Revolutionary Organization and Class
Consciousness
The following article is the text of a speech delivered at a
public meeting to discuss revolutionary organizations and class
consciousness on Saturday February 26, 2005 in Toronto. The panel
included a speaker from the
Internationalist Workers' Group, the Montreal affiliate of
the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party and
Red & Black Notes. Interested readers can see
a letter from
Internationalism,
the US section of the International Communist Current
regarding this meeting followed by a
comment from Red & Black Notes.
Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels wrote The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Beginning
with the stirring lines that the history of all hitherto existing
society has been the history of class struggle, Marx and Engels
concluded that working people have nothing to lose but their chains.
At the beginning of the 21st century, there's little to change in
that statement. If anything, the urgency, the need for communism is
even greater. And while there are certain sections of The Manifesto
that are underwritten, several key points need to be underscored.
At the end of the first section in The Manifesto, "Bourgeois and
Proletarians," Marx and Engels write, "What the bourgeoisie,
therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers." In other
words: the working class. Second, in the section entitled
"Proletarians and Communists," they write, "The Communists do not
form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties." The
point is not to brandish quotations from Marx and Engels as if they
were Holy Writ, but the sections quoted do raise key questions for
today's revolutionaries:
1. If the working class is the gravedigger of capitalism, how will
it achieve the consciousness to do it?
2. What is the role of a Communist organization in this
process?
Before attempting to answer those questions, it is necessary to
situate the perspectives of Red & Black Notes. For much of the
twentieth century, the dominant political current on the
revolutionary left derived from the theory and practice of Leninism,
in its Stalinist, Trotskyist or Maoist variants. From the mid-1980s
to the mid-1990s, I was a Trotskyist. Like Lenin, Trotsky and his
supporters had a quite specific approach to questions of
class-consciousness and revolutionary organization. They believed
that what the working class needed above all was a vanguard party.
This model was derived from the political model of Bolshevism; a
model which came from particularly Russian conditions, but was later
extrapolated for broader application. Today, Red & Black Notes is
primarily influenced by the Dutch-German Communist Left and to a
lesser extent by the Italian Communist Left.
These two left tendencies were expelled from the Communist
International in the 1920s. People will probably have heard of or
read, Lenin's famous booklet Left
Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, but unfortunately few will
have read the replies to it, such as Herman Gorter's Open
Letter to Comrade Lenin. Both of these tendencies were
significant working class trends, and both had significantly
different approaches to that of Bolshevism. I'll speak more about
them, and in particular the Dutch-German communist left, a little
later.
What then is class-consciousness? Better yet, what is class? Many
leftists groups have a fairly elastic definition of class - whenever
workers do what the leftists think they should do, workers are deemed
to be class conscious. When they don't, they are suffering from false
consciousness. Leaving aside that this view turns class-consciousness
into ideology; this view sets up workers as passive consumers. The
development of class-consciousness becomes like buying soap. Workers
are never seen as independent actors, only recipients. Much of the
left pays lip service to Marx's famous comment that the liberation of
the working class must be the task of the working class, as this
assertion clashes with much leftist thought. The most infamous
expression of this view was Lenin's, who argued workers by themselves
could only achieve trade union consciousness. In other words, while
workers could find the consciousness to rebel against capitalism,
they could never reach the level of the understanding of the need to
overthrow capitalism. Revolutionary consciousness would be brought to
the working class through the agency of the revolutionary
organization. And while Lenin modified this view, he never entirely
abandoned it, believing that the working class could never be right
against its conscious expression, i.e. the Bolshevik Party.
In this view, Lenin was only echoing the majority view, but not
the exclusive view, of the Second International. Indeed, Lenin's
formula echoed those of the International's main theoretician Karl
Kautsky, whom Lenin later denounced as a "renegade."
Bearing this in mind, it's useful to consider the historian E. P.
Thompson's very interesting definition of class:
Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences
(inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their
interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose
interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The
class experience is largely determined by the productive relations
into which men are born - or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness
is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms:
embodied in traditions, value-systems and institutional forms.
EP Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
The important thing to remember is that class is not a thing; it
is a social relationship, which is in constantly in flux, and that
the conditions, under which it is produced, are constantly
changing.
At the dawn of capitalism, peasants moved from the land into the
new factories. They did not immediately become proletarians in their
consciousness (their understanding of themselves), but over time,
they were to understand their new role. In the early days of
capitalism, apparently one of the hardest things was to discipline
the workers with the clock. And also to get people to show up for
work on Monday. Many who failed to show up announced they were
celebrating St. Monday.
But being determines consciousness: Proletarianized, workers
identified with each other, with the working conditions, their
struggles and aspirations, as the lower wages, longer hours attitudes
of the capitalist. (Even as those working conditions changed through
new technology).
One of the results of this affinity of interests was the building
of trade unions as defensive organizations. Later on, workers formed
political organizations. However, as Marx noted, the ruling ideas of
any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class, and these organizations
tended to reflect the divisions and prejudices of capitalism. These
powerful organizations were incorporated into the structures of
capitalism in the early years of the twentieth century.
Does this mean that without their mass organizations
class-consciousness is impossible or that it simply requires a
different type of organization? Not at all. Class-consciousness
develops through the interaction of workers with their
environment.
Imagine a situation: A person is waiting for a bus. Another person
arrives and asks how long the first has been waiting. A conversation
arises over the inefficiencies of public transit, the weather, or
anything else that might be of interest. As the conversation deepens,
the bus arrives and the two passengers sit in different parts of the
bus, dropping back into the lonely crowd. But imagine if the bus had
not arrived, or if a crowd of people had been involved in the
conversation. It is possible the conversation could have survived the
immediate satisfaction of interests.
Of course, this example has its limitations. The two passengers
are unlikely to become lifelong friends. Nor is revolution likely to
emerge from a simple strike over working conditions or wages. But
these represent a disruption in the flow of normal operating
conditions, both material and ideological, of capitalism.
It's important to recognize two things. Class-consciousness is not
an ideology, a thing, which the proletariat has to learn from its
would-be saviors. Class-consciousness is a process.
The impetus for class-consciousness springs from the role of the
working class under capitalism, as an exploited class. At the same
time, capital continually undermines the natural solidarity it
creates through sectional logic and by reorganizing the means of
production (It goes without saying that the trade unions and other
official organizations loyal to capital reinforce this
sectionalism).
In the process of class struggle, the possibility for
class-consciousness develops. This class struggle is neither
pre-ordained nor pre-determined. And because of the sectional
developments within capitalism, it is generally not even. The
development of class-consciousness may see advances and retreats
according to the advances and retreats of the class. But it is in the
struggle that its possibilities are created.
Martin Glaberman, a communist activist from Detroit, in his book,
Wartime Strikes told a story of
the struggle against the no-strike pact during the Second World War.
During the 1944 United Autoworkers convention none of the resolutions
on whether to re-affirm the no-strike pact, either pro or con,
passed. It was decided to hold a membership-wide referendum through a
postal ballot on the question. While the pro-position passed, less
than half of the membership bothered to vote; however, at the same
time more than half of the membership of the UAW engaged in wildcat
strikes. Contradictory? Not really. If you measure
class-consciousness by the number of votes for social democracy or
the number of copies of Socialist Worker sold on the last
demonstration, this story makes no sense. But if you see
consciousness as part of the living existence of the working class,
it makes perfect sense.
While it's important to reject class-consciousness as something to
be grasped by the workers, neither is it simply the mirror image of
the economic struggle. It is in the process of class struggle that
class-consciousness develops. As Marx so clearly wrote:
The materialist doctrine that men are the products of
circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are
products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that
it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself
needs educating. Hence, this doctrine necessarily divides society
into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen,
for example). The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of
human activity can only be conceived and rationally understood only
as revolutionizing practice.
- Theses on Feuerbach
What then of the second question, the role for communists? A
revolutionary organization can be thought of as a link: Between the
past and the future. But it is a link that is a part of the
class.
As noted earlier, the most prevalent model for revolutionary
organization in the twentieth century owed some debt to Leninism.
While this meant widely different things in practice, all so-called
Leninist organizations swore some allegiance to Lenin's views about
spontaneity and organization. Since the Stalinist and Maoist
interpretations have largely disappeared, although Maoism seems to be
making a comeback within direct action and anarchist circles, let's
look at Trotskyism. For half a century, Trotskyism has been guided by
the opening lines of The Transitional Programme, which held
that the crisis of humanity is "characterized by the historical
crisis of the leadership of the proletariat." Essentially, the
critique boils down to arguing that what is needed is the
revolutionary leadership of the vanguard party. And while the talk is
constantly of the betrayals of the current leaders, it overlooks the
role these leaders and their organizations play.
Rather than the Bolshevik tradition, let's look at the Communist
Left mentioned earlier. After their expulsion from the Communist
Party of Germany (KPD) in 1919, the German left formed the Communist
Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). Unlike the KPD, the KAPD opposed
participation in the trade unions and parliament. Now for many this
was proof of their ultra-leftism, but given that the unions had
helped to liquidate the workers' councils in Germany, and the Social
Democratic Party had unleashed the proto-Nazi Freikcorps on the
revolution killing, among others Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht,
you could be forgive for a little "ultra-leftism." While the party
saw itself in a leading role it had a different focus from the
Bolsheviks. The party they wished to build would be, in the words of
Herman Gorter, "As strong as steel; as clear as glass."
The KAPD at its founding was larger that the KPD, and its
workplace organization, the General Workers' Union of Germany (AAUD)
had over 200,000 members. Yet within a few years, it had almost
completely vanished. Contrary to their expectations, the time for
permanent opposition organizations was over. The development of the
decadence of the capitalist system leading to permanent crisis, and
the vast expansion of the law of value into the previously untouched
social spaces meant that any sizable organization would be
recuperated by capitalism with little trouble. As for the Leninists,
the successful ones have largely functioned like their social
democratic cousins, while the smaller ones have had negligible
impact. As Paul Mattick noted, purism is the luxury of the sect.
In 1927, former members of the Communist Workers Party of the
Netherlands (KAPN) founded the Group of International Communists. The
GIK was a break with the "party spirit," but saw itself as part of
the "council movement." The GIK did not try to be a leadership, but
did publish material hold public meeting, publish materials about the
nature of capitalism and its agents in the working class, as well as
intervening in the workers movement, especially in the struggle of
unemployed workers.
But in this orientation, the GIK, and other council communist
organizations felt, as Paul Mattick, put it
The 'consciousness' to rebel against and to change society is
not developed by the 'propaganda' of conscious minorities, but by the
real and direct propaganda of events
so long as minorities
operate within the mass, the mass is not revolutionary but neither is
the minority. Its 'revolutionary conceptions' can only serve
capitalistic functions. If the masses become revolutionary, the
distinction between conscious minority and unconscious majority
disappears and also the capitalistic function of the apparently
'revolutionary' minority.
If it seems that what is being advocated here is a kind of
spontaneous approach to revolutionary organization, that's a mistaken
impression. The liberation of the working class must be the task of
the working class, but revolutionaries are a part of the working
class. A revolutionary organization is not separate from the class.
It's a part of it; it should take part in the struggles of the class,
even isolation from the broader layers of the class makes that
participation limited. Discussion and debate are not separate from
the class struggle. Was Marx carrying out a merely theoretical task
when he wrote Capital in the British Museum? Through clarifying
points, and helping in the development of the critique of capital,
revolutionaries can help the development of the real movement against
capital, communism.
Fischer
February 2005
Revolutionary Organization and Class Consciousness
The following article is the text of a speech delivered at a
public meeting to discuss revolutionary organizations and class
consciousness on Saturday February 26, 2005 in Toronto. The panel
included a speaker from the Internationalist Workers' Group, the
Montreal affiliate of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary
Party and Red & Black Notes. The text has been edited for
publication.
Over one hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels wrote The Manifesto of the Communist Party. Beginning with the
stirring lines that the history of all hitherto existing society has
been the history of class struggle, Marx and Engels concluded that
working people have nothing to lose but their chains. At the
beginning of the 21st century, there's little to change in that
statement. If anything, the urgency, the need for communism is even
greater. And while there are certain sections of The Manifesto that
are underwritten, several key points need to be underscored.
At the end of the first section in The Manifesto, "Bourgeois and
Proletarians," Marx and Engels write, "What the bourgeoisie,
therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers." In other
words: the working class. Second, in the section entitled
"Proletarians and Communists," they write, "The Communists do not
form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties." The
point is not to brandish quotations from Marx and Engels as if they
were Holy Writ, but the sections quoted do raise key questions for
today's revolutionaries:
1. If the working class is the gravedigger of capitalism, how will
it achieve the consciousness to do it?
2. What is the role of a Communist organization in this
process?
Before attempting to answer those questions, it is necessary to
situate the perspectives of Red & Black Notes. For much of the
twentieth century, the dominant political current on the
revolutionary left derived from the theory and practice of Leninism,
in its Stalinist, Trotskyist or Maoist variants. From the mid-1980s
to the mid-1990s, I was a Trotskyist. Like Lenin, Trotsky and his
supporters had a quite specific approach to questions of
class-consciousness and revolutionary organization. They believed
that what the working class needed above all was a vanguard party.
This model was derived from the political model of Bolshevism; a
model which came from particularly Russian conditions, but was later
extrapolated for broader application. Today, Red & Black Notes is
primarily influenced by the Dutch-German Communist Left and to a
lesser extent by the Italian Communist Left.
These two left tendencies were expelled from the Communist
International in the 1920s. People will probably have heard of or
read, Lenin's famous booklet Left Wing Communism: An Infantile
Disorder, but unfortunately few will have read the replies to it,
such as Herman Gorter's Open Letter to Comrade Lenin. Both of these
tendencies were significant working class trends, and both had
significantly different approaches to that of Bolshevism. I'll speak
more about them, and in particular the Dutch-German communist left, a
little later.
What then is class-consciousness? Better yet, what is class? Many
leftists groups have a fairly elastic definition of class - whenever
workers do what the leftists think they should do, workers are deemed
to be class conscious. When they don't, they are suffering
from false consciousness. Leaving aside that this view turns
class-consciousness into ideology; this view sets up workers as
passive consumers. The development of class-consciousness becomes
like buying soap. Workers are never seen as independent actors, only
recipients. Much of the left pays lip service to Marx's famous
comment that the liberation of the working class must be the task of
the working class, as this assertion clashes with much leftist
thought. The most infamous expression of this view was Lenin's, who
argued workers by themselves could only achieve trade union
consciousness. In other words, while workers could find the
consciousness to rebel against capitalism, they could never reach the
level of the understanding of the need to overthrow capitalism.
Revolutionary consciousness would be brought to the working class
through the agency of the revolutionary organization. And while Lenin
modified this view, he never entirely abandoned it, believing that
the working class could never be right against its conscious
expression, i.e. the Bolshevik Party.
In this view, Lenin was only echoing the majority view, but not
the exclusive view, of the Second International. Indeed, Lenin's
formula echoed those of the International's main theoretician Karl
Kautsky, whom Lenin later denounced as a "renegade."
Bearing this in mind, it's useful to consider the historian E. P.
Thompson's very interesting definition of class:
Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences
(inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their
interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose
interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The
class experience is largely determined by the productive relations
into which men are born - or enter involuntarily. Class-consciousness
is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms:
embodied in traditions, value-systems and institutional forms.
EP Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
The important thing to remember is that class is not a thing; it
is a social relationship, which is in constantly in flux, and that
the conditions, under which it is produced, are constantly
changing.
At the dawn of capitalism, peasants moved from the land into the
new factories. They did not immediately become proletarians in their
consciousness (their understanding of themselves), but over time,
they were to understand their new role. In the early days of
capitalism, apparently one of the hardest things was to discipline
the workers with the clock. And also to get people to show up for
work on Monday. Many who failed to show up announced they were
celebrating St. Monday.
But being determines consciousness: Proletarianized, workers
identified with each other, with the working conditions, their
struggles and aspirations, as the lower wages, longer hours attitudes
of the capitalist. (Even as those working conditions changed through
new technology).
One of the results of this affinity of interests was the building
of trade unions as defensive organizations. Later on, workers formed
political organizations. However, as Marx noted, the ruling ideas of
any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class, and these organizations
tended to reflect the divisions and prejudices of capitalism. These
powerful organizations were incorporated into the structures of
capitalism in the early years of the twentieth century.
Does this mean that without their mass organizations
class-consciousness is impossible or that it simply requires a
different type of organization? Not at all. Class-consciousness
develops through the interaction of workers with their
environment.
Imagine a situation: A person is waiting for a bus. Another person
arrives and asks how long the first has been waiting. A conversation
arises over the inefficiencies of public transit, the weather, or
anything else that might be of interest. As the conversation deepens,
the bus arrives and the two passengers sit in different parts of the
bus, dropping back into the lonely crowd. But imagine if the bus had
not arrived, or if a crowd of people had been involved in the
conversation. It is possible the conversation could have survived the
immediate satisfaction of interests.
Of course, this example has its limitations. The two passengers
are unlikely to become lifelong friends. Nor is revolution likely to
emerge from a simple strike over working conditions or wages. But
these represent a disruption in the flow of normal operating
conditions, both material and ideological, of capitalism.
It's important to recognize two things. Class-consciousness is not
an ideology, a thing, which the proletariat has to learn from its
would-be saviors. Class-consciousness is a process.
The impetus for class-consciousness springs from the role of the
working class under capitalism, as an exploited class. At the same
time, capital continually undermines the natural solidarity it
creates through sectional logic and by reorganizing the means of
production (It goes without saying that the trade unions and other
official organizations loyal to capital reinforce this
sectionalism).
In the process of class struggle, the possibility for
class-consciousness develops. This class struggle is neither
pre-ordained nor pre-determined. And because of the sectional
developments within capitalism, it is generally not even. The
development of class-consciousness may see advances and retreats
according to the advances and retreats of the class. But it is in the
struggle that its possibilities are created.
Martin Glaberman, a communist activist from Detroit, in his book,
Wartime Strikes told a story of the struggle against the no-strike
pact during the Second World War. During the 1944 United Autoworkers
convention none of the resolutions on whether to re-affirm the
no-strike pact, either pro or con, passed. It was decided to hold a
membership-wide referendum through a postal ballot on the question.
While the pro-position passed, less than half of the membership
bothered to vote; however, at the same time more than half of the
membership of the UAW engaged in wildcat strikes. Contradictory? Not
really. If you measure class-consciousness by the number of votes for
social democracy or the number of copies of Socialist Worker sold on
the last demonstration, this story makes no sense. But if you see
consciousness as part of the living existence of the working class,
it makes perfect sense.
While it's important to reject class-consciousness as something to
be grasped by the workers, neither is it simply the mirror image of
the economic struggle. It is in the process of class struggle that
class-consciousness develops. As Marx so clearly wrote:
The materialist doctrine that men are the products of
circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are
products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that
it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself
needs educating. Hence, this doctrine necessarily divides society
into two parts, of which one is superior to society (in Robert Owen,
for example). The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of
human activity can only be conceived and rationally understood only
as revolutionizing practice.
- Theses on Feuerbach
What then of the second question, the role for communists? A
revolutionary organization can be thought of as a link: Between the
past and the future. But it is a link that is a part of the
class.
As noted earlier, the most prevalent model for revolutionary
organization in the twentieth century owed some debt to Leninism.
While this meant widely different things in practice, all so-called
Leninist organizations swore some allegiance to Lenin's views about
spontaneity and organization. Since the Stalinist and Maoist
interpretations have largely disappeared, although Maoism seems to be
making a comeback within direct action and anarchist circles, let's
look at Trotskyism. For half a century, Trotskyism has been guided by
the opening lines of The Transitional Programme, which held that the
crisis of humanity is "characterized by the historical crisis of the
leadership of the proletariat." Essentially, the critique boils down
to arguing that what is needed is the revolutionary leadership of the
vanguard party. And while the talk is constantly of the betrayals of
the current leaders, it overlooks the role these leaders and their
organizations play.
Rather than the Bolshevik tradition, let's look at the Communist
Left mentioned earlier. After their expulsion from the Communist
Party of Germany (KPD) in 1919, the German left formed the Communist
Workers Party of Germany (KAPD). Unlike the KPD, the KAPD opposed
participation in the trade unions and parliament. Now for many this
was proof of their ultra-leftism, but given that the unions had
helped to liquidate the workers' councils in Germany, and the Social
Democratic Party had unleashed the proto-Nazi Freikcorps on the
revolution killing, among others Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht,
you could be forgive for a little "ultra-leftism." While the party
saw itself in a leading role it had a different focus from the
Bolsheviks. The party they wished to build would be, in the words of
Herman Gorter, "As strong as steel; as clear as glass."
The KAPD at its founding was larger that the KPD, and its
workplace organization, the General Workers' Union of Germany (AAUD)
had over 200,000 members. Yet within a few years, it had almost
completely vanished. Contrary to their expectations, the time for
permanent opposition organizations was over. The development of the
decadence of the capitalist system leading to permanent crisis, and
the vast expansion of the law of value into the previously untouched
social spaces meant that any sizable organization would be
recuperated by capitalism with little trouble. As for the Leninists,
the successful ones have largely functioned like their social
democratic cousins, while the smaller ones have had negligible
impact. As Paul Mattick noted, purism is the luxury of the sect.
In 1927, former members of the Communist Workers Party of the
Netherlands (KAPN) founded the Group of International Communists. The
GIK was a break with the "party spirit," but saw itself as part of
the "council movement." The GIK did not try to be a leadership, but
did publish material hold public meeting, publish materials about the
nature of capitalism and its agents in the working class, as well as
intervening in the workers movement, especially in the struggle of
unemployed workers.
But in this orientation, the GIK, and other council communist
organizations felt, as Paul Mattick, put it
"The 'consciousness' to rebel against and to change society is not
developed by the 'propaganda' of conscious minorities, but by the
real and direct propaganda of events
so long as minorities
operate within the mass, the mass is not revolutionary but neither is
the minority. Its 'revolutionary conceptions' can only serve
capitalistic functions. If the masses become revolutionary, the
distinction between conscious minority and unconscious majority
disappears and also the capitalistic function of the apparently
'revolutionary' minority."
If it seems that what is being advocated here is a kind of
spontaneous approach to revolutionary organization, that's a mistaken
impression. The liberation of the working class must be the task of
the working class, but revolutionaries are a part of the working
class. A revolutionary organization is not separate from the class.
It's a part of it; it should take part in the struggles of the class,
even isolation from the broader layers of the class makes that
participation limited. Discussion and debate are not separate from
the class struggle. Was Marx carrying out a merely theoretical task
when he wrote Capital in the British Museum? Through clarifying
points, and helping in the development of the critique of capital,
revolutionaries can help the development of the real movement against
capital, communism.
Fischer
February 2005
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