“You think that’s what I want? Become one of them? Become my own enemy? I want to move around for myself. If I’m going to laugh or cry, I want to do it for myself.”
- Alexander, ‘Star Trek’
“It can only know by means of your knowledge… understand through your understanding. It can only exist through your submission.”
- ‘The Quatermass Experiment’
“I offer you nothing. I’m not a politician.”
- William Burroughs
So how could we get out of this sorry state of affairs? Well, what are the main obstacles to us getting back control of our lives? There's several contenders, of course. Big capital, mainstream political parties, the police force... but the most pernicious and so perhaps the most dangerous of them all? That’s the Left.
Now people can find this one… um... counter-intuitive. After all, if you’re opposed to the Right you must be on the Left, right? Yet the very fact that the Left is a generally agreed term, that even when it’s pilloried it’s regarded as within the frame of acknowledged thought, that should already be raising our suspicions.
To generalise a little… okay more than a little, let’s say the Left wing itself has two wings, the ‘official’ Left (the Labour Party, Trade Unions, formalised political pressure groups, etc) and the hard Left of the ever-sloganising Trot sects. Then let’s look at them in turn.
We’re often told that it was a Labour government which brought about gains for working people. The most obvious example would be the National Health Service. And it was a gain! Treatment suddenly based on the depth of a patient's need, not the size of their wallet. But then if it was all due to Labour why were the Tories so quick to accept those changes, and weren’t to challenge them for the next thirty years? Further, why did Labour governments more recently actively participate in the piecemeal privatisation of the NHS?
The truth is, even if it happened *under* Labour the NHS was not brought about because of them. It was the high level of class struggle at the time which enabled it... in fact, probably the more accurate word there is compelled. The simply didn’t dare not do it. But when that level of struggle dissipated the NHS became assailable, like a retreating army leaving one of it’s main cities open to attack.
And of course we have in recent years been pressed into defending those hard-won victories. These struggles are of course important. We need the NHS for one simple reason - we might get sick. But seemingly confined to the two options we came to believe our choices were over how much state control should be exerted. If privatisation was the foe, nationalisation was the desired result.
Reader please note this is not a matter of – in that popular cliché – the workers being “bought off”, through pay settlements or whatever. The problem with the Left isn’t that it’s stuffed with traitors and turncoats. Of course, it normally is. Contrary to all the tabloid propaganda about the Trade Unions manipulating credulous workers into strike action through their wormtongue words, strikes are almost always initiated by workers and then scabbed out by Union bosses.
But even when that happens it stems from the actual problem, which is more inherent. It’s that the Left treats state and legal institutions as though they’re politically neutral. Sometimes it actively complains that they’re not, sometimes it tries to set up it’s own legal institutions, very often it does both at the same time. But regardless of the rhetoric, regardless of the personal motivations of those inside the Left, it will always act in this way, always seek an accommodation with the system it’s ultimately part of.
Yes of course workers show up at a workplace every morning and sell their labours to others. Yes of course tenants remain housed only on the basis of agreement made with landlords who live elsewhere. That's accepted. The only open questions concern particularities - how this relationship operates, not whether it does.
And this is definitional to the Left. After the French revolution, before political parties were formalised, the more pro-revolutionary factions tended to sit together on the left side of Parliament. It has always been a Parliamentary term. These groupings led to political parties. And ultimately, as Pannekoek said, “a party is an organisation that aims to lead and control the working class.”
And so by accepting the Left we accept capitalism. We became merely another faction within it, debating how it might be run and thereby arguing on its terms. To quote Gilles Davue: “Communism is not a programme one puts into practice or makes others put into practice, but a social movement... We will not refute the various brands of socialists whose programmes merely modernise and democratise all existing features of the present world. The point isn't that these programmes are not communist, but that they are capitalist.”
But here we need a caveat. Some see this and come to the conclusion that it’s ‘un-communist’ to become involved in ‘reformist’ struggles. What we want is ‘revolution’, so naturally nothing less will do. A path which, you can’t help but notice, doesn’t lead to revolution. In point of fact, it doesn’t lead anywhere at all. It’s mostly an excuse for inaction. There is nothing… nothing at all wrong with workers agitating for a decent pay rise, tenants demanding safety features in the building they live in so they don’t catch fire, a neighbourhood resisting fracking, and so on. Better things for us are always to be welcomed. Concessions count as victories.
However, concessions are always going to be the cheese in the mousetrap. Tasty stuff, to be sure. But to be extracted and made off with without getting yourself caught up in the binding mechanism.
Similarly, people can confuse rejection of the mainstream political system with militant tactics, such as black blocism. Such tactics can admittedly have their time and place. And we give no credence to those who moralise over a few smashed windows, then cheer on the mass bombing of whole countries. It was Paulo Friere who said “with the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun.” Their system is institutionalised violence. Ours won’t be.
But the problem arises when people turn these tactics into their identity, as if you need to be masked up and chucking bricks or you’re not doing it right. The thing that defines us, that makes us truly radical, isn’t militant tactics. Tactics must always be secondary.
If you move beyond ‘reformism’ the next political faction you normally encounter is Bolshevism. Represented in Britain by the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party and a bewildering array of other squabbling factions. (In Britain it’s almost always Trotskyism in some form or other, though different strands exist elsewhere.) To quote the Situationist film ’Call It Sleep’: “Bolshevism is the dominant notion of what it means to rebel against authority. Every notion about revolution inherited from Bolshevism is false.”
Bolshevism sets itself against the ’reformist Left’. Yet, however endless their squabbles, both are part of the same continuum. As Trotwatch said: "A Leninist party simply reproduces and institutionalises existing capitalist power relations inside a supposedly 'revolutionary' organisation: between leaders and led; order givers and order takers; between specialists and acquiescent and largely powerless party workers. And that elitist power relationship is extended to include the relationship between the party and the class."
The most immediate problem with the hard Left is how it takes people eager for change and turns them into unpaid workers, labouring for the benefit of a new set of bosses. But ultimately, the last line in that quote is the most important one. Bolshevism is summed up remarkably accurately by the ‘Ripping Yarns’ episode ‘Roger of the Raj’, where the protagonist’s private tutor “had told me that a moment like this would come. When the old order would finally collapse. And I was to let him know if it happened while he was out.”
And note the use of “collapse”. Bolshevism reduces to the notion that, just like its ersatz products, capitalism itself comes with a sell-by date. One day it will simply lay down and die. The Party as an elite institution is required, not to bring about that “collapse,” which is assumed to be happening anyway, but to step into the resulting vacuum and organise the workers on the march into the next phase of history. Me and you, we don’t overthrow the system that exploits and oppresses us. Our role is to welcome our new bosses with the better management plan, and then get back to work - this time for them.
Lenin always claimed “the working class by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.” Which would have been news to Marx and Engels, who always insisted “the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above”. For all its claims otherwise, Bolshevism is Marxism only in that its Marxism turned upside down.
Bolshevism’s selling point is its claim to elevated perspective. Standing above our heads and outside history, “the Party” had a unique perspective granting it insight - and so can always accurately assess the social situation and know what is to be done. And you can see how appealing that would be. No more confusion, no more wondering what’s best to do, now we can just defer everything up the chain.
And of course historically that’s the one thing “the Party” has most consistently failed on. Like water, information does not flow well uphill. A remote, autocratic and doctrinal leadership simply misreads every situation and gets everything wrong. The ‘Ripping Yarns’ quote above is even historically accurate, the Russian Revolution really did happen while Lenin was out; he read about it in the morning paper while in exile in Zurich, and was gobsmacked by the unexpected news. They’ve got no better since.
And something else...communism is often described as the workers owning the means of production. Marx himself sometimes spoke of things that way. But the Russian revolution demonstrated a fatal ambiguity in this. In early 1917, the revolution largely consisted of workers seizing control of their own industries. But after the Bolshevik take-over, as soon as the next Spring, managers were brought back. Often the old managers the workers had just got rid of.
The workers still really owned things, the argument ran, because the managers were now answerable to the Party, and the Party represented the workers. But workers no longer had direct control, they were no longer collectively making the decisions which affected their working lives. The revolution was lost at that moment.
Further, the means of production has changed. Particularly in Britain, many jobs may produce a profit but have a social value of zero. Should we collectivise a call centre which rings you up to flog you insurance? The means of production is no more a politically neutral instrument than the political or legal system. The question of capitalism doesn’t reduce to a question of ownership. It’s a social structure, which determines how we relate to one another within it, and it’s one which needs replacing.
The most important thing Marx ever said, possibly the most important political sentence anyone ever said, was “history is the history of class struggle.” It’s not that we live under some monolithic and absolute state of capitalism, but one day a revolution might strike along and sweep us into some equal but opposite absolute state of communism.
The idea that the class struggle is to come, that its arrival is something we wait for like millennial cultists, is as much an error as imagining it’s about Stalin signing off Five Year Plans. This is not a difference in emphasis. It’s a difference of kind, of chalk to cheese.
And this assumption class struggle should always be seen as a break from the norm plays into the capitalists’ hands. In reality the class struggle is ongoing, every hour of every day, and what happens is the outcome of the clash of those competing class forces. We already shape the world.
The class struggle starts, by necessity, where it is. And, to quote perhaps an unusual figure for this piece, the Duke of Westminster warned “beginning reform is beginning revolution”. Or, as the Workers Solidarity Movement put it:
”Our politics must begin always at this point; at the contradiction in our daily lives between our needs, our desires, what we see is possible and the constraints capital puts on us by operating according to an alien logic that forces us to abandon our needs, our desires, our dreams and work according to its dictates. Our revolutionary politics must always begin with working class resistance to this experience, it must be an intervention not to assert or defend 'communism' or 'the working class' as ideal forms against impurities, but rather to search for the quickest, speediest and most painless route from here to where we want to go.”
And yet of course that’s easier said than done. Leftism isn’t confined to a defined set of groups, who you can ignore when you can and oppose when you need to, even if that’s where it’s most prevalent. I have very often seen, for example, Anarchists behaving in the most Leftist way. And we are always pushed towards Leftism, not by some inner weakness of character but by incremental social pressures. Like sailing against a headwind, we need to constantly compensate just to stay on course. And we act as Leftists every time we behave as though we have privileged knowledge, denied to others, which means all struggles must be centred around us.
But perhaps there’s a bigger objection. Aren’t the odds so weighted against us as to make the struggle pointlessly one-sided? Does David really want to get himself in a tussle with Goliath? Truth be told, it often feels like that.
But first, there is effectively no choice. The past forty years have shown precisely what happens if we try opting out. Economists gaze perplexed at a Britain where the link between economic growth and wages is broken; put bluntly, at a country that gets richer while its people don’t. But that ‘link’ was never a neat mechanism, a function of the system. It was through struggle that we won those gains. Opting out doesn’t mean opting out of the game. It means losing it.
And besides, David had a little trick up his sleeve when facing Goliath...
Against the Left… against all capitalists, we say this system was only ever made by our hands, and only our hands can bring it down. It will end when we collectively chose to end it, and at no other time. If we deliberately defer the date that's going to start, then it will always be deferred – dangling ahead of us like the donkey's carrot.
It's a notable feature of our language that words for a directed crowd are all negative, such as 'mob.' The Courts openly stated that more severe penalties would be handed out for activities committed at the time of the 2011 riots, even if no causal link was proven. This fear of the directed crowd should tell us where our true power lies.
To counter the alienated notion that conditions we endure now are inevitable, we need to bust a hole in the edifice (it scarcely matters where) then try to enlarge it. Back in '87, the Frankfurt Autonomists perhaps summed this up the best:
“We are can openers in the supermarket of life. Not willing to wait until humankind changes, we pretend that already happened and live our lives accordingly. It means the refusal to be a victim. Give us everything that life has to offer. Let our forms of struggle and desire, the time and the place, the beginning and the extent, not be determined by them.”
The times where the powers-that-be have seemed most under duress was when a campaign was widespread and grassroots, yet had a radical wing which was not estranged from the rest. One example of this in action would be the anti-Poll Tax movement of the late Eighties. In his book 'Poll Tax Rebellion’, Danny Burns commented:
“The Anti-Poll Tax Unions… had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role… This immediate form of organisation also meant that people weren't patronised by those who had political experience. In the local groups, people didn't need permission to act, they just had to get on the phone to their neighbours and get something going. People stay involved in political campaigns if they can contribute in the way that they feel is most effective. Very often this is not by sitting in boring meetings… This means that political movements have to accommodate a great deal of diversity. Because of this, most of the successful Anti-Poll Tax Unions operated on a principle of parallel development.
“Rather than trying to assert majority control or spend hours reaching consensus, people were allowed to get on with what they thought was most important. Everything could be done in the name of the Anti-Poll Tax Union, which existed to co-ordinate activity against the Poll Tax, not to specify its exact nature… The Anti-Poll Tax movement encompassed an enormous range of approaches…
“The activities of those who were not prepared to break the law were not undermined by the actions of the few who chose to throw fire bombs. Likewise, those who chose to leave Trafalgar Square peacefully, were not tarnished by those who chose to fight back against the police attack. The occupations of the courts didn't prevent those who wanted to argue legal technicalities, and those who chose not to attend meetings but to take action on their own, didn't undermine the collective decisions of those who met in the APTUs. The movement was not damaged by this diversity, it was strengthened by it. It created a feeling that everyone, from every walk of life, was involved in this campaign in some way, and that meant it was strong.”
Crucially the relationship wasn't a vanguardistic one, where the insight provided by the higher foreheads and more attuned senses of ‘the politically educated’ came to provide ‘the workers’ with the correct theory. The truth was that we needed each other, like two chemicals needed to mix for a reaction to occur. Without grassroots campaigns to keep them on course, autonomous social movements easily become unmoored from reality and drift off into militant lifestylism – and in truth they very often do. Sartre famously said “it’s those who aren’t rowing who have time to rock the boat”. But when does the boat stop? That’s determined by the rowers.
And the Left know this too. Maurice Brinton’s eyewitness account of the events in Paris ’68 includes descriptions the CGT (the French, Stalinist-controlled version of the TUC) sending goon squads to physically prevent different sections of the demo from intermingling, particularly the students and the workers, and ensure everyone went home again once time was officially called. When they go to that much effort to keep us apart, we can only conclude we’ll be better off together.
What good might be done by writing all this out? In itself, nothing. The notion that our primary task should be prosleytising, laying “the truth” before the poor befuddled masses, is not just limited in approach, its a fundamental misconception of the situation we find ourselves in. Theoretical understanding of our situation is fine, but only in theory.
To quote Jean Barrot again: “There is an illusion in propaganda, whether it is made by texts or by deeds. We do not ‘convince’ anyone. We can only express what is going on. We cannot create a movement in society. We can only act within a movement to which we ourselves belong.”
I’m not claiming to be particularly politically active these days, nor that the stuff I was involved with held any especial importance. I’m just doing what I can, which is write stuff. And you’re better doing what you can than railing about what you can’t. Communism isn’t, and has never been, about executing some masterplan. Communism is, and always has been, about the subjects of capitalism doing what they can about their situation - until we’re subjects no more.
”Mayday isn't an army. We are Mayday. They’re people just like us.”
-June, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
“If you're listening to this, you are the resistance.”
- John Connor, 'Terminator Salvation'
(Okay, that was a crap movie. It's still a good quote...)
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