The 2024 US election returns revealed that a significant portion of the working class including black people, Latinos and women had voted for Donald Trump for President of the United States. Liberal Democratic Party regulars were left wringing their hands and shaking their heads after taking such a beating. And think pieces about the Trump victory have been coming out of any number of political currents. Furthermore, the existence of a fascist-oriented right wing is growing and strengthening in the United States, but more importantly in nations around the world. All of this made me think of my late friend and comrade, Loren Goldner and his 1980 essay The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Re-composition of Class Terrain. The essay was in part a polemic against what Loren called “official Marxism.” Loren’s alternative formulation helped to explain why large segments of the working class, both in the United States and in Great Britain, embraced Reagan and Thatcher in the elections in those two countries.

I first met Loren in 1984 at a Marxism study group held in a friend’s apartment in Chicago. He brought with him a number of copies of a very thick document that had been reproduced by mimeograph machine (the prevailing technology available to people with little money to burn). In that meeting Loren assailed what he called “official Marxism” that included the “monopoly capital theory” of the Marxist publication Monthly Review and all of those who adhered to Lenin’s theory of imperialism. He also referred to liberals and trade unions in league with the United States government as the “left wing of devalorization.” All of this was new to me. I bought one of the copies of The Remaking of the American Working Class he brought with him to the meeting. It had a very great impact on my thinking then and now.1

Re-reading this book, 40 years later, it is clear that the ideas developed by Loren in 1980 served as a guide to much of his thinking and writing throughout his life. In Remaking…Loren utilizes Marx’s three volumes of Capital to analyze the recent history of capitalism itself including class struggles and capitalism’s adaptation to ongoing crises. Each volume of Capital has a separate sub title that Loren used to explain Marx’s methodology: Volume 1 A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production; Volume 2 The Process of Circulation of Capital; Volume 3 The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. It was volume 3 that Loren emphasized in his analysis of the process of capitalist production in 1980. The Marxist concept of total capital—that is capitalism as a world-wide system was the orientation of Loren’s Remaking… And today it is critical to understanding why we are seeing such a global rise in neo-fascist ideas and action throughout the world today.

What is meant by “the system?”

We often hear today’s revolutionaries talk about “the system” without much clarity about what is meant by that. I am not going to try to summarize Loren’s body of work or even Remaking. But I will try to explain his concept of what “the system” is with a few of the concepts he uses to describe the functioning of global capitalism. Loren’s work defines “the system” in great detail using Marx’s categories to analyze how capitalism has worked historically and throughout Loren’s lifetime. Capitalism works by exploiting labor—taking some of the surplus value workers create in the form of profits and reproducing this system on an ever-expanding basis. This means that with an initial amount of money capital the capitalists force the workers to produce commodities whose sale results in more money than the capitalist had to start with. A key concept, valorization, means turning the production of goods and services needed for the reproduction of both the workers and the capitalist system into money capital that workers can use to live on (food, clothing, shelter, education and health care) and that capitalists can use to reproduce the system.

But where do capitalists get the necessary money capital to get the valorization process going to begin with? In its earliest form, capitalists had to get people to work for wages. In England this happened by taking away land needed by peasants to live on and forcing them into wage labor while increasing land that could be used for capitalist production. That primitive accumulation continued as capitalism spread around the world. Historically, colonialism brought peasants and land in the colonies into the capitalist system. Slavery and genocide were the building blocks for primitive accumulation in the United States Loren argues that such primitive accumulation continues perpetually and is a vital part of expanded reproduction today.

In the early development of capitalism in the United States, European peasants were brought here to serve as cheap labor and Africans were forced to perform slave labor. Genocide and slavery against native peoples enabled US capital to seize lands and expand the system to the West. In the late 20th Century capitalist production was subjected to a process of deindustrialization in industrial nations and moved to Asia and Latin America where displaced peasants took up wage labor at a fraction of the cost. The building of dams, mines and infrastructure around the world is displacing more people who are forced into wage labor and providing lands to capitalists to expand industrial capitalist development.

In early capitalism, increased accumulation was also achieved by increasing the length of the working day. This resulted in fierce class struggle to place limits on how long a worker had to work. Primitive accumulation through slavery and native genocide resulted in slave and native rebellions and, in the United States, a Civil War that ultimately abolished slavery. Native resistance to the theft of their lands was ultimately suppressed through brutal genocide.

Resistance to both primitive accumulation and efforts to lengthen the working day throughout the developed world and in the colonies led capital to alter the basic method of accumulation. Technology was used to lower the total wage bill and increase profits. And workers struggles took the form of resistance to job destroying machinery and to the intensification of work on the shop floor.

But this led to an adaptation by capital that was analyzed by Marx primarily in Volume 3 of Capital and stressed by Loren in his writing. Value created by workers had to be expanded in a process of self expanding valorization as capitalists turned money capital into more commodities resulting in greater money capital. Expansion therefore needed an ever-expanding amount of money—especially as the global capitalist class continued to engage in primitive accumulation and use technological innovation. For this reason, from the very beginning of capitalism money took on a specific form that involved a banking system and credit.

This money capital is termed fictitious capital because it has no value produced by living labor behind it. In fact it represents a claim on value not yet generated by living labor. And it is living labor that enables the valorization process. Fictitious capital has been used to replace human beings with machines and to move capital to areas of the world where wages are lowest. It has been used in places like China to build industrial cities and bring peasants from the countryside to these cities as wage labor, accelerating primitive accumulation.

Workers in industrial nations who are either displaced by machines or by movement of capital to lower wage areas of the globe are often forced into unproductive segments of the economy—that is jobs that do not contribute to the valorization process. All jobs in government, fast food and restaurant work, retail store clerks, and a variety of other service sector jobs are examples. To say such jobs are not productive in this sense does not demean the jobs or the people who work them. It simply means that they don’t contribute to the fundamental need of the capitalist system to reproduce the system. Unproductive labor can only exist if living workers pay taxes and purchase services with the wages they get for producing needed goods and services (like health care and education). One of the biggest segments of unproductive labor is the military. The function of the military is to protect the capitalist system but it does not contribute to the reproduction of capital in the valorization process.

Loren gives an important example of productive and unproductive labor. “The steelworker making steel for private cars is productive; the same steelworker making steel for (military) tanks is unproductive…(Also) consider the production of jet transport planes. A jet sold to a capitalist electronics firm flies components from Silicon Valley to Taiwan for assembly; then flies the final product to Spain for sale inside the Common Market. This plane sold from Capitalist A to Capitalist B continues to function as capital, as value valorizing itself. The same plane sold to the Saudi government for troop transport, absolutely ceases to be capital (because it no longer is used to reproduce the capitalist system).”

The prior discussion summarizes Loren’s detailed answer to the question “what is the system?”

So if revolutionaries wish to overthrow the system, what does that mean specifically? It means the abolition of wage labor, destroying the basis of social classes in the process. It means the elimination of classes, races, and other categories of oppression and exploitation. It means an end to the capitalist form of money. It means that labor power is no longer a commodity to be bought, exploited and sold. Rather labor becomes a process of self development where each worker is involved in producing goods and services that enable all to live a decent life. It means the elimination of government functions like police, prisons and even the courts that are designed to protect the system and replacing them with institutions designed to protect the health and security of everyone. In such a society, there is no need for national boundaries. In short, we want a system, as Marx writes, whose very purpose is the full and free development of every being. It is a society in which the needs, capacities and enjoyment of all are the true definition of wealth and the very point of society itself. And it is a system that no longer exploits and destroys nature and the entire eco-system.2

Crisis and Devalorization

In The Remaking of the American Working Class, Loren traces ongoing periods of global capitalist crisis along with the response of the working class—both class struggle and at times support for leaders like Reagan, Thatcher (and now Trump). He also traces the adaptations made by the Capitalist class that has allowed the system to continue. Crisis in our capitalist system has been ongoing. While many leftist analysts contend that crisis is due to either “overproduction” or “under consumption,” Loren argues vigorously that the root of crisis is not in the process of production at all. Rather crisis stems from the “periodic incompatibility of the M-C-M’ (money->commodity-> more money) valorization process and reproduction of total capital with the process of the expanded material reproduction of society.

In my own writings I describe this incompatibility as the creation of more claims on value than the system is able to produce. 3

Historically this incompatibility has been temporarily averted by the credit system—the circulation of fictitious values. But eventually there are more claims on value than what the system is able to produce. At this point various ways are found to temporarily put the system in balance again. One is simply the destruction of claims on value—both economic destruction (inflation, unemployment, bankruptcy and deflation) or extermination of a growing number of surplus workers through the use of prisons and war. Once claims are eliminated the system has reorganized itself, reset and started the process all over again.

Loren argued, however, that despite these measures the underlying crisis is ongoing and reappears from time to time. But the temporary fix means that some members of the working class find that they are unable to purchase their housing, food, clothing, education and healthcare. Nor can they pay increasing taxes. The concept of devalorization is critical to understanding this.

As an example of devalorization as a system-wide response to crisis, Loren points to the destruction of manufacturing jobs in industrial countries that began in the 1970s and greatly accelerated in the 1980s during which workers supported Reagan for President. Looking at this process today, you can see exactly what Loren was driving at.

By now the extent of deindustrialization and its destructive wake are clearly visible throughout all of the industrialized nations and in what are now termed “battleground states” where Trump has now won the Presidency in the United States twice. The Southeast side of Chicago and Northwest Indiana included one of the largest concentrations of heavy industry in the world. The region was anchored by ten steel mills, which at their peak, employed two hundred thousand workers, half in Chicago. It has been estimated that for every steel job in the region there were seven other manufacturing workers bringing the total employment to over one and a half million workers. The presence of Lake Michigan ports, rivers that served industry, railroad spurs, highways and the mills themselves attracted firms that manufactured steel products like automobiles, railroad cars and steel structures. It also attracted industries that supplied products to the mills and to other factory workers—chemicals, processed foods, tools, work boots, welding equipment. Today, nearly all of this is gone. All of the Chicago steel mills are closed and demolished along with most of the factories whose location was determined by the mills. What was left behind is toxic waste and crushing poverty.

The work in the mills and the associated factories was hard, dirty, and dangerous. Noel Ignatiev’s book Acceptable Men describes in detail his working conditions at US Steel in Gary, Indiana.4 And I document my work in seven smaller factories in the area in, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor.5 Also the mills and factories polluted the air when they were up and running full blast and when they closed, the land on which they once sat was polluted with toxic waste requiring extensive clean up if they were ever to be developed again. Yet the historical struggles of the people who held these jobs yielded living wages that were eliminated once the mills and factories were closed.

The Southeast Chicago Northwest Indiana area jobs that were lost were replaced largely by service industry jobs. Workers often have to work two or three such jobs to maintain a standard of living that the old manufacturing jobs once supplied. And these jobs fail to contribute to expanded reproduction of capital and are considered “unproductive.” Many workers left the area and migrated to other states in a futile search for living wage jobs.

The collapse of manufacturing jobs in this region and throughout the industrialized world was part of a strategy on the part of the capitalist class to deal with crisis and associated worker militancy that had begun in the 1960s as documented in Loren’s Remaking of the American Working Class. Manufacturing jobs and the capital behind them were moved in order to lower the costs of production, essentially lowering the global social wage. It was a form of devalorization as a way to reset the system to enable the valorization process (moneycommodity productionmore money) to continue.

The process involved more than simply moving production to low wage/lower environmental and safety regulation parts of the world. As Loren demonstrates in Remaking…, capitalist crisis is not centered in production at all. Crisis was not the result of over production or under consumption. Rather, crisis is situated in the global valorization process that results in a situation where claims on value are greater than the system can produce. That meant that the temporary fix had to be a global devalorization that took the form it did in Southeast Chicago/Northwest Indiana and other industrialized areas of the world.

What happened between the mid 1960s and into the 1990s was a radical transformation of the global capitalist system. New technologies were developed that required less living labor, a form of devalorization itself. But equally important was the development of process technologies that made it feasible to decentralize the production of specific products. Parts of automobiles or computers and most other commodities could economically be produced in different locations around the world and assembled somewhere else entirely. New transportation technologies and computer based inventory control made it possible to construct complex global production chains. New institutions like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) were introduced and old ones like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were repurposed to enable unfettered movement of capital around the world. As a result, the capitalist class itself became predominantly trans-national which hollowed out the capitalist state in individual nations.

The reprieve this offered to the ongoing crisis was of short duration. What was left was toxic waste and a working class in the industrialized nations that was angry and afraid. Establishment Republicans and Democrats had facilitated the closing of factories and the establishment of the institutions that made the radical systemic changes possible. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both contributed to the establishment of an unprecedented globalization and devalorization on the backs of the working classes in industrialized nations. Both political parties continued to advocate a continuation of what had come to be called “neo-liberalism.” The recent elections that brought back President Trump and rejected establishment Republicans and Democrats suggest that the working class in the United States has had enough. But there were no options offered by liberals or leftists.

Looking at this incredible exercise in devalorization and reorganization through the lens of Southeast Chicago/Northwest Indiana, the devastation to the working class is highly visible. For example, one of the largest steel mills in South Chicago was US Steel South Works. Constructed in the late 19th Century, the mill, which occupied 600 acres of land along the shores of Lake Michigan, once employed up to 20,000 workers. Beginning in the 1970s the total number of workers began to decline. By the end of the decade employment had declined to 10,000. The mill was shut down in 1992. Its employment was down to 700 before it closed. All of the buildings were torn down. Part of the site became a public park. Several development projects including a “new town in town” were proposed but never materialized. For one thing the ground was highly polluted and would have to be restored. Meanwhile the neighborhood around the mill has deteriorated beyond recognition. The sons, daughters and grandchildren of the former South Works employees have all suffered.

The latest effort to develop the South Works site is a proposal called Quantum and Microelectronics Park anchored by a quantum computing facility owned by PsiQuantum. They intend to occupy 300,000 square feet of land (about seven acres) and employ up to 150 people within five years. The Democratic Party leaders, Illinois Governor Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, are fully behind the project. The State of Illinois is offering PsiQuantum $200 million in incentives and the Mayor of Chicago has expressed his desire to offer an undisclosed amount of tax incentives even as his city council turned down his bid to raise property taxes. If going from 20,000 jobs to 150 isn’t bad enough, most of the new jobs will go to highly trained and educated workers rather than the working class residents of the Southeast Side. Here is devalorization at work. The fact that establishment Democratic Party political leaders support the entire process, caused Loren to label such leaders as “the left wing of devalorization.”

Fictitious Capital

The whole shift in the nature of the global capitalist system described above was made possible by finance capital. In Remaking… Loren, drawing largely on Volume 3 of Marx’s Capital, stresses how the system of international loans and credit are extensively used to keep the system going. But any capital that does not enhance the valorization process is fictitious because it is not backed by actual value, which can only be produced by living labor. In fact, loans and subsequent debts constitute a claim on value not yet produced. Investment in technology that enables production without human, living labor cheapens labor globally. This is a form of devalorization and it is not sustainable. As loans and debt pile up faster than global productive output, the system breaks down and it is unable to produce more value than the claims on it and we are in crisis.

The capitalist system’s use of fictitious value has gone way beyond what Loren could see in 1980. He used the framework of his 1980 book to look at the further development of the global system of credit and debt. In 1999, Loren wrote a new introduction to Remaking stating his intention to write a revision even though he thought 80 percent of it needed no revision. The last time I saw Loren in Brooklyn in 2019 we discussed the incredible development in the global system of credit and debt. And we discussed the possibility of including these developments in a new edition of Remaking. He had written about some of the developments in the expansion of fictitious capital in a number of subsequent interviews and essays. For example, in 2012 he wrote “Fictitious Capital and Contracted Social Reproduction Today,” which can be seen on his website. 6 Unfortunately he never did a full rewrite of “Remaking…” as his health deteriorated and he died before he was able to do it. Reading his 1980 essay today, however, offers the reader the basic theoretical formulations that can inform today’s ongoing crisis, a crisis that is at the heart of the MAGA movement that just propelled Donald Trump to a second term as President of the United States.

Fictitious Capital continues to evolve in response to crisis and is at the heart of global capitalism today. Credit is now being used to buy debt. And debt is being bought and sold in speculative derivative markets. Giant “asset managers” like Vanguard and State Street are now playing a growing role in the circulation of fictitious capital globally. Asset managers are major stock holders of the largest industrial corporations in the real economy and are on the board of many of them. But the assets they hold constitute a claim on wealth yet to be produced. And these claims add up to more than the system can produce. The global system as a whole is unable to feed, clothe, house, educate and care for the workers of the world while a handful of people get wealthy on returns on fictitious capital.

Relevance of Loren’s 1980 Analysis to Today

The connection of Loren’s 1980 work to today is revealed by the fact that much of the United States working class including black people, Latinos and even women have helped bring Donald Trump back into the White House. Not only that, but Trump now also has control of the entire Federal Government and many State and local governments as well. Furthermore, far right wing politics like Trump’s MAGA movement are replicated throughout the world as the entire global capitalist system finds itself in deep crisis. “The system” can only be understood today in terms of the operation of total capital that is accumulating and expanding through the use of primitive accumulation that pushes the global peasantry into wage labor. And the system depends on massive devalorization through the circulation of fictitious capital. The ruling class is decisively transnational and dominated by finance and technology, which only deepens the crisis. In 1980 Loren worked out Marx’s critique of the political economy in part to gain insight into why the working class brought Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to power. Today those same insights can be helpful to our understanding of the global right wing insurgence. Back in 1980 Loren also tried to correct the explanation offered by what he called “official Marxism.” Much of the left then and now saw capitalist crisis being generated within the process of production. “Official Marxism” claimed that huge firms with monopoly power to set prices were over producing and consumers were under consuming. Specific corporations were associated with nation states that represented their interests. These huge firms were identified with powerful nations that enabled them to export capital to a “periphery” of less developed nations which was termed imperialism. Loren countered that the root of crisis was not in production at all but could only be understood in terms of “the process of capitalist production as a whole” or total capital. I believe Loren’s understanding of capitalism revealed in Remaking can help us think through what is happening today and offers a guide to action.

Activism today offers revolutionaries the opportunity to project what their activism is for to those with whom we interact. The broad context of all activism today is ongoing capitalist crisis. The problems our activism seeks to address are generated by that crisis. So while the problems we address such as mass deportations, climate change, police and prisons, speculative excesses of the financial institutions, militarism and war, can be ameliorated, they ultimately can’t be solved without ending capitalism itself and replacing what Loren termed “the system.” Below are a few examples of what I mean.

Immigration Rights

As I write this, activists in the United States are gearing up to resist Trump-promised mass deportations. Within the United States there is considerable public support for the deportation of undocumented workers. The immediate need for the activism on immigrant rights is to protect the people being targeted by the Trump administration for deportation while countering propaganda that accounts for public support.

Borders around the world have been historically established to facilitate the rule of capitalism. Ongoing global capitalist crisis has undermined nation-based capitalism and given rise to a transnational capitalist class. This in turn challenges the relevancy of borders drawn in an earlier era. This is an opportunity for revolutionaries to place immigrant rights work in a broader anti capitalist context. How might a world without national borders facilitate meeting the needs of people in a new type of society? Questions such as this can be raised as supporters of immigrant rights work together to resist the immediate threat of mass deportations. A recent demonstration at the airport in Gary, Indiana where deportations are being implements had a banner and a chant: “No Borders/No Nations/Stop Deportations.” This seems to me to be a good starting point for a discussion among demonstrators and onlookers of what an immigrant rights struggle is for.

It is important to understand and project the immigrant question from the perspective of total capital. Peoples throughout the world are leaving their nations looking to survive in a world racked by war but also a world in which capitalists are throwing millions of workers out of the labor market altogether. Most of the migrants who try to cross the United States border with Mexico are doing so not solely because of actions by their own governments and the United States government in their countries. Rather, from the perspective of total capital, the system is unable to employ the working class, which creates an enormous pool of surplus labor. These surplus workers then leave their homelands frantically looking for a way to find living wage jobs.

War and also the growth of criminal gangs and cartels are also due to the crisis of the capitalist system. This is another cause of migration world-wide.

Anti War Movements

There are growing anti war movements around the world that revolutionaries should be a part of. Most recently we have witnessed or participated in efforts to stop Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon through demonstrations and waves of occupations and encampments on college campuses.

Wars around the world are also a product of the crisis of total capital. And our anti war work needs to project that as we work to stop the wars and try to undercut militarism and also to abolish the police and prisons locally. As discussed earlier, war is an extreme form of devalorization as it exterminates workers who have a legitimate claim on value in order to meet basic needs. War as devalorization also destroys capital. While war can and should be opposed on humanitarian and moral grounds, its relationship to the need of total capital to grow and expand should not be left out of the discussion.

Climate Change

As wildfires rage, massive hurricanes and tornadoes reek havoc, death and destruction, some regions in the world suffer droughts and others floods: some of the representatives of the capitalist state dither over regulations to combat climate change and the now the President of the United States declares his intention to “drill, baby, drill” (for more fossil fuels).

Since the 1960s a small number of environmentalists began giving us warnings that releasing carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels would result in a warming planet and we would experience monster storms, droughts, floods, forest fires, melting of polar ice caps and a rise in sea levels that would wipe out many cities around the globe. What seemed fantastic to many at the time is no longer fantastic at all. Beginning in 1969 the United Nations began issuing proclamations and holding conferences to try to slow down or stop the degradation of the environment. Increasingly the emphasis was on the burning of fossil fuels. By 1975 a number of scientists began to publish articles in scientific journals sounding the alarm. In the United States, much of this was largely ignored until 2019 when liberal Democrats—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States House of Representatives and Bernie Sanders in the Senate—introduced resolutions calling for a “Green New Deal.” President Joe Biden during his term in office signed legislation that would promote the use of “sustainable energy.” His successor declares that he will reverse Biden’s initiatives and return to large scale use of coal and oil and pull the United States out of even the weak international efforts to stop climate change fueled by global warming.

In 2020 I wrote an essay offering a critique of the Green New Deal.7 Briefly, I argued that the limits of any Green New Deal were to be found in the capitalist system. Going back to Loren’s argument that the system as a whole must “valorize value,” I argued that the relentless need for growth and consumption will always over run any of the measures included in the “green new deal.”

Environmental activists of all political stripes should unite to stop the use of fossil fuels for energy. But while uniting in this effort, it is important for revolutionaries to take this occasion to put capitalism’s role in the destruction of the planet into the discussion.

Fictitious Capital

The global flow of financial assets is what keeps the system in crisis afloat. As I stated above, “any capital that does not enhance the valorization process is fictitious because it is not backed by actual value, which can only be produced by living labor.” In fact, stocks, bonds and other loans and subsequent debts constitute a claim on value not yet produced.

In the past, the circulation of fictitious capital was generated by banks that were regulated by their respective governments. Today fictitious capital is being used to control capitalist development including global corporations, domestic companies, farmland, hospitals, senior assisted living facilities, residential and commercial real estate, railroads, highways, oil pipelines, ports, water supply systems, electricity transmission grids. Massive amounts of assets from pension funds, insurance companies as well as banks are used to purchase stocks, bonds and all sorts of funds are used to control corporations and to purchase small businesses, infrastructure, land and housing. 8 Asset management companies that operate world wide hold assets consisting of fictitious capital (claims on value not yet produced by human labor) that enables the capitalist system to function. Asset management firms like Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street, Blackstone and Carlyle own or control much of global capitalism. It is a house of cards.

There are many struggles going on at workplaces to gain living wages and safe working conditions. These struggles offer participants an opportunity to expose how the company relies on and is partially controlled by asset management companies who are also major players in the circulation of fictitious capital worldwide. For example, the top stockholders of Amazon are: Jeff Bezos (10 percent ); Vanguard (6.4 percent ); BlackRock (5.6 percent ); and State Street (3.2 percent ). Public employees can see who manages their pension funds and the role their funds play in keeping the system afloat. Also the owners who profit from municipal infrastructure are visible. A consortium of asset managers own the City of Chicago parking meters: Morgan Stanley, Allianz Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Activists can turn a struggle over pay, working conditions or the policies of a piece of municipal infrastructure into an opportunity to explain how these conditions contribute to the functioning of global capitalism.

Immigration rights, anti-war, climate change action, and work place struggles that expose the generation and use of fictitious capital are all examples of how Loren’s insights into the workings of global capitalism can be useful to turn various activist struggles into an anti capitalist direction.

• 1https://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/the-remaking-of-the-american-working-class-the-restructuring-of-global-capital-and-the-recomposition-of-class-terrain/.
• 2Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 28 “Economic Manuscripts of 1857–58,” (International Publishers, 1986) p. 411.
• 3See, for example, https://www.david-ranney.com/books/new-world-disorder-the-decline-of-us-power.
• 4Noel Ignatiev, Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World, (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2021).
• 5David Ranney, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From the Outside In and the Inside Out. (PM Press, 2019).
• 6https://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/fictitious-capital-and-contracted-social-reproduction-today-china-and-permanent-revolution/.
• 7https://www.david-ranney.com/essays-videos/eco-socialism-or-annihilation-toward-a-green-new-deal.
• 8Brett Christophers, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World, Verso Press, 2023.

It is important to keep in mind the climate of rapidly-evolving world crisis in which the Johnson-Forest tendency was developing and attempting to break new ground. The majority in the Workers Party, around Max Shachtman and James Burnham, used a version of Bruno Rizzi’s theory of “bureaucratic collectivism,” a new managerial mode of production, to characterize the class nature of the U.S.S.R., rather than the state capitalist analysis developed by James, Dunayevskaya and Lee. But the minority’s discontent with the Workers Party majority was no mere semantic dispute and went well beyond the “Russian question.”

In spite of the Shachtmanites’ break with Trotsky, they retained the kind of an “a-theoretical pragmatism” which Trotsky had discerned in them in his last book In Defense of Marxism (1940).1 The Johnson-Forest tendency was heading in another direction, around a radically innovative recovery of the Hegelian backdrop to Marx which would influence James’s and Dunayevskaya’s later contributions from then on.

In 1943, the Workers Party participated in the series of wildcat strikes that shook the American auto industry at the same time that the United Mine Workers under John L. Lewis were waging a long illegal strike in the Appalachian coal fields. These strikes were major challenges to the wartime “no strike pledge.”2 The wartime wildcats and the massive postwar strike wave of 1945–1946 spurred them to look for a deeper conceptualization of working-class self-activity in Marxian theory. Dunayevskaya’s knowledge of Russian gave her access to Lenin’s 1914 Philosophical Notebooks (almost unknown at the time in the English-speaking world) and Lee’s knowledge of German opened the way to Hegel’s Logic and to the then also almost-unknown Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.3 The wartime and postwar insurgency of American workers had pushed Johnson-Forest to question the limits of Workers Party orthodoxy. No revolutionary current in the world, in those years, took as seriously as Johnson-Forest the idea that “philosophy must become proletarian.” The self-activity of the wildcatting workers led James, Dunayevskaya and Lee to the philosophical expression of self-activity in Hegel’s thought.

Their discontent with the Shachtmanite majority led Johnson-Forest in 1947 to rejoin the SWP. They remained there until 1950, exiting with State Capitalism and World Revolution, a book co-authored by James and Dunayevskaya. In the three years Johnson-Forest remained in the SWP, James also participated in party discussions on the American “Negro question” (as it was then called), arguing for support for separate struggles of blacks as having the potential to ignite the entire US political situation, as they in fact did in the 1950s and 1960s.

Johnson-Forest were animated again by the remarkable strikes in the Appalachian coalfields of 1949–1951, the first wildcats against automation. Dunayevskaya (then living in Pittsburgh) organized a study group of striking miners around basic texts of Marx and the new Hegelian insights about self-activity. It was also during the coalfield strikes that the tensions first surfaced between Dunayevskaya and James that resulted in their split in 1955.

James had already used an extended stay in Nevada in 1948 to write Notes on Dialectics (only published in 1980. In this work, James got onto paper what he had taken from the wartime and postwar strikes as well as the recovery of Hegel they inspired. The main historical thread is a study of the role of the petty bourgeoisie from the English Revolution of the 1640s to the French Revolution (1789–1794) to the triumph of Stalinism.4

Once out of the SWP, Johnson-Forest founded its own organization—Correspondence. But the tensions that had surfaced in the 1949–1951 coalfield wildcats led to a split in 1955. Through his theoretical and political work of the late 1940s, James had come to the conclusion that the revolutionary party was no longer needed (as it had been before 1917) because its truths had been absorbed in the masses. In 1956, he would see the Hungarian Revolution as confirmation of this). He was not sure what would replace it. Dunayevskaya had agreed that the Leninist vanguard party was outdated, but felt, in contrast to James, the need for some kind of revolutionary organization. In 1953, James was deported from the United States to Britain, and the polemic continued. The split was consummated in 1955, when Dunayevskaya and her faction founded the group News and Letters.5

1955 was also the year of the first big postwar UAW wildcat, a watershed event in the American working-class movement touching off a series of wildcat strikes which only grew in intensity until 1973. Similar developments in France, such as the Nantes aerospace wildcat of the same year, were theorized by the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, which had also broken with Trotskyism in the late 1940s, and which was animated by such figures as Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Daniel Mothe. (“S ou B,” as it was popularly known, had been publishing material on the new forms of struggle in the U.S, from its earliest issues). Contacts between Johnson-Forest and Socialisme ou Barbarie date from the late 1940s.

The 1945–1946 period in the United States witnessed the last major strike wave called by the official CIO leadership, and the last one in which the leadership still felt capable of controlling the ranks. In the turmoil of the postwar “return to normalcy,” with 20 million discharged military personnel and armaments workers about to rejoin the civilian work force in a situation widely anticipated as a probable return to 1930s depression conditions, the strikes were an attempt to take back terrain lost during the unions’ enforcement of the wartime no-strike pledge. From that point onward, the famous “postwar settlement” by the UAW evolved in which wage and benefits increases offered by management, and supported by the union, were exchanged for total management hegemony over shop floor conditions in the plants. The 1955 UAW wildcat, in answer to another such contract touted by Reuther, was the American auto worker’s response to this arrangement. It was to the great credit of James and Lee to sense the importance of this development in its proper terms and to theorize it in Facing Reality, by bringing it into relationship with similar developments in Britain and in France.

When working-class revolution failed to materialize in the immediate postwar period, a deep demoralization had overtaken most of the small revolutionary milieu in Europe and the United States The onset of the Cold War took a further toll, and a third world war seemed likely. Instead of Trotsky’s prophecy of revolution, Stalinism had extended itself to Eastern Europe, China and Korea. Among militants who did not simply abandon working-class politics, official Trotskyists grappled with the problem of how to relate to these new “workers’ states” created not by revolution but by the Red Army, or by peasant armies. One international Trotskyist current, initiated by Michel Pablo predicted centuries of Stalinist hegemony, and argued that Trotskyists would have to survive these centuries by clandestinely infiltrating the large Stalinist parties.) Pablo’s theory had no sooner been articulated when it was refuted by the East Berlin worker uprising of 1953, but that revolt was quickly crushed. In this climate, Johnson-Forest, and (after the 1955 split) the separate Facing Reality and News and Letters groups, had the advantage, based on their insights into the wartime and postwar wildcats, of seeing a new historical moment open up to which both Stalinists and orthodox Trotskyists were blind—the moment of autonomous working-class self-activity outside and against political parties and unions that would continue for nearly two decades.

These insights had their limits, as the following text will argue, but they seemed of intoxicating clarity when the Hungarian workers, with no vanguard party in sight, established a Republic of Workers’ Councils in the fall of 1956. 1956, of course, was also the year of Khrushchev’s speech to the 20th Party Congress, of Polish worker ferment in Poznan, and of the humiliation of Britain and France in the Suez crisis in the Middle East. The conjugation of these three events were a thaw announcing an upward curve of struggle into the mid-1970s. It was this insight, with its strengths and weaknesses, which made Facing Reality a classic.

By the time he co-authored Facing Reality with Lee and Castoriadis, James had concluded that the task of revolutionaries was, in contrast to Lenin’s time, to “recognize and record” the advance of the “new society” within the old. His view was at antipodes from the formulations of the early Lenin in What Is To Be Done, according to which revolutionary intellectuals would bring class consciousness to workers, the latter being incapable of going beyond trade-union consciousness without such an intervention. (Lenin repudiated this view after the 1905 revolution in Russia.) James argued later that Lenin himself had “recognized and recorded” the Russian soviets of 1905, and that the task of revolutionaries in the present was similarly to recognize forms of struggle and organization, and to provide a press in which the tensions of the present could be argued out among different currents of workers.

What follows, then, is my sense of a “balance sheet,” written in 2002, of the successes and failures of the approach presented in Facing Reality.

• 1This is almost certainly not the point to establish precise definitions, except perhaps to say that precision itself matters more than it might appear.
• 2Martin Glaberman, War Time Strikes: The Struggle Against the No-Strike Pledge in the UAW During World War II. Detroit: 1980.
• 3The first English-language translation of the latter texts, which played an important role in the Marxist renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s, initially appeared in the press of the Johnson-Forest tendency in 1947.
• 4One of James’s main polemical targets in Notes on Dialectics is the Trotskyist interpretation of Stalinism as a force that “betrays” the working class. James shows Stalinism as part of a worldwide transformation in the direction of state capitalism:

  “Whatever their social origin, whatever their subjective motives, the fact remains that stalinism finds this caste of labor leaders all over the world, in China, in Korea, in Spain, in Brazil, everywhere, intellectuals, labor leaders, workers who rise–the caste grows, changes composition, but it remains as an entity. It faces death, undergoes torture, finds energy, ingenuity, devotion, establishes a tradition, maintains it, develops it, commits the greatest crimes with a boldness and confidence that can only come from men who are certain of their historic mission.”

  “As I think over Trotsky’s writings, I can see this sequence of cause and effect in an endless chain. This happened, then the other, then the Stalinist bureaucracy did this; then; and so he keeps up an endless series of explanations, fascinating, brilliant, full of insight and illumination, to crash into his catastrophic blunders at the end. We, on the other hand, who show that Stalinist cause could create the mighty worldwide effect because it elicited class forces hostile to the proletariat and inherent in capitalist society at this stage in its development, we restore to the proletarian struggle the historical struggle of the classes with social roots. We finish away with the demoralizing, in fact self-destroying, theory that everything would have been all right, but for the intervention of Stalinist corruption.”

• 5Peter Hudis, a current member of the International Marxist Humanist Organization, tells the story of the evolution of James, Dunayevskaya and Lee during these strikes in Historical Materialism, No. 11/4 (2003), pp. 275–288. In a letter, dated September 17, 1951, and quoted in Hudis, James characterized Dunayevskaya’s strategy for intervention in the strike as a “proposal to send leaders down there to edit and organize and generally to lead like SWP leaders.”

In 1958, Facing Reality was an important book, uncannily anticipatory of the historical period which would unfold over the following 15 years. Its main assertions are still being debated. Even though I myself have serious doubts about them, the following is written to provoke further debate. What I find most interesting in Facing Reality is not so much the answers it offers as the questions it asks. Those questions revolve around the role of the revolutionary Marxist party today.

————

The authors argue that the Bolshevik vanguard party was appropriate to the conditions of Russia from 1903 to 1923, presumably from the Bolshevik-Menshevik split to the end of Lenin’s political life. But they argue further, after the 1930s triumph of the one-party state in its welfare-statist, Stalinist and fascist forms, the transfer of this model to the new situation, in Russia and in the West, was an anachronism. Stalinism, in their view, was symptomatic of the ferocity with which the state had to suppress what the authors call the already-existing “new society,” and from this they conclude that no vanguard party is any longer necessary for revolution. They see the Hungarian Revolution as confirmation of this. For them, the Hungarian workers overthrew the Stalinist state with no vanguard party in sight and, similarly, fought very creatively against overwhelming odds against the subsequent Soviet invasion.

Leaving aside the accuracy of this account (and there is no doubt much truth to it), the authors arrive at the intriguing idea that the ferocity of state control in the post-1933 period: 1) expresses the “immediacy” of revolution in our epoch, that is, the high level of general development present in today’s working class which capital must suppress and 2) is the collective experience that prepares a revolution beyond vanguardism. The authors (in contrast to many others of the libertarian current) are quite right to say there was nothing “spontaneous” about Hungary, but that it was prepared during years of discussions among workers in response to their experience of Stalinist “planning.”

Another (in my view) unique aspect of the book, again in contrast to so much libertarian theory, is its affirmation of the idea of leadership, simultaneous with its rejection of reducing leadership to some formal vanguard grouping. Most libertarian anti-vanguard formulations always immediately reduce any “leaders” to “bureaucrats.” What James and the others reject is the formal relationship of self-appointed vanguards to the historical experience of the class, much of which the latter are incapable of recognizing. In their view (and here I fully agree with them) the leaders of different struggles are not pre-selected by formal association in a vanguard organization, but from among those with the particular talents and skills of leaders, adequate (or not) to the tasks of the real movement. A great strength of this text, in my opinion, is that it avoids both the conventional libertarian rejection of “leaders” as a swear word, and at the same time the formal understanding of leadership stemming from the conventional, incarnationist-body of Christ concept of the Trotskyist milieu (from which the authors all emerged).1

Those of us shaped by “1968” have lived through such a long and bleak historical period since then (without precedent, in length, in the history of the movement since 1848) that the book’s description of the problems of vanguardism acquires a ring of truth it would not have had, to many, in the 1968–1973 period, which seemed to be an historical “recovery” of the vanguard concept, with the proliferation of sects claiming the mantle of Bolshevism (“proletarian Jesuits,” as James and the others call them).

The singularity and exceptional interest of this text, at least for me, is four-fold: 1) the use, in very accessible and not condescending language, of the reading of Hegel for revolutionary purposes; 2) the idea that the “one-party state” which triumphed globally around 1933 (fascism-Stalinism-New Deal) obviates the Bolshevik model of the party for present and future purposes; 3) the forecast that automation was posing “every” question for the working class in a way unknown to earlier generations of Marxists; 4) will be dealt with momentarily. Twenty-five years before the concepts of “Fordism” and “post-Fordism” became fashionable, James and the others wrote: “What is coming to an end is the stage of mass production by assembly line workers.” My own term for this new phase has been the “Grundrisse phase of capitalism,” the phase in which scientific labor (resulting in, among other things, automation) is directly appropriated by capital as a significant source of value. “Value” is striking in their text by its total absence.)

Taken by themselves, these first three strands, however innovative at the time, are not absolutely unique to the authors. What is (as far as I know) unique, and what constitutes “Johnsonism” today, is the assertion that the “new society” is omnipresent in the daily relations of the working class, and that socialism consists in nothing more or less than pushing aside all aspects of the official society that hold them back, up to the formation of a Republic of Workers Councils.

This view of the “new society” being born and deepening itself every day focuses on what is possibly the unique “Johnsonite” idea of the irrelevance of explicit, stated consciousness of workers (or of any other group) at a given moment, when grasped in relationship to what the workers (and others) do, even when (or particularly when) what they “do” contradicts what they “say.” Paradigmatic for this formulation is Marty Glaberman’s experience of the 1943 Detroit auto wildcats against the no-strike pledge, carried out by workers who were often Roosevelt (and sometimes even Wilkie) supporters, and who just before had voted for the no-strike pledge at a UAW convention and in a union-wide referendum. James and the others give many further examples of this complicated relationship between explicit consciousness and class activity.

If one wished to characterize the theoretical advance of the historical “moment” of the return of revolution in the West in the 1960s, of the great advance in the understanding of Marx made possible, on one hand, by the struggles of that period and, on the other, by the unprecedented diffusion of the “early” Marx, of the Grundrisse, of the “Unpublished Sixth Chapter of Capital,” and (more recently) of Marx’s study of the Russian peasant commune and of primitive societies, one would be hard-pressed to summarize the advance more succinctly than in the term “self-reflexivity.” It is impossible to underestimate the break this constitutes with the theory and practice of the classical workers’ movement; one need only think of the poverty of Lenin’s first attempt at philosophy—Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908). One great merit of the work of the authors is their emphasis on the fact that we understand the past in new ways from the struggles of the present; that is, that we can “see” with fresh eyes the importance of the Levellers in England, the Enrages in France and of American slaves in the United States Civil War because of events such as the Hungarian Revolution, not to mention the upsurges of the Sixties.

The 1960s revolt against “bureaucracy” (that is “applied rationalism” so to speak) was the immediate social backdrop to the recovery of “self-reflexivity” in Marx’s outlook (as for example his definition of capital as “value valorizing itself”). What does “self-reflexivity” mean? (This is my term; the authors use the term “self-movement”). It is the key to the break with the past; it refers to the specific self-development of human beings and above all of social classes in struggle as arising from subjects “acting on themselves.” This comes straight from Hegel’s an-und-fuer sich consciousness and Marx’s “class-for-itself” (the revolutionary class), contrasted with the “class-in-itself,” the dispersed proletariat in its day-to-day existence as variable capital.

It is no accident that every vanguardist grouping still in existence in the world today (primarily Trotskyists) displays total indifference, when not outright philistine contempt, toward the 1950s and 1960s recovery of Hegel, the 1840s Marx, the Grundrisse, the “Unpublished Sixth Chapter” of Volume 1 and continues this indifferentist attitude even toward Lenin’s late discovery of Hegel (“No Marxist since Marx has understood Capital,” presumably including Lenin himself up to that point) and his post-1914 (Philosophical Notebooks) repudiation of the sophomoric, reductionist, boiler-plate world view of his earlier Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. For these groups, such considerations are “mere theory,” at best an afterthought useful for placating a few intellectual contacts who, in Lenin’s formulation, “must be kept on a very short leash.” The vanguardists are indifferent on the question of philosophy (while of course generally adhering to the most unashamed unspoken reductionism), as they are of James and the others’ assertion that “philosophy must become proletarian.”

But let us continue with the four-fold singularities of James and his comrades: the implications of the consolidation of the “one party state” in the first third of the 20th century. “Today, one billion people are living under a totalitarian state that a few decades ago existed only in the scribblings of a few madmen.”

From 1848 and particularly from 1871 and the Paris Commune onward, popularized “Marxism” of a sort was of course undermining and going beyond Anglo-French Enlightenment thought and culture. But what was this “Marxism”? It was mediated to the world largely by the Lassallean SPD, whose distinguishing characteristic was precisely the separate “elite body of professional organizers” (a notion quite foreign to Marx himself), organizing the working class as rationalist thought organizes objects and, not accidentally, propagating the original boiler-plate reductionist “Marxism” that prompted Marx to exclaim: “I am not a Marxist!” This current culminated in the Bolshevik Party, whose adherence to this approach (despite the little-known “late Lenin”) was carried far into the 20th century by Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism.

In other words, the “Marxism” that spread from Germany to Russia to the rest of the world after 1917 was largely a warmed-over version of Enlightenment rationalist thought, in which the whole conceptual revolution of “self-organization” underlying the work of Hegel and Marx was totally obscured, lost and even (in Stalinism) calumnied. This “Marxism” only began to be seriously undermined by the events and ferment of the 1950s and 1960s, yet more than 30 years later the vanguardists have still not awakened to the implications of the conceptual revolution undermining the epistemology which, however dimly they may be aware of it, pervades their approach to the working class.

What James and the others have done, in other words, in contrast to almost any other text I am aware of, is provide a social explanation, both in terms of the mutation of the state and of the productive forces, for the “epistemological break” constituted by the recovery of self-reflexive—self-movement through Hegel and the previously buried texts of Marx.

What is ultimately at stake in these shifts is the question of communication. Is it to be unilateral: here is the truth, (which “we” the Marxists “embody”)? Or is it to be two-way, between the Marxist organization and the working class, that is what the authors call the task of the former to “recognize and record,” as in Lenin’s 1905 recognition of the soviets? If James and his comrades are right, and there is in fact no longer any difference between theory and practice, it must be the latter, putting the Marxist organization seemingly on a “level playing field” with the working class as a whole.

What changed after the high point of influence of the Anglo-French liberal model, beginning around 1870 but above all after 1914, was, by 1933, everywhere, what James and the others called the one-party state—Stalinist, fascist, or welfare-statist. This is the planning state (however little it actually “planned”), and the significance of this new state was that it drove home to tens of millions of working people the ultimate social meaning of the old rationalism, of the administration of people as objects, the administration of people instead of the administration of things. The worldwide dominance of this state after the 1930s was a vast “generalization,” but one also showing the limits, of the old-world view, with which almost all “Marxism” was still on a continuum.

To take as a viable model a working-class vanguard developed under an autocratic state where a kind of politics still in the orbit of the old rationalism could nonetheless be new and liberating, and to transpose it to the rest of the world, where all of rationalism’s possibilities have long since been extended far beyond anything known in Tsarist Russia, and have decayed for all to see, is truly to be an anachronism.

The third is the question of automation. Perhaps nowhere does the dated quality of Facing Reality, its lack of attention to the Marxist theory of value, come through as in this aspect of the book. The discussion assumes automation’s relentless extension, in the framework of the welfare/one-party state, into the indefinite future, an assumption the authors shared with any number of other 1950s/1960s treatments of the subject, from the “Triple Revolution” theorists to Murray Bookchin’s “post-scarcity anarchism.” James and his comrades seem to completely forget (as did virtually everyone else at the time) that, without living labor, capital does not exist and that when capital is threatened by expelling too much living labor from the production process, it must re-employ workers in labor-intensive activities to continue its “vampire” relationship to living labor.

Nevertheless, the authors are correct in saying that automation, unlike any previous technological innovation, posed for the first time in the history of capitalism, not the creation of vast numbers of new jobs but the permanent elimination of vast numbers of jobs, and thus the question of the fate of the growing mass of permanently unemployed. This, however, has worked itself out since 1958, through high-tech, nanotechnology, outsourcing, kanban,2 de-industrialization, MacJobs, Third World industrialization and globalization, in a way that would be almost unrecognizable to James and his comrades writing at a time when it seemed self-evident to focus on shop-floor struggles in the United States, Britain and France. No reader today will have any difficulty recognizing the pertinence of these lines from 1958:

“Now, with automation, capitalism is robbing the majority of the population of the only role they have been permitted.

When millions of young people have no idea whether they will ever have a job and lie in bed half the day because they don’t know what to do with themselves, that is a system committing suicide.” (p. 26)

To tie these four strands together, we see that the old epistemology from the classical workers’ movement, badly compromised with rationalism, was realized in the planning state which came into existence to manage “masses of workers on the assembly line,” and that automation, which implies (for a socialist society) the emancipation of the working class (and humanity) from such repetitive drudgery, also undermines the need for vanguards by posing the possibility of “a different kind of activity” beyond the capitalist antagonism of work and leisure, one already present in the “new society” of everyday relations in the working class. The latter is the meaning of Marx’s idea that only with communism does “pre-history” come to an end and actual human history begin.

These four strands—1) the centrality of self-activity or self-movement from Hegel to Marx; 2) the “realization” of the rationalist world view in the “one-party” state after 1933, 3) the entirely new situation opened up by the end of the assembly line through automation and 4) the “new society” which must be freed from its containment by “official society,” and which the Marxist organization must “recognize and record”–-are, in my view, the truly radical (especially for the time) underpinnings of Facing Reality. It is all the more remarkable when one realizes how much of the subsequent fifteen years Facing Reality anticipated in 1958, as in (to cite only one particularly cogent example): “The French workers will move, and when they do, they will leave the French Communist Party hanging in the air.” (p. 156)

Obviously, I am extrapolating the themes that hit me between the eyes, and neglecting the very rich discussion of the total bankruptcy of “official society” since World War I, as in 1) “any elite must of necessity consciously falsify the information it gives to the mass…Official society does not know and has no means of knowing or even of understanding the actual facts of its own existence.” (p. 96); 2) the brief, brilliant asides on the fate of art in this period, containing in one line a devastating critique of the “post-modern” assault on the “canon”: “so it is that at this stage of our society art is either the contemporary abortions which rasp the nerves and stimulate without satisfying; or it is a retreat to the accepted classics because they are being used as a bomb shelter, whereas they were originally explosives” (p. 85). One wishes to find one PoMo capable of acknowledging that the “dead white male” classics were once explosives.

Similarly anticipated in this book is the nearly world-wide wildcat movement up to 1973 (on which the authors were drawing from direct experience in mid-1950s Britain, France and America); the resulting 1960s surge of interest in councilism, workers’ councils and workers’ control; the worldwide impact of Hegel, the 1844 Manuscripts the Grundrisse, the (then) Unpublished Sixth Chapter of Volume l; all the new histories of the classical workers’ movement focusing on factory committees, workers’ councils and soviets in Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain; the rediscovery of the council communists—Pannekoek, Gorter and the KAPD; the histories of the bourgeois revolutions which “rediscover” such currents as the Levellers (and Diggers, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men) and Enrages; the Situationists’ critique of art; the international debate on Lenin, “party and class” in the 1968–1975 period; some of the new “history from below” shifting the focus away from leaders, organizations and ideologies; the explosive development of the black movement in the United States, perhaps culminating in the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, more or less exactly along the lines set down by James and his comrades ten years earlier. One can in the long run also judge a book by the “research program” (meant here in the broadest sense of the term) it inspires, or at least anticipates. By this criterion, Facing Reality must be recognized as being way ahead of its time.

But, of course, if we are interested in Facing Reality forty-five years after it was written, it can only be for what the book might illuminate for our present and future, for the main real question (for non-antiquarians) of what is to be done. It is here that James and the others, whatever one might think of the merits of the book sketched above, enter the most controversial terrain of the new conception of the Marxist organization in the new epoch of self-organization, the “one-party” state, automation and the superannuation of vanguardism by the emergence of the “new society” in everyday life.

Writing in 1958, the authors refer to thirty years of futility of the small Marxist organization (looking back to the definitive 1928 triumph of Stalinism in Russia). We, in 2002, can say seventy-five years (which is in no way to denigrate the explosion of the 1960s and early 1970s which gave many of us the “eyes” with which to read James and his co-authors).

Who can honestly say there is not a great deal of truth in their description of the life of the sect, of “small organizations dressing up as big ones” as the authors put it? Everyone who lived as a militant through the late 60s and early 70s must recognize how the small vanguard groups were mainly tossed about like corks on a wave by the major upheavals of the time and could, by no stretch of the imagination, be said to have “led” them. This is particularly true when we consider the wildcat movement in industry, in most major capitalist countries, from the mid-1950s to 1973.

But since that wildcat, shop-floor movement is what is best theorized by the book, we might also ask, as we might ask about the example of Hungary: What went wrong? What happened to all that self-activity? It is there, I think, that the weaknesses of the book start to come more clearly into focus. For James and the others (as in much of James’ other work, the working class is portrayed as a tiger straining on a leash, barely contained by official society, the latter led by “working-class parties,” and unions and union officials enforcing the contracts.

At the risk of greatest heresy, I might contrast Facing Reality to formulations in a text seemingly at the other end of the spectrum (to be published shortly in English translation) on the question of “party and class” and a critique of Gramsci by the Bordigists. It is not necessary to linger over the Bordigists’ assertion that nothing of interest happens in the working class without the party. The nub of their critique of Gramsci, above all on the question of workers’ councils in a capitalist framework, is that any oppositional force that becomes a “power,” outside of the context of revolution, quickly becomes part of official society.

James and his co-authors are of course not arguing for such reformism either. Neither James nor the Bordigists are advocates of any “gradualist” conquest of power by the working class; both currents see the revolution as happening “whole,” against all aspects of official society up to that point. This, however, is where they radically part ways.

The Bordigists draw their force from a wholesale critique of “immediatism,” going back to Marx’s polemic against Proudhon in the Poverty of Philosophy (1847). They see “immediatism” (by which they mean, without always saying it explicitly, any working-class action not led by the vanguard party) in various currents that have arisen since Marx, from the “left” and from the “right,” which express the situation of the working class in the individual factory, or even at the point of production as a whole, what Marx (in Volume 1) called the “sphere of immediate production.” They see this as a common thread uniting Proudhonian and Bakuninist anarchism (with the latter’s historic appeal to craft workers desiring to control their own production process), Bernsteinian reformism (which evolved into the German works’ councils or Betriebsraete, officially recognized first in the Weimar Republic and then more thoroughly after World War II), anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism and syndicalism of the Sorelian direct-action variety around 1900, 1920s German-Dutch councilism and, finally in the Socialism or Barbarism group in the post-1945 period. None other than Lenin observed, in the pre-1914 syndicalist revolt and strike wave of British workers against the Labour Party and its unions, that reformism breeds syndicalism, and that the two are interdependent rejections of Marxism, and specifically (by syndicalism’s refusal of politics) of direct political confrontation with the capitalist state.

The Bordigists see this “immediatist” workplace-centered view of the working class (which, in either its reformist or apparently radical guises, attacks Marxism–by which the Bordigists also mean, of course, the “party”) as a replication, within the workers’ movement, of the essence of capitalism itself—the alienation of different groups of workers in the very capitalist category of the firm and the individual sector. “The hell of capitalism,,” as the Bordigists put it, “is the enterprise, not the fact that the enterprise has a boss.” This means (following Marx’s Volume 1 presentation of capital largely from the viewpoint of the individual enterprise, the “immediate sphere of production”) that it is the “heteronomy” of society flowing from its dispersion into a myriad of competing enterprises which is one major aspect of capitalist alienation to be overcome. The ultimate drift of this “immediatism” is toward a conception of a “republic of producers” (as it was specifically advocated by many currents of anarchism, syndicalism, etc.) controlling the immediate workplace.

The Bordigists (rightly in my opinion) see this flawed conception as a mystification of the existing working class at the point of production in the daily life of capitalism as being “already revolutionary” or almost revolutionary. Such a view denies the radical break by which the point-of-production workers, along with the unemployed and others excluded from production, become the class-for-itself, the “class with radical chains,” breaking with their status as “producers” in this or that firm and posing themselves in society as a whole as the practical, universal embodiment of “Man” (the only concrete meaning such a word can have) as “all-sided in their production as in their consumption” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The working class becomes revolutionary by shedding its fragmented status as a class-in-itself, as it exists in the single factory or in the sum total of all factories, as mere “negation,” thereby breaking up the alienated, capital-conditioned division of labor and posing itself as a total alternative power, a class-for-humanity. Or, to paraphrase Hegel, what initially loomed large in everyday consciousness has now receded to a single trace.

I contend that most of the examples of the “new society” given in Facing Reality are “stuck” in “immediatist” situations, even if the authors’ vision of the new society’s ultimate triumph is indeed based on a “break” and a totally alternative self-organization of the working class as the dominant force in society. The latter is indeed the meaning of their view that “philosophy must become proletarian.” They agree with the Bordigists in rejecting any power that becomes part of official society, but the two currents disagree drastically about the role of the Marxist organization in bringing about this break.

The authors of Facing Reality would of course immediately point to the Hungarian Republic of Workers’ Councils as the practical refutation of any charge of “immediatism,” as the latter precisely went beyond the individual factory or all factories taken together to rule society as a whole, at least for 13 days. No one, and I least of all, would deny the power of this experience, or of 1905 and 1917 in Russia, of some of the insurrections immediately after World War I, of elements in Spain in 1936–37, or finally of May 1968 in France. All these experiences are refutations of the tired, early Leninist, assertion in What Is to Be Done? that by itself (that is, without the party) the working class cannot go beyond trade-unionist consciousness, which is still the belief of most vanguard groups today. James and his co-authors point out that:

“… if the organization was the subject of history, the proletariat was the object. In this conception of organization, in philosophical terms, was the Universal. This conception of the organization is inherent in the extreme views that Lenin expounded in What Is to Be Done? He repudiated them later, but not with the force and thoroughness which were needed to prevent them from doing infinite mischief.” (pp. 93–94).

Facing Reality is one of a handful of works produced in the years 1956–1973 which truly can be said to have anticipated what was new in that period. The question confronting us, once again, is whether or not it has anything to say to our own.

Serious economic crisis is nowhere in this book. A few derisive asides are made to mainstream debates over inflation, the balance of payments, “living standards,” followed by assertions that the working class could solve these problems in short order, once it has set up the Republic of Workers’ Councils.

One wonders what James and the others would have to say today about the unraveling of capitalism in the three core countries they discuss—about entire de-industrialized regions, about millions of people trapped in minimum-wage no-future service jobs, a 10–20 percent fall in real wages, a 10–20 percent increase in the work week, “flexible hours” eliminating overtime and even a predictable work schedule, the demise of the big factory, the outsourcing of work even in core sectors such as auto which loom so large in their analysis, the dispersion of remaining industry to non-union “greenfield” sites in the Sunbelt and out of the country altogether to maquiladoras and export platforms around the world; the related breakup of big working-class concentrations in the old industrial cities and the great dispersion of populations to suburbia and exurbia; three and four minimum-wage job blue-collar families working at Walmart, call centers and the new casinos that have replaced industry; the return of sweatshops, child labor and bonded labor (i.e. virtual slavery); the prison construction boom and prison labor; Third World immigration and American (black and white) hostility to it; the growing working-class sympathy for protectionism; devastated “inner cities” where all the factories closed twenty years ago (South Central LA and Cincinnati being paradigmatic; wiping out whole swaths of the black working class that in many places was at the forefront of the 1960s wildcat rebellion); the rise of far-right parties in Europe with a serious working-class base organized around the issue of immigration.

All this is a far cry from the mid-1950s era in which the core industrial unions were negotiating ever-greater wage and benefit deals in an attempt to stop the shop-floor rebellion against loss of control over the work process. And what did the authors’ “new society” do while all this was going on, except undergo it? If the American workers in fact “held all the cards” in 1958, as the authors say, they certainly threw away their hand over the next three decades. James and the others hardly imagined struggles of the kind that characterized the post-1980 period, where every concession was not enough to keep companies from shutting down Northeastern towns and cities. It is as if the capitalists had read Facing Reality as well, and had done everything in their power to break up the immediate source of the problem, the big factory and the large urban concentration of workers in factories.

But we have hardly exhausted the richness of James and the others’ formulations about contemporary working-class life and the tasks of the Marxist organization. That task is concisely summarized as:

“… to recognize and record” the presence of the new society, which the authors think was already one of Lenin’s main contributions in his recognition of the importance of the soviets (a breakthrough conceived in advanced by no theoretician). The first condition, then, is to “give the working class means of expressing itself” (p. 94). While greatly inferior to official society in resources and reach, the Marxist organization has the great advantage over its enemies in its ability “to see intertwined the decadence of official society and the socialist solution” (p. 97).

The “invading socialist society” (to use another Jamesian formulation from another publication) is shown to be present in the way in which workers deal with the concrete problems of production, constantly having to fight management’s interference. The authors do cite remarkable material such as the 1955 French wildcats (which were already pushing the unions aside) and the informal groups in British longshore and textile which wielded more effective power than either management or the unions. They show (in the British case) how the workers used Communists strictly for their own ends and discarded them when they sensed manipulation; the authors argue, from the great informality of the selection of leaders in real workers’ assemblies, that “the question of leadership is a false problem” (p. 93)

Their discussion of the issue of the relationship between electoral politics and direct action at the workplace develops the key idea of the book: the connection between the workers’ strategy at any given moment, and the uses they may or may not make of official society’s political system. These are of course developed with a focus on the French Communist Party, the British Labour Party and the American Democrats). They argue that vanguard groups reach a low water-mark of sterility in endless “sweating” about how to relate to elections and this flows from the problem of “small organizations dressing up as big ones.” They argue that the great masses of people today have ideas similar to those of the Marxist organization but in their own form; hence the need to “recognize and record.” What the workers need from the Marxist organization is “information” about such breakthroughs of the new society as the Russian factory councils of 1917, or the workers’ councils in Hungary and Poland in 1956. What they need, beyond that, is access to the many aspects of contemporary culture and science which, in muted form, point to the dead end of official society. James and his co-authors throw out the very important idea that only those who recognize the central importance of what the great masses of people do in present and future history are capable of organizing such knowledge.

How, in light of these formulations, do they imagine the role of the Marxist organization, if it is not to act like a small political party, that is, “recruiting and training workers for the revolution” as they would put it? Once again, such an organization would attempt to “recognize and record,” as Lenin recognized the soviets as an unprecedented practical innovation put on the scene by the working class and not by any party. (Of course, Lenin also did much more than that, about which the authors do not have much to say.) It would attempt to give expression to the tensions in the working class, as exemplified in Facing Reality’s insistence on the crucial difference between what workers say/think (that is, voting for reformist parties) and what they do (seizing the factories, as in France after the election of the Popular Front in 1936). If this book has one paramount polemical object, it is this zeroing in on the vanguards’ preoccupation with stated political views and with the outward signs, to which their “habit of mind and way of life” accustoms them, of political awareness. If the book has one paramount argument, it is an assessment of how working people use elections, unions, bourgeois newspapers, and other forms of organization and communication as parts of a broader overall struggle to push the “new society” to the limit and remove all obstacles to its full triumph. I found most arresting the examples cited, from France in 1936 to Britain, France and the United States in the mid-1950s, where workers waged a struggle whose different dimensions confounded the exclusive focus on explicit political consciousness as expressed in elections or party membership or what newspapers the workers read.

The role of the Marxist organization is not to imagine itself as the nucleus of the party which will sweep aside the Social Democrats and Stalinists as the Bolsheviks swept aside the Mensheviks (for in the authors’ view the workers do not imagine the future in terms of a new political party); it is to give workers the information they need to establish the Republic of Workers’ Councils. They insist that the workers’ writings from Hungary and Poland in 1956 constitute some of the richest material in existence of the new society in action and say it shows the poverty of the small Marxist parties that no one has translated and edited them for working-class readers.

To me, the key passage of the entire book is (p. 140):

“What is the difference today between theory and practice, between theory for the intellectuals and theory for the masses? There is none. As we have said earlier, in every department of modern intellectual and scientific life immense discoveries have been made which tear to bits the assumptions by which our society lives and point the way to a new society…

“We repeat: in all these scientific discoveries what is lacking is an integrating principle, some comprehensive universal which will relate them to each other and to society and open out all their possibilities. This integration will not come at any one time, nor will it be the work of one man or any group of men. But this much is certain, that it can come only from men who have grasped the role of the great masses of the people in the new society and understand that the people are today ready to initiate the vast changes in society which the Hungarian workers initiated. The Marxist organizations and the intellectuals in particular must understand that it is their task to make all this knowledge available to the people in such terms as they can understand. This is not popularization. It has been proved that the most difficult of social, political, artistic, and philosophical conceptions can be presented to the people with simplicity and without vulgarization. But to do this demands mastery of the subject and understanding of the people, of the terms of their own experiences. It is the second of these which is so hard to come by. We have indicated the road.”

In light of this, their vision of how this kind of Marxist organization acts differently from vanguards in their conception of a newspaper “by workers, not for workers” is most instructive. One might concisely say that the vanguard’s press still expresses the “Kantian” viewpoint of “judgment”: it exposes and condemns the crimes of official society, and it brings to bear the “categorical imperative” of “workers must do this and must do that,” culminating inevitably in the long laundry list of demands at the end of every article. “The vanguard organization substituted political theory and an internal political life for the human responses and sensitivities of its members to ordinary people. It has now become very difficult for them to go back into the stream of the community.” (p. 131).

The conception of James and his fellow authors, by contrast, would seem an attempt to make the press embody the tensions of an “Hegelian” dialectic, in which different workers’ viewpoints, expressing the “stage we are in,” are thrown into play against one another, trying to capture as best as possible the tensions existing within the class and between what workers “say” and what they as a class “do”; how the workers in Britain can vote (or not vote) Labour and, on the next day, paralyze the docks by wildcats; how the French workers can vote for the Popular Front one day and occupy the factories the next. Most interesting of all is the discussion of how such a press would function in the United States, where “who fails on the Negro question is weak on all.” (p. 152). The authors argue for a newspaper in which white and black workers would be encouraged to develop their views on the race question, and where:

“…. if a white worker or group of white workers after reading and contributing to the paper as a whole finds that articles or letters expressing Negro aggressiveness on racial questions make the whole paper offensive to him, that means that it is he who is putting his prejudices on the race question before the interests of the class as a whole. He must be reasoned with, argued with and, if necessary, fought to a finish” (p. 152).

One sees the great difference from the typical Trotskyist vanguard publication in the following formulation. “How is he to be reasoned with, argued with, and if necessary, fought to a finish?”

First by making it clear that his ideas, his reasons, his fears, his prejudices also have every right in the paper. Every white worker who is in daily contact with Negroes know of their aggressiveness on the race question. It is no secret to him. Further, apart from the fundamental conflict with management, few questions occupy him so much. Whether he speaks about it or not, it is a hard knot in his consciousness, as it is in the consciousness of every American today, a growing torment which the American cannot rid himself of. A frank and free discussion in public of the various difficulties as they arise is the surest way to prepare for that closer unity which comes from common participation in great actions.” (p. 153)

But almost immediately following this very provocative proposal for a different kind of working-class newspaper, they insert a throwaway line that contradicts everything else they have said, and which is never elaborated again. In the midst of this idea of airing all the tensions in the class, informed by “the recognition that the new society exists and that it carries within itself much of the sores and diseases of the old,” the authors write: “The Marxist organization will have to fight for its own position … the Marxist organization may have to carry on what for long periods may seem a losing battle. It will have to stand firm.” (p. 154)

What is then this “own position” around which the Marxist organization “will have to stand firm”? Such a shift in focus seems to jump off the page; it is never mentioned before or after in the text. Stand firm around what? Does the Marxist organization then have something special to say that is not expressed by the conflicting viewpoints of workers? And if this is a newspaper “by workers, not for workers,” just who is supposed to articulate this? And does this not constitute some “theory” different from the “practice” of the masses of people at some point?

What exactly in the modern conditions of the “one-party state” has obviated the formulations of the Communist Manifesto?

“(the communists) are that section which pushes forward all the others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”

There seems to be a flagrant contradiction at the heart of the project proposed by James et al. On one hand, they insist that the task of the Marxist organization is to “recognize and record”; it is to learn and not to teach; it is not to recruit and train; it does not publish its press so much for its own growth as to put “information” at the disposal of the working class so that workers can “decide what to do.” When the paper says what workers should do, it should be at the initiative of some group of workers asking it to do so. On the other hand, almost surreptitiously in a couple of lines, the authors refer to the Marxist organization “fighting for its own position” and “standing firm.” So which is it? For the entire book, the authors seem to argue that the Marxist organization should be providing ink and paper for a newspaper “by workers, not for workers.”

I do not wish to build a whole case around a couple of formulations. One might indeed appreciate the broader project of the authors. in which the task of Marxist intellectuals is to make materials available to workers so that they can decide what to do.

They even say that such a role will continue under socialism for the “intellectually inclined.” But who are these “intellectually inclined” in a society that has abolished (as the authors rightly propose) the separation between education and production?

But this is sniping. It is secondary to the much larger question I want to raise about the approach of the authors, namely what happened to the “new society” in the 45 years of history since it was plausible to write about workers at the point of production in Britain, France and the United States and their multi-layered “strategy” for following the lead of the Hungarian workers and establishing the Republic of Workers’ Councils?

James and the others are talking about workers voting for reformist working-class parties. What about workers voting for George Wallace and Ronald Reagan? What about workers voting for Jean-Marie LePen, Jorg Haider and half-a-dozen other contemporary far-right anti-immigrant parties in Europe? What about workers opposing immigration and calling for protectionism, that is workers whose attitude might be charitably summarized as “taking care of our own” and “lay off someone else”? Workers who vote for California’s Proposition 187, denying social services to illegal immigrants?

The authors are rooted in the period when the “main enemy” seemed to be welfare-statist and Stalinist parties and trade unions trying to rein in the shop-floor rebellion, but what do their perspectives mean in the neo-liberal era in which all those forces are greatly diminished, and the “main enemy” appears to many workers as poorer sections of the working class from other countries, whether as immigrants or as overseas competitors? A significant number of American workers today believe, or could be easily convinced, that Chinese workers and peasants shipping cheap goods to the United States market and shutting down factories, or immigrating to the United States to work in sweatshops, are their enemy. They think or could be convinced to think something similar about workers and peasants driven from the Latin American countries devastated by decades of US policy. What would the authors or those who today further their conceptions have to “say” in face of such dilemmas? If no workers stepped forward to critique such chauvinism, would their Marxist organization “fight for its position”? And what would that position be? And would not having such a position violate the very premise that the task is to “recognize and record”?

James and his comrades nowhere say that one task of the Marxist organization is to unify the working class. That has been the perspective of Marxists since the Communist Manifesto. Every development is to be judged according to the question: does it help, or hinder, the unification of the working class? In the view of the authors, the working class is already unified in the “new society.”

In 1934 in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the Trotskyist forces around A.J. Muste intervened in a losing strike of auto parts suppliers, in the depths of the depression, and said: to win this strike, and stop the scabs coming into the plant, you must have a strategy to organize the unemployed. An Unemployed League helped the Auto-Lite workers fight the National Guard, and part of the settlement of the strike was the hiring of some unemployed workers. The idea that the Marxist organization would propose “broadening the struggle” to an isolated group of workers is nowhere in Facing Reality; the authors assume that the class is already basically unified. In their universe, dockers in London hear of a strike at an auto plant, write a brief note to them, and prepare to hot-cargo all cars, even those coming from companies not on strike. In fact, when Thatcher came to power, Britain witnessed a series of working-class defeats made possible in part by the inability of the “new society” to confront a new array of anti-worker legislation against secondary pickets, legislation that was of course honored by the trade unions. Where was the “new society” there? When Thatcher took on the miners, shutting down mines that were no longer profitable, and the miners were stopped from using their old tactics by Scargill and the miners’ union leadership, where was the “new society” saying that the task was not defending dying mines (however important it might be to defend miners’ jobs), but in developing new sources of energy that did not require people to spend their working lives at the bottom of a mine shaft?

The authors say nothing about program. All of that, for them, will be obvious when the Republic of Workers’ Councils is set up. And indeed, one cornerstone of contemporary ideology is the alleged “complexity” of the world, in which simple ideas of two basic classes in society do not take us very far. And it is certainly true that one major role of a Marxist organization, once such a Republic of Workers’ Councils is established, would be to make material available to workers enabling them to make decisions about all kinds of issues, complex or not.

But if workers have neither the time nor the inclination to study such issues of importance to the workers’ movement, and Marxist organizations do, why shouldn’t the Marxist organization do the same thing for programmatic issues involved in “getting from here to there” as they do for “recognizing and recording”?

• 1Emphasis in original.
• 2Kanban is a visual project management tool that was developed at Toyota as part of its overall production management strategy.

In 2007, Loren initiated an online discussion of the relative importance and political potential of the Trotskyist formations in the United States and Europe in comparison to what was described as individuals and groups in the left-communist tradition. The exchange included Loren and three of his political comrades—Yves from France, and Will and Amiri from the United States.

Besides Loren, Yves, a long-time militant, was the most active participant in the discussion. He articulated very distinctive positions in response to Loren’s enthusiastic embrace of the 1917 Russian Revolution, his more or less friendly portrayal of various left communist writers and groups (such as the Situationists) and his sympathetic portrayal of various Trotskyist groups in Europe and the United States. The following is an extensively edited version of several of the key exchanges in the larger discussion.

________________

Loren to All:

After spending time in Korea where he found a great deal of interest in the history of the Russian Revolution, Loren found himself immersed in the controversies associated with 1917. He felt compelled to write about them.

In short, there I was back again on the Russian Revolution. About that time a friend passed on the Glaberman book [a collection of CLR James’s writings] and I found the portrait of Lenin so interesting that I went back to Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle, and began to feel (again) some sympathy for the guy (James makes a big deal of Lenin’s speech to the 1922 Comintern 4th Congress, in which he seems to repudiate many of the theses of the 3rd Congress as “too Russian"). It was his last public speech.

You recall Lenin’s eulogy for Rosa Luxemburg after her death: “She was wrong on the question of organization, of nationalism, of economics, but she shall always remain for us an eagle.”1 Somehow, I feel I could say the same thing about Vladimir Ilyich. In 1971, in the funk after the collapse of the New Left, I traded in my complete works for the complete Remembrance of Things Past of Proust. I unloaded another set in 2000, this time into the garbage can, since my local used bookstore wouldn’t trade it for anything! I then acquired a third set in Paris in 2003, I’m not sure why. Do you know Valentinov’s portrait of Lenin (Oxford University Press, 1968)? He was not—how shall I say—a nice guy. But I do buy the idea, reiterated many times, that he was, in contrast to Trotsky, not overly taken with himself and utterly without vanity. He wrote about philosophy, about literature, about the Russian economy. He was a hack in philosophy, not terribly inspiring about literature, quite problematic in his economics. He did write an entire book on American agriculture in 1913. The key books: What Is To Be Done?, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Imperialism, Left-Wing Communism, the Philosophical Notebooks (if that can be called a book) taken individually or as a whole, are deeply flawed. But I guess he lingers with me as the supreme example of a certain coherence of theory and practice, however one criticizes both. Trotsky is more appealing and has a wider range. One cannot easily imagine Lenin collaborating with Breton and Rivera in 1938. The History of the Russian Revolution is a masterpiece. But one cannot (as Eastman points out in his memoirs) imagine Trotsky without Lenin backing him up, as evidenced by what happened after 1923. Lenin owed a lot to Trotsky, to be sure, but the dependence was not mutual. Luxemburg is a third figure, undoubtedly the most humane of the three, and so much more right about so much.

There were a number of people of the historical ultra-left—Bordiga, Pannekoek, Gorter, Mattick, Ruehle, Canne Meier, Cajo Brendel—who produced important oeuvres but, I ask you, when one sets them side by side with Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, does one see the range of the latter three? CLR James, who to my knowledge never repudiated his interpretation of Lenin, also had that range. In one essay in the 1999 Glaberman book, James says in passing that there was nothing comparable to Russia as it prepared the revolution, not merely in the Marxist tradition, but also in literature, painting, music. The pressures that produced the revolutionary movement and then the revolution also produced a unique culture, a hot house to be sure. And what do we have to show in our own time? Of course, there is an endless list of creative people, from Debord, Camatte via EP Thompson—you can fill in your favorites. But as Thompson said in his polemics with the Althusserians, all this heavy theory has not produced one practical mouse.2 That’s what pulls me back, I think. I recently saw the Warren Beatty film “Reds” again. Is there anything since 1917 comparable to that brief moment of hope in which everything seemed possible, on a world scale? 1968, of course, comes close, without the practical success (such as it very briefly was).

I recently told a good friend (who’s pushing 70, and who is no slouch) that I experience the pull of the Russian Revolution like a bear trap from which I cannot extricate my leg. Am I living in the past? Not in the sense of Faulkner’s remark that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even the past,” but in the sense that one’s sensibilities (I’ll be 60 in October, f’chrissakes) almost necessarily become superannuated, in the way 1930s survivors struck us as superannuated in the 60s.

Yves to Loren:

There are three different problems in your [initial] letter.

The historical role of Lenin and his status as a theoretician. It seems quite obvious that Lenin’s works only had such a lasting political influence because of the existence of a “totalitarian” state which published and used its works internationally in all sorts of social and political contexts. Note that the Russian state never published in other languages the complete works of Marx. That says much about the difficulty in using Marx for the same aims as Lenin. Hopefully Marx was not a Marxist and did not build a system, or a state or a “totalitarian” Party (although he used all sorts of maneuvers to kill the First International).

The fact that the Russian state was a counter-revolutionary state, which made possible a huge primitive accumulation, gave birth to an imperial power, gave its full meaning to the concept of totalitarianism, persecuted everywhere revolutionaries, manipulated national liberation movements, etc., all that in the name of Lenin, points to the weaknesses and ambiguities of Lenin (and the party he contributed to build) both as a theoretician and as politician. There are elements of continuity between Leninism and Stalinism, and the 1917–1924 period enabled these elements to take a decisive negative form which has influenced our history until now.

The Russian Revolution as an exceptional event in history. No doubt about that. But I don’t think we should underestimate other failed insurrections, nationalist insurrections, long general strikes, democratic revolutions, massive factory occupations, that happened since 1917.

Unless one is obsessed by state coups and the building of a new so-called “socialist state” (which you are not), history gives us many examples of the creativity of the exploited to resist by all sorts of means. And that is what fuels my optimism; not the nostalgia of 1917, 1919, 1921 or 1936. It’s also the continuous attempt of the exploited to find a way to counter all forms of oppression (the fight against racism and sexism has made huge historical progresses, and these questions were totally underestimated before the Second World War and even during the early 60s). Since 1917, there have only been small groups of revolutionary militants who often were preoccupied by their own survival and did not have much time and energy to devote to illuminating new perspectives. Very often they just repeated what had been written in the sacred texts with an uncritical mind or picked up some trendy new idea and made a strange cocktail between rigid literal Marxism and some fashionable ideology.

Instead of being nostalgic about past revolutions, I think those who want to help revolutionary militants to get out of their present mediocrity should analyze today’s world and offer new and inspiring perspectives to them and all those who care about changing this world.

Yves to Loren:

“militantism itself is often an ideology”

Loren wrote: “I don’t think it’s fair to call the most important writings of Debord and Camatte “fake” because they fail the “militancy” test.”

That’s not my point. The Situationists are fakes because they spent a lot of energy presenting others’ ideas as theirs. That is not intellectually honest. And the worst is their young followers today: as we live in a society where only what was produced today is valuable to their eyes (the rest is corny, outdated, boring, etc.), they think they don’t need to read Marx, Pannekoek, Bordiga or Luxemburg, because everything is in Debord, Vaneigem or Sanguinetti. And tomorrow they will read the heirs of Debord and probably ignore where these ideas come from.

Obviously, but Marxism has no interest for me if it is not related (in whatever form) to my daily life. The first writings of the Italian operaistas were obscure and difficult to read for an ordinary militant with no academic or Marxist background but at least they were addressing Italian realities in the 1960s. They could not be reduced to the 1567th analysis of the law of value, alienation or fictitious capital in Marx’s writings

Loren criticizes the fact of “relegating theory and culture to window dressing and Sunday morning edification, and generally favoring people who had no use for theory of any kind.” He is right but this situation is also linked to the very abstract and difficult character of the writings which pretend to produce new theories or new interpretations of old theories. It is linked to the unwillingness of their authors to address ordinary militants, to give lectures, to confront other militants in the streets, in struggles, etc.

If a radical author writes for a small audience who has to know and understand all sorts of mysterious concepts, then he should not complain if people don’t read his writings. If he never confronts other militants or ordinary working-class people to explain his ideas, then he has no reason to complain about the small impact of his ideas. But usually academic or radical Marxologists don’t bother with these details. They like to have a court of admirers around them and that’s enough to satisfy their ego.

Loren writes about the Situationists: “I clearly “saw” the world I lived in, of high-rise apartment buildings, suburbia, freeways, television, mass consumption, and white-collar work.” There are many sociologists, novelists, filmmakers who described all these realities. They did not claim to be revolutionaries—but cares? What is important is to find good sources of information about the world we live in. And so-called radical philosophers and Marxologists are perhaps not the most useful ones for people who can only devote 45 minutes per day to reading—as a working-class militant told me recently.

The Situationists were not only people who described the world, like Loren says; they were a group which pretended to have a form of political activity, which pretended that this activity could change the world or has effectively changed the world. That’s why we should be much more demanding than if we were discussing an interesting novel, film or piece of sociology which has no militant or political aims.

Loren praises Camatte for having underlined: “the centrality of the Russian peasant commune and the agrarian question which, in my own experience, no one had ever talked about before.” Did not Marx write about Russia and the importance of the Russian peasant commune in his letter to Vera Zasulich? Camatte may have dwelled on this idea but it did not come from him. And the centrality of the agrarian question in a country where 90 percent of the population is composed of peasants does not seem to me a very original idea. After all, Lenin spent a lot of energy discussing the importance of the peasantry, the possibilities of class alliances between the working class and the peasants, and he defended the idea of the “democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants” at least until April 1917 (according to Trotsky) and even later (according to the Stalinist version of history). If you don’t concentrate your attention on the Bolsheviks and the Putilov factories and start looking at the other political parties during the Russian revolution including the anarchists and the Narodniks or left revolutionary-socialists, if you analyze what happened during the Civil War, it’s not difficult to see the importance of the agrarian question! You will “discover” the same basic element, if you try to understand the mass resistance against the collectivization of agriculture launched by Stalin.

Loren to All:

I do not wish to make a big deal of my bout of nostalgia, if that’s what it was, for “1917.” When I say 1917, I don’t just mean Russia, I mean the world moment of 1917–1921, just about everywhere. Which took to its paroxysm the world revolutionary wave of 1905–1914. Of course, as Yves says, there have been many movements and general strikes and creative moments, large and small. But I frankly don’t think that capitalism has been on the defensive at any time, in face of a world movement, as it was in those years.

Second, on Russia itself. The thread that ties me to the complex of events, people, etc. conjured up by “Russia” is the contemporary importance of Trotskyism. This may sound strange, to some people on this discussion and in the broader left. Not too many people at “Porto Alegre” (for example) give a damn about Trotskyism.3 But frankly, I think that “Trotskyism” in the broad sense is still the “team to beat” in the contemporary period.

In 2003, at the demos just before the Iraq war in Washington, New York and Paris, I was struck by the fact that, after more than 30 years during which I had been influenced by and involved with “left communists” or the broader ultra-left (the Situationists, Socialism or Barbarism, Bordiga, and many journals from around the world) that the weight of those currents in these events wasn’t much different from 1968. In 1968 as in 2003, the “traditional left groups” seemed to have the ability to capture the high ground (in terms of the ability to “set the tone"). The work of the “old mole” in undermining the conditions for the “bureaucrats” did not seem to have progressed much.

Yves to All:

One should not discuss Trotskyism as Trotskyists do (and as most of its adversaries do): as a coherent and unified ideology or theory, as the continuation of “Leninism” (for its partisans) or “Stalinism” (for its adversaries), as the “revolutionary Marxism of the 20th or 21st century.” This method may seem useful for polemics but it’s a lazy and unproductive way of dealing with Trotskyist ideas and practices.

One should differentiate between Trotskyism as a rather coherent ideology or theory until 1940 (Trotsky’s assassination), and what it became afterwards. Today one can’t talk anymore of Trotskyism, but only about very different forms of “Trotskyisms” which have very little in common in theory and practice with their origins. What is left of the original Trotskyism today, among its present followers, is mainly a cult of the personality of Trotsky and a general incapacity to make a balance between his theoretical work and actions when he was in power or in exile.

For the same reason, the fact of reducing Trotskyism to a form of “centrism” (this ideology which allegedly hesitates between reform and revolution) is just a lazy way to deal with the complex and multiform evolution of different political currents—unless one has a very simplistic vision of the political world as divided into three basic forces: the revolutionaries (ourselves), the counter-revolutionaries and those in between (the centrists). This kind of vision is a simple copy of what Lenin wrote during the First World War 80 years ago when he analyzed the positions inside the international Social Democracy and can’t be seriously applied to all non-100 percent-revolutionary political groups since then. For the same reason, comparisons between the different political Russian tendencies before 1917 (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Narodniks) and present revolutionary groups are not of any use today.

Today, it’s more important to pinpoint what Trotskyists do, than what they write. Or better to study the relationship between what they write and what they do in practice. At least in the countries where they have some influence on reality. And that’s true for all political currents; it does not apply just to Trotskyist groups. A French libertarian group like Alternative libertaire is in fact, by its practice, much nearer to the Trotskyist Ligue communiste révolutionnaire than to the Fédération anarchiste. The British SWP today is nearer to the Mao-populist or even Mao-Stalinist groups of the 1970s than from its Marxist-Luxemburgist origins or its Trotskyist heritage. The anarcho-syndicalist CNT-AIT is strongly influenced by traditional Marxist ultra-left thinkers. So, what applies to Trotskyism applies also to anarchism and other political tendencies. There are no more definite frontiers between the most active “revolutionary” tendencies. Or, if they exist, they are more subtle than the officially proclaimed theoretical and practical differences.

These prerequisites are essential because if we don’t agree on these minimum points, discussing Trotskyism becomes like discussing genealogy: one goes as back as far as possible in the past (for revolutionaries, it’s usually the mid-19th century) and then one establishes an apparently “coherent” list of political ancestors (what Marxists usually call the “red thread” or the “historic continuity”). Then, the game (and political reflection) is already over—your present political group belongs to a long, “coherent” tradition which was always right for the last 150 years, so obviously what you do and say today is right because you are continuing what all your always-right-political ancestors did.

Trotsky’s failures

They are today rather easy to spot, at least in what concerns the analysis of Soviet Russia and Trotsky’s desire to defend Lenin’s ideas and the political theses of the first four congresses of the Third International. This work has been partly done by all the different “state-capitalist” (Socialisme ou Barbarie, Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis; Tony Cliff and the International Socialists), “left communist’ (Amadeo Bordiga, Anton Pannekoek, Grandizio Munis, Otto Rühle, Paul Mattick) and anarchist groups or intellectuals (Luigi Fabbri, Makhno, Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman and Rudolf Rocker). This work has been useful because it showed that Trotsky’s conception of Marxism had disastrous political consequences when he had to analyze Stalinism, both in Russia and internationally. And also that he proposed totally or partially wrong tactics to face the traditional forms of reformism and the general crisis of capitalism in the 1930s.

But these criticisms, written in the 1920s, 1930s and used by their political heirs generally share the point of view that an international revolution was possible between the two world wars. This assumption should be today discussed in detail, if one wants to understand what happened at that time but also after the Second World War.

In other words, the explanation by a long-term “counter-revolution” and/or by the “lack of a revolutionary Party” does not suffice to explain the weight and continuing existence of Social Democrat reformism or why Stalinism controlled so easily the newly formed CPs.

Another problem: left communists and “state-capitalist” analyses of Soviet Russia start from the point of view that Marxist categories could be applied to Soviet Russia’s economy and politics. Although Soviet Russia does not exist anymore, it’s strikingly astonishing that since 1989, no revolutionary group has tried to re-evaluate Stalinism now that access to this country, its archives and its people is much easier. 4 The same could be said about Eastern European former Stalinist states. No effort has been made to put together and confront the concrete experiences and theories of Stalinism in Eastern European countries by local revolutionaries and the theoretical analyses produced in the West. At least for a last check of what was wrong and right, in the analyses of Stalinism. This theoretical laziness has dangerous political consequences because it means that the bureaucratic problem inside the workers movement is strongly underestimated even by those who always denounced the bureaucracy as a class or a social layer in the Stalinist states.

What happened to Trotsky’s ideas?

Most Trotskyist groups have in fact rejected the most revolutionary insights of their political mentor. They kept the worst (the tactical recipes: like “entrism” into reformist or Stalinist parties, the faith in the magical effect of political slogans like the Constituent Assembly, the United Front or the Workers Government) and rejected the best—his revolutionary hatred of reformism and Stalinism).

At least one positive thing remained from Trotsky’s voluntarism, if one compares the fate of Trotskyist groups with the fate of the groups influenced by the Left Communist tendencies: Trotskyist groups have always attracted people (intellectuals of all kinds, but also workers) who wanted to do something concrete against capitalism and oppression, while left communist groups have attracted mostly people who despised what they called “activism” or had such a pessimistic and defeatist analysis of reality that they decided to only comment on what was happening and not intervene in political struggles. So, the concrete consequences today in France, for example, are that Trotskyist militants are well-known in their workplaces, lead strikes or at least can express their opinions publicly inside strike movements, while ultra-lefts are in marginal positions, are rarely known by their workmates and have rarely a leading role in strikes. In other words, there is a strange division of labour: Trotskyists act (with wrong political tactics and strategies) and ultra-lefts criticize them in little-read theoretical journals.

If we turn back to the negative aspects of the various forms of Trotskyisms for the last 60 years, they are so numerous that it is difficult to list them all:

• tailism towards the national liberation movements,
• tailism towards the states which were born after the success of these national liberation movements,
• tailism towards all the so-called left-wing tendencies which appeared inside the socialist and Stalinist parties,
• incapacity to analyze the basic trends of postwar capitalism,
• until the end of the 1950s (they believed in the possibility of a Third World War and never asked themselves since then why their prognosis was wrong),
• and then the incapacity to foresee the basic developments of world capitalism: oil crisis, ecological crisis, social role of women and its effects on capitalist society, the changing international role and place of Chinese and Indian capitalist powers, disappearance of the USSR and Eastern European Stalinist states, fundamental changes inside the Western working class, etc.
• incapacity to renew, modernize the socialist program both in function of the failures of the revolutions between the two world wars, and of the changes occurring inside world capitalism.

Loren to All:

Yves has supplied us with some excellent insights into the realities “on the ground” in France and to some extent in the rest of Europe. But does this material really undermine what I said? I refuse to consider myself a dinosaur. I mentioned earlier the feeling of superannuation, somewhat analogous to the way we in the 60s looked at the people still around from the 30s. Certainly, there is a “style” in Marxism that resonates with the contemporary world in which it is expressed. It actually exasperates me that the “cultural” writings on my web site get far more hits than the critique of political economy stuff. When one thinks of a figure like Hal Draper, no one could have been more out of sync with the “cultural style” of the 1960s, yet he was the only adult “over 30” hailed by the 1964 Free Speech Movement and his overall oeuvre influenced hundreds of people, beyond the small circle of militants he personally formed. Lyn Marcus, too, with his bow ties and business suits, cajoled his ex-New Left following (1000 members, including in Europe, at its peak ca. 1973) into giving up Bob Dylan and rock for Beethoven and Spinoza, and into reading Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital instead of Marcuse.

The left communist “scene” in the world today looks at the Trotskyists and says: the CPs and the SPs are parties of “state capitalism"; the unions are instruments of capital which cannot be captured for revolution; national liberation fronts etc. are reactionary, the “left wing of capital.” In fact, for the left communists, the Trotskyists themselves are the “left wing of capital,” a role they have certainly played in Chile or Nicaragua or (with the exception of LO) in France during the Mitterand years.

Around 1940, American Trotskyism had a few thousand militants. Or perhaps 2 percent of the CP’s membership. Was their social weight comparably small? How about the Minneapolis Teamsters’ Strike and the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, both in 1934, two of the most important battles of the American 30s and again, unthinkable without Trotskyists? How about the waves of wildcats against the no-strike pledge during World War II in which the (Shachtmanite) Workers’ Party, just off its split with Trotsky, played a leading role? How about CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Hal Draper, and Lyn Marcus, who at their best (we can discuss exactly where this was) influenced thousands of people in the 60s and 70s let’s not forget that Ex-Trotskyists became key figures of the post-World War II intelligentsia, on the “left” (the Daniel Bells and Irving Howes and Michael Harringtons) and on the right (some of the neo-cons).

There are of course much larger populist formations afoot today. But when I say Trotskyism remains the “team to beat,” I don’t trouble myself overmuch with these more visible, obviously bankrupt groupings. However much in the past, the question of Stalinism still hovers over the international left like a shadow, something that billions of people instinctively point to when the question of “going beyond capitalism” is raised. Isn’t going beyond capitalism still the issue, Yves? Isn’t the abolition of commodity production still the goal?

Yves to All:

Trotskyism is almost dead. Has neo-Trotskyism a future? I would give another meaning to the term “neo-Trotskyism.” In the European context, I consider the neo-Trotskyists to be those who have abandoned the following aspects of traditional Trotskyism: 1) the perspective of building a revolutionary party around their program as a long-term perspective of building parties with “undelimited programmatical frontiers"; 2) the idea of a revolution as an insurrection; 3) opposition to participation to a bourgeois government; 4) reference to Trotskyism as a main element of their political identity; 5) democratic centralism as a main reference; 6) the dictatorship of the working class. The LCR and the 4th International have made their turn towards the defense of democracy, a move which impedes them to defend the dictatorship of the working class.

In contrast, I would call Trotskyists those who in words, on paper, maintain more references to their political origins.

We have to get accustomed to the idea that “our” (at least Loren and I) past Trotskyist references discovered 40 years ago are totally un-understandable today, including for the new generations of Trotskyists and neo-Trotskyists. As Trotskyism was always deeply interlinked with Stalinism for all sorts of reasons (both as mortal enemies and competitors claiming the same heritage: the October Revolution and Lenin), it’s quite normal that as Stalinists die or change skins, Trotskyists follow the same biological and political process.

The whole generation of Trotskyist leaders who have known the October Revolution has disappeared. The next generation who lived at the time of 1936 in Spain and France and the Second World War will soon die. And the third generation in Europe has only known a long period of peaceful development (at least in Western Europe) obviously with some serious political and social crises in the 60s in Italy, and France and later in Portugal (factory occupations and self-management) but that’s already too far away to be a concrete reference for the militants who arrived in the revolutionary milieu in the late 80s, 90s and later.

As regards the other grouplets of the communist Italian, German and Dutch Left, their references are even more esoteric and unknown today, as their publications (when they are published more than twice or once a year) are almost impossible to find not to speak of their non-existent “militants” or clandestine meetings. The web may be a source of information but I doubt ideas which are not defended by frequent face to face contacts and discussions can last very long.

Dear Loren, I hope this won’t make you more nostalgic, but we are already dinosaurs.

Yves to All:

Trotskyism was built in opposition to Stalinism. Very roughly speaking it took radically two opposite directions when it faced a mass CP.

Some Trotskyists chose to see the local CP and Stalinism in general on a world scale as their main enemy. One could say roughly the same thing about people like Cornelius Castoriadis or Daniel Mothé who chose to cooperate with the journal of the CFDT trade union just after 1968 (when this former right-wing Catholic trade-union progressively evolved in the direction of a “left-wing” Social Democracy after 1968; later the CFDT evolved more and more to the right, even of Social Democracy and Castoriadis took his distance with traditional political or trade union circles).

The strong anti-Stalinism of these groups and intellectuals had a positive aspect (they did not have illusions on the exploitative nature of the Soviet bloc, they supported the 1956 Hungarian revolution, they did not fall in the trap of the Chinese cultural revolution or the Cuban revolution) but on the other hand they were not able to maintain a radical position after the crisis of the 1960s and went more and more politically to the right.

Another aspect of this strongly anti-Stalinist current: all these groups and intellectuals were very critical towards national liberation movements when everybody else hailed them in the 1960s. This was positive in a way, but it did not lead them to propose an alternative policy to immigrant workers in France or to the “colonial peoples” in French colonies.

Some Trotskyists chose to enter clandestinely the CPs (the majority of the Fourth International) or to oppose it openly (Lutte ouvrière triggered the Renault strike in 1947 which obliged the French CP to leave the government and abandon its open pro-bosses and national unity policy; after 1956 they started distributing factory bulletins in front of the factories which provoked numerous fights and even battles with the Stalinists) before 1968 but they always considered Stalinist militants and Stalinist states as “comrades in error” and at least “anti-imperialist” states which had a positive role. For them there was only one imperialist power: the USA. Therefore, they were much more critical towards Social Democracy, generally much more “anti-American” during the Cold War. They criticized the formation of the EU as an American plot (1) to struggle against the Soviet Bloc, and they supported uncritically the national liberation movements.

Today this soft anti-Stalinist tendency leads them to be allied, uncritical or soft towards the neo-Stalinists (in Germany, France, Italy at least it is the case) and to be much more anti-social-democrat that anti-CP. These tendencies openly regret the positive influence of the USSR in international politics and have illusions about Cuba, Chavez, Hamas, etc.

This primary option (who is our main enemy—Social Democracy or Stalinism?) may help to explain many splits and differences inside the Trotskyist movement. I took this idea from Philippe Raynaud’s book (L’extrême gauche plurielle) who applies it to France and I tried to apply it internationally.

But we have to go further. In the countries where the CP was not a mass party, or was not the hegemonic force inside the workers movement, the Trotskyists had a big problem. They did not have the same monstrous enemy (Stalinism) to define themselves against.

But maybe we can apply the same division between those who decided to be, from the start, ferocious anti-Stalinists and to ally themselves with Social Democracy, the Labour Party or whatever moderate “anti-communist” forces and those who decided to be more or less soft on the Russian camp. The Spartacists and the American SWP being a good example of this soft anti-Stalinism in the Anglo-Saxon world where the CPs were never a significant force. And this soft anti-Stalinism has progressively led them to be a pro-Stalinist force today.

As regards the British SWP (first called IS) it grew inside the Labour Party as a strong anti-Stalinist and Luxemburgist group, but strangely enough when it left the Labour Party, when it grew by itself and later when it made its “Leninist” turn, the positive aspects of their anti-Stalinism progressively disappeared: they started supporting a third worldist party in Portugal in 1974 (the PRP), then they discovered the radical aspects of political Islam and today they look like any confused Maoist group of the 1960s: third worldist, anti-working class, building the Respect Coalition with the MAB, a group linked to the ultra-reactionary and anti-Communist Muslim Brothers. In international politics the SWP and its International Socialist Tendency defend the same so-called “progressive anti-imperialism” that the USSR, the Stalinist CPs or the Maoists defended in the 1960s and 1970s.

It would be very useful if other people could add some information to this picture or criticize its flaws. Or propose another picture. Obviously, it is a way to see large tendencies in the International Trotskyist movement and they are many national exceptions to the general picture. But I think it can help us to stay less focused on the past political heritage of the “revolutionary” groups, their so-called Trotskyism, and interpret their evolution in relation to the evolution of the big forces of the “workers movement” (Social Democracy and Stalinism) and of the powers and States (today for example Russia, Iran and Venezuela) competing with American and European imperialism on a world scale.

Yves to All:

To start with I think there is a little misunderstanding. We (Loren and I and may be others who would like to join the club) are not dinosaurs because we are asking ourselves how to change the world, we are dinosaurs because (or if) we think young militants today have the same references as we had 30 or 40 years ago. That’s one of the reasons I attacked the Situationists so much, because they are the worst theoretical link between the experiences of the 60s and today that I can imagine; with their confused writings about “alienation,” “consumer society” and “spectacle industry” they provide intellectual justifications to all those who don’t want to fight against this society today: the exploited are so dumb and alienated, the system’s ideology is so pervasive and subtle, let’s just have a bohemian lifestyle and be proud of our isolated esthetic radicality.

This is why we are dinosaurs if we discuss Trotskyism today, as if it had not radically changed.

The British SWP has not used all these Trotskyist slogans in its daily propaganda for years, if it has ever used them in Socialist Worker or its leaflets, which I doubt.

According to Loren “Trotskyists think that the trade unions are workers’ organizations that can become revolutionary with the correct leaders"

We are dinosaurs if we think Trotskyists are still worried by socialist revolution; and we are dinosaurs if we think that they are worried by transforming the trade unions into revolutionary organisations.

Yves to All:

“Isn’t going beyond capitalism still the issue?” asks Loren.

Yes, but not in the terms posed by the Third or the Fourth International or the Communist Left.

Obviously knowing the past is important. The journal Ni patrie, ni frontières reproduces and translates old texts in almost every issue. I agree that there are “trans-generational” problems, concepts, etc. as Loren writes, but we also need to produce NEW answers to these old questions. Often the left is blocked by old answers—when it knows them, which today is less and less the case (the radical left culture including among the anarchists and Trotskyists is much more oriented towards trendy sociologists, like Bourdieu or critics of imperialism, like Chomsky, than towards Trotsky, Marx, Bakunin or Proudhon.

“Isn’t the abolition of commodity production still the goal?” asks Loren.

Well for the mass of the no-global young militants, for the Trotskyist young sympathizers, NO, unfortunately. And we are dinosaurs if we discuss as if we had a common culture with these guys even if they are vaguely interested in the radical left.

That’s the big difference with the 60s and 70s. We have lost (and this is not our choice) a common ground of discussion, a common set of references, with the rest of the revolutionary left and even with the reformist left.

We have kept and cherished very important ideas, but the young generation does not care. And not because it is interested in “cultural politics,” as Loren writes (although rap or comic books or movies are a source of politicization of the youth), but because it is engaged in massive humanitarian actions, from the defence of illegal workers (you may have heard about the RESF network in France) to solidarity work in Palestine or elsewhere. International solidarity work in the 60s and 70s was 100 percent political. Today it is totally centered around humanitarian micro-projects and refuses to discuss political issues—like, for example, what are the political forces in Israël, Lebanon and Palestine, outside the ones the media talk about? Are there political discussions inside the Left of these countries, etc.). If we deal with Third Worldists (that is, in modern terms, partisans of the no global movement) today as we did 40 years ago, then we are dinosaurs.

• 1Although Lenin did make the observation about Luxemburg being an eagle, he didn’t do so until February of 1922. A few days after her assassination in 1919, along with Liebknecht, he had only this to say about them at a demonstration in Moscow to mourn their deaths:

  "Today the bourgeoisie and the social-traitors are jubilating in Berlin-they have succeeded in murdering Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Ebert and Scheidemann, who for four years led the workers to the slaughter for the sake of depredation, have now assumed the role of butchers of the proletarian leaders. The example of the German revolution proves that “democracy” is only a camouflage for bourgeois robbery and the most savage violence.

  Death to the butchers!”

  Not another word! The eagle comment of 1922 could never make up for Lenin’s icy detachment of 1919.

  Furthermore, Lenin’s 1922 observations about Luxemburg, in the document titled “Notes of a Publicist,” only amounted to a paragraph in several pages of assorted comments about different matters. This is the relevant one. It should be noted that Lenin could not resist listing what he thought were Luxemburg’s numerous serious errors (see italics below).

  "Paul Levi now wants to get into the good graces of the bourgeoisie—and, consequently, of its agents, the Second and the Two-and-a-Half Internationals—by republishing precisely those writings of Rosa Luxemburg in which she was wrong. We shall reply to this by quoting two lines from a good old Russian fable: “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles.” Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of the accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others, she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (she corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 after she was released). But in spite of her mistakes she was—and remains for us—an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works (the publication of which the German Communists are inordinately delaying, which can only be partly excused by the tremendous losses they are suffering in their severe struggle) will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of Communists all over the world. “Since August 4, 1914, German Social-Democracy has been a stinking corpse"—this statement will make Rosa Luxemburg’s name famous in the history of the international working-class movement. And, of course, in the backyard of the working-class movement, among the dung heaps, hens like Paul Levi, Scheidemann, Kautsky and all that fraternity will cackle over the mistakes committed by the great Communist. To every man his own."

• 2Edward Thompson, The Poverty of Theory. New York: 1978.
• 3Porto Alegre was the site in Brazil where the first meeting of the World Social Forum was held in 2001.
• 4I am not certain that this citation is an adequate response to Yves’ comment but his views regarding a Marxist analysis of the Soviet Union deserve serious consideration. See Paresh Chattopadhyay, The Marxist Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience: Essay in the Critique of Political Economy. Westport: 1994.

The following article originally appeared in New Politics, 1989.

A strange anomaly dominates the current social, political and cultural climate. World capitalism has for over fifteen years been sinking into its worst systemic crisis since the 1930s, and one which in its bio-spheric dimensions is much worse than the 1930s. At the same time, the social stratum which calls itself the left in Europe and the United States is in full retreat. In many advanced capitalist countries, and particularly in the United States, that stratum increasingly suspects the world outlook of Karl Marx, which postulates that capitalism brings such crises as storm clouds bring the rain, of being a “white male” mode of thought. Stranger still is the fact that the relative eclipse of Marx has been carried out largely in the name of a “race/gender/class” ideology that can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. What this “discourse” (to use its own word) has done, however, is to strip the idea of class of exactly that element which, for Marx, made it radical: its status as a universal oppression whose emancipation required (and was also the key to) the abolition of all oppression.

This question of the status of universality, whether attacked by its opponents as “white male,” or “Eurocentric,” or a “master discourse,” is today at the center of the current ideological debate, as one major manifestation of the broader world crisis of the waning 20th century.

The writings of Marx and Engels include assertions that the quality of relations between men and women is the surest expression of the humanity of a given society, that the communal forms of association of peoples such as the North American Iroquois were anticipations of communism, and that the suppression of matriarchal by patriarchal forms of kinship in ancient Greece was simultaneous with the generalization of commodity production, that is, with proto-capitalism. Marx also wrote, against the Enlightenment’s simple-minded linear view of progress that, short of the establishment of communism, all historical progress was accompanied by simultaneous retrogressions. But most of this is fairly well known; this is not what bother contemporaries. What bothers them is that the concept of universality of Marx and Engels was ultimately grounded neither in cultural constructs or even in relations of “power,” which is the currency in which today’s fashion trades.

The universalism of Marx rests on a notion of humanity as a species distinct from other species by its capacity to periodically revolutionize its means of extracting wealth from nature, and therefore as free from the relatively fixed laws of population which nature imposes on other species. “Animals reproduce only their own nature,” Marx wrote in the 1844 Manuscripts, “but humanity reproduces all of nature.” Nearly 150 years later, the understanding of ecology contained in that line remains in advance of most of the contemporary movements known by that name. Human beings, in contrast to other species, are not fixed in their relations with the environment by biology, but rather possess an infinite capacity to create new environments and new selves in the process. Human history, in this view, is the history of these repeated revolutions in nature and thus in “human nature.”

What bothers contemporary leftist opinion about Marx is that the latter presents a formidable (and, in my opinion, unanswerable) challenge to the currently dominant culturalism, which is so pervasive that it does not even know its own name.

Today, the idea that there is any meaningful universality based on human beings as a species is under a cloud, even if the opponents of such a view rarely state their case in so many words (or are even aware that this is the issue). For them, such an idea, like the idea that Western Europe from the Renaissance onward was a revolutionary social formation unique in history, that there is any meaning to the idea of progress, or that there exist criteria from which one can judge the humanity or inhumanity of different “cultures,” are “white male” “Eurocentric” constructs designed to deny to women, peoples of color, gays or ecologists the “difference” of their “identity.”

Edward Said, for example, has written a popular book called Orientalism which presents the relations between the West and the Orient (and implicitly between any two cultures) as the encounter of hermetically-sealed “texts” which inevitably distort and degrade. In this encounter, according to Said, the West from early modern times counterposed a “discourse” of a “dynamic West” to a “decadent, stagnant” Orient. Since Said does not even entertain the possibility of world-historical progress, the idea that Renaissance Europe represented an historical breakthrough for humanity, which was, by the 15th century, superior to the social formations of the Islamic world is not even worth discussing. Such a view not only trivializes the breakthrough of Renaissance Europe; it also trivializes the achievements of the Islamic world, which from the 8th to the 13th centuries towered over the barbaric West, as well as the achievements of T’ang and Sung China, which during the same centuries probably towered over both of them. One would also never know, reading Said, that in the 13th century the flower of Islamic civilization was irreversibly snuffed out by a “text” of Mongol hordes (presumably also Oriental) who levelled Bagdad three times. Were Said somehow transported back to the wonder that was Islamic civilization under the Abbasid caliphate, the Arabs and Persians who helped lay the foundations for the European Renaissance would have found his culturalism strange indeed, given the importance of Plato and Aristotle in their philosophy and of the line of prophets from Moses to Jesus in their theology. Said’s text-bound view of the hermetically-sealed relations between societies and in world history (which for him does not meaningfully exist) is the quintessential statement of a culturalism that, which a pretense of radicalism, has become rampant in the past two decades.

Martin Bernal has written a book called Black Athena which current fashion likes to lump with Said’s, even though it rests on the opposite view of the relations between cultures, and does not deny the existence of progress in history. Bernal’s book is sub-titled “The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,” and is an attempt to show precisely how Egyptian (and therefore African) and Phoenician (and therefore Semitic) cultures influence the Greek achievement in antiquity. For Bernal, this is not an attempt to trivialize the Greek breakthrough, but rather, as he states from the outset, to restore it to the true dimension which modern racist and anti-Semitic classicism had obfuscated, by setting it against its real backdrop of dialogue with other cultures. If Said had titled his book “The Hellenistic Roots of Islamic Civilization” or “The Islamic Roots of the European Renaissance,” he would be much closer to Bernal than he is, but then he would have written a different, and far better book, one not likely to become popular in the “era of Foucault.”

In such a climate, then, it is quite refreshing to read Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism, a book by an Egyptian Marxist intellectual whose critique of Western ethnocentrism, including actually Eurocentric variants of Marxism, is not made from a relativizing discourse of cultural “difference” incapable of making critical judgements. Amin’s critique of Eurocentric Marxism is not aimed at the latter’s (unfulfilled) aspirations to universality, but rather on the premise that such Marxism IS NOT UNIVERSAL ENOUGH. Amin seeks a “way to strengthen the universalist dimension of historical materialism.” He has plenty of problems of his own, though they are of another order. But his book has merits which should be highlighted before people read no further than the title and assimilate it too quick to the genre established by Said (whose world view Amin characterizes, drawing on the earlier critique by Sadek Jalal el-Azm, as “provincial.”

Amin, who understands the “species” dimension of Marx’s thought, believes many unfashionable things. He believes that there has been progress in world history, that such progress obviously antedated the emergence of the West, that the social formation that engendered Renaissance Europe was revolutionary, unique in world history, and superior to any that had preceded it, and that its achievements, including science and rationality, had laid the foundations for further historical progress, which must clearly go BEYOND the West.

In the first section of the book, presenting an overview of the mainly Mediterranean “tributary” (pre-capitalist) societies prior to the Renaissance, Amin lays out a theory of successive innovations, from ancient Egypt onward, which were breakthroughs for humanity as a whole, and which made possible further universal breakthroughs. “The universalist moral breakthrough of the Egyptians,” writes Amin, “is the keystone of subsequent human thought.” Later, in ancient Greece, there was “an explosion in the fields of scientific abstraction” in which “empiricist practice– as old as humankind itself–finally came to pose questions of the human mind that required a more systematic effort of abstraction.” The accomplishments of ancient Egypt, moreover, later evolved to an all-encompassing metaphysics that furnishes Hellenism, and later Islam and Christianity, with their point of departure, as the thinkers of the period themselves recognized.”

One might quarrel, even substantially, with the specific emphases of Amin’s account of the creation, over several millennia, of what he characterizes as the general synthesis of “medieval metaphysics” in which the (Moslem) Averroes, the (Jew) Maimonides and the (Christian) Aquinas without qualms read, critique and borrowed from each other. But Amin is certainly right that the origins of Eurocentrism came from reading out of history the common Eastern Mediterranean origins of the medieval era in which Islam was long superior to barbaric Western Christendom, and out of which the capitalist West emerged. This artificial isolation of the Greek breakthrough from its broader context made it possible to forget both the earlier phase in ancient Egypt and particularly the later contribution of Hellenistic Alexandria upon which both Christianity and Islam drew so heavily, and later transmitted to Europe. In Amin’s view, it was precisely the backwardness of Europe relative to the Islamic Mediterranean that made the next breakthrough possible there, where it did not have to confront the sophisticated medieval metaphysics of Islam. And presumably no one will call Amin an “Orientalist” when he notes “the reduction of human reason to its single deductive dimension” by Christian and Islamic metaphysics and when he regrets that “contemporary Arab thought has still not escaped from it.”

Amin’s critique of Eurocentrism is not, as we said, the latter’s affirmation of modern capitalism’s uniqueness and, for a certain historical period, (now long over) its contribution to human progress. He aims his fire at capitalism’s rewriting of history to create an imaginary “West” which could alone have produced its breakthroughs. By rejecting the attempt to discover universal historical laws that would accurately situate the West’s achievement with respect to all the societies who helped build its foundations (in the way that Bernal does for ancient Greece) the West created a powerful ideology denying the global historical laws that produced it, thereby undermining the very universal character of its achievement, and “eternalizing” progress as unique to the West, past, present and future. In Amin’s own words, worth quoting at length:

“The dominant ideology and culture of the capitalist system cannot be reduced solely to Eurocentrism… But if Eurocentrism does not have, strictly speaking, the status of a theory, neither is it simply the sum of the prejudices, errors and blunders of Westerners with respect to other peoples. If that were the case, it would only be one of the banal forms of ethnocentrism shared by all peoples at all times. The Eurocentric distortion that marks the dominant capitalist culture negates the universalist ambition on which that culture claims to be founded…Enlightenment culture confronted a real contradiction that it could not overcome by its own means. For it was self-evident that nascent capitalism which produced capitalism had unfolded in Europe. Moreover, this embryonic new world was in fact superior, both materially and in many other aspects, to earlier societies, both in its own territories (feudal Europe) and in other regions of the world (the neighboring Islamic Orient and the more distant Orients…) The culture of the Enlightenment was unable to reconcile the fact of this superiority with its universalist ambition. On the contrary, it gradually drifted toward racism as an explanation for the contrast between it and other cultures…The culture of the Enlightenment thus drifted, beginning in the nineteenth century, in nationalistic directions, impoverished in comparison with its earlier cosmopolitanism.”

In light of the above, it goes without saying that Amin has no use for Islamic fundamentalism and other Third Worldist culturalisms, which he diagnoses as an anti-universalist provincialism existing in counterpoint to the provincialism of Said and of the post-modern critics of “white male thinking” (Amin does not use the latter term; I do). This conflation of “white male” with the humanist universalism produced by world history actually reproduces dominant ideology by denying that the Renaissance was a breakthrough in a broader human history and by failing to recognize the contributions of “non-whites” to key aspects of “Western” culture, as Bernal showed in Black Athena. (Bernal leaves to black nationalists the problem of putting together his corroboration of the African dimension of ancient Egypt, which they have always maintained, with his claim that it had an important influence on Greek culture, which they have always denounced as “white.”) Neither Eurocentric provincialism nor anti-Western provincialism draws much solace from a truly universalist approach to history.

But despite these undeniable strengths of Amin’s Eurocentrism, Amin’s book is deeply flawed by its own baggage, of quite another type. What Amin gives brilliantly in his diagnosis, he takes away clumsily in his prescription for treatment. I apply to him the same critique he applies to the Euro-centrists: he is not universal enough. His own universalism is not that of the global class of working people exploited by capitalism, but that of an ideologue of Third World autarchy. He sets out “to strengthen the universal dimension of historical materialism” but winds up only presenting in slightly modified language the kind of Marxism whose debacle in the 1970s helped to spawn post-modernism in the first place. Amin’s universalism is not that of the international working class and its allies, but that of the STATE. The post-modernists’ point of departure is their assertion that all universalism is necessarily a concealed apology for power, as in the power of the state. Amin, unfortunately, will not disabuse them.

Who is Samir Amin? He is perhaps best remembered as the author of the two-volume Accumulation on a World Scale, which, like Eurocentrism and most of his other books, have been translated and published, not accidentally, by Monthly Review Press. He might be less charitably remembered as one of the more outspoken apologists of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the years 1975–1978, persisting even when it became known that the Khmer Rouge’s near-genocidal policy had killed 1 million of Cambodia’s 8 million people. Cambodia is in fact an example of Amin’s strategy of “de-linking,” which repeated unhappy experience has taught him to call a “national popular democratic” strategy, since neither the Soviet Union nor China nor Pol Pot’s Cambodia can be plausibly characterized as “socialist.” (Cambodia, significantly, is not mentioned once in Eurocentrism.)

Amin belongs to a constellation of thinkers, including Bettelheim, Pailloix, Immanuel and Andre Gunder Frank, who worked off the ideas of Baran and Sweezy and who became known, in the post-World War II period as the partisans (not of course uniformly agreeing among themselves) of the “monopoly capital” school of Marxism. The Monthly Review School, which had its forum in the publishing house and journal of the same name, evolved from the 1940s to the 1980s, liked “anti-imperialist” movements and regimes, and believed that “de-linking” (to use Amin’s term) was the only road by which such movements and regimes (which they then tended to call socialist) could develop backward countries. This inclination led them from Stalin’s Russia to Mao’s China, by way of Sukharno’s Indonesia, Nkrumah’s Ghana, Ben Bella’s Algeria to Castro’s Cuba. Most of the time, they came away disappointed. They went with China in the Sino-Soviet split. The post-Mao evolution cooled them on China, but this disappointment was quickly followed by Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the expulsion of the (ethnic Chinese) boat people from Vietnam, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the Sino-Vietnamese border war of 1979, and China’s virtual alliance with the United States, It was hard, in those years, to be “anti-imperialist” forces were all at war with each other, and when China was being armed by the biggest imperialist of them all. With the fundamentalist turn of the Iranian revolution for good measure, by 1980 a lot of people, including people in the Third World, were coming to the conclusion that that “anti-imperialism” by itself was not enough, and some were even coming to think that there was such a thing as a REACTIONARY anti-imperialism. Finally, around the same time, countries like South Korea and Taiwan emerged as industrial powers, not by autarchy, but by using the world market and the international division of labor, which Amin and his friends had always said was impossible.

De-linking is a fancy name for an idea first developed by Joseph Stalin called “socialism in one country.” (Amin thinks that Stalin was too hard on the peasants, but he has never said what he thought about the millions who died during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”) Amin and the school he comes out of base their world strategy on a theory of “uneven development” which they see as a permanent by-product of capitalism. This in itself is fine, and was worked out in more sophisticated fashion by Trotsky 80 years ago. For Amin and his co-thinkers, de-linking is a strategy to break the “weak links” in the chain of international capitalism. Karl Marx also had a theory of “weak links,” which he called “permanent revolution,” a term significantly never used by Amin, probably, again, because of its Trotskyist connotations. Marx applied it to Germany in 1848, where it explained the ability of the German workers, because of the weakness of the German bourgeoisie, to go beyond bourgeois liberalism to socialism in the struggle for democracy, hence giving the revolution a “permanent” character. Leon Trotsky applied same theory in Russia after 1905, and was alone, prior to 1917, in foreseeing the possibility of a working-class led revolution in backward Russia.

But Marx and Trotsky, unlike Amin, did not propose that the workers in “weak link” countries “de-link” from the rest of the world. They saw the working class as an international class, and saw German and then Russian workers as potential leaders in a world revolutionary process. Following this logic, the Bolshevik revolutionary strategy of 1917 was entirely predicated on a successful revolution in Germany for its survival. When the German revolution failed, the Russian revolution was isolated and besieged. Only when Stalin proposed the previous unheard-of grotesquery of “socialism in one country,” and the draconian autarchy it implied, did “de-linking” first enter the arsenal of “socialism.”

Although Amin and his Monthly Review colleagues rarely spell out their origins so clearly, their theory rests on the defeat, not on the victory, of the world revolutionary wave of 1917–1921. Amin’s theory takes from Marx’s notion of permanent revolution only the “weak link” aspect. Amin thinks that “de-linking” saves the workers and peasants of the de-linked country from the bloody process of primitive accumulation imposed by Western capitalism, but it only legitimates that same process, now carried out by the local “anti-imperialist” elite. The workers and peasants of Cambodia, for example, learned this lesson the hard way. Amin’s theory also “de-links” the workers and peasants of the Third World from the one force whose intervention (as the early Bolsheviks understood) could spare them that ordeal: the international working-class movement. Amin thinks socialist revolution by working people in the West is essentially a pipedream; he at least has the honesty to say so. Amin’s theory, finally, links the workers and peasants in the “de-linked” countries, under the auspices of “national popular democracy” (he does not dare call it socialism, as he and others used to) to Mao, Pol Pot and their possible future progeny, who substitute themselves for Western capitalists and carry out that accumulation under the rhetoric of “building socialism.” That is why it is appropriate to call Amin’s theory that of a Third World bureaucratic elite, and his universalism a universalism of the state.

All of this is stated only allusively in Eurocentrism; Amin’s book De-Linking (which appeared in French in 1985, and which will soon appear in English) is more explicit. In the latter book at least, Amin gingerly raises the question of Cambodia, where he speaks (as such people always do) of “errors,” but nowhere does he say why “de-linking” will work any better the next time.

One can therefore only regret that Samir Amin’s spirited defense of some of the most important aspects of Marx, so maligned in the current climate of post-modern culturalism, as well as his much-needed attempt to go beyond Eurocentric Marxism, conjugates so poorly with his “national popular democratic” strategy of de-linking. “National” and “popular” were also words central to the language of fascism, and none of the regimes Amin has praised over the years for “de-linking” have a trace of democracy about them. The next breakthrough in world history has to go BEYOND the exploitation which characterizes world capitalism, in the “periphery” AND in the “core.” Recent history has seen enough cases where “de-linking” has led to autarchic meltdowns that have tragically led millions of people in places like Poland, the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia to think that Western capitalism has something positive to offer them. It doesn’t. But neither does Samir Amin.

It is seldom remembered today, but from the mid-eighties through the end of the millennium there was a veritable flood of Marxist books about postmodernism. During the preceding decade, a wide range of figures had proclaimed that modernity was at a close: Ihab Hassan in literature,1 Charles Jencks in architecture,2 and Jean-François Lyotard in philosophy.3 Fredric Jameson led the charge among the Marxists, diagnosing postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” in an influential 1984 lecture. Over the next fifteen years, he would release two essay collections on the topic.4 David Harvey examined The Condition of Postmodernity in 1989, looking at the shift from Fordism to flexible accumulation within the global economy and the spatiotemporal texture that corresponded to each.5 Alex Callinicos fulminated Against Postmodernism that same year, arguing that what felt like a monumental change was in fact the simple result of political defeats.6 Terry Eagleton, after an initial foray into the topic in 1985, sought to dispel the ideological Illusions of Postmodernism roughly ten years later.7 Even Ellen Meiksins Wood weighed in on the debate in a 1997 piece.8 Perry Anderson gave a synoptic overview of The Origins of Postmodernity in 1998, where he summarized the contributions of Jameson, Harvey, Callinicos, and Eagleton.9 Although “postmodernism” may seem a dead letter at present, it was very much on everyone’s mind.

Meanwhile, on a related front, a number of Marxist authors confronted a theoretical current widely seen as adjacent to postmodernism: namely “poststructuralism,” a term encompassing everything from deconstruction to schizoanalysis to epistemic archeology. Jürgen Habermas, the leading spokesman of the Frankfurt School’s second generation, mounted a defense of the unfinished project of modernity in 1980. He then tried to address the challenges posed by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, along with their followers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.10 Anderson had likewise gone over the rise of Foucault and Derrida, as well as Jacques Lacan and Habermas himself, seeing their theories as filling the void left by historical materialism in France and Germany.11 Peter Dews painstakingly differentiated the thought of four French poststructuralists — Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, and Foucault — from the claims of German critical theory.12 Slavoj Žižek, fresh off the success of his 1989 debut, launched entertaining Lacano-Hegelian broadsides against Derrida and Deleuze.13 Many of the Marxian appraisals of postmodernity also engaged with these theorists en passant; Jameson dealt with numerous poststructuralist motifs throughout his work, while Callinicos looked to delineate the “aporias of poststructuralism.”

Besides postmodernism and poststructuralism, moreover, a feeling of posteriority seemed to set in everywhere around this time. The critic Arthur Danto signaled the end of art in a 1984 paper,14 and in 1989 the philosopher Francis Fukuyama similarly declared that history had come to an end.15 (Jameson saw both of these quasi-Hegelian positions as symptomatic of the postmodern moment.)16 With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many felt that the end of politics had finally arrived.17 A postartistic, posthistorical, and postpolitical age was thus at hand. Not all the Marxists mentioned above shared the same assessment of this state of affairs. Harvey, Anderson, and especially Jameson held an ambivalent attitude toward postmodernism, neither celebrating nor condemning it. Eagleton and Callinicos were, by contrast, extremely hostile. Others, like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, embraced the postmodern turn, becoming unapologetic post-Marxists reliant on a “deconstructive” approach to old historical materialist categories.18 Regardless of how they individually lined up, however, all of them agreed that things had changed.

Loren Goldner’s Vanguard of Retrogression: “Postmodern” Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital can be considered yet another attempt to reckon with the superstructural effects of the long downturn.19 Published shortly before the September 11 terrorist attacks, it brought together articles written between 1979 and 2001. The book went largely unnoticed upon its appearance, garnering at most a handful of citations,20 but in many ways it is the best of the genre of Marxian interpretations of postmodernism. It is useful to compare Vanguard of Retrogression with some of the other titles listed above. Quite like Jameson, for example, Goldner grounded postmodern ideologies in material transformations in the sphere of production. Unlike Jameson, he did not outsource his economic analysis to Ernest Mandel.21 For Goldner, as for Harvey, the 1973 crisis marked a turning point in the history of capital accumulation. However, Goldner did not adopt the regulation school’s “Fordist”/”post-Fordist” periodization,22 instead characterizing it in terms of a switch from formal to real subsumption (or “domination,” to use his preferred translation).23 Similar to Callinicos, he had political objections to postmodernism. But whereas Callinicos came out of the British tradition of Cliffite Trotskyism, Goldner was influenced by French neo-Bordigism. And although he shared many of Dews’ criticisms of poststructuralist theory, the latter’s perspective was more akin to that of Theodor Adorno, while the former leaned on Leszek Kołakowski.

Early in Vanguard of Retrogression, Goldner remarked that, already by 1971, “a sense of the end of something was in the air.”24 The sixties, which had seen such upheaval, were over. Ranging effortlessly from politics and economics to philosophy and culture, his account of that turbulent decade in the preface sets the tone for the rest of the book. (Here again it is interesting to read alongside Jameson’s “Periodizing the Sixties,” by contrast a much more anodyne essay.)25 Goldner would recall in a subsequent chapter the dramatic changes that took place during this short stretch of time, all in one breathless sentence:

Where there had been in 1960 earnest, crew-cut, and bobbed-hair liberal supporters of JFK and Young Republicans, there were in 1970 Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Young Lords, Black Panthers, White Panthers, Hell’s Angels, Gypsy Jokers, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, Tim Leary, and Richard Albert (aka Baba Ramdass), Ken Kesey and his bus of Merry Pranksters, Carlos Casteneda and Mescalito, Esalen, the Guru Maharaji, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, free-jazz black nationalists, the East Village Other, the Stonewall riots, women’s consciousness-raising groups, Woodstock Nation, fragged Army officers in Vietnam, the death of George Jackson, Attica, the Chicano riots in LA, the Brown Berets, the “army of 100,000 Villons,” as Saul Bellow called them, “modernism in the streets,” as Daniel Bell put it.26

But even before the decade’s close, there was a liquidity crisis and other ominous signs that the postwar boom was stalling out. Over and above this malaise, “sleaze and rot” set in.27 And then came the turn into the seventies. “These years, 1971–1973, were eerie,” mused Goldner. “It seemed that all the revolts of the previous three decades had faded away with remarkable speed, leaving behind only the ‘new social movements’ of women, blacks, Latinos, gays, and ecologists… battling their way into the mainstream.”28 Corresponding to these movements was an intellectual outlook that Goldner dubbed “middle-class radicalism,” which conceived of freedom as mere transgression and the refusal of constraints.29 Earlier enthusiasms for existentialism, Beatnik poetry, and French New Wave cinema were abandoned,30 or replaced by structuralism and schlock. Such was “the social and ideological world of the radicalized middle classes in the early 1970s.”31

Many of the essays in Vanguard of Retrogression focus on what Goldner took to be the theoretical underpinnings of postmodernism. As the subtitle to his polemical opener suggests, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social: Deconstruction and Deindustrialization,” he drew “a parallel between the economic trend of deindustrialization… and the academic fad of deconstruction.”32 Though this theme is left somewhat underdeveloped, it was the attenuation of the proletariat as the Lukácsian “identical subject-object of history,”33 its fracturing into so many disparate subjects, that motivated the cultural turn. Goldner saw the poststructuralist emphasis on the “new Nietzsche” and the “late Heidegger” — in contrast to the earlier existentialist Nietzsche and Heidegger of dread and angst — as providing the justification for this move.34 In Goldner’s view, this was especially true of the latter thinker:

Heidegger, like Foucault after him, [aimed] his critique directly at dialectical thought, against the reason that tends to absorb the other into itself, that understands all “otherness” as alienation. (Or as Marx said, “nothing human is alien to me” [humani nihil a me alienum].) Against this kind of rationality, Heidegger tried to erect the wall of Differenz, difference that was not dialectically mediated or superseded by any historical process.35

It was precisely “Heidegger’s attempt to found an irreducible, antidialectical difference (Derrida later called it différance)” that theoretically underwrote the practical fragmentation of politics in this period. Postmodernism required a new (ir)rationality, to rationalize “the death of the subject.” Goldner personally suspected that

behind the all-too-facile attacks on “master narratives” and “bureaucracy,” the capitalists and their ideologues, the theoreticians of “difference,” were after the real game of the unitary working-class “subject,” which had seriously frightened them from 1968 to 1973. The pulverization of anything that might be construed as a “general interest,” the breaking up of the big “worker fortresses” of Detroit, Manchester, Billancourt, and Turin, the staggering reversal throughout the West, after 1968, of earlier postwar trends toward greater income equality, the “identity politics” of various groups asserting that they have nothing in common with anyone else, the seemingly limitless ability of capital to attack, outsource, and downsize, without encountering any “contradiction” undermining it, all create the climate for the postmodern derision of such “metaphysics”… while hope for a higher organization of society beyond capitalism seems to fade away by the day… What was ending then and there was the world-historical career of “negation,” theorized for modern history by Hegel.36

All this high theory, itself a reflection of the sociohistoric shift Goldner identified, eventually trickled down into political practice. “The big debate on the American left in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” he thus observed, “was about the ‘difference’ of the ‘identity’ of every oppressed group, with the notable exception of the working class as a whole.”37

Of course, Goldner was well aware of the different layers of mediation through which these concepts had passed before arriving on the shores of the United States in the waning decades of the twentieth century. He pointed out that Nietzsche, in particular, would have found the poststructuralist deployment of “difference” unrecognizable side-by-side with his own.38 Both Nietzsche and Heidegger had aimed their attacks primarily at socialism — at the arguments of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Dühring in Nietzsche’s case, and at those of Marx in Heidegger’s — using Hegel’s philosophical system as a proxy. Goldner claimed their post-soixante-huitard epigones shared this hostility toward Marxism, even if they otherwise disclaimed any overtly reactionary stance. “The meaning of the currently fashionable word ‘deconstruction’ is a distillation of their effort to overthrow dialectical reason,” he maintained. “What they attack in Hegel is subliminally imputed to Marx.” (Parenthetically, he added that “the occasional assertion that Marxian and deconstructive theories are compatible is like saying that Marxism and monetarist economics are compatible.”)39 But there were two intermediary figures whom Goldner saw as shaping the American reception of their thought: “The two major mediators of Nietzschean-Heideggerian ‘difference’ to North American postmodern academia are Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In France, ‘difference’ became, with Foucault, differences of ‘desire’ and, with Derrida, of ‘other voices’; in America it became, in pseudoradical guise, the ideological counterpoint to the [assault on] the social in the era of high-tech neoliberalism.”40 For Goldner, the concept was subtly transformed along the way. Recounting the story of its transatlantic migration, he thereby reminded readers that

the ideology of “difference” began with Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s attack on the universal claims of dialectical reason and its drive to make the “other” into a moment of the “same.” In France, through Foucault and Derrida, this “deconstruction” of the unitary subject of Western philosophy (culminating in Hegel’s world-historical subject, the latter often seen as a stand-in for Marx’s proletarian subject) led to a view of a “plurality of discourses” or “multiple voices,” that were never mediated in a higher unity, understood as illusory by definition. Finally, in America, these currents became the extremely esoteric veneer of what amounts to a radical restatement of American pluralism, radical only in the radicalism of its insistence that people of various races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences in fact have nothing of importance in common with one another. In this view, in opposition to Marx, even “class” becomes just one more difference, not a unifying element whose emancipation is the sine qua non of all emancipation… For Hegel and Marx, difference is contradiction, pointing to a higher synthesis; for the postmodernists, difference is irreducible difference, and a higher synthesis is just a new discourse of power, a new “master narrative.” The high irony is that for Heidegger, such qualities as class, race, ethnicity, and sexual preference are precisely in the fallen realm of a “metaphysics of presence,” images “beneath” which real authenticity, always totally individual… is discovered. The current theorists of “identity” who base themselves on collective categories… have completely inverted the source. But in such a way do ideas migrate, particularly to America.41

Jameson also spoke of “the ideology of difference” in his book on Postmodernism, connecting it to the death of the subject, the promotion of marginalized groups instead of the proletariat, and incredulity toward metanarratives.42 Like Goldner, who similarly deplored “the ‘cultural studies’ scene today,”43 in a 1993 essay “On Cultural Studies” he entertained “the possibility that the various politics of Difference — the differences inherent in the various politics of ‘group identity’ — have been made possible only by the tendential leveling of social Identity generated by consumer society.”44 Moishe Postone, whose magnum opus Goldner critically (if appreciatively) reviewed in 2005,45 expressed an almost identical sentiment:

Postmodernism could be understood as a sort of premature postcapitalism, one that points to possibilities generated, but unrealized, in capitalism. At the same time, because postmodernism misrecognizes its context, it might function as an ideology of legitimation for the reconfiguration of capitalism of which it is a part. The contemporary hypostatization of difference, heterogeneity, and hybridity, doesn’t necessarily point beyond capitalism, but can serve to veil and legitimate a new global form that combines decentralization and heterogeneity of production and consumption with increasing centralization of control and underlying homogeneity.46

Goldner’s attitude toward postmodernism was doubtless more polemical than that of either Jameson or Postone, but he would likely have agreed with their assessment. Still further, he regarded the turn toward identity as symptomatic of the broader “NGOization” of politics, as part of the aftermath of 1968. “Postmodernism and ‘cultural studies’ today still live off of the sixties or, more specifically, the defeat of the sixties,” Goldner bitterly remarked.47

Beyond the bastardization of their ideas in the United States, though, a fair amount of vitriol is reserved in Vanguard of Retrogression for Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault themselves. Heidegger in particular is excoriated for his reactionary politics. Victor Farías’ admittedly mediocre book came out in 1987,48 making clear that Heidegger’s membership in the Nazi party had lasted all the way through 1945. It sparked a major controversy in France between his detractors and defenders. Not long after, an antisemitic article written by the Belgian critic Paul de Man for a collaborationist paper during the war was unearthed.49 Given the influence of Heidegger, and de Man’s stature, these revelations scandalized the public. (This was all well before the former’s notorious Black Notebooks were published in 2014.)50 Whereas Jameson sought to shield his late friend de Man from charges of Nazism, believing that “these twin… ‘scandals’ [had] been carefully orchestrated to delegitimate Derridean deconstruction,”51 Goldner delighted in these discoveries. He skewered Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, without ever mentioning him by name,52 for suggesting that “Nazism is a humanism.”53 Fluent in French and conversant with the writings of Henri Simon, Gilles Dauvé, and Jacques Camatte, all of whom he met in the early seventies, Goldner was unimpressed by the radical postures coming out of elite universities in Paris around this time. Reviewing a book by Jean-Pierre Faye, he highlighted the perverse “vacillations” of the poststructuralist milieu.54 “There’s a deep critique to be made of Heidegger, the French Heideggerians, Foucault, Derrida, and their latter-day bastard progeny the postmodernists,” Goldner wrote. “Faye has made a huge contribution to it.”55

Derrida certainly receives more abuse in Vanguard of Retrogression than his erstwhile friend and later rival Foucault, but the latter does not escape unscathed. Goldner found some of Foucault’s earlier studies interesting, particularly Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things, but thought that his rejection of totalizing logics led him to dismiss Marxism as a just another system aspiring to absolute knowledge (a synonym, in his vocabulary, for power).56 Like Dauvé, who saw Foucault’s substitution of “discourse” for “ideology” — and hence, discourse-analysis for ideology-critique — as itself ideological,57 Goldner regarded this move as mirroring a deeper social mutation. “It is not often appreciated in the US,” Goldner pointed out, “that Foucault, in France, anticipated both the media event of the ‘new philosophers’ (André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy) in 1977, but also the neoliberalism that first gained currency under Giscard d’Estaing and then became an international tidal wave in the eighties, fervently embraced by the ‘socialist’ Mitterand government.”58 Recently, the relationship between Foucault and neoliberalism has been hotly debated, but Goldner already made this connection several decades ago. He did not even mention Foucault’s glowing 1977 review of Glucksmann’s execrable survey of The Master Thinkers,59 a screed against Plato, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, et al. Or how Foucault told Lévy in an interview the same year that revolution was not simply impossible, but undesirable, and that all of politics might vanish as a result.60 Goldner reiterated his suspicion that these figures’ anti-Hegelianism was coded anti-Marxism.61

No matter the allure such ideas held in France, their spread to the United States had even more deleterious consequences. Here they enabled the laziest cultural relativism, in literature as in other realms. “While the American population as a whole falls to forty-ninth place in comparative global literacy,” lamented Goldner, “purveyors of the postmodern ‘French disease’ continue the frenzied production of self-involved books and posh academic journals, which communicate nothing so much as a basic ignorance of real history and the pathetic belief that the deconstruction of literary works amounts to serious political activity.”62 From the mid-eighties through the early nineties, the “canon wars” raged in the public sphere. On one side were the unabashed Eurocentrists, authors like Hilton Kramer and Allan Bloom, while on the other were the multiculturalists. Goldner refused to accept the very terms of this dispute, however, counterposing an emergent world culture to both the haughty parochialism of the official canon and the shallow inclusivity of expanded curricula. He had nothing but contempt for the conservatives who now canonized Joyce, Proust, or Kafka, but would have been incapable of recognizing the merit of these novelists in their day. But Goldner focused his ire on the advocates of multiculturalism, who wrote off the Western tradition as an endless parade of “dead white European males.” Even beyond this peremptory dismissal, they remained ignorant of the real roots of the originality of the West:

[W]hat do the ostensibly radical postmodern multiculturalists tell us about all this? Precisely nothing! And why? Because, through Nietzsche and Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida, they have swallowed the Hellenophile romance whole, except to change the plus and minus signs. They ignore the Arabic and Persian sources of the Renaissance, and thus obscure the Alexandrian and Muslim mediation, and further development, of the Greek legacy. Further, they agree with the Eurocentrists across the board that “Western” culture, like all “cultures,” is a self-contained phenomenon. Do they tell us that French Provençal poetry, from which modern Western literature begins, borrowed massively from Arab poetry, and particularly the erotic mystical poetry of Islamic Spain? Do they tell us that Dante was steeped in the work of the Andalusian Sufi Ibn Arabi? That some of the greatest Spanish writers of the sixteenth-century siglo de oro, like St. John of the Cross and Cervantes, drew heavily on Islamic and Jewish sources? Do they tell us about the Franciscan heretics in sixteenth-century Mexico who attempted to build, together with the Indians, a Christian communist utopia in defiance of a hopelessly corrupt European Catholicism? Do they tell us about the belief in the Egyptian sources of Western civilization which held sway from the ancient Greeks, via the Florentine Academy, to the eighteenth-century Freemasons? They tell us nothing of the kind, because such syncretistic cross-fertilization of cultures flies in the face of their relativistic assumption that cultures confront each other as so many hermetically sealed and invariably distorting “texts.” So many “dead white European males” turn out to have massive debts to dead males (and in the case of Arabic poetry, females) of color! The postmodernists are so busy exposing the “canon” as a litany of racism, sexism, and imperialism that they, exactly like the explicit Eurocentrists, fail to notice that some of the canon’s greatest works have roots in the very cultures they supposedly “erase.”63

One of the critics Goldner blamed for this blindness was the Columbia University professor Edward Said, whose “omnipresent book, Orientalism, virtually founded the genre.”64 Said forgot to mention in his account that the Islamic world prior to the Renaissance had for centuries surpassed Christendom in science, mathematics, technology, and culture. Muslim travelers to Europe like the Arab Ibn Sa’id, for example, described the eleventh-century Franks as “resembling animals more than men,” lacking “keenness of understanding and acuteness of mind.” He even justified this prejudice climatologically by saying that “[t]he cold air and cloudy skies [cause] their temperaments to become frozen and their humors to become crude,” with the result that “they are dominated by ignorance and stupidity,” in a very early instance of geographic determinism.65 For Goldner, such condescending attitudes were the effect of being culturally more advanced than the Europeans of this period. Relativists like Said were for obvious reasons “loath to admit that some cultures are, in the context of world history, at certain moments more dynamic, in fact superior to others.”66 Goldner had already dealt with Said in passing in his brilliant 1989 essay on “The Universality of Marx,” a tour de force polemic against not just multiculturalism but culturalism as such. In this piece, he reproached Said for denying any aspect of societal advancement:

[S]ince Said does not even entertain the possibility of world-historical progress, the idea that Renaissance Europe represented an historical breakthrough for humanity, which was, by the fifteenth century, superior to the social formations of the Islamic world, is not even worth discussing. Such a view not only trivializes the breakthrough of Renaissance Europe; it also trivializes the achievements of the Islamic world, which from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries towered over the barbaric West, as well as the achievements of Tang and Song China, which during the same centuries probably towered over both of them. One would also never know, reading Said, that in the thirteenth century the flower of Islamic civilization was irreversibly snuffed out by the “text” of Mongol hordes (presumably also Oriental) who leveled Baghdad three times. Were Said somehow transported back to the wonder that was Islamic civilization under the Abbasid caliphate, the Arabs and Persians who helped lay the foundations for the European Renaissance would have found his culturalism strange indeed, given the importance of Plato and Aristotle in their philosophy, and of the line of prophets, from Moses to Jesus, in their theology. Said’s text-bound view of the [impermeable] relations between societies and in world history (which for him cannot meaningfully exist) is the quintessential statement of a culturalism, which is a pretense of radicalism, that has become rampant in the past two decades.67

Famously, Said’s book also included an aside castigating Marx for his supposed reliance on Orientalist tropes in a few articles on the British presence in India.68 Postcolonial theory would get far worse, of course, after Said. Dipesh Chakrabarty used Marx’s name in Provincializing Europe to signify universal history (“History 1”), while Heidegger’s name stood for historical difference (“History 2”).69 As if to confirm Goldner’s hunch about the Heideggerian provenance of these concepts, the second form of history is irreconcilable with the first — “History 2 cannot sublate itself into History 1.”70 Though there have been Marxian criticisms of postcolonial thought, many of these have proved conceptually impoverished. Vivek Chibber’s polemical disquisition against subaltern studies a decade ago scored a number of solid hits on its target,71 as did a more recent article he wrote on Orientalism,72 but his own brand of analytic Marxism offered little in the way of an alternative.73 Goldner by contrast gave a far richer rendition of the materialist dialectic in Vanguard of Retrogression than Chibber. In any case, there were other, and older, rejoinders to Said. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm’s early critique,74 cited by Goldner,75 was particularly trenchant. Much better than Orientalism, in Goldner’s estimation, was Samir Amin’s Eurocentrism. Despite his dependentist Maoism, which led to certain blindspots, Amin correctly diagnosed Eurocentric conceits as insufficiently universal. The problem was not that the Enlightenment was too “universalistic,” but that it fell short of this ideal.76

On that note, Goldner addressed the question of the Enlightenment in several chapters from the book. Although it is clear from the above that he defended the concept of progress in world history, Goldner did not endorse some unidirectional, gradualist vision. “Marx… wrote, against the Enlightenment’s simple-minded linear view of progress, that short of the establishment of communism, all historical progress was accompanied by simultaneous retrogressions,” he explained.77 Even if limited by certain assumptions about how society would inevitably improve, Goldner took exception to the postmodernists’ casual deprecation of Enlightenment philosophy. During the eighties, this entire body of thought was put on trial, convicted of all manner of offenses.78 He was therefore quite sympathetic to the aforementioned efforts by Habermas to rescue it from certain oblivion, even if Goldner felt these efforts did not grasp the seriousness of the situation. In one of his articles, he indicated that by the nineties

…… [f]ew people on the Western left… are very enthusiastic about defending the Enlightenment per se. And with good reason: its social legacy is in shambles… A vigorous defense of the Enlightenment, as put forward by figures such as Habermas and his followers, might seem a breath of fresh air in the contemporary climate of postmodernism and “identity politics,” whose hostility to the Enlightenment, drawing on Nietzsche and Heidegger (often without knowing it), the Habermasians rightly decry. To seriously defend the Enlightenment today means to draw on a historical culture that is totally unfashionable, suspiciously “white male,” in the parlance of the trendy academic radicalism of today. But such defenses also show signs of not realizing how serious the problem is. One cannot today defend the Enlightenment (and we agree that a defense is necessary) with the ideas of the Enlightenment alone. However unpalatable it may be to do so in the contemporary climate, where the Enlightenment project is everywhere under attack by Nietzscheans, “cultural studies” ideologues, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists, Foucauldians, Afrocentrists, and (most) ecologists, it is necessary to discuss the limits of the Enlightenment in order to defend it and go beyond it.79

Among other crimes, the Enlightenment stood accused of racism. Goldner acknowledged that there was something to this accusation in his magisterial two-part essay on “Race and the Enlightenment,” originally published in Race Traitor, but not at all in the way usually imagined. “In the current climate, in which the Enlightenment is under attack from many specious viewpoints, it is important to make clear from the outset that the thesis here is emphatically not that the Enlightenment was ‘racist,’ still less that it has validity only for ‘white European males,’ ” he explained. “Rather, it is that the concept of race was not accidentally born simultaneously with the Enlightenment.”80 He granted that various philosophes had excused slavery and harbored abhorrent opinions about nonwhites, but insisted that it was misguided to fixate on such matters. Though Goldner listed some examples of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century treatises written by celebrated thinkers proposing racial hierarchies, from William Petty and François Bernier to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Immanuel Kant,81 he was nevertheless adamant that

[t]his kind of polling of Enlightenment figures for their views on slavery and race is an extremely limited first approach to the question, easily susceptible to the worst kind of anachronism. What was remarkable about the Enlightenment, seen in a world context, was not that some of its distinguished figures supported slavery and white supremacy but that significant numbers of them opposed both… Slavery as an institution flourished in the colorblind sixteenth-century Mediterranean slave pool, and no participating society, Christian or Muslim, European, Turkish, Arab, or African, questioned it.

Despite its opposition to irrational ideologies, however, there was something about how it conceived of man and nature that led it to embrace white supremacism. “On one hand, the Western Enlightenment in its broad mainstream was indisputably universalist and egalitarian, and thus created powerful weapons for the attack on any doctrine of racial supremacy,” argued Goldner. “[O]n the other hand, the Enlightenment just as indisputably gave birth to the very concept of race, and some of its illustrious representatives believed that whites were superior to all others.”82 It was this double-edged character that he sought to explicate. Early on, biblical critics like Isaac de La Peyrère had to invent alternate, pre-Adamite genealogies of mankind to claim that the races were unrelated.83 (Various Anabaptist currents in North America — from the Mennonites to the Quakers — would resist this interpretation, making common cause with black freedmen and indigenous tribes.)84 Nineteenth-century biological racism, having left religion behind, could dispense with such textual hermeneutics in postulating polygenetic descent.85 For Goldner, it was the Enlightenment’s scientistic propensity to quantify, classify, and taxonomize disparate phenomena, combined with the accidental ascendance of Europe, that lent itself to the racializing anthropologies of the age. Yet he recognized the historically progressive function this scientism served in dispelling feudal superstitions, and passionately defended those elements of Enlightenment thought that inspired the transatlantic revolutions. Goldner summed this all up marvelously:

Nowhere did the radical Enlightenment program of “Liberty-Equality-Fraternity” acquire such concreteness as a program for mass action as in Santo Domingo after 1791 and in Paris in 1793–1794; Toussaint L’Ouverture had himself studied French Enlightenment thought. Thus the “best of the Enlightenment” is revealed precisely by the actions of people who, influenced by it, were already in the process of going beyond it, with practice (as always) well in advance of theory. This realization of the Enlightenment, as the revolution ebbed, was also the end of the Enlightenment… The Enlightenment had foreseen neither the Jacobin Terror nor Napoleon, and could only be salvaged by figures such as Hegel and Marx, who subsumed the Enlightenment into a new historical rationality.86

The “worst of the Enlightenment,” to Goldner’s mind, was an expression of what Hegel had termed schlechte Unendlichkeit: the boundless numeric divisibility of the Newtonian infinitesimal. Marx’s breakthrough was to give practical shape to the idea of “actual infinity,” a phrase which recurs throughout Vanguard of Retrogression.87 Since this is perhaps the central motif in the book, it deserves to be spelled out. Goldner believed that, beyond just the Hegelian heritage of the Marxian dialectic emphasized by numerous interwar revolutionaries and scholars, there was a recovery of its “Neoplatonic sources.”88 A thread ran from Philo, Plotinus, Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysius in antiquity, through John Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, and Nicholas of Cusa in medieval times, down to Paracelsus, Marcelo Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Johannes Kepler, and Jakob Böhme in the Renaissance.89 During the Enlightenment, their cosmobiological view of an organically united nature and culture was overshadowed by more mechanistic conceptions until being picked up again by Hegel. Kepler in particular was held up by Goldner as representing a path not taken, even if he also thought highly of Newton’s neglected alchemical writings.90 Neoplatonists anticipated Marx’s doctrine of “sensuous human praxis” and “the active side of idealism” in stressing the role played by the imagination in transforming material reality.91

Inspiration for Goldner’s reading of “actual infinity” was principally drawn from the mystical German Marxist Ernst Bloch and the Polish Marxist Kołakowski, mentioned above. Both traced the origins of dialectical thought to Neoplatonism.92 While a student at Berkeley in the late sixties, Goldner had attended Kołakowski’s lectures on the topic.93 His review of the translation of Bloch’s Principle of Hope trilogy once again underscored the link between Renaissance-era metaphysics and Marxian theory.94 For Goldner, this was furthermore connected to the view of nature as a creative process (or natura naturans, also crucial to Spinoza)95 with human consciousness at its center. This is all laid out in his essay “History and the Realization of the Material Imagination,” which forms the methodological core of Vanguard of Retrogression despite appearing at the end. Goldner saw the arc of history as bending toward a tripled self-development: “self-development of the universe…, self-development of the biosphere, self-development of the species.”96 This would be exemplified by the oft-quoted formula, from the young Marx, whereby man can fish the morning, hunt in the evening, and criticize at night. Predicates could attach and detach without ever exhausting the limitless capacities of humanity. One of Goldner’s other favorite quotes by Marx had to do with how nonhuman “animals only reproduce their own nature, whereas man reproduces all of nature.”97 According to Goldner, “the Marxian project of communism conceives of freedom… as the practical solution of a problematic which evolved theoretically from Spinoza and Leibniz to Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach as the transformation of laws, up to and including the physical laws of the universe, [as] man’s unique ‘Promethean’ capacity.”98 He felt that human beings could consciously reshape their environs, bolstering his claims with a dizzying array of allusions to modern science.99 Unlike the standard image of scientists as passive observers of phenomena, they are instead active participants.100

Vanguard of Retrogression has tremendous range given its brevity. Despite occasional repetitiveness, unsurprising for any collection of essays written over the span of decades, it covers a great deal of ground. Goldner discussed literature, pointing out that “no novel succeeded in telling the story of real people coming of age in the sixties or what happened to them later,”101 as that generation shifted its attention to theoretical texts. He touched upon architecture in passim, connecting the international style to the high modernist technocracy of the fifties,102 even if the built environment was not as central to him as it was to Jameson. Sprinkled throughout the book are innumerable insights. “Capital is Hegel’s Spirit: totality apparently moving by itself,” Goldner alleged. “Marx’s Capital is nothing other than the phenomenology of labor-power coming to its concept, discovering itself as the unconscious mover of a seemingly autonomous world… The world of capital is the inverted world [verkehrte Welt] described by Hegel.”103 In this passage he anticipated the infamous inversion of Lukács’ argument by Postone, who held that capital — and not the proletariat — is the subject of history.104 But the word “apparently” marks a key difference between Goldner’s interpretation and Postone’s, as is clear from the sentences that follow. As Goldner saw it, this automatic quality of capital as self-expanding value is a fetishistic form of appearance disguising its necessary mediation by labor. Proletarian consciousness, as Lukács argued in 1923, would be nothing other than the workers’ recognition of themselves as commodities,105 which would then spur them toward their own self-annihilation as a class.106 Here Goldner upheld the dialectical vision of Marxism.

One of the more perplexing aspects of this book for readers decades later must be its attacks on ecologists, especially in light of the climatological crisis society is presently facing. Goldner’s brief piece charting the path “From National Bolshevism to Ecologism” might seem an outlier, set against the rest of Vanguard of Retrogression, but it makes sense insofar as it confronts romantic anticapitalism. In it, Goldner examined a line of thought that ran from the Counter-Enlightenment of Hamann and Herder through the Prussian geschlossene Handelsstaat proposed by Fichte, until arriving at the interwar tendency of Wolffheim and Laufenberg. From there it was but a short distance, largely via the lyrical antitechnologism of Heidegger, to the contemporary environmental movement.107 Goldner acknowledged in other texts that “there is indeed an ecological crisis,” but regretted that so much opposition to it was framed in Neo-Malthusian terms by groups like the Club of Rome or in terms of “Gaia” by New Age mystics.108 While he thought that technology would be vital to overcoming the catastrophe of uncontrolled climate change, he did advocate in his measures for the first hundred days of a postcapitalist society a rapid “transition out of the automobile/oil economy” and a “phasing out of fossil fuel use.”109 Recently the debate around the environment among Marxists has been staged in a rather unhelpful manner, as a dichotomy between “ecomodernism” and “degrowth communism.” Looking at the entirety of Goldner’s œuvre, it might seem as if he would side more with the former, but without all of its reformist social-democratic trappings.

If the present reviewer were to take issue with anything espoused in Vanguard of Retrogression, it would certainly be the snide offhand comments directed at the Frankfurt School. Compared to his polemics against French poststructuralism, the remarks Goldner made seem relatively mild. But they still betray a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of critical theory. For example, he drew an analogy between Foucault’s Nietzschean gloss on Enlightenment thought and Adorno and Horkheimer’s Weberian critique of the same. Where the former equated knowledge with power, the latter equated instrumental rationality with domination.110 Despite the Frankfurt School’s antipathy toward Heidegger, Goldner felt that they were operating along similar lines.111 Adorno once wrote a letter to Horkheimer where he suggested that Heidegger’s pursuit of “false trails [Holzwege]” was “not so very different from our own,”112 yet too much has been made of this throwaway remark. His book-length reproach to The Jargon of Authenticity and settling of scores with fundamental ontology in Negative Dialectics ought to suffice to distinguish the two, even if Goldner believed he was a “Mandarin” who had regressed to the Young Hegelian standpoint of “critical criticism.”113 Though Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly an “odd book,”114 as Habermas later said, it never took leave of its object, attempting an Enlightened critique of the Enlightenment. “Today as in Kant’s time,” Adorno consistently maintained, “philosophy demands a rational critique of reason, not its banishment or abolition.”115 Unlike the poststructuralists, moreover, and in contradistinction to many of his followers at the Institute for Social Research, he refused to renounce Marxism.

Should Vanguard of Retrogression ever be reissued, which it hopefully will (along with any number of Goldner’s other writings), emendations and expansions will have to be made. Of course, there are the misspellings and grammatical errors that attend most self-published texts. Queequeg Publications was a one-man press, so such editorial oversights are to be expected. There are also unintended repetitions in a couple places, as well as a chronological chart of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century theories of race missing from part two of “Race and the Enlightenment.”116 Beyond such minor corrections, however, the biggest change to the book would be the addition of one of Goldner’s articles on fictitious capital. Although the phrase appears in the subtitle, none of the chapters seek to unpack its meaning. Goldner’s understanding of this concept was doubtless idiosyncratic. Usually “fictitious capital” refers to claims on future income streams, on surplus-value that may or may not materialize. In the third volume of Capital, Marx discussed it in connection with credit.117 Now Goldner accepted this definition, but he hoped to further ground it in the two sides of the organic composition of capital. On the variable side of living labor, he looked to the proliferation of unproductive jobs, the faux frais of management that has ballooned in recent decades. On the constant side of dead labor, he saw it as stemming from technological depreciation, from the obsolescence of productive machinery and equipment. His unusual interpretation of fictitious capital was the occasion of a controversy with the British ultraleft journal Aufheben, in which contributors from Internationalist Perspective eventually intervened. All this could be clarified by a new introduction discussing this dispute, along with Goldner’s 2002 piece “Fictitious Capital, Real Retrogression.”118

Postmodernism today may seem passé, forgotten after the War on Terror that followed 2001. But the President-Elect of the most powerful country in the world, Donald Trump, is a former reality TV star who first made a name for himself in the eighties, during the heyday of the pomo period. His gaudy towers, with their eclectic interiors, evince nothing so much as a postmodernist sensibility, reminiscent of the later works of Philip Johnson (whose firm he commissioned to build a skyscraper castle in 1984).119 Some commentators have called him the first postmodern president,120 though that title rightly belongs to Reagan. Meanwhile, his main opponent this last election cycle, Kamala Harris, is the living embodiment of neoliberal postpolitics. She was clearly selected as nominee on the basis of her identity as a black woman, despite her deep unpopularity. The Democrats are the party of credentialed, university-educated professionals and the technocratic elite; they stand for nothing but the perpetuation of the status quo. Leftists for their part remain shackled to what Goldner regarded as the pseudoradicalism of race/gender/class, which despite sounding vaguely Marxian only served to bury Marx.121 They are unequipped to face the rightwing populism of a demagogue like Trump. Goldner’s book is thus much timelier than one might expect.

1. Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1987). This collection gathers pieces on postmodernism originally published between 1971 and 1987.↩︎

2. Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture [1977] (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1984); Charles Jencks, What is Postmodernism? [1986] (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).↩︎

3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979], translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982–1985 [1988], translated by Don Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1992).↩︎

4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (New York, NY: Verso, 1998).↩︎

5. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change [1989] (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997).↩︎

6. Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism [1989] (London: Polity Press, 1991).↩︎

7. Terry Eagleton, “Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism,” New Left Review (Vol. I, № 152: July/August 1985), pp. 60–73; Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996).↩︎

8. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?”, Review of International Political Economy (Vol. 4, № 3: Autumn 1997), pp. 539–560.↩︎

9. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity [1998] (New York, NY: Verso, 2006).↩︎

10. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project” [1980], translated by Seyla Benhabib, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 3-15; Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures [1985], translated by Frederick Lawrence (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998).↩︎

11. Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1984).↩︎

12. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Poststructuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York, NY: Verso, 1987).↩︎

13. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor [1991] (New York, NY: Verso, 2008); Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences [2004] (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012).↩︎

14. Arthur Danto, “The End of Art” [1984], The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986); Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).↩︎

15. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest (№ 16: Summer 1989), pp. 3-18; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1992).↩︎

16. See Fredric Jameson, “ ‘End of Art’ or ‘End of History’?,” The Cultural Turn, pp. 73–92.↩︎

17. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy [1995], translated by Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1999), pp. 61–122; Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 198–205.↩︎

18. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics [1985] (London: Verso, 2001); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, “Post-Marxism without Apologies,” New Left Review (Vol. 1, № 166: November 1987), pp. 79–106. Inspired by Laclau and Mouffe, Saul Newman proposed postanarchism a little over a decade later. See Saul Newman, From Bakunin to Lacan: Antiauthoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power [2001] (London: Lexington Books, 2007); Saul Newman, The Politics of Postanarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).↩︎

19. The phrase is taken from Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 (New York, NY: Verso, 2006). Goldner was acquainted with Brenner from his time in the Independent Socialist Clubs in the early seventies. For his views on an earlier version of Brenner’s essay, published in the New Left Review, see Loren Goldner, “ ‘Total Capital’ Rigor and International Liquidity: A Reply to Robert Brenner,” Against the Current (№ 80: May/June 1999), pp. .↩︎

20. Mostly in writings by the (excellent) Argentine Marxist Guido Starosta and the British Marxist-humanist Cyril Smith.↩︎

21. Jameson finds in Mandel’s 1972 book Late Capitalism “a usably Marxian perspective,” in Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. 400. Earlier on (pp. 35–36), he leaned on its notion of a “third stage” of capitalist development. For worthwhile critiques of this book by Mandel, see Paul Mattick Sr., “Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism” [1974], Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), pp. 165–227; and Moishe Postone, “Contemporary Historical Transformations: Beyond Postindustrial Theory and Neo-Marxism,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 19 (Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 1999), pp. 3-53.↩︎

22. Harvey relies on the twin concepts of “mode of regulation” and “regime of accumulation,” coined by Michel Aglietta and popularized by Alain Lipietz. For a critique of the regulation school, see Robert Brenner & Mark Glick, “The Regulation Approach: Theory and History,” New Left Review (Vol. 1, № 188: July/August 1991), pp. 45–119. To his credit, Harvey recognizes that “[t]here is, within the regulation school, little or no attempt to provide any detailed understanding of the mechanisms and logic of transitions,” and tries to furnish deeper concepts. Harvey, op. cit., pp. 176–179.↩︎

23. “We translate Marx’s term ‘subsumption’ throughout the text as ‘domination,’ e.g. formal, real domination. We do so because ‘subsumption’ also often used in English, strikes us as a somewhat clumsy word. We wish to point out, however, our reluctance to spread confusion with Frankfurt School or Weberian notions of domination, which come from the German word Herrschaft, and which refer to a notion of force which seems to us external to Marx’s theory of value.” Loren Goldner, The Remaking of the American Working Class: The Restructuring of Global Capital and the Recomposition of Class Terrain (published as a manuscript in 1979, reissued in 1999).↩︎

24. Loren Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social: Deconstruction and Deindustrialization” [2001], Vanguard of Retrogression: “Postmodern” Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital [2001] (West Somerville, MA: Queequeg Publications, 2011), p. 6.↩︎

25. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties” [1984], The Ideologies of Theory (New York, NY: Verso, 2008), pp. 483–503.↩︎

26. Loren Goldner, “The Online World Is Also On Fire: How the Sixties Marginalized Literature in American Culture (and Why Literature Mainly Deserved It)” [1995], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 58.↩︎

27. Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” p. 7.↩︎

28. Ibid., pp. 12–13.↩︎

29. Strangely, he associates this second attitude with Situationism. Ibid., p. 8.↩︎

30. “One fundamental shift that has been almost totally forgotten today is the disappearance of the climate associated, for better or worse, with the word ‘existentialism’ that reigned from the early 1940s to ca. 1965. This mood was articulated in the works of authors who have for the most part faded away: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Dostoyevsky, Heidegger, Jaspers, Unamuno, Maritain… ‘Existentialism’ seemed, in those years, to overlap, or to be on a continuum with, various contemporary ‘avant-gardes’ of the 1945–1965 period, including the American beats, the British ‘Angry Young Men,’ Paris Latin Quarter cellar nightclubs, bebop and free jazz, serial music, the films of directors such as Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, the theater of Pinter, Beckett, and Ionesco. The popularized watchwords of ‘existentialism’ were despair, angst, death, despair, nausea, absurdity, meaninglessness, alienation.” Ibid., p. 10.↩︎

31. Ibid., p. 16.↩︎

32. Loren Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture? On a ‘Left’-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown” [1991], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 90. Published in 1993 at Against the Current as “Postmodernism vs. World History.”↩︎

33. “Only when the consciousness of the proletariat is able to point out the road along which the dialectics of history is objectively impelled, but which it cannot travel unaided, will the consciousness of the proletariat awaken to a consciousness of the process, and only then will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality.” Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [1924], translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), pp. 197–198.↩︎

34. Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” pp. 11–12.↩︎

35. Ibid., p. 14.↩︎

36. Ibid., p. 16.↩︎

37. Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture?”, p. 89.↩︎

38. “What is today called ‘difference’ with distinctly populist emphasis was, ironically, first articulated by Nietzsche as a radical aristocratic refusal of the culmination of history in a ‘closed system’ of egalitarianism, liberalism, democracy, science, and technology, or socialism, which for him were so many manifestations of a ‘slave morality,’ the leveling wish for sameness which the ‘weak’ foist upon the ‘strong.’ That such an idea, one hundred years later, would become the basis for vaunting the radical ‘difference’ of a gay black woman of the underclass did not, in all probability, occur to Nietzsche.” Ibid., p. 92.↩︎

39. “While socialism was the culmination of the trend they denounced, Nietzsche knew next to nothing of Marx or Marxism (although he did brilliantly intuit the bourgeois character of the German Social Democrats, long before most Marxists did). Heidegger was more familiar with Marx — above all through his student Herbert Marcuse — he but rarely treats Marx directly in his work. For both of them, Hegel was a totem for the kind of historical rationality which culminated in socialism… Their target is a rationality for which all ‘otherness,’ i.e., difference, is sooner or later subsumed in a higher synthesis or supersession.” Ibid., p. 93.↩︎

40. Ibid., p. 95.↩︎

41. Ibid., p. 97.↩︎

42. See the subsection titled “The Ideology of Difference” in the final chapter, where he writes: “[T]he ideology of groups comes into being simultaneously with the well-known ‘death of the subject’ (of which it is simply an alternate version)… This is, of course, one of the things that problematize the visions of history or ‘master narratives’ of either bourgeois or socialist revolution… for it is hard to imagine such a master narrative without a ‘subject of history.’ Virtually Marx’s first published essay… in a remarkable philosophical leap discovered just such a new subject of history — the proletariat. Marx’s early format was then maintained for other such now marginal subjects — blacks, women, the Third World, even, somewhat abusively, students — in the rewriting of the doctrine of ‘radical chains’ during the 1960s. Now, however, in the pluralism of the collective groups, and no matter how ‘radical’ the immiseration or the marginalization of the group in question, it can no longer fill that structural role, for the simple reason that the structure has been modified and the role suppressed.” Jameson, The Postmodern Condition, p. 348.↩︎

43. Loren Goldner, “The Online World is Also on Fire: How the Sixties Marginalized Literature in American Culture (and Why Literature Mainly Deserved It)” [1995], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 64.↩︎

44. Fredric Jameson, “On ‘Cultural Studies’ ” [1993], The Ideologies of Theory, p. 619.↩︎

45. Loren Goldner, “The Critique of Pure Theory: Moishe Postone’s Dialectic of the Abstract and the Abstract” [2005], Break Their Haughty Power.↩︎

46. Moishe Postone, History and Heteronomy: Critical Essays (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 2009), p. 106.↩︎

47. Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” p. 18.↩︎

48. Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism [1987], translated by Paul Burrell and Dominic di Bernardi (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).↩︎

49. Paul de Man, “The Jews in Contemporary Literature” [4 March 1941], translated by David Lehman in Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York, NY: Poseidon Press, 1992), pp. 287–288.↩︎

50. Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II-VI: The Black Notebooks [1931–1938], translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016).↩︎

51. “[F]or [Paul de Man] the thing dramatically called ‘collaboration’ was simply a job… [A]s long as I knew him personally [he] was simply a good liberal.” Jameson, The Postmodern Condition, p. 257.↩︎

52. “[I]n the 1987–1988 Heidegger and de Man controversies… such formulations [surfaced] as ‘Is Nazism a Humanism? (Le Nazisme est-il un Humanisme?) The argument was as follows: Humanism was the Western metaphysic of the ‘subject,’ culminating in Hegel and reshaped by Marx. Trapped in and constituted by the metaphysics of ‘presence,’ the reduction of everything to a ‘representation’ (image), humanism was the ideology of the subjection — the pomos would, of course, write (subject)ion — of the entire earth to ‘representation,’ in what Heidegger called the worldwide domination of ‘technological nihilism’ (Nietzsche had already arrived at important anticipations of this analysis). For a certain ‘post-1945’ (!) Heidegger, Nazism had culminated this drive to ‘technological nihilism.’ (When he was a Nazi, up to 1945, Heidegger had gamely argued that liberal capitalism was the culmination of ‘technological nihilism.’) The French Heideggerians thus argued that Nazism was a humanism in its drive to complete Western ‘technological nihilism,’ and that the apparently Nazi Heidegger, by attempting to ‘deconstruct’ humanism, was thereby ‘subverting’ Nazism. Meanwhile, of course, the opponents of Nazism, of whatever political stripe, were trapped in ‘humanism,’ and therefore trapped on Nazism’s terrain, similarly facilitating the worldwide victory of ‘technological nihilism.’ ” Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” pp. 9-10.↩︎

53. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political [1988], translated by Chris Turner (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 95.↩︎

54. “Faye [tracks] the oscillation whereby, in 1987–1988, it became possible for Derrida, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe, and others, to say, in effect: Heidegger, the Nazi ‘as a detail,’ by his unmasking of the nihilistic ‘metaphysics of the subject’ responsible for Nazism, was in effect the real anti-Nazi, whereas all those who, in 1933–1945 (or, by extension, today) opposed and continue to oppose fascism, racism, and antisemitism from some humanistic conviction, whether liberal or socialist… were and are in effect ‘complicit’ with fascism. Hence the calls for an ‘inhuman’ thought.” Loren Goldner, “The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye’s Demolition of Derrida” [1994], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 85.↩︎

55. Ibid., p. 86.↩︎

56. “At the beginning of [The Order of Things] (1966), the book that established Michel Foucault as a major figure in France, there is a fascinating analysis of Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas, which contains in some sense the whole Foucauldian project. In this analysis, Foucault identifies the king as the linchpin in the whole game of representation, which is the real subject of the painting. In all of Foucault’s early work, and above all in his innovative (but problematic) early studies of medicine and of madness, the project is the identification of Western reason with the ostensibly omniscient vantage point of the king, of representation, and of power. This project is the ultimate source of Foucault’s conception that all ‘representational’ discourses of ostensibly universal knowledge — including Marxism — actually conceal discourses of separate power. For Foucault, any attempt at such a universal ‘discourse,’ and by implication a universal class, which attempts to unite the different fragments of social reality, or the different oppressed groups of capitalist society (particularly one which privileges the working class), must necessarily be a separate discourse of power, the game of representation centered on the ‘king’ — a master discourse.” Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture?”, pp. 94–95.↩︎

57. See the section “Class Analysis vs. Discourse Analysis, or the Flaw in Foucault,” where Dauvé writes: “[Foucault] trawled through a vast archive of memory artefacts, he equated power techniques with power discourses, as if society were ruled by what it says and believes about itself. It is significant that in the last decades the word discourse has by and large replaced ideology. However pompous and formulaic ‘ideology’ often was (targeting ‘bourgeois ideology’ at every turn), at least it tried to remain connected to some elemental social realities, whereas ‘discourse’ can and indeed must pertain to just about anything.” Gilles Dauvé, Your Place or Mine? A Twenty-First Century Essay on (Same) Sex (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2022), p. 18.↩︎

58. Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture?”, p. 96.↩︎

59. Michel Foucault, “The Great Rage of Facts: A Review of André Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers” [1977], translated by Michael Scott Christofferson, Foucault and Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 170–175.↩︎

60. “As you know, it’s the very desirability of revolution which is a problem nowadays… Perhaps we’re living through the end of politics. For if it is true that politics is a field which was opened up by the existence of revolution, and if the question of revolution can no longer be posed in these terms, then politics could disappear.” Michel Foucault, “The History of Sexuality: An Interview with Bernard Henri-Lévy” [12 March 1977], translated by Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary Review (Vol. 4, № 2: 1980), p. 12.↩︎

61. “Foucault’s ‘decentering’ of the Hegelian subject, aimed at ‘Western’ Marxism of the fifties and sixties, and, beyond that, at Marxism generally, …carried out ideologically what d’Estaing and then Mitterand carried out practically, the dismantling of the French mercantilist development tradition. The final connection was made by the ‘new philosophers,’ who popularized Foucault in their slick paperbacks and media happenings. At the cutting edge of this development were figures such as Glucksmann and Lévy, both of whom had once been ultra-Stalinist militants of France’s post-1968 Maoist movement. The appearance, in 1974, of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was the moment of truth with their ostensible earlier ‘Marxism.’ After a decade of glorifying the most elephantine totalitarian state in modern history, Mao’s China, the ‘new philosophers’ became famous by proclaiming, in the newly receptive neoliberal climate, that all Marxists, including those who had been combating Stalinism fifty years before them, were of necessity totalitarians too. What they took from Foucault was the notion of the ‘master discourse,’ the philosophy of the Hegelian or Marxist type which attempts, or purports, to unify fragmentary realities into higher, universal syntheses. Within a decade, suspicion of universalizing ‘master discourses’ had become rife in American academia, tantalizingly parallel to Reaganism’s ideological dismantling of big statism and decentralization of poverty and austerity to states and cities.” Goldner, “Multiculturalism or World Culture?”, pp. 98–99.↩︎

62. Ibid., p. 91.↩︎

63. Ibid., pp. 103–104.↩︎

64. Ibid., p. 104.↩︎

65. Quoted in ibid., pp. 104–105.↩︎

66. “To acknowledge this would open the way to acknowledging the unacceptable, unrelativist idea that in the seventeenth century, the situation had reversed itself and that some cutting edge of world-historical ascendancy and superiority had passed to the West.” Ibid., p. 105.↩︎

67. Loren Goldner, “The Universality of Marx” [1989], ibid., pp. 130–131.↩︎

68. Edward Said, Orientalism [1978] (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. 153–157. Later in the book, on p. 325, he anachronistically condemns “Marx’s own homogenizing view of the Third World [sic].”↩︎

69. “Marx [is] a classic exemplar of [the] tradition [of universal humanity]… Heidegger is my icon for [a] second tradition [of historical difference].” Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 18.↩︎

70. Ibid., p. 62.↩︎

71. Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Thought and the Specter of Capital (New York, NY: Verso Books, 2013); Vivek Chibber, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, et al., The Debate on Postcolonial Thought and the Specter of Capital (New York, NY: Verso, 2017).↩︎

72. Vivek Chibber, “Orientalism and Its Afterlives,” Catalyst (Vol. 4, № 3: Fall 2020), pp.↩︎

73. For a very sharp critical review of Chibber’s latest book, see Russell Jacoby, “Shadowboxing? A review of Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix,” Platypus Review (№ 152: December 2022-January 2023).↩︎

74. Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East (№ 8: 1981), pp. 4-26. See also Mahdi Amel, “Marx in the Orientalism of Edward Said” [1985], translated by Angela Giordani, Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings (Boston, MA: Brill, 2020), pp. 99–110.↩︎

75. Goldner, “The Universality of Marx,” p. 131.↩︎

76. The criticisms Goldner leveled at the Monthly Review school and its notion of “delinking” are still well worth reading, however. Ibid., pp. 131–137.↩︎

77. Ibid., p. 129.↩︎

78. “The 1980s were clearly a ‘trial of the Enlightenment,’ and all the more so for those strands of Marxism which saw only continuity between the Enlightenment and Marx… Out of this ‘trial of the Enlightenment’ in the West and elsewhere have emerged the ‘new social movements’ and, in less activist intellectual milieux invariably tied to academia, such movements’ more esoteric ideological expression, increasingly known under the rubric of ‘postmodernism.’ Their contribution to clarifying the reigning malaise maybe stated succinctly. To those ideologues and dullards, still benighted

    by the ‘canons’ of the ‘nineteenth century,’ who lament or work to rectify the current loss of a ‘roadmap,’ these bright-eyed junior professors rush, like so many latter-day Zarathustras with their lanterns in daytime, to announce the good news that there is no roadmap, but rather many maps, and more important, that there is no road. Or better still: there are many roads, not necessarily connected to each other, not necessarily leading anywhere, and, lo!, they are to be found more or less exactly where the mapmakers ‘desire’ them to be.” Loren Goldner, “Postmodernism Meets the IMF: The Case of Poland” [1990], ibid., pp. 109–110.↩︎

79. Goldner, “The Renaissance and Rationality: The Status of the Enlightenment Today” [1995], ibid., p. 71.↩︎

80. Loren Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment, Part 1: From Antisemitism to White Supremacy, 1492–1676” [1997], ibid., p. 22.↩︎

81. Loren Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment, Part 2: The Anglo-French Enlightenment and Beyond” [1998], ibid., p. 45.↩︎

82. Ibid., p. 46.↩︎

83. Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment, Part 1,” pp. 31–32.↩︎

84. Loren Goldner, “The Fusion of Anabaptist, Indian, and African as the American Radical Tradition” [1987], ibid., pp. 145–146.↩︎

85. Goldner, “Race and the Enlightenment, Part 2,” p. 51.↩︎

86. Ibid., p. 48.↩︎

87. It appears twenty times in the book.↩︎

88. “[H]ard behind the Hegel renaissance in Marxism was the recovery (elaborated by Bloch, Kołakowski, and others) of the more general Neoplatonic sources of the Marxian dialectic, in Plotinus, Erigena, Eckhardt, Cusa, Bruno, and Böhme; of the natura naturans view of nature of the same tradition and, side by side with that, the idea of actual infinity first articulated by Cusa and Bruno, and passing through Spinoza and Leibniz into Hegel and Marx.” Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” p. 17.↩︎

89. Different names are given each time, with some repetition, but this is the most comprehensive list.↩︎

90. Goldner, “The Renaissance and Rationality,” pp. 75–77.↩︎

91. Marx’s notion of sinnliche umwälzende Tätigkeit, which appears four times in the book.↩︎

92. “What has also enriched our understanding of Marx has been the demonstration, by figures such as Kołakowski and Ernst Bloch, that the ‘active side developed by idealism’ to which Marx refers in the Theses on Feuerbach comes straight out of the Neoplatonism of late antiquity, and such medieval and early modern Neoplatonists as Eckhardt, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Böhme, all predecessors of Hegel and rarely, if ever, invoked by the ‘hardheaded materialists’ of the classical workers’ movement.” Loren Goldner, “Marxism and the Critique of Scientific Ideology” [1983], ibid., p. 154.↩︎

93. “In 1969, …the philosophy department [at Berkeley] brought in the eminent Polish thinker Leszek Kołakowski to teach Marx, though by the time he arrived he had already turned away from the Marxist humanism for which he had become famous in Eastern Europe. The opening lecture of his undergraduate Marxism class was packed with student militants, but Kołakowski’s talk on the origins of the dialectic in the Neoplatonic thinkers of late antiquity, above all Plotinus, quickly cleared out the room. I stayed.” Loren Goldner, “Marx and Marxism in Berkeley in 1968,” Insurgent Notes: A Journal for Communist Theory and Practice (№ 18: May 2018).↩︎

94. “Bloch shows that the active human constitution of the world through historical activity separates Marx from any previous ‘Democritean’ materialism… [H]e shows figures such as Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme to have actually elaborated, in the Renaissance and Reformation periods, a view of humanity-in-nature as the reconciliation of natura naturans and natura naturata as discussed in theology and philosophy from Eriugena to Spinoza, a conception of an active, living matter infused with imagination that was buried by Galilean-Newtonian physics.” Loren Goldner, “Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope,” German Politics & Society (№ 10: January 1987), p. 48.↩︎

95. The phrase appears nine times in the book.↩︎

96. Loren Goldner, “History and the Realization of the Human Imagination” [1979], Vanguard of Retrogression, p. 174.↩︎

97. The line about hunting, fishing, and criticizing came from The German Ideology, while the line about “all of nature” came from Marx’s economico-philosophical Paris manuscripts. The second was quoted as an epigraph to two separate essays, and appears five times in the book.↩︎

98. Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” p. 8.↩︎

99. “Humanity’s ‘sensuous transformative praxis,’ i.e., man’s anti-entropic role in the biosphere. Human history is the history of the creation of new… environments.” Goldner, “Marxism and the Critique of Scientific Ideology,” p. 156.↩︎

100. Goldner, “History and the Realization of the Human Imagination,” pp. 168–170.↩︎

101. Goldner, “The Online World is Also on Fire,” pp. 59–60.↩︎

102. “The future of the planet, everywhere, seemed to be high-modernist technocracy, materialized in the austere architecture of the international style that had triumphed in the 1930s and in the giant industrial and infrastructural projects that littered the ‘socialist’ bloc or the Third World (steel mills, dams, entire cities like Niemeyer’s Brasilia or his equally sinister French Communist Party headquarters in Paris).” Goldner, “Ontological ‘Difference’ and the Neoliberal War on the Social,” pp. 9-10.↩︎

103. Goldner, “History and the Realization of the Human Imagination,” p. 171.↩︎

104. The explicit inversion of Lukács is made in Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press: New York, NY: 1993), pp. 71–83. But Postone originally sketched a version of this argument in an earlier piece, just a year before Goldner. “If class is in fact a category of alienation, then revolutionary class consciousness could only mean the desire to abolish and transcend itself. This position rejects the notion of the proletariat as the historical Subject whose existence as such is veiled by fetishized forms of thought and appearance and whose ‘task’ is to emerge openly as the Subject. The problem with the proletariat as ‘dogmatic subject’ is basically due to defining the proletariat as Subject. This not only does not allow for a concept of socialist revolution as the self-overcoming of proletarian labor by the proletariat, but — what is related — necessarily posits a static, nonhistorical proletariat… In the position here developed, the proletariat is considered as the source of the alienated Subject — capital — which, in its interaction with the latter, is the essential driving force of the historical development of the capitalist social formation, leading to the historical possibility that it abolish itself — and therefore capital — thereby allowing humanity to become the historical Subject.” Moishe Postone, “Necessity, Labor, and Time: A Reinterpretation of the Marxian Critique of Capitalism,” Social Research (Vol. 45, № 4: 1978), pp. 781–782.↩︎

105. “[T]he worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity… Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of raising himself above the role of object his consciousness is the self-consciousness of the commodity; or in other words it is the self-knowledge, the self-revelation of the capitalist society founded upon the production and exchange of commodities.” Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” p. 168.↩︎

106. “[W]e must never overlook the distance that separates the consciousness of even the most revolutionary worker from the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat… The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle.” Georg Lukács, “Class Consciousness” [March 1920], History and Class Consciousness, p. 80.↩︎

107. Loren Goldner, “From National Bolshevism to Ecologism” [1980], Vanguard of Retrogression, pp. 161–165.↩︎

108. Loren Goldner, “Social Reproduction for Beginners: Bringing the Real World Back In,” Break Their Haughty Power (27 August 2008). This piece also features the line about humans reproducing all of nature as an epigraph.↩︎

109. Loren Goldner, “Fictitious Capital and the Transition Out of Capitalism,” Break Their Haughty Power (26 August 2005).↩︎

110. Goldner cautioned readers “not to fall into a Foucauldian view of the Enlightenment as about nothing but ‘power,’ nor is it to echo a Frankfurt School view of the Enlightenment as mere ‘domination.’ One is quite right to reject these Nietzschean and Weberian views of rationality.” Goldner, “The Renaissance and Rationality,” p. 74.↩︎

111. “Heidegger’s musings are today taken up by many theoreticians of the Frankfurt School, who criticize classical Marxism for having no critique of the ‘domination of nature’ by human technology.” Goldner, “From National Bolshevism to Ecologism,” p. 164.↩︎

112. Theodor Adorno to Max Horkheimer [26 November 1949], quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance [1986], translated by Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 593.↩︎

113. Goldner thus criticized Adorno’s “essentially Mandarin world outlook”: “Western Marxists [are] currently in disarray after having, consciously or unconsciously, reproduced the errors of the Young Hegelians and taken the step back to ‘critical criticism’ to which they were invited by Adorno at the beginning of Negative Dialectics.” Goldner, “Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope,” p. 50.↩︎

114. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 106.↩︎

115. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1966], translated by E.B. Ashton (New York, NY: Continuum, 1973), p. 85.↩︎

116. It should appear somewhere between pp. 45–46. The original chart can be found in Race Traitor (№ 10: Winter 1999), p. 53.↩︎

117. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3 [written 1860s-1870s, published 1894], translated by David Fernbach (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 525–542.↩︎

118. Loren Goldner, “Fictitious Capital, Real Retrogression,” Break Their Haughty Power (6 August 2002).↩︎

119. Bruce Handy, “Trump Once Proposed Building a Castle on Madison Avenue: A Brief History of the President’s Unfulfilled Architectural Dreams,” The Atlantic (April 2019).↩︎

120. Jeet Heer, “America’s First Postmodern President,” New Republic (8 July 2017).↩︎

121. “[T]he relative eclipse of Marx has been carried out largely in the name of a ‘race/gender/class’ ideology that can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian.” Goldner, “The Universality of Marx,” p. 129.↩︎

What’s the definition of a good essay? Is it one that’s right from start to finish? Or one that goes astray in certain places and is all the more interesting for it?

“The Online World Is Also on Fire,” which Loren Goldner wrote in 1995, falls into the latter category. Subtitled “How the Sixties Marginalized Literature in American Culture (and Why Literature Mainly Deserved It),” it’s a meditation on a fin-de-siècle slump so deep that for many of us the hit TV sitcom “Friends” (which premiered in 1994) stands out as the cultural high point. Goldner’s article is bitter and scornful as befits a Marxist who believes that intellectual ferment must go hand-in-hand with any sort of working-class upsurge and who is dismayed that thinking has gone so flat. But while Goldner had high hopes for allied fields such as history and cultural studies, his essay argues that the novel had fallen hopelessly behind.

Why? The culprit is the 1960s, that tumultuous decade that was too much even for a form as expansive as the novel to take in. As late as 1964 or ’65, the literary culture of the immediate postwar period was still going strong according to Goldner. Such was its prestige that no one “would voluntarily admit to an ignorance of Kesey, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Salinger, Jean Genet, J-P Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Unamuno, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Kafka, Mann, Aldous Huxley, Proust, Henry Miller, Michael McClure, Leroi Jones and many other names one could provide.”

But the coming super-storm would sweep them all away. “The Online World Is Also on Fire” describes the “incredible kaleidoscope of events” that did literature in, beginning with the Berkeley free speech movement and continuing on through “the bombing of North Vietnam, the assassination of Malcolm X, the invasion of the Dominican Republic, the Watts riots, the emergence of LSD, riots on Sunset Strip, the break in rock associated with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” and so forth. Where once there were Democrats and earnest ACLU liberals, now there were “Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists, Young Lords, Black Panthers, White Panthers, Hell’s Angels, Gypsy Jokers, Up against the Wall Motherfuckers….”

It was dramatic and thrilling, not to mention crazy and absurd. “And yet,” Goldner writes, “no serious literary expression of that earthquake was written either in the midst of it or subsequently … no one wrote a novel of any importance about it, not here, not in France, not in Germany, not in Italy or Britain or Japan, similar countries where a similar break occurred around the same time.” Instead, the emerging radical generation turned its attention to such nonfiction writers, thinkers, and revolutionaries as Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Trotsky, C.L.R. James, or Rosa Luxemburg:

“One can agree or disagree with someone like [Christopher] Lasch, but can one argue that there is any contemporary novelist who has come close to his analysis of American culture and its malaise in the past 30 years? Can one name one post-1965 novel which has captured the imaginations of 60s people (or anyone) as did E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class?”

There is no doubt that Goldner was onto something. One can quarrel with some of the details. Remarkable novels did come out, such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) or One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). But while a few dealt glancingly with the radical scene—E.L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel (1971) is one that comes to mind—it’s indeed difficult to think of a single top-flight work, written during the sixties or after, that confronts it head on.

So far, so good. But then “The Online World Is Also on Fire” runs into trouble. Once sixties radicalism finished its mugging of great literature, it says, the politically-vacuous seventies and eighties completed the job by ushering in an “hour-glass” economy that left “only yuppies and the homeless in cities like Manhattan” while “devastating the life conditions of the urban working class and marginal bohemia.” Since it is the interplay between the bohemian intelligentsia and the urban flotsam and jetsam that often provides the basis for great literature, the hollowing out of late-capitalist society led a “decline of reading” that made it impossible to produce good literature at all, not only about sixties radicalism, but about anything.

The death of the novel had been announced many times before, but this time Goldner says it’s true. He informs us that “the ‘plugged in’ daily reality of the American middle class … offers little possibility for a novel of the stature of Light in August or Studs Lonigan.” A growing social breakdown in which “children exchange gunfire across America [and] marauding guerrilla bands without ideology or purpose are razing city and countryside like locust hordes in Angola and Liberia and Afghanistan” makes the outlook even bleaker. Thanks to social decay and the rise of glamorous Manhattan lifestyles based on high finance, hyper-consumption, and high-pressure jobs, “it is difficult to cultivate the state of mind into which one enters through, among other things, great literature.” The novel was as much at odds with the times as the epic poem or the courtly masque.

But writers should think twice before they leap because such sweeping judgments were already being proved wrong.

The evidence is Roberto Bolaño’s great 900-page novel 2666, which the Chilean-Mexican-Spanish poet began working on the same year that Goldner wrote his essay. Bolaño described the work in progress in a letter to a friend as “a demented tangle that surely no one will understand.”1 But he was evidently able to straighten out the kinks in time for it to be hailed as a masterpiece when published in Spanish in 2004—a year after the author’s tragic death in Barcelona at age 50 from liver failure—and then in English translation in 2008. Reviews were ecstatic. Jonathan Lethem wrote in the New York Times that Bolaño had “become a talismanic figure seemingly overnight” while the Argentine writer Rodrigo Frey compared him to Cervantes, Stern, Melville, and Proust. Sales were through the roof, and Bolaño’s widow and two children were left very well off.

But what makes 2666 especially relevant from a Goldnerian viewpoint is its politics. It’s not merely a case of an unexpectedly great writer emerging out of an obscure corner of Europe, but one emerging out of the same left-oppositionist milieu that Goldner inhabited, a milieu, of course, that the literary establishment dismisses as hopelessly obscure and marginal but which had just produced a work that it now celebrated. Neither man knew of the other’s existence, of course, since Goldner by that point had largely given up on literature. But 2666 can be read as a counter-thrust to his argument that it was no longer possible.

Fittingly, Goldner and Bolaño’s lives ran on parallel tracks. Born in 1947, the former grew up in Berkeley, became a Trotskyist by age 20 (albeit of the unorthodox Tony Cliff variety), and then cycled through various left tendencies: the ex-Trotskyist Lyndon LaRouche’s National Caucus of Labor Committees (Goldner left after LaRouche launched “Operation Mop-Up,” an insane campaign of physical violence against Communist and Trotskyist opponents), then Luxemburgism, and then the writings of the Italian ultra-leftist Amadeo Bordiga. It was a life devoted to reading, writing, meetings and discussions, and passionate engagement with history and Marxism.

Bolaño was six years younger. Born in Chile in 1953, he moved with his family to Mexico City in 1968, just in time for the Tlatelolco massacre in which troops shot down dozens of student leftists and arrested hundreds more. He was also a passionate reader who began as a poet before turning to short stories and novels. In the 1970s, he took part in a radical literary movement known as “Infrarealism,” which had at least two Trotskyists in its ranks, and was much taken with the Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art that Trotsky wrote with André Breton in Mexico in 1938. But the Third World nationalism of his day left him burned out and bitter. “The truth for me … is that the idea of revolution had already been devalued by the time I was twenty years old,” he told a Chilean newspaper in 1999. “At that age, I was a Trotskyist and what I saw in the Soviet Union was counterrevolution. I never felt I had the support for the movement of history. To the contrary, I felt quite crushed.”2

It’s a feeling that other veterans of the period know all too well. Bolaño claims to have been arrested in Chile following the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, a story that friends in Mexico later dismissed as unlikely, and to have met the leftwing Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, subsequently executed by his comrades in the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, or ERP, a meeting that has also been debunked.)3 In 1998, he published Los Detectives Salvajes, translated into English as The Savage Detectives in 2007, a sprawling novel about bad-boy literary rebels in Mexico City in which Trotsky’s great-granddaughter, the poet Verónica Volkow, makes an appearance. A half-dozen years later came 2666, which rocketed him into the literary stratosphere.

2666 is divided into five books centering on the northern Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, a stand-in for Ciudad Juárez, sister city of El Paso, Texas. The first concerns a quartet of literary scholars searching for a publicity-shy German author named Benno von Archimboldi who is said to be in line for a Nobel. They discuss Archimboldi at academic conferences in Bologna, Zurich, and Toulouse, they jet back and forth from Paris and London to Madrid, and eventually wind up in Santa Teresa where the Archimboldi trail goes dry. The second concerns a Chilean-born philosophy professor, a refugee from the Pinochet coup, who has also wound up in Santa Teresa, while the third is about a black American journalist who falls in love with the professor’s daughter. Book number five is about Archimboldi himself, an 80-year-old Wehrmacht veteran who, in the book’s very last sentence, boards a flight for Santa Teresa too.

In between is book number four, “the part about the crimes,” which serves as the novel’s political and dramatic pivot. Its subject over the course of nearly 300 pages is the scores of women and girls, some as young as twelve, whose raped and mutilated bodies have been cropping up in garbage dumps, behind warehouses, and in alleyways. More than just a crime in the old-fashioned Agatha Christie sense, the “femicides,” as they came to be known, were a bourgeois horror story in a city defined by giant maquiladora assembly plants that have been spreading like mushrooms since NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect in January 1994. The maquilas turn Santa Teresa into a boom town, a drug entrepot, and a killing zone. Unions are suppressed, Yankee plant managers pay off the police, while the cops themselves while away the hours telling misogynist jokes that are not just crude but violent and hateful. (“A woman’s path lies from the kitchen to the bedroom, with a beating along the way … women are like laws, they are made to be broken.”)

Scattered along the way are detectives, prostitutes, politicians, and journalists plus the women themselves whose torn and broken bodies are described in the plainest of prose. “The victim exhibited facial trauma and minor lacerations to the chest, as well as a fatal fracture of the skull just behind the right ear,” reads one. “She was thin but not skinny, and she had long legs, full breasts, and hair past her shoulders,” reads another. “There was both vaginal and anal abrasion. After she was raped she had been stabbed to death. According to the medical examiner, she must have been between eighteen and twenty.”

And so on. Amid it all, a medium goes into a trance on local TV: “It’s Santa Teresa! It’s Santa Teresa! I see it clearly now. Women are being killed there. They’re killing my daughters. My daughters! My daughters! … The police do nothing … the fucking police do nothing, they just watch, but what are they watching? what are they watching?”

What makes it all so extraordinary is that 2666 is a portrait not of individuals or of a particularly violent episode, but of a historical period marked by the same social breakdown that is the subject of Goldner’s essay. “No one pays attention to these killings,” one 2666 character remarks, “but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” The political perspective is left-oppositionist, i.e. critical of official Communism, third-world nationalism, or bourgeois liberalism, but from a leftwing viewpoint. Its modernism is striking. Bolaño eschews “the political violence of the dictator novel,” to quote one critic, and zeroes in on “the systemic violence of millennial capitalism” instead.4 “Dictator novel” in this instance refers to Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and The General in his Labyrinth, which, for all their brilliance, imply that dictators are the source of evil and that everything will be better once they’re gone. From a left-oppositionist perspective, this is so much reformist twaddle since it assumes that society is otherwise normal. Get rid of that aberrant individual or outside force and harmony will return. But the Santa Teresa of 2666 is not normal. Rather than extrinsic, the violence emerges out of the system itself, one whose essential elements are NAFTA, the drug war, the IMF and international debt, plus sexism so vicious as to be nearly incomprehensible. Conditions may seem legalistic enough on the surface, but they’re out of control below,

Another left-oppositionist stand-out is 2666’s internationalism. America looms like a colossus, yet the impression it gives is that the gringos are more than happy to subcontract self-degradation to the locals, who are fully capable of doing the job themselves. 2666 is counter-patriotic. It features a prominent politician who recalls a past lover as “an asshole who thought he was a revolutionary. Mexico has an abundance of these assholes. Hopelessly stupid, arrogant men, who lose their wits when they come across an Esquivel Plata, want to fuck her right away, as if the act of possessing a woman like me were the equivalent of storming the Winter Palace.” It tells of a 1930s Moscow poetry reading in which a “bad Soviet poet (as oblivious and foolish and prissy and gutless and affected as a Mexican lyrical poet, or actually a Latin American lyrical poet, that poor stunted and bloated phenomenon) reeled off his lines on the steel industry (possessing the same crass, arrogant ignorance as a Latin American poet speaking about his self, his era, his otherness) ….” It has the professor asking at one point: “Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city? Because it was one of the few hellholes in the world I hadn’t seen yet?”

“So far from God, so close to the United States”—so goes the famous Mexican expression. To which 2666 responds in so many words: baloney. The trans-border nightmare is an international system in which the Mexican ruling class fully participates. 2666 is wearily cynical in terms of what has been done in the name of revolution so far, but is warily hopeful with regard to what might be done in the future. While staggering through the even worse hellscape of the Eastern Front during World War II, a German soldier named Hans Reiter, the future Benno von Archimboldi, has an epiphany in a deserted kolkhoz when he discovers notebooks hidden away by a Jewish Bolshevik named Boris Abramovich Ansky: “In 1930, said the notebooks, Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union (although he was actually expelled in 1929, a mistake attributable to the lack of transparency in the Russian press) and Ansky’s spirits began to flag. In 1930, Mayakovsky committed suicide. By 1930, no matter how naïve or foolish one was, it was clear that the October Revolution had failed.” Reiter-Archimboldi’s last image is of Ansky leaving his hiding place, dodging the Einsatzgruppen, or Nazi death squads, and heading out to join the Soviet partisans. He still has hope even though he ends up being “felled in a hail of gunfire.” Reiter also has hope, and so, perhaps, did Bolaño too.

2666 and “The Online World Is Also on Fire” thus book-end one another. For those of us who knew Goldner, he was a remarkable figure, a linguist who spoke everything from Persian to Korean, an inveterate world traveler, and an intellectual whose idea of relaxation was to bury himself in some abstruse historical study or other, “Amazonian shamanic medicine, Jewish mysticism in 13th-century Barcelona, [or] the impact of alchemy on the history of science,” to quote his essay. Based on the innumerable literary references in 2666, Bolaño also seems to have read everyone and everything. Despite reports that he was a hard-living ex-heroin addict, his widow describes him as a homebody who drank mainly tea, ironed his clothes, ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and watched TV with the kids. (The titles of 2666’s five books, “The Part about the Critics,” “The Part about Amalfitano,” etc., are undoubtedly taken from “Friends,” whose installments are entitled “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate,” “The One with the Sonogram at the End,” or “The One with the Thumb.”) Bolaño thus also had a taste for the plebeian that Goldner most definitely did not. Still, it’s fun to imagine them meeting in some wine-dark Barceloneta dive discussing Pico della Mierandola, Bede, Augustine, and Lichtenberg, all of whom make an appearance in 2666, far into the night.

For both, the emphasis was on Marxism not as dogma but as an open-ended tool for exploration. 2666’s description of a 1920s Moscow editor seems apropos: “a dialectical and methodical and materialist and in no way dogmatic Marxist, a Marxist who as a good Marxist hadn’t studied only Marx but also Hegel and Feuerbach (and even Kant) and who laughed heartily when he reread Lichtenberg and had read Montaigne and Pascal and was relatively familiar with the writings of Fourier.”

It is a form of omni-voracious Marxism that both men subscribed to. Bolaño and Goldner approached the problem of capitalist decay from different angles and ended up with different results. But their Marxism was equally capacious.

• 1Mónica Maristain, Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations (New York: Melville House, 2009), 12.
• 2Maristain, Roberto Bolaño, 46–47.
• 3https://www.nytimes.com/2009–01/28/arts/28iht-novelist.1.19745848.html?searchResultPosition=34, http://venepoetics.blogspot.com/2007–03/poor-poets-roque-dalton-and-roberto.html.
• 4Sharae Deckard, “Peripheral Realism, Millennial Capitalism, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666,” Modern Language Quarterly 73:3 (September 2012), 354.

The starting-point for this volume is the rapidity with which the 60s wave of radicalism evaporated. By 1971, it was clear that the whole culture of the previous 30 years was fading away. In New Left bastions like Berkeley, people, who only one to two years before had wanted to be professional revolutionaries, were now scrambling to be just professionals: lawyers, doctors, academics, but, of course, in an entirely new way.

Many of those who had thought of themselves as Marxists decided that they had been totally deluded and that it was time to grow up. Others clung to their old slogans and beliefs, while refusing to ask themselves what had happened in the real world. Loren Goldner decided that neither of these approaches was right. Instead, he began to re-examine the traditional ideas of the Left and to analyze the new trends which had taken their place.

His new book is a marvelous antidote to that intellectual complacency which prevails on the so-called Left today. In a series of essays which have appeared over the past twenty years, he confronts a wide variety of problems to test out how the ideas of Marx can take them all on.1 As he explains in the introductory essay (it is the latest to be written, since he prints them in reverse order), the contributions were written against the grain of much of the ideology of the past fifty years, above all in its left and far left guises, that might be summarized with the term middle class radicalism.

He counterpoises this kind of radicalism to the politics of Marx, especially on the issue of freedom: “Middle-class radicalism conceives of freedom as transgression, as the breaking of laws, the refusal of all constraints, as the Situationist International put it 30 years ago, whereas the Marxian project of communism conceives of freedom as the practical solution of a problematic which evolved theoretically from Spinoza and Leibnitz to Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach as the transformation of laws, up to and including the physical laws of the universe.”

This way of posing the question demands the re-examination of a multitude of political, economic and philosophical questions, covering centuries of thought. Goldner is not afraid to take up this task.

Scathing about the kind of single-issue politics which replaced all consideration of the transcendence of capital in the 80s and 90s, he demonstrates it to be the background to the ludicrously-named postmodernism. This is what replaced thinking as the excuse for mindless politics, and his savage and uncompromising onslaught on these tendencies will gladden the heart of many a reader. Read, in particular, the 1993 essay, “The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Fayes Demolition of Derrida,” and the 1989 one on “The Universality of Marx.”

Several important themes recur throughout the book, and a brief review can do little more than refer to them. In a number of places Goldner pursues the postmodernists into the realm of literature and cultural studies, in one essay showing how this followed the virtual eclipse of American literature in the 1960s. Two 1998 essays take up the question of the origin of the concept of race. Goldner shows how this coincided with the period of the Enlightenment, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This shadow on the Enlightenment runs directly counter to the old Marxist story about the bourgeois revolution. In this connection, study also the 1991 piece called “Multiculturalism or World Culture: on a Left-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown.”

In 1993, Goldner had written about “The Renaissance and Rationality: The Status of the Enlightenment Today.” Here, he carefully separates his critique of the Enlightenment from its fashionable postmodern rejection. Even more important, he revisits the tradition of Hermetic and heretical thinking which the Enlightenment thought it had buried forever. What is needed, he believes, is the rehabilitation, in suitably contemporary form, of the outlook of Paracelsus and Kepler, not of Voltaire and Newton, which the left requires today, for a (necessarily simultaneous) regeneration of nature, culture and society, out of Blake’s fallen world of Urizen and what he called single vision and Newton’s sleep.

Two papers, one written in 1983 and one in 1979, deal with the history of the natural sciences from this angle. In them, Goldner points out, in a startling and stimulating way, links between ideas which would not ordinarily enter the same head at the same time.

Each of these chapters raises a multitude of questions, often without pausing to attempt to answer them. On all these issues, a huge amount of work is needed. If we are to see a regeneration of the international workers movement, these are the problems which have to be tackled, and Goldner’s book should be an invaluable spur to this work.

• 1From 1980 to 2000.

It was the very same month, as the one we are typing these short notes, though six years ago, when we met in person with Loren Goldner. Informed as we were that he was visiting nearby Italy, we promptly invited him to Athens so as to stage a public event and discuss with him about his, then recent, book Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment (Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia). An important book that shows how the counter–revolutionary promotion of the Soviet state’s national interests under the guise of “anti–imperialism,” its interests as a nation–state within the broader, international capitalist balance of power, started long before Stalin’s “socialism in one country” doctrine in 1924.

In order to better link Loren’s in–depth critique of the anti–imperialist ideology to the history of the Greek proletariat’s struggles, we had asked him to present the second chapter of the previously mentioned book, the one focusing on the RSFSR/USSR–Kemal alliance that was tragically signed with the flesh and blood of Turkish communists (“Socialism in One Country” Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary “Anti–Imperialism”: The Case of Turkey, 1917–25). That offered us the opportunity to further discuss the evolution (or, rather, bolshevization) of the Greek Socialist/Communist Party (SEKE), in the context of the Greek–Turkish war of 1922 in Asia Minor and the on–going struggles of the newly formed Greek, yet multinational, proletariat.

For Goldner, and for us as well, the parallel study of Greece–Turkey–RSFSR/USSR from that specific perspective offers a two–fold critical assessment of the anti–imperialist ideology—and its disastrous outcomes for the anti–capitalist cause. Firstly, on the grounds of its ability, both as an ideology and a practice, to spew capitalist nation–states –potentially imperialist ones, too, should the circumstances and the intra–capitalist dynamics allow such geopolitical manoeuvres––by crushing all local class movements that go beyond and against the horizons of the national–liberation popular fronts. Secondly, on the grounds of the local socialist/ communist parties’ dutiful attunement to the USSR’s particular foreign and trade policy needs. As far as the Turkish Communist Party is concerned, that attunement led to its actual destruction by the supposedly anti–imperialist–Kemalist regime which was vividly supported by RSFSR/USSR so that an efficient “buffer–zone” between the latter and the “West” could be secured.

Regarding Greece, SEKE’s rather moderate anti–war internationalism was also aligned to the USSR’s strategic plans and became even more so by the time it got fully bolshevized and championed the expansion of Greek–Russian trade co–operation–a demand that was apparently also promoted by the Greek capitalist class. This is not to say that SEKE’s own deficiencies and limitations could determine the behaviour of the local (multinational) proletariat; the latter managed to express, in many cases on its own terms, class–war internationalism.

It goes without saying that the importance of such critical discussions, public or not, becomes even more evident as proletarian internationalism has largely collapsed today, given the reactions towards the on–going wars, both in Ukraine and the Middle East. In a truly Orwellian twist, “internationalism” has come, in our sad times, to represent the… international support for a nation–state building plan; the international support for this or that national capitalist class; international support for a nation–state defense; or, even the shameful co–operation of (wannabe) “left–communists” with Stalinists under the pretext of “anti–colonial,” “anti–war” sit–ins. Loren, you will be missed!

October 2024

What follows is the English translation of the texts we presented during the joint public event with Loren in October 2018 in Athens. Loren’s presentation has not been preserved in paper form but see the aforementioned chapter in his book to read what he had to say. The third part is only partially modified (mostly by means of the inclusion of extra footnotes) so that it would allow those comrades who are not explicitly familiar with the Greek labour movement to better understand the social–political context of the 1918–1922 period. Since we chose to publish these texts as they were, we made no further modifications based on new books or other bibliographical sources that were published after 2018. In that sense, it could be argued that the texts may contain certain limitations in terms of the provided documentation.

A few words about us:

Red Thread publications were initiated by TPTG and friends in 2002. Ιn the preface to the first book we published,1 we stated that our primary objective was to show that communism is a lasting, existing antagonistic tendency here today; that this antagonistic tendency we belong to comes from afar and continues to go through its long and painful road.

The texts we publish do not attempt to present yet another ideology, or another program or doctrine. The practical need for communism stems from the need to overcome the dead–end of contradictory capitalist social relations and the real, everyday struggles of the proletariat.

Our publications attempt to outline the theoretical diversity and the practical experience of the communist movement and class struggles from the 19th century onwards, seeking to contribute to the exploration of the historical perspective in which today’s social conflicts can be understood and shed light on the paths and methods through which we can overcome separations (national, occupational, gender, or others) among us, in the struggle for the recomposition of the human community.

Who is our guest, Loren Goldner?

As a student at the University of California/Berkeley in the spring of 1966, Goldner participated in anti– war demonstrations, building occupations and confrontations at the university to maintain the right to student draft deferments and he was arrested during one of these mobilizations. He is mistrustful of the Maoist, Trotskyist, and Third Worldist groups of that time, and his encounter with Marx’s work and his real education in Marxist politics takes place in the Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC)–that became the International Socialists in the 1970s. Soon, the movement in the United States and western Europe, the strike waves in the United States from 1966 to 1973, the May–June general strike in France 1968, the Italian struggles from 1969 to 1977, the Spanish and Portuguese working class upsurge in the mid–’70s all had a profound effect on him.

Everywhere, the surpassing of trade unions and workers parties’ tactics by the workers themselves in their wildcat strikes called into question the leftist analysis of unions as vehicles for advancing the working–class struggle. It was at that time that Loren first encountered the theory of the “ultra left”–libertarian communists, Situationists, the Socialism or Barbarism group in France around Lefort and Castoriadis, the ICC, the neo–Bordigists who were trying to synthesize the Dutch communist left theses and the Italian communist left—namely theoretical currents which have influenced us, as well.

However, apart from our political affiliation with Goldner, we also find his wide range of interests to be fascinating: his texts and books deal with a plethora of subjects ranging from the October Revolution, crisis and class struggles everywhere in the world, to analyses of racism, the Enlightenment and a critique of postmodernism.

Until his death, he participated in Insurgent Notes, a journal of communist theory and practice, and he also had his personal site, Break their haughty power. 2

Some of his texts have been translated and published in Greek, such as :

Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today

Fictitious capital for Beginners, by Coghnorti

Revolutionary Termites in Faridabad, by the Rebelnet

The Spanish Revolution, Past and Future

Short History of the World Working–Class Movement from Lassalle to Neo– Liberalism

We’re Tempted to Say We Told You So, But We Won’t, by Enzymo

The Sky Is Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn: Class Struggle in the United States from the 2008 Crash to the Eve of the Occupations Movement—The Occupy Movement in the USA, by SKYA.

We invited Loren to speak about a chapter from his book Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment, “’Socialism in One Country’ Before Stalin, and the Origins of Reactionary ‘Anti–Imperialism’: The Case of Turkey, 1917–1925.” 3

In it, he deals with the very early years of the Turkish Communist Party (TCP) and refutes the widespread view that the promotion of Soviet national interests, its interests as a nation–state within the broader, international capitalist balance of power, only started with Stalin’s “socialism in one country” doctrine in 1924. In fact, Goldner shows how it started well before, through Bolshevik anti–imperialist ideology (mainly Leninism) and its relation to the new nationalist, anti–colonial, movements in central Asia or elsewhere which emerged out of the crumbling multi–national empires. He shows in particular why the Bolsheviks became allies of the Kemalist nationalist developmental regime, what their particular interests were and why this alliance was not shaken by the massacre of the Central Committee of the Turkish CP in January 1921, in all likelihood by Kemalist nationalist forces. On the contrary, the Soviets concluded a trade agreement with that same Kemalist regime only some months later and kept quiet about the massacre and the Turkish Communists’ suppression for further months. In other words, Goldner explains why Turkish communists and the other revolutionary movements in the region did not have the support of the Bolsheviks and why the preservation of the Kemalist regime took precedence over possible proletarian revolution in the East.

This particular case gives us the opportunity to criticize the left anti–imperialist ideology–which has had a disastrous, long–standing impact on the Greek anti–authoritarian, autonomist and anarchist milieu– through the unfolding of the events that led to its first implementation, in the early years of the October Revolution. Because our focus is primarily on the political uses of anti–imperialist theories that attempt to justify views and attitudes that undermine a class struggle perspective, we consider it necessary to highlight the events that demonstrate the specific political intent of the Bolsheviks in that early period of anti–imperialism.

Specifically,

• Anti–imperialism is the ideology that legitimizes the creation of new nation–states out of the old crumbling empires and the old colonial systems, and they themselves prove to be imperialist, too.
• The Comintern’s anti–imperialism was part of a much more ambitious political strategy aiming at the reconfiguration of the global imperialist chain and the safeguarding of the Soviet state and, as a consequence, it was selective.

We should also add that one of the two main sources Goldner used in his text, the Turkish comrades’ (who were then part of the ICC) brochure, can also be found in Greek. The text of the Turkish group, titled “The Left wing of the Turkish Communist Party,” was published in four consecutive issues in Enzymo journal (before its nationalist, reactionary mutation).

Anti–imperialism as a means of Bolshevik foreign and internal counter–revolution

There has been much debate about counter–revolution since the 2008 riots in Greece. Usually, the debate is limited to modern police–military control techniques. It seldom extends to the origins of counter–revolution–the events that followed immediately after the great proletarian revolution in 1917 in Russia.

The constituent elements of the Bolshevik counter–revolution can be summarized under the following headings:

• introduction of state–monopoly capitalism;
• establishment of a “left” police to monitor whether proletarian behaviour is politically correct or not;
• depoliticisation of the press and vilification of strikes and labour riots in Russia as “petty–bourgeois” or “counter–revolutionary” actions;
• exerting pressure on the western workers’ parties to support the bourgeois national liberation movements in the East;
• inauguration of diplomatic, military and commercial relations with Western imperialists;
• introduction of the theory of “socialism in one country.”

On 8 January 1918, during an assembly of party cadres, Lenin supported the idea of a separate peace agreement with the German imperialist state. The left of the party opposed this proposal and claimed that such a peace was against the principles of proletarian internationalism and would strengthen Austro–German imperialism. Lenin replied that Russia’s participation in the war would strengthen Anglo–French imperialism. “In neither case,” he said, “would we be entirely escaping some sort of imperialist bond”. By distorting the standpoint of the left of his party, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars came to a conclusion that included the new theory of socialism in one country:

The correct conclusion from this is that the moment a socialist government triumphed in any one country, questions must be decided, not from the point of view of whether this or that imperialism is preferable, but exclusively from the point of view of the conditions which best make for the development and consolidation of the socialist revolution which has already begun.

In other words, the underlying principle of our tactics must not be, which of the two imperialisms it is more profitable to aid at this juncture, but rather, how the socialist revolution can be most firmly and reliably ensured the possibility of consolidating itself, or, at least, of maintaining itself in one country until it is joined by other countries.4

At the next session of the Central Committee, on 11 January, Stalin, a politician as “pragmatic” and “insightful” as Lenin, taking sides with the latter, declared at their party’s Central Committee: “There is no revolutionary movement in the west, nothing existing, only a potential, and we cannot count on a potential.”

At Brest–Litovsk, on March 3, the Soviets signed a peace agreement which was painful for them. They gave the Germans a quarter of the former Tsarist empire—Ukraine, Poland, a part of Belarus, Finland and the Baltic countries. In addition to 60 million people, these areas included one–third of the railway system, over half the industrial enterprises, three–quarters of steel factories and almost all coal mines.

Four days later, at the 7th Congress of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Russia (Bolsheviks), thereafter called Communist, Lenin explained what the party program would be henceforth:

Yes, we shall see the international world revolution, but meanwhile it is a very nice fairy–tale, a very pretty fairy–tale. I quite understand that it is natural for children to like pretty fairy–tales, but I ask: is it natural for a serious revolutionary to believe fairy–tales?5

Everything should be subordinated to the logic of building a new disciplined people’s state:

The last flareup of the war has given the Russian people a bitter, painful, but serious lesson, forcing them to organize themselves, to discipline themselves, to learn how to submit, to create a model discipline. Learn from the Germans their discipline, otherwise we are a doomed people and shall forever be prostrate in slavery.6

“Socialism” for Lenin did not mean the change of productive relations, the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. No, “socialism” signified the growth of productive forces, piece–wages,7 the Taylorist organization of labour, the one–man management of production, the separation between those who take decisions and those who carry out tasks. “Socialism” was not equal to the conscious creation of a new human community by the working class itself; it merely meant voluntary adaptation of the workers to the rhythm of the capitalist labour machine:

The masses must have the right to choose responsible leaders for themselves… But this does not at all mean that the process of collective labour can remain without definite leadership, without precisely establishing the responsibility of the person in charge, without the strictest order created by the single will of that person… Socialism owes its origin to large–scale machine industry. If the masses of the working people in introducing socialism prove incapable of adapting their institutions in the way that large–scale machine industry should work, then there can be no question of introducing socialism… At the present moment we are immediately confronted by the tasks of strictly separating discussion and airing questions at meetings from unfailing execution of all instructions of the person in charge… There must be voluntary fulfillment of the instructions of this individual leader, there must be a transition from the mixed form of discussions, public meetings, fulfillment –and at the same time criticism, checking and correction– to the strict regularity of a machine enterprise.8

However, because there were “slackers,” “parasites” and “bums” who did not seem willing to obey the instructions of the managerial “organizational talents,” the President encouraged his followers to proceed to convictions without trial:

In one place half a score of rich, a dozen rogues, half a dozen workers who shirk their work (in the manner of rowdies, the manner in which many compositors in Petrograd, particularly in the party printing–shops, shirk their work) will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with “yellow tickets” after they have served their time, so that everyone shall keep an eye on them, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot.9

Since “the economic essence of imperialism is monopoly capitalism,”10 and state–monopoly capitalism is “the little half part of socialism” (it only lacks the right political form), as the Chairman informed us in May 1918, when for the nth time he was praising German capitalism,11 and since, let’s repeat it, the imperialist ties are inevitable, Lenin turned to the Entente forces in the autumn of 1918 after Germany was defeated to ensure the consolidation of his state and its “socialist” program.

On December 25, 1918, Litvinov handed over to the leader of the Norwegian Social Democrats, Ludwig Meyer, the Soviet peace proposal to the allies, according to which a political amnesty law would be introduced in Russia, censorship of the press would be abolished, the right of national self–determination would be granted to Poland, Ukraine etc. and the foreign debt of the Tsarist regime would be re–examined. In addition, the Soviets would “refrain from any kind of propaganda against the Allied countries, which could be seen as interference in their internal affairs.” In return, the Soviets asked for financial and technical assistance and the termination of allied military operations on their territory.12

On February 4, 1919, Chicherin returned with a better proposal. The Soviet government was prepared to concede territories belonging to the Tsarist Empire to the allies, recognize the foreign debt of the Tsar, pay interest on new loans in the form of raw materials, guarantee mineral rights and forest products to foreign capitalists and restrain their propaganda in the countries of Entente.13

One of the main reasons that the Entente, and especially the French government, refused these offers was because they believed that they could have the whole pie through trade embargo and military operations.

At the same time, in March 1919, the Soviet state established the so–called Communist International as a means of pressure against British imperialism in the East and as a key instrument of its foreign policy.

After the “economic blockade” of Soviet Russia was lifted in January 1920, diplomatic contacts between the British and the Soviet governments began, which resulted in the Anglo–Soviet trade agreement of March 16, 1921, and the introduction of the New Economic Policy in Russia.

Lenin’s and his staff’s attempt to persuade western capitalists that the Soviet regime would be a more reliable partner than a Russia of White Guards and private capitalism, in one way or another, came to fruition. This policy was expressed in the most explicit way by the former trade commissar Bronski in an interview with the Italian socialist newspaper Avanti! on August 5, 1920:

International capitalists know very well that a bourgeois Russia would be a financial weight on their shoulders, and this would mean new taxes; the obligations of a bourgeois state towards its own bourgeoisie would be enormous, and world capitalism would be compelled to take on these obligations over the next two decades, while we are not a burden. A bourgeois Russian state would be unable to pay the foreign loans it contracted, while we can. We can pay not only with our gold but with our natural resources, our vast thick forests, our boundless and fertile soil, and our mines. If you are about to retort that even a bourgeois Russia could pay with these same means, I’ll tell you right away, NO! Because the Russian proletarians would not work in a bourgeois state, while with us they work willingly without a timetable and without excessive salary demands, because they are directly involved in the regime that they themselves have created. I’ll tell you something else: not only would Russian workers produce more but so would workers in other countries if they knew that their products were going to proletarian Russia … The miners of Germany and Czechoslovakia have declared several times that if they knew they were working for [trade] with proletarian Russia they would refrain from striking and would increase their own working hours. That is the secret of our strength which a bourgeois Russia could not have.14

Whereas, with regard to the western front, Soviet foreign policy was working towards an international organization of exploiters and a reorganization of the imperialist chain through individual trade agreements (and not only), on the eastern front, the same purpose was served by the promotion of national liberation and anti–colonial, developmental, authoritarian regimes, such as Kemal Ataturk’s in Turkey.

The contents of Loren’s remarks were based on the above–named chapter.

On the other side of the borders…

As discussed earlier on, the left wing of the TCP recognized SEKE’s15 anti–war contribution during the 1919–22 Greek–Turkish war. More specifically, they stated that “[w]e should be satisfied with these comrades of ours for having fulfilled their duty successfully both in Turkey and Greece. It is an indisputable fact, nowadays, that the defeat of the Greek troops is mainly due to the successful propaganda of the Greek communist comrades against the war both within the army forces and among the Greek workers. The influence of their propaganda was so great that today the Greek government should think seriously before dragging the country towards a new war, because it is fully aware that it will have a negative outcome and will result in a much greater defeat for the Greek bourgeoisie: an insurrection and a takeover of power by the Greek working class. Turkish workers, comrades! Be sure that the Greek communists have done much more for the Turkish workers than the Turks and the Muslim merchants and generals who filled up both their stomachs and warehouses during the last war by making you eat mud instead of bread.”16

Actually, bearing in mind Loren’s in–depth analysis of the TCP–RSFSR/USSR politics, they should have instead noted that the Greek workers have done a lot more for the Turkish workers and TCP than the Bolsheviks themselves.

What exactly happened on the other side of the still–under–formation–borders? Was the multinational Greek proletariat so effective in sabotaging the war effort? Before delving into the local working–class movement, let us first share a few words about its condition.

According to data cited by A. Benaroya, the Jewish leader of the Socialist Workers’ Federation in the Ottoman Empire and later on in Greece,17 the 1910 decade was characterized by an industrial boom.18 By 1918 there were about 700 large industrial enterprises, employing about 70,000 proletarians. Another 60–70,000 workers were employed in small–scale manufactures and the trade sector. Of these, more than 75,000 were organized in trade unions during the same period.

Outlining the political context of the period, it must be noted that the modernizing regime of the Venizelos’ government was actually in favour of a workers’ confederation, so as to establish a more liberal capitalist public sphere, freed from the limitations of the organization of work in the quasi–feudal Ottoman empire (e.g., guild–based labour division and production control, workers’ self–help clubs), but also in order to effectively mediate, contain and pacify emerging workers’ struggles. Having said that, Venizelos obviously envisaged a liberal workers’ confederation, not a socialist–oriented one, which would also serve as a means to further achieve the goal of national integration and promote nationalist claims in the international fora.19

In the 1st general workers’ Congress (October 21–28, 1918), from which the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE) would emerge, there participated 214 unions representing about 65,000 workers.20 Against the liberal/reformist political factions, including those who rejected class struggle as a matter of principle, the Confederation’s final charter explicitly referred to class struggle and the need to “guard class struggle against all bourgeois influence.”21 It also called for a Democratic Federation of the Balkan States. At the same time, though, the Venizelist trend obtained the control of the administrative council.

The constant entanglement of the Greek state in imperialist warfare between 1912–1922 (the Balkan Wars, World War I, the Greek Campaign in Ukraine in 1919)22 and the consecutive massive conscription led to a reduction in the local relative surplus population: a shortage of labour was observed leading to rises in nominal wages, although the general financial situation of the working class remained dire.23

Already by the 1919 May Day celebrations, the radical tendency of the GSEE (affiliated to SEKE, which as mentioned before had, in the meantime, been founded) “wanted to turn the celebration into an anti–government rally, while the government trade unionists, on the contrary, sought to tie the labour movement to the chariot of the dominant policy and class compromise.”24 The authorities made use of the “exceptional national circumstances” and dispersed the rally.25

Moreover, in response to the participation of more than 20,000 Greek soldiers against the Bolsheviks in Ukraine and the occupation of Smyrna by Greek troops in May 1919,26 anti–war articles were regularly published in Rizospastis [“The Radical”], a newspaper then run by Petsopoulos and linked to SEKE. In counter–response, Petsopoulos and Dimitratos got arrested.27

Despite state repression, class tension remained high. In 1919, a strike of 2,500 machinists in the industrial centre of Piraeus, a key sector amid war preparations, lasted for 3 months and faced the employers’ lockout.28 “The strike reached other industries in Piraeus, the chemical fertilizer plants, while workers in the paper mill were already on strike,”29 and was finally called off on February 8th, 1920, after the intervention of the reformist Transit and Transportation Union.

In April 1920 the tobacco workers in the non–homogeneous–in terms of ethnicity, religion and language–region of Western Macedonia went on strike (Thessaloniki, Xanthi, Kavala).30 The strike was held against attempts to deskill the profession by means of unprocessed tobacco exports.31 In its proclamation after the end of the strike, SEKE attempted to link it with the ongoing war in Asia Minor: “The bourgeoisie, the privileged class of society, the leech that sucks our sweat and blood, has under–taken another struggle, to become the guardian of the European and American capitalist class. As unscrupulous as it is, it has bartered away the will of our working class to the international capitalists and therefore it is doubly interested in keeping us enslaved.”32

In September 1920, SEKE’s statement, titled “Against the Treaty of Sevres” (July 28/ August 10, 1920), was published by Rizospastis newspaper: “Our fatherland, whose name is appropriated by them [i.e. the capitalists], the fatherland of those whom we have been sent to fight for, is nothing but the geographical area on which exploitation is spread. The expansion of which they rejoice is the expansion of the limits of exploitation and profitable investment of their capital […] In the emancipation of the enslaved brothers they see nothing but the obtaining of cheap labour for their industry, cheap slaves for their manors and estates, new consumers for their merchandise.” The statement continues as follows: “The time of war has come, the enemy is within the borders and not beyond them!”33

After the Extraordinary Electoral Congress of SEKE in September 1920, an anti–war statement was issued: “stop the war and fight by all means any attempt for a new war and a new conscription, grant a general amnesty to all convicted and all those under trial for political and military matters (deserters, disobedient soldiers).” It also asked the Greek state to “definitively recognize the Russian Workers’ Republic and establish regular economic and political relations with it,”34 echoing the constant pursuits of Russian foreign policy at that time–as it will be shown later on, that was the case in other instances, too.

On September 20, 1920, one of the two newspapers affiliated to SEKE, Ergatikos Agonas (“Labour Struggle”), published an anti–war text by Pouliopoulos, under the title “The Voice of the Soldiers of the Front,” which, despite its promising title, was largely vague [Official Texts of the KKE, vol. 1 (1918–1924), pp. 114–116]. However, this article reflects the anti–war tensions within the Greek army in Asia Minor.

During the November 1920 election, SEKE mainly focused on anti–war ideological/ political actions against Venizelos’ government.35 We could talk of strictly propagandist activities, because “SEKE has no claim to take the power today. It was only during the war that the local working class began to get awakened and organized, only now has it taken up the struggle for the awakening and organization of all working and suffering classes, etc.”36 Actually, the question of its participation in the elections and, consecutively, that of a closer connection between GSEE and SEKE had already been raised at its Second Congress (April 5–12, 1920).

During the 1920 elections that were held with a complex electoral system, which allowed casting votes to two parties, some members estimated that the party received approximately 100,000 votes.37 Benaroya himself understates the votes down to 35,000. The predominance of the monarchists, who were against the government and thus against the war, also reflected this broad interclass anti–war social tendency. Not surprisingly, however, the newly elected government continued the war: new conscription and compulsory internal borrowing (–50 percent on the face value of banknotes) were announced soon after.38

The “internal front”

A great wave of strikes erupted in 1921, that is during the on–going war. Some estimates put the number of major strikes in 1921 at about 50, involving 40,000 workers, some of which are listed below.

On 16–22 February 1921, in Volos, a general workers’ rally against the rising cost of living and war turned into riots. The army was called in to suppress the riots, while telegrams described the situation as a “Bolshevik revolution.”39 “The signal for the start of the riots was given when Benaroya, hearing the sound of a piano from a neighbouring house, interrupted his speech to say: ‘While we are talking about the hunger of the people, they are playing the piano’.”40 In the same month, seamen working on ships owned by L. Empeirikos, a famous ship–owning family, went on strike. Empeirikos was also Minister of Food. The strike ended with the forced conscription of the strikers, the very same day as the railway strike began, on 21 February 1920.

Although reformist, the Railway Workers’ Federation, which had refused to be associated with SEKE and therefore with GSEE, launched a strike that paralyzed the whole local railway network, demanding wage increases, as well as raising the issue of an 8–hour workday. Although the government’s counter–proposal for a 9–hour workday was adopted, by a margin of only 11 votes, the strike continued. The government then moved on conscripting the strikers and thus hundreds of them were sent by force to the Asia Minor’s front.41 However, this led to a more rapid diffusion of radical anti–war ideas among the soldiers.

In 1921, despite the fact that the May Day celebration was forbidden, it did take place, nevertheless. Interestingly, soldiers refused to board the ships that would take them to Asia Minor and joined the strikers. As a result, the government declared martial law and some of those arrested, such as Stinas, were brought before the Extraordinary Military Court of Adrianople.42

In November 1921, the Federation of Electrokinesis (which included tram workers, railway workers, workers in light gas and electricity power) declared a strike. Once again, the response by the state was harsh: martial courts and severe sentences for those arrested, among them members and cadres of SEKE.43

The next month, the rally of olive oil producers in Corfu, asking for free export of olive oil, rapidly evolves into an anti–war demonstration. According to the vivid description of a participant –then, also a deserter– “trumpets and dynamite accompany the chants ‘down with the war’,” while “a platoon of soldiers joins the angry farmers. The authorities are terrified. The prefect was shaking so much when he went to the window to speak that his dentures fell off."44 According to Benaroya, despite the defeat, “a broad anti–war propaganda is developed at the front and in the rear.”45

On top of that, in March–April 1922, port–workers at Thessaloniki, bakery workers, dock–workers, carpenters, electricians and tobacco workers in two major production centers of the recently annexed Macedonia (Kavala and Xanthi) went on strike.

Class insubordination on the Asia Minor front

While this was the case in Greece, what was happening on the front? According to one source, the number of deserters reached 90,000 and some of them were armed. Another source offers a more moderate estimation, reducing that number to 60,000. Dimitratos, then secretary of SEKE, during the discussion on the “national question” at the 3rd Congress of the CI (12 July 1921), mentions 100,000 deserters.46 However, that issue was not just a question of numbers, as it did have a qualitative aspect, too. According to some sources, the conscripted railway workers served as efficient links between the different communist groups at the front, distributing anti–war written material amidst the soldiers and the locals. They also were of practical help to many deserters abandoning the front and communist cadres visiting military units, alike.

About 200 people from the workers’ clubs/groups gathered at the front, at least according to some testimonies.47 In almost all the units at the front there were communist cells, Stinas argues.48 Benakis claims that actions were mainly taken around Smyrna, not on the eastern front of Prussia.49 According to other sources, however, a more conservative assessment is shared: the actual contribution of the communist cells must have been less crucial, as there weren’t that many SEKE(K) members/cadres anyway at the time. For example, during the Second Congress that took place in April 1920, only 1,000 members were registered (among them there were 500 youngsters), while the distribution of workers’ newspapers hardly exceeded 16,000 copies all in all.

At the front, it has been confirmed that there were at least 19 soldiers’ newspapers in circulation. Those newspapers arrived at the frontline through Thessaloniki and Alexandroupolis (then called Dedeagats), most probably from the summer of 1921 onwards. Others were handwritten and circulated by the soldiers themselves. Some were legal (humorous, like Founta) but two were communist ones (e.g., the “Red Guard” and “Bohemio”). Kemal’s forces picked out material from the anti– government Greek press which was in circulation in Istanbul and then they distributed these anti–war articles to the front, to further undermine Greek soldiers’ morale.

For this purpose, the actual anti–war coordination among the Greek soldiers was very important and it led, later on, to the initiation of the Movement/Union of War Veterans in 1924. According to Stinas, the anti–war movement in Corfu in 1923, in which “Archive–Marxists” participated, organized an anti–tax campaign and a land workers’ strike.50

During the collapse of the front (1922), according to the eloquent accounts by a lot of participants, a soldiers’ strike broke out. More specifically in Tekirdag (also known as Raidestos), red flags were raised and armed groups chanted: “Long live the Soviets,” as the authorities were being abolished.51 At the same period, SEKE(K)’s Central Committee and the 22 most active communists at the front got arrested. The latter were sent to prisons in Smyrna on the charge of high treason. However, their trials did not take place as the Greek military apparatus collapsed, alongside the regime’s imperialist aspirations. The ex–prisoners, joined by other SEKE’s members who were in Smyrna in those days, held a meeting. Some proposed to seize power and march with the army against the Greek government. Others, being more realistic as one could argue, proposed to simply return back to Greece with their units, while others decided to remain in Smyrna opting to reach the Soviet Russia.

Outcomes

Both the ICC pamphlet and Dumont point out that SEKE’s agitation against the war was indeed an important factor in the collapse of the front. Dumont, based on a Soviet source, claims that “[t]he Greek Communists rose up against the war in Asia Minor starting in mid–1920. It seems that they, by their active anti–militarist propaganda, significantly contributed to the undoing of the troops sent to Anatolia. Starting at the end of 1920, desertions in the Hellenic army multiplied and there is every evidence that a certain number of mutinies took place in the barracks around Smyrna. According to N. Dimitratos, the delegate of the Greek Communist Party at the Third Congress of the Comintern, more than 100,000 ‘workers and peasants’ had deserted during the first two years of the war. This figure may seem a bit Homeric, but it nonetheless gives a certain idea of the extent of the phenomenon.”52

However, Stinas relativized SEKE’s actual political footprint on the anti–war movement at the front, as he clarifies that “all this anti–war and anti–militarist movement was taking place without the knowledge and against the will of the Central Committee. The party had in no sense a firm line and specific objectives. Its policy was confusing, opportunist, perhaps pacifist and ‘pro–workerist,’ but nothing more than that. Now and then, articles with resounding titles like ‘Bordello’s State,’ ‘We answer with the phrase of Cabron’ [note: Shit!], etc. broke out, but nowhere could you see and nowhere was there a revolutionary politics that would in some way respond to the critical conditions due to the ongoing war.”53 Simultaneously, Stinas argues, there was no denunciation of the Muslim population’s persecution in Thrace during 1921.54 The most immediate interests of SEKE were different. Among the resolutions of the 1st Extraordinary Conference (February 6, 1922) it was explicitly specified that the party “needs a long legal existence,” because it “still is within an organizational and propaganda period,” while at the same time the Greek capitalist state is characterized by “the spirit of petty–bourgeois compromise which manifests itself through the commitment of the popular and working masses towards democratic and parliamentarian institutions.” It is obvious that during this period SEKE is seeking to secure a more active role within the bourgeois political sphere.

It is in this context that SEKE denounced desertion as a strategy of “individualism” and “cowardice,” while at the same time it declared its… opposition to war, stating the need for united fronts. More specifically, “[t]he Party takes into account with satisfaction the fact that it has always remained an anti–war party and has opposed all nationalist efforts and imperialist alliances of the parties of the old and new bourgeoisie. It considers that its gained recognition on this question must be developed through intensified and methodical propaganda against all wars. Its policy, regarding this point, however, should not be confused with pacifism and be based on the feelings of individualism and the cowardice of the fugitives. Its policy against war must always be demonstrated by exposing the calamities and destruction that befall the interests of the country and the people, and the dangers which pro–war tendencies cause against peace and coexistence of the Balkan and Eastern peoples in general. Our Party will thus expose not only the criminality of the policy of bourgeois parties, but will also point the way to the salvation of the Greek people through its close consultation and cooperation with the other peoples of the East.”55 The above mentioned excerpt is truly enlightening in that the practical resistance to the Greek imperialist policy (e.g., the soldiers’ strike during the collapse of the front) is downplayed as individualist as opposed to SEKE’s (vague) denunciatory/anti–war propaganda.

On March 23 1922, GSEE/SEKE denounced the new forced loan and taxation, correctly linking these measures to the ongoing war efforts, however, proletarian practical resistance remains a future goal, under the guidance of the party, as while “[i]t is time for the oppressed people to be saved and prevented from destruction, starvation and death,” people “must first wake up.”56

In 1922, during the congress of the Balkan Communist Federation in Sofia, in which the “national question,” especially with regards to the quest for an independent status for Macedonia, was discussed, Petsopoulos embraced and kissed the Turkish delegate in front of thousands of workers, simultaneously denouncing the war and speaking about the common interest of Turkish and Greek workers. Despite this statement, there was no mention in the Greek communist press of the fact that all the acts of repression and murder of Turkish communists committed by Kemalists one year before took place while their national liberation movement was in close economic and political alliance with Soviet Russia. In Greece, this statement made a great impression on the bourgeois press and, subsequently, Petsopoulos was expelled from SEKE, according to the resolutions of the Extraordinary Congress that took place in October 1922 so that the party could proceed with the ousting of all “internal opposition” and ratify February’s 1922 resolutions.57

The Bolshevization of the Greek party accelerated in 1924, the same year that the nationalist right–wing faction of TCP, backed up by the Comintern, assumed the leadership of that party. By 1925, both KKE and TCP had definitely become organs of Soviet foreign policy. Already by January 1924, according to a party announcement with the eloquent title: “The resumption of Greek–Soviet relations” SEKE claimed that “the resumption of our diplomatic relations with the new Russia… is also advantageous to our merchant shipping sector, since the Black Sea ports (Southern Russia) have always been the main trade route for the Greek merchant navy… This fact will have a favorable impact not only on commerce, but also on national economy.”58

As if this was not enough, the “Theses on the political situation,” which were published in Rizospastis newspaper in February 1924, stated, at its closing remark, that “our Party will fight for the immediate restoration of both commercial and political relations between Greece and the Union of the Soviet Republics of Russia.”59

By the end of that year (November 26 to December 3), SEKE is renamed KKE (Greek Communist Party). The “new” party, freed from its “internal enemies,” is now capable of further solidifying its ties to the USSR, undermining in that way the local class struggles.

1. Gilles Dauvé, Eclipse and Re–emergence of the Communist Movement, https://www.kokkinonima.gr/?p=1.↩︎

2. See http://insurgentnotes.com/ and https://bthp23.com/.↩︎

3. The full text of the chapter is available at https://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/socialism–in–one–country–before–stalin–and–the–origins–of–reactionary–anti–imperialism–the–case–of–turkey–1917–1925/

   https://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/socialism–in–one–country–before–stalin–and–the–origins–of–reactionary–anti–imperialism–the–case–of–turkey–1917–1925/.↩︎

4. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 26, p. 445.↩︎

5. Lenin, op. cit., Vol. 27, p. 102.↩︎

6. Ibid., p. 106.↩︎

7. Ibid., pp. 258, 583.↩︎

8. Ibid., pp. 212–213.↩︎

9. Lenin, op. cit., vol. 26, p. 414.↩︎

10. Lenin, op. cit., vol. 22, p. 298.↩︎

11. Lenin, op. cit., vol. 27, p. 340.↩︎

12. Degras, Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, vol. 1, pp. 133–135.↩︎

13. Ibid. pp. 137–139.↩︎

14. Avanti!, 5/8/1920, cited in Piero Melograni, Lenin and the myth of world revolution.↩︎

15. The Socialist Workers’ Party of Greece (SEKE) was founded in November 1918 after the inauguration of the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE) and rather late compared to socialist parties in other countries. Later on, after its 2nd Congress (April 5–12, 1920) it will be renamed “SEKE(K)” (K for Communist). During the same year the party joins the Communist International and for a long time it will be wavering between the positions held by the 2nd and those held by the 3rd International. According to the decisions made in its 3rd Extraordinary Congress of 26 November–3 December 1924, it will be finally named KKE (Communist Party of Greece). To outline the internal ideological–political conflicts of the era one would need a separate text. Suffice to say that the local class struggle dynamics were only partially dependent on the intra–SEKE(K) conflicts, while the latter necessarily, though also partially, reflected the local class–based conflicts.↩︎

16. EKS/ICC, The left wing of the TCK, p. 81.↩︎

17. A. Benaroya, The first development of the Greek proletariat, pp. 110–115.↩︎

18. On the political level, see the modernising character of the 1909 “Goudi coup” and, later on, Venizelos’ Liberal/Republican government. The Goudi coup was a military coup d’état, in the aftermath of the 1897 Greek–Turkish war, the first of such military interventions in the local political scene. The coup paved the way to Eleutherios Venizelos’ involvement in Greek politics and, thus, it represents the transition to an era marked by two opposing political forces, the liberal Venizelism being the one and the conservative–monarchist anti–Venizelism the other.↩︎

19. Elefantis, The Promise of the Impossible Revolution: KKE and bourgeoisie in the inter–war period, p. 28–29; Stinas, Memories: Seventy years under the banner of socialist revolution, pp. 27–28.↩︎

20. Stinas, well known for his active participation in the labour movement as a member of KKE and smaller groups originating from the Archive–Marxist party, states a higher number of workers were represented in the Congress: 70–80,000. Op.cit., p. 28.↩︎

21. A small anarcho–syndicalist group of people including Speras, Koukhtsoglou and Fanourakis strongly opposed themselves to the principle according to which it was necessary to “guard against all bourgeois influence”. They insisted that the union must preserve itself not only from bourgeois influence but more generally from all political influence, implying the Socialist/Communist party as well. Ibid, p. 31.↩︎

22. In the first 5 months of 1919 more than 23,000 Greeks fought against the Red Army in Ukraine. This was a major intervention, given that the French army was unorganized and some of its main naval forces allied with the Red Army and strikers in Sebastopol. The Greek soldiers were, then, used to suppress this rebellion.↩︎

23. Bolaris, SEKE: The revolutionary roots of the Left in Greece, p. 21–22.↩︎

24. https://www.rizospastis.gr/story.do?id=4017252.↩︎

25. Bolaris, op. cit., p. 24. In the aftermath of those events, the venizelists left GSEE and initiated their own Confederation, based in the instrustrial centre/port of Piraeus, which was their stronghold.↩︎

26. On 2 to 15 May 1919 the Greek troops of the 1st Division, commanded by General Zafiriou, landed in Smyrna and occupied both the city and the surrounding areas with the support of the Greek, French and British naval forces. In October 1920, the Greek army advanced into East Asia Minor with the support of the above–mentioned countries, which, on their part, wanted to force the Turkish government to sign the Treaty of Sevres.↩︎

27. Benaroya, op. cit., p. 139. Founding member of SEKE, Dimitratos served as Secretary of the CC during the 1918–22 period. He then supported SEKE’s bolshevization, but later on became an advocate of SEKE’s “legal existence.” After his expulsion from SEKE, in 1924, he shortly allied with Benaroya to promote social–democratic positions.↩︎

28. Bolaris, op. cit., p. 29.↩︎

29. Kabagiannis, Τhe Trade–unionist Movement in Greece, 1918–1926, p. 80.↩︎

30. This region had become part of the Greek territory only 8 years earlier, after extended military operations, and hosted a great number of Muslim and Jewish proletarians–a lot of the latter were members of the largest socialist group, Federation, a group with an internationalist understanding that stood against the, then recently adopted, Zionist politics.↩︎

31. Bolaris, op. cit., pp. 29–30.↩︎

32. See Rizospastis, 17/5/1920. Official Texts of the KKE, vol. 1 (1918–1924), p. 83.↩︎

33. Ibid, pp. 106–108.↩︎

34. Ibid, p. 127.↩︎

35. Benakis, The other side of the Greek labour movement (1918–1930), p. 54.↩︎

36. Official Texts of the KKE, vol. 1 (1918–1924), p. 148, our emphasis.↩︎

37. See Benaroya, op. cit., p. 196–7.↩︎

38. Stinas, op. cit., p. 36.↩︎

39. Benaroya, op. cit., pp. 142–144; Stinas, op. cit., pp. 36–38.↩︎

40. Volos, a century. From the integration into the Greek state (1881) to the earthquakes (1955), Volos Publications, Volos 1999, p. 167–168.↩︎

41. Bolaris, op cit., pp. 33–36.↩︎

42. Stinas, op. cit., pp. 36–38.↩︎

43. Bolaris, op. cit., p. 39–40.↩︎

44. Stinas, op. cit., p. 38.↩︎

45. Benaroya, op. cit., p. 148.↩︎

46. J. Riddell, To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921, 2015, p. 840. To that end, adding to the pressure exerted by defectionism, an also important factor was the low conscription rates, not only in Greece but also among Asia Minor’s Greek–speaking population. According to some Generals commanding troops in Asia the Greek speaking local population was way too reluctant to join the Greek forces, despite the multiple drafting sessions. Notwithstanding Greek government’s propaganda, the “liberation of Asia Minor’s Greeks” was not met with much enthusiasm by those concerned.↩︎

47. D. Livieratos, Pantelis Pouliopoulos: An intellectual revolutionary, p. 17.↩︎

48. Stinas, op. cit., p. 41.↩︎

49. Benakis, op. cit., p. 54.↩︎

50. Ibid, pp. 91–92.↩︎

51. Stinas, op. cit., p. 62; Benaroya, op. cit., p. 158.↩︎

52. Dumont, Paul, Du socialisme ottoman à l’internationalisme anatolien, Istanbul: Les Editions Isis, 1997, p. 392 n. 2.↩︎

53. Stinas, op. cit., pp. 41–42, our emphasis.↩︎

54. Ibid, pp. 54–55.↩︎

55. Official Texts of the KKE, vol. 1 (1918–1924), p. 211–225, first emphasis is ours.↩︎

56. Ibid, p. 236, our emphasis; See also p. 242–244 on linking war with savage taxation (21 May 1922).↩︎

57. Stinas, op. cit., p. 64, Benaroya, op. cit., p. 156, 160. Regarding the view favouring SEKE’s “legitimate operation,” see above. Obviously, this resolution caused lots of heated internal debates.↩︎

58. Official Texts of the KKE, vol. 1 (1918–1924), p. 392, our emphasis. A public announcement for the matter by the Greek ship–owners, merchants and bankers, three of the leading sectors of the local economy, wouldn’t have been that much different…↩︎

59. Ibid, p. 409, our emphasis.↩︎

March 2024

The following thoughts were presented at an international meeting of comrades in September 2023. They represent a fairly wide-ranging review of the practical work and theoretical justifications developed by the Angry Workers in the UK and they situate Loren’s sketch of a program for a transition out of capitalism in that review.

I want to address the gap between the discussion about the current ‘strike wave’ and the ‘contours of the world commune.’ I will try to proceed from the role of a ‘program’ in the transition from strike wave to class movement, to the question of dual power during the peak of class movements to the question of revolutionary transition.

The challenge is to think about revolutionary transition neither in a sense of ‘gradually increasing degrees of organisation or consciousness of the class,’ nor in a spontaneous sense of a movement that can voluntarily move in all directions. A movement has to be able to build on previous experiences or relationships and needs time to develop collective knowledge. A transition is materially determined by the time and structures it takes to change the divisions of, amongst many others, manual and intellectual labour or different stages of regional development.

It will need a collective political debate and research to determine to what extent existing organisations or campaigns are part of the necessary ‘school of the class’ to build both collective knowledge and social cohesion, such as trade unions, cooperatives, experiences of self-management etc. and at what point they become confinements and castles in the sky due to the structural limits of laws and markets. We will have to determine what kind of structures remain from the ups and downs of strikes and movements that play a positive role in the sense of preserving a certain class wisdom or social connections that were created by the movement, without turning a blind eye to the necessary stagnation and re-integration of most ‘struggle organisations’ once the struggle is over.

The role of a ‘class program’ during the transition from strikes to class movement

Our old ultra-left wisdom maintained that putting forward ‘general demands’ runs the risk of curbing the spontaneous dynamics of a situation of strikes like a blanket and that it should rather be the strongest strikes that should set a point of orientation for others. The wisdom stated further that rather than focusing on demands that have to be recognised and fulfilled by the bosses and their state, we should instead promote direct forms of reappropriation, e.g., that workers should reduce the rent they pay or squat houses rather than demand a rent cap. There are merits to this old wisdom, in particular when we see how the wider left tries to use ‘general demands’ to unite a strike situation from the outside, without actually analysing the strikes in detail and their advanced and backward tendencies. Still, we also see that in situations of concrete movements, the old wisdom might confine us to a sphere of de-politicised immediacy that only looks for the ‘most radical’ points and is silent when it comes to the movement as a whole.

During the recent ‘strike wave’ in the UK, the trade union initiative, ‘Enough is Enough’ proposed a joint platform of demands that included an energy bill cap, amongst others. In general, it seemed a step in the right direction to create a united focus of the various strikes and to address issues that go beyond the sphere of the immediate wage. The problem of the ‘strike platform’ was that is came from the top of the union hierarchy, that various unions and political forces tried to compete within the power vacuum that Labour has left and, most importantly, that it remained detached from the concrete strike demands—it did not question the law which prohibits ‘political strikes.’

During the Gillet Jaunes mobilisation in France, we saw how the focus on ‘taxes’ created overlaps between proletarian and petty bourgeois tendencies. It is obviously necessary to look in detail at how this overlap expressed itself in concrete forms of struggle, but to push for working class demands, such as the increase of the minimum wage or an end to temp contracts might have created stronger bonds with the wider class. The same could be said for the recent movement against the pension reform, where young and precarious workers fought without their own interests being reflected in the goal of the movement.

The transitional program of the Fourth International, 1938

According to our old wisdom, we criticised the ‘transitional program’ as a kind of manipulative trick of leftist wannabe leaders, who wanted to raise the consciousness of workers by promoting demands that seem common sense and realistic, but that capitalism won’t be willing or able to fulfill, thereby opening the eyes of the working class for the need of revolutionary change. This criticism is valid if we look at how the various Trotskyist groups have referred to the program as some kind of eternal recipe.

Re-reading the transitional program of the Fourth International as a concrete intervention in a concrete moment of time and against the background of our current moment today, I was astonished at its strategic boldness. It refers to a concrete moment, in terms of a global pre-war situation of imperialist tension with high inflation and increasing unemployment, where the old leadership in the form of left parties and trade union leadership have lost relevance and the class is developing new forms of militancy, e.g., in the form of the sit-down strikes. At this moment in time, the program draws a few concrete lines of working-class defense in the sand by proposing to fight for automatic inflation compensation to defend wages, working time reduction and public and transparent recruitment processes to defend against unemployment. We can discuss the wider proposals, such as nationalisation of certain industries and the banking system, but in general the demands are not formulated as a legalistic offer of dialogue with the state. At the same time, the demands are attached to concrete proposals of how to organise the necessary power to enforce them, e.g., in the form of workplace committees and workers’ militias. It is true that the program remains general and largely admits that revolution was not on the immediate cards and that the class would have to gather its forces through a defensive battle, but perhaps that is part of its strength.

We have to discuss if the program of 1938 can still serve as a reference point when trying to formulate our own responses in concrete moments, e.g., for a ‘working class program’ during the pandemic, which both addresses immediate workers’ interests and attacks the nexus of a privatised and state-bureaucratic healthcare system. I hope that a re-reading of the program can serve as a productive provocation of our old wisdom. At the same time, the program of 1938 certainly leaves various doors open for the general opportunism of official Trotskyism, e.g., when it comes to the trade unions, to the question of ‘oppressed nations,’ or alliances with the peasantry. More recently, comrades such as Loren Goldner or Karl-Heinz Roth have tried to formulate ‘transitional programs’ for the current times; we have to reflect on their use value together. 1

The Transitional Program (Part 1) (marxists.org)

The question of ‘non-reformist reforms’

We have to distinguish the transitional program from the strategy of ‘non-reformist reforms.’ Both address the challenge of the class having to gather its forces, to develop strategic capabilities and to learn how to rule, though while the transitional program is largely an imposition, the concept of ‘non-reformist reforms’ focuses more directly on how the class can influence the management of capitalist society to create certain plateaus for its own interest and power.

In the 1960s, Andre Gorz proposed that through the use of “non-reformist reforms,” social movements could both make immediate gains and build strength for a wider struggle, eventually culminating in revolutionary change: “through long-term and conscious action, which starts with the gradual application of a coherent program of reforms.” Fights for these reforms would serve as “trials of strength.” Small wins would allow movements to build power and put them on more favorable footing for the future. “In this way,” Gorz argued, “the struggle will advance. . . [as] each battle reinforces the positions of strength, the weapons, and also the reasons that workers have for repelling the attacks of the conservative forces.” It is not by chance that later on he would write a farewell to the working class as his reforms referred primarily to ‘social movements’ and ‘social demands.’

Today the idea of ‘non-reformist reforms’ is en vogue again and we see its contradictory nature. On one hand we see a positive politicisation of the debate and the return of strategic thinking: what kind of proposed changes can connect our immediate strength with a longer-term goal? We could discuss, for example, the current campaigns for a ‘socialisation’ of large-scale property owners in Berlin. The campaign has politicised a wider debate, which spread from the question of housing to the question of industries and ‘green transition,’ and put a ‘general interest’ and ‘democratic control’ back on the agenda. At the same time, the campaign remains dependent on ‘campaign forms,’ detached from working class power, and embroiled in legalistic dialogue about the actual implementation. We see perhaps the opposite problem with ‘abolitionism’ in the US, which primarily addresses the need for changes in the prison and police regime, without addressing the wider issue of poverty and workers’ control necessary to undermine the ‘crime regime’ of the state. At its most acute moment, we can still maintain that Syriza expresses the fatal dead-end of the attempt to establish a dialectic between movement and capitalist institutions, while this should not prevent us from looking at and engaging with concrete campaigns.

André Gorz’s Non-Reformist Reforms Show How We Can Transform the World Today (jacobin.com)

The question of dual power and its limits

The debate around the concept of dual power originated primarily in the 1905 revolution, where the idea that councils could grow as economic, political and military bases and at a certain point tip the balance of power. Later on, in Italy in the 1970s, groups like the Political Committees for Workers’ Power around the newspaper Senza Tregua revived the concepts with their own strategy of ‘workers’ decrees.’ During this moment of heightened class struggle, various strategies of generalisation emerged within the radical left. Lotta Continua and others decided, also against the backdrop of the military coup in Chile 1973, that an electoral victory of the PCI, pushed by a workers’ program from below, could generalise and defend the movement—it failed even at the electoral hurdle. Other groups of the autonomia focused on a workers’ campaign for a concrete set of demands, which included a general rise of the minimum wage, reduction of working hours and a general guaranteed income for students, unemployed and people working unpaid at home. While supportive of the latter, Senza Tregua emphasised the primary need for ‘workers’ decrees’ as concrete impositions: bringing sacked work-mates back into the factory against the will of the employer; housing occupations and ‘proletarian shopping’; direct attacks on fascists and company security; local ‘taxation’ of the bourgeoisie in the form of reappropriation of wealth. In Rome the workers’ committee at the polyclinic imposed free clinics and an actual change in the law that took away the power from the semi-mafia, semi-fascist ‘barons’ of the clinic hierarchy—perhaps a ‘non-reformist reform’ in a proletarian sense. Senza Tregua framed this as a strategy of growing dual power as a phase of transition, whereby the growing was primarily conceived as a territorial expansion that would eventually culminate in a civil war situation.

In hindsight we can see that these concepts of transition and of what a revolutionary moment would look like were fairly old school and perhaps lagging behind the actual revolutionary practice of the movement. The movement constituted itself not only as a force to impose decrees and not only as a force that would slowly undermine the control of capital and the state over universities, workplaces or working-class neighbourhoods. The movement also constituted itself as a productive power, through the generalisation of knowledge within its own practice, e.g., in assemblies of workers and students, or doctors and porters or assembly line workers and technicians. Producing the movement itself, its practical structures, its media, its critique of management and to a certain degree official science (critique of mainstream medicine, nuclear power, etc.) was a potentially transitional act, necessary to positively supersede the ‘dual power impasse’ that the movement was facing.

Unfortunately, this ‘productive element’ of the movement was only theorised as ‘self-valorisation,’ a concept that shied away from both the question of state power and from large-scale workers’ control over the main essential industries. Therefore, the Italian concept of ‘revolutionary transition’ experienced a fatal bifurcation.

On one side, there was the idea that ‘the class imposes the management of affairs on capital’ while undermining its power in concrete terms and appropriating wealth; after overestimating the political scope of ‘wage struggles’ during 1969, this was a kind of hippie-ish or termite-like understanding that would avoid the winter palais moment of unifocal confrontation and focus on changes of the actual relationships and generation of counter-knowledge. It had a certain appeal to see what was happening, e.g., the widespread questioning of authority and professionalism, as a ‘revolution’ in modern capitalism, but this ‘strategy’ was slowly undermined by restructuring, cultural isolation and the use of the capitalist crisis.

On the other side was the primarily ‘negative’ concept of expanding workers’ decrees and ‘refusal’ territorially and destroying the capitalist state, without a clearer strategy and vision for a productive takeover. Without such a vision, the strikes started to run empty, the calls for a ‘return to normality’ became louder also from within the class, to which this concept of transition could only react with military escalation—most of Senza Tregua ended up in armed groups such as Prima Linea. The question of the role of a centralised class force during the transition was answered only in a traditional political sense in the form of the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ of the most organised elements of the class to defeat the class enemy—but not in relation to the role of such a central force in the process of undermining the material barriers for social participation, e.g., through the socialisation of knowledge, the end of the isolation of the household and so on. These barriers won’t all be brought down through a revolutionary upheaval itself, which explains and justifies the role of a centralised and politicised force during the transition that has to make itself redundant as much as possible in the course of it.

There is a return of the concept of ‘dual power’ today, with fairly large conferences in the United States and debates within the libertarian milieu, though it seems that ‘dual power’ has degenerated into a general mish-mash of any kind of ‘rank-and-file’ organisations that also take care of material needs of the class, such as tenant unions, cooperatives or rank-and-file unions, plus, of course, Rojava—without any major strategy apart from ‘expansion.’

Senza Tregua—Working class political committees and violence in Italy 1973 to 1976—Lessons for today—Angry Workers

Dual Power: A Strategy to Build Socialism in Our Time (dsa-lsc.org)

Post Gathering Retrospective | Dual Power 2022

The moment today

The widely acknowledged necessity of some sort of ‘green transition’ has opened some doors, and the advanced parts of the movement are going beyond the limits of ‘green technical expertise’ that just looks for alliances—workers being one possible ally amongst many others. At the same time, we see how green liberalism is the spearhead not only of neoliberal green austerity that calls for an attack on working class consumption levels, but also of re-militarisation for a green democracy.

In this moment, struggles like at GKN in Italy have an organic vanguard position, starting from the solid grounds of working-class self-organisation and technical productive knowledge, but reaching out actively and practically to the wider critical science, the green movement, campaigns for free public transport and to the precarious parts of the class with a concrete ‘green’ class program, that aims at forcing the state to finance a worker-led transition. Of course, this struggle might well end up limited to running a crowdfunded bike part factory, but the wider aspiration that was formulated and practically fought for is of importance.

Both the pandemic and the climate crisis have demonstrated that a working class-led transition or alternative plan to the incapability of capital and state cannot be some kind of bricolage of half-knowledge generated in social centres or isolated occupied factories. The thorny issue of the relation between expert knowledge, the science workers and the wider working class is currently under theorised and only touched upon practically on the lower-skilled fringes, e.g., amongst so-called tech-workers.

At the same time, the increasing militarisation, concentration of wealth/power, deepening of the crisis and lumpenisation of the bourgeoisie are showing us that the transition won’t happen by convincing ‘society’ with a technically sound alternative—the necessity of mass militancy to enforce a working-class plan is more pressing than ever.

It will primarily be the role of workers in the essential industries to enforce, as a medium step, the end of bullshit service jobs and unnecessary polluting industries through ‘worker decrees’ and the redeployment and retraining of the liberated workforce under worker control and drastically reduced working times. The degree of social chaos and disorganisation amongst the class may not allow for such a ‘productive combination’ of working-class intelligence and dual power as an intermediate and relatively controlled phase of transition—but it would be a best-case scenario.

Some possible tasks

It is significant to discuss what historical role ‘programs actually played,’ from the Gotha to the Manifesto to the various programs of revolutionary syndicalism, and what kind of role a program could play today.

I think it would be fruitful to revisit the ‘Italian experience’ of the 1970s from a programmatic point of view, as it was the high-point of class struggle in recent times, but has primarily been analysed regarding levels of self-organisation of the class, less regarding its programmatic efforts and concept of revolution.

We could proceed by reflecting on our own stage of debate and re-read, amongst other things, ‘the Contours’ and ‘Insurrection and Production’ for blind spots when it comes to intermediate programs.

We could then look in more detail at the various current ‘programs’ from municipalism, to ‘European minimum rights’ to green transition to debates about dual power and formulate a productive critique.

We could engage in a basic empirical analysis of the employment share between essential labour and socially/naturally unnecessary labour in Europe and the main working-class composition within the essential sector and its global dependence.

We could finally look at the situation of concrete current struggles and working-class organisational initiatives in Europe, their most advanced tendencies and their various impasses. Here, the balance sheets produced by comrades who experienced actual movements, such as in France, will have a central significance.

We could try to synthesise a type of manifesto from this, a ‘balance sheet of the strike wave’ that anticipates a wider future program. We could use it for wider propaganda with concrete organisational proposals, e.g., an invitation and structure to collectivise ‘struggle analysis,’ and as an introduction to our circle.

All this could easily be a lifetime engagement and fill books, but perhaps it would be possible to constrict ourselves to a work-plan of six months and a pamphlet of 30 pages.

We could primarily address the vast amount of grassroot initiatives that aim at ‘working class organisation’ and are interested in a wider debate, but that lack a political compass and umbrella.

It could also be a test if we can work together as a wider structure and clarify differences and shared views.

The historical moment that produced us: global revolution or recomposition of capital?—Loren Goldner | libcom.org

What follows in conclusion, then, is a program for the “first hundred days” of a successful proletarian revolution in key countries, and hopefully throughout the world in short order. It is intended to illustrate the potential for a rapid dismantling of “value” production in Marx’s sense. It is of course merely a probe, open to discussion and critique:

1. implementation of a program of technology export to equalize upward the Third World.
2. creation of a minimum threshold of world income.
3. dismantling of the oil-auto-steel complex, shifting to mass transport and trains.
4. abolish the bloated sector of the military; police; state bureaucracy; corporate bureaucracy; prisons; FIRE; (finance-insurance-real estate); security guards; intelligence services; cashiers and toll takers.
5. taking the huge mass of labor power freed by this to radically shortening of the work week
6. crash programs around alternative energy: (in the long run, if possible) nuclear fusion power, solar, wind, etc.
7. application of the “more is less” principle to as much as possible (examples: satellite phones supersede land-line technology in the Third World, cheap CDs supersede expensive stereo systems, etc.).
8. a concerted world agrarian program aimed at using food resources of North America and Europe and developing Third World agriculture.
9. integration of industrial and agricultural production, and the breakup of megalopolitan concentration of population. This implies the abolition of suburbia and exurbia, and radical transformation of cities. The implications of this for energy consumption are profound.
10. automation of all drudgery that can be automated.
11. generalization of access to computers and education for full global and regional planning by the associated producers
12. free health and dental care.
13. integration of education with production and reproduction.
14. the shift of R&D currently connected with the unproductive sector into productive use
15. the great increase in productivity of labor will as make as many basic goods free as quickly as possible, thereby freeing all workers involved in collecting money and accounting for it.
16. a global shortening of the work week.
17. centralization of everything that must be centralized (e.g. use of world resources) and decentralization of everything that can be decentralized (e.g. control of the labor process within the general framework)
18. measures to deal with the atmosphere, most importantly the phasing out of fossil fuel use by 3 and 6

Post Script

Marco

It’s sad when comrades go. I met Loren twice. The first time we drove through Spanish mountains in the young millennia, on the passenger seat our friend Antonio, an old car worker who escaped from Franco’s regime to Brasil and then from the Brasilian junta to Germany. Antonio could talk and smoke for hours and the road twisted in tune. Loren had to sit on my bed in the back of the van and looked a sea-sickly pale-green. We drove to a meeting of metal worker comrades who read Marx, I think. I was impressed how quickly Loren recovered from the journey and spoke to them fluently. With me he was a bit brief, perhaps the older man – younger man competition. Perhaps he didn’t like the way I drove. The next time I saw him we drank ale in the damp, celebrating the global financial crash in the backroom of a pub near Fleet Street. One of these London gatherings that happen when something happens. There were comrades from all over, I think even the Greeks were there, Loren talking on fictitious things. He made things clear. I like the fact that he didn’t sell himself to academia. You could read that in his texts, as they had bones. The text he wrote after visiting the comrades in Faridabad impressed me a lot. I still wonder what it does to you when you mainly write alone and are known and respected as the comrade ‘author.’ It seems Loren managed to meet a lot of good people everywhere, hopefully that created deeper bonds. Farewell, comrade.

• 1“As a first approximation, it means the global program which can unify, as a “class-for-itself”—a class prepared to take over the world and reorganize it in a completely new way—the wage-labor forces currently dispersed in the (somewhat diminished but still central) classic “blue collar” proletariat, the dispersed and casualized sub-proletariat, and those elements of the technical, scientific, intellectual and cultural strata susceptible to allying with such forces. These are, in “inverted” form, the forces actually comprising what Marx called the “total worker” (Gesamtarbeiter).” The historical moment that produced us: global revolution or recomposition of capital?—Loren Goldner | libcom.org.