Separate economic parliaments and governments

[Die Neue Zeit]

I wanted to post this here and not in the Antifa thread for the reason below.

In the immediate aftermath of WWI, every radical group from the Bolsheviks to the Nazis advocated "economic parliaments" with legislative authority, from the Russian congresses of economic councils (and the factory committee equivalent)... to the German Economic Parliament envisioned by Weimar Social-Democrats such as Rudolf Hilferding to... Hitler's odd musings on "the future economic parliament [based on trade unions], which will be made up of chambers representing the various professions and occupations." [I was also informed that Denmark tried this to some extent in the 1970s.]

To what extent is this "outsourcing" of legislative power revolutionary, and to what extent is this reactionary (facilitating corporatism)?

[Hiero]

How do you even know this stuff?

[Q]

I have no idea what you're on about JR, nor why this is in CC.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Notwithstanding my e-mail, I read past threads a long while back in the Antifa forum about syndicalism's relationship with corporatism.

This is in the CC because I wanted discussion if anybody [mis]interpreted this as an advocacy of corporatist ideology (a bannable offense, I might add). I don't like the Businesses-Government-Unions makeup envisioned by both Hilferding and Hitler (as strange a pair of bedfellows as Stalin and Hitler in 1939, and also I don't know if Mussolini envisioned a similar "economic parliament" under his corporatist scheme).

http://en.internationalism.org/node/2513


Fascism stood for the construction of an Economic Parliament composed of members elected according to their trade. This is why it attracted into its ranks many of the leading Sorelian syndicalists. These people found in this ‘daring' project a vindication of their principles of apoliticism and of trade union independence from political parties.

However, other aspects of the "economic parliament" are worth discussing due to the Soviet experience (even later on, as for the most part the USSR Council of Ministers had the majority of lawmaking input for economic policy than the CPSU CC Politburo).

[Dimentio]

As far as I'm aware, the early fascist movement in Italy - prior to Mussolini - was a populist left-wing non-marxist movement remniscent of the narodniks in Russia.

It took up popular demands from libertarian socialism and mixtured it with Italian nationalism, futurism and anti-clericalism. The only reactionary trait here was the nationalism (the cult of violence was very prevalent in that time in all radical political movements). Moreover, fascist nationalism in Italy prior to the race laws of 1938 was not racist, but rather saw the state as the expression of the will of a population. Idiotic? Yes. But hardly any different from the ideals of the French Revolution. Besides, many of the early fascist ideologists were Jews.

Before Mussolini initiated his march against Rome, the main fascist leader was Gabriele d'Annunzio, a poet who occupied the town of Fiume in Yugoslavia, attempting to use it to spark a revolution in Italy. The constitution enacted in Fiume - the charter of Camaro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Carnaro) - built on the idea of corporations as the foundation of society. Lenin actually wrote fondly of d'Annunzio (strangely).

Mussolini initially tried to get the support of the Italian socialist party in his idea of a march to Rome. They said "fuck off", so his goons started to beat up socialists instead and making themselves a tool for the beleaguered upper classes in post-war Italy. Originally, Mussolini had himself been kicked out of the socialist party for advocating Italy's entry into WW1.

The early fascist party in Italy was characterised by a profound decentralisation. It was not a centralised apparatus like the NSDAP, and Mussolini had quite large logistical problems in directing the so-called "fascis" (local departments) as they were voluntarily shaped and autonomous. He could of course influence them profoundly through his editorials in the newspaper Avanti.

Mussolini incapicated Gabriel d'Annunzio by letting his henchmen throwing him off a window prior to the march on Rome, thus opportunistically making himself into the uncontested leader of the fascist movement. Most fascists were poor countryside workers who Mussolini rabble-roused against the socialists and the liberals.

When studying fascism as a movement, we must remember that fascism as it came to expression in Italy, Germany, Spain, Slovakia, Romania, France and Britain cannot be studied as an entity in its own right due to the differences in conditions between these countries.

Mussolini's movement painted itself as a competing left-wing movement aimed at the "fulfillment of Italy" and "social justice".

Hitler's movement was building itself on romanticism mixtured with antisemitism and social-darwinism.

Franco's movements were an amalgamation of Italian-inspired fascist parties with reactionary movements from the 19th century and the catholic church.

The only similarities are anti-communism, worship of violence and state power, nationalism and a dominating leader figure.

Mussolini, Hitler and Franco were very different kind of leaders as well.

Mussolini was an unashamed opportunist who wanted power for the sake of power itself, and transformed his from the beginning radical left-wing movement into a radical right-wing movement.

Hitler was a lunatic and a fanatic living in his own universe. He did not operate according to any class agenda, but he utilised such agendas in order to gain power in order to burn the world to build a new one. Hitler really did believe the Jews were behind everything. His mind did not operate according to any ideology or naked lust of power in themselves, but rather according to paranoid fixations.

Franco was a blood-stained general of the type quite so usual in countries which have undergone coup d'etats. He was also a very reactionary conservative.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So I take it that any take on "economic parliaments" or separate legislative and administrative bodies for socioeconomic affairs isn't really central to corporatism, but rather their makeup?

[Dimentio]

So I take it that any take on "economic parliaments" or separate legislative and administrative bodies for socioeconomic affairs isn't really central to corporatism, but rather their makeup?

For Mussolini (or rather the fascists, as Mussolini slothed to 1937 before enacting corporatism) it was important and central to the ideology. In fact, the pre-Mussolini fascists saw it as an alternative to capitalism.

For NSDAP, it was not so very central as Hitler had zero interest in economics. Hitler liked such stuff like conquering and enslaving nations, drawing buildings, eating cookies and watching Disney cartoons. The man was like a kid in some aspects.

Franco drew a part of his support from the Falange, which had some very economically left-leaning elements, and the early years of his regime saw some clumsy attempts to install corporatism.

In Sweden, there was the New Swedish Movement led by the priest son Per Engdahl. It was a pro-Mussolini fascist movement which was primarily concerned with corporatism. One odd aspect with Engdahl's movement was that he wanted to abolish the government and just have councils on local and regional levels deciding the priorities of the country in a direct democratic fashion (like during the age of the vikings). After the war, he was instrumental in founding some sort of neo-fascist "international".

But corporatism has mostly been enacted in western European parliamentarian states after the Second World War, like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria (the prime example) and France. There, it was not instituted like an official economic parliament, but as informal councils were politicians, businessmen and representatives of labour organisations together decided the economic fate of the nation.

[Die Neue Zeit]

For Mussolini (or rather the fascists, as Mussolini slothed to 1937 before enacting corporatism) it was important and central to the ideology. In fact, the pre-Mussolini fascists saw it as an alternative to capitalism.

I think it had more to do with how these bodies were formed, though. They didn't fathom they notion of these being elected or demarchic (random selection), and then recallable. Instead, they wanted the managers and workers to sort things out.


In Sweden, there was the New Swedish Movement led by the priest son Per Engdahl. It was a pro-Mussolini fascist movement which was primarily concerned with corporatism. One odd aspect with Engdahl's movement was that he wanted to abolish the government and just have councils on local and regional levels deciding the priorities of the country in a direct democratic fashion (like during the age of the vikings). After the war, he was instrumental in founding some sort of neo-fascist "international".

A fascist who wanted something like soviets? Hmmm... one more "strike" against soviets, then.

[BTW, part of my original post, if further developed, would involve a critique of "all power to the soviets" arising from mass strikes. For one, the "sovereign economic government" isn't intended to arise from such.]

[Glenn Beck]

Quality non-troll post from Dimentio! I damn near shat myself. :thumbup1:

One could definitely look at the fascist milieu as a rather eclectic mix of contradictory ideologies representing every single element of the capitalist right excluded by the emerging liberal consensus in Western Europe and the USA, from monarchism to the bizarre pseudo-anarchist philosophies that inspired folks like D'Annunzio. But you can definitely see a binding thread in the denial of both class conflict and bourgeois liberalism. Fascists have had significantly divergent economic policies but the thread that ties them all together is the desire for a harmonious society where each sector of society works as an organ of a single body.

Also rightist corporatism as a solution to class conflict and the social dislocation of liberal capitalism goes at least all the way back to Pope Leo's Rerum Novarum.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Actually, I was tempted to quote Marx from the 18th of Brumaire, in which he himself saw the emergence of "Social Democracy" as a means for the petit-bourgeoisie to minimize class conflict between themselves and the workers. Comrade Rakunin keeps quoting the relevant portions. ;)

The proposal implied in my original post has mainly to do with "smashing the state" (the repressive instruments of minority class rule) and nothing to do with petit-bourgeois fantasies:

The material separation of high politics, security politics, and all other related state politics from regular socioeconomic politics through the transference of the latter jurisdiction to sovereign economic governments directly representative of ordinary people

So instead of lower and upper legislative chambers, for example, there would be a single chamber dealing with "state" issues and the other dealing with socioeconomic ones. Both chambers would have their corresponding executives, kinda like European republics with presidents handling "state" issues and prime ministers handling socioeconomic issues. The composition of the latter would definitely not be a fixed appointment of bosses' and workers' reps. Separate tax regimes would be in place, too.

[Dimentio]

I think it had more to do with how these bodies were formed, though. They didn't fathom they notion of these being elected or demarchic (random selection), and then recallable. Instead, they wanted the managers and workers to sort things out.


In the Fiume Constitution though, the representatives of the corporations were supposed to be elected and subject to re-call. The government of Fiume was also a syndicalist-fascist coalition government, creating one of the most democratic constitutions in Europe for that time* - the charter of Camaro.

I would say, from what I know about Italian politics in the 1910's and the 1920's, that the fascist movement came to canalise right-wing sentiments instead of being formed as a right-wing storm movement. The reason why the fascists quarreled with the socialists was because both movements targeted the same part of the population to adhere for support.

If the situation would have been different, Italian fascism (which had been a countryside anti-landowner/anti-church movement since the early 20th century) would not have become synonymous with reactionary policies and totalitarian police states. I would say it turned out as a right-wing extremist movement due to the opportunism of Mussolini coupled with the lack of ideological principles and the residual Italian nationalism within the movement.

*= One of the authors of the charter, de Amaris, was a radical syndicalist and later on fought against Mussolini's regime.

[Die Neue Zeit]

In the Fiume Constitution though, the representatives of the corporations were supposed to be elected and subject to re-call. The government of Fiume was also a syndicalist-fascist coalition government, creating one of the most democratic constitutions in Europe for that time* - the charter of Camaro.

Ah, but you said "representatives of the corporations" (not, of course, today's multinationals or such). That sort of reminds me of the czarist Duma, which was divided into curias. The Bolsheviks even captured the whole of the workers' curia, even if it was small.

Still, that isn't the typical representation seen in today's legislatures. I understand the rest of what you're saying regarding pre-Mussolini fascism and Mussolini's thuggish opportunism.



OUTLINE: The Material Separation of State Politics from Regular Socio-Economic Politics



1) Leading quote: “But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm)

2) Continuation of the Paris Commune account:

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.

During the subsequent regimes, the government, placed under parliamentary control – that is, under the direct control of the propertied classes – became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.

3) The state: the repressive instruments for the rule of minority classes

4) Despite the emergence of the world’s first welfare state (Bismarck’s Germany): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Socialism
- Health Insurance Bill of 1883, Accident Insurance Bill of 1884, Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill of 1889
- Citation: A History of Modern Germany: 1840-1945 by Hajo Holborn [http://books.google.com/books?id=Y4pLQ1jC1JIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s]

5) Demand: The material separation of high politics, security politics, and all other related state politics from regular socioeconomic politics through the transference of the latter jurisdiction to sovereign economic governments directly representative of ordinary people

6) Historical precedents and corporatist concerns
- Bolsheviks: The Experience of the Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution by Rod Jones [http://www.geocities.com/Athens/acropolis/8195/factory/FACTRY09.HTM]
- Hilferding: Social Democracy and the Paradox of the Vanguard: Rudolf Hilferding's Odyssey by William Smaldone [http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/1817]
- Earlier fascism and then HITLER in Mein Kampf: “Before everything else, the trades unions are necessary as building stones for the future economic parliament, which will be made up of chambers representing the various professions and occupations.”
- European “social market economies” post-WWII: governments, businesses, unions jointly determining economic policy
- Marx on composition for class collaboration: “As against the coalesced bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called Social-Democratic party [...] A joint program was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to the social demands of the proletariat; the purely political form was stripped off the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose Social-Democracy [...] The peculiar character of Social-Democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony.”
- Citation: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch03.htm]

7) Modern concerns
- Gray areas: infrastructure, military-industrial complex, etc.
- Right-wing “libertarians”/propertarians and minarchism: income thresholds for opting out of paying into and benefitting from the sovereign economic governments

8) Reform-enabling? More budget accountability (separate budgets)? [Potentially too shallow]
- “Conscientious objection” to paying taxes for military purposes: http://www.ndp.ca/press/siksay-introduces-conscientious-objection-bill (NDP of Canada)

9) Basic principles? Going back to Marx above
- Extending Lenin's logic as critiqued in CSR Chapter 5: “This brings us to another aspect of the question of the state apparatus. In addition to the chiefly "oppressive" apparatus – the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy – the modern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely close connections with the banks and syndicates, an apparatus which performs an enormous amount of accounting and registration work, if it may be expressed this way. This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrested from the control of the capitalists; the capitalists and the wires they pull must be cut off, lopped off, chopped away from this apparatus; it must be subordinated to the proletarian Soviets; it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nation-wide. And this can be done by utilising the achievements already made by large-scale capitalism (in the same way as the proletarian revolution can, in general, reach its goal only by utilising these achievements).”
- Citation: Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm]
- ARISING FROM WORKERS' DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLES BUT AGAINST THE SOVIET FORM



END OF OUTLINE

[Die Neue Zeit]

The Material Separation of State Politics from Regular Socioeconomic Politics

“But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (Karl Marx)

As mentioned in the last chapter, class-strugglist anarchists differ from typical Marxists on the question of the state, among other questions. A synthetic definition of the state was provided, but what is the basis for this synthetic definition? Continuing with Marx’s account of the Paris Commune:

The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.

During the subsequent regimes, the government, placed under parliamentary control – that is, under the direct control of the propertied classes – became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.

What is not mentioned here is centralized state power in slave societies (whether in Europe, the Middle East, China, or elsewhere) or a similar role for the state structures of the much smaller feudal fiefdoms in medieval Europe and Japan. What is also not mentioned is the absence of state structures in the pre-capitalist societies of Native America, despite the civil-society hierarchies present in those societies and gender-based division of labour based on regular males, regular females, and “social males” (lesbians who were tasked with male social functions in their societies).

With these insights, along with the clear emergence of the “bureaucratic” coordinator class in the Soviet Union and then in Western capitalist countries, it can be said that the state is first and foremost the sum of the repressive instruments for the rule of minority classes – and a very private and not public one according to Kantian reasoning.

While civil-society functions like the building and maintenance of roads can be performed publicly but independent of a state apparatus, they are performed nevertheless by most states historically, with the effect of obscuring their primary function. Consider the emergence of the world’s first “welfare state” in the Germany of the 1880s: in order to counter the growing influence of the German worker movement under the banner of the (flawed) Gotha Program, the Junker landlord regime headed by Bismarck pushed forward the Health Insurance Bill in 1883, the Accident Insurance Bill in 1884, and the Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill in 1889.

To end this obscurement, therefore, there should be a material separation of high politics, security politics, and all other related state politics from regular socioeconomic politics through the transference of the latter jurisdiction to sovereign socioeconomic governments directly representative of ordinary people. Thus, the separation of powers can exist in the wrong way, as is the case with the bourgeois separation of legislative and executive-administrative functions, or in the right way, in accordance with the participatory-democratic premise of parallelism.

In regards to the Draft Program, this threshold demand could have been stated as a demand for the democracy question if it were indeed crucial towards the expropriation of ruling-class political power:

All jurisdiction over regular socioeconomic politics shall be materially transferred to sovereign socioeconomic governments directly representative of ordinary people – separate from legislatures and executives responsible for high politics, security politics, and all other related state politics.

If the demand were not as crucial, it could have been stated in the preamble leading to the minimum demands for transnational opposition – extending the phrase “can only be achieved by transnational class struggle” with “including the struggle for” accompanied by the demand itself – given the emphasis on “consistent, preferrably simultaneous, obviously complete, and especially lasting implementation.”

While the mention of direct representation (inclusive of immediate recall) avoids the debate between demarchy and radical republicanism, it is nevertheless crucial as a reminder of historical precedents – even corporatist ones. In the new Soviet republic, there were factory committees and federal-level economic councils. Numerous Weimar Social-Democrats, including Rudolf Hilferding, toyed with the formation of economic parliaments based on labour, managerial, and consumer sectors of the population coming together – but nevertheless subordinated to the main parliament. Adolf Hitler himself once wrote an unfulfilled political measure about how, “before everything else, the trades unions are necessary as building stones for the future economic parliament, which will be made up of chambers representing the various professions and occupations” – undoubtedly based on the corporatism of the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro, a heavy influence on Benito Mussolini’s fascism. Then, of course, came the Western European corporatist model, whereby representatives of government, businesses, and unions met together on a regular basis and jointly determined economic policy. Except for the Soviet precedent, the common goal of these precedents was in line with Marx’s observation of a new class-conciliationist phenomenon in the 1850s:

As against the coalesced bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called Social-Democratic party [...] A joint program was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to the social demands of the proletariat; the purely political form was stripped off the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose Social-Democracy [...] The peculiar character of Social-Democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony.

The most obvious concern to arise from this demand pertains to gray areas and the extent that regular socioeconomic politics can really be separated from the truly statist politics. Mentioned above was the responsibility of building and maintaining roads, with the broader concern involved being infrastructure. However, even before the rise of terrorism associated with political Islam, bourgeois governments included infrastructure questions in state security policy. Another aspect of state security is the military-industrial complex, even that part which deals merely with the notorious but profitable arms trade. Therefore, the concept of materiality is thus borrowed from the profession of auditing (dealing with the quantitative and qualitative significance of amounts, transactions, discrepancies, and disclosures), since in all material respects, most of the civilian economy has little to do with state security. For example, it would be ludicrous to suggest that residential area roads are a state security concern!

Another concern is the possibility of opting out of paying taxes for certain things. On the one hand, there is the legal theory of conscientious objection to military taxation, whereby pacifists and others can refuse their tax money to be allocated to military spending. On the other hand, individualistic propertarians would want similar status for their conscientious objection, thereby not paying into and benefitting from the sovereign economic governments (especially those in charge of the “welfare state”); income thresholds for opting out may be a partial solution for this concern.

Even if this demand could have been stated in the preamble leading to the minimum demands for transnational opposition, it would still not meet the Hahnel criterion for facilitating other threshold demands or even immediate and intermediate ones. This is because the other demands can be fulfilled without the fulfillment of this one. The suggested inclusion in the preamble would have merely been akin to a hypothetical, anti-opportunist inclusion of the political demand for the “democratic republic” in the Erfurt Program.

Now, does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? Although this demand would end the obscurement between proper state functions and civil-society functions, how is this in accordance with the principle of social labour? Although I criticized monetary social-statism with Lenin as its face in my earlier work, quoted in that work was his own distinction between the two kinds of functions – notwithstanding the absence of a “welfare state” in pre-Soviet Russia:

This brings us to another aspect of the question of the state apparatus. In addition to the chiefly "oppressive" apparatus – the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy – the modern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely close connections with the banks and syndicates, an apparatus which performs an enormous amount of accounting and registration work, if it may be expressed this way. This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrested from the control of the capitalists; the capitalists and the wires they pull must be cut off, lopped off, chopped away from this apparatus; it must be subordinated to the proletarian Soviets; it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nation-wide. And this can be done by utilising the achievements already made by large-scale capitalism (in the same way as the proletarian revolution can, in general, reach its goal only by utilising these achievements).

Thus, at least a large part of social labour would be planned and distributed by the sovereign socioeconomic governments.

On the principle of class struggle and the distinction between the more well-known, economistic but traditional interpretation of “class warfare” and the Marxist definition of class struggle as being political, there is too much emotional attachment to glorified strike committees (better known as workers’ councils, or soviets) as the allegedly definitive organs of ruling-class power for the working class – undoubtedly rooted in the organizational defeatism that is stikhiinost. Although the Russian soviets of 1917 were not glorified strike committees, because of their size they soon ceased to be working bodies, with their executive-administrative functions being carried out by executive committees and by the equivalent of bourgeois cabinets known as the Council of People’s Commissars (Russian: Sovet Narodnykh Kommissarov - Sovnarkom). Moreover, unlike parliaments, cabinets or even the combined legislative-executive-administrative council of the Paris Commune, the soviets – like glorified strike committees – did not meet in continuous session to at least hold subordinate bodies to account, instead meeting once every few months at best. This is why, historically, the slogan “all power to the soviets” is ultimately an infantile sham; no emergence of glorified strike committees have posed the question of dual power except where such councils have been created and coordinated by political parties. Glorified strike committees dare not become government organizations!



REFERENCES:



The Civil War in France by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm]

Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females by Evelyn Blackwood [http://www.jstor.org/pss/3174235]

An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant [http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/enlightenment.htm]

A History of Modern Germany: 1840-1945 by Hajo Holborn [http://books.google.com/books?id=Y4pLQ1jC1JIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s]

The Experience of the Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution by Rod Jones [http://www.geocities.com/Athens/acropolis/8195/factory/FACTRY09.HTM]

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler [http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv2ch12.html]

La Carta Del Carnaro by Alceste De Ambris and Gabriele D'Annunzio [http://www.reakt.org/fiume/charter_of_carnaro.html]

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch03.htm]

Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm]

Reform coalition, or mass strike? by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/618/McNair%20-%20Strategy3.htm]

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/state_organisations.htm]