straw man. He was immediately pronounced “President of the High Authority of the Transition,” an entity replacing the President of the Republic and supposedly established to organize presidential elections…which are still awaited!

Thus for nearly five years, Madagascar has been “in transition.” In reality, the political clique, rotten to the core with wheeling and dealing, pretends to be scandalized by this situation, one amounting to a real political impasse. The chaotic machinations of private interests feed off an alarming decomposition of the state apparatus, whose down-sizing of public policy and endemic corruption are the most manifest signs. This disorder creates ideal conditions for the feeding frenzy of the transnationals.

As is customary with IMF austerity policies and deregulation, as well as its structural adjustments from the 1990s onward, the Malagasy state, during the recent period of political crisis, has made efforts to lower its public debt (accounting for about 6 percent of GDP, from western sources). The budget deficit was held to 3.1 percent of GDP in 2012. As a result, drastic restrictions hit public budgets in vital sectors such as health (many clinics have closed), social supports (malnutrition has exploded), education (more than 900,000 children have been left without schools over the past five years). The general decay of roads, buildings and public transportation is the direct result of a total absence of investment. At the same time, to make the economy “attractive” to foreign investors, tax-free zones have mushroomed and labor laws have been shredded. Corruption, meanwhile, has proliferated, and is now part and parcel of the functioning of institutions. According to a survey of Malagasy by the NGO Transparency, published in its 2013 World Corruption Barometer, the “judiciary, the police, public authorities and civil servants are the three sectors most often perceived as being part of corrupt organizations.” Bribes paid to public employees are very common, and people prefer to use personal connections in these institutions to carry on ordinary business. Machinations and seedy transactions at the highest levels of the state are legion, showing the hold of various mafias over the public sector. The latest affair was the (quite probable) murder of the governor of the Central Bank of Madagascar, who had intervened in the troubled waters surrounding the handover of the most important bank in the country, the Banque BNI Madagascar to a Malagasy, Mauritian and Indian consortium (Ciel, Bank One, Hiridee). The Crédit Agricole, a French establishment owning 51 percent of the bank’s capital, wanted to sell its share. The Malagasy state, owning 34 percent, was supposed to supervise the transaction in the general interest, i.e., by guaranteeing that the new owners were sound banks. But nothing was farther from the truth, since the interested buyers had placed most of their funds in fiscal havens, notably the Virgin Islands. The late governor of the Central Bank, himself hardly above reproach in conflicts of interest, could no longer express his dissent from the project, which of course was finally approved by the authorities.

Administered as it is by a state totally under the thumb of private interests (which of course makes it a paragon of “governance”), Madagascar, bursting with natural and mineral resources, is therefore easy prey, one which mafias at the highest levels of power hand over, without scruples, to voracious foreign companies. The High Transition Authority (HTA) has thus made multiple concessions of land to transnational companies, despite the illegality of these actions, since the HTA is normally supposed to restrict itself to managing matters of a smaller scope. For its part, the UN Council on Human Rights last year fell all over itself to obfuscate this unbelievable scandal: “Most transnational firms in Madagascar have obtained their operating permits from either the putschists or from the transition regime. For this reason, their operations there have neither legality nor legitimacy. Moreover, these permits were obtained through the serious corruption of these same political leaders.” The list of abuses is endless. We might mention the trafficking in rosewood, whose main clients are Europe and especially China, a practice which progressively wipes the remaining primary and secondary forests, as well as their local animal and plant species, off the map.

We might also mention the expropriation of the lands of thousands of small peasants lacking in property titles, by groups such as the VARUN Energy Corporation (from India), which has moved into agribusiness. But the real plum, the true bonanza, lies underground and offshore, along the west coast. Current extraction includes, among other things, ilmenite (in which Madagascar is the leading world producer), nickel (in which it is second), coal, cobalt (second in the world), chrome, graphite, marble, mica, copper, uranium, platinum, gold and sapphire (the world’s largest mine). Next up for development are bauxite, iron, oil, rare earths, valadium and tantalum. According to estimates, reserves (not including oil) in the large Malagasy mines have an estimated value of $300 billion. Further, what we might call the assault on Madagascar’s petroleum El Dorado has begun, as both western and Asian majors (Total, Shell, Chevron, Petrochina…) regularly announce the discovery of new drilling sites. There are currently about twenty onshore and eight offshore projects.

Such operations will obviously be of no positive economic benefit to the Malagasy population. Quite the contrary, Madagascar’s people are already suffering the downsides produced by these companies. On one hand they see the island’s patrimony being looted, with no financial benefit to themselves. The taxes paid by those transnationals operating on the island are ridiculously low. Following on the liberalization measures imposed by the World Bank in the 1990s, current regulation only underwrites the gigantic contracts between the state and the transnationals, since only 1 percent of revenues are owed to the public purse. With the usual obfuscation of reality taking care of the rest, Malagasy pockets remain desperately empty. On the other hand, transnational industrial companies impose real damage on the environment and on the locals. There is no shortage of examples: water shortages and radioactivity near the Ranobe mine, operated by the Australian company Toliara Sands SARL and by the Chinese firm Lomon Titanium, ruining the lives of those living downstream. By the same token, a local ecological catastrophe has already been unleashed by what amounts to nothing less than pure and simple vacuuming of the soil by the Dynatec Company, for the extraction of cobalt and nickel. The imminent operations of the oil wells of Belomanga and Tsimororo, by a subsidiary of the French giant TOTAL, will follow this same fatal logic. “Heavy oil” will be extracted first, to be followed if necessary by fracking. These two forms of extracting “unconventional oil,” particularly the latter, have already acquired a terrible reputation, especially in Alberta (Canada) where they first began. The ecological, health and climatic ravages set in motion (contamination of the air, the soil and water, devastation of the landscape, a proliferation of cancers due to exposure to toxic substances, urban explosion, increased cost of living, the destruction of traditional ways of life) are there for all to see. Equally abetting this ongoing generalized tragedy, the state does not merely support capital with helpful legislation stemming from systematic corruption. Since the end of 2012, it has been running a military operation which, on the pretext of tracking down bandit groups, is in reality intended to force the evacuation of the rural population of a large part of the country’s south, since the latter inhabit the surface of a considerable mining bonanza, which several large companies want to seize as soon as possible. Armed attacks have been carried out on villages, twenty of them have been burned to the ground, and dozens of people have been killed.

A fragmentation of the country for confiscation by private interests, the use of the state to this end, the looting of the natural and human environment, opaque operations and transactions: these are the key realities of the current feeding frenzy orchestrated by the transnationals.

Nothing, moreover, is going to be reversed, because the incredible geopolitical and geostrategic pressures under which this looting is carried out will be intensified by the position Madagascar is acquiring in the worldwide great game. At least four major geopolitical powers, already present on the island and in its environs, are redoubling their aggression in pursuit of huge industrial and commercial projects. As the only rich country sharing a border with Madagascar (Reunion Island, a French department, is an hour’s flight from Tananarive), France also benefits from the vestiges of its colonial power, still very much alive in Malagasy culture and in the economy. But if the French have been very keen, since the end of the 2000s, to have the inside track in Madagascar, while reviving the old expeditious methods of their former African empire, it is neither because of the 650 local French firms nor because of 25,500 French resident nationals, nor, finally, in the name of the old Franco-Malagasy friendship. In reality, this enthusiasm is based on the discovery of a remarkable hydrocarbon field (gas and oil) in the Mozambique Channel, which specialists are comparing to the North Sea in the mid-1960s, when the latter’s potential was first revealed. Five tiny islets in this channel along the Malagasy coast, called the “scattered islands,” remained French territory after Madagascar’s independence, despite repeated protests from the international community. Nevertheless, current international regulations allow France, according to the terms (1982) Montego Bay Convention, to consider these islets a “Zone of Economic Exclusivity” (ZEE) and thus authorize it to control the resources within 200 nautical miles of its territorial waters. France thus has control of 425,000 square kilometers, or two-thirds of the Mozambique canal. Sitting on such a fortune, French diplomacy has been bent on maintaining the docility of the Malagasy authorities on this issue, despite Anglo-Saxon pressure and even that of the European Union, which does not look kindly on this solitary imperialist posturing by French capital in the region. In light of these facts, we can thus better understand the open support of the United States and South Africa for the camp of Marc Ravalomanan, the former president overthrown by France’s man, Andry Rajoelina. The confrontation is only beginning, because the Ravalomanana camp is running a candidate in the presidential elections.

On the other hand, an “eastern push” is very much in evidence, in particular from China, but also from India and Thailand. China, the number one exporter to the red island, has a growing position in the mining sector (coal and oil), one complemented by its strong influence with the current Malagasy head of state. The Chinese would like to control the ports of Madagascar’s south, which are important way stations on the maritime commercial route to South America, particularly to Brazil, itself another emerging country. To counter this project, the French have been planning to open a land route through the two Lusophone nations (from Portuguese influence) on the east and west coasts of Africa, Mozambique and Angola, thereby linking up with Brazil’s ports through the Atlantic. Chavez’s Venezuela was prepared to launch a development partnership with Madagascar, in exchange for various raw materials. But it seems that these projects have remained a dead letter.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, opulent countries facing the depletion of their old reserves in the near future, consider Madagascar (a l’image d’une kyrielle d’autres pays) as a good investment for their policy of shoring up their financial resources. In this case as well, Qatar is living up to its reputation as an imperialist micro-power, and is trying to have direct influence at the highest levels of the Malagasy state. It is thus actively supporting, above all financially, the Muslim community, while supporting Rado Rafalimanana, a candidate in the future elections, who conducts his campaign sending around cargo planes filled with prime necessities.

Confronted with this sinister festival of vultures, the exploited classes of Madagascar, relegated to a life of misery with no other rights except that of remaining silent, have not yet, for the moment, demonstrated en masse and in their own interests the deep revolt that is brewing. Aside from a few associations of small peasants struggling against the transnational expropriation of their lands to force recognition of their property rights, and from a few sporadic strike movements in certain public sectors (teachers, customs officials), the Malagasy are still too harassed, divided and inundated with religious propaganda (especially Catholic and evangelical, even if Islam is currently making spectacular inroads) to rise up and to imagine valid emancipatory perspectives. The multiple reschedulings of presidential elections over the past five years have amounted to a permanent provocation for the lingering vestiges of democracy there. But one senses a strange resignation, completely mixed up with a visceral anger. Perhaps this potentially explosive cocktail will finally shake up the agendas of the decidedly overconfident capitalist looters. We certainly hope so, and our revolutionary solidarity will support any attempt in that direction.

August 25, 2013

When the management of the PSA Peugeot Citroën group announced, in early July 2012, that it was eliminating 8,000 jobs and closing the Aulnay plant near Paris (3,000 employees) in 2014, it caused a shock wave, well beyond the workers in the automotive sector. The Peugeots, the largest shareholders of PSA, are one of the richest families in France. The anger and anxiety provoked by these announcements, which also anticipated layoffs at the PSA plants in Rennes and in Sevelnord, could have been the spark for a larger movement, the beginning of a working-class counter-offensive. Jean-Pierre Mercier, the CGT1 union representative of Aulnay, reflected this state of mind when he made a strong statement, echoed by the media, and generally much appreciated: “They declared war on us. We will make war on them!” Since Mercier is also one of the spokesmen of the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvriere (LO)2 this raised even more hopes for a political offensive going beyond the framework of the factory.

At Aulnay itself, however, Mercier and the CGT team, which included other LO activists, explained that it would be a mistake to wear themselves out by starting an immediate strike. The struggle, in their view, should be conceived as “a marathon, not a sprint.” The upshot, after a general assembly elected a committee to prepare the struggle, was that the CGT-Aulnay was, in July, more concerned with establishing unity with the SIA,3 the company union, than in quickly testing the determination and combativeness of the workers by proposing a strike of 1–2 days. All arguments put forward revolved around saving the Aulnay plant, with the help of workers in other factories, and not in building an overall movement with general demands. Mercier and his friends also said they could save Aulnay by “producing a small car,” a strange “industrial” argument coming from self-styled “revolutionary” activists.

The outbreak of the “war” was thus postponed until after the August 2012 holidays, both giving PSA time to organize its strategy and allowing the Hollande government4 to wash its hands of the matter, while at the same time letting the PSA Aulnay workers not expect too much from the struggle, or even to start looking for work elsewhere.

But in September, the “war,” i.e., the strike, was no longer on the agenda. The CGT-LO activists explained that it was not possible to launch an effective struggle with less than a thousand employees. At a meeting celebrating one hundred years of PSA in Sochaux, an LO militant from CGT-Aulnay declared that, henceforth, striking would be playing into the hands of the bosses, remarks casting a chill over the audience.

In October, however, an opportunity arose to really launch a major movement, one involving workers from other factories and from other combative sectors, making it clear that the problem of Aulnay was everyone’s problem, i.e., of all those currently undergoing or threatened by redundancy schemes and competitiveness plans. But the CGT-Aulnay turned its back on this perspective. It refused to participate in a broadly based annual disruption, by militant trade unionists and auto workers, of the highly-publicized International Motor Show in Paris. Significantly, when Philippe Poutou, NPA5 candidate in the presidential elections and CGT delegate at the Ford factory near Bordeaux, wanted to speak at a rally in Aulnay after participating in the auto show action, Mercier and friends objected.

Nevertheless, the idea of joint action at the auto show was so popular among trade union members and in particular among CGT militants at different PSA, Renault, and Goodyear factories that the CGT Aulnay was obliged to join it later, on the morning of October 9. But it did so while working to put the brakes on the mobilization, which by that time involved 2,500 people. Mercier and his comrades even tried to stop angry workers who wanted to enter the Auto Show and confront the CRS.6 One Goodyear demonstrator made his displeasure known to an LO militant in a very direct way. Following this raucous mobilization, a spontaneous and dynamic procession of several hundred workers crossed Paris to link up withh a demonstration of all of the major unions planned for that afternoon.

Without going into further details, the LO militants at PSA systematically pursued a policy of isolating the Aulnay factory and refusing to coordinate combative groupings in the various factories and industries around the country.But once the risk of a wider, overall struggle had faded away, the CGT-LO militants could indulge in resolute language calling for a “major struggle.” In fact, everything began to be focused mainly on negotiations with the PSA, with many stoppages in different workshops at the Aulnay factory, and timely interventions by a few dozen workers at some other auto plants, actions that were always welcomed by their colleagues.

Since negotiations with the Peugeot bosses and government officials in late October, November and December were going nowhere, the workers at PSA Aulnay bit the bullet and and struck on January 16, 2013. There was some damage to company property and angry slogans were painted on the walls. The strikers initially numbered about 500 out of a total of approximately 3,000 employees. It was a wildcat strike, but soon the CGT (LO) jumped in and took the lead. (Though they had not called the strike!) This very small strike lasted four months. The suspension of the strike was voted at a general assembly on May 17, and work resumed on May 21.

During these four months, a lot of pressure was put on the strikers by 200 managers who were permanently moblized in the workshops. The strikers were tacitly supported by the non-strikers, so that very few cars were produced in this period. The militant core of strikers had fallen to two hundred people by April.

The militants multiplied actions outside the factory (even though in the previous fall, Mercier, from LO, had repeatedly said that minority actions outside the factory did not make sense). The workers invaded various locales and disrupted various official meetings (including a meeting between the MEDEF7 and a Council of the SP8 ). Actions at other plants by some dozens of strikers (e.g., at PSA Saint-Ouen and at Renault-Cleon) were well received, without of course fundamentally changing the balance of power.

Financial solidarity worked very well, with contributions coming from all over France. All told 800,000 euros were collected, which made it possible to give each striker 1,000 euros on three different occasions and which kept up their morale and their determination.

The agreement ending the strike canceled all penalties (especially dismissal procedures against four union delegates) and allowed those workers willing to leave in the near future to receive at least 60,000 euros (with up to 100,000 euros for those with seniority). Eight-hundred fifty employees immediately requested dismissal with maximum compensation, because those who want to stay are likely to get much less later (a minimum of €40,000). What was won is roughly what has been won in other movements of this kind, centered on one site and enjoying a certain solidarity.

Another strategy could have been attempted and implemented in September and October 2012 (the coordination of struggle, making possible its spread), but from the moment that Mercier and his comrades gave priority to a highly delineated struggle…at the negotiating table…we can say that, fortunately, by January of this year the strikers had had enough and finally just managed to save what was still possible within the framework of a single plant and two hundred strikers. Within this four-month movement, which could no longer be spread, LO thus probably did everything necessary so that the movement, which it had helped to restrain, got everything it could get from PSA, and salvaged in part the morale of the workers at the factory.

That said, the Aulnay plant will close on December 31, 2013, and the management of PSA will achieve what it wanted: the elimination of 11,200 jobs (3,000 at Aulnay and 1,400 at the plant in Rennes) and an open door for its “competitiveness plan” at the group level, which will result in a sharp deterioration of working conditions, hours and wages. Note that during the first months of 2013, the government and the MEDEF succeeded in passing a national agreement (ANI) signed by the CFDT, CFTC and CGC and weakly opposed by the leaders of the CGT and FO9 ; nonetheless, locally, some groups from the CGT and Solidaires (SUD) and were very active in fighting and denouncing this agreement, which will lead to a large step backwards in the working conditions and existence of the working class in France.

• 1Conféderation Génerale du Travail, greatly reduced from its former influence when it was more or less the official union of the French Communist Party, but still one of the more “left”-leaning unions in France.
• 2LO is the biggest and most blue-collar oriented of the French Trotskyist groups.
• 3Syndicat Indépendant de l’Automobile.
• 4Francois Hollande of the French Socialist Party, barely center-left, hapless figure elected in 2012.
• 5Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, a declining hodge-podge of ex-Trotskyists, ecologists, etc., cobbled together for electoral purposes and undermined by factions. For more on the NPA, see Y.C.’s “Letter from France” in Insurgent Notes, no. 5.
• 6Corps Républicain de Sureté, the elite national anti-riot police.
• 7The French national employers association.
• 8The French Socialist Party, currently in power.
• 9The CFDT, CFTC, CGC, FO and SUD are other small French unions. Less than 10 percent of the French work force is unionized, but some union contracts still play a “flagship” role for other non-unionized sectors.

The government is taking advantage of recent events to invoke the danger of the right and to reinforce the left wing of the ruling group.

Ten days after the “Rebellion of the Coxinhas,”1 we can now draw up a balance sheet.

1.

The decisive phenomenon in the Rebellion of the Coxhinhas, from within, of demonstrations launched by the far left, which found themselves to a certain extent boxed in by a politically amorphous mass, the latter being mobilized by conservative social forces and by the far right, thanks to social networks, the mass media and the police. In reports we have received, Salvador seems to have been an exception to this scenario, perhaps due to the social composition of the city, but the same process is taking place in all the other cities about which we have information. And the further evolution of events, in which the far left recaptured control of some demonstrations, will make it possible to forget what happened on June 20 and in the days just before, or why those earlier demonstrations mobilized a much larger number of people than the radical demonstrations after June 20.

It is also somewhat early to know to what extent the Revolt of the Coxinhas will have lasting effects on the previously amorphous mass, and if they do have such effects, whether they will only make themselves felt at the electoral level. As for the far right, however, this will happen only if it acts in the near future with incredible stupidity and if it does not take advantage of the events of June 20 to strengthen itself organizationally and to project its ideological themes.

Fascism, however, has at its point of departure an enormous political error, an error which led to all its defeats in the past. The mortal error of fascism is its belief that democracies are inherently weak regimes, inherently incapable of dealing with generalized dissatisfaction and disorder in the streets, and that only they, the fascists, can successfully impose order and authority, establishing a dictatorship and putting new elites in the posts of command. This same error—although with opposite pluses and minus signs—is also widespread among far-left groups, which think that sooner or later democracy will have to make use of fascism. Sensing that democracy’s organizational forms and its ideological weapons are ineffective, these far-left groups prophesize that fascism is just around the corner and that it would be better for people to support the far left, because democracy will either be too impotent to oppose fascism or will even call on fascism to put out its fires. But this error of appreciation led the precursors of these groups to dead ends, and will do the same to their present heirs.

2.

The notion that democracy is a weak regime is a deadly political error, because democracy has shown, throughout its history, an enormous capacity for recuperating struggles and assimilating revolts:

—The demands of the working class—the arming of the people, education for all, the 8-hour day and so on—were recuperated by democracy as factors for constituting a unified labor force (a conscription army and free and obligatory education) and for an increase in productivity, accelerating the cycles of surplus value. If surplus value consists in the capitalist appropriation of the labor time expended by workers, then democracy, with its capacity for absorbing demands, is the most appropriate political regime for capitalism.

—In the social sphere, this assimilation of demands underwrites a rising mobility. Through the trade union bureaucracies, and today through social movements as well, and finally through the university system, democracy can absorb many of the most intelligent and industrious workers, and integrate them into the ruling classes. Recuperation is not carried out through demands alone, but also works its effects on people.

—On the ideological plane, this recuperation and assimilation is expressed by the integration of former subversive themes into the arsenal of the ruling classes. We do not have time here for long dissertations, but we can limit ourselves to reminding readers that the first generation of disciples of Marx advocated social democracy, whereas today that term designates, in various countries, including Brazil and Portugal, right-wing parties. The same thing happened with socialism, a term which today designates parties from which no one with any sense would expect socialist measures. Communism suffered an identical evolution, having been used to characterize state capitalism and even, in the case of China, designating a mixed regime of state bureaucracy and private entrepreneurs. In the same way the PT, the Workers Party, was converted into a party “For All,” and in effect Brazil had uniquely achieved the feat of having, within its governance, both the main trade union leaders as well as the managers of Brazil’s major transnational companies.

Passa Palavra has analyzed the form by which these mechanisms of recuperation work in Brazil in two types of articles. On one hand, starting with the article “Between the frying pan and the fire,” we showed how the internal bureaucratization of the social movements creates a propitious climate for their recuperation into capitalist democracy. Our analysis of this process especially included the Landless Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra–MST) and in numerous articles we took off from the history of the MST and wound up showing the movement’s current links with the market and with certain large companies. On the other hand, especially in the article “The State and the Social Movements”, we showed how the relationship between the top-level managers of the state and the bureaucracy of the social movements has been important for the PT government. The government maneuvers following the Rebellion of the Coxinhas show the expansion and deepening of this process.

3.

The government is taking advantage of the recent events to conjure up the danger of the right wing and to reinforce the left flank of the government, and, therefore, it is already making proposals which, instead of trying to contain the scope of the demonstrations by forcing them from the streets or by repression, it seeks to give them content and, from within, to induce them into agendas and actions which should open the way to advancing important aspects of PT strategy.

In this respect, it is fairly well known that on July 25 the ex-President Lula met with certain of the social movements closest to him, including the MST and youth organizations linked to government managers. According to statements by participants, the idea was for these groups to take the streets, rather than pulling back. Such a stratagem, which might frighten some disoriented people, is, in reality, the implementation of a much more efficient mechanism of control over the direction of the protests. What is underway is a clear effort to re-link the person of Lula, and the PT, to the social movements and, thus, to prepare a Plan B in case President Dilma suffers a loss of image compromising her re-election. But it could be more than that—and here the frontist verbiage within the movements and organizations of the left appears to be in synch with Dilma’s main steps within the government itself: the announcement of pacts to re-establish political order.

The MST publication MST Reports (MST Informa), of June 25 reprinted an interview with Joao Pedro Stédile in Brasil de Fato in which this figure of the MST declared forthrightly that “the government must confront the ruling class in all its aspects.” This will set the tone for left-wing demagogy in the near future: a capitalist government confronting capital!

First of all it should be noted that we are always at a disadvantage when we allow the agenda of our struggles and mobilizations to be dominated by themes taken from the government. Further, what interest does the anti-capitalist left have in debating political reform at the institutional level, for example, if during the last twelve years, in which we have been gathering our forces and, while hoping for the re-emergence of a mass movement, we have done little or nothing to consolidate rank-and-file decision-making nuclei, rooted in our concrete local problems of housing and work? Is the transformation of political mechanisms that anti-capitalists want a top-down construction acting on those below, or is it one of the rank-and-file determining the higher levels?

To sum up, this is an operation with two aspects: 1) institutionalizing the demonstrations, pushing them towards themes which are of interest to the PT strategy; and 2) renewing the mechanisms that tie, formally or informally, these mobilizations to the governing bodies. If the PT succeeds in carrying out this operation with the help of a bureaucratized social movement such as the MST and its political arm, the Popular Consultation (Consulta Popular), capitalist democracy will be greatly reinforced in its structures and expanded at its base.

4.

Considering all this, what is the situation of the anti-capitalist far left, i.e., the far left that does not consider state capitalism to be a solution for the evils of private capitalism?

In a first moment, a large part of the libertarian left was a victim of the same panic that took hold of the left-wing parties, showing that it believed an alien rhetoric to be its own. Accustomed as it is to fighting capitalism with proclamations and exclamation points, and to considering scuffles in the streets to be a civil war, it became hysterical seeing the other side inflate a balloon bigger than its own.

After things calm down and sensible voices map out an orientation for the near future: leave the downtown areas of Sao Paolo and of other cities to the coxinhas, where they have their natural habitat and concentrate and support work and mobilization in the areas of the urban periphery.

There has been a lot of talk on the far left of poorer areas on the urban peripheries, but it is necessary to clear up some confusion. First of all, the working class is today much more vast than just the population of these outlying neighborhoods. Contemporary capitalism has proletarianized the old liberal professions and, if journalists and sociologists continue speaking of “middle classes,” they are using a term with no economic meaning. What distinguishes the so-called “middle classes” is that they have recently lost their professional independence, and, in their overwhelming majority, they ideologically reject a working class to which they belong economically. Many of the coxinhas fit this definition. These “middle classes” are nothing but the most qualified workers for relative surplus value and, nonetheless, in Marxist terms—while this may seem paradoxical to people who know Marx only by hearsay—are more exploited than the workers who are producing absolute surplus value. Anyone wishing to understand the dynamics of the working class must learn to distinguish between poverty and degree of exploitation, and the notion of surplus value makes possible such a distinction. Thus people who think that the working class is made up of people in the poorer areas on the urban periphery, in the current conditions of capitalism, are susceptible to an extremely dangerous political activity, because instead of trying to unify the class in a common consciousness, they are trying to divide it. And it is precisely this which interests the capitalists.

Secondly, the peripheral areas as well are not a geographical milieu made up entirely of workers. In some demonstrations in such places around Sao Paolo, we can note a large participation of coxinhas. Except in a few places, the popular strata are often drowned out by the self-inflating tone of the actions. Culturally and in his comportment, an unskilled worker from a peripheral neighborhood feels much more identified with the boss of a small business living in the same neighborhood than with a skilled worker living in a neighborhood with more status. Class consciousness is not an acquired characteristic. It results from common struggles and from effort at organization and clarification based on these struggles.

In effect, and thirdly, if poverty and the anti-capitalist spirit were synonymous, the world would have made a major change long ago. Some thoughts are so simple that people forgot them. Thus, just because the police, prison guards and other agents of repression are recruited from the poorest families, should we conclude that when the police beat students from the University of Sao Paolo and elsewhere, the proletariat is attacking the bourgeoisie?

The neighborhoods on the urban periphery certainly point to the tactical road to follow at this particular moment, but this will be a work in progress and not a ready-made solution. And it is not merely a question of doing work in such places, but rather, while doing this, of unifying groups which were previously isolated. In Goiânia, for example, we had a movement which greatly expanded its potential by linking university students and the central regions of the city with students from the urban periphery, who revolted more forcefully over the transportation question. This unification brought new elements into the struggle, both in terms of tactics and in terms of agenda, and broke down old sectarianisms between the groups. Of equal importance was the link-up between students in public and private institutions, who similarly had little experience of solidarity with each other. This unification and link-up was only made possible by the horizontal form of the organization of struggle, both in organization and in action, and the common agenda of public transportation. The mobilizations against the fare increases on public transportation made it possible to pull together a significant part of the working class. This effort at practical organization and definition of a class consciousness is what is becoming urgent to pursue, and everything that stands in the way of this should be resolutely swept aside.

Lula meeting with representatives of the social movements. On the left in the second row is Pablo Capilé, manager of the Fora do Eixo company.

• 1Translator’s Note: The following article, from the Portuguese-Brazilian website Passa Palavra, attempts a “balance sheet” of the important movement in the streets in Brazil in the early summer of this year. One translation headache is the key use of the Brazilian word “coxinha,” which the Passa Palavra comrades admitted was untranslatable, as well as unelaborated references to the events of “June 20.” Briefly, on June 20, large demonstrations in Sao Paulo and in some other key Brazilian cities, celebrating the rollback of the transit fare hikes by the mass movement in the streets, were attacked by right-wing and far-right elements, waving Brazilian flags and, perhaps more disturbingly, chanting many of the slogans of the movement. These events became known at the “Rebellion of the Coxinhas.” I decided to leave the untranslatable word “coxinha” in Portuguese in the text while providing an adequate description of this group found on the blog of a certain Cacau, a social commentator: &lquo;You must have heard of the famous ‘coxhinhas.’ Speaking sociologically, it is a specific social group, which shares specific values. Among them is an exaggerated individualism, and dozens of things deriving from that: the necessity of differentiation from the rest of society, a strong priority for security in daily life, as an element of ‘not mixing’ with the rest of society, linked to a strong need to appear as a fun-loving ‘good guy.’ The coxhinhas, basically, are people who wish to flaunt a superior status, with its own codes. Differentiation came naturally, with the absurd social inequality of the large Brazilian metropolises. Today, with more and more people earning better money and consuming, this group seeks other forms to affirm its difference. To this end, they often go about with a spiffy look, dressing in a specific way, and are ‘politically correct,’ within a distorted view of politics; they cultivate an almost unspeakable arrogance, with almost no tolerance for any kind of criticism. The origins of the term are very controversial. Various reporters have attempted to elucidate the mystery, without success, it is high time to reveal the truth about it. The origins of ‘coxhinha,’ with reference to this differentiated group, have nothing noble about it.” Prior to its use to describe this social group, “coxinha” referred to a small deep-fried hors d’oeuvre served in Brazilian bars.

By definition, a singularity is something utterly peculiar unto itself, a species of being unmatched for its “this-ness.” The term has found usage in a number of domains, most significantly in physics, where a singularity defines a condition of matter whose volume is approaching zero as a function of its density approaching infinity. Cases of singularities or near singularities include black holes and the singularity that preceded the Big Bang.

The singularity is the topic of a recent book on Marxism by Luca Basso—Marx and Singularity (2008), which is an attempt to understand Marx’s thought from the early writings through the Grundrisse in terms of the search for individual realization. Others too, such as Bruno Gullì ( Labor of Fire, 2005), have worked in part to correct the errant notion that Marxism is predicated on an undifferentiated mass subject, rather than a fully articulated, fully realized (social) individual, a singularity.

But I am using “singularity” in yet another sense, to refer to the technological singularity, the hypothetical, near-future point at which machine intelligence will presumably supersede human intelligence, and when an intelligence explosion will commence. Inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil, whose books include The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), The Singularity Is Near (2005), and How to Create a Mind (2012), heralds the singularity in the technological sense.

In this singularity, a prospect predicted and also advocated by “Singulartarians” like Kurzweil, the future is as fabulous as science fiction might have it. In the short term, regular genetic check-ups to scan for “programming errors” in gene sequencing, and gene therapy, would be common, as would the merging of human brains and computer prostheses. But soon thereafter, nanorobots would clean up the environment, removing excess CO2 from the atmosphere, recreating a green planet, and reversing global warming. Micro-robots would also course through the human bloodstream, removing waste (and a distasteful process), killing pathogens, eliminating cancer cells, repairing genetic codes, and reversing aging. Computer chips, implanted in the brain, would increase memory by a million-fold. By 2029, technologists will have successfully reverse-engineered the brain and replicated human intelligence in (strong) artificial intelligence (AI), while vastly increasing processing speeds of “thought.” Having mapped the neuronal components of a human brain, or discovered the algorithms for thought, or a combination thereof, technologists would convert the same to a computer program, personality and all, and upload it to a computer host, thus grasping the holy grail of immortality. Finally, as the intelligence explosion expands from the singularity, all matter will be permeated with intelligence; the entire universe would “wake up” and become alive, and “about as close to God as I can imagine,” says Kurzweil. Thus, in the Singulartarian vision, the universe begins with a singularity and becomes God-like by another. This second singularity, Kurzweil suggests, involves the creative intelligence of the universe becoming self-aware, vis-à-vis the informational, technological agent. Thus, in the technological singularity, the technological and mystical converge, as Kurzweil resembles a techno-cosmic Hegelian. Incidentally, according to Kurzweil, our post-human successors will bear the marks of their human provenance. Thus the future intelligence will remain “human” in some sense. Human beings are the technological carriers of universal intelligence and human culture is the fragile substratum.

Kurzweil justifies his belief in the inevitability of a technological singularity with the law of accelerating returns, a tendency for the exponential increase of information processing, which he traces from the beginning of matter through the computer age, and beyond. Kurzweil’s trick is to place material, biological and technological evolution on a graphic continuum, a method that reduces matter and its development, in whatever form, to information, likewise allowing its eventual subsumption into computing processes. Human (and post-human) intelligence is measured primarily if not solely in terms of processing speeds. While recognizing that such a measure of subtle human intelligence is insufficiently qualitative, Kurzweil nevertheless accepts it as adequate for his purposes.

If all of this sounds rather otherworldly, Kurzweil wields his predictions with aplomb, and powerful institutions serve to validate his self-assurance, at least for now. With the backing of Google, Genentech, Nokia, Cisco and other sponsors, he co-founded (with Peter Diamandis) Singularity University in Silicon Valley, which has as its stated mission “to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges.” Since 2009, Singularity University has attracted business leaders, technologists, graduate students, and others, and has been training them in the Singulartarian framework for solving what they deem the world’s most pressing problems. Far from being relegated to the role of guru or hack, Kurzweil has since become Google’s Director of Engineering, where he has been given the reins to convert his futuristic notions into fungible consumer products. Whether or not the singularity itself is actually near, or even possible, the singularity as an idea is already considered a credible rubric for significant technology investment.

The singularity paradigm, so its advocates assert, amounts to a second Scientific Revolution. Trans-humanists (those who call for the supersession of humanity by a new “species” with a higher intelligence and extended lifespan) such as Simon Young (in Designer Evolution: A Trans-humanist Manifesto, 2005), oppose this new optimistic orientation to the postmodern pessimism of the neo-Luddite left, among other groups. The anti-Enlightenment, anti-technology left, represented by such figures as Bill McKibben, blames science and technology as such for nuclear bombs, environmental degradation, GMOs, the overuse of psychotropic drugs, robotic war, etc. McKibben has written against the Trans-humanist singularity (Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, 2004), arguing for the halting of such research programs through legal and other means. Following Carl Sagan, the New Enlightenment thinkers counter-argue that science and technology have vastly improved human life and must be pursued apace so as to overcome the hurdle of humanity’s scientific and technological infancy.

While Singulartarians and Transhumanists surely have their enemies on the left, they also have earned the ire of both the religious and humanist right. Members of the latter group have recently sounded off against the movement in both the National Review and The Weekly Standard. Both articles use Trans-humanism or Singulartarianism to casually slur Marxism, which they refer to, along with Trans-humanism and Singulartarianism, as a form of “scientism,” or a “one-dimensional explanatory scheme of all that exists.” The bogey for the humanist right is the reduction of humanity to instrumentalism for either technical (Singulartarianism) or social-scientific (Marxism) mastery. Gone is the fully elaborated and irreducible individual, and along with it, the humanities, or the traditions for preserving the kinds of knowledge that cannot be codified, or encapsulated in formulas for prediction and control.

Kurzweil and others would respond by suggesting that the “human” is not eradicated per se with the singularity, but expanded exponentially. The humanities, meanwhile, far from being lost, might become a packet for easy download in a matter of minutes or seconds. The questions of moral and social agency would be transcended, Kurzweil suggests, as new philosophical problems emerge, unforeseen at present.

But what might be a Marxist perspective with reference to Singulartarianism or Trans-humanism? Contrary to the National Review and The Weekly Standard, such a perspective, while perhaps singular, is by no means scientistic.

Marxism embraces science, but not scientism. That is, it does not cede social desiderata to scientific authority, as in Comtean positivism. Furthermore, Marxism is not techno-determinist; the character and direction of the social order are not determined by science and technology, per se, nor do science and technology develop autonomously in a particular direction of their own accord. Rather, like any other form of capital, Marx noted that technology must be valorized in relation to the cost of reproducing labor, that is, in relation to the cost of labor itself. Singulartarianism may be regarded as another means of just such self-valorization of machine capital. Contrary to their own assertions, meanwhile, Singulartarians, including Kurzweill, tacitly admit as much; in their Open Letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon they imply that there is nothing inevitable about the technological developments that they advocate, as they petition the UN to take seriously their solutions to real-world problems.

On the one hand, it is not sufficient to merely suggest that Singulartarian science, to the extent that it is science, is bourgeois in character. The same might be said for all science and technology developed under capitalism. Marxism does not call for the abolition or eschewal of the products of bourgeois science and technology as such, but rather aims to preserve and improve upon the real gains in scientific knowledge and technological development, while eliminating those obviously developed for sheer domination or destruction. On the other hand, Marxism does not embrace the ideological character of particular scientific or pseudoscientific movements.

Even leaving aside its cosmic pretentions, the Singulartarian worldview is in fact techno-determinist, scientistic, and mystified. The movement is a carrier of an ideology would leave the social order in place as it ignores the antagonisms of class society to focus on technological management. It obscures the social basis of real-world crises by promising a panacea of technological fixes as opposed to social change. It ignores the fact that the social relations of capitalist production are culpable for the environmental crises that beset us (see John Bellamy Foster, et al., Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, 2010). At the same time, the Singulartarian worldview fetishizes biotechnical processes, promising to place highly advanced technologies within the reach of the wealthy few, notwithstanding the weak claim that Moore’s Law closes the technological breach by exponentially increasing the price-performance of computing (and thus halving its cost per unit of measurement) every two years or less. These fetishized biotechnologies, fetishized because they are given undue attention and importance, include avatars controlled by brain-computer interfaces, the development of life-support systems for disembodied human brains, fully artificial equivalents of the human brain, and the uploading of the entirety of human brain processes to computers, all of which reveal the bourgeois ideological character of the Singulartarian priorities. While unstated, the life-extension and immortality of the few are given precedence to the experience of a mere mortal existence by many others. Further, under this rubric, knowledge and consciousness are understood in reified, individualistic terms, as if they can be abstracted from their material and social substratum, isolated, and uploaded in a neatly contrived package onto silicon or other non-biological platforms. Such a conception is idealist and instrumentalist at base, while utterly missing the reality of social relations that make cognition and consciousness not only meaningful, but also possible.

Further, Singulartarian technologies are aimed at subjecting human beings to a kind of technological management that would make the surveillance of the NSA look like child’s play. Even if the prospect for the literal connection of brains to the Internet (and thus the direct “data mining” of thought and memory) may remain impossible, the kinds of technological mastery over experience contemplated and supposedly being developed under the direction of Kurzweil and other Singulartarians poses threats to the integrity of decision-making capabilities. With humans capable of controlling avatars, some of which may bear an uncanny verisimilitude to their masters, the possibility for reversing the direction of control seems equally plausible. The use of avatars meanwhile presents moral dilemmas that the current social order is unprepared to deal with. Even with Google Glass, which is a crude development in comparison to what might follow according to Kurzweil et al., the technological constraints on experience, billed as enhancements, are already apparent. All technologies bear the marks of their makers’ priorities for users. All constrain and construct experiences in particular ways. But when such technologies enter into direct interface with the brain, the possibilities for eliminating particular kinds of experience and motivations becomes plausible. The desideratum to record, label, informationalize, rather than to understand, let alone critically engage or theorize experience, may take exclusive priority given the possibilities for controlling neuronal switching patterns. Given the instrumentalism of the Singulartarians, decisive, action-oriented algorithms may dominate these brain interfaces, compromising faculties for the critical evaluation of activity. Naturally, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World comes to mind, but as suggested, Singulartarianism bills its prostheses, extensions and substitutes for human brains as vast improvements over standard human intelligence. Thus, such technologies would have an ideological appeal not all imaginable for soma. Nevertheless, they will have been based on an intelligence defined in a particular way, putting considerable emphasis on the speed and volume of “data processing,” construed as “knowledge.”

Kurzweil claims that it is nearly impossible to imagine what would take place after the singularity. We think that the possibilities can be extrapolated from existing conditions. Under class society, a decentralized, open-access info-sphere of exploding intelligence is unfathomable. Developed in connection with the state apparatuses already in place in the United States and elsewhere, such as the vast data storage and processing centers in Nevada, and the programs, such as Prism, set up to fill them, Singulartarian technologies would become part of the arsenal for class domination and enhanced imperialism. The supersession of human intelligence by machine intelligence would likely involve the use of such data and data processing capabilities to further predict and control social behavioral patterns of domestic and other populations. Meanwhile, warrior avatars and other advanced weaponry would supplement the existing arsenal of robotic weapons, such as drones and demining robots, for expanded imperialist and less bloody (for the imperialists) adventures. The “intelligence” of all of these weaponized systems would be dramatically enhanced, making them ever more effective and dangerous. In addition, the biotechnical enhancement of the few would serve to exacerbate an already widening class gulf, while the “superiority” of the enhanced would function ideologically to rationalize differences permitted by class division. The movie Gattaca (1997) comes to mind here. That is, if developments proceed as Kurzweil predicts, this vastly accelerated information collecting and processing sphere will not constitute real knowledge for the enlightenment of the vast majority. Rather, it will be instrumentalist and reductionist in the extreme, facilitating the domination of human beings on a global scale, while rendering opposition ever more difficult.

In short, whether or not the vaticinations of Raymond Kurzweil have the slightest chance of becoming reality, it is clear that the Singulartarian movement provides ideological cover for the objectives of an increasingly technocratic, ruling elite. Promises of vastly increased “intelligence” during an “information explosion,” or of immortality given the increasing precariousness of life on Earth, serve to allay fears and provide (false) hope, while obscuring real social and material conditions. The singularity notion proffers a resolution to existing conditions while sidestepping the confrontation that a real resolution requires. If it were mere ideology, Singulartarianism would not merit much concern. But make no mistake: the singularity paradigm is a Trojan horse that smuggles a desideratum for the singular mastery of space and time by a few under the cover of a techno-utopia for the totality. If indeed the ruling elite is hastening us toward a singularity, as corporate and State projects would seem to suggest, then we must be cognizant of the actuality it signifies, and work to oppose it, not on anti-technology grounds, as the Singulartarians would have it, but from the standpoint of the use of science and technology for the purposes of human emancipation. Whether anything may be salvaged from the technological apparatuses leftover from Singulartarianism is a question for the future, the future of socialism-communism, not, if we have our way, of Singulartarianism.

The current global crisis has once again brought the questions of global struggle and world revolution into a position of importance. The basic questions posed are whether it is possible to build a “global Left” and how to rethink the idea of universal human liberation, which was the utopia once central to the left, and which has perhaps re-emerged once again. The unity of the world is indeed clearest to us in times of crisis. Susan Buck-Morss’s book on the relationship between critical theory and political Islam is an interesting and important contribution to this discussion, as it attempt to create a dialogue between critical thought in the “west” and that within the Islamic world. In keeping with her previous work on Hegel and the Haitian Revolution, she attempts to resurrect and redeem the idea of universality after it had become a bad word among many in the academic activist milieu. Although the book was published some time ago, its relevance has only increased.

The loss of any conception of human universality, especially as it relates to the political struggle, has affected the understanding of social revolution. Many events have occurred since the publication of the book that demonstrate the importance of returning to the discussion of the world revolution and the universal subject that is supposed to be the agent of this revolution. Events such as the “Arab Spring” and the Iranian “Green Movement,” the riots and strikes against austerity, the unrest in Brazil in the midst of the World Cup qualifiers, Occupy Wall Street, all demonstrate some sort of global shift.

For the past twenty to thirty years, it has been almost an article of faith that any attempt to posit a universal subject should be looked upon with scorn. Indeed the word has been associated with another taboo word, “humanism.” Any advocacy of either one can be attacked for essentialism, Euro-centrism, or Orientalism, at best, and in extreme cases, even totalitarianism. One of the strengths of Buck-Morss’s approach is that she is not satisfied with just positing a universal subject from the past and dismissing the variety of these critiques, particularly that of the Eurocentric conception of the universal subject. She doesn’t just resurrect an old conception of universality; she attempts to point towards a new way of thinking about universality and the promise of human liberation. She attempts to develop an understanding of universality that remains critical of Euro-centrism.

The book carries on a theoretical struggle to understand the negotiation between universality and difference. But while the questions Buck-Morss asks are of great importance, and indeed correct in my opinion, the conclusions she draws and the method she uses to get there are way off the mark.

CAN THERE BE A GLOBAL LEFT?

Her argument also has a definite historical foundation which, she believes, can offer the potential for a more universal and hence more emancipatory left. She highlights the importance of the fact that now, more than ever, we live in a global interconnected world—what she calls “global immanence.” She writes:

Globalization is not new, but global “immanence” is. I use this term to refer to the fact that in our era of global capital, global production, global labor migrations, and global penetration by technologies of communication, there is no spatial outside, no “other” of peoples, territory or environment against which some of us could conveniently define ourselves and, holding ourselves apart, control our fate.1

One can assume that what Buck-Morss means by this statement is that the globalization of capitalism and interconnectedness itself is not novel or unique, but the fact that we are all “immanent” or contained within this global interconnected world is something new. It is new that there is no more inside or outside with regard to capitalism. How new or how long this tendency stretches back can be debated, but let’s agree that it is more true today than in the past. This means, and we are still in agreement here, that any struggle that hopes to deal with the problems humanity faces must, like that very global system to which we are all subject, be global in thought and in action.

It is however where she goes after this that the confusion begins. Indeed, she sees the main force of opposition to capitalism in the Middle East in the Islamic movements. Actually, it is more correct to say that she sees the vanguard of critical thought against contemporary modernity in Islamist political theories of a variety of stripes. Either way, one is forced to raise eyebrows. It indeed reflects a fascination among theorists on the left in the “west” towards thinkers who articulate their ideas using religious language. The fact that this exists among many self-proclaimed Marxists is an even more curious occurrence. But there is something to be learned if we examine this further, and perhaps we can point to answers for these very same questions, but ones that lead us down a different path.

Her answer comes from a belief that Islamic political movements and their theoreticians are somehow more authentic than other secular opposition forces. This accusation is more often than not pointed in the direction of Marxism. In some ways it reflects the self-loathing nature of the western, particularly US, academic left. Now whether this is true or not (it is certainly not) we perhaps should go further and scrutinize this search for authenticity. What is it about Islamism that evokes the fascination of theorists? What is it about the “jargon of authenticity” accepted by theorists that causes them to be enamored when they would otherwise be critical of such a discourse? Buck-Morss constantly reiterates that there is a wide diversity among Islamist writers. This is certainly true. There is a world of difference between Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali Shariati, and Abdulkarim Soroush. There are in fact wide differences, among theorists from the same nation, but even more so among those that come from different cultures and historical contexts. There is such variety and diversity that one wonders what use there is in talking as if there is some commonality. As Buck-Morss makes her argument, no matter how many times she says otherwise, there is something she sees as essential and more “grounded” in a discourse coming in a religious language. This is essentializing by default. It takes Islam to be definitive of the political culture of the region. There is absolutely no doubt that Islamism is an integral and important feature of Middle Eastern political culture, just as Christian populism is for the United States or Catholic liberation theology is for Latin America. But that does not make it the most representative.2

In many ways this quest for authenticity reflects the residue of the Third Worldist discourse. The ideology of anti-imperialism in Third World guise equated those more exotic and unlike “us” as the more revolutionary force, as the one least tarnished by the virus of capitalist modernity. In particular it was the Third World peasant that really got the romanticism of the western academic left going. While part of this phenomenon is the fetishism of the “other,” we must also remember that this is not unique to our views of the Third World, but is also a feature of all forms of populism. The folksy jargon of praise for the authentic German peasant, who is honorable and works with his hands and who is pure and unsoiled by the cheapness of bourgeois urban life, was an important ideological component of fascism. It is surprising that a theorist who sees her thought rooted in the tradition of the Frankfurt School does not realize this, because one of the theoretical achievements of this tradition was a clear analysis of the cultural and ideological foundations of National Socialism.3 One aspect of this analysis was the recognition that the “jargon of authenticity” was also reflected in much of the philosophy popular at the time, particularly existentialism. This was the other side of their critique of positivism. Indeed they recognized that both positivism and obscurantism, or irrationalism, were part of the same dialectic of modernity.

If we want to think in postcolonial terms, the other side to the dominant Eurocentric ideology of capitalism consists of ideologies of various Third Worldist stripes, including its greatest expression, Islamist Third Worldism. All the more so, perhaps, because they are not so much different sides of the same coin, as different reflections of the same phenomena, two parts of a dialectical whole if you will. Islamism is Eurocentric because it holds the “west” to be some kind of trans-historical entity. What Buck-Morss fails to recognize is that many of these “Islam-centric models” are Eurocentric. They are Eurocentric because they take “the West” as something with an essential character, one existing as the “other” against which Islamic identity can be posited and recognized. For someone who wants to emphasize “global immanence,” Buck-Morss places too much emphasis on the categories of “within” and “without.”

Third Worldism was an ideology that combined anti-imperialism with populism. The particular variety that developed in the Islamic world was common to both Islamic parties and to many Marxist-Leninist groups. This was rooted in a conception of something essential about the West and, conversely, something essential and authentic about the Islamic, Arab, Iranian, or Eastern worlds, however one’s different views framed this opposition. Perhaps its most sinister effect was to obscure the disagreements differentiating socialism from the politics of the Islamic parties. Because of the focus on western hegemony, those who could prove themselves to be the most anti-imperialist won the hearts of the masses. This disarmed the left during the Iranian Revolution, as it was unable to show that it was more “authentic” than the Islamist factions within the revolution. We live in a different world, as Buck-Morss constantly reminds us, so why return to a tradition that is now defunct? That tradition is as defunct as the Marxist-Leninist groups of the same era. The only difference is their exotic nature, because their references are so foreign to those unfamiliar with the culture. We can think of this as a “politics of despair,” whereby we no longer see any potential for socialist revolution on the horizon, and thus acquiesce before the dominant ideology.

A critical theory of society has as its task the critique of ideology in contemporary society. This does not mean to side with one over the other, or to play mix and match in the marketplace of ideas. It means rather to shatter ideologies, to attempt to demystify a reified and obscure world, all the while knowing that the real critique that changes conditions does not merely take place in the realm of theory, but in the act of changing social relationships. This includes the critique of Marxism as an ideology, as it served as for most of the twentieth century. The greatest weapon against ideology was itself turned into an ideology and a strong one.

We should also ask about the connection between these thinkers to whom Buck-Morss is referring and what they developed into. Of course they are not a monolithic group. But let’s say there is some commonality and common points of critique. This is particularly true in the two places where there is a commonality in terms of similarity and influence, namely in the cases of Egypt and Iran, and in the two thinkers who particularly interest Buck-Morss—on the one hand, Sayyed Qutb, an important thinker in the history of the region and one of the intellectual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, and on the other hand Ali Shariati, whose ideas shaped many of the youth partaking in the Iranian revolutionary uprising of 1978–79 and whose death, in the months before the revolution, made him into a somewhat mythical figure among Iranian opposition groups. His unique blend of Shia imagery with Third World Marxist slogans was a direct reflection of the time and, one could say, the best reflection of this hybrid ideology, a Third World populism specifically tailored for Iran.

Buck-Morss writes that “there is no universal law of the market that can guarantee us a benevolent future.” Here we come to an important theoretical confusion. There is certainly no law that could “guarantee us a benevolent future,” but perhaps there are laws which, unless altered by human struggle, may bring a tragic future. We need to understand how “laws” are understood in Marxian theory. It is not that laws don’t exist, but rather that they are historical, a product of human creation over time. An important law for Marx, as well as for many of the early critical theorists, was the law of value. The idea or hope was that a revolution would “abolish” the law so that human life could be freed from the tyranny of the commodity-form.

The book points to a perhaps more important question in its attempt to think about where we are and what a future society would mean. We want to move beyond an understanding of universality and world revolution that is grounded in a Eurocentric conception of universal history, and at the same time we want to retain such a universal understanding of history. This is perhaps the central problematic the book points to and its most important contribution is indeed in bringing this problem to light.

There is currently a lack of any normative basis for critique. And this problem reveals itself here. The consequence is then to see all critiques of modernity as the same. What do we mean by capitalism and “communism” in the twenty-first century? What, exactly, are we at least struggling against, if we are not certain what we are fighting for? Going back to this politics of despair, we seem to have lost all vision and basis on which our critique of this society stands. In the hopes of abandoning an ideological understanding of socialism that history demonstrated to be defunct, we have become so eclectic and diluted that there is nothing to differentiate a radical critique of modernity from any critique of modernity.

The thinking exemplified by Buck-Morss’s book is so desperate for some common voice of struggle she wants to grab at any critique of modernity and claim common ground. The cultural difference obscures the reality. Orientalism, like many ideologies, works in ironic and mysterious ways. Our task should not simply be to unite all critiques of modernity into some common hodge-podge to rally around. Our task, or rather the task of a critical theory of society, is to critique modernity, but also to critique the critiques of modernity. This is the critique that can help arm us against ideology rearing its ugly head at times when the struggle reaches a high point. It is precisely during high points of struggle that the critique of ideology is most necessary. It is these various critiques of modernity that will prove dangerous when the time comes for history to finally judge the modern era. It is in these times when it looks as if humans are reshaping history in their own image that ideology will serve to pump life back into capitalism’s veins.

The positive critique of modernity comes in the streets, in the workplaces, communities, and schools; anywhere that people reproduce their daily existence. The positive supersession of capitalist society is not the work of critical theory. Critical theory can only point to the possibilities, but it is in the power of negativity to critique what the obstacles are and will be for the times when the “old mole” reappears. During the struggle against the Shah’s regime, when it reached its climax during the general strike of 1978–79, workers’ councils were formed throughout the country. They properly served as a force of dual power. Then, when the state collapsed, they served as the primary power. These councils were not just in the factories, but in offices, neighborhoods, schools and universities, as well as in the provinces. The ideology of an Islamic populism helped rein in these forces. One should not forget the direct repression of the state, but we should also understand the role that ideology played in obscuring the conflict that was taking place. No one was immune from this understanding of a false sense of “unity.” We should also acknowledge that it was not the “fundamentalists” that began the attack on the popular councils, but the “liberals” of the provisional government, many of whom were associates and friends of the late Dr. Shariati.

In one part of the book, Buck-Morss, using the work of another scholar sympathetic to the Islamist movement in Iran, claims that Ayatollah Khomeini, by not speaking with references to western political concepts, “has managed a triumphal escape from Western hegemony.”4 But this immediately begs the question: can one escape from Western hegemony by changing the concepts one uses? What does it mean to institute an “autonomous discourse” in a capitalist world? This is an extremely idealist notion if there ever was one. How can one have autonomy from a totally “immanent” world, to use Buck-Morss’s understanding, yet establish an autonomous sphere merely through discourse? This alone can have a very ideological effect, one which has plagued post-colonial theory. It sees capitalism and colonialism with such an emphasis on discourse that it can lead people to the blind alley of thinking that an alteration in the discourse can make for an alteration in the actual relations of power.

What surprises the reader is the virtual absence of any acknowledgement of the actually existing historical left in the Middle East. Buck Morss writes as if there was so little of a left tradition that she really needed to stretch to find common ground with forces in the region. The history of the actually existing left in Iran or Egypt is nowhere to be found. It is conveniently brushed aside. But this seems to be no mere accident, or something that can simply be attributed to ignorance. This seems, rather, more connected to the general disillusionment with anything connected to the left.

Speaking of the left in the region, Buck-Morss’s few passing comments give the impression that the left in the Middle East was nothing but a second-rate impersonation of the left in Europe. This is a common misconception, but one with quite problematic conclusions. One often gets the impression that socialism was also a colonial imposition on the Islamic world, and, even worse, that socialists from those countries were merely parroting the movement in the West. But indeed nothing could be further from the truth. The movement in many of the nations, but especially in those bordering what was the Russia and Central Asia, such as Iran and Turkey, grew in symbiotic relationship with the movement in Russia. The origins of the Communist Party of Iran are closely tied to the development of the Bolshevik party. The socialist movement of Iran, going back even earlier, was born out of migrant Iranian workers who had been employed in the oil fields of Baku, Azerbaijan. Indeed, many workers from the surrounding areas—mostly Muslim lands—had travelled to the Russian Empire, and to Baku in particular, to work on the oil fields, but also in the ports and factories. These workers became involved in the organizing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party, taking part in the Revolution of 1905. They soon returned to their home countries and used the organizing skills they had learned in organizing in their nascent home industries as well as in establishing socialist parties.

Buck-Morss claims that the secular left in the Middle East carried what she calls an “apologist discourse,”5 meaning that its general outlook was one that was not critical of modernity. It shared the values of a Eurocentric modernity, that was technology-and development-centered, and which also shared the values of secularism and distrust for tradition.

The “apologist discourse” which she accuses the secular left in the Middle East of having was by no means unique to it but was also shared by many currents within the Islamist movement. Perhaps this hostility to Marxism, evident in the works of Islamist scholars, is not rooted in a critique of developmentalism or authoritarianism, as Buck-Morss suggests, but has a different source; one to which the history of Europe in the twentieth century is no stranger.

This is an historical lesson that needs to be remembered. There are critiques of modernity that point towards a revolutionary supersession of existing conditions and there is a critique of modernity that serves reaction. Fascism also carried with it a definite critique of modernity, one that stressed the authenticity of the pure German working man against the decadence of a modern bourgeois society serving only money instead of the values of pride, honor, and valor. There is also the critique of technology that existed in Europe in the mid-twentieth century, reflecting a reactionary fear of society, which has dissolved in the face of capitalist modernity. And that term, capitalist modernity, is precisely the issue.

How we understand the past and the present directly affects how we understand the future as well as the struggle to get there. This is why not all critiques are on equal footing. Some reflect the condition of modernity better than others. Are we to understand our condition as one of good versus evil, or as one that emphasizes some abstract concept of justice against oppression? What does oppression exactly mean? For some it is the rule of capital over everyday life; for others there are more obscure understandings of the world we live in.

This confusion reflects a worldview that is in many ways the ideological expression of our current era, namely the idea that all ideas and “narratives” stand on equal footing with each other. Since none possesses a final claim to a “truth,” none is truer than any other. One can just pick up and put down any ideas that one feels serve the purpose at the time. And anything can mean anything. Not realized in this confusion is that this is the worldview reflecting contemporary capitalism, the universal exchange of equivalents. One does not have to believe in absolute truths to believe that some understandings of the world are more correct than others. Instead, we get the ongoing confusion among many academics who want to remain within the Marxist fold but who bow to the ideological influence of our “post-modern” period.

Marxist concepts are not just another conceptual apparatus because we feel that they sound better. It is also not because Marx happened to say them. It is because they more correctly reflect the social reality in which we find ourselves. Being historical concepts, they are constantly changing in order to more correctly reflect the social reality and we can and must abandon them if they no longer suffice in reflecting this reality. It therefore makes a difference whether someone sees the main problem as capitalism, as a system that alienates living human labor to reproduce itself, or if one sees the problem as being alienation from our “Islamic roots” and our subjection to “westoxication.” Otherwise, there is nothing separating the communist critique of capitalism from any other.

The book suffers from wanting to have its cake and eat it too. I suppose that all of us are who are attempting to think through the idea of a universal, global social movement in the twenty-first century and are attempting to think through the idea of world revolution with the understanding of the effects of colonialism on history and capitalism. What the book fails to do is to point towards new forms of collective struggle based on the actual struggles that exist. Instead, it points to a way of conceiving struggle that, in the past, reinforced the worst ideological effects of the struggles of the people in the region.

Another negative effect of Buck-Morss’s insistence on the necessity of grounding discourse in some traditional or “authentic” discourse is the limits it places on the scope of the discourse itself. By forcing all discussion of particular social questions faced by the people in the region today to be framed in this very narrow way, it immediately rules out the multiple ways, many not yet imagined, by which people may rethink their lives and how they may see themselves and their place in the world. By insisting on seeing Islamism as the more or even most authentic discourse, we limit the ways in which the right questions can be asked. What of all the activists who choose to articulate their struggles in a discourse other than that of religion? Are they being “apologists”?

Buck-Morss writes: “To accomplish a global critique, however, it is the object criticized that must have priority, not the discursive model.”6

Yes, but what if the difference is about what that object is? What if it is the difference that makes for the difference in the discursive model? Is breaking free from western hegemony something that can be achieved through discourse? But we have to think further; if we are in agreement with this statement we must ask another question. If this is indeed the case, why should we then choose to reify the very identities that are the product of the Eurocentric worldview? Buck-Morss constantly reiterates the point that Islamism is not a monolithic entity. True, point taken. But now what? Do we abandon our critique? Indeed, what surprises us is that, for a work of critical theory, how uncritical her work really is.

• 1Buck-Morss, op. cit., 93
• 2One thinks of Hamid Dabashi’s point that Islamism is “integral but not definitive” to the political culture.
• 3See Herbert Marcuse, “The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, Grove Press (1969), pp. 3–42.
• 4Ibid.
• 5Ibid., p.99.
• 6Ibid., p. 99.

Philip Mirowski has written an important book, one well worth reading. Both an economist and an historian/philosopher of science, Mirowski is unusual in being highly attuned to the purging (long ago) of both economic history and the history of economic thought from the Anglo-American academic “economics” curriculum. Ninety-nine percent of the “professional economists,” in academia, business and government, drank the neo-liberal Kool-aid long ago, and marginalized, silenced and ridiculed the tiny minority of “Cassandras” in their profession who in one way or another predicted the something like the 2007–2008 meltdown and its aftermath. After the crisis hit with full force, from the sub-prime real estate meltdown to the liquidation of Lehman Brothers to its internationalization through the “new financial instruments” of “securitization” sold around the world in the presumed “slicing and dicing of risk,” these same professional economists reacted with different forms of denial, and above all denial that anything in their neo-liberal paradigm, the belief in the infinite wisdom of markets, required a rethink. Further, through a series of interlocking institutions of influence, what Mirowski calls the “Russian doll” of layers within layers of think-tanks, media outlets and policy wonks, these same economists managed to convince a fair part of the “public” that the crisis had been caused by “big government” interfering with their market utopia. For these people, every apparent debacle of the “rational allocation of resources” or the “efficient markets hypothesis” had one obvious solution: still more, and still freer, markets. But there is worse to come, much worse. Mirowski sees neo-liberalism reaching far into what he calls the “left.” He does not include in this category “those benighted few, those Revenants of the Economic Rapture,” by which he means Marxist theoreticians of breakdown crisis (including, presumably, the likes of this author). Mirowski addresses himself to “a different, more general audience. The Great Contraction has completely wrong-footed people who used to be [sic] called ‘socialists’ or ‘progressives,’ confounding every expectation that they had finally achieved some small measure of vindication for their understanding of the economy.” I presume Mirowski is not thinking here of (whatever their problems, and there are many) Levi and Dumesnil (to the extent they are Marxists), Robert Boyer, Robert Brenner, Francois Chesnais, Robert Kurz, Andrew Kliman, Alan Freeman, Jürgen Heinrichs, Anwar Shaikh, Robert Guttman, David Harvey, Paolo Giusanni or spinoffs of the Japanese Uno school such as Richard Westra. Nor is he thinking, apparently, of conferences of rock concert dimensions on Marx in both Europe and the United States since 2007. But let this go, for now. We do not insist, at least not initially, that every useful book on the crisis seriously engage Marxian theory. But this virtual silence about Marx and Marxian crisis theory (Mirowski is, it must be recalled, writing about professional economists in the Anglo-American world), combined with Mirowski’s demonstration of how far neo-liberal thinking has pervaded what he calls the “left” (including figures such as Paul Krugman, Jeffery Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz) actually points to a deeper problem which he barely mentions, namely the fading away, for over 40 years, of any viable “reformism” in the advanced capitalist world (or anywhere else for that matter). We hardly need to waste words on the farce of the Obama administration, nor on the various Socialist and Labour governments that have come and gone in Europe since the 1970s, all without exception toeing the neo-liberal line. But politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and the absence of the type of “reformists” who built the post-1945 welfare state since the 1970s points to a deep structural reality in world capitalist accumulation: there is no social space for them.

But this said, Mirowski’s book is far too rich to be casually dismissed for not discussing what he did not intend to discuss. He rightly dismisses nostalgia for some pre-1970s Golden Age, of those who wish to reregulate the economy (while he points out that it has been the neo-liberals who have actually reregulated the way the economy is managed). The neo-liberals, as Mirowski demonstrates in detail, are way beyond the “economy” and have pushed their market theories into every sphere of life, from sex to climate change (some of us Rapture theorists call this the “real domination of capital,” taking off from the Unpublished Sixth Chapter of Volume One of Marx’s magnum opus). Mirowski is strongest, perhaps, in showing how the economists have appropriated methods (especially from the thickets of mathematics) from other fields, above all the natural sciences. Orthodoxy is set down not by the likes of past (presumed) giants (he mentions John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, Paul Samuelson, et al.) but by “a few journals that are designated indispensable” and “a few highly ranked departments” rather than “any clear intellectual standards…graduates are socialized and indoctrinated by forcing them to read articles from those journals with a half-life of five years.” Given this socialization, Mirowski’s book is dedicated to exploring the ways in which the crisis has not yet served as an exemplary instance of “falsification of much of anything…”

Neo-liberalism originated in 1947 with the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society by the likes of Friedrich von Hayek and others who had been humiliated and marginalized by the triumph of Keynesianism and welfare statism coming out of the post-1929 crisis. Unlike the “night watchman” state of classical nineteenth-century liberalism, neoliberals in reality are willing to countenance a strong state, if it is one that enforces “free markets” (one need only think of their involvement with Pinochet’s Chile). From this initial core, another layer of Mirowski’s Russian doll was the takeover of some academic departments. This was followed by foundations and think tanks dedicated to the spread of the gospel. Another step was into Rupert Murdoch–type journalism, and beyond that to supposedly grassroots single-issue political movements. This Russian doll structure “helps explain why neo-liberalism cannot be easily inscribed on a set of three-by-five cards.” The strong state dimension is the basis for the “neo” in neo-liberalism; “if anything, bureaucracies become more unwieldy under neoliberal regimes.” The suspicion of concentrated power in classical political economy from Adam Smith onward is replaced in neo-liberalism in the belief that corporations can do no wrong. All in all, except for our one proviso, a very good and worthwhile book.

Note: The following was written by a Mexican comrade of Insurgent Notes, in response to an inquiry about a very upbeat Financial Times assessment, in the late spring, of the Mexican economy under the new president Enrique Peña Nieto. –The Editors.

Mexico City

What the Financial Times says is completely false. The Economist and other “global” magazines have emphasized the “reset” of the Mexican economy, but there is not much to say on this count:

• it is not possible for the government to have realized this so-called turnaround in six months;
• the very same official bourgeois press in Mexico, as well as the leading business associations, are talking about a fall in the GDP in the first quarter of the year;
• even worse, because of the Fed’s (the United States Federal Reserve Bank) interest rate increases, a lot of capital has flowed out of Mexico, which is red-flagging a possible devaluation of the Mexican peso (which had previously surprised people by its “strength”) against the dollar and the euro;
• My explanation is that Mexico, and its submissive attitude, is one of the countries “tolerated” by Washington and London; that’s why they are talking up the new government. At the moment, the major decision to completely privatize PEMEX1 is pending; this is the chicken laying the golden eggs for our government and country, and thus the global chorus calling for the smooth enactment of this reform is being cranked up to ensure that it happens.
• There has been much hoopla about the so-called Pact for Mexico, which is a blatant and cynical agreement of all the parties (the PRI, the PRD and the PAN)2 to support a series of reforms: in the energy sector (sale of PEMEX), and of the government tax agency. Both reforms have been seen as flashpoints which would set off a social confrontation. But now, the acceptance of these reforms by the official left is no secret but is seen rather as symbols of maturity and political strength. In this sense, the PRI government is a total success. There is, on the other hand, a split from the PRD, which claims to maintain the continuity of a reformist and nationalist left, and also claims to be launching a new party which will be called MORENA. However, this is an embryonic organization, and the general mood is one of skepticism about political parties, fear, individualism, apathy, depression, etc.
• Finally, adopting somewhat the “final crisis” interpretation of the ICC3 (with which I do not agree and in which I have never believed, namely that the crisis of capitalism is a kind of zero growth combined with the impossibility of the emergence of new national powers), there has been no improvement for the middle classes. For people such as myself who are pushing 50, the Mexico I saw in the 1970s and mid-1980s was very different from the Mexico of today, seen in a long-term perspective: it is possible for a young professional to be employed in a transnational company and to earn a good “salary,” to live in a comfortable apartment, for both him and his wife to have nice cars, to have all kinds of computers and apps, and to travel abroad. But these successful “young people” have neither the sufficient income nor the psychological ability to support a family of four or more children, and further, to provide them with university educations, as some proletarian families managed to do in the 1960s when the country was growing and when there was something of a Keynesian welfare state and the like, making possible a certain social mobility. No, the successful young people today have difficulty separating from their families, do not marry and still less have children, but at most a pet; they have no prospect of a secure retirement and medical insurance.
• The rest is a disaster. The “war against the narco-traffic continues; what has changed is the manipulation of information. Mexico continues to be a country of massive massacres, assassinations of journalists and activists, and a growing militarization.
• Of course, the wonder of capitalism is its ability to remake itself through shit: violence, poverty, drugs, weaponry, etc., and alongside that, big tourist centers, new shopping malls, bigger and bigger cars, absurd real estate projects, etc., etc.

PS. One point in the preceding may be inaccurate: when I say that Mexico continues to have “massive” massacres, perhaps it would be better to say “collective” ones. I have never understood what number is necessary to merit the adjective “massive.” In this country, many people like to pretend that “nothing is happening,” and that what is being said is an “exaggeration.” In fact, we Mexicans say that we are the country where “nothing happens,” describing in this way a cruel national subjectivity characterized by a peculiar mixture of indolence, indifference, and individualism…but more than anything by a profound fear of ourselves in the shadow of “barbarous Mexico”4 or “wild Mexico.” In the last instance, this is the topic of much speculative social psychology, which Marxism has quite rightly avoided, but which continues to demand some kind of explanation. But certainly, by comparison with the great historical massacres, it is not “exact” to call the murder of 10, 20 or even 50 to 70 people in a single “event” a massive massacre; I don’t know. But don’t think I’m digressing into macabre ideas, but only that I feel that not even we who are living in Mexico understand what is happening in this new Colombia.

N.

• 1Pemex is Mexico’s petroleum industry, previously owned by US and British capital, and nationalized in 1938.
• 2The Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which ruled the country from 1930 to 2000 and which returned to power in 2006, and won again in 2012 election; the Partido Revolucionario Democratico, a left-center opposition party around the populist Lopez Obrador, and the right-wing Partido de Accion Nacional, which defeated the PRI in 2000.
• 3The International Communist Current, which has argued for decades for a view of the decadence of capitalism as an historical mode of production.
• 4The title of a famous 1910 exotic travel account by John Kenneth Turner.