BUREAUCRACY
 Organisations of militants are all hierarchical. Some organisations not only don't hide this fact, but pride themselves on it. Others are content to talk about it as little as possible. Finally some small groups try to deny it altogether. In the same way that they reproduce, or rather ape work, militant organisations have a need for « bosses ». Unable to build their unity starting from their concrete problems, militants are naturally led to believe that the unification of decisions can only result from the existence of a leadership. They don't imagine that a common truth can emerge from particular wills, or as they see it, can come out of the shit, instead it must be weighed and imposed from on high. So by necessity they represent revolution as a clash between two hierarchical state apparatuses, one bourgeois, the other proletarian. They know nothing about bureaucracy, about its autonomy or about the way in which it resolves its internal contradictions. Grass-roots militants naively believe that conflicts between leaders can be reduced to conflicts of ideas, and that when they are told there is unity, there is indeed unity. Their great pride is to have been able to distinguish the organisation provided with THE best leadership. While adhering to this or that chapel they will adopt a system of ideas in much the same way as one slips on a costume. Without having verified its basis, they will still be ready to defend all of its consequences, and respond to any objections with incredible dogmatism. At a time when priests are torn by spiritual crises, militants keep the faith. Forced to take account of the increasingly widespread contempt for any form of authority, militancy has produced offshoots of a new kind. Some organisations claim not to be organisations, and in particular conceal their leadership. The bureaucrats hide themselves all the better to pull the strings. Some traditional organisations try to set up parallel forms of organisation, some permanent, some not. They hope in the name of « proletarian autonomy », to co-opt or at least to influence people who otherwise would have escaped them. One could mention Secours Rouge, the O.J.T.R. and the Assemblées Ouvriers Paysans du PSU... [7] In the same way, some independent newspapers or satellite organisations claim only to express the point of view of the revolutionary masses, or of the autonomous rank and file groups. For example, « Cahiers de Mai » [8], « Le technique en Lutte », « L'outil des travailleurs »... Wherever people refuse to clearly raise questions of organisation or theory, on the pretext that the hour for the construction of the revolutionary party has not yet arrived, or in the name of a bogus spontaneism ( « we are not an organisation, but a gathering of nice guys, a community » etc. etc. ), one can be certain that there is a bureaucracy and quite often that one is dealing with maoism. The advantage of trotskyism is that its fetishism of the organisation forces it to display its true colours; it co-opts while saying that is what it's doing. The advantage of maoism ( we're not speaking here of pure, archeo-stalinist maoism of the Humanité Rouge variety [9] ) is that it creates the conditions for its own supercession; playing at being acrobats of co-option they will certainly tumble to the ground. Notes [7] Secours Rouge, the O.J.T.R. and the Assemblées Ouvriers Paysans du PSU... Secours Rouge ( 'Red Aid' ) was formed in 1970 by a committee of « militants and personalities » ( Biard ) including the ubiquitous Sartre. Its purpose was to be a unitary body for organising practical defence and struggle, theoretically to be controlled by popular local meetings. It attracted the support of a number of trotskyist, maoist and anarchist groups and organised activities ranging from demonstrations to attempts at practical solidarity of different kinds. In reality Secours Rouge was primarily an initiative by the maoist Gauche Prolétarienne which by then had been banned by the government and existed through networks of groups and organisations which it either started itself or else co-opted. ( See footnote 5 ) The scene of in fighting amongst the various groupings from the start, one by one the trotskyist groups and the left socialist PSU broke away, leaving the militants of the « ex-GP » in control before it broke up completely. See Roland Biard, Dictionnaire de l'extrême-gauche de 1945 à nos jours, belfond, Paris, 1978., pp. 345-346 and A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism - Theory and Practise in France and the United States, Autonomedia, New York, 1988., Chapter 3 pp. 108-109. Assemblées Ouvriers Paysans du PSU. The Parti Socialist Unifie ( PSU ) was a small left socialist party formed in 1960. Strongly divided over its direction following the 1969 elections, and facing strong pressure from sections of its membership ( it had picked up a lot of younger and more militant recruits following May '68 ), the party's National Council decided to convene Assemblies of Workers and Peasants across the country. The novel element was that these would be open to non-members of the party, and would charged with formulating strategy documents to go to the party's Congress at Lille in June 1971. Unsurprisingly the Assemblies promptly became the scene of in-fighting for control by the various factions in the party, and the texts which finally went to the congress represented the factions rather than the 'voice of the struggling masses'. See Roland Biard, Dictionnaire de l'extrême-gauche de 1945 à nos jours, belfond, Paris, 1978., pp. 280-309 particularly 295-300. The OJTR ( Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs révolutionnaires ) were the group which produced this text - presumably this is either a joke by the authors or a misprint in the version this has been translated from ( translators note ). [8] « Cahiers de Mai » - Journal founded in June 1968 by some militants from around Nantes, which originally set out to express the viewpoint of the Action Committees formed in May. As the movement which sprang into being during May 68 died away the journal became a forum for discussing and popularising workers struggles. In January 1969 it initiated a debate on the theme « How can we help the workers take revolutionary action ? ». This debate involved workers as well as militants and a number of study groups were set up. In 1972 an attempt was made to formalise this through an association of friends of Cahiers de Mai, devoted to championing new forms of organisation and action and promoting autonomous struggle. However as Biard puts it : « (...) the notion of the autonomy of the working class is closely bound to the notion of the organization of revolutionaries. What are the relations between the autonomous movement and the revolutionary groups ? Depending on the answer that one gives - from the negation of the revolutionary groups to the recognition of their vanguard role -, there is an infinity of possible positions ». The journal ceased publishing in 1975. See Roland Biard, Dictionnaire de l'extrême-gauche de 1945 à nos jours, belfond, Paris, 1978., pp. 57-58 ( translators note ). [9] Humanité Rouge - journal of the Parti Communiste Marxiste-Leniniste de France ( PCMLF ). Centralised Maoist party formed in December 1967 by a number of former Communist Party ( CP ) members. Unlike the althusserite UJCML which broke from the CP's student group and was the seedbed for the 'non-party' maoist current such as Gauche Prolétarienne ( see footnote 5 ), the PCMLF was primarily composed of ultra-stalinists opposed to what they saw as the 'revisionism' of the CP. Active during May '68, it was banned like many other organisations and subsequently operated clandestinely, its public face and name becoming that of its journal Humanité Rouge. See Roland Biard, Dictionnaire de l'extrême-gauche de 1945 à nos jours, belfond, Paris, 1978., pp. 270-273 and A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism - Theory and Practise in France and the United States, Autonomedia, New York, 1988., Chap. 3. ( Online at that link ) ( translators note ). |