The Factory Committee: Motor of the Social
Revolution
Benjamin Péret
The following article was originally published in the French
anarchist paper Le Libertaire on September 4, 1952. The first
English translation appeared in Radical America vol. IV, no.
6, August 1970. Thanks to Don LaCoss for supplying the article.
No one will deny that capitalist society has entered a period of
permanent crisis, which induces it to reassemble its weakened forces
and to concentrate, more and more, all political and economic power
in the hands of the state, by means of nationalizations. To this
concentration of capitalist power, are we going to continue to oppose
the scattered forces of the workers? To do so would be to run into
definitive defeat. And one of the principal reasons for the present
apathy of the working class resides in the interminable series of
defeats suffered by the social revolution throughout this century.
The working class no longer has confidence in any organization
because it has observed them all at work, here and there, and seen
that all of them, including the anarchist organizations, have
revealed themselves to be incapable of resolving the crisis of
capitalism - that is to say, of assuring the triumph of the social
revolution. One must not be afraid to say that all of these
organizations are outdated and no longer valid. On the contrary, only
this very realization - the importance of which should not be reduced
by more or less circumstantial considerations, nor by blaming others
for the consequences of one's own errors - provides a point of
departure from which we can truly prepare ourselves to revise all
doctrines (which today share a substantial portion of outdatedness),
perhaps resulting in a fundamental ideological unification of the
workers' movement in the direction of the social revolution. It goes
without saying that I do not by any means dream of a movement whose
thought would be monolithic, but a movement unified from within, and
in which diverse tendencies could enjoy the most ample freedom to
manifest themselves.
On the other hand, it is no less true that action is called for
immediately. This action must obey two general principles: first, it
must facilitate the ideological regroupment mentioned above; and
second, it must cease considering the revolution as the work of
future generations for whom we are supposed to make the preparations.
We are faced with this dilemma: either the social revolution and a
new impetus for humanity, or war and a social decomposition of which
the past offers only a few pale examples. History is granting us a
breathing space the duration of which we do not know. Let us make use
of it to reverse the course of the present degeneration and to bring
about the revolution. The present apathy of the working class is only
temporary. It indicates, at this time, both the workers' loss of
confidence in all organizations, and a certain detachment on their
part. It depends on us, as revolutionaries, to draw the lessons,
which will enable this detachment to be transformed into active
revolt. The energy of the working class asks only to exert itself.
Nevertheless, it is necessary to give it not only an end - it has had
a presentiment of this for a long time - but also means of attaining
this end. If the task of revolutionaries is to bring about a
fraternal society, this necessitates, beginning immediately, an
organism in which this fraternity can form and develop itself.
At the present time, it is on the factory level that workers'
fraternity attains its maximum. Thus, it is there we must act, but
not in clamouring for a trade-union which is chimerical today, in the
actual conditions of the capitalist world, and which, moreover, could
only come forward AGAINST the working class, since the trade unions
represent now only different tendencies of capitalism. In fact, a
"united front" of the unions could happen only on the eve of the
revolution - and would act against the revolution since the major
unions would all be equally interested in torpedoing it to assure
their own survival in the capitalist state. Henceforth, as integral
parts of the capitalist system, they defend this system by defending
themselves. The interests of the union are essentially their own and
not those of the workers.
Moreover, one of the most powerful obstacles to a workers'
regroupment and a revolutionary renaissance is constituted by the
apparatus of the union bureaucrats, even in the factory, beginning
with the Stalinist apparatus. The enemy of the worker, today, is the
union bureaucrat every bit as much as the boss, who without the union
bureaucrat, would most of the time be powerless. It is the union
bureaucrat who paralyzes workers' action. And thus the first
watchword of revolutionaries must be: Out the door with the union
bureaucrats!
But the principal enemy consists of Stalinism and its union
apparatus, because it is the partisan of state capitalism - that is
to say, the complete fusion of the state and unionism. It is
therefore the most clear-sighted defender of the capitalist system,
since it outlines,
for this system, the most stable state conceivable today.
Meanwhile, one should not destroy an existing organization without
proposing another in its place, better adapted to the necessities of
the revolution. And it is precisely the revolution that has taken t
upon itself to show us, each time that it has appeared, the
instrument of its choice: the factory committee directly elected by
the workers assembled on the shop-floor, and the members of which are
revocable at any time. This is the only organization which is able,
without alteration, to direct the workers' interests within
capitalist society while looking to the social revolution; and which
is also able to accomplish this revolution and, once having attained
victory, to constitute the base of future society. Its structure is
the most democratic conceivable, since it is directly elected in the
workplace by all the workers, who control its actions from day to day
and are able to recall a member of the committee, or the entire
committee, at any time, and choose another. Its creation offers the
minimum of risks of degeneration because of the constant and direct
control that the workers are able to exercise over their delegates.
Furthermore, the constant contact between elected and electors
favours a maximum of creative initiative in the hands of the working
class, which is thus called upon to take its destiny in its own hands
and to directly lead its own struggles. This committee, which
authentically represents the will of the workers, is called upon to
administer the factory and to organize the workers' defence against
the police and the reactionary gangs of Stalinism and traditional
capitalism. After the victory of the revolution, it is the factory
committee which must indicate to the regional, national and
international leaders (these also are directly elected by the
workers), the productive capacities of the factory and its needs of
raw materials and manpower. Finally, the representatives of each
factory would be called to form, on the regional, national and
international scale, the new government, distinct from the management
of the economy, and whose principal task would be to liquidate the
heritage of capitalism and to assure the material and cultural
conditions of its own progressive disappearance.
At once economic and political, the factory committee is the
revolutionary organism par excellence. That is why even its
establishment represents a sort of insurrection against the
capitalist state and its trade-union branches, because it assembles
all the workers' energies against the capitalist state, and even
assumes the latter's economic power. For the same reason one sees it
burst forth spontaneously in moments of acute social crisis. But in
our epoch of chronic crisis, it is necessary for revolutionaries to
passionately defend and advocate this conception starting now if they
wish, in the first place, to put an end to the meddling of union
bureaucrats in the factories, and to restore to the workers the
initiative of their emancipation. Let us therefore destroy the unions
in the name of the factory committees, democratically elected by the
workers in the plant, and revocable at any time.
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