Community and Communism in Russia (III)

Every revolution has a triple character depending on how long ago it occurred. If one envisages the revolution in a vast historical cycle, it appears like a natural phenomenon which developed spontaneously and with irrepressible violence. That is how the Russian revolution appears when one studies it from the 1825 Decembrists (many of Pestel's positions were re-adopted by the populists and he himself adopted some of Radishchev's, which were at least thirty years earlier) to the October revolution. However, if one examines the revolution at the moment of its paroxysm, culminating in February to October 1917, it appears that it only happened because there were people that could be called 'extraordinary' and that the revolution could only happen because of their action. Some made Lenin into a messiah, and Zinoviev said that he was the type of man who appeared only once in 500 years. Finally, when one studies the revolution in retrospect, in what it realized, and one compares it with the pre-revolutionary period, often some doubt its necessity. All that happened was that the members of the ruling class tended to make it, so the conviction as to its uselessness is reinforced. Instead one must know how to reform in time. It is true that the revolution solved no problems that it itself was to create, but it resolved those that the previous mode of production had given rise to and could not solve.

We have analysed the first characteristic, there remain the other two, which are intimately linked and are determined by the first. Here it is not a matter of making a justification, but of giving as realistic an exposition as possible of what had inevitably to arise from the moment that the discontinuity that we have mentioned had not been integrated into the theory. We shall only provide statements because it is impossible to prove adequately their truth in the bounds of this introduction.

Whatever some critics of bolshevism may say, the Bolsheviks did not stage a coup d'etat in October 1917, in the sense that it was a movement to force the situation and to assume a different course to the one already started. Their seizure of power was an absolutely vital moment of the revolutionary movement beginning in February. It allowed the realization of what was already underway, but which would have been stopped if the old state (an obstacle to the free development of the revolutionary forces) had not also been destroyed. Not even a capitalist revolution would have been able to develop without this act, and Russia would have evolved like India did.

On the other hand, the Bolsheviks could not make "the bourgeois revolution in the proletarian manner", despite what Bordiga said. The Brest-Litovsk peace was not, as Lenin hoped:

"...peace in the interests of the working people, and not in the interests of the capitalists." [1]

"There is only one way to prevent the restoration of the police, and that is to create a people's militia and to fuse it with the army (the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the entire people)." [2]

But the police was re-established and Lenin proclaimed it to be necessary. As for the Red Army, it was constituted just like the army of the French revolution, as an amalgam, separated from the people.

Workers' control had been one of the central points of the revolutionary programme before October, but it was rapidly replaced by economic management, the need for competition, and the Taylor system (which Lenin had previously criticised violently). Thus there is a mass of facts attesting to the overgrowth of the revolution, hoped for by Lenin from 1905, and on which the majority of revolutionaries had counted, being exhausted in a year due to the delay in international aid. So a purely capitalist content imposed itself. The Bolsheviks also rapidly lost the ability to understand all the possible renewals of this overgrowth, because they were caught up in the state. They no longer had the receptivity to allow them to avoid losing all touch with the proletariat and peasantry.

There was some radicalization in 1919 with the revolutionary movements in the West, allowing the creation of the Third International, but the retreat reopened the path to economic integration. The soviet state progressively became a state stronger than society, but prey to world capital. The Bolsheviks wished to maintain the state as it had been built. They would only modify it as they were so constrained and forced. Above all, they would concede it to the proletariat only after the latter's reformation, economic re-organization, and the restarting of industry. This was, as Venturi showed, somewhat similar to the position of some members of Narodnaya Volya:

"The revolutionary party would not hand over power to the representatives of the people until the revolution had been achieved. Until that time they would keep it firmly in their own hands and resist anyone who tried to snatch it from them." [3]

Put another way, the Russian proletariat had not succeeded in constituting itself as the ruling class in the way Marx had indicated in the Communist Manifesto and Critique of the Gotha Programme. It had thus foundered just like the western proletariat in 1848 and 1871. The Kronstadt Commune and its repression, the great strike in Petrograd, are the most convincing expressions of this. Parallel to this retreat was the fact that Lenin spoke more of building socialism in Russia after 1921. The constitution as a ruling class was realized later in a mystified form (just as in the West) when the last opposition movements were eliminated.

Leading the "bourgeois revolution", even "in the proletarian manner" cannot avoid the retention of the conception of the party, the latter being conceived of institutionally: one must organize the working class which finally organizes the peasantry, thus Russian society. The society sank ever deeper into chaos following the dissolution of the obshchina which made a solidly structured party necessary: it was the sole element with an absolute will, inflexibility and the ability to be the intermediary between the state and the peasants.

Lenin was circumspect over the soviets. (In one way he agreed with the Mensheviks: the appearance of the soviets was due to the absence of the party and trade unions.) He praised them: they were "the embryo of a new revolutionary power", and he mistrusted them because he feared spontaneist and anarcho-syndicalist influences. The soviets were a sort of adaptation of an organ of the obshchina called the skhod. So in finally adopting them in 1917 and to such an extent that they were placed in the front rank in State and Revolution, Lenin again adopted populist elements because the revolution in Russia could not avoid having a populist character. But he could not stop identifying the soviets with a western phenomenon. He declared that they realized proletarian democracy while they were beyond democracy from the start just because of their attempt to recompose the community, even beyond the geo-social-historic basis of the countryside. The formation of soviets was the affirmation of the constitution of the proletarian class as class. But very soon after there was a break between them and the Communist Party. The soviets were not powerful enough to encompass it, and the party did not succeed in achieving a supersession on their basis (a spontaneous movement against Tsarism and world capital). The impossibility of the union between them expressed the blocking of the Russian revolution as a socialist revolution.

The explosion of the soviets as the way of life of the Russian proletariat in its movement for the destruction of capital allows the explanation of the following difference: in pre-1914 Germany the SPD and the trade unions it ran grouped all the workers, while in Russia a similar party did not exist on the eve of the revolution. The party in Germany was the expression of the proletarian movement. It tended to be a society, as some have remarked. We would say moreover that it tended to form a new community which also maintained capital's presuppositions, hence its failure. Its project was realized without the illusory veil by the Nazi Party when it included the proletariat as producer in the community of capital. Rosa Luxemburg clearly understood this and waited right to the end before making the break, i.e. when the break had already been made by the proletariat. The break did not pose such a problem for the Russians because the community that the workers tended to create occurred in forms other than the party: in the soviets. The party phenomenon as the expression of the global class opposition could not occur in Russia because of the non-class dimension to the revolution. We have insisted at length on the popular-populist aspect of the 1905 revolution (that is why the historians of the Russian revolution prefer to deal with it as rapidly as possible) which re-appeared in February and even October 1917. The soviets thus had to be reconquered, while in Germany the councils immediately fell under SPD influence and the revolutionary proletariat had to form Unionen.

In both cases, Russia and Germany, the wish to use the other as a model was partly irrelevant. Originally Lenin and the Bolsheviks (but also the Mensheviks to some extent) dreamt of creating a party like the SPD. Later the German communists aimed at bolshevization of their own party.

The various parties all acted as if marginal to the action, despite all their links with the masses: marginal to the movement of the proletariat and peasantry. The hiatus could have been abolished in 1917. It is perhaps because of this discord between the party and the masses that some have said that the October revolution was premature. We think that it was an attempt at unification, more exactly of a party-masses coalescence with the question of the struggle between the parties as bearers of different historical perspectives always in suspense, and always both present and absent was the abandonment of the perspective of the leap over the CMP, the determining factor in the development of the revolution. The socialist overgrowth could only be realized on the basis of this unification.

One of the most controversial measures was the proclamation of the right of nations to self-determination: certainly a bourgeois measure, but needed to disorganize the Tsar's empire, so enfeebling the central power. That is why one already finds it in the programme of the worker members of the Narodnaya Volya party:

"(3) Peoples who have been annexed to the Russian state by violence will be free either to abandon the Pan-Russian federation or to remain within it." [4]

And this had been stated by other populist currents beforehand. One must not, though, omit the fact that Lenin did not oppose the members of the proletarian parties of the countries under Russian domination when they declared that, on the contrary, one must remain in the Russian zone. But the weakness lay in not having understood the important mutation in relation to the nineteenth century. Then a reconstructed Poland played a revolutionary role. A century later, its re-establishment could only be the creation of the counter-revolution. Rosa Luxemburg had seen this intuitively [5].

It is insufficient to attribute the checking of the revolution in the countries that separated themselves from Russia to the Bolsheviks' position. It was the product of the weakness of the whole international movement. The revolution in the countries on the southern periphery (i.e. Turkey, Iran and India), which had also been affected by the revolutionary wave, was easily blocked by world capitalism and clearly the USSR used them from the very start to diminish the pressure exercised on herself, so contributing to the congealing of their development.

However, just like those countries, Central Europe too constituted an axis where revolution and counter-revolution again met and the two axes were like the fault lines of contemporary capitalist society. It is no accident that among the most repressive states in the world are to be found there. The counter-revolution thus had to block the development by provoking a balkanization of Central Europe (where it was only restructured) as in other countries of the Middle East, and especially with the division of India into India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ceylon and the small Himalayan states. Now however, the revolution develops from above and the spectre of popular revolution has not been totally exorcized. Also the 1911 movement in Ceylon showed a communist dimension.

The Bolsheviks did not succeed in re-imposing communist theory. Bordiga stated the opposite and always called this theory marxism. This is, for us, only the ideologization of the theory. It is true that Bordiga's proposition would be correct, taken literally, but we maintain our statement, given what we have said. Actually the Bolsheviks `restored' what they needed for their immediate struggle, i.e., things on the state, revolution, party, development of the CMP, the development of human societies etc..

The weakness of the Bolshevik Party appears in this definition of communism by Lenin:

"What is a communist? Communist is a Latin word. Communis is Latin for 'common'. Communist society is a society where all things the land, the factories - are owned in common and the people work in common. That is communism." [6]

A restoration no longer imposes itself upon us (even if one removes everything reactionary from that word) because one has to do more. One has to supersede Marx's work and that of all those working with the communist revolution in view. It is the capitalist movement which imposes itself upon us. It has gone, as Marx foresaw, beyond its limits and so it is no longer a matter of, e.g. developing an activity to restructure the working class, to unite it, but of operating in the movement of the negation of classes. Thus it is not a question of wishing to impose the dialectic again, but of thinking of superseding it.

The analysis of what the Russian revolution realized and its diffusion in the world is more important than the study of the errors and weaknesses of the Bolsheviks, even though these cannot be excluded from the lesson. Given the weight of the communitarian phenomenon, it is totally inadequate to compare the Russian revolution with the revolutions of 1789-84, 1848-9, or 1871, as Lenin did, following Engels. There are certainly common traits, but the dimension of the leap over the CMP was always missing as the perspective and possibility of these revolutions. This perspective end possibility supported the whole Russian revolutionary process.

The Russian revolution profited from the capitalist mode of production, just as the CMP profited from the USSR. This was already the case of Russia in the last century:

"Russian diplomacy has already survived, not only undamaged, but with direct profit, so many western European revolutions, that it was in a position to greet the outbreak of the February revolution of 1848 as an exceedingly favourable occasion." [7]

Russia had helped England to become the leading capitalist power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and by maintaining the European status quo, especially after 1848, it aided in the realization of the formal domination of capital. The USSR became partner to the US in the twentieth century and contributed to ensuring the latter's global supremacy. But that simultaneously facilitated the realization of the real domination of capital over society [8]. Two great revolutions, in France and China, momentarily tended to question those evil-intentioned alliances. Each time the shock could be overcome and now one can say that China is integrated into the community of capital's domination, that its real domination is tending to graft itself onto Chinese society.

Both revolutions were defeated. The defeat was concretized in the destruction of the German proletariat, so feared by Marx. But it was not Tsarism, but the young soviet capitalism that did this, so greatly increasing the realization of the real domination of capital over society world-wide.

The end result was the rejuvenation of capital because, in the final analysis, it profited from humanity's youthful forces, i.e. the countries still not overcome by the development of exchange value. Capital's own movement has resolved the question Marx asked Engels in his letter of 1858. But the irruption of the masses which had barely issued from the community, or were separating from it, weighed so heavily on the development of humanity that one again finds the debate between populists and marxists over the resolution of the questions posed by the introduction of capital into such areas, while an attempt was made to avoid the western path. There was certainly a very rapid development and what emerged twenty years ago has largely been superseded by capital because capital itself has drawn the lessons of the development of the western "path". The Japanese did not destroy their old human relations, and so they could graft the capitalist mode of production onto feudal society which has not yet been fully dissolved. So there could be a limitation to the constitution of the proletariat as a class because the break with the old presuppositions was not made. Primitive accumulation by the western method was impossible in China because the expropriation of the peasants would create utter chaos due to the enormity of the population. Besides, capital used the communitarian phenomenon to hinder the autonomization of the working class. This is the case in South Africa where the black proletariat is readsorbed into the old community to which it returns after a few years in the town, the community being the zone of capital's reserve. Finally there are areas of climatic difficulty where capital has only been able to implant itself through the communitarian phenomenon. This is exemplified in Israel by the kibbutz, but it also occurs in Angola, or did in Zaire under Belgian rule. Generally capital, having reached the level of material community, no longer needs totally to dissolve the old social relations in order to dominate. Moreover, dissolving them would even remove the possibility for capital to implant itself because it needs humans, those able to survive, and the only living and operative behaviour is the communitarian one in some parts of the world.

Another statement one can make on Russia's rise, and which was generalized in nearly all the countries undergoing capitalist revolutions after 1917, is that liberalism and democracy cannot flourish there. There can be either communist forms or despotism. Some populists understood this perfectly. In these countries there can but be inflation of the state, assuming grotesque aspects in some African states.

Here again we can note the theoretical wandering of Lenin and the Bolsheviks: their defence of democracy and the wish to establish a proletarian democracy. The whole debate between them and the social-democrats (especially Kautsky and Bauer) was a huge quid pro quo. The latter called the Bolsheviks undemocratic; the Bolsheviks replied that they were realizing democracy, not pure democracy, but true democracy: democracy for the vast majority etc.. But this was impossible in Russia as this country could either go far beyond democracy, or engender despotism, given the historico-social character. This aided the social-democrats' positions given that the dictatorship of the proletariat was rapidly reduced to that of the party and so that of the state. The defence of democracy in the west could only be a defence of capital, but the Bolsheviks could not state that theoretically and practically as they were enlisted in the glorification of revolutionary parliamentarianism. Perhaps only Bordiga took a revolutionary position: total rejection of democracy [9], but his break was rapidly readsorbed due the position he took on the Russian revolution and the Communist International. The revolutionaries acted under the level of historical potentialities. If "words overflowed the content" in 1848, as Marx said, after 1917 in the West, words masked the inability to seize the content.

In short one can say that the 1848-1917 period (one should also remember the other rejuvenation's, such as the Chinese revolution, which took place during the period of renewal indicated above) was when the proletarian revolution in the period of capital's formal domination over society was mainly classist as the proletariat had to destroy the bourgeois state on taking power, constituting itself as the ruling class, but also because it had to generalize its own condition to allow the growth of the productive forces, a fundamental condition for proceeding to communism. One finds here what may be called Marx's revolutionary reformism and linked to it the characteristic that once power was won, one went on to reforms of the economic apparatus and to proclaim laws favouring the proletarian class, e.g. shortening the working day:

"The shortening of the working day is its (i.e. socialism's) basic prerequisite.." [10]

This conditioned the existence of post-capitalist phases before pure communism. Also the indirect tactic had to be applied, given that a certain development of the productive forces was necessary, and so too a sufficiently developed proletariat. One had to struggle against capital's enemies or to pressurize capital through the intermediary of the state to improve the proletariat's position, but also to force capital to develop [11]. When Marx wrote inter alia a phenomenology of capital, he also wrote defending a theory of growth. Clearly he wanted to understand the development of capital and not only to describe the mode of its destruction (Marx's study is a necrology, as Bordiga said), but also to be able to proceed without exchange value developing and engendering capital, especially in countries where the CMP was little developed or was yet to start. Since the 1848 revolution had not destroyed the old society, one had to explain capitalist society in order to understand how the revolution would be able to launch a new attack on it. Also one had to smash the various utopias like Proudhon's which desired free credit!

The men who could appear when a new social form emerged or when a social form had to give over to another (the two moments did not always coincide) could be revolutionaries, while those having to live while the new mode of production had to exhaust its content were often easily absorbed. Marx and Engels saw the great break of 1848, but they too had to submit to the phase of capital's development, especially after 1871. Their revolutionary reformism emerged during this phase. It was not for nothing that Capital described the movement of the CMP and showed how the proletariat could fight it, "the serpent of their torments", and described above all how communism could implant itself on the basis of capital's formal domination over society. Clearly their position was difficult when they refused to retreat after the revolutionary movement was finished to avoid letting themselves be absorbed by the infamous honesty of bourgeois society. The use of politics and democracy contained the danger of an integration even more pernicious if it operated under the cover of a struggle. Marx, and especially Engels, were recuperated by democracy in fact. Thus marxism could be created and revisionism etc. flourish. So for us, living when the content is exhausted and who can have a really revolutionary and radical position (although this deserves no special mention), it is Marx's early works which are compatible with our revolutionary passion because they are already beyond capital and do not compromize with its intermediate development, suffered by generations of proletarians.

Put another way, the revolutionaries of the last century had to enter deeply into their own negation, not only in thought, but also in life, i.e. they had to work to reinforce capital while being in a position to think of their conclusion to this development in the negative. But, as Hegel said, one risks losing oneself (total alienation) in such an abandonment. This is also what happened to the entire workers' movement, as was very clearly theorized by Bernstein: the movement is all; the goal nothing. It could see humanity's development only through the infinite development (the bad, i.e. the indefinite) of the productive forces, really a development of capital as it was absorbed by capital which it should have negated. The dichotomy between minimum and maximum programmes was another expression of this historical moment and the latter rapidly became the revolutionary fig-leaf which the smallest gust of social wind would inevitably carry away.

However, to situate best the 1917 revolution, one must note that it was definitely a revolution inside a counter-revolution, i.e. there was not really a revolutionary break world-wide despite the left currents. This break postulated the final rejection of democracy. The Russian revolution could not maintain itself at the level of the overgrowth either, i.e. shorten the capitalist stage and, in certain sectors, avoid it altogether. It thus became compatible with the reign of the counter-revolution (i.e. the development of capital, as we think in terms of communism). It will be the same with the Chinese and anti-colonial revolutions. However, if these revolutions immediately strengthened the counter-revolution, they also finished it as the counter-revolution reached its conclusion thanks to them and extinguished the revolutionary potential of 1848. That is the basis of the papering over of the Russian revolutionary phenomenon some do.

This shows the fragmentary character of Bordiga's contribution. He thought out a resistance to capital, but performed a `restoration' of marxism by returning to the Bolsheviks' positions (up to and including the Second Congress of the Communist International), thus holding the movement in the counter-revolutionary sphere. This affirmation of a possible resistance to capital can only be understood by allowing for two statements by Bordiga:   1. marxism is a theoretical anticipation [12],   2. marxism is also the theory of the counter-revolution (here he clearly differed from Korsch). Now that the phase of the counter-revolution is over due to the emergence of the revolution (1968), Bordiga's theoretical activity is superseded.

The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, rooted in the Jacobins of the French revolution and in Babeuf, was taken up by Buonarroti and slightly differently by Flora Tristan, S. Born and some Chartists, flowered with Blanqui and his disciples (e.g. Tkachev), existed bright and clear in Marx, determinant as Lenin said, (Bernstein virulently reproached Marx for not having been able to overcome his blanquism), was hegemonic in Lenin and the Bolsheviks and was completed by Bordiga. It postulated that the despotic intervention of the proletariat in the economic process could hasten the passage to communism. It was the extolling of political action which should have shortened the capitalist phase of development. One cannot avoid a mode of production once it has been established. Thus the cycle originating in 1848 is now over.

The debate that began then between supporters of a classist revolution and one that could be called communitarian (populism began in 1848), was ended by the defeat of both and the triumph of the capitalist class, of capital, which can only ensure its victory by the mystification of the proletariat as ruling class.

Until now the communist revolution has developed on the basis of the formal domination of capital over society, or even more, on the basis of its transition to real domination. Therefore one has to state clearly the characteristics of the future revolution, if only in homage to Bordiga who concluded his study of Russia by setting its arrival date at 1975. The future, but not distant, revolution will immediately be conditioned by the following fact: capital world-wide tends to negate classes. It realizes this by the generalization of wage-labour, reducing all men to the level of wage-labourers, functionaries for capital, and so produces a universal class (in numbers and, potentially, in its goal). One does not have to restructure the old classes clearly and precisely, but to push the movement of negation to the end by destroying the mystification. It is thus that one has been able to represent momentarily the phenomenon, congealed as it were in one of its phases, while one did not take into account the tendency for the state to become society in all class societies. The capitalist state realizes this tendency with the CMP and the internalization of capital's domination by men due to everyone becoming the next one's policeman. Besides, more than ever there is no absolute break between what is capitalist and its negation, above all, historically speaking, between the proletarian and what one might call man. In fact the duality is in each being in a more or less distinct and acute manner, even in those who revolt against capital's domination, which has made some say that the class struggle occurs even on an individual level. It is no longer a matter of class struggle, but a struggle of men and women against capital dominating humanity which it has made hierarchical in terms of its total valorization. The state is like capital's social incarnation which keeps all men under its yoke by external force, i.e. coercion exercized by a separate body (police, army, elements of repression found in each production unit: and all is production for capital) and by internal pressure, progressively more intimate acceptance of capital's representations.

Only humanity can rise up against capital's oppression (the contradiction is such that it is humanity which favoured capital's production). There can only be a clash with capital if this humanity is revolutionized. This will not happen with a united front of all the present day members of humanity (what are called the proletariat and the middle classes etc.) because this would be to rivet all revolutionaries onto the level of the past class struggles. Today men must surpass their old representations and no longer perceive themselves in a classist schema, but to recognize themselves in their common state: slaves to capital, and thus to discover the place and moment of their liberation. The unification of humanity can no longer take place only by a struggle between two elements, men on one side (before one said proletarians), the capitalist state (previously known as the ruling class) on the other, but it must also come about in all of us because every one of us has been capitalized to different degrees. If the struggle loses its Manicheism and millenarianism, it will still be necessary and will become harder and more virulent. The revolution will only be possible if there is production of revolutionaries. Being revolutionary now is to tend to pose oneself as a person no longer of the past, but existing on the state of possibility in society itself. Presently it is dominated by the pole of capital, the communist pole is really too weak for there to be an opposition which divides this society into two camps, but from the moment that the movement of the autonomization of men regarding capital, thus regarding the state (seen according to all its characteristics), will assume some depth, society will also tend to be polarized according to communism until the moment when the tension will become too strong and the eruptive phase of the revolution will break out. The revolution no longer has the immediate goal of building a state, even a transitory one. There can no longer be the dictatorship of the proletariat because it is dissolved in the social whole and, in any case, it can only triumph in negating itself. The goal is the formation of the new community. In April 1917 Lenin wished to realize a state no longer a state: a state commune. The situation is now ripe for beginning the entry of the community able to impose its dictatorship to eradicate capital and its presuppositions.

Thus if the proletariat in Russia had a romantic task, as Bordiga said in 1953 (Kibalchich had stated this in 1881) and in 1968 we wrote that "the proletariat no longer has to accomplish a romantic task, but a human role", one has to show how it is to be realized. It is evident that this goes beyond the investigation of the Russian revolution, but one must show that in huge Russia, now the USSR, the only solution was and is communism because, unlike the West, where society as a whole, or at least an important part, was able to enjoy a more favourable situation after feudalism, in Russia there was the immediate transfer from one despotism to another (the impossibility of liberalism and democracy). The Russians' struggle was to rediscover the communities and what was a vague recollection in the West was still tangible reality with them. The populists' project, also Marx's, was stranded and the CMP was imposed on the country. However, we are fully convinced that the project will manifest itself in another form, all the energies cannot be dedicated to saving something from the past, but to creating a new future. And there both the West and the USSR will inevitably meet again.

The great revolutionary wave culminating in Paris and Mexico in 1968 seemed to have spared the USSR and there were serious effects only in the tampon countries. However, the persistence of the shock was such that in 1970 there was an insurrection in Poland indicating that the old battle line between communist revolution and capital was still in motion. Besides, the Asian countries, either bordering directly on the fault line or more distant from it, have not yet been domesticated. This means that we must consider two sets of contradictions on a world scale derived from the CMP at its highest level of development and those which arise from the impossibility of realizing its domination in areas of very strong communitarian activity.

To characterize the coming revolution, one has to state how capital's domination occurs today, especially in the West.

The process of the anthropomorphosis of capital was accomplished while that of the capitalization of men was fully developing. Capital's development has drawn in utility (marginalism and neo-marginalism) which is why it can foresee the behaviour of men while they are totally subjugated by capital's laws. By dominating in the name of the productive worker (Keynes and the theory of full employment), it realizes the proletarian ruling class in a mystified form. Thus the 1848 programme (i.e. all bar communism) has been realized.

Capital has perverted the whole revolution, all demands have been taken up and denatured, the communitarian movement in the USSR, the utopian one in the USA and that in Israel (one must not forget that this country could only be created after the defeat of the proletariat, Jews emancipated as Jews and not as men, destruction of the Bund's communitarian project, then that of Borochov, even if those two projects were less radical than those of 1848), even the abolition of labour is now the utopia of capital because it would make humans superfluous, robbing them of their activity. Similarly the desire to create new relations between men and women is changed into sexual emancipation and, as ever, in bourgeois-capitalist society, one has not had the man and the woman emancipated as man and woman, but as two sexes, allowing the commercialization of all emotional and sexual relationships.

But capital does not content itself with having recomposed and absorbed all men's past, their unconsciousness becomes mercantile fodder disputed by the various psychoanalytical sharks. Capital wants to colonize the future of the species and so remove any possibility from it of another development, locking it up rigidly in a totally programmed daily life, thus moving towards absolute domination over man.

The revolutionary movements remain stuck to the past (the word revolutionary is thus a stylistic concession here) and in the rejuvenation of capital (third worldism's triumph). They cannot make the leap or recognize and accept the discontinuity because the past weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. Presently one can see the pendulum of history in motion, rise of the revolutionary movements, repression, stagnation of these movements, the soaring of capital, at least US capital, during this period, then another rise etc... The USA and the USSR try to profit from these oscillations as one can see in Latin America, but the movement which each time tries to oppose the existing order hits a wall, returns to the starting point, and sets off for the obsessional wall... This is the generalized impasse. It is even worse in some cases: there is a massacre pure and simple, e.g. that of the Palestinians to which the Arab countries, Israel and the international `left' contributed directly or indirectly. The international `left' deluded itself and the Palestinians as to their power: the `left' that was searching for its revolutionary event, its new Vietnam!

The present revolutionary movement does not have to struggle against these perversions, nor to drive the moneylenders from the temple one has to seize. All that has been perverted is what could have been realized without a radical revolution. What one must do is to act in view of the latter. Having reached this point, one often meets the following objection: capital can recuperate everything. But this is precisely the attribute of all social formations which struggle against their limitation, to attempt to survive by including, so as to say, the antagonistic social formation, but by doing so it becomes a form full of alien content which flakes off at the first shock and allows the shaking of the new social form in an impetuous movement. Capital has entered the field of revolution to such an extent that some already talk of a new counter-revolution able to effect depollution, demographic regulation etc., even while the revolution has not shown itself effectively. When there is a revolution, there are effectively only revolutionaries: there is no one to defend the old world. It is only when the movement slows down that the counter-revolution organizes. But it is inadequate not to fear recuperation: one must be able to live in relation to the discontinuity because the coming revolution brings out a discontinuity in relation to all previous ones.

What we have given up to now is a non-exhaustive explanation of the discontinuity with the past. But this explanation does not indicate it as the present or future movement. Now this latter clearly manifested itself during the short span of May-June 1968, which was preceded by a period when it was already possible to anticipate it and was followed by some movements confirming it (e.g. Poland 1970, Sri Lanka 1971). The whole ideological apparatus clearly strives to veil this discontinuity (there is nothing better than recuperation for this and it matters not which minister spoke of changing life, of imagination in power!). All the political gangs denied it as to recognize it would be to recognize their own death. Some who awoke as revolutionaries in May 1968 now discover that it was a reformist movement. This was a deep discontinuity because it reached the very root of man. May proclaimed the liberation of the gesture, word and imagination. The first two have already been seized on by capital in the course of its anthropomorphosis and now it tries to remove the third, for it is with imagination, by the use of the frontal part of the brain (neo-cortex) that humans will really be able to be creators and somehow realize the old dream of humanity: becoming gods. May also demanded the liberation of the individual. There again it was a case of a process rooted in the whole evolution of the human being. It is only with the person that the individual can emancipate itself and cease being slave to the species. In both cases the biological revolution can only be accomplished with a total communist revolution. Thus the cycle originating in the dissolution of primitive communism (first form of the realization of humanity) will end and with it all prehistory. Besides, there will be the achievement of another cycle (historical arc) with a far greater amplitude which began with the appearance of the vertebrates, from the freeing of the forefield (forelimbs and face), liberation of the latter from prehension and compensation for this loss in the anthropoids through the development of speech etc., to the flowering of the biological substrate of imagination [13].

Obviously we shall only note the biological dimension's importance because describing it would be too long, but we shall at least foresee an objection. Talking of a biological revolution does not mean that it must be led by scientists, nor that one must wait for the whole social world to acquire the required knowledge for it to happen. On the contrary, we remark on the fact that the scientists and technicians of various specialities, by coming to pose the problem of social overthrow, desiring it, even if they had to provide a recipe for it based on elements of their speciality, shows that the social group nearest to the global production process of capital (capital cannot live without science) is forced to separate itself from the contemporary Gemeinwesen, as Marx said, indicating that there is already a revolutionary movement underway. It is not the savants as such who could lead it because they still think with the presuppositions of this Gemeinwesen. As ever it will be the group most ignorant of science which will be able to destroy the CMP with their action. The May movement also showed this: it was not the savants who proclaimed in the roads or who wrote liberation slogans on the walls.

May 1968 and the previous movement in the USA showed above all another biological dimension: the need to reconcile man and nature. On the other hand, by exalting action, rejecting the various ideologies and even refusing theory, the movement showed another requirement in the desire to affirm life. Western civilization from the start has transformed all life into knowledge and one must transform all knowledge into life (as Nietzsche showed). The society of capital is the rule of death and it would be easy to show that capital as reified (sachliche), autonomized form is merely absolute knowledge!

One has to abolish the old cognitive process which implies that destruction is necessary for knowledge. For that individual man must be reconciled with himself by the reconciliation of the brain and the senses, and also to reconcile himself as a species. The coming revolution will integrate the needs of previous ones. Communist theory born with the rise of the proletariat in history is thus not to be rejected, on the contrary, it is now most verified, but it cannot be effected other than by a radical revolution, as Marx stated from 1843 on, transforming society and man.

The revolution will not merely resolve the problem engendered by the CMP, but all those bracketed during the development of human societies (e.g. the return to a kind of paganism, a revolt of the body against the spirit [14] ). In the USSR, the community sought since the middle of the last century was papered over in the 1917 revolution. It will impose itself again as an irrepressible requirement and as a positive solution to human development, thus rejoining the movement in the West and, starting from different historico-social facts, that of the rest of the world. The huge community of men and women will not annihilate, but integrate (and in their own development) all human diversities [15].

Jacques Camatte,
December 1972

Footnotes

[1] The Virtual Armistice in Collected Works Vol. 24, p. 377.

[2] The Tasks of the Proletariat in our Revolution ibid. p. 70.

[3] Venturi op. Cit. P. 675.

[4] ibid. p. 702

[5] Rosa Luxemburg's positions are usually deformed, a process aided by the non-appearance of her collected works. Her contribution to the Polish question is remarkable and cannot be dealt with here. A serious analysis of her position can only begin with her thesis Die industrielle Entwicklung Polens (The Industrial Development of Poland) (Leipzig, 1898) where she demonstrated the fundamental role of Polish capital in Russian industry and thus the formation of the Russian-Polish interdependence. The 1917 revolution certainly destroyed this. It would be interesting to study the many consequences of this for the later development of the USSR and Poland too, as well as the latter's present subjugation by soviet despotism.

Marx, and especially Engels, were a bit absurd on Poland. Engels wrote to Marx (23.5.1851.) "...the more I think over the business, the clearer it becomes to me that the Poles as a nation are done for and can only be made use of as an instrument until Russia herself is swept into the agrarian revolution. From that moment onwards Poland will have absolutely no more reason for existence." (Marx Engels Correspondence 1846-95 (London, 1934) p. 37). Before he had remarked "Beside Hungary, Germany has only one possible ally, Russia, on condition that there is a peasant revolution in that country." (Werke Vol. 27, p. 266). But after 1869-70 a strong revolutionary movement developed in Russia and, moreover, Poland was crushed in 1863. Hence Rosa Luxemburg's position had to emerge.

[6] Rosa Luxemburg's positions are usually deformed, a process aided by the non-appearance of her collected works. Her contribution to the Polish question is remarkable and cannot be dealt with here. A serious analysis of her position can only begin with her thesis Die industrielle Entwicklung Polens (The Industrial Development of Poland) (Leipzig, 1898) where she demonstrated the fundamental role of Polish capital in Russian industry and thus the formation of the Russian-Polish interdependence. The 1917 revolution certainly destroyed this. It would be interesting to study the many consequences of this for the later development of the USSR and Poland too, as well as the latter's present subjugation by soviet despotism.

Marx, and especially Engels, were a bit absurd on Poland. Engels wrote to Marx (23.5.1851.) "...the more I think over the business, the clearer it becomes to me that the Poles as a nation are done for and can only be made use of as an instrument until Russia herself is swept into the agrarian revolution. From that moment onwards Poland will have absolutely no more reason for existence." (Marx Engels Correspondence 1846-95 (London, 1934) p. 37). Before he had remarked "Beside Hungary, Germany has only one possible ally, Russia, on condition that there is a peasant revolution in that country." (Werke Vol. 27, p. 266). But after 1869-70 a strong revolutionary movement developed in Russia and, moreover, Poland was crushed in 1863. Hence Rosa Luxemburg's position had to emerge. 6. The Tasks of the Youth Leagues in Collected Works Vol. 31, pp. 295-6

[7] Engels The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism (1890) in The Russian Menace to Europe cit. p. 44.

[8] Many authors, including Marx and Tocqueville, have written studies comparing the evolution of Russia and the USA. The populists saw some similarities in the rise of the two countries, the only ones where something new could be done, they thought. One of the most remarkable common elements was the phenomenon of the frontier.

[9]il Principio democratico, Rassegna comunista 28.2.22. pp. 870-89.

[10]Capital Vol. III (Moscow, 1971) p. 820

[11]Capital Vol. I, Chapter 10. `The Working Day'.

[12] Cf. The Historical Invariance of Marxism

[13] Cf. Leroi-Gourhan who shows the phenomenon of the externalization of gesture and speech in his magnificent book Le Geste et la Parole and how technique exuded by man becomes his antagonist; what had become externalized becomes oppressive. Replacing technique by capital and by showing from which moment this substitution is necessary, it is possible to understand the present clash between the biological human needs and the constraints of capital. We shall return to all that in a later study. Let us note on the same subject a book by G. Cesarano and G. Collu called Apocalisse e rivoluzione (Bari, 1973).

[14] Norman O. Brown Life against Death (London, 1959)

[15] We have frequently used P.-P. Poggio's Marx, Engels e la rivoluzione russa Quaderni di movimento operaio e socialista n. 1 (July, 1974).