A Post From Elsewhere

I think this is pretty pithy and interesting. Again, this is from the Salon de ver Luisant.

I hope this if of interest. It's focus is on the Communist Left, but I feel that it also would only be complete were were to extend it to all of the communist tendencies.

Despite protestations by hybrids like Platypus that claim Trotsky, Luxemburg, and Lenin on one side and Adorno on the other, the idea that "He who wants to eat must work" is not altered by combination with "those who labor must rule". It merely completes the argument that the revolution is the raising up of labor to the supreme principle. Even here the dichotomy of means and ends ("only if this is conceived as the revolutionary means, and not as the end goal of anti-capitalist revolution") appears immediately. The result of raising labor to power in the case of Russia was Bolshevism not merely enforcing but extending the capital-labor relation vis-a-vis the immediate curtailment and then suppression of the Factory Committees (the problem of "Workers' Control of Production" is beyond this discussion), Taylorism, piece wages, one-man management of the factories, extension of the trade unions (legal arbiters of workers' rights in the context of a society of wage labor), not to mention the cruder matters of forced labor and strike breaking.

Not merely the social form of labor is missed, but that the dominance of labor in society as itself indicating capitalist social relations is missed as well.

The political side of this disconnect of means and ends involves the conception of the revolution as creation of an alternate state power (dictatorship of the proletariat as a type of state, of "the workers' state"), and that this state then carries out the abolition of capitalist property relations. The revolution is conceived of as a predominantly political act (and yes, of course, one can find quotes in Marx that the revolution is a political act, just as one can find other quotes in Marx leading a different direction; "If the path to Hell is paved with good intentions, the path to bourgeois politics is paved with good quotations.")

This begs the question of the state as a social form, however. It presumes that the instrumental conception of the state taken from Engels' conceptions in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and reproduced throughout Social-Democracy and finding its most radicalized expression in Lenin's State and Revolution. Here the state is merely an object, an instrument, defined by whom it serves, by the class membership of whomever holds the offices, and the formal boundaries associated then with its function (grabbed out of context from Marx's Civil War in France.) The state is no more a means to an end, and thus mere 'means' than money is a means to simplify exchanges as political economy thought. Money is the form of value through which exchange is possible, and the state is the form or mode of existence of the separation of power and re-production into separate spheres of the political and the economic.

Exactly grappling with this set of problems points to what allows the German-Dutch and Italian Left Communists to go beyond the still social-democratic, still bourgeois-political notion of the revolution present in Bolshevism. Neither side expressed the matter in it's totality, comprehensively. While they did not quite split matters (they shared the critique of parliamentarism, the critique of the concept of a "workers' state", the critique of the United Front), they did address different aspects of the problem in a way that allows them to speak to the problems, but not necessarily to each other.

The German-Dutch Left Communists (the KAPD, which took the majority of communists with it when the KPD was forced to split and which formed under the influence of the IKD, Anton Pannekoek, Hermann Gorter, the Bremen Left, etc.) expressed the critique of trade unionism and parliamentarism, of the state as not merely an instrument and the revolution as not merely a political act, but the taking over of the conditions of life (the state as social form was given its highest theoretical expression independently in this period by the Russian Marxist Evgeny Pashukanis' General Theory of Law and Marxism, which also influenced and was critiqued by the Left Communist philosopher Karl Korsch). However, this practical critique still viewed the revolution as the elevation of labor to social domination, more or less to universalized "workers' self-management". It is not accidental that this led to Councilism, to making a fetish of the council form and not adequately grasping the theoretical problem of labor.

The Italian Left Communists, grouped around Amadeo Bordiga, took a different view. He was the first to argue that communism was a content, not a question of organizational forms. Bordiga retained the separation of the revolution into the political moment and then the social moment, but he already grasped that the revolution was not the proletarian control of the factories or "workers' control of production", but the destruction of capitalist relations of production. This did not involve, for him, statification, but the abolition of wage-labor, value, capital, etc. Thus Bordiga was able before anyone else to comprehend that Russia was a capitalist country. Bureaucracy, statification, and even abolition of formal markets could go hand-in-hand with the maintenance and extension of capitalism. This is in many respects the core of the argument in *The Uniqueness of Capitalism and the Normative Content of a Socialist Political Philosophy.* (Rough draft) by G.M. Tamás. However in Bordiga the critique of the concept of revolution as seizure of power from the abolition of capitalist social relations does not develop. It remains that one follows the other rather than the re-organization of social life being the revolution, being the destruction of the state, being the dictatorship of the proletariat. I would suggest that this conception of capitalism as not a regime but as a social form finds it's highest theoretical expression in this period in the work of I.I. Rubin, who took Lukacs' comments on value and form as his jumping off point.

The separation of means and ends, the separation of political revolt from social revolution in space and most importantly in time, is the actual legacy of Lenin and Trotsky. They did not get beyond the problems presented by trying to be communists in a country with a woefully low level of capitalist development and what to do then face with revolution. The matter is less one of intent on the part of the Lenin and Trotsky, but that their theoretical perspectives were those of 2nd International Lasallean Marxism achieving state power. Where the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks to them indicated success, the transformation of the Bolsheviks into the counter-revolution from within was not, maybe could not be, grasped or even posed adequately by the Bolsheviks themselves because state power forced them to presume what needed most to be called into question in practice. Maybe this is why it was only from the outside of the halls of power that some intellectuals could articulate, though even here at the cost of their own lives, the problems in their sharpest philosophic forms. Outside of Russia, however, Bolshevism for a while still needed to, was willing to, persuade. Even if the Communist Left could not resolve the issues, they posed them and tried to address those problems in theory and practice. The connected philosophical issues found their highest treatment in Lukacs, Korsch, Pashukanis, and Rubin.

What makes Adorno, Sohn-Rethel, etc. valuable today is not their attachment to Bolshevism, but their development of the critique the bourgeois world that generated the crisis of, and attained its fullest maturity in, 1914-1921 and the ideal manifestations of that world in crisis (the actual art, music, philosophy, and also the Lassallean Marxism), a critique given its fullest practical and political-theoretical expression prior to 1933 by Left Communists and philosophically in the work of Lukacs, Korsch, Pashukanis, and Rubin. One of the limitations of Adorno, Sohn-Rethel, et al, is the practical failure of a real challenge to capital to develop after 1923, as opposed to the massive extension and deepening of capitalist social relations across the globe, i.e. the success of counter-revolution in all of its forms. I find Adorno's unwillingness to posit the given existence of a historical Subject or to claim some radical new opening for another kind of practice during his life more clear-headed, if depressing, than the desperate search for a positive "Subject of History" in Maoism (Sohn-Rethel, apparently), the student movement/new social movements (Marcuse), or the official Communist Parties (as Ernst Bloch seems to have done). That this was less of a personal failing of the Frankfurt School Marxists than a set of possible responses to an objective situation seems evident to me in the ways that despite the transformations of capitalism after WWII, even the most sophisticated developments of communist critique were hard pressed in practice to do more than recapitulate an idealized Bolshevism (Trotskysim, part of the Johnson-Forrest Tendency), Italian Left Communism (International Communist Party) or Councilism (Socialism or Barbarism, Situationist International). The only novel openings in practice appear to have been in the events from Paris and Prague in 1968 to the hot Autumn in Italy in 1969 through the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, and seemingly the last appearance of workers' councils, in 1978, and these seem in retrospect more the death agony of a certain organization of struggles; a last brilliant flare, to be less morose, against the world ushered in by Fascism, Stalinism, and Keynesianism or the Spectacle or Fordism or whatever one chooses to call it.

Maybe their lack of being tied to a particular tendency and not being limited intellectually to the defense of that tendency and to "positions" also allows Adorno, et al to remain vibrant and challenging for us, even if we find contradictions in their work that force us to read them against their political affiliations. This may also be part of what allows other, more recent, heterodox communists to remain a challenge (I have in mind here Jacques Cammatte, Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, and less well-known people such as Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut
Reichelt, Krisis Gruppe, Robert Kurz, G.M. Tamas, etc.) regardless of their immediate political commitments.

We don't live in 1917 or 1936 or 1956 or 1968. You want to know what it is really almost impossible to do these days that I could still do in 1988: stand in front of a factory and hand out leaflets with communist politics to workers. You know why? Because a) there's damn few factories left, 2) they're almost all in the suburbs and drive-in, so you can't stand there and hand out shit, 3) most of the workers live in the suburbs, have a car and a home mortgage and a lot of them own stock in the company, 4) the idea of workers' power is an incomprehensible joke, a kind of verbal fart in an elevator. Or you can try and leaflet an office building, which has no clear class composition, and where most of the workers don't think of themselves as workers at all. Not to mention that the number of strikes involving 1000 or more workers since 1990 has been under 50 every year, and since 2001, it has been under 30 a year.

Politics that want to make workers celebrate being workers finds no reflection in the US, at least. Maybe the "affirmation of labor" is possible elsewhere, but not here. Capital may be the same in terms of value-form, money-form, etc., but its concrete form of expression does not lend itself to the practical politics of the period 1917-68. Already in 68-78, something else peaked through, but I don't even know if that has any relevance.

We experience today as the loss of those touchstones without necessarily any new openings presenting themselves.

Pan Maldito

Last edited by Pan Sloboda (Today 18:16:41)