The following is more a reminiscence than an obituary.

I first became aware of Noel Ignatiev (then known as Noel Ignatin) during the crackup of the New Left ca. 1968 or 1969. At the final conference of sds (Students for a Democratic Society) in Chicago in June 1969, Noel broke through to national prominence as a spokesperson for rym II (Revolutionary Youth Movement), where the Progressive Labor Party (plp or more commonly pl) took over sds just as it was disintegrating, in the larger context of the disintegration of the 1960s “Movement,” in effect taking over a corpse.

I had spent the 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area, more specifically in Berkeley, in the Independent Socialist Clubs (isc), which around that time changed their name to International Socialists (is) and which over the course of the 1970s spawned five or six break-away groups, the most visible for a time being the International Socialist Organization (iso). Many is comrades left Berkeley in 1970 to organize in Detroit auto plants and, with more success, in the Teamsters. I became an independent, and stayed in Berkeley until I decamped for New York in 1976.

I pretty much lost sight of Noel until he appeared in Cambridge, Massachusetts, around 1984. I was working in the Harvard Library system, and Noel came to Harvard to do a PhD. As he put it, in one of his many memorable formulations, “In Russia, when you fail in politics, you go to Siberia; in America, when you fail in politics, you come to Harvard.” We were introduced one evening by a mutual friend from Italy.

I was initially standoffish, knowing little about Noel as a person, and still harboring bad memories of his association with Maoism and with the term “white skin privilege” which over decades has morphed into “white privilege,” of near universal acceptance today on both the soft and hard left, and which appears as such in the New York Times. Noel was in that way a pioneer, even if he rejected most of the currents which picked up the term and integrated it into a left-liberal respectability he loathed. Loathing was a leitmotiv of his political judgments; when I would criticize some formation such as Labor Notes (cf. below), Noel would say “I want to hear some loathing.”

We began to meet, off and on at first, as refugees from the post-1970 shipwreck of the left. My hero from the history of revolutions was (and remains) Rosa Luxemburg; Noel’s was John Brown. I was oriented to the radical currents of the European revolutionary movements, and the American groups which looked to them; while Noel was knowledgeable about them, and had had ties to Italian Autonomia, he was far more rooted than I in American currents, from the pre–Civil War Abolitionists onward. He talked at times of re-creating for the present John Brown’s action at Harper’s Ferry, by which he meant some kind of action that would polarize the situation as Harper’s Ferry had done in 1859. We converged around a recognition of the iww as the most radical current to date in the history of the American working class. The decades of absence of any mass radical movement in the streets in the United States never put these divergences to the test.

My past association with the currents growing out of the 1960s isc kept me focused, from afar, on their organizing in the Midwest, above all, again, in Detroit. In 1993, I persuaded Noel to attend a conference of Labor Notes, one of the most successful mini-mass creations of the “industrialized” is comrades. We conferred on the sidelines, unenthused. Noel reminded me of some 1960s conferences in Chicago where the tone had been set by black radicalism and where “it was the is types who were relegated to the sidelines.”

Noel was no hard-nosed Marxist philistine; he listened to Mozart day in and day out; I was occasionally puzzled by his lack of interest in black-inspired music, which was then my orientation; he showed no interest in jazz, which in those Cambridge years was my focus. He said once “jazz is about being cool,” which did not interest him. African culture was also a dead key for him. He read widely, far more than I, in contemporary novels, while I settled in to writing a PhD thesis on Herman Melville, on whom we did converge. My choice of Melville did grow out of an interest in the questions of race and class, which owed a great deal to my discussions with Noel. I could honestly say that Noel got me intellectually and culturally interested in America, which had previously been eclipsed for me by Europe.

We staked out a bench by the Charles River, on which we proclaimed hegemony. Noel referred to Harvard as the “boneyard,” to which we had come to retire. Noel had a personal warmth and humor which was infectious. He was very successful in attracting women, an ongoing topic of conversation between us. He was also intent on having children, and had a son and a daughter in the 1980s. He quoted Joe DiMaggio, who said that of all the things in his life of which he was proud, his grandchildren were the most important.

We traveled together on occasion, once to Philadelphia, from where we visited the nearby Amish country, because the radical religious sects already in the late seventeenth century had attacked slavery. In 1989, we drove down to Pittston, Virginia, where a long and militant miners’ strike was underway. One striking miner invited us to his home, where Noel held back from expressing his thoughts on the limits of trade unionism. The miner offered to meet us again the next day and show us around, then caught himself and said “No, wait, I have a date with a wild turkey!” What struck me most of the way back to Cambridge was the contrast between the miners’ scene in Appalachia, truly a separate world, and the endless stretches of suburbia.

Noel could be overbearing, and told me more than once that “I could still save my soul, by which he meant (I suppose) becoming an “Ignatievite.” I attended a founding editorial meeting of what became Race Traitor, which appeared from 1993 until 2005 (I had my own plans, and held back, though I did submit a couple of articles, my two-part series on “Race and the Enlightenment,” and in 2010 co-founded Insurgent Notes, with a number of comrades).

In the year 2000, I left Cambridge for New York, which had always been my intention. My contact with Noel over the remaining two decades of his life was mainly on the phone. Not a week before he died, he was trying to draw me out once again on the issue of Lenin vs. Luxemburg on the national question; he was relentless when there was any kind of serious disagreement. It was to be our last phone call. I wrote to him a day or two before he died, care of his son John Henry:

Dear Noel,

John told me 1–2 hours ago about your decision to forego any further surgery and let nature take its course. Very courageous, as your dealing with your deteriorating condition over the past weeks has been courageous.

I just wanted John Henry to read this to you as I doubt we will talk or write again.

I plan to write an article or some such about our friendship for Insurgent Notes.

We became friendly in Cambridge in the early ’80s and have been friends, with ups and downs, ever since. For me, it goes without saying, it was a great privilege. You taught me to see America and American history in a way I never had. Beyond that, your very magnanimous spirit and warmth were always infectious. When I was down and out because of crises with different girlfriends, you were always there to help and above all to listen. Those days on our “bench” next to the Charles, during our enforced retirement after the 1970s collapse of the left, will always stay with me, as all the other shared memories will stay with me.

I am glad we were able to write and above all talk until quite recently. I will always remember you, with great affection.

Your friend and comrade always.

Love

Loren

The movement of the yellow vests seems to confirm a break in the historical thread of class struggles. It had already been initiated world-wide by the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and the movements of the Squares, all of which had been at the head of mobilizations of demands concerning liberties, equality, living conditions in general; employment more than working conditions. It is also for this reason that these movements were addressed much more to the State than to employers, insofar as the process of globalization/totalisation of capital leads States to manage the reproduction of social relations at the territorial level, while remaining dependent on the requirements of globalization.

In France, the resilience of the traditional workers’ movement still maintained the idea of the class struggle against capital. In the spring of 2016, the fight against the reform of the labor law and labour statutes continued along the path of “the working class above all,” without however obtaining tangible results. A few years earlier, the renewed mobilisation generated by the “movement of the squares” did not allow for an effective reaction or resistance, because it quickly privileged the formalism of the assemblies, to the detriment of the substance of struggle. This struggle seemed to have found a more promising blend within the Spanish movement, with the overflow of the squares towards neighbourhood solidarities in connection with housing problems.

In all of these struggles, including in the case of the struggle against the labour law, the question of the general strike or the blocking of factory production was not raised, nor has it been posed by the yellow vests movement. In these conditions, to bring together the pursuit of roundabout occupations with calls for a workers’ strike is a fiction of “conflict convergence” or the outdated idea that blocking flows of goods would be secondary to blocking the production of the goods themselves.

A community of struggle that is no longer a community of labour

The roundabout rebels certainly include many salaried employees (or similarly, employees who benefit from subsidized jobs or social assistance to return to work), but there are also other non-salaried occupants or former employees (including poor self-entrepreneurs and especially retirees who are far from all going off on low-cost flights to exotic destinations). It is not from the working relationship that they intervene, but from their living conditions and their social non-existence. A struggle, of course, but a classless struggle rather than a class struggle. It is therefore useless to look for what would be its proletarian wing, to animate its expansion, something that it clearly does not wish to develop.

Moreover, if the yellow vests are scorned by the power in place, it is not because they are “proletarians” in the historical sense of the term (Macron does not openly scorn the professional workers raised in the rules of the art of labour unionism and legal education), but rather because they are, for him, nothing (“people who are nothing,” he said), modern sub-proletarians, social cases, savages having forgotten all the rules of civility, people who can neither speak nor produce officials or leaders. “No teeth,” as François Hollande said once. A contempt itself despicable as it is charged with inhumanity; a blind contempt since it casts an undifferentiated judgment on the movement, while even we, as we mingle with them, know that there are very many different people within the yellow vest collectives.

According to the testimonies of the collective life of the yellow vests in the “cabins” which have flourished on the roundabouts, we can affirm that it is first and foremost a community of struggle made of sharing, in difficult living conditions; a union of energies against globalist power (Macron, ministers, the elected, the corrupt, the great tax evaders, the confiscators of the word of the people, etc.); collective aspirations to put an end to a bad life; all this with sometimes utopian accents, as sung by a yellow vest amateur musician “I do not want to live in a world where doves do not fly any more.” A lyricism and songs far removed from the eternal political couplets on “emancipation” that accompany the demonstrations of workers or leftists. It is this community of struggle that makes people take turns to prepare food on the spot or share the food that is brought in support. Solidarity is not an empty word.

What is the organisation?

If we agree that yellow vests have developed an autonomous movement, we will not go so far as to say that they self-organise themselves in the ideological sense of self-organisation, as conceived by historical councilists or libertarians. It is an immediate self-organisation that leads to nothing but its own immediate practice. It reaches its limits when it wants to move to the stage of a true organisation of the movement, if only in the decision-making to refuse or not the requests of official authorisation for demonstrations or to accept or not established routes, the election of spokespersons or delegates. There is a refusal of organisation and not self-organisation, and it corresponds not only to distrust of any political or trade union organisation, but also to the fact that the present conditions have exhausted all the known historical forms.1 Indeed, the yellow vests can not create “roundabout councils,” as there were formerly workers’ councils or soldiers’ councils. But that does not mean that they can not argue or act from these roundabouts. Simply, they are not places that can ensure the durability of political forms, as we have seen recently with their dismantling. Here again the movement innovates, because it at the same time blocks and moves. Nodes of blockades can indeed be moved and renewed in the same way that places and protest routes can be redefined at any time.

The risk is that of a repetition of previous actions. However, this repetition is already made precarious:

1. by the decreasing number of those present at the points of mobilization;
2. by the intervention of the gendarmes at the roundabouts and especially against the kinds of small zads which have more or less spontaneously formed there;
3. by the new apparatuses mobilised by the police during the Saturday demonstrations, which tend to transfer the real violence of the repression of the State, which alienates a large part of public opinion, onto a violence intrinsic to the movement, given the fact of its refusal to comply with government calls to stop demonstrating.

It is the movement that then becomes the troublemaker and all those who call for it are thus guilty of the same offense, by intention, a form of crime increasingly manufactured in the name of urgency or exception (for example, in relation to terrorist activity), but recyclable for the occasion.2

From negation to institutionalisation?

Did we move to a second phase, more affirmative, that of the ric [référendum d’initiative citoyenne/citizens’ initiative referendum: a demand to promote proposals of law originating with the citizenry, along the lines of what is found in Switzerland], while the first was more negative (Macron, resign!, We will not give up on anything, etc.)? Or can the movement continue by absorbing this new electoral proposal, something that seems to offer a way out for those who, among the yellow vests, see that Macron will not resign?

If the ric destroys the immediate dynamics of the movement, it is because on its current basis, that of the roundabout occupations and demonstrations on Saturday, it does not carry a clear historical dynamic, especially as the practice of assemblies, as well as the idea of delegation, find little echo or create divisions within the movement. It is precisely because it is incapable of making its dynamics historical on an assembly basis, that it can take refuge in the ric. A referendum is for some an example of direct democracy, but for us it is the risk of a beginning of the institutionalisation of the movement3 —or worse the birth of a typical Five Star movement, as in Italy.

Our criticism of the ric cannot therefore be taken primarily on the basis of a perceived strategic error of the movement that would thereby be “co-opted,” as claimed by a leaflet published on the net. Indeed, this leaflet retains the traditional leftist discourse on “co-option,” but finally rests on positions of “disengagement” limited to an anti-macronism. It is tempting for some to appropriate them because they may seem uncompromising and have expressed the unity of the movement during the first weeks, but for those who, like us, think that capital is a social relationship, we can be satisfied with neither. Of course there are reasons to argue that the adoption of the ric would ultimately only concern “societal issues”; questions that are at the source of all the media or populist manipulations, and which do not relate to the material and social conditions which are at the source of the revolt. Moreover, how could a referendum force employers to raise wages and owners to lower rents?

But then it will be retorted, “what do you propose?” This is the same as what we were told in ’68 and this time, in addition, without even the escape, for some, of responding by proposing exotic models (Cuba or China).

One can not neglect the fact that what makes the strength of the movement is also what makes it weak. To take just one example, the actual link between the yellow vests and trade unionists intervening on the roundabouts remains very formal, insofar as these trade unionists only intervene as individuals, as we do, but without establishing a mediation that makes possible and concrete the fact that more and more basic trade unionists are ready to enter the movement, but on another basis that is not the convergence of struggles (this is the point of view of the cgt), but with the feeling that it is the same struggle and that in addition it took forms that make it possible to “win.”4

Yet it is a sentiment shared by many participants in the inter-professional union event of December 14, who also participated in one or more Saturday demonstrations with yellow vests. Moreover, more and more cégétistes, even if globally they are a very small minority, put on yellow vests, while bearing signs and cgt stickers, or better, wear red and yellow vests. But subjective expectations are limited by objective conditions, because the union world is increasingly cut off from what we can no longer even call the world of work, so much have situations become particularized. A composite ensemble that, on the one hand, understands that “working more to earn more” is an illusion, but on the other, does not seem to oppose the tax exemption of overtime proposed by the government. However, the latter has recognised negative effects on the level of employment, which is a concern of the yellow vests. This contradiction may explain the fact that the movement does not seem to make any reference to the notion of guaranteed income, even though it has the consciousness and the experience that, often, working is no longer enough to live.5

The movement expresses, by its diversity and heterogeneity, the multidimensional nature of inequalities and a very different “sense” of the statistical inequalities, taken one by one. This gap is also due to the fact that France is more efficient in redistributing income upstream (accessibility to university, health, minimum wage, quality of life in general), that seems “normal,” than downstream, where the direct progressive tax weighs little; the csg is for all, along with the vat and various other taxes which weigh particularly on the propensity of the poorest salaried employees to consume.6

Towards a general of all roundabouts?

A consumption that the movement upsets during this holiday season by blocking the supply of large supermarkets at central platforms, such as that of Auchan near Nimes, or directly blocking the entrance of supermarkets. Some prophets of doom, always running ahead of triumphant capital, may have spread rumours about the yellow vests, that they are hurting the economy by blocking large supermarkets, thereby benefiting Amazon and other online sales services. However, this assertion is highly questionable since the first figures show a general decline in consumption in traditional shopping places and a slight increase, but normal, because expected on the basis of an average increase, of online sales. Yet it is not unthinkable to consider the idea that “the spirit of the time” (gassed) is not conducive to consumption and not just because it would be more difficult to supply. In the same vein, we saw statements such as, “Unplug the tv and put on your vest.” Many yellow vests indicate that they no longer leave their homes except for what is essential. The lack of social relations is palpable and the invisibility we are discussing here is not that of exclusion, but that of a general social invisibility due to the new geopolitics of space which also concerns the inhabitants of suburbs.7 This situation imposes itself on a much broader ensemble of people than that which is covered by the struggle between the two great classes, the bourgeois and the working class, nor is it reducible to a simplistic opposition between the rich and the poor defined quantitatively or monetarily.

It is the classless struggle of a “multitude” understood in the sense that it is not that of the kind, exploited 99 percent against the 1 percent of malicious exploiters and profiteers, at a time when the hierarchies of social positions or at work are both multiplied and refined, and are produced and reproduced without too much qualms by individuals, at each level they occupy. A classless struggle in the sense of the absence of a historical subject.

The movement of yellow vests is often criticised because, unlike historical workers’ struggles, it would not present a project of emancipation. It is a fact, but we have already said elsewhere why these projects were carried, from 1788 and 1789 until the years 1967–1978, by precisely historical subjects (first the bourgeois class and then the proletariat). The defeat of this last revolutionary cycle ruined any project of emancipation, except that which capital itself realized as part of the completion of the process of individualization in a capitalised society. But at the roundabouts and other places of expression of the current movement, anyway, there is a tension towards the community, not an abstract tension towards the human community, but a tension at the same time concrete (it is at the level of affect) and general because the movement embraces and questions all social relations. It is no longer the “All together” of 1995 against a specific project, but a sort of inseparable overturning and questioning of the capitalist totality, from viewpoints or angles in themselves partial.

This partiality of the attacks is for the moment compensated by the totality of the “act against,” the one that is translated in the language of “We will not give anything up” of the yellow vests, which answers to the “you are nothing” of Power. This “We will not let go” implies determined collective actions that the excessive presence and aggressiveness of the police can make violent; a confrontation of forces that the power and the media call “extreme,” with all the interested orchestration they give them.

Temps critiques, December 27, 2018

• 1On this point, cf. the blog of Temps critiques about the days of Eymoutiers.
• 2After Julien Coupat, it is now the figure of the yellow vest movement that is paying the price. We are witnessing a criminalisation of social movements with the proliferation of arrests, preventive custody and heavy prison sentences for the slightest trifle. So many anti-constitutional measures, because of their blatant disproportion with the incriminated acts which demonstrates not the strength of the state, but its weakness. A weakness made even more visible by the fact that, on the other side of the barricade, the police, in a half day strike, obtained a from 120 to 150 euros of monthly salary increase.
• 3At the same time, we notice that for the first time, official requests for authorised protest routes have been filed with certain police prefectures, as was the case on 22 December 2018; the first noticeable retreat of the movement, with the concomitant creation of marshal services specific to the yellow vests.
• 4While the cgt signed with six other trade union centrals the condemnation of the methods of struggle of the yellow vests.
• 5And paradoxically, it is Macron who makes the ghost resurface, with the increase of a tax on work activity, which thereby loses its original character, which was to push back to work people satisfied with the social minimum. But this is something else that is the recognition that wages no longer pay work “correctly” and that the complement must be drawn from public money. The “work more to earn more” exhausted its effects, even if the tax exemption of overtime seeks to give it a breath of life…at the expense of unemployment figures!
• 6See the investigation by Thomas Piketty and the Laboratory on Global Inequalities.
• 7Indeed, if the “problems” of the suburbs are highlighted by sensationalism on the side of the media or political interest by the parties, the daily life of the majority of its inhabitants, all associative or cultural actions that take place, are rendered invisible.

From the first occupations of roundabouts, highway tolls, commercial areas, during street and square demonstrations, the emblems of the French Revolution are present and openly expressed by the Yellow vests. Tricolour flags, Phrygian caps, guillotines and the singing of the Marseillaise set the tone and punctuate the various forms of struggle. In meetings and on social networks circulate strategic slogans and modes of political action which, for the majority, make reference to the strong moments of the French Revolution: registers of grievances, destitution1 of the president-monarch, citizens’ assemblies, the abolition of intermediary bodies, direct democracy, the end of fiscal injustice, the control of elected officials and the reduction of their remunerations, the call to form a constituent power, the union of patriots for the defense of the nation, etc.

This reference has been repeatedly noted, described and commented. But more often than not, it has been so as a symbolic reference rather than real; a sort of nostalgia; at best, as a political impulse given to the struggle. However, two decisive questions arise in the relationship of the yellow vests to the French Revolution and they have rarely been considered:

1. Beyond the historical specificities of the French Revolution, what value is claimed as common to these two moments? We posit that it is the value of universality which is at the heart of these two moments; an aspiration towards the universality of the human community.
2. The second question is raised even more rarely about this desire for the French Revolution, on the part of yellow vests. Why is the French Revolution the only reference to past revolutions? Why are the workers,’ proletarian, “communist” revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries almost impossible references for the movement of yellow vests?

The universality of the commune of “cabins/huts”2

If we consider the first three months of the existence of the yellow vests’ movement, the moment when the dimension of universality of the human community manifested itself with the greatest intensity was that of the occupations of the roundabouts. Although less explicit, this aspiration has also been expressed in the control of highway tolls and in interventions at supermarkets.

That the initiative of the struggle at the roundabouts has been coordinated on social networks does not deprive the yellow vests’ movement of this human solidarity that is its strength. In the limited but strategic space of the roundabouts, in this community lived in the rudimentary “huts” built there, there has powerfully risen up the freedom of citizens’ words, words always ignored, often despised, and determined action to make it heard.

With their vests donned, both women and men organised themselves to block or filter road traffic and, in doing so, they shared the conditions of their precarious lives, unjustly taxed, invisible to state power and its networks.

In the exchanges on the difficulty of daily life, but also on the possibilities of another society and another life; in the shared meals; in the reception of passersby in solidarity or the defense against hostile motorists, a universal aspiration to the human community has been affirmed. Nothing but this aspiration to a “Republic of the human race” proclaimed by Anacharsis Cloots, Prussian atheist self-described as “orator of the human race,” made honorary citizen by the Girondin revolutionaries in 1792, then sent to the guillotine in 1794 by Jacobin theist Robespierre, who earlier had excluded him from the Convention as a “foreigner to the nation.”

The impasses of assemblies and parliamentarianism

With the spreading yellow vests’ movement, collective decision-making with regards to the organisation of the struggle quickly becomes a crucial imperative, a political necessity that is not without generating internal tensions. How to discuss the continuation of the struggle? How to coordinate the various proposals? By which means of communication: social networks, local assemblies, development of “yellow media”?

[…]

During the French Revolution, the deliberations in the Constituent Assembly and then of the Convention, were controlled by the bourgeois, regardless of whether they were Girondin or Jacobin Republicans. In the clubs and local sections, the control of political speech was in the hands of the revolutionary class, the one that completed its triumph against royalty: the bourgeoisie.

Thus the Enragés and the Hébertists were excluded from the deliberations by the terrible repression led by the despotism of the Jacobins. The republican model of political deliberation was framed, limited, guided by the victors of the exercise of State power.

The use of deliberation as a means of regulating social antagonisms worked only for the benefit of the political and economic interests of the triumphant bourgeoisie. The institution of deliberation in sections, clubs and parties, as in the assemblies, was only contested by movements outside the established republican order: the popular riots against the free price of flour, against the taxation of essential goods, against the Le Chapelier law, which forbade any association of the workers; an order also challenged by the insurrections of the Fédérés, the uprising of the Vendéens, the revolt of the “revolutionary women”3 and the sans-culottes, etc.

The practice of the yellow vests in collective decision-making clearly departs from the assemblyist and parliamentarian model. It has more in common with movements that have opposed the ruling power of the bourgeoisie. Rather than the compromise of “direct democracy,” it is “direct action” that could be the most appropriate term for qualifying this orientation.

Through social networks as well as through assemblies (two modes of non-contradictory political organization), the yellow vests movement managed to guide its action with a certain unity. Despite the focus on individuals called yellow vests by the media and the ministry of the Interior, the movement drew its strength from the most original of its slogans: no representatives, no delegates, no spokespersons. A simple unifying recognition: yellow.

The immediate consciousness of an in-common to come is the main path taken by the collective speech of the yellow vests; a generic consciousness turned offensive speech and loaded with human potentialities.

A one and only revolutionary reference: the French Revolution

We have observed that the yellow vests’ movement is not a struggle linked to work, to the sphere of work, and therefore no more to that of the old class struggle.4 It situates itself in the universe of a way of life, in purchasing power, in the daily fight for survival. Its social composition has been commented at length (and by many people deplored!): artisans, tradespeople, service and health professionals, trades tied to transportation and the economic circulation, intermittent employees of the private sector, precarious employees, farmers, retirees, etc.

“Guaranteed employees” of the private sector and their unions, public service executives, teachers, intellectuals, artists and researchers, executives of big cities, the media, politicians and union officials, middle managers, etc., have from the beginning of the movement expressed strong reservations and often repulsion towards yellow vests.

In the present economic, social, political and historical conditions, it was and still is impossible for the yellow vests to be in continuity with the historical labour movement. Why? First, because of its historical failures: defeated by the Stalinist and National-Socialist despotisms, rallied to various nationalisms, integrated into social-democratic statism, consenting to liberalisms.

Secondly, and above all, because the dynamics of capital have rendered the labour force in its valorisation process inessential, and more generally has encompassed all the relations of production in the global processes of power. With the economic decompositions/recompositions partly caused by the failures of the movements opposed to the existing order at the end of the 1960s, it is today the reproduction of all social relations that constitutes the central political concern. For thirty years, we have analyzed these historical upheavals, which also have an anthropological dimension.

Spontaneously, the reference to the French Revolution constituted for the Yellow Vests the only historical reference, because only it carries the collective memory of a social and political upheaval with which they can identify.

This identification is not only symbolic since we can highlight some analogies between these two political moments: anti-tax revolt, hate of power from above and anger against its main figures; the need for social justice and real equality; demonstrations in the neighbourhoods and places of power, etc. But the game of analogies soon turns out to be rather futile because the historic cycle of domination of the bourgeois class and its values, which forcefully began with the French Revolution, ended with the worldwide failure of the last proletarian assaults of the late sixties of the twentieth century.

The cycle of revolutions that has crossed modernity is exhausted. We are in another era, that of capitalized society;5 a time, certainly, that remains historical; an era in which many men seek ways out of the dark circle of capitalisation of their activities and the planetary devastation of nature.

Temps critiques, February 7, 2019

• 1The slogan “Macron resign” is to be understood as “Macron destitution,” more than “Macron, go away, you failed.” Destitution, that is to say, affirmation of a potentially constituent power, challenge to the arrogance of parliament, abolition of the supreme representation constituted by the election of a President of the Republic. In this, the yellow vests’ movement touches the foundations of the state-republican order, which according to them is illegitimate because it is in the hands of the world financial powers and major world groups like the gafa the internet giants.
• 2cabanes: This is a reference to the provisional shelters built by the yellow vests on the occupied roundabouts.
• 3Actress Claire Lacombe, co-founder of the Revolutionary Republican Society, led a battalion of Fédérés to attack the Tuileries. In 1794, close to the Enragés, she is imprisoned by order of the Committee of Public Safety for disorder in a meeting.
• 4Marxist sects did not fail to scream “interclassism,” the absolute evil in their antiquarian eyes. We have already analyzed how this notion is of no political significance to understand the yellow vests movement. See Temps critiques, supplement to number 19, December 2018.
• 5Jacques Guigou and Jacques Wajnsztejn (ed.), La société capitalisée. Anthologie IV de Temps critiques, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2014.

We said in March that the movement had reached a crest. What about today that the number of demonstrators, and those present at the General Assemblies, declines, that the roundabouts are not recovered? How can one continue to say: “We will not give up anything,” without being in denial of the weakening of the movement? It is for all of these reasons that it seems appropriate to us to evoke a simple question: what can remain of a movement like this? This is a question that requires leaving aside the short term on what can still be done here and now, without projecting oneself into an illusory “it will resume in September, with the preparation of Macron’s new measures that will only worsen the situation.”

We have “Straightened our backs …1

The exercise is not a simple one, because we lived a long and intense struggle (6 months of mobilisation and struggles). We do not reduce this movement to its practical forms: roundabout occupations, actions at tolls or commercial areas, determined demonstrations, popular assemblies, etc. No, behind that, what seems essential is to have “straightened our backs.” We have indeed refused to negotiate for our freedom to demonstrate and circulate, we have taken them, because the legitimacy of our revolt cannot be contained by a legality that reduces to nothing our capacities to express ourselves and act.

Through our actions, we have encountered all kinds of life paths and we have widened a horizon beyond all political differences, of generation, of sex, of habitation; differences that suddenly appeared only as divisions. Only social urgency, the realization that it is no longer possible and the determination to act, to make it stop, have brought us together. That’s why the yellow vests carry their heads high, despite all the contempt they have suffered from the media, politicians, from all of those who have an interest in the continuation of the status quo of the society of capital. And again, despite this, the disdain shown to them by many more, Macronians without knowing it, of the Left, who for the most part, are chained to and buried in their small identities, their small differences, their small ideological niches.

…and revealed the imperious nature that is hidden behind the management of the reproduction of social relations

The movement against the labor law had unveiled the new tendencies of repressive policies against social movements, but they had expressed themselves only in marginal ways, as in the treatment of the “heads of demonstration marches [cortèges de tête]” or in the “excesses” of [the police interventions] Nantes and Sivens. But with the multiple attempts to dislodge/destroy the cabins and the entire area of Notre-Dame-des-Landes by the police, then with the more extensive and comprehensive crackdown on the yellow vests, since November 2018, we find ourselves before a systematic, if not systemic, logic. The voluntary attacks on the bodies of the protesters are no longer mere excesses; the criminalisation/penalisation of the least act of resistance becomes the norm, prevention measures no longer correspond to a targeting of elements deemed dangerous, but are intended to prevent demonstrations.

Nevertheless, from this last struggle, we begin anew armed with a rare solidarity, reinforced by all the moments lived together in adversity.

The state has shown its face of violence, that of everyday life, which before we only conceived of in solitude, each in her/his own corner, and that which raged in the street, many did not know, except indirectly.

This brutal repression against anonymous people, people with nothing, does not have the same meaning as the repression against the students of May ’68, certainly violent also, but which led to the mass uprising of almost a whole generation supported by the benevolence, sometimes active, of the greater part of the population, at least until the end of May. Here, today, it is not a question of repressing, but of terrorising the demonstrators and by capillarity the sympathisers who could eventually join them. This has been partly successful, the yellow vests’ movement is gradually reducing to its hard core and very few people have joined after its December high.

When politics descends onto the street in the face of a power that does not do politics, it is no longer formal democracy that presents itself before us, the one that is enshrined in the rule of law, but an imperious state ready to silence anyone who takes seriously unvarnished freedom, concrete freedom in its various forms of expression.

The demand for concrete freedom is the only positivity which a movement wholly directed towards negation (of representation, of negotiation) expresses, with so many “claims” (almost fifty) that they cancel each other out and which prove to be nonnegotiable, even if by chance they had found a faction of power willing to start negotiating them. Faced with a government that did not want to let go of anything, it is the latter which finally took the initiative. First of all, by targeting some basic points of social and fiscal justice (reduction of the csg [Contribution Sociale Généralisée: a general progressive tax that serves to finance France’s social security and unemployment insurance, in addition to that which is taxed on employees’ salaries] and the indexation of modest pensions, exceptional bonuses). Seemingly few things, but more than the unions had obtained in the last ten years. Next, in skirting the demand for citizen participation (via the ric—Référendum d’initiative citoyenne) by proposing a “Great Debate” against which the “True Debate” of the yellow vests, finally modeled on the original, could only appear as a pale copy.

A fundamental negativity of a movement on which there is nothing to “capitalise”…

Yet from the very heart of the movement, we already hear this horrible expression from those who, in one way or another, do not want to lose…to start from scratch and therefore for whom, “you have to capitalise on the movement.” A very natural reaction when one has the impression of having only been fighting for six months, but a reaction that we can only reject from the political point of view. It takes many forms. There are those who give it a communalist form with the assemblies of assemblies which seek to survive without any notion of a relation of power, of the situation of the movement;2 or a municipalist and civic form with the local ric and future participation in municipal councils.3 There are those who want to form themselves as a “people” through calls for direct and citizen democracy with the ric present in all matters and their will to become constituents, whereas the movement included, from the beginning, a strong destituent desire (the permanent “dégagisme”) and expressed a negative politics. For others, finally, the movement will have been only a point of departure (insufficient) to try to stop the decline of the labour unions, by playing the base against the leadership through the call for a “convergence of struggles,” which has more often than not, remained a one-way proposition [to sustain the unions]. This is because the time of the struggle, which is of the order of event, is not the same as the course of daily struggles.

For all these trends to capitalise on the “gains,” the [European] election result had the double paradoxical effect of on the one hand a cold shower (Macron did not come in at less than 10 percent, something that many had hoped more or less secretly), and on the other hand, the confirmation that it was necessary to save what could be saved.

At the beginning of the movement, at the end of November 2018, Temps Critiques asked itself if a co-extension of the struggles was possible.4
Our eyes have had time to focus on this subject and, for example, it is without any illusions regarding the fantasies of convergence, the lip-service support of certain unions as well as the modest attempts in this direction by the ecological Left. All these attempts were marked by failure and rendered the very idea obsolete. That today some see support for future struggles marks a return to settled forms unable to think the possible and even probable death of the movement. In reality the mass vanguard dimension of the yellow vests frightened, and frightened above all those in power, including those who aspire to take over… So we see how this fact could change without the loss of the singularity, the new potentiality that came with the yellow vests.

Just as some, at the time, saw in May ’68 only a general rehearsal before the revolution, others today already announce the resumption of struggles at the beginning of the Fall season, given the Macronian measures underway or planned; the same causes are supposed to have the same effects. In both cases, there is a misunderstanding of what a historical movement is and therefore of a movement that is an event and then adopts its own temporality far from that which exists, for example, in the everyday conflicts in companies, in the attempts by groups of employees to gain some autonomy with respect to the logic of labour union activity, etc. In this the yellow vests’ uprising is not a social movement in the sense that we have heard speak of since the 1980s; the years after which it becomes difficult to speak in terms of class struggle. In effect, the yellow vests’ uprising is not the result of an opposition between the interests of social agents or categories and the state, mediated by social partners; a conflict in which the unions were both the advocates for these interests and the co-managers of the political compromise between classes within the welfare state. With the yellow vests’ movement, we are dealing with a direct confrontation between a fraction of the population and the State, because the first no longer tolerates further mediation and because the second has done everything to weaken them. Hence the violence of the confrontation and a sudden movement that will very quickly reach a very high speed.

But as is said in the current language, the train that passes will not pass again and thus, after six months, it is clear that not many people have gotten on, even if some have fumbled with the step. The decisive moment was December. The moment when the movement knew its greatest strength (between the 1st and the 8th of December) and also its biggest street repression, completed with the destruction of cabins and tents at roundabouts, in the beginning of January, along with the crushing of the secondary school movement, whose pallid sequel was the Youth for Climate movement; a sign of the recovery in hand by the coalition of powers, that even it if they did not promote the latter, at least supported it.5

…and for which to endure for the sake of enduring can only mean the loss of meaning

Of course, since then, the movement has continued, but as if outside of the event it produced; outside of its revolutionary and insurrectional dimension. It is now only a question then of lasting to last and thus of organising “events” (in the weak or spectacular meaning of the term) or to attach oneself to other’s events, as can be seen in this month of June, with calls from yellow vests’ groups to join the “Pride March,” as a new act of the yellow vests.

Either this, or let itself be cut off the forces that made the event, in the strong and historical sense of the term, because every Saturday was like the announcement of a possible changeover into something else.

A sign of this tendency to persist—and thus to take other forms—is reflected in the fact that positions are now asserted which surreptitiously pass from the “We Are All Yellow Vests” of 2018 to the “All Together” of 1995. For these, it would be a way of responding to the isolation of the movement and the obvious failure of “convergence.” A double-handed failure, that of struggles too embryonic to not be included in a yellow vests’ movement (see the example of the “stylos rouges/red pens” of education); that of activists and strikers who have no desire to be assimilated to the yellow vests (the example of blouses blanches/white coats). It must be clearly seen that whatever their level of radicality, these struggles remain those of professional categories, defined by their threatened statuses or deteriorating working conditions, whereas what is specific to the yellow vests was to have left all of this at the door of the movement by referring to the general conditions of life, conditions which violently reveal one’s state as dominated and not any particular conditions of exploitation in a workplace. This different position in relation to power and domination has led to an intrinsic difficulty in bringing struggles closer together. An almost objective difficulty to which is added a subjective difficulty, that of the often unfavorable evaluation of the nature of the yellow vests’ movement by other social forces. A movement that would not be politically correct, a movement that would be uncontrollable because it refuses any direction or leadership, a movement that ultimately scares everyone (the powers in place as well as protected segments of wage labor), although many would like to instrumentalise it for their benefit.

Some “lessons” to retain?

Without saying that the movement is over, it seems urgent to us to put forward what it reveals, from the point of view of the movement, although this is sometimes in its defending body:

The “people” do not exist. The yellow vests could only run up against a wall from the moment it became clear that their will to set themselves up as a people, ran up against the harsh reality that they were only its partial representation. The people in action, in a way, because in action it soon became apparent that they were, at best, only their de facto vanguard. A whole reflection would have to be made on this point and on the impasses that a criticism limited to the 1 percent of the richest, the elites, and attacks against the patrimonial oligarchy of the Pinault-Arnault and other banks, represent, while at the same time, globalisation and financialisation attack oligarchical positions in order to make them more fluid and flexible, in order to find new equilibria between old and new modes of domination.

Avant-garde in fact, we say, and not by right, because it is this legitimacy that will be denied them by all the powers in place, political, media and trade union, up to and including among the extreme Left and libertarian circles.

A movement that has experienced confrontation with the State as the basis for mass action, and not just as small groups of activists. But a movement that still seeks its relationship to what is the State in general, as indicated by the proposals for upcoming demonstrations against any measures for the increase in prices for major energy and transport services and for the defense of the public sector. This proposal does not take into account the failure of the unions to maintain the “system” of 1945 (the cnr—Conseil national de la Résistance program), but seeks to replace them in the same kind of great counterproductive masses, without advancing what could have been demands-actions of the movement, such as the constitution of local committees against the payment of the increase in the price of electricity, that could join those already in place against Linky electricity meters, etc.

In short, while it advocates popular or citizens re-appropriation and is truly a grassroots movement and of the grassroots, the difficulty it has in actually taking root in daily struggles, at this level, and joining with what already exists (associative struggles, struggles against police violence in the suburbs and elsewhere) push it to launch global calls that not only are unlikely to be heard, but do not correspond to its original and unique characteristics. But of course, in the face of such criticism, which occasionally arises in general assemblies, the eternal social-statist reason arises and most often imposes its reality principle by this simple sentence: “Are you then against public services?” One finds oneself then in a dead end.

What made the originality and strength of the movement in its ascending phase, namely its break with many theoretical a priori and ritualised practices to the point of being strained, turns into weakness in the downward phase, when all that transpires is its instability, its lack of organisation and its difficulty to take the initiative, to surprise again. To the point that to continue, it is ready to abandon its historical singularity so as to mould itself into forms of mediation that are themselves in crisis. When official “social movements” are no longer able to do 1995, some yellow vests think that they can succeed at it and in addition see this as a panacea, when this whole system was still based on the centrality of work in the process of the valorisation of the capital, on the one hand, and when the definition of social relations, on the other hand, was still based on this same centrality (employees/non-employees, contributions/benefits).

The result of the European elections must question the movement, to the extent that the surprise came from the interest shown in the elections (moreover European) from protagonists of the yellow vests’ movement denying precisely the legitimacy of representatives, including theirs! We then arrived at the absurd positions of some calling to vote for anyone except Macron and “yellow” lists [yellow vest candidates]! All this confusion comes, in addition to the electoral illusion, from the fact that the movement thinks itself as the “people” and therefore inevitably the majority. Yet the historical examples are instructive: if elections can lead to an insurrectional surge (Spain 1936 and to a lesser degree France with the victory of the Popular Front, Chile 1973), a strong and even insurrectional movement followed by an election brings only sores and bumps (June ’68, spring 2019).

A movement which, since the beginning, played non-institutional cards in the elaboration of its relation of power and which sometimes seeks to concretise them in medium-term views, such as those of the “wild ric.” A prospect which suddenly collapsed under the blows of a Macron not sanctioned by the ballot box. We understand that some yellow vests want to make voting mandatory, when 50 percent of registered voters abstain; not to mention the non-registered. But what will it take to get people to vote “well”? This is a question that has often led politicians and even activists to want to “exchange the people”…when it does not match their expectations. But it came from groups or parties that had or wanted power. The yellow vests are not in this category: they are before themselves and cannot despair of the people while now brushing with despair.

This difficulty, peculiar to our period after the class struggle, is that everywhere today we are witness to a resurrection of the notion of the people. In the history of modernity, the people want to be a whole, which is the negation of class contradictions, as they are only a sum of particular interests. This is the basis of the opposition between the bourgeois and the “bras-nus” during the French Revolution, to use Daniel Guerin’s terminology…and at the same time, their unity in the idea of “the fatherland in danger” of 1792, which must weld the people to become the social body of the Nation. In this vision, it is the people who suffer all the wrongs. It is the general interest that made a people against the enemies from the outside (emigrant aristocrats, imperial and royal powers from abroad). Fascism will take up this image of the people-totality against “internal” enemies, but foreign to the nation and to the race (Jews, Freemasons, gypsies, homosexuals). It is the basis of Carl Schmitt’s theories about the state of exception that delimits the “boundaries” between friends and foes. But to return to the revolutionary theses born of the French Revolution, Marx breaks with this idea of a people-totality in a critical thesis on Hegel (in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right), where he reverses the Hegelian dialectic to make of a class, the proletariat, the class-totality, because it would not suffer any particular harm to the extent that it suffers them all. It is then this potential totality that transforms this immediately particular class into the revolutionary class par excellence, or more exactly, the class of the revolution.

Without knowing it expressly, it is this thesis that the yellow vests assert by proclaiming the state of social urgency on the part of a new popular totality suffering a general wrong beyond the particular wrongs suffered by each of its fractions or segments. A new “all” therefore, without historical determination or any messianic essence, but based on the idea more or less commonly shared that everything is going from bad to worse, that the situation is becoming unbearable and that the dominant ones, whoever they are (political representatives, capitalists and the rich), do not care.

It is precisely because this wrong is felt as general that it does not need to rely on facts and statistics and that what is “felt” is what counts in the revolt and the spirit of resistance. The urgency exceeds its social character to become vital in a utopia of equality … this in the country, however, that is the least unequal among the rich countries and where the welfare state still produces its relative effects, by contrast to the situation in the neighbouring countries. However, redistribution no longer follows the same process and does not have the same effects when it is no longer centered on work and social partners, but on a vague universalism assumed by the State through taxes (cf. the cmu) and taxes imposed upon everyone, regardless of their position in relation to production relations and work.

The yellow vests’ movement was not necessarily made up of employees and, in any case, “guaranteed” or “stable” employees have little to do with the figures that show that wages have increased on average, when spending constraints have suffered an even bigger increase still, something that they feel directly when it comes to filling the fridge or freezer. The movement is therefore by nature voluntarist and subjectivist, since it is a question of “forcing” the numbers, to go from resentment to revolt. This necessary coup de force constrains it and contains it in a minority position, even though it fantasizes its majority dimension (“We Are All Yellow Vests”), which can only come back on it as a boomerang in the moments of the movement’s deceleration.

It is also this feeling that collapses before the result of the elections. Either the people do not vote (50 percent abstention + about 10 percent non-registered + all the “foreigners” who do not have the right to vote) and it is then the failure of the “citizen’s vote”; either s/he votes badly when s/he does vote…and no ric can do much about that. The illusion of the ric is to rely on the fact that the “people” would not be divided by capitalist social relations, which nevertheless traverse the whole of the division of labor and the hierarchies which it produces; all of the divisions of status that allow, for example, yellow vests to participate in joint demonstrations with the White Coats in the defense of public health care services, as if “White Coats” defined that fraction of the people that would constitute the “hospital people.” Therefore, involuntarily or not, an outrageous hospital hierarchy is masked, a hierarchy that is also responsible for the dysfunction of the public hospital and furthermore denounced in the cries for help by emergency ward doctors.

So many “results” or non-quantitative gains, but qualitative gains that make the yellow vests’ uprising a historic moment of inversion of the too ordinary course of exploitation and domination. A moment that refutes all political accountants in the service of the capitalism of the summit, without yet opening for us a way out.

Temps Critiques, June 10–13, 2019

• 1Cf. “Si t’as envie de vivre, tu décourbes ton dos” in L’évènement Gilets jaunes, …/temps critiques, éd. À plus d’un titre, 2019.
• 2A strong trend in big cities, even though it originated in Commercy. A third is planned at Montceau-les-Mines at the end of June.
• 3A strong tendency on the roundabouts and within the “periphery” groups. Under what label they will present themselves, this remains a mystery since the yellow vests’ lists are globally disavowed.
• 4Revue Temps critiques Nº 19 : “Les luttes : de la coexistence à la coextension?”
• 5High school students wounded by the rubber bullets, those humiliated of Mantes-la-Jolie, were suddenly praised as conscious and responsible young people, showing the example to their elders! While the many severely wounded yellow vests in the demonstrations of the first weeks have received only “they were looking for it” or “it will teach them” from the intellectuals and the dominant castes.

Now with a little hindsight, we can ask ourselves the question of what links a movement such as the yellow vests can maintain with what we have called “the revolution of capital.”1 One cannot say that it is the product of capital, because that would be close to a truism. It also cannot be said that it is the expression of capital, because the revolution of capital is not a ‘subject,’ but a process of forces tending towards what we have called capitalised society. There are forces that go in the direction of reinforcing this process or that fuel its dynamics and others that are counter-fires. The recurrent resistances that do not fail to occur during this process are part of these forces, but they have no final, fixed meaning, as we see in the history of the workers’ movement and that of socialist theories in general which have espoused the course of ‘progress’ (in the so-called “progressive” camp, as opposed to the reactionary or conservative camp), something that today is very controversial.

Closer to us, a movement like May ’68 carried within it the notions of emancipation and the end of alienation, but we now know (well, it’s been a while) that this significance was overturned electorally by the Gaullist election victory (what political scientists call “the prize to the winners”)2 ; and that it thus finally participated in, with most of its activists defending as a body (Hegel’s good old ruse of reason in history), this revolution of capital (what some have called “recovery,” which for us is not one).

There is therefore no reason to proceed in any other way with the yellow vests’ movement and it is moreover the majority of the positions defended within Temps critiques, and this precisely because we cannot prejudge a movement’s principal meaning. It is therefore not surprising that we did not adopt the position of denouncing the “confusions” that could find expression in it, coming from extreme or ultra-left groups, with their revolutionary ‘principles’ as measures, principles invalidated and consigned to the dustbin of history, as the good Marx would say if he lived today. On this account, one could return the accusation against them, so much are most of them in a situation of great theoretical confusion because of the little efficiency of their patented compasses, incapable of turning their gpss towards the revolution. To criticise one or more “confusions,” one must have, if not particular theoretical and political certainties, at least a body of doctrines that permit “illuminating” (cf. enlightenment) the dark and troubled dimensions of an historical event.

This was the case with Marxism and anarchism since the First International; this is no longer the case with the exhaustion and then the defeat of the revolutionary workers’ movement (in the 1920s, although other periodisations are possible). In the yellow vests’ movement, a great diversity of individuals have been involved and have expressed themselves and among them, some from the extreme right and others from the extreme left; but there has never been a combination of these two currents; they coexisted until the end of December and disappeared in the practice of the movement, without their positions being at any time adopted by it. In other words, there has been no “coming together of the extremes,” as has been analysed in certain aspects of fascism and Nazism (cf. Jean-Pierre Faye and his critique of totalitarian languages) and, moreover, could there have been such a junction, given that the yellow vests’ movement has no ideology in the doctrinal sense of the term?

In this ideological no-man’s land, the black blocks will finally find their place, at the service of the movement, no doubt, but a movement of which one of the limits is precisely not to have determined more precisely how far it wanted to go in its confrontation with the State and what relationship it had with the police. There was clarification between the almost friendships of the beginning on the roundabouts on weekdays because these law enforcement officers were perceived as part of the dominated, in contrast to the harsh reality of the “legitimate violence” of the State and its armed guards during the subsequent Saturday urban protests. But the emphasis on repression to attract solidarity has been rather counterproductive, for not only has there been no active solidarity towards the movement by other social forces, but this latter has reduced the number of truly determined people. This was the intended goal of the government.

So no particular or specific “confusion” or combination of heterogeneous political forces, but rather individuals who, on the immediate basis of difficult conditions in everyday life, would aggregate on the basis of what appears to them (the governmental measures) like the drop of water that breaks the camel’s back. From then on, a community of struggle gradually emerges which literally pulls the yellow vests out of their social atomisation and which appears to them moreover as an opening up onto an outside world that many seem to discover for the first time (see the discussions with the many first-time protesters). After the close meetings on the roundabouts on weekdays follow open discussions and opportunities for action with people “from outside,” during the city demonstrations on Saturday and quick, targeted actions.

Rather than expressing the revolution of capital, it seems more accurate to speak of a movement which acts, in the first place, as a resistance to this revolution of capital3 and acts as an “analyser” of the crisis of the reproduction of capitalist social relations; a particularly acute crisis in the sector that we have identified and defined as that of the reproduction of social relations. Indeed, the main contradictions of capitalism are now carried from the level of production to that of reproduction. But contrary to what some people think, like Laurent Jeanpierre in his book In Girum: les leçons politiques des ronds-points (La Découverte, 2019), the question of reproduction of which we speak is not comparable to that of the reproduction of a species in which, in fine, this author comes to oppose social and societal by giving primacy to the second term, into which he introduces the ecological/environmental dimension. In this, he finds himself completely in sync with a slogan more or less accepted under the influence of climate groups like Alternatiba, then brandished by fractions of yellow vests: “End of the month, end of the world, same struggle.” And we had considerable difficulties in trying to correct an “End of the month, end of this world, same struggle” which specified more precisely the capitalist dimension of what we fight against, that it is the politics of great infrastructures, the systematic development of platforms to accelerate flows of capital or commodification of healthcare.

As for our active participation in the yellow vests’ movement, we can say that it is quite “natural” insofar as we had previously developed theses on the human revolution, the tendency to capitalise all human activities and not only those deemed “productive”; and also in a more down-to-earth way, because we think that a movement capable of making an event by the surprise and the force of revolt, disobedience and even insubordination that it projects, is better than all the speeches around ‘value’ in the Place de la République during Nuit Debout. So it was not for us to intervene as professional activists ready to support any movement or any ‘cause’ engendering agitation, but to grasp the importance of this moment that from the outset caught everyone off guard. But after a first borrowed and timid approach in November, by December we felt like fish in water, even if it was necessary to mix sometimes with strange specimens.

That’s why our critical activity turned into concrete political intervention. For this time, we were not ‘standing above,’ as we were criticised by some insurrectionist currents and what we said met with such an echo that the group that formed around us in the Journal de bord was gradually transformed, certainly in Lyon, into a sort of yellow vests group in itself, recognised as such, which we had never asked for and which sometimes bothered us.

If the revolution of capital is not a ‘subject,’ the yellow vests are also not one, and above all they do not constitute a ‘subject of substitution’ for the proletariat because they have no vocation to continue. However they do not form thereby an undifferentiated and heterogeneous magma because they have been traversed by processes of individualisation that have upset the old class structures and contributed to the atomisation of individuals in urbanised geographical areas (see Henri Lefebvre), having the allure of the city, with all of its constraints but without its benefits.

What gave this impression of an undifferentiated mass was the fact that, contrary to prevailing current trends of recomposition of capitalist social relations, the yellow vests rejected the new forms of particularisation (gender, youth, communitarian, racialist, etc.) in their first statement, “Tous Gilets jaunes/We are all Yellow Vests.” Of course, this led to the disarray of sociologists, journalists, trade unionists, etc.; it went against the political sense of those who still want and always find the “class line” and who could only cry screaming at the image of small bosses in four-by-fours alongside single mothers employed in supermarkets or old retirees; an original representation that did not last long for those who participated in a nine month movement and who were able to note its sociological and political transformation.

Thus, all the analyses in terms of classes that flourished at the beginning of the movement have been relativised or even invalidated. An attempt all the more ludicrous in that those who sought to set up these categorisations are those who are usually the most critical or reserved in relation to the contemporary use of this notion (sociologists or journalists who gargled “lower middle class” or leftists who saw a return of the class struggle). And this inadequacy of class interpretation even arose amid the yellow vests, when Drouet tried to launch a call for a general strike starting with his followers and noticed, after an internal poll, that the latter, for the most part, because of their objective situation, were unable to go on strike, either because they were not employees or because they worked in very small businesses!

To put it bluntly, the yellow vests are only their own movement, that is, they are only pure subjectivity in the movement of struggle. The conditions of life which underlie it play certainly as objective conditions, but they are unrelated to any general objective conditions. Only the struggle and the setting in motion produce a dialectic of conditions. This is the specificity of this type of movement in relation to the traditional dialectic of class struggle that implied a fixity or permanence of the relationship (a proletarian worker or a boss, remained a worker and a boss, even outside a cycle of struggle), with the labour unions mediating the reciprocal capital/labour dependence.

A yellow vest is nothing outside her/his community of struggle, hence a tendency for self-reference, to think of the movement as a totality (the people); a tendency which makes it difficult for it to grasp the current reversal of the balance of power. A difficulty that has visibly appeared in the outraged reactions or stupor vis-à-vis the results of the European elections, then, since the summer, in the desperate attempts of some to hold on at all costs. What creates the confusion, within the movement itself, is that while representing an event in the strong sense of the term marked by a limited duration, it has persisted in time without it being lead to become institutionalised (the refusal to participate in the “Great debate,” the failure of yellow vest electoral lists in the European elections, the little decision-making weight of the Assembly of Assemblies) nor to continue in history (it is not a movement in the sense of the labour movement or the feminist movement; it is a movement in the sense of the one against the new labour law, but with a higher charge of insurrection). This persistence can be explained in part by its diversified and discontinuous modes of action and also by the fact that it did not seek to sort out or filter, keeping a lot of discussions open (avoiding issues that annoy) and focusing on objectives that guarantee unity in decision-making and action, without requiring an ideological unity, even one produced along the way by the movement itself. This does not mean that it did not incorporate elements that were not originally expressed, such as the question of the relation to nature, but it did not make it a criterion of discrimination or autonomy, even less a dominant criterion of identity. It integrated it not ideologically but as part of the ordinary experience of people from below, who doubt their near future (the end of the month) as well as the distant future (the end of the world).

In this sense, we can say that the movement has gone beyond its exclusive character as an event. Not because it would have formed a vanguard of a more general uprising, in the sense that this term could have been used for the role played by student insubordination in the May 1968 movement, but as a “collective heresy” without millenarianism, a notion which, although indefinite and marked by its religious dimensions, nevertheless accounts for the will to discontinuity that manifested itself in the absence of any declaration with prefectures of police for demonstrations and their paths, the refusal of overly planned marches in the manner of the labour unions with their marshals doubling the police presence, as well as in the collective life of the roundabouts where less capitalised practices of life shared in the joyful conviviality of the “cabins,” without thereby shattering new revolutionary norms, as expressed, for example, in the zad of Notre-dame-des-Landes.

The yellow vests: heretics “in every matter,” if one cares to mimic the complete formula of the fundamentalists of the ric—Référendum d’initiative Citoyenne: “the ric in every matter.”

The yellow vests never saw themselves as avant-gardist. We have emphasised it: no utopia, not even a clear alternative other than that of a ric stuffed with everything under the sky…or social networks, no projection into any particular future; but also no nihilism of the “no future” type. On the one hand, a revolt and cries of anger in direct actions marking a “that’s enough” and a desire to get rid of the political leaders; on the other, a general contestation of the authorities who hampered the development of the movement (resumption of the “police everywhere, justice nowhere” of the leftists during the demonstrations).

It is this heretical side that rejected the traditional workers’ organisations that could no longer tolerate this outrage in 2018, no more than they had tolerated it in 1968. If on the one side we have heretics, the least we can say is that the others are Orthodox. But more generally, it is all of the elements of the “left” that found themselves at odds with the movement because still living on the memory of a “proletarian experience,” well analysed by Claude Lefort in the journal Socialisme ou barbarie (nº 11, 1952), which is little more than memory and at best nostalgia. Left-wing activists who, moreover, have no knowledge of this ordinary experience uniting the yellow vests because it is no longer determined primarily by the relation to labour-activity (the big factory, the neighbourhood). This left, which can no longer and no longer wants to be “social” in the old sense of the “social question,” then becomes “moral” by tracking non-ordinary experiences and limit situations everywhere, even if it means finding themselves towed by information entrepreneurs for whom the spectacularised situations of the diversely and variously discriminated against seem to be the only subjects worthy of attention, because on the one hand they have resonance in the media and on the other hand because they do not imply in themselves an attack against the powers in place and capital. Their political correctness then comes to collide head-on with the return of the incorrectness in politics of which the yellow vests gave an example. But this incorrectness is not a provocation as could be, from the left, the surrealists of the 1920s or that of the right, amid the “nonconformists” of the 1930s. It is also in this sense that the notion of avant-garde is no longer appropriate.

It is the expression of a political language, certainly basic, but which constituted a taking back of speech by people who had been deprived of it for a long time and who inevitably, for lack of habit, found themselves exposed to all the mockeries and criticisms of those who monopolise it…or who rise up radically within the limits of their world.

And this event of political heresy, as sudden as it was unexpected, suddenly occupying the public and informational space, could not escape its share of what some bad omens call “confusions.” But was there not also “confusion” in ’68 within the leftist groups influenced by Maoism, Guevarism and other third-worldisms? Are there not also “confusions” today when one sees the development of ever more marked anti-Semitism of the left? The idea would certainly not have come to us, in 1968, to brandish the tricolour flag and we opposed it even when the Stalinists brandished it, but in a symbolic battle where we opposed it with red and black flags! And who today would like to brandish a red flag whose revolutionary historical value stopped roughly in 1923 and a black flag perhaps less devalued historically, but without any current meaning except for a very small fringe of people in a very limited number of countries? It is the same for the singing of the International. Internationalism is certainly not defined by the Marseillaise, but from Hong Kong to the Arab countries, and throughout many others, demonstrations of all kinds are covered with yellow…and not red. Like most people, we do not particularly like the colour yellow and in addition, for those who have claimed the red thread of class struggles, it is an enemy colour, but the movement has been able to make it its colour by ease first, because it accompanies people every day when, by car or bicycle, they keep a yellow vest in reserve by obligation and also, perhaps, because it was distinguishable from the colours of the union vests.

To judge the movement by stopping at its immediate symbolism, if it is not primary, it is to forget that many in the movement did not wear yellow vests, much less flags, nor did they sing the Marseillaise.

The reference to the French Revolution has long been perceived as a betrayal of the ‘social’ and is therefore difficult to accept, especially among Marxists influenced by the historical left-wing communists. However, it can be a point of reference and departure for many revolts, provided you do not stop there and work to clarify the difference between the taking of the Bastille by the sans-culottes and the Feast of the Federation celebrated by Macron with his fireworks. In our booklet on the right to petition, we tried to highlight the contrasting and sometimes contradictory path of the struggles that lead from the 1792 right of petition to the 2018 ric, through the ‘right’ of rebellion of 1793. All of this was and has been the subject of discussions within the movement, as there have also been discussions around the question of the monopoly of legitimate violence that the State arrogates to itself, or whether or not the term citizen should be used to describe individuals and their actions, etc. These are seeds that can produce their fruit from the moment when we do not just reason in the traditional terms of political awareness, as this was conceived of by the socialist theories of the nineteenth century.

Temps critiques, September 10, 2019

• 1Cf. J. Wajnsztejn: Après la révolution du capital, L’Harmattan, 2007, and all the issues of the journal Temps critiques starting from Nº 15. [Cf. also After the Revolution of Capital. Presentation notes.]
• 2Similarly, the 2019 vote in Europe is marked above all by the confirmation of a larger Macronian hard block than expected and a progression of the rn; two results that were received as a real blow by the yellow vests.
• 3Cf. the special issue of Temps critiques of April 2019: “Gilets jaunes: une résistance à la révolution du capital,” written in response to a request from the Swedish magazine Subaltern.

A ridge, a line marking a limit, that accompanies all uprisings because, by definition, we do not know when and how they are going to fall. What makes us glimpse this phase is that the yellow vests’ movement is today stranded before several pitfalls that were nevertheless its strength yesterday.

If it does not allow itself to be defined, it does not define itself

If the yellow vests’ movement does not define itself, it is because it is not (anti-Semitic, anti-migrant, sexist, homophobic); to do otherwise would be to put itself in a position of counter-dependence with the attacks of its enemies or the media. It also does not define itself because it is. As with any movement that has its own real dynamic, cleavages presented as inescapable realities by the State, sociologists and the media, are no longer so for it. For “the people from below” who rise up against the order of the dominant, the splits between “sensitive neighbourhoods” and peripheral, suburban communities are relativised when the secondary school students of Mantes-la-Jolie show that in the suburbs as well, survival is no longer bearable. The division between those on social assistance and the unemployed, targeted by Macron’s murderous phrase “it is enough to cross the street to find a job,” is also abolished, since many of the unemployed, present on the roundabouts, developed relations of solidarity and conviviality. The fragmentation between the working poor (employment is no longer a guarantee of a decent living) and modest wage earners, artisans or self-entrepreneurs, is also erased.

By its own dynamics, by direct action, the yellow vests’ movement has practically refuted the ideological reproaches abstractly leveled at it by the dominant political-media circles.

Within a segment of the population, which has not always been the most active in social movements, because it has both wanted and undergone the processes of individualization, the good old idea is rediscovered, that in each struggle of importance, to divide makes it possible to reign better. But it must be recognized that after three months of struggle, these political advances are insufficient. Indeed, while it has also experienced a certain maturation in the discernment of its objectives (from the fight against taxation to the struggle for social justice, for example), the movement is still unable to truly define itself. This is not only detrimental to its extension to the margins of hesitant sympathizers, but makes abstract the often misunderstood idea of “Everyone is Yellow Vest,” since without a more precise definition of what it is, all the margins of society with affinity to the movement should be able to integrate it and, conversely, on whose behalf or from what principle could they say: “No, you, you are not yellow vest”? Neither the call of the assembly of the assemblies in Commercy, nor the press releases of the yellow vests of central Lyon, have managed to lift this equivocation in relation to, for example, the presence of the extreme Right within the movement.

It is that the community of struggle posits as its first and fundamental political value, solidarity in disagreement, that is to say, the opposite of the traditional conception of politics, including on the extreme Left for which, in contrast, disagreement is raised as the first principle and “line” of sharing. This first provision, in favour of the community of struggle and the solidarity which results from it, leads it however to avoid addressing or to relegate to the background “the difficult or sensitive subjects.” Do not say too much so that you can keep talking to yourselves. Thus, while the yellow vests speak a lot about voting and they vote to make decisions, while many defend the ric [Citizens’ Initiative Referendum], the question of the right to vote is absolutely not addressed, because it would divide the solidarity of yellow vests, from the moment it would have to take a position on who is a citizen, and especially who is not, at the risk of disagreement.

In the general assemblies, it is often necessary to intervene already to correct the term “citizens’ assembly,” often used in assemblies originating in the roundabout occupations, to coordinate action and reflection between suburban municipalities. Because vagueness often persists regarding the contours of citizenship, especially as in these actions, the yellow vests do not hesitate to ask the city authorities for reunion halls and for the presence of elected municipal officials or even national deputies, to the point where sometimes it is difficult to distinguish these debates from the [Macron’s] “Great Debate.”

It may just be a last resort, but as things stand today, the notion of “popular assembly” used in the assemblies of Commercy and those (more urban) assemblies that have joined them, remains vague. Nevertheless, this denomination of popular assembly lends itself to less confusion, while remaining very paradoxical. Indeed, the “citizens assemblies” are of a much more “popular” social composition than the “popular assemblies” which are more “citizen” based, in the sense that the French Revolution gave to this term. However, originally, on the roundabouts, the question had not been posed abstractly, but in a practical way, because it seemed difficult to be on a roadblock or a roundabout with a “foreigner” who is fighting tax injustice beside you and then to tell him that the ric is not for him…because he does not have French nationality and he cannot vote! The reference to the French Revolution should again serve here: the “citizen” is anyone who participates in the “revolution,” whatever his nationality.

If, for many yellow vests, the reference to the French Revolution is real and profound, then the movement must assume its share of “sans-culotterie” without constantly falling back on the idea of a just citizen, conceived as a subject of State power, as a consequence of performing duties that give rise to rights. Moreover, it would practically end this bizarre idea, shared by some yellow vests, of voting considered as mandatory and therefore as a duty more than a right. But it would be optimistic to think that the movement could in two months acquire an awareness of the (human) community that erases all boundaries. The community of struggle traces, consciously or not, its borders in the struggle. The striking example is the distinction that appears in discussions among “grass roots” yellow vests on the issue of migrants.1 If immigrants are well recognized and accepted by the yellow vests—especially since there is a significant number of them—their acceptance is based on the old figure of the immigrant worker. Descendants of immigrant workers, who are also yellow vests, consider that their parents and they have become or are French because they contributed to the construction and prosperity of the country, whereas in their eyes the migrants of today do not seek to settle and establish themselves (cf. Calais and all those who absolutely want to go onto England). They are part of an international crisis management that eludes the community of struggle.2 As a result, this greatly restricts the scope of the movements’ tension in relation to the human community. It is also a short-sighted situation, because while the labour force is globally supernumerary today in the process of capital valorisation, the surplus is not always there where we believe it to be, as shown by the current efforts of companies such as McDonald’s, Starbucks and other monsters of the hotel-restaurant industry or the construction industry, who go so far as to propose to newly arrived migrants3 accelerated courses in French, because they are looking for “small hands” on conditions so much on the margins of the labour law, that no one accepts them.

A discourse of protest rather than revolutionary or reformist

If the expression of a just anger was the strength of the movement in its infancy, it is now searching for a second wind that would turn it into a more global social struggle against an ensemble structured by the State and capital, what it tends to summarise by the terms of a struggle against the “system,” without seeking to define it further. With the failure to do so, this anger tends to turn into a hatred against the oligarchy (the “I even hate you,” sometimes written on yellow vests denotes in passing a certain political culture and good natured sense of humour), itself reduced to a few large companies or banks and a few individuals (politicians, influential journalists), “that we will go out and fetch,” as the protesters say. It’s as if they have to pay for their own individual treachery, even while the yellow vests have gradually realised that they are dealing with a “System.” In this, Macron is a victim of his own “dégagisme” [disengagement/buzzing off]. He wanted to have done the most difficult thing by getting rid of the old political world and it is the old world of the people that falls on him; a world much more difficult to make disappear.

This anger of the yellow vests against the System is supported by an oligarchic view of power, with popular hatred only devoted to the richest 1 percent who would oppress the other 99 percent, while all social relations are marked by hierarchies and inequalities that divide and fragment; the process of domination cuts across the whole of social relations. To recognise this, or at least to take it into account, would be to recognise that the notion of the people does not exist in itself, that it is built in the conflict and tension between those who lead, for whatever reason (economic, political, cultural) and those who have no title to do so. But there is also no reason to have the yellow vests bear the brunt of supposed political inexperience, when this is a widely shared belief, expressed by the Occupy Wall Street Americans, as by a political party like La France insoumise!

It follows that the movement is therefore often on the watch for scapegoats or conspiracy theories, especially as social networks easily cultivate the “us and them,” and above all Facebook, which is their most commonly used relay of information. This has been the case, on many occasions, when, in some cities, the movement planned to launch actions against the Rothschild Bank, a preferred target because it would be a symbol of globalised capitalism and also because Macron was a bank associate and manager. That this type of action is taken up by a spontaneous group like Article 35–Insurrection is one thing, since its revolt is immediate. But that in general assemblies, where representatives of the various groups of yellow vests are present, that it must be explained that one must stop with the symbols and look instead at the reality of the banking system in the overall operation of capitalism, is the sign of a certain theoretical weakness. On this point, as on the role of the shareholders in the formation of capital, the criticism of the “system” is skewed by the delusion of a financial system that represents absolute evil.

In general, the yellow vests, whose political maturity is only three months old, cannot be reproached for committing the same simplifications as those produced by confirmed far-Left political organisations or by newspapers such as Le Monde diplomatique. The difficulty is to try to correct the target without playing the experts…and taking into account that the analysis of the yellow vests is limited from the outset by the fact that it isolates the process of the circulation of capital from the process of production, while capital is effectively trying, through liberalising reforms, to unify it.

To remain concrete, the yellow vests sometimes tend to be attached to numbers that are supposed to speak for themselves, but which give rise to an over-interpretation close to misinterpretation. For example, in a yellow vests’ tract on finance, part of which was dedicated to shareholders and dividends, the description that is made of France tends to credit the idea that it is in France that dividends reach the best percentage of remuneration for shareholders, which would be absolutely scandalous and would make of it a model of predator capitalism. It is precisely because until now France has more effectively resisted the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism and its requirements that France today needs to attract more capital. It thus rejected the transition to private pensions, which then deprives the country of its own pension funds, forcing it to pay more for investments. The problem is not so much that this approach is false, but that it prevents us from understanding the overall functioning of capitalism at the theoretical and practical levels, which often blocks the discussions. The movement tends to carry out a “moral” attack, rather than a political one, something that then includes the idea of a possible moralisation of things and social relations. This trend can only be thwarted by actions that are just starting, but which are developing in support of social conflicts, among sectors of the population that are making demands, because the labour unions are now almost absent, such as against outsourcing companies for large supermarket labour needs. The yellow vests can here complement their initial actions of blocking traffic in and out of distribution centres with a denunciation of exploitation, and thereby allowing themselves to play an effective role in a relation of power.

A contradictory universalism at the risk of isolation

After having broadened its initial demands and continuing to refuse to negotiate, this latter being essential in maintaining an antagonistic relationship with the powers in place, the movement finds difficulties in extending its initial base; difficulties encountered on February 5, as well as the failure to liaison with the secondary school students’ movement in December, which lead the movement to fall back upon itself, on demands that were perhaps part of its originality as a movement, but which are no longer its own exclusively. The yellow vests movement is certainly right to want to affirm both its precedence in the struggle and its autonomy compared to other forces. In this way, it situates itself as a kind of mass vanguard (“Everyone is a Yellow Vest”) to the extent that donning the yellow vest suddenly became an act of resistance in itself, then a sign of recognition and finally the first step towards something else. As a result, it had nothing to expect from the traditional and often “bogus” call for a “convergence of struggles,” the cream pie of the 2000s that succeeded the “Tous ensemble” [Everyone together] of the 1990s. The fiasco of the March 16 common protest between Climat and the yellow vests shows that the path is a long one before everyone becomes a “yellow vest,” where the yellow vests become “humankind.” But what is not said is that some of the latter are no longer easily found in blockading actions of the economy (energy) or in actions to support employees in struggle; so many interventions that can take advantage of the general destabilization of the powers in place. The problem is then to know what role to play. Without wanting to settle the matter definitively, our current experience of events shows us that it would be a pity if we were to replay the support for the struggles of the people, in the guise of the Maoists of the 1970s. The yellow vests, on the pretext that they are mobilised and determined, must not be some kind of armed force (even without weapons) of employees or of any other struggle.

It is when actions are taken together against capitalised society that there is convergence and not by first acting separately, to eventually converge (on this subject, the counter-example of the “red pens”4 ).

If the yellow vests call for another “Tous ensemble” today, it is not of the same nature. The first was an appeal to all segments of wage-earners, but with the idea that the working class and particular categories of the working class, such as railwaymen, were the vanguard; with the second call for unity, that of the yellow vests, the “Tous ensemble” is posed beyond the divisions. Being potentially everyone, it is not clear who could join them. But the consequence is then that it is the yellow vests who position themselves or are perceived as this vanguard, which obviously does not please everyone and which explains in part the hesitations of the cgt, and its various factions, in relation to the movement, something that appeared even more clearly on March 19 than on February 5.

This “Tous ensemble” is therefore more potential than real and added to the repetitiveness of Saturday demonstrations, with their procession of wounded, convictions and preventive arrests, the movement has been led to turn towards more institutional actions; actions that seek on the one hand to affirm the necessity of the ric, not, as in the beginning, as a demand among others, but as a miracle cure for the crisis of political representation, a model of direct democracy, and on the other hand, the attempt to respond to the “Great Debate” of the government by the supposed alternative that would represent a “true debate,” this time led by yellow vests. For us, this is a false alternative because it ultimately remains in a sort of counter-dependence with the Great Debate, since concretely and even if the debates are more free, the original idea of the registers of grievances are taken up by political power, for the latter’s benefit. Where then has the autonomy of the movement gone?

This is a step back from a direct action supported on the broadest and most comprehensive basis for everyone, with the slogan “Macron-resign”; a retreat from challenging the State by blocking roundabouts and holding undeclared protest demonstrations. To this extent, the ric now seems to represent the hope of a distant resignation, replacing the belief in an immediate one.

The movement then increasingly defines itself in reference to support for the ric, which however finds no favour in any other part of the population and which, moreover, is not really discussed within the different groups of yellow vests. For example, there is no real agreement on whether the ric is a demand, and in this case, where it is to be placed in the vast catalogue of demands or piecemeal proposals, among the original 42 propositions; or if it is only a tool for satisfying the demands or constituent proposals. However, the ric is supposed to solve all the problems from the moment when it would be understood by all, after publicising its principles (cf. Les “marcheurs” du ric [the “walkers” for the ric]). What appears here is the contradiction between the collective action of the yellow vests and an ric that is based on the individual act of voting in the voting booth or even a simple computer click to be performed at home in a comfortable pair of slippers.

With the ric as headliner, there would be a break between political revolution and social revolution, a separation already present at the time of the French Revolution.5

Power itself is not questioned, nor is the nature of the state. It is as if the whole problematic of making the ric possible has made the yellow vests forget the nature of the State that they have discovered, or rediscovered, during their movement. It follows that there is a danger of over-personalising the political function and ignoring the contradictory link between individual personality and public office. For a majority of yellow vests, political personnel and oligarchy constitute a “System” and are therefore not separable. It thus seems more than a little incoherent to attack only political persons (Macron, Castaner) and their underlings (Benalla, etc.), as if they should be punished as individuals, rather than fighting against the very fact that there are professional politicians whose function is separate, that they have separate activities, one more separation among so many others that are a characteristic of the capitalist “System.” It is the same when along with the ric, the demand is made to carry out a “clean hands” operation, that is, that the representatives of the people have no criminal record. Without a radicalisation of their position, this proposal risks leading to the Italian situation of today, itself partly due to the “clean hands” (“mani pulite”) operation, even if the movement is very different from the Five Stars.

While the Yellow Vests seek amnesty for condemned yellow vests, they do not think to extend this to previous events, carried out during the demonstrations against the new labour code, when it was a somewhat similar matter, with arrests, preventative measures, prohibitions to demonstrate and disproportionate penalties. Although many yellow vests say they regret their passivity at the time, they do not seem to want to connect the events and they may be therefore victims of their own “presentism.”

In their anger targeted at people, even if they are no longer the same, the yellow vests are still walking in the footsteps of the French Revolution. Indeed, if the taking of the Bastille was followed by an opening of the prison, it was quickly filled again and even over-filled by those who were not guillotined. Moreover, on the roundabouts of the yellow vests could be found, for some time, figurative guillotines and demonstrators were even brought before justice for having mimed the public execution of Macron. The problem is that today, the “System” is a little more detached from its “bearers” than at the time. This is true both from the point of view of an ever more abstract capitalist structure, as it is from the side of a State that goes from the nation form to the network form. But it is perhaps also that which produces the breach into which one can rush. Indeed, compared to the time of the French Revolution during which its solid institutions were not yet in place, the Third and Fourth Republic will relegate politicians to positions subordinate to their function and to institutions of the nation-State. However, the Fifth Republic and especially election by universal suffrage reversed the trend. The personalisation of power that has followed has been indirectly reinforced since then by the relative absorption of State institutions in the State’s network form.

There is a storm in the head of the yellow vests, because how is it possible to resolve the contradiction between, on the one hand, the universalist tendency of the Republic of humankind, which appears as the strategic perspective of the movement and, on the other, a popular sovereignty which seems to give colour and polish to the nation form?

The difficulty of finding a form of organization

The generalisation of the occupation of the roundabouts that we called for in our brochure “A yellow costume that creates community,” is today defeated by the repression of the State, which saw in the occupations a dislocation of its integrated capitalist space (a danger for its control of the flow of people and goods) and the bases of another reproduction of social relations, and which without reaching an important and organized point of fixation like at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, there was nevertheless a tendency for the temporary hut-like shelters to proliferate, as so much slag in a smooth landscape. The situation is now one of retreat onto private lands or quick actions at tolls, with a difficulty, it seems, much greater in the periphery of large cities, as compared to the situation in the villages and around small towns, where all manner of intermediate forms of struggle seem to be able to coexist and survive as best they can.

The assemblies have, on the other hand, developed in many cities, but on more traditional bases and modes of organisation closer to what they were at the time of Nuit Debout, that is to say with a fixation on democratic formalism, very often in contradiction with the idea of free speech. Also with tendencies to want to “organize the organization” or to vote to know if we will vote (and other joyous proceduralisms), leading sometimes to a reversal of things in which the ga believes it is making the movement, when in fact it is the movement that makes the ga. While on the roundabouts it was possible to go from discussion to action and vice versa without any problem, with any organisation existing possibly at the level of a coordination of roundabouts, the assembly form found itself to be very weak before the gap between the progress of its organisational form and the lack of reality of its decision-making form, for example in the organisation of events whose progress, in fact, continued to elude it.

Everything remains open

Collective action, be it on the roundabouts or in the street, constantly reshapes the political and social body of the yellow vests, because it is on these occasions that it confronts the power of the State, including physically, where an all or nothing is played out, well beyond the “real debates” and other rics. Moreover, the themes posted on the social networks by the yellow vests and treated in a survey by the newspaper Le Monde, are proof of this, as it shows that it is the mobilisation that is most important, followed by the repression, only then followed by criticism of the elites, cited half as frequently as the first and finally demands, cited four times less than the first.6

It is in this collective action that the movement experiences in practice a world that suddenly it no longer seems to suffer passively, because it began to transform certain conditions (social life, fraternity and solidarity, mutual aid), while allowing everyone to discover and change in the same movement, through this action.

Direct action is constitutive of the movement and the demonstrations, like that of Saturday, March 16, show the necessity. Apart from the subjective satisfaction of the targeted vandalism, for the first time the yellow vests assumed themselves as “casseurs” [breakers/vandals] or “pro-casseurs,” posing without shame in the middle of the damage. But it is not certain that this will make things progress, at the moment when the base of the movement begins to narrow, and during which another anger makes itself more and more manifest…but against the yellow vests and that, at the limit, the next time power can “mark” the protesters with indelible products and, why not, even shoot them.7

No immediate solution presents itself to us because the movement has exhausted part of its original dynamic. It is clear that it is in the moment of its greatest violence that the movement realizes its own exposure…and that it is at the mercy of the decisions of power. Taking seriously the desire for revolution on the part of some yellow vests, something unimaginable at the beginning of the movement, pushes it, for the moment, towards an alternating succession of all or nothing actions, from attempts at institutionalisation and politics to riots (Paris, Bordeaux, Toulouse to a lesser degree). The “ultimatum” of March 16 is a strong act, but it also risks being a jump into the void if the movement does not react immediately and by diversifying its modes of action; by temporarily fleeing, for example, a new showdown with the authorities or by provoking them elsewhere, but unexpectedly.8 It is a question of creating a link between all these modes of action without opposing them. Actions carried out since the beginning of the week show that power is scared. Contrary to what it tries to make believe, all gatherings are not forbidden and especially not when it deals with the yellow vests, the new social plague. Power can not intervene everywhere, provided it is harassed everywhere. Forward!

Temps critiques, March 22, 2019

• 1This is probably why signs against the Pact of Marrakesh may have appeared sometimes and finally surreptitiously, in yellow vest demonstrations, carried by protesters of the far Right.
• 2See the article: “Les réfugiés sont les bienvenus sur les métiers en tension,” Le Monde, March 21, 2019, p. 20.
• 3It is as if the yellow vests had intuitively learned the lessons of May 13, 1968, when the students put the fate of the movement in the hands of the cgt, whereas in the current context, this same cgt would not be able to cope with this demand, given the capital/labour balance of power and union’s decreasing influence.
• 4We are not talking here about yellow vest assemblies after the manner of Commercy or the House of the People of Saint-Nazaire which, in fact, bring together people politicised by a passage in Nuit debout or militants more or less attuned with lfi or the npa, which defend the free movement of people, the reception of migrants, practice inclusive writing and are not concerned about the approach of “people from below” of which they are not really a part. Their adherence to the movement is most often motivated by political proselytism.
• 5See our leaflet “Dans les rets du ric : remarques sur les faiblesses politiques d’une revendication,” February 2019.
• 6Of course, these are only surveys and statistics, but it can be asked, who introduced the ric into the basket of questions?
• 7See the leaflet of the police union, Synergie-Officers.
• 8This situation, the oldest among us lived in the early morning of May 25, 1968…without having the opportunity to find a favourable outcome. But history never repeats itself…

Today there is a curious convergence of views between the Right and the dominant Left on the meaning of socialism. Put more concretely, for both the Right and the dominant Left socialism refers to the system which came into being as a sequel to the conquest of political power by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, and this system signifies a society governed by a single political party-basically the communist party-and where means of production are owned predominantly by the state, and the economy is directed by central planning. The two most important points stressed by both the sides for this socialism are the existence of a single central authority exercising political power and the institution of ‘public property’-signifying the substitution of private property in the means of production predominantly by the state property. Needless to add, the Right looks at this ‘socialism’ negatively while the (dominant) Left considers this ‘socialism’ positively. Both these tendencies, again, assert the origin of this socialism in the ideas of Marx. Now that this socialism has almost evaporated, two kinds of responsibility have been attributed to Marx involving two kinds of criticism of Marx in regard to this socialism. First, it is held, since the inspiration for this system supposedly came from Marx, and, consequently, since Marx is thought to be responsible for its creation, its disappearance only shows the failure of Marx’s ideas. Similarly, under the same assumption that this socialism was Marx’s brain-child, a contrary charge is directed against him. Here the point is stressed that the horrible reality of this system in practice shown, above all, in its relation to human individuals only demonstrates that (Marxian) socialism by nature is repressive, that is, it is an inhuman regime. The second kind of responsibility attributed to Marx and, consequently, the second kind of criticism of Marx is very different. It involves Marx’s prognostication of the future after capitalism. The affirmation is made that what Marx had envisaged for the future, that capitalism undermined by its own inner contradictions would go out of existence yielding place to a new, infinitely more humane society—socialism—has been proved wrong. Capitalism continues to exist in spite of all its ups and downs and socialism continues to elude humanity. Marx’s vision has simply proved to be unrealizable,

The present paper is concerned with demonstrating that socialism in Marx is completely different from, if not opposed to, socialism as we find it in its common theoretical presentation as well as in the practice in its name in the twentieth century and that what Marx had envisaged as socialism has not yet been tried. Secondly, as regards the alleged failure of Marx’s prognostication of society after capital, the advent of socialism in Marx’s sense is conditional upon the presence of certain material and subjective conditions which require a prolonged historical period for their fruition within the existing society itself before the new society could appear, for which Marx did not set any calendar. Marx’s emancipatory socialist project has lost none of its lustre and is still worth striving for.

For a proper perspective we first offer, in what follows, a synoptic overview of socialism as envisaged by Marx. Then we proceed to present the specificity of the concept of socialism as it took shape in the last century before proceeding to give a brief account of that socialism in reality. Both as regards the concept of socialism and its reality in the last century we consider socialism in Russia after October 1917 as the prototype of all later socialisms. Hence, first we analyse the Russian case at some length where we discuss successively Lenin, then Stalin, and then offer a shorter account of the next outstanding case of China under Mao. We conclude by (re)asserting the relevance of Marx’s emancipatory socialism today.

Socialism in Marx

First a word on the confusion about the term ‘socialism.’ There is a widespread idea that socialism and communism are two successive societies, that socialism is the transition to communism and hence precedes communism. Later in this essay we will say a little more on the origin of this thesis and the consequences of its acceptance. For Marx this distinction is non-existent. For Marx socialism is neither the transition to communism, nor is it the lower phase of communism. It is communism tout court. In fact Marx calls capitalism itself the ‘transitional point’ or ‘transitional phase’ to communism (Marx 1953: 438; 1962a: 425–26; in Most1989: 783). For him, they are simply equivalent and alternative terms for the same society which he envisages for the post capitalist epoch which he calls, in different texts, equivalently: communism, socialism, Republic of Labour, society of free and associated producers or simply Association, Cooperative Society, (re)union of free individuals. Hence what Marx says in one of his famous texts—Critique of the Gotha Programme (hereafter Gothacritique) about the two stages of communism1 could as well apply to socialism having the same two stages. Now socialism or communism appears in two different senses in Marx (and Engels). First as a theoretical expression. In this sense this expression does not mean a state of things which should be established or an ideal to which reality should conform. It is rather the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The movement arises from to-day’s (pre)conditions.” (Marx and Engels 1973a: 35). Socialism (communism) “to the extent that it is theoretical, it is the theoretical expression of the place of the proletariat in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the résumé of the conditions of the emancipation of the proletariat” (Engels in Marx and Engels 1972:322) or the “theoretical principles of the communists…are only the general expressions of the real relations of the existing class struggle, of a historical movement that is going on before our eyes” (Marx and Engels 1966:70). In the second sense socialism (communism) refers to the society which is envisaged as arising after the demise of capitalism. Now, to drive home our point that socialism and communism in Marx mean the same social formation, and thereby to refute the uncritically accepted idea—a sequel to Bolshevism—of socialism being only the transition to communism, we could mention at least four of Marx’s texts where referring to the future society after capital Marx speaks exclusively of ‘socialism’ and does not mention ‘communism.’ Thus in a 1844 polemic Marx writes: “Generally a revolution—overthrow of the existing power and the dissolution of the old relations—is a political act. Without revolution socialism cannot be viable. It needs this political act to the extent that it needs destruction and dissolution. However, where its organizing activity begins, where its aim and soul stand out, socialism throws away its political cover.”(Marx 1976a:409). The second and the third texts2 are almost identical, appearing respectively in his 1861–63 notebooks (second notebook) and in the so-called ‘main manuscript’ for Capital III. Here is the 1861–63 text: “The capitalistic production… is a greater spendthrift than any other mode of production of man, of living labor, spendthrift not only of flesh and blood and muscles, but of brains and nerves. It is, in fact, at the greatest waste of individual development that the development of general men is secured in those epochs of history which prelude to a socialist constitution of mankind.” (Marx 1976b: 324–27). This text is repeated almost word for word in the ‘main manuscript’ for the third volume of Capital (Marx 1992:124–26)3. Finally, in course of correcting and improving the text of a book by a worker (Johann Most), meant for popularizing Capital, Marx inserted: “The capitalist mode of production is really a transitional form which by its own organism must lead to a higher, to a co-operative mode of production, to socialism” (in Most 1876,1989: 783).

The conditions for the rise of socialism are not given by nature. Socialism is a product of history. “Individuals build a new world from the historical acquisitions of their foundering world. They must themselves in course of their development first produce the material conditions of a new society, and no effort of spirit or will can free them from this destiny” (Marx 1847,1972:339; emphasis in original). Precisely it is capital which creates the material conditions and the subjective agents for transforming the present society into a society of free and associated producers. “The material and the spiritual conditions of the negation of wage labor and capital—themselves the negation of the earlier forms of unfree social production—are themselves the result of its (own) process of production”(Marx 1953:635). The material conditions are created by capital’s inherent tendency towards universal development of the productive forces and by the socialization of labor and production. As regards the subjective-‘spiritual’ condition it is provided by capital’s “grave diggers”—the proletariat—begotten by capital itself. Even with the strongest will and greatest subjective effort, if the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of circulation for a classless society do not exist in a latent form, “all attempts to explode the society would be Don Quixotism” (Marx 1953: 77). More than two decades later Marx wrote: “A radical social revolution is bound up with certain historical conditions of economic development. The latter are its preconditions. It is therefore only possible where, with capitalist development, the industrial proletariat occupies at least a significant position.”(Marx 1973b: 633). It must be stressed that capitalist relations are not revolutionized within capitalism automatically even with all the requisite material conditions prepared by capital itself. It is the working class which is the active agent for eliminating capital and building the socialist society. It is necessary to emphasize that the proletarian revolution is an act of self-emancipation. “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves”(Marx 1964b: 288). Marx and Engels equally underline that the “consciousness of the necessity of a profound revolution arises from the working class itself” (Marx and Engels 1973a: 69). The starting point of the proletarian revolution is the conquest of political power by the proletariat—the rule of the “immense majority in the interest of the immense majority,” the “conquest of democracy”(Marx and Engels 1966:74,76). This so-called ‘seizure of power’ by the proletariat does not immediately signify the victory of the revolution4, it is only the “first step in the worker revolution” (Marx and Engels 1966: 76) which continues through a prolonged “period of revolutionary transformation” of the capitalist society into socialist society required for superseding the bourgeois social order (Marx in Marx and Engels 1964c: 24). Until capital totally disappears the workers remain proletarians and the revolution continues, victorious though they are politically. “The superseding of the economical conditions of the slavery of labor by the conditions of free and associated labor can only be the progressive work of time” (and) the “working class will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes transforming circumstances and men” wrote Marx with reference to the victory of the Commune (Marx 1971: 76, 156–57). Later he reminded Bakunin that (even) with the installation of the proletarian rule the “the classes and the old organization of society still do not disappear” (Marx 1973: 630). At the end of the process with the disappearance of capital the proletariat along with its “dictatorship” also disappears, leaving individuals as simple producers and wage labor naturally vanishes. Classes disappear along with the state in its last form as proletarian power and the society of free and associated producers-socialism-is inaugurated.

In all hitherto existing societies—based on class rule—community has stood as an independent power against singular individuals and subjugated them. Thus it has really been a “false” or “illusory” or “apparent” community. The outcome of the workers’ self-emancipatory revolution is the socialist society, a “reunion of free individuals”—individuals neither personally dependent as in pre-capitalism nor objectively dependent as in capitalism, hence free, and there arises, for the first time, the “true” community where universally developed individuals dominate their own social relations (Marx 1932: 536; 1973a: 136; 1953: 593; 1987:109). Correspondingly, the capitalist mode of production (cmp) yields place to the “associated mode of production”(amp). With the disappearance of classes, there is also no state and hence no politics in the new society. We cited Marx above holding that with the victory of the proletarian revolution politics ceases to exist and socialism throws away its political cover. This 1844 position of Marx is repeated in his Anti-Proudhon (1847) and in the (with Engels) Communist Manifesto (1848). Following the same logic, he and Engels affirm that the “organization of communism (socialism) is essentially economic” (Marx and Engels 1973a: 70). Here the appropriation of the conditions of production is no longer private, it is collective, social. Similarly, with the transformation of society’s production relations its exchange relations-–individuals’ material exchange with nature as well as their exchanges among themselves—are also transformed. Capital, driven by the logic of accumulation, seriously damages the environment and undermines the natural powers of the earth together with those of the human producer, the “twin fountains of all wealth” (Marx 1987:477). In contrast, in the new society, freed from the mad drive for accumulation and with the unique goal of satisfying human needs, individuals rationally regulate their material exchanges with nature with the “least expenditure of force and carry on these exchanges in the conditions most worthy of and in fullest conformity with their human nature” (Marx 1992: 838). As regards the exchange relations among individuals, the inauguration of collective appropriation of the conditions of production ends the commodity form of products of labor. Here the directly social character of production is presupposed and hence exchange value ceases to exist.” Community” here is “posited before production”(Marx 1980: 113). From the very inception of the new society as it has just come out of the womb of capital—Marx’s first phase of socialism—“producers do not exchange their products and as little does labor employed on these products appear as value” (Marx 1964c: 15). Finally we come to the allocation-distribution of conditions of production—the material means of production and the living labor power—and the consequent distribution of their products in the new society. The distribution of the conditions of production boils down really to the allocation of society’s total labor time (dead and living). This allocation, effected through exchange taking value form in capitalism, is contrariwise performed in socialism by direct and conscious control of society over its labor time. At the same time, in conformity with the nature of the new society, free time beyond the labor time required for satisfying the material needs must be provided by society to the associated individuals for their “all sided development.” Hence the “economy of time is the first economic law on the basis of communitarian production,”(Marx 1953: 89). As regards the distribution of the total social product in socialism it is first divided between the production needs and the consumption needs of society. Production needs here refer to needs of replacement and extension of society’s productive apparatus as well as insurance and reserve funds against uncertainty. Consumption refers to collective consumption—health, education, provision for those unable to work—and personal consumption. As regards the latter, the principle governing it still remains the principle which regulates commodity exchange-the quantity of labor given to society (after necessary deductions) by the individual is received back from society by the individual. However, the mediating ‘labor coupons’ have no exchange value. In fact in commodity production there is a contradiction between “principle and practice,” equivalence is established “only on average,” individual share in social total labor is unknowable. Opposite is the case with socialism (Marx 1964c: 16. emphasis in original). Similarly, in his famous discussion of the “reunion of free individuals” in Capital I, Marx posits that under “socialised labor, diametrically opposed to commodity production,” the mediating labor certificates are not money, they simply ascertain the share allocated to each labouring individual—“only for the sake of a parallel with commodity production”—according to the individual’s labor time (Marx 1987: 109, 122)5 At the initial phase of the new society this principle of equivalence, in parallel with the principle under commodity production—hence called by Marx “bourgeois right”—but without having value form assumed by the product cannot be avoided.This process is wholly overcome only at a higher phase of this society when all the springs of co-operative wealth open up more fully leading to society’s adoption of the principle “from each according to one’s ability to each according to one’s needs” (Marx 1964c: 17).

Anti-Emancipatory Character of Twentieth Century Socialism

First, a word on the theoretical categories on which the twentieth century socialism (hereafter tcs) had drawn and justified the practice of its socialism. These categories were shaped originally and principally by Lenin, developed and perfected later by Stalin. This conceptual framework became, broadly speaking, the heritage of twentieth century socialism. Indeed the theoretical categories of tcs are only the footnotes to Lenin—to paraphrase A.N. Whitehead on Western philosophy in relation to Plato. They had little relation with the categories which Marx (and Engels) had put forward in their own presentation of the future society. In fact tcs’s theoretical representation of the post-capitalist society shows a near complete revision (in Lenin’s precise sense of the term) of Marx’s ideas. As regards the conditions of the socialist revolution, Lenin advanced two important arguments in justification of socialist revolution in Russia after the February uprising (1917). First, a few months before the seizure of power, he affirmed that as a result of the February revolution the state power in Russia had passed into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the landlords turned bourgeois.” To this extent the bourgeois revolution is completed” (Lenin1982b: 19; emphasis in original). Shortly afterwards he asserted, without any qualification this time, “the bourgeois revolution is already completed” (Lenin 1982b: 51; ). The second argument for a successful socialist revolution in backward Russia, already implicit in Lenin’s 1915 declaration on the possibility of the victory of socialist revolution outside Europe, given “unequal development of capitalism” (Lenin1982a: 635–36), was explicitly made only a few months after the October seizure of power: it was easier for “the (socialist revolutionary) movement to start” in a backward capitalist country like Russia,” things had worked (out) differently from what Marx and Engels had expected” (Lenin1982b: 509, 510). To paraphrase Keynes’s statement about Ricardo, Lenin conquered not only the revolutionary Left but also some of the lucid minds of the twentieth century as completely as the Inquisition had conquered Spain. They thought without question that a socialist revolution had indeed taken place and been victorious in one of the most backward capitalist countries thereby disproving Marx’s prognostication. Thus E.H. Carr thought that the “Marxist scheme of revolution was bound to break down when the proletarian revolution occurred in the most backward capitalist country” (Carr 1964: 43–44). In his turn Isaac Deutscher wrote that it was the Russian Marxists, and not Marx and Engels whom (the events in Russia) proved to be right (Deutscher1960: 184). In the same way Paul Sweezy opined: ‘The revolution that put socialism in history’s agenda took place not in economically developed countries, as Marx and Engels thought they would, but in countries where capitalism was still in early stages” (Sweezy1993: 6). The position of these people confirms what Marx and Engels noted in an early text: “While in the daily life every shopkeeper knows very well the distinction between what a person pretends to be and what s/he really is, our historiography has not yet come to know this triviality. It believes an epoch at its word what the epoch affirms and imagines itself to be” (Marx and Engels1973a: 49)6. Now both the arguments of Lenin in favor of socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 were a radical revision of the materialist conception of history. As regards the first argument, Lenin predicated the “completion” of the bourgeois democratic revolution simply on the basis of the passage to political power of the bourgeoisie independently of the question of any change in the social relations of production in Russia whereas for Marx only a radical transformation of these relations, and not a mere change in political power, would signify “completion” of a social (including bourgeois) revolution. As to Lenin’s second argument mentioned above, the fundamental question is—even assuming the presence of the revolutionary class-the proletariat-whether it is possible to have a socialist revolution without the presence of the adequate material conditions for inaugurating a “reunion of free individuals” contrary to what Marx had stressed in his different texts including his latter-day anti-Bakunin text given above. Theoretically not inconceivable, Marx’s thesis could only be refuted by the reality of a successful socialist revolution under Lenin’s conditions (see below). Apart from Lenin’s argument about the conditions of socialist revolution his theoretical position on socialism itself is of enormous importance in view of its lasting effect on the way socialism was conceived and practiced by the regimes, which followed worldwide after the Bolshevik victory, calling themselves ‘socialist.’ Lenin distinguishes between socialism and communism, equating them respectively, with Marx’s lower and higher phase of communism. He also speaks of two transitions, one from capitalism to socialism, another from socialism to communism (Lenin 1982b: 42,301–02,305; 1982c: 530,541–42). We already saw above that for Marx socialism and communism are equivalent terms. In this light one could also speak of a lower and a higher phase of socialism. Now the Leninist distinction in question, apparently merely terminological and innocent looking, had far reaching consequences which were far from innocent and far from what Lenin himself presumably might have expected. It became a convenient instrument for legitimizing and justifying the ideology and every oppressive act of the Party-States from 1917 onward in the name of socialism which, it was maintained, was only a transitional phase toward communism, thus shelving all the vital aspects of Marx’s immense emancipatory project of the post capitalist society off to the Greek calends of never-never land of communism thereby metamorphosing Marx’s project of communism (socialism) into an unalloyed utopia.

The Russian Case: Concept and Reality—Lenin

Lenin speaks of socialism basically in juridical terms not in terms of a complex of social relations of production. For him socialism is “social ownership” of the means of production which he further specifies as “ownership by the working class state” (Lenin1982b: 300,302,669; 1982c: 711,712,714). Of course Marx also speaks of the ownership of the means of production in the new society as “social” where society itself and not state-absent from the new society-is the owner, but for Lenin it is the working class state which is the new owner (sobstvennost’ na sredstva proizvodstva v rukakh gosudarstva) (Lenin1982c:711,712). Here Lenin has successfully stood Marx on his head. For Marx, socialism—even in Lenin’s revised sense of the first phase of communism—is already a classless society, a “union of free individuals” coming into existence after the working class along with the last form of state—the dictatorship of the proletariat—has vanished. The proletarians (wage labourers) have been transformed into simple producers as free individuals and it is their society (the collectivity of free individuals)—and not any state—which possesses the means of production. Lenin speaks not only of the working class state but also of what he considers to be its equivalent, ”socialist state” (Lenin1982c: 714). Needless to say, this last expression is nowhere to be found in Marx. Earlier we referred to Marx’s texts showing that there can be no state in socialism. Lenin tries to smuggle ‘state’ into Marx’s text of the Gothacritique by brazenly revising it. This he does by connecting two independent ideas in two analytically separate places of the text-Marx’s discussion of the continuation of ‘bourgeois right’ in the first phase of communism and Marx’s speculation about the future of the “present day functions of the state.” Lenin emphasizes the need for the existence of the “bourgeois state” to enforce the “bourgeois right” in the first phase of the new society. His logic is baffling. For Marx this first phase is inaugurated after the disappearance of the proletarian rule-the last form of state. From Lenin’s position it follows that in the absence of the bourgeoisie (by assumption), the producers themselves-no longer proletarians-would have to recreate, not even their old state, but the bourgeois state to enforce the bourgeois right. For Marx, from the start of the new society there are no classes and hence there is no state and no politics. Whatever bourgeois right remains in the area of distribution does not require a particular political apparatus to enforce it. It is now society itself which is in charge. One could read this textually in the Gothacritique. Similarly, for the first phase of communism (Lenin’s socialism) Lenin envisages the economy as one “state syndicate” or one “single factory” where “all citizens” are transformed into “ hired employees of the state” (sluzhashikh po naymu) with “equality of labor, equality of wages (zarabotnoyplatyi)” (1982b: 306,308; emphasis added).What a contrast with Marx who in his “Inaugural Address”(1864) had clearly distinguished between “hired labor”(of capitalism) and “associated labor”(of socialism)! For Marx what Lenin is saying about is simply the “state itself as capitalist,” “in so far as it employs wage labour” (1962b: 370; 2008: 636). So what Lenin presents us as socialism is really state capitalism which with a “single state syndicate” or a “single factory,” as Lenin puts it, will be–-in Marx’s terms, as we find in Capital’s French version—the “total national capital constituting a single capital in the hands of a single capitalist” (Marx 1965: 1139).

Let us now try to see this socialism, the prototype for the twentieth century, in reality. The problematic begins right at the start. There is no evidence that the accession to political power by the Bolsheviks signaled a proletarian or socialist revolution (or at least its beginning) in Russia in the sense of Marx, that is, a revolution which is the outcome of the “autonomous movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority,” as the 1848 Manifesto affirms (Marx and Engels1966: 68). The so-called October revolution was neither initiated nor led by the proletariat. The same goes for the subsequent installation of the single party rule. In October 1917, the fate of over 170 million people was decided by a handful of non-proletarian radicalized intelligentsia—far removed from the site of the real process of production and exploitation, unelected and un-revocable by and totally unaccountable to the labouring people. Through the substitution of a whole class by a single party, power was seized under the slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ not from the Provisional Government but really from the soviets themselves, the authentic organs of laboring people’s self-rule created by the self-emancipatory country-wide spontaneous popular uprising in February. This pre-emptive strike was perpetrated independently of and behind the back of the Congress of Soviets depriving, by this singular operation, the Congress of the right of maternity regarding the founding act of the new order. Revealing in this regard is Lenin’s secret correspondence (September-October 1917)—expressing utter distrust and disdain of the soviets while mouthing ‘all power to the soviets’ in public—to his comrades in the party leadership. ”To wait for the Congress (to meet) is complete idiocy and total treachery (polnaya izmena. The Congress will give nothing and can give nothing (nichevo ni mozhet dat’) ( Lenin 1982b: 345,346, the latter expression emphasized in original). Undergoing a virtual radioactive decay, the soviets as independent self-governing organs of laborers evaporated as early as summer 1918. “Soviet democracy lasted from October 1917 to the summer 1918,” and “beginning with 1919 Bolshevism started to deny all the dissidents of the revolution the right to political existence “ (Serge 2001; 832). “All power to the soviets’ appeared to be a reality on the 26th of October 1917,” wrote an eminent historian, “but it was mostly power to the Bolsheviks in those soviets…. The whole system of soviets and executive committees was reduced to an administrative and propaganda auxiliary of the party… Deprived of power in the soviets and in the factories the Russian proletariat found that the triumph of the dictatorship in its name was a very hollow victory.” (Daniels 1967: 223–24). The masses and the majority of soviets representing them certainly greeted the fall of the hated old regime, but refused to have a Bolshevik hegemony. Alexander Rabinowitch in his blow-by-blow account of the events wrote, “The mass mood was not specifically Bolshevik in the sense of reflecting a desire for a Bolshevik government. As the flood of post-Kornilov political resolutions revealed, Petrograd soldiers, sailors, and workers were attracted more than ever by the goal of creating a soviet government uniting all socialist elements. And in their eyes the Bolsheviks stood for soviet power-for soviet democracy” (2004: 139,167; our emphasis). Very interestingly, on the eve of the Second Congress, the delegates arriving in Smolny were asked to fill out questionnaires, where one finds that “an overwhelming majority of them (including the Bolshevik delegates) came to Petrograd committed to supporting the transfer of all power to the soviets, that is the creation of a soviet government presumably reflective of the party composition of the Congress…They had the mandate to support the creation by the Congress of a coalition of government parties represented in the Soviet” (Rabinowitch 2004:291–93). There was also another important set of workers’ self governing organs created in work places before October 1917—factory committees with their own soviet (Ferro 1980:20). After having seized power from the Congress of Soviets the Bolsheviks turned their eyes on the factory committees who were exercising workers’ democracy in their work places and asserting control over the management. “The Bolsheviks saw for the first time the danger of radical democracy confronting them, following literally Lenin’s words on the sovereignty of the soviets” (Anweiler 1958: 277). The Bolsheviks now asked the trade unions where they had a majority to help them to subdue these self-governing organs of the workers. The trade unions obliged by simply annexing them as their lowest level (Bunyan and Fisher 1934: 639–41). It should be clear that far from itself conquering political power as an act of self-emancipation (in Marx’s 1864 sense), the Russian proletariat participated in the seizure of power—effected in the name of the proletariat by a party completely substituting itself for the proletariat—only as followers. It must be underlined that by their pre-emptive strike against the soviets the Bolsheviks successfully destroyed any possibility of the unfurling (bourgeois) democratic revolution, so magnificently started by the quasi-totality of the country’s labouring people in February, from developing over time into a genuine proletarian revolution as a process of “revolution in permanence,” to use the 1850 “battle cry” of Marx and Engels.

Before the seizure of power Lenin had stressed the need to destroy the old state apparatus and to replace it with “commune-state” with freely elected and revocable officials, and the police and the standing army with the armed workers. Later he had to admit that the Bolsheviks “effectively took over the old apparatus of the tsar and the bourgeoisie” (Lenin1982c: 695). Instead of officials being elected and subject to recall, there appeared bureaucrats, all party nominees and hierarchically organized from the top downward. Similarly there appeared a special police apparatus, particularly the dreaded secret police, before the end of 1917. In the same way the ‘Red’ army was fashioned, beginning with early 1918, not very differently from the professional army of a class society with the ex-tsarist officers in higher positions in increasing numbers. As regards industry, with the virtual liquidation of the self-managed factory committees, the principle of direction from above was imposed. Lenin now discovered that “the Russian is a bad worker in comparison with the worker of the advanced nations,” hence the workers must show “ unquestioning obedience to the single will of the leaders of the labor process, … to the one person decision of the soviet directors” (Lenin 1982b; 610,618, 630; emphasis in text). One year later he added:” Till now we have not reached the stage where the labouring masses could participate in administration.” (Lenin 1982c: 115). We thus see—remaining within Marx’s conceptual framework—that the regime created by October was anything but a proletarian regime. It was the party’s dictatorship over the proletariat. Naturally workers’ opposition to the regime became more and more widespread which was increasingly suppressed by force. The climax was reached with the mass massacre of the Kronstadt sailors and toilers in early 1921 on the totally false charge of their collaboration with the Whites, on Lenin’s own testimony at the tenth congress of the party in 1921. I. Deutscher writes that, by 1921–22 for the first time since 1917, “the bulk of the working class unmistakeably turned against the Bolsheviks… If the Bolsheviks had now permitted free elections to the soviets they would almost certainly have been swept from power (Deutscher 1963: 504).

Stalin

It was Stalin who, following Lenin’s lead on the concept of socialism, gave it the finished form on which the whole rationale of tcs was founded. Needless to add, Stalin totally subscribes to the Leninist identity of socialism with Marx’s “first phase of communism” and the Leninist idea of socialism as the transition to (full) communism. Stalin’s inversion of Marx’s materialist position goes even further than Lenin’s. Whereas in Lenin socialism is conceived in terms of ownership of means of production that is, in juridical terms, independently of the real relations of production, Stalin specifically makes “ownership of means of production the basis of production relations” (1980: 505), and state ownership of means of production is, again, à la Lénine, identified with socialist ownership (Stalin 1970: 383,386). Lenin’s idea of citizens as hired wage laborers of state in socialism is also taken over by Stalin. Stalin’s ‘improvement’ on Lenin’s position here lies in his statement that given the absence of private property in the means of production in socialism labor power has ceased to be a commodity and that there are no hired wage laborers here (Stalin 1980: 580–81). However the laborers receive their remuneration “in the form of wage” reflecting the material incentive according to the quantity and quality of labor. But this “wage under socialism is fundamentally different from wage under capitalism” because contrary to what happens in capitalism labor power is not a commodity in socialism (Akademiya Nauk SSSR 1954: 452,453). In other words, wage exists and labor exists but wage labor does not7. It seems Lenin lacked this ‘subtle’ logic of his follower. Finally, given the existence of two forms of ownership in the means of production—state ownership and collective farm ownership with exchange of products between them mediated by money—Stalin affirms the necessity of the existence of commodity production and hence of the law of value in socialism. However, in the absence of private ownership the socialist commodity production is totally different from commodity production under capitalism. (Akademiya Nauk 1954: 440–441; Stalin 1980: 580–81). So we have socialist commodity and socialist wage as the specific products of socialism, completely different from their counterparts in capitalism. It should be stressed that the foundation of the rationale for the existence of socialism in the new regime—underlined by Stalin following Lenin, from which all its other characteristics follow—is the alleged absence of private property in the means of production.8 Here private property means for Lenin, “property of separate individuals” (1982b: 300,302) in the means of production9. We submit that the concept of capitalist private property (in the means of production) meaning individual (private) property and, correspondingly, capitalist as the individual owner of capital is pre-Marxian. As a juridical category it is as old as the Roman law taken over later by the bourgeois jurisprudence. This is the juridical form in which capital appears at its beginning period. But with the progress of accumulation this form increasingly loses its relevance. Marx shows clearly that at a certain stage of capitalist development, for the needs of increasing accumulation of capital—the “independent variable” in capitalist production—this form tends to be largely inadequate and there appears increasingly—as is seen in the rise of share capital—what Marx calls “directly social capital in opposition to private capital” together with “associated capitalist.” This signals the “abolition of private property within the limits of the capitalist mode of production itself.”10 However, Marx does not speak only of individual private property in the means of production. In his work we also read about another kind of private property largely left aside by the Marx readers. In this second, and more important sense, private property in the means of production exists as property of the few in the face of non-property of the great majority who are compelled to sell their labor power in order to live. In this sense the objective conditions of labor are the “private property of a part of society”(Marx 1956: 21; emphasis added). It is then “class property.” This is the sense which appears in the assertion of the Communist Manifesto that communists could sum up their theory in a single expression: ”abolition of private property,” and the latter is explicitly used in the sense of “disappearance of class property” (Marx 1966: 71,73). The same idea reappears in Marx’s address on the 1871 Commune: “The Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few”(1971:75). Hence even with the (juridical) abolition of individual private property, if the great majority continues to earn its living by exchange of labor power against wage/salary, that would signify that private property continues to exist as “class property.” It is not with (working class) state property but only with society’s direct appropriation of the conditions of production implying necessarily the disappearance of the wage system that private property finally goes out of existence. Then only capitalism ends. The idea of socialism as the lower phase of and transition to communism based on public(mainly state) ownership of the means of production and wage labor and in the state form under a single party, founded by Lenin and perfected by Stalin (with the additional introduction of commodity production), this idea remained the central idea of socialism—accepted uncritically—by the rulers of the whole system of tcs across the globe and their international sympathizers. In this ironclad frame of socialism state substituted for society and party substituted for (working) class totally. It should be clear, following our earlier discussion above, that this socialism has nothing in common with Marx’s socialism—not transitional but equivalent to communism— conceived as a society of free and associated individuals with social ownership of the means of production and without state, commodity production or wage labor.

The Soviet Union was not considered socialist by its rulers till the late 1930s. Till then it was considered a proletarian dictatorship. The victory of socialism was proclaimed on the basis of the fulfillment of the second five year plan (1933–1937) showing 98.7 percent of the means of production coming under state and cooperative-collective ownership. The party declared that: “in our country … the first phase of communism, socialism, has been basically realised”(kpss v resoliutsiakh 1971:335). As we already mentioned above, in Stalin we find the theoretical justification post festum of this ‘socialism,’ fundamentally based on ‘public’ (mainly state) property in the means of production, with wage labor and commodity production kept intact. (Needless to add, the Party-State political framework of this ‘socialism’ became increasingly oppressive). The basic structure of this socialism remained more or less the same till the end of the regime. And only towards the end, with the introduction of relative freedom of opinion and expression gained by the citizens, we start to get to know the real nature of this socialism from the internal witnesses of the regime. Thus an eminent Soviet economist of the period wrote: “Removed from direct administration and disposal of social ownership, having no influence on the system of remuneration, and participating in no way in the distribution of national income and produced product” the soviet workers “perceived” such “state ownership” as “alien” and “not their own” (Butenko 1988:16,18). Similarly, the doyen of labor economics underlined: ”The state ownership was neither public nor socialist. Surplus labor and the corresponding surplus value belonged not to the people or to those who generated them. Profit was appropriated by the state, …the directors of enterprises hired labor power in the name of the state. Wage, in these conditions, was, as in any capitalist society, the transformed form of the value of labor power as a commodity (prevrashchennoi formoi stoimosti tovara rabochaya sila) (Manevich 1991:139). It is in this situation of “apathy enveloping millions” and “exhausting all motivational basis,” as another economist observed, that the “standard ‘socialist toiler’ (sotsialisticheskoi truzhenik), a product of 70 years of soviet rule,” has worked (Loginov 1992).

China: Concept and Reality—Mao

Now a rapid overview of an important exemplar of tcs, China under Mao Zedong. Mao proclaimed that “the salvoes of the October revolution brought Marxism-Leninism to China” and he characterized his party as the “bolshevized communist party” (Mao 1972:175). Materially China was even more backward than the pre-October Russia. China’s revolution—abstracting from its anti-imperialist character—was essentially a peasant war led by the Communist Party of China (cpc hereafter) directed against the pre-capitalist social order. The cpc under Mao, contrary to the Bolsheviks under Lenin, came to represent China’s great majority, firmly rooted in the country’s rural labouring masses. The supposed leadership by the proletariat was more theoretical and ideological than real, the party having tenuous links with the industrial working class. In fact Mao wrote: ”More backward a country is, easier is its passage to socialism” (Mao 1975:81). He was even inclined to consider-like the 19th century Russian ‘populists’-the possibility of “the Chinese revolution to avoid the capitalist path in order to reach socialism directly” (Mao1972: 131). According to the regime’s spokespersons the cpc’s victory in 1949 meant the triumph of the “new democratic revolution” accomplishing the anti-feudal and anti-imperialist tasks. The subsequent period till the end of the first five-year plan (1953–57) was a transition period of “socialist construction.” From 1956–57 on China, it was claimed, became a socialist country. Remaining well within the non-Marxian Leninist tradition Mao considered socialism as the lower phase of and the transition to communism. About the nature of the Chinese society for the period beginning with the late 1950s Mao is ambiguous. Thus in two texts separated by a few months he speaks curiously of ‘socialist relations of production’ in February and of ‘proletarian dictatorship’ in October as existing in China(Mao1977: 394, 507). Positively referring to Stalin, Mao affirms, reversing Marx’s materialist position, like Stalin before him, that the “system of ownership is the basis of the relations of production” (Mao1977: 139). Again, following Stalin, Mao proclaimed the establishment of socialism in China on the basis of the abolition of the individual private ownership in the means of production. Correctly taking account of the existence of commodity production and wage system in China’s ‘socialist’ reality, Mao, unlike Stalin, did not resort to subterfuges to hide their incompatibility with socialism (in Marx’s sense). He stated: “China is a socialist country… At present our country practices the commodity system, an eight grade wage system, and the wage system is unequal, and in all this scarcely different from the old society; the difference is that the system of ownership has changed” (Mao cited in Biography 2004:1475).11 Mao also asserted, going beyond even Lenin, the “existence of classes and class struggle”-insisting on the latter’s “protracted and sometimes violent character “-in “socialism” (Schram 1974:168). This sharpening class struggle included the struggle within the cpc itself against the “capitalist roaders” through a series of “cultural revolutions.” The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (gpcr) began with a lot of fanfare on the initiative of the “Chairman in person.” The 16-point decision proclaimed the need “for the masses to liberate themselves.” Here undoubtedly Mao was in advance of the Bolsheviks in whose writings such a clearly stated emancipatory message for the labouring people is difficult to come by. The nearest for them was the slogan ‘all power to the soviets’ whose rapid liquidation in reality we already saw above. The ‘Sixteen Articles’ of August 1966 called for a system of general elections like that of the Paris Commune.12 However that was not how things turned out to be. Within a very short period Mao himself rejected the attempt made in Shanghai to follow faithfully the example of the Paris Commune. Mao favored rather the military dominated revolutionary committees. ”Whatever may have been Mao’s intention at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, in the end he settled for the reestablishment of a presumably ideologically rectified Party and a presumably reformed state bureaucracy” (Meisner, 1999: 370). Far from establishing a system of election and recall at all levels of administration, all functionaries continued to be nominated. Finally the old bureaucratic machinery emerged from the Cultural Revolution almost intact. This was also grosso modo the experience in Russia after October 1917 as we saw above. Speaking in general, as regards the pretension of having proletarian dictatorship and then socialism, the reality showed that the laboring people of China, as in Russia earlier, had no role in the fundamental decisions and the enforcement of those decisions affecting their own lives. This was the exclusive privilege of the Party leadership. The “task” of the ‘masses’ (how condescending the term became in the communist movement!) was to follow the “instructions” from above. Going beyond the Russian experience it was a single individual—Mao—who was the ultimate reference point. Whether it was the system of “people’s communes” or the launching of the gpcr the initiative came from the “Chairman in person.” In a society supposed to be marching toward communism every move was centered on following the Chairman’s “latest instructions.” What a contrast between the emphasis on Mao being the “great teacher, great leader, great supreme commander, great helmsman” and Marx’s self-emancipatory perspective of the “proletariat organized as the ruling class,” let alone of socialism as the “reunion of free individuals”!

Conclusion: The Relevance of Marx

It appears that the revolutions of the last century claimed to be socialist were really all minority revolutions in the name of the majority. Though we discussed only two specimens of tcs above, it would not be difficult to show that the pattern that emerges from these two apply mutatis mutandis to all the members of tcs. To go back to a remarkable text by Engels, “Even when the majority participated in them (in these revolutions), this participation was only in the service of a minority. Because of this (participation) and because of the unopposed attitude of the majority, the minority acquired the impression that it was the representative of the whole people” (Marx, Engels 1966:227). All these societies have been ‘State socialist’—to use an oxymoron from the point of view of Marx—the state “entailing (enmeshing) the living civil society like a boa constrictor” instead of “society reabsorbing the state (power),” and in the process “perfecting the state machinery instead of throwing off this deadening incubus (Marx 1971:149,150,153).13 The theoretical ground and justification (in advance) of this enslaving system one already finds in the anti-emancipatory reading of Marx’s Gothacritique by Lenin in his apparently libertarian brochure State and Revolution where the two fundamental instruments for enslaving the human individual—the state and wage labor—are explicitly made to appear in the lower phase of communism, (mis)interpreted as the ‘transition to communism’ . It is no wonder that this is about the only text of Marx on the future society with its division into a lower and a higher phase which is the constantly mentioned reference point for the spokespersons of the Party-States for showing the concordance of their socialism with the socialism envisaged by Marx, inasmuch as this two-phase division could easily be manipulated-given Lenin’s particular reading-to justify the existence of state, commodity production and wage labor in the first phase seen as only the transition to “full communism.” Indeed the practice of twentieth century ‘socialism’ has been a vast exercise in the enslavement of the human individual whose emancipation is the ultimate goal of the socialist revolution as envisioned by Marx. The situation of the individual in the future Association in Marx’s different texts does not find much echo in the discussion on socialism by the partisans of tcs. Marx’s relevant discussion appears in his texts beginning as early as 1843–44 dealing with the problem of individual’s alienation in commodity-capitalist society. In the Communist Manifesto appears the essence of his position: “freedom of each is the condition of the freedom of all.” His basic criterion for judging a society was the extent to which the individual was free in the society bereft of alienation and the constraints of labor and division of labor imposed on the (laboring) individual from outside. Marx’s 1859 assertion that the whole period of human evolution till now has been characterized by the “pre-history of the human society” precisely refers to the inhuman situation of the human individual which has prevailed till now where the individual’s subordination to an external power, alien to the individual, has prevented the individual from the “development of all the human powers as such without being measured by any pre-established standard,” the “complete elaboration of human interiority” (Marx 1953:387). There is a remarkable passage in Marx’s 1857–58 manuscripts summing up the evolution of the status of the laboring individual through three stages: “The relations of personal dependence (first wholly natural) are the first social form in the midst of which human productivity develops (but) only in reduced proportions and in isolated places. Personal independence based on material dependence is the second great form only within which is constituted a general social metabolism made of universal relations, faculties and needs. Free individuality based on the universal development of the individuals and their domination of their common social productivity as their (own) social power is the third stage. The second creates the conditions of the third” (Marx 1953:75). The remarkable fourth section of the first chapter of Capital I carries over from the 1844 manuscripts the central theme of the alienation of the individual under commodity production and opposes it to the de-alienated “Reunion of free individuals” (Marx 1987: 109–10). In the same book Marx refers to the transformation of capital’s private property into “individual property” under the future Association of free individuals (Marx 1987: 683)14 Again, Marx’s famous discussion of necessity and liberty in the manuscript for the third volume of Capital is precisely built around the “socialized individual” in the free Association (Marx 1992: 832). This whole emancipatory message has been conspicuously absent from the reality of ‘socialism’ of the last century. The only human and humane alternative to the inhuman reign of capital is socialism—understood as the “Association” or “(Re)union of free individuals”—as Marx envisaged it.

References

Akademiya Nauk SSSR 1954, Politicheskaya Ekonomiya Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stva Politicheskoi Literatury.

Anweiler, Oskar 1958, Die Rätebewegung in Russland 1905–192, Leiden :E.J.Brill

Biography of Mao Zedong (in Chinese) 2004, Beijing: Zhongyangwenxian Press.

Bunyan, James and Fisher, H.H 1934, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1918, Documents and Materials, London: Humphrey Milford.

Butenko, A.P. 1988, “O Kharaktere sobstvennosti v usloviyakh real’nogo sotsializma” (On the character of ownership in conditions of real socialism) EKO 2.

Carr, E.H. 1964, The Bolshevik Revolution volume 1, London: Macmillan.

Daniels, Robert V. 1967, The Red October, New York: Charles Scribner.

Deutscher, Isaac 1960, Russia in Transition, New York: Grove Press.

Deutscher, Isaac 1963, The Prophet Armed, Trotsky (1879–1921), New York: Oxford University Press.

Engels, Friedrich (1895) 1966, “Einleitung zu Karl Marx,’ ‘Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850’ ” in Marx-Engels Studienausgabe volume 3 Frankfurt a.M: Fischer Taschenbukh Verlag.

Engels, Friedrich (1847) 1972, “Die Kommunisten und Karl Heinzen” in Marx-Engels Werke (hereafter MEW) volume 4 Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Ferro, Marc 1980,Des soviets au communisme bureaucratique Paris: Gallimard

Che Guevara, Ernesto 2006, Apuntes críticos a la Economia Politica, Habana: Editorial de ciencias sociales.

kpss v Resoliutsiyakh i Resheniyakh volume 5, 1971, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literaturi.

Lenin, V.I. 1982a Izbrannye Proizvedeniya (Selected Works)(hereafter IP) volume 1, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literaturi.

Lenin, V.I. 1982b IP volume 2 Mosow:Izdatelst’vo politicheskoi literaturi.

Lenin, V.I. 1982c IP volume 3 Moscow:Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literaturi

Loginov, V 1992 “Prichiny krizisa sovetskoi ekonomiki:vosproizvodstvennyi aspect” (causes of crisis of the Soviet economy: aspect of reproduction), Voprosy ekonomiki no. 4-6.

Manevich, E. 1991 “Zárabotnaya pláta v uslovyakh rynochnoi ekonomiki” (Wage in the conditions of market economy), Voprosy ekonomiki no.7

Mao Tsetoung 1972 Textes Choisis, Pekin: Editions en Langues Etrangeres.

Mao Tsetoung et la construction du socialisme 1975 Textes Inédits, Traduits et Présentés par Hu Chi-His Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Mao Tsetung 1977 Selected Works volume V Peking: Foreign Languages Press.

Marx, Karl (1844) 1932 “Aus den Exzerptheften:Ökonomische Studien” Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (hereafter MEGA) I/3 Berlin: Marx-Engels Verlag.

Marx, Karl (1857–58) 1953 Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

Marx, Karl (1861–63) 1956Theorien über den Mehrwert volume 1 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1861–63) 1962a Theorien über den Mehrwert volume 3 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1880) 1962b Randglossen zu Adolph Wagners “Lehrbuch…” MEW 19 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1894) 1964a Das Kapital volume 3 Berlin: MEW 25.

Marx, Karl (1871–72) 1964b “Statuts Généraux de L’Association Internationale des Travilleurs” The General Council of the First International: Minutes Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl (1875) 1964c Randglossen zum Programm der deutschen Arbeiterpartei in Marx-Engels Ausgewäwalte Shriften volume 2 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1875)1965 Le Capital in Oeuvres:Économie volume 1 Paris: Gallimard.

Marx, Karl (and Friedrich Engels) (1848) 1966 Manifest der kommunistischen Partei in Marx-Engels Studienausgabe volume 3 Frankfurt a. M: Fischer Taschenbuch.

Marx, Karl (1871) 1971 On the Paris Commune Moscow: Progress.

Marx, Karl (1847)1872 Die moralisierende Kritik und die kritisierende Moral MEW 4 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (and Friedrich Engels)(1845–46)1973a Die deutsche Ideologie in MEW 3 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1874–75) 1973b Konspekt von Bakunins Buch ‘Staatlichkeit und Anarchie’ in MEW 18 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1844) 1976a Kritische Randglossen zu dem Artikel’ Der König von Preussen…’ MEW 1 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl(1861–63) 1976b Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Manuskript1861–63) in MEGA II/3.1 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1858–61) 1980 Ökonomische Manuskripte und Schriften in MEGA II/2 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1872) 1987 Das Kapital volume 1 in MEGA II/6 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx. Karl (1863–67) 1988 Ökonomische Manuskripte in MEGA IV/1 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1863–67) 1992 Ökonomische Manuskripte on MEGA IV/2 Berlin: Dietz.

Marx, Karl (1868–81) 2008 Manuskripte Zum Zweiten Buch des “Kapitals” in MEGA Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Meisner, Maurice 1999 Mao’s China and After New York: The Free Press.

Most, Johann (1876) 1989 Kapital und Arbeit in MEGA II/8 Berlin: Dietz.

Rabinowitch, Alexander 2004 The Bolsheviks Come To Power Chicago: Haymarket.

Schram, Stuart 1974 Mao Tse-Tung Unrehearsed Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Serge, Victor 2001 Mémoires d’un Révolutionnaire Paris: Robert Laffont.

Stalin, J 1970 Selected Writings Westport: Greenwood.

Stalin, J 1980 Oeuvres Choisies Tirana: Nëntori.

Sweezy, Paul 1993 “Socialism, Legacy and Renewal” in Monthly Review, January.

1. This text is the only place in Marx’s writings where this two-phase temporal division of the future society is found.↩︎
2. In Marx’s own English.↩︎
3. In his edition of the manuscript published as Capital III Engels translates this passage in German, but not quite literally (Marx 1964a:99).↩︎
4. Like the widely used phrase of the Left: “victory of the October(1917) revolution” by which is of course meant the seizure of political power.↩︎
5. This idea reappears in Marx’s second manuscript for Capital II ( Marx 2008:347). Interestingly, considering both the texts of the two volumes of Capital on allocation-distribution as given here one sees clearly that they refer not to the higher phase of the socialist society but to its lower phase as we find in the Gothacritique, that is, we already have a society of free and associated individuals with neither commodity production nor wage labor.↩︎
6. The term ‘shopkeeper’ is in English in the text.↩︎
7. For Marx wage is simply the value of labor power which is a commodity (see for example Marx 1988:16).↩︎
8. The discussion of socialism in Lenin’s case was purely theoretical, the outcome of his specific (mis)reading of Marx, while for Stalin the theorization came as a rationalization of the actually existing regime he was heading.↩︎
9. In the expression the term “separate”(otdelnyi) does not appear in Moscow’s English version.↩︎
10. Marx 1987:572, 1992:502.↩︎
11. Translated from Chinese and transmitted to us by the distinguished Chinese scholar Wang Hui in a private communication.↩︎
12. Here we draw on the distinguished historian M. Meisner 1999:370–71.↩︎
13. Che Guevara with his otherwise refreshingly critical notes on the soviet Textbook on Political Economy in his recently published manuscripts does not cross the bounds of the ‘State socialist’ framework including its commodity production and wage system. See Guevara 2006.↩︎
14. This echoes what Marx had said in his 1871 Address on the Commune that it had made “individual property a truth” by transforming the means of production “into instruments of free and associated labor” (Marx 1971:75).↩︎

Source: Stenographer’s report of proceedings held before the Moabit Special Court on June 22, 1921, published by Felix Halle, 1921. Franke Verlag Leipzig-Berlin.

Translated: and annotated by Ed Walker.

Max Hoelz (or Hölz) was one of the communist leaders of the March Action of 1921. From a working-class background, Hoelz had worked in London and trained in Dresden as an engineer. He had nothing to do with politics before the revolution but used the military experience he gained during the First World War to lead columns of armed workers during the Kapp putsch and the Central German insurrection. Although abandoned by the KPD after his arrest, he attained cult status, which he himself encouraged, and which was exploited for propaganda purposes in Germany and the Soviet Union. Hoelz’s autobiography, Vom “Weißen Kreuz” zur Roten Fahne (From the “White Cross” to the Red Flag) became a best-seller. He drowned in the Oka River near Nizhny Novgorod on September 15, 1933, in suspicious circumstances.

Retrieved from marxists.org.

Hoelz: Highly respected, venerable, exceptional special court!

Chairman (interrupting abruptly): Hoelz, if you want to insult us here, I will immediately forbid you to speak.

Hoelz: I merely underline the point: You have the power and therefore the right. Whether you forbid me to speak at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the trial, that’s all the same to me. I’ll speak if you let me speak and I will say what I want and what I feel. When I speak, then I speak. I’m not doing it to defend myself. If I were to defend myself, I would have to feel guilty. But I do not feel guilty, least of all before a bourgeois court, which I do not recognize.

As I was led into this room, a picture came into my mind, from my childhood. In a village where I went to school, I was once in a puppet theater and saw the trial of Dreyfus. And when I see you like this, then I must inevitably think of the wooden marionettes of the puppet theater. (Laughter in the auditorium, which the chairman reprimands.)

I do not want to insult you, I just want to express everything that I feel. I regard you just as wooden puppets, without feeling. You are heartless.

I do not want to comment on the speech made by the “honorable” state prosecutor. The prosecutor’s indictment is a funeral oration for bourgeois society, which employs him and from which he may earn his fee. I also have nothing to add to the remarks made by my defense lawyers. My defense lawyers are mentally far superior to me, but in a practical revolutionary sense I wipe the floor with all three of them. You are putting on trial a human beast, so scream the bourgeoisie, so scream the hounds of the bourgeois press. And that’s how the “honorable” state prosecutor’s speech also sounds. Very well. I, as the so-called accused—which in reality I am not—since I am the accuser—have the right to say a few words about my character. I want to dissect this beast. I want to dissect it so that you get a real picture of this beast.

I

I was born the son of an edge-mill worker. My father worked for many years as a day laborer. We were six brothers and sisters, two of us died when very young. My father was a hard-working man, but he had a hot temper. He was no sycophant. As soon as he knew that he was expected to lick someone’s boots, he was on his way. And so it was that we moved through six or seven villages. Which for me meant a lot of different schools. But in any case, I never had the time to do the homework set by country schools. When I reached the age of eleven, I already had to earn money for the family. First, I tended the geese, later in summer I herded cattle and horses. In winter I had to drive the horses on the threshing machine.

My parents were very religious, as they still are. My father is Catholic, my mother Protestant. They raised us in accordance with their religions. I cannot remember a single Sunday that we did not go to church, what’s more not for superficial reasons, in order to be seen, but out of inner need. Not once did we sit down to dinner without praying, we did not go to bed without saying our prayers. My father earned 10 Marks per week. We were six children, later we were four. We all had to work, and we did so honestly. My parents took care of my grandparents. I had to spend hours taking food to my grandparents in a distant village. I thought that when I left school I would also have to take care of my parents. I have such tremendous respect for my father and my mother. My father never once went to the pub. He had just one pleasure. On Sundays he sat on the sofa and smoked a cigar. This man, great at his work and modest in his needs, is the typical non-class-conscious proletarian. He is a great animal lover, who came from a family of country squires. He had attended one of the better schools in Ulm, but his love of horses led him back to the simple rural profession. This man does not share my attitude and never did. He is ashamed of my attitude. Nor can one demand of such a person that he should take my attitude. He cannot fully understand my action, but perhaps he will still come to comprehend it.

When I left school, I would have liked to have become a locksmith, but my parents were dirt poor and could not pay for any apprenticeship. After my confirmation I was given over to a landowner as a day laborer. I did all the tasks that there are in the countryside. This work never bothered me. I’ve always striven to move forward, not just to live, but to earn, to pay back my parents for what they’ve done for me and my brothers and sisters. My parents set their greatest hopes on me, as I was the most gifted of their children. In the two years that I spent on the land, in my few hours of leisure I brought myself so far through reading books that I broadened my horizons, encountering a world that was unknown in my village.

At the end of these two years came the first independent and decisive step in my life. Without my parents’ consent, I went to the city. After two months I took an even greater gamble. At the age of 16 I emigrated to England and tried to advance my career there. My wishes came true insofar as I managed to secure “a position” as a volunteer in a technical office. People in England are more broadminded than in Germany. They do not demand a statutory certificate or examination for every post. You can raise yourself up by your own efforts. In England they don’t ask, “who is your father?” In England what matters is the man, what he does, what he accomplishes. Today I know that the dispossessed class is also exploited in England because of the capitalist system, but at that time I felt freer than in Germany. During the day I visited the technical college in a London suburb, while at night I washed hackney cabs. With this night work I earned my keep, school fees and money for books. In England I was very hungry and often did not have the basic wherewithal to buy dry bread for myself. I once went for three days without enjoying a single crumb of bread, collapsing in the street.

To fulfill my duty to do military service, I had to return to Germany. I did not immediately find a position in my profession as a mechanic. At first, I worked as a porter at the Architektenhaus in Wilhelmstrasse while I tried to find a job that matched my knowledge. It was a difficult time. Hundreds of jobseekers queued in the places where jobs were issued “onto the market.” Then I went to Siemens and Halske where I brought up the workers’ food during their lunch break. Only after a long wait did I succeed in finding employment with Arthur Koppel, in my profession as a mechanic. I was assigned to the allied company of Bachstein and sent from here to a railway construction site in Bavaria. In this job the engineers said to me: Hoelz, you are a decent man. Try to visit a technical school for another two or four semesters. I tried to prepare myself for technical university, but I could not get the means to do so from my parents. To start with, I wanted to obtain the “one-year’s service” certificate.1

I went to Dresden so that I could visit a “crammer”—an Institute that prepared young men for the “one year’s service examination” there. In Dresden I found it hard to get by. I could not take a position as a mechanic, because I would have had to work during the day and there would have been no time left for my schoolwork. So, I had to look around for all sorts of job opportunities. I could have stolen, if I had been inclined to do so; I did not lack hunger as an incentive. In the evening I did not shy away, as a twenty-year-old, from setting up skittles for the pleasure of satiated, fat bourgeois. For which I received 75 Pfennigs per evening. With such occupations I earned enough to keep my head just about above water. Finally, I found a job as a projectionist in a cinema theater in the Wettinstrasse. For which I received 25 Marks per week. With this I had money to rent a proper room, to visit the “crammer” and buy books. Because of my double employment, as a student and a worker, I led a very stressful, unhealthy lifestyle. After leaving the “crammer” I had to go and do the cinema screenings, which I could only leave after the last evening performance. Then I started on my schoolwork. Often, when morning dawned, I was still sitting in my clothes over my books. Then I went off to school in the morning without having gone to bed. I led this life for a year. Then I was called up in the general conscription.

The medical examination found a terrible change in my physical condition. Whereas I had qualified for the cavalry a few months earlier, I was now sickly and unfit for service in the ranks. The military doctors could not explain the causes of my sudden physical decline. I joined the reserves. Because I myself felt incapable of further pursuing the life I had led up to this point, especially because I suffered from frequent headaches, I consulted various doctors. They suspected that I had tuberculosis. The doctors unanimously advised me against further attempts to complete the one-year’s service exam, also recommending an apprenticeship in the open air. Following this advice, I went to the Vogtland, where I found suitable employment. I got to know and married my wife there. That’s how I stayed stuck in Vogtland.

II

At the outbreak of the war I enlisted with the Royal Saxon Hussars in Grossenhain as a volunteer. In the belief that I was fighting for a good and just cause, I took to the field full of enthusiasm. I would have felt ashamed to stay at home while others went out. I was assigned to the staff headquarters of the General Command. I do not forget the day before the General Command moved out. It was in Neustadt and General von Carlowitz made a vigorous speech to his troops. He said, “When we are in enemy territory, we do not want to move in as robbers, plunderers, and brigands, but as men defending their homeland.” I am convinced that General von Carlowitz meant his words honestly. But just a few days later, during the invasion of Belgium, the General had to acknowledge that reality made it impossible to abide by the fine speeches that he had given at home. The first encounter with the English took place at Ypres. As we marched on we saw 12 inhabitants lying on the street, shot dead, among them two girls of roughly 10 and 12 years old. These people had not fallen in battle; they had been summarily executed. When we asked why these people had been shot, we and our comrades were told that they had been francs-tireurs. A German Lieutenant apparently had been asked the time by one of the girls. Taking this opportunity, the child was said to have shot him down with a pistol. We took up quarters in this place and got to know the inhabitants. It turned out that the accusations against those who had been shot were plain nonsense. They were not francs-tireurs at all, the child had no pistol; the simple fact was that they were innocent and had been shot down against the law. There was also a house in the village, on whose gate was written in chalk: “Here are the children of the dead.” There were fifteen or twenty children in one room. That was a shocking sight to me.

Now came trench warfare. At first General von Carlowitz held the command, followed by General von Schubert. I must emphasize that I had a high regard for these two as men. Both were typical of the old and honorable military. They rode through the thick of the shellfire. It was only when others came to the top of the General Command that the bouts of drinking and rakish goings-on began among the officers, which aroused the hatred of the common man. People who had never seen the enemy bragged about the Iron Cross, which was rarely given at the time.2 A military policeman, about whom we said that three men could not encircle his waist, had been given the Iron Cross for his services as an informer, while he got all dizzy about the fact that a heavy shell landed and exploded five meters in front of him, without causing him any injury. I saw the wounded coming dirty, hungry and thirsty from the front and not being fed rations, but instead being fed insults by the officers for not having fought bravely enough.

I then came to Cavalry Section 53, where I was assigned as a dispatch rider. I took part in the entire campaign, partly on the Somme, partly in Champagne, and partly in Galicia. I saw hundreds, thousands of men bleed to death. I was so shaken by the experience that I began to think about the purpose of this slaughter. After the impressions made by the battles on the Somme and before that at Ypres, the question, “why?” would not let me go. I felt, something is not right here. I had taken to the field with the firm conviction that I was fighting for a just and good cause, but my experiences made me realize that the fight we were waging was not a struggle for justice. I saw people who had never known each other and had previously caused no harm to one another slaughter each other with such barbarism. It was as though the scales had fallen from my eyes. I could not speak about this with my comrades. The cavalrymen were raw and had no sense of what I was feeling. When I tried to protect captured Englishmen against mistreatment by my comrades and complained to them, I was treated as a spy, especially because I had been to England before the war, could talk to the Englishmen in their own language and showed understanding for their feelings. At the sight of fallen and captured Englishmen, I remembered that many people had treated me well in England. I was a human being who had to come to terms with himself. I tried to find my way out of this labyrinth of thoughts. After doubt had taken away my childhood beliefs and my religious ideas had wavered, I had to think through all the questions again. We had been taught that there must be rich and poor, and that the poor were assured a place in the Kingdom of Heaven in return for their life in this world. But what I saw in the field is that the world is divided into the oppressed and the oppressors.

Before I come to talk about the struggles of 1918, I would first like to weave in an experience that became crucial in my transformation. As we advanced on the offensive in 1915, we broke through the enemy lines, entering an area that was previously held by the French and the English. We encountered a field of corpses. The fallen were French, English, Slav and German. The dead had lain there unburied for six months. The corpses looked black. A thick, yellow substance streamed out of their eye sockets. The stink was dreadful. You could not linger a single minute without having to cover your nose and mouth with a handkerchief. And yet I stood by these corpses for hours and asked myself the same question again and again: what would the relatives who sent their loved ones off to fight “for the Fatherland” do if they saw their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons in this condition? I think they would have pulled out all the stops to put an end to this killing. I fought a hard struggle to the bitter end. I had lost my childhood faith, but I had still not yet found a new world view. I had not solved this puzzle myself, and it had not been solved by those I asked.

During the 1918 offensive we advanced from Cambrai. It was a time when our difficulties in getting rations had reached the ultimate. We got a level spoonful of jam a day, and so little bread that we could hardly stand on our feet. We had to march 40 to 50 kilometers per day. Only at Amiens did we come to a halt. We heard that the French had received reinforcements. And we felt the truth of this message soon enough. We stopped at the corner of a forest, 100 meters from our own artillery. Our side’s artillery started a barrage; half an hour later an even more intense barrage began from the other side. A shell struck 20 meters away. I saw that it was a direct hit; it exploded. I heard screaming, and eight meters away a telephone operator collapsed, as he repaired the broken wires to the observation post. It was a young man, who might have been 18, but looked like a 16-year-old. He was badly hit. We could see that his lower leg was only hanging on by his puttee. The wounded man shouted, “Mother, Mother” over and over again. This episode agitated me so much that I did not know what I should think and do. My own horse had been struck dead by the blast. We had to get out of the forest. At precisely this moment my comrade, with whom I had been in the field for all four years, was struck by a shell, which ripped out his entire lower back. He stayed alive for another 15 minutes. His eyes were completely vitrified. He cried out my name again and again. That sight, and the utter impotence of not being able to do a thing to help, shook me so much that people who saw me later, after I had returned to our camp, took me for being mentally ill.

But before I made my way back, more serious experiences were in store for me. An infantryman, coming out of the firing line, mistakenly gave me the wrong directions. Now I too ran into the hail of hostile bullets with my new horse, the horse of my fallen comrade. My horse reared up, turned over, and I fell under him and stayed lying there, stunned by the fall, for six hours. As German soldiers later took this position, they found me and pulled me out. We now advanced 200 to 300 meters, but then the fire became so intense that we had to take cover. There were small foxholes in this location, intended for just one man. Two of us dived for shelter in one of these foxholes and waited—thirsty, hungry and freezing cold—for the raging fire to ease off. But the fire only got worse. A shell struck nearby, and the mass of earth that was thrown up buried us alive. Only after some time did incoming reinforcements manage to dig us out during a pause in the barrage. We then had to beat the retreat; our troops could not hold out any longer. We then reached calm near Verdun.

Since I had suffered concussion from being hit by the flying earth, and had also received an injection for contusion, I could have reported sick and stayed in the field hospital. But I had seen enough how the military doctors dealt with wounded comrades and knew what I could expect from their treatment. I reported back to the front and was assigned to a machine gun division. Despite this, I got into the clutches of the military doctors against my will. When I was detailed to the machine gun division, my feet festered because of ingrowing toenails. So, I had to return to barracks. A doctor saw me there and ordered my compulsory transfer to the Verdun field hospital for surgery. In the hospital, I asked the doctor who was treating me if my nails were going to be torn out again, as I had already had an operation of this sort in peacetime. The doctor said that was none of my business, we do things the way we want. Seven men stood round me holding me down while the surgeon tore my nails out. I shivered, had a panic attack, got restless and started raving. To calm me down and to demonstrate that they were finished, they showed me my bloodied toes. It seemed to me as though they were making a mockery of my agitated state. Now I endured frequent panic attacks and defended myself against every change of bandages with my bare fists. Thereupon I was transferred to a hospital for the mentally ill in southern Germany. I found sensible physicians, people who set great store by treating the psyche, the soul of the patient; doctors who knew perfectly well that they could not win the affection of the sick with rough treatment. After seven weeks I was sufficiently healed to be released as fit for garrison duty and reported to the barracks where I was to serve. But it turned out that my nerves had suffered far more than had previously been thought. I was unfit for duty and they sent me on convalescent leave to my wife in the Vogtland. Since being buried alive by the explosion, my headaches had been so bad that I was often in despair. The train journey had put me under great stress. The headaches were so intense that I thought I was going crazy. It was while I was in this mental condition that I made the suicide attempt reported by the medical experts. I was dismissed as unfit for military service with a monthly pension of 40 Marks.

I now sought to return to my civilian career. But wherever I looked for a post they took a dim view of my discharge due to a nervous disorder. Again and again I received the same decision: We regret that we cannot hire you because of your condition. Finally, after four letters of application and a personal interview, I got a job as an engineer at the Glaser company. I was sent to a railway construction project in Lorraine where I was to supervise more than 150 workers. But it soon became clear that I was no longer able to work in my old profession. I found it impossible to sit in a closed room, do calculations and technical drawings. I was fired and had to look for work once again.

III

In November 1918 I returned to the Vogtland, unemployed. I went to the small industrial town of Falkenstein, where the economic situation was bleak. There were 5,000 unemployed out of a population of 15,000. I was elected Chairman of the Unemployed Council. We very soon came into conflict with the authorities. The bitterness felt by the town’s poor towards the mayor was immense. As far as unemployed or poor people were concerned, this splendid official adhered strictly to the letter of the law. As far as his own interests and those of the propertied classes were concerned, he could be more flexible. He treated soldiers’ wives in the coarsest manner, answering their legitimate requests by threatening to have them thrown down the stairs. He threatened the unemployed, who demanded work or an increased level of support, because it was impossible to get by on what was officially granted, with military force. There were also problems regarding the coal supply at that time. The poor had no fuel. There are vast forests near Falkenstein, but they only existed to pour even more cash into the moneybags of their already filthy rich owners. The poor weren’t allowed to lay a finger on the forest, under threat of heavy punishment. Self-help by the unemployed put an end to this absurdity. The rich forest owner, the Chamberlain Baron von Trützschler-Falkenstein, was forced into allowing wood to be felled in his forests and given away at low prices to those in need. The unemployment council also insisted that Falkenstein’s potatoes, which had previously been unavailable, were delivered to the town’s poor. It turned out that in several cases not only potatoes and peas, but also unrationed food had been offered to the mayor for purchase. The mayor declined, unlike his colleagues from in neighboring cities, only to save the city’s purse in the interests of the few well-off. After the mayor had torn down a public notice issued by the unemployment council, he was forced to march at the head of the procession at the next demonstration. But once this demonstration was over, the mayor alerted the higher authorities in Dresden to the specter of a Red insurrection in Falkenstein. He succeeded in getting the military sent to Falkenstein in response to this malicious denunciation. The usual prosecutions began after the Reichswehr arrived in Falkenstein. Members of the unemployment council who had not already fled were arrested and transported to Plauen, after searches had been carried out. My own house was searched. They ransacked everything and rummaged through every cupboard. Except the cupboard where I was hiding. The next day, the unemployed turned up in droves in front of the town hall and demanded the withdrawal of the troops. Negotiations then took place between the unemployed and the military. The soldiers declared that they were only marching against Falkenstein because their leaders had told them that robbery and plunder was taking place there. So, the Reichswehr withdrew. We took the mayor and several city councilors hostage and demanded that the captured comrades be released.

My persecution began in consequence of these events. I was wanted as a ringleader for breach of the peace: a reward of 3,000 Marks was put on my head. I had to leave Falkenstein. I then traveled around the country under a different name and started working illegally for the revolutionary cause. After I had instinctively joined the Communist Party, I learned about the tasks of the revolutionary struggle during my illegal agitation, as well as by reading communist books and attending courses. I now realized that it is not enough to side with the oppressed and dispossessed class based on instinctive emotions. Rather, you must fight for the social revolution using all the means that I had learned to abhor so desperately in the war. I came home from the war a pacifist. But the events in the Vogtland and my subsequent study of the theory and practice of the class struggle taught me that the liberation of the working class cannot prevail through economic struggle alone; a struggle for political power is necessary, using all available means of violence, because the bourgeoisie itself seeks to maintain the economic enslavement of the working class using all available means of violence. I came to realize that the social revolution is coming, and must come, because it is rooted in the whole history of mankind. Objectively speaking, there is not the slightest doubt that the pressure on the masses will become ever stronger, until the masses realize that only the ruthless struggle against their former oppressors can save the proletariat from ruin. The experiences of the past two years have made me the mortal enemy of the bourgeoisie. I originally joined the proletarian cause for economic reasons. Once I entered the movement, I explored the meaning of the proletarian revolution in greater depth. I never persuaded myself that an armed putsch could bring about the social revolution. The social revolution comes in consequence of certain economic conditions and social forces. However, that does not exclude the possibility of promoting the revolution through actions, and every true revolutionary must be ready to take up the struggle at any moment when he is driven into it by the old social forces. I am only a simple soldier of the Revolution. Bit by bit, the scientific realization came to my burning heart that the social revolution is an iron necessity. If I had not gained the scientific conviction of the coming of the revolution, the many disappointments of recent years would have led me astray from the belief that the social revolution will end in victory. The workers organized in the Social Democratic Party and the Independent Social Democratic Party will not be able to avoid the violent unfolding of the class struggle, even if under the influence of their socially treacherous leaders they declare themselves not for, but against the revolution.

During my illegal wanderings in Saxony, I came to a small place where comrades told me that the authorities were on my trail. The comrades said, “Get to safety. Get your long hair shorn and get out of here!” I followed their advice, got my hair cut, put it in an envelope and sent it to Reichswehr Colonel Berger, who was leading the military’s efforts to track me down. I wrote to him: “Here is the long hair of Hoelz, which shall betray him, look for the guy who goes with it.”

I made my way back to Falkenstein and was arrested soon after my return; but I was just as quickly freed by the revolutionary workers. Falkenstein was occupied about five times in a row by Reichswehr troops. Every time, after the troops left, the revolutionary movement in the working class became stronger. I could not stay for long in Falkenstein, not least because the rewards for my capture were constantly being increased. I left Saxony and traveled to central and northern Germany. I was arrested at the Leuna Works near Halle but freed again by revolutionary workers. I then went to Hanover and did a study course there. I agitated for a while in Central Germany, then returned to Falkenstein. I spoke at public meetings and was arrested and freed again by revolutionary workers. I moved on to Weglau in Saxony, where I agitated and freed captive comrades. During this erratic illegal life, I lived in hundreds, even thousands of proletarian families with whom I found refuge. I myself did not own a single Pfennig. Workers shared with me the last of what they had. People had no meat, no butter, just a little bread. In 1919 I went seriously hungry, and my comrades with me. The realization that hundreds of thousands of people are living with me in Germany, people who are pursuing the same goal of social revolution, convinced me to endure the struggle and continue fighting.

Shortly before the Kapp putsch, I ended up in Selten in Bavaria, accompanied by several comrades. We wanted to travel further on the next day. We already had train tickets to Hof. We saw several civilians who seemed to be taking an interest in us, arousing our suspicions. We soon realized that something was in the air, so we decided not to leave on the train, as it seemed we could be arrested at the station. We beat it into the forest, which was deep in snow. The henchmen remained on our trail, supported by Bavarian gendarmes, hounding us from 4 o’clock in the morning until 7 o’clock in the evening. At 7 o’clock we arrived in Oberkottrau near Hof, where we wanted to board the train, when we heard that the government had fallen in Berlin. This news emboldened me somewhat. When a gendarme barged into one of our comrades, I gave him some cheeky answers: “You know my wanted poster. Do you even know who your government is? Maybe we’ll be summoning you to your roll-call tomorrow, and I’ll pick you out for myself.” The gendarme went back to the station building. We assumed that he was phoning through to Hof, so that we would be arrested there. But he came back with four other colleagues. In the meantime, we’d already boarded the train. The gendarmes got into the carriage and entered our compartment to arrest me. They demanded that I get off. I said, I’m not getting out, I’m staying here. The officials pointed their revolvers at me. I was always clear on the matter: if they catch me, my head will be on the block. That’s why I always carried an egg-grenade,3 which I held ready before the gendarmes’ entrance, releasing the safety catch before their eyes. I called to the gendarmes: “If anyone touches me, the whole carriage will blow up!” The gendarmes shouted to the horrified passengers: “Stay in! Stay seated!,” but they were the first to get to safety. I was the only one left in the car, taking the opportunity to leave the compartment on the opposite side to the station building. I stormed over the tracks to escape my pursuers. I then marched on foot to Hof and on the next day, back to Falkenstein.

IV

In Falkenstein, the working class was arming itself. They had several skirmishes with the Reichswehr. We moved our revolutionary headquarters to Schloss Falkenstein. The civil defense forces were disarmed. Then I moved with an armed squad to Plauen, where we freed political prisoners. It was the best day of my life, as I could give our comrades back their freedom. If, at the trial, some bourgeois witnesses have alleged that the bourgeoisie is very cowardly and that the cowardice of the bourgeoisie is due to the successes of the revolutionary working class, I can confirm that this is so, according to my experiences. Plauen is a city with 150,000 inhabitants. It had a garrison and a constabulary. I got through to the prison with just 50 men, without anyone daring to obstruct me. As some of our prisoners had been deported further away by the Reichswehr, we took the Chief Prosecutor of the district court, Dr. Huber, as a hostage, declaring that we would release him only if our comrades in captivity were released, and that the records of the district court, which had likewise been taken away, were handed over to us. Dr. Huber, who was known to us as a reactionary, cannot complain that we treated him badly. We fulfilled our side of the bargain by releasing him immediately after the arrival of the requested prisoners and files. We formed a regular Red Army. We hoped that the further development of military action would make it possible to hook up with the Red Army of the Ruhr in the spring. We held out to the last. Only after the Red Army of the Ruhrgebiet had been dissolved did the government dare to act against us. The bourgeois and social-democratic press declared with rapture that there were never more than 150 men behind Hoelz. But if this were true, and if the action had not been supported voluntarily by the revolutionary proletariat, why did the government mobilize, according to its own statements, 40–50,000 soldiers against the Vogtland?

Peace and law and order, even in the bourgeois sense, held sway in the Vogtland and in Falkenstein until the Reichswehr showed up. We had demanded that the factory owners raise specific contributions for the Red Guard. The factory owners counter-demanded that we take over the protection of property, houses and human lives. Thus, during the period of the Kapp putsch there was a tolerable, if not entirely peaceful relationship between the revolutionary proletariat and the rest of the population. The bourgeoisie did not cause us any special difficulties. The picture changed when we heard that the governments in Berlin and Dresden had decided to send the Reichswehr into the Vogtland. We had no reason to show any consideration to the advancing armed force of the counterrevolution. We threatened the bourgeoisie with the harshest reprisals. We declared that the moment the Reichswehr arrived, we would blow up the houses of the rich and slaughter the bourgeoisie. It would have been madness for the revolutionary advance guard of a few hundred to a thousand men to allow itself to be easily encircled by a force of 40,000–50,000 men, armed with all kinds of technical equipment, not least artillery. To give our words the impetus of action, so that they did not appear to be empty slogans, we set fire to some of the bourgeoisie’s villas. Otherwise nothing happened to the bourgeoisie. No members of the bourgeoisie were beaten or shot. Despite all its hardships, the Vogtland proletariat showed itself to be less bloody-minded and cruel than the over-fed, but psychically bloodthirsty bourgeoisie. Not a single citizen died during the days following the Kapp putsch.

After a few days, we saw that our position had become untenable. At a nightly roll-call, I told the revolutionary troops that there were only two options; first to attempt, as a closed squad, to push through to the Czechoslovakian border and then transgress as a closed association onto foreign territory where we would be interned. The second option involved the immediate dissolution of the troops, after which each comrade would have to try to escape on his own through the Reichswehr’s cordons. We decided on the second option. I myself went with my companions towards Wingall, off the main road. We hid in a homestead where a haystack, barely able to hide four or five people, served as our refuge. After a few hours, the homestead was surrounded by the Reichswehr. It was afternoon and the light was already fading. The soldiers discovered our haystack and started stabbing the hay with their fixed bayonets. We had the choice of shouting “We are here” or staying quite calm. We stayed calm, even though we were staring certain death in the eye. We were ready to face the thrust of a bayonet in the face at any moment. Then the signal sounded to regroup. The soldiers climbed down from our haystack. Some comrades wanted to stay, but I said, we’re not doing that, they’ll be back. We took off as fast as we could in the direction of the border. We marched through the whole night, wet, hungry, freezing. It rained non-stop. The next morning we marched on, without knowing where to go. In the afternoon we reached the homestead with the haystack again and learned that the Reichswehr had returned an hour later after our escape and had rummaged through the entire haystack, shaking it apart. Now we crossed the border. We made it to Neudek in Bohemia.4 We boarded the train in Eger.5 Arriving in Pilsen, we attracted suspicion. The gendarmes came after us. At the station we were taken off the train. We were wet and dirty, they found an egg-grenade on me and arrested us. I was transported back to Eger. Czechoslovakia recognized me as a political refugee and did not extradite me. I went from Czechoslovakia to another country, which I will not name. Later I returned to Germany, with the sole purpose of helping the comrades who had been imprisoned, to provide support for their dependents and to try and free the prisoners themselves

V

As far as my participation in the March Action of 1921 is concerned, I did not come to the comrades until after the uprising had started, making myself available to the revolutionary action committee. I took over the military leadership of a defensive struggle against the repression of the revolutionary working class, which was always ready to go from the defensive struggle onto the attack. I declare that to the best of my knowledge neither the United Communist Party, nor the Communist Workers’ Party, nor the Executive of the Communist International orchestrated the armed uprising in Central Germany.6 Of course, all three of these bodies have an interest in pushing the revolution forward. The March Action arose from Hörsing’s provocation.7 The revolutionary working class of Central Germany was instinctively opposed to working under the supervision of armed slaveholders. They went on strike, and the attempt to crush this strike ignited the insurrectionary action. The fact that the Communist Parties supported the struggle once it had begun was fully in keeping with their revolutionary duty. The working class of Central Germany is revolutionary to the bone. The working class of Central Germany awaits an action every day and every hour. It believes that this action must be initiated by a party or trade union. There is no doubt that the government, and especially Hörsing, noticed that the revolutionary working class had gone over from passivity to activism. And perhaps Hörsing speculated, not without reason, that sooner or later the day would have come when the party leaders would have called the masses to armed struggle. Hörsing tried to ignite the struggle earlier, at a moment that was more favorable for him. For this reason, he sent his green rangers8 into Central Germany. When I arrived in Central Germany, no worker yet had a weapon. During the March days I was in Berlin. I had no direct connection with a party. I was not sent, I went on my own free will and at my own discretion. I believed it was my duty as a revolutionary fighter to go and make myself available to my comrades. When I arrived, action committees had already been formed. According to the news we received, we had to believe that the entire revolutionary proletariat would stand united against Hörsing’s provocation. But, owing to the treacherous attitude of the SPD, and especially that of the USPD, a unified strong action of the proletariat did not materialize. Only when the Sip made arrests after incidents in Eisleben and Hettstedt and individual comrades were maltreated did the workers spontaneously take up arms. I took over the military task assigned to me. I led the struggle with all available means, not because I exalt violence, but because I have recognized that the class struggle of the proletariat can only be led towards its victorious objectives by means of violence. Two years ago, I still believed that the communist idea, the concept of emancipating the proletariat, could be carried out by means of an economic struggle, without the use of force. At the time I would have been ashamed to shake hands with someone like myself today. But when the revolutionary working class uses force, it does so only in response to the violence that the ruling class unleashes against the proletariat’s existential struggle and its attempts to raise itself up. It is the ruling class that was first to use violence. When a communist speaker appears today before a gathering and proclaims his views, he is persecuted, and violence is used against him. Yet every use of violence by the oppressed class is branded by the bourgeoisie’s public opinion as an injustice, as a crime. The ruling class grants us freedom of expression and freedom of speech only on paper. In practice, communist newspapers are banned, and communist assemblies prevented—all by means of violence.

The white murderers are under the protection of your corrupt judiciary. Thousands of workers have been unlawfully killed over the past two years. But the bourgeois courts do nothing. Bourgeois society craves the blood of the workers’ leaders. I ask you, have revolutionary workers ever killed a single leader of bourgeois society? Have revolutionary workers killed a single king, minister or party leader?

State Attorney Broh: Not in Germany.

(In fact, the sole exception of the killing of Minister Neuring in Dresden by the embittered crowd only confirms the rule that the German revolutionary proletariat has so far categorically not made use of individual terror.)

Hoelz (continuing): The revolutionary proletariat did not commit a single murder in Germany. How many political murders does German bourgeois society have on its conscience? How many intellectual leaders have been assassinated by the hand of civil society. I only need recall Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Jogiches, Landauer, Paasche, Eisner, Sült and the most recent victim, Gareis.9 All those named did not fall in open battle; they were insidiously murdered. They accuse me of the murder of the landowner, Hess. I humbly regret the killing of Hess, but Hess was not assassinated. He probably fell in battle in connection with revolutionary action.10 I suppose he had a gun and grabbed hold of the weapon out of fear. We held power in the Vogtland, but not a single judge or prosecutor was maltreated. But where you were in power, hundreds of proletarians were ambushed and murdered. A bloody trail indicates the advance of the Reichswehr and police. This hearing has proved it. In Schrapplau not three, but six workers were murdered by the police. The bodies lay without weapons, their breasts shot to pieces, in the village’s lime kilns. But no prosecutor, no judge, has shown up to atone for this crime. In the Leunawerk, 46 workers were murdered by the police!

Chairman: These are unilateral assertions by you that were not the subject of the hearing. I forbid you to make such remarks!

Hoelz: In Hettstedt two workers were murdered. A 58-year-old worker was shot dead on the open road for no reason. A 58-year-old man, who did not want to be searched on the street, was put up against the wall, shot and, as he lay there, an officer approached and kicked him three times in the face with the heel of his boot.

Chairman: If you continue like this, I’ll forbid you to speak.

Hoelz: I believe you. You don’t want to hear about it. This trial has proved that I am not the accused. No, it is the state attorney who stands accused! All your verdicts are verdicts against the revolutionary proletariat. But you do not condemn me. You condemn yourself. I am convinced that through this trial you have done more good for the Revolution than I have during my entire revolutionary activity.

If I had not seen for myself the death-defying way that the revolutionary working class has struggled, I would not find the strength to physically cope with the demands of this hearing. If I do not lose my sense of optimism in my cell, it is because of my feeling of solidarity with all proletarian fighters. If I was thus able to stand up to you, you may call it impudence; I call it revolutionary class consciousness, so it is the consciousness that I am not alone in the immense struggle. There are millions on this earth who stand by our cause and it will become hundreds of millions. This certainty gives me the strength and stamina to endure what is being imposed on me now. I hope that the revolutionary proletariat will one day give you the bill for everything you have done to the workers and what you are going to do to me. I hope that you accept your fate and bear it as I have born it and will bear it. You say you are not afraid. I believe you, I know you too little to deny that you have personal courage. But I assert that bourgeois society, which you represent today, is afraid of the revolutionary proletariat. That’s why you put me on trial only under the protection of the armed forces. The police are there to hold back the revolutionary proletariat.

As I already said, I do not want to reply to the indictment. I do not recognize the prosecutor’s statement and I do not recognize the judgment of the court. For me, it’s a matter of clarifying to the working class what motives I’ve acted on. I champion my actions with the courage that every revolutionary fighter must have. And if I had shot dead a man out of revolutionary necessity, or gave the order to do so, I would say so. If you pronounce the death sentence against me today, you will not kill much. You will kill the body, but you cannot kill the spirit. You are judging me, as you say. You can fell one Hoelz, but a thousand more Hoelzer11 will shoot up in his place. Among these thousand Hoelzer there will be men of iron, who will not make the revolution by slapping you in the face. There will come a time when the proletariat will no longer say, we cannot fight, we have no weapons. It will maul its opponents with its hands and with its fists! So long as the ruling class manages to rout 25,000 protesters with two or three machine guns, your rule will last. But the moment will come when the revolutionary proletariat pounces on the guns and smashes them or turns them around; then comes the real revolution! You, and the ruling class, can tremble at this revolution. What happened in Germany in 1918 was not a revolution! I know only two revolutions: the French and the Russian. The German revolution will surpass all revolutions in atrocity. The bourgeoisie forces the proletariat to commit atrocities. The bourgeoisie operates in a cold and calculating way. Sentiment is on the side of the proletariat. You regard the proletariat as bunglers in politics. The atrocities you inflict against the proletariat cannot yet be returned by the proletariat today; it is still too softhearted to do this, but as I said earlier, the day will come for the proletariat to become an animal. Then only cold calculation will decide. The proletariat will say: it is no longer possible for us to let the heart speak, we must use the fist to our advantage!

If you pass judgment on me today, I consider it a school exam. If you acquit me, which of course I do not expect, and which you cannot do, then tomorrow there would be four deaths in Berlin: three judges and one defendant. You would have to hang yourselves, because you would not be able to show your face before your class comrades, and I would have to hang myself, because I would be ashamed to face the revolutionary proletariat. Your verdict, whatever it may be, will be a class verdict. You can sentence me to 10, 15 years, or to life imprisonment, or yes, to death. Ten years imprisonment mean for me a poor mark, 15 years in prison a pass mark, a life in custody ten out ten; but if you condemn me to death, then I get a distinction, that is the best testimony that you can give me. Then you will prove to the revolutionary classes of the world that a true revolutionary has lived and has sealed his class consciousness with death. I am a fighter, I am a man of action: “Words cannot save us. Words break no chains. Action alone makes us free.”

My lawyers think it is important to declare that I am an idealist and a passionate fighter. How you feel about that means nothing to me. I cannot demand any bourgeois honor from you. You also cannot deny me bourgeois honor. I have never possessed the bourgeois honor that you are arguing about. For me, bourgeois honor means the art of living off the work of other people. It means a monocle in the eye, a full stomach and an empty head. For me, there is only one proletarian honor; you want to deny me this and you cannot. Proletarian honor means the solidarity of all the exploited, it means fraternity, it means proving by action that you love those who are close by you as your brothers. The world is our fatherland and all humanity our brothers.

I have hurled heavy words at you. As a matter of principle, I do not speak for your benefit. You will continue to be what you are: a judge for the bourgeois class. I cannot demand that my words will make any kind of impression upon you. I know that bourgeois society and you, as their representatives, will not come over to us through words, propaganda, even through books. You must be confronted with the iron truth; only then will you bend. You say, you are not afraid. All well and good, prove it, that you are not afraid, prove it by having the courage to pronounce such judgments against your own class brothers and comrades as you constantly impose on revolutionary workers. But you only pronounce harsh judgments against the revolutionary proletariat.

The prosecutor said to me, in the preliminary investigation, that if all workers are permeated with your ideas, then it must be easy for you to gain power on the basis of universal suffrage. I replied to him and say to you: you are not drawing the logical consequences from objective power relations. If the German people are sustained in the German ideology, “Everyone is a subject of the authority which has power over him,” by means of school, church, state and press, and at the same time and by the same means the illusion is reinforced, that there must be rich and poor, and the dear God wants that, so that the poor will go to Heaven.

Chairman: That is all irrelevant. You must defend yourself against the charges. We are not obliged to listen to revolutionary speeches. If you continue like this, I’ll forbid you to speak.

Hoelz: The German people must first be roused. But your judgments will cause the proletariat to escape more quickly from the ideology that you have imposed on it with the help of schools, the church and the press. The German proletariat must be shaken out of its sleep …

Chairman: I forbid you to speak. (The chairman gets up and goes into the conference room with the assessors.)

Hoelz (yelling at the judges through the still open door to the conference room): You can forbid the word, but you cannot kill the spirit.

Chairman (returning to the hall again): The defendant is to be led away for the time being.

Hoelz (shouting aloud): Long live the world revolution!

Hoelz is led away by the guard. His defenders rush after the escort.

1. Recruits who had gained this qualification only had to serve one year in the army instead of two.↩︎
2. Max Hoelz does not even mention, let alone brag, that he was awarded the Iron Cross during the war. He did not want to say anything during this speech that might ingratiate himself with his class enemies.↩︎
3. The Model 17 Eierhandgranate (“egg grenade”) was a small portable hand grenade used by German forces in World War I.↩︎
4. Now known by its Czech name, Nejdek.↩︎
5. Now known by its Czech name, Cheb.↩︎
6. The United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) was formed in December 1920 by the fusion of the Communist Party (KPD) and the left wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). The Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (KAPD) was established in April 1920, bringing together left-communists dissatisfied with the KPD’s rightward turn at its Heidelberg Congress in October 1919. Hoelz was expelled by the KPD for indiscipline and was for a time close to the KAPD.↩︎
7. Friedrich Otto Hörsing, a prominent SPD politician, was President of Prussian Saxony 1920–27.↩︎
8. A reference to the paramilitary Sicherheitspolizei (Sip or Sipo), who wore green uniforms.↩︎
9. Karl Gareis, a leader of the USPD, was assassinated in Munich just a few days before this hearing by Organisation Consul (O.C.), an ultra-nationalist force formed by disbanded members of the Freikorps.↩︎
10. Hoelz was sentenced in 1921 to life imprisonment for the murder of a landowner named Heß. It was claimed that Hoelz shot him on the street. The real culprit turned himself in later. Following the publication of Hoelz’s prison letters in 1927, which were published by the well-known journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, an appeal was made by numerous intellectuals (Bertolt Brecht, Martin Buber, Otto Dix, Albert Einstein, Leon Feuchtwanger, Carl Froelich, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Ernst Rowohlt, Arnold Zweig, etc.) for the review of the judgment to be published. On July 18, 1928, Hoelz, who had since rejoined the KPD, was amnestied and released. In 1929 he emigrated to the USSR.↩︎
11. This is a play on words in German: Holz means wood, figuratively speaking a tree or timber, and the plural is Hoelzer.↩︎

I have never attended a Trump rally. I don’t believe that he has held any here in Brooklyn. If he held one, I’d go to see it firsthand. The following account is based on reports in print and electronic media.

Small groups of ticket holders line up early, often enough in miserable weather, joined just before show time by many thousands more. The hawkers of souvenirs and conspiracies line up on the side. For the most part, they have few buyers—people already have their hats and T-shirts. Eventually, the crowd is let into the arena to the sounds of loud music that appears to have no obvious connections to Trump’s distinctive messages (think early Elton John and the Rolling Stones). Some local speakers, joined on occasion by darlings of the right-wing media (including Diamond and Silk, two black women who have secured a place in that orbit), get on stage and tell admiring tales of the president.

The president arrives; the crowd erupts in applause and cell phone photos. He takes the stage and takes it all in. He begins. There is no subtlety in what he says. And there are few polite preliminaries. He gets to what the crowd wants to hear. The script has mostly stayed the same since he began his campaign in 2015 although it now includes numerous references to how great he has been doing. He always seems to find time to talk about how unfairly he’s being treated. This is drama, not great drama—but recognizable drama.

The crowd knows what it has come for—a chance to be with others who support the president and want to see his show in person (there are more than a few who travel from rally to rally). He tries not to disappoint and mixes up old standards (“Crooked Hilary,” “Fake News,” “I’ll never let you down”) with new material that he’s trying out (like his recent “blunder” that led to the now infamous “Send them back!” chant in North Carolina) and the all but hilarious charge that the Democratic Party has been taken over by far-left socialists. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may deserve a some credit but she’s hardly on the far left. Rest assured, there’s not a Republican or Democratic Party member of Congress who has ever met a “far-left socialist.” Sad to say, almost no one else has either.

It’s a well-known call and response routine. But the crowd’s appetites for what he has to say are quickly satisfied and they begin drifting out while he’s still talking.

For the most part, the crowd isn’t all that interested in what Trump thinks; they’re more interested in what he represents—a rejection of all the “norms” that the liberal media never tire of passionately embracing. He says things that you’re not supposed to say and they get to share in the excitement that goes along with getting away with something. Truth be known, many of the “norms” in place since the end of World War II (such as the repression of popular movements in foreign lands through CIA covert operations and more or less continual warfare all over the world) deserve to be rejected. But the Democratic Party has now become the party that openly supports everything done around the world to protect American interests. That’s why there are so many ex-spies and veterans in the new Congress.

But it’s not only the crowd who has come to see Trump; it’s Trump who has come to see the crowd. What he wants to see is not only their votes come Election Day but their full-throated approval at the rally itself, most evident in their three word chants—”Lock her up,” “Build the wall, and “Drain the swamp.” And, of course, he also wants lots of coverage of the crowd and its excitement in the various news media.

For Trump, as for others in the American past, the electioneering, not the election, is the real story. There was a good deal of talk at the beginning of Trump’s presidency about him becoming more presidential. What that more or less meant is that he would learn how not to exaggerate every claim he made about his fortune, talent or popularity; that he would not lie about stupid things; that he would keep silent when that served the purposes of power; that he would postpone the most obvious profit-making opportunities that come with being president (like the book deals that Barack and Michelle Obama have scored) until after his term in office had expired, and so forth. But the transformation never happened! And no one who supported him seemed to care.

Trump is a performer, whose act has been shaped by Roy Cohn (arguably the most evil lawyer in American history), the comedian Andrew Dice Clay, radio shock-jocks like Howard Stern, and right-wing talkers like Rush Limbaugh. Dice Clay is especially interesting because he appeared on season one of Celebrity Apprentice. By that time, he had established himself as the most vulgar comedian in the country—for whom there were no boundaries to what he would say. He and Trump had a falling out—according to Dice Clay because Trump once claimed that he (Trump) was more popular. Clay’s response was to ask if Trump had ever sold out Madison Square Garden on two nights. Clay is still performing and, while he insists that he’s not into politics and doesn’t criticize Trump, he does complain that: “He stole my act.” Trump is a new incarnation of an old American personality, the con man—typified by the real P.T. Barnum (who, among other things, wrote a book titled The Art of Money-Getting) and the fictional Confidence Man of Herman Melville’s novel of that name.

His performances also echo widespread forms of carnival-like behavior during elections in English and early us history. The historian, Edmund Morgan, tried to make sense of what it meant:

It [the election carnival] enabled like-minded persons of all ranks to oppose, denounce, and even attack persons of all ranks on the other side. And it exerted a temporary equalizing influence within the ranks of each side. It gave a boost to the ego, a possibility of hobnobbing with the great, that anyone might enjoy simply by espousing one side or the other.

An election was a time when ordinary men found themselves the center of attention. The frantic solicitation of their votes elevated them to a position of importance they could not dream of at other times and it broke up the patterns of social deference that normally bound them.

The people…knew that this fraternization with them was temporary. There was a make-believe quality to it, a temporary pretending that people were equal when everybody knew they were not.

To put this idea another way, one might say that the carnival provided society with a means of renewing consent to government, of annually legitimizing (in a loose sense of the word) the existing structure of power. …By not carrying the make-believe forward into rebellion, they demonstrated their consent. By defying the social order only ritually, they endorsed it.

Trump’s people come because, as one essayist observed, it makes them “a little less lonely.” I understand full well that an awful lot of what happens at the rallies is objectionable. But, when it comes to understanding it and trying to figure out what to do about it, I think that there’s a misplaced emphasis on what’s in people’s heads rather than on what people’s heads are in. In this instance, people’s heads are in the crowd. The crowd is what allows them to violate rules, including rules that they otherwise routinely follow.

I end with the proposition that rally participants, and the much larger group of solid Trump supporters, will not change their loyalties by arguments about how he’s tricking them or by how things could be better if, for example, we had “Medicare for All.” Instead, they need to be presented with the possibility to be part of a different kind of life and a different kind of social group—way beyond the crowd, the “base,” the two parties, and the United States as we know it. For starters, that might mean imagining what a community might be like if it was defined not by all those it wants to keep out but by a conviction that a unified humanity is our only way out of the desperate circumstances we find ourselves in.

At the end of the rallies, individuals go back to their lives as they have been living them—miserable jobs, deep uncertainties about their future, worries about kids and bitterness about the life they didn’t get to have. Trump’s biggest con has been to convince them that what they have is worth holding on to.

This article was previously published in Issue #7 of Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life.