Die Neue Zeit
26th May 2010, 04:21
Transformative Critique: Direction on Syndicalism and Revisiting Mass Strike Strategies
“Imagine all the workers of the world truly, actually uniting… and then striking. It would be a world-transforming action.” (Jack Harden)
In Chapter 6, I wrote about one of the highest freedoms of class-strugglist assembly and association: all workplaces being legally considered to be unionized for the purposes of political strikes and even syndicalist strikes, regardless of the presence or absence of formal unionization in each workplace. This is deemed to be a directional measure, since it is tied explicitly to some form of revolutionary upheaval.
In my earlier work as quoted in Chapter 1, I wrote that one of the forms of extralegal “revolution” happens to be a euphemistically “well-defended” version of the suggestion of mass strikes by the likes of Bakunin, Sorel, and Luxemburg. When Lenin deemed strategies of strikes for revolutionary upheaval as being economistic, it was because the proponents misidentified the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat as being in the ability to withdraw one’s labour. From this, it was hoped that political struggles would grow out of economic mass strikes. That more basic political struggles rarely grow out of more basic economic struggles should dispel such illusory hopes.
Reconsider, on the other hand, revolutionary centrism as accounted by Mike Macnair in his profoundly true and important book on revolutionary strategy:
The centre tendency in the German Social Democratic Party and Second International was also its ideological leadership. In spite of eventually disastrous errors and betrayals, this tendency has a major historical achievement to its credit. It led the building of the mass workers’ socialist parties of late 19th and early 20th century Europe and the creation of the Second International. The leftist advocates of the mass strike strategy, in contrast, built either groupuscules like the modern far left (such as the De Leonists) or militant but ephemeral movements (like the Industrial Workers of the World).
[…]
For the centre tendency, the strength of the proletariat and its revolutionary capacity flows, not from the employed workers’ power to withdraw their labour, but from the power of the proletariat as a class to organise. It is organisation that makes the difference between a spontaneous expression of rage and rebellion, like a riot, and a strike as a definite action for definite and potentially winnable goals […] The second central feature of the strategic understandings of the centre tendency was that the socialist revolution is necessarily the act of the majority.
[…]
The centre tendency drew two conclusions from this understanding - against the left, and against the right. The first was rejection of the mass strike strategy. On this issue, the centre presented the anarcho-syndicalists and the left with a version of Morton’s Fork. The first limb of the fork was that a true general strike would depend on the workers’ party having majority support if it was to win. But if the workers’ party already had majority support, where was the need for the general strike? The workers’ party would start with […] a mandate for socialism, rather than with the strike. It was for this reason that the centre, in Bebel’s resolution at the 1905 Jena Congress of the SPD, was willing to demand the use of the mass strike weapon in defence of, or in the struggle for, universal suffrage.
The second limb of the fork was that the strategy of the working class coming to power through a strike wave presupposed that the workers’ party had not won a majority. In these circumstances, for the workers’ party to reach for power would be a matter of ‘conning the working class into taking power’. However formally majoritarian the party might be, the act of turning a strike wave into a struggle for power would inevitably be the act of an enlightened minority steering the benighted masses.
The argument against the right was also an argument against minority action - but minority action of a different kind. The right argued that the workers’ party, while still a minority, should be willing to enter coalition governments with middle class parties in order to win reforms. The centre argued that this policy was illusory, primarily because the interests of the middle classes and those of the proletariat were opposed.
[…]
When we have a majority, we will form a government and implement the whole minimum programme; if necessary, the possession of a majority will give us legitimacy to coerce the capitalist/pro-capitalist and petty bourgeois minority. Implementing the whole minimum programme will prevent the state in the future serving as an instrument of the capitalist class and allow the class struggle to progress on terrain more favourable to the working class.
It should be noted that Macnair did not dismiss the mass strike weapon for revolutionary upheaval, simply because, as a cynical political proverb goes, if voting changed anything, “they” would make it illegal. Majority political support by the working class for a program is not the same as mere electoral support for registered “parties,” since the latter can entail protest votes like modern Russian liberal dissidents voting for official Communists “for democracy” against the ruling elite in the Kremlin, and since the former can be found in other areas like spoiled ballot campaigns and especially membership itself in a political party.
However, there are two ways around Morton’s Fork as presented above, and both can intersect with one another. The first is when a revolutionary program is supported by only fifty-percent-plus-one of the working class. That is figure is a minority of the population as a whole is irrelevant (as pointed out on a class basis by an enraged Lenin in his primary counter-polemic with the senile renegade who was his most influential theoretical mentor), but the concern is that the program is not supported by a supermajority of the working class. The French Marxist Jules Guesde once said, “At all times there have been, if I may so express myself, two proletariats in the proletariat. One is the proletariat of ideas, aware, knowing what it wants and where it is going; the other is the proletariat of facts, undecided if not refractory, that has always had to be towed along. And it will continue to be thus up to the revolution.” Unfortunately, history has a tendency of not waiting.
The other way around Morton’s Fork is implied in the Communist Manifesto itself:
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
[Note: In modern parlance, the first two goals are the transformation of the working class in itself into a class for itself and the establishment of working-class hegemony at the expense of bourgeois hegemony. The third goal expresses itself in the implementation of minimum programs like the one in Chapter 5, whereby individual demands could easily be implemented without eliminating the bourgeois state order, but whereby full implementation would mean that the working class will have expropriated ruling-class political power in policymaking, legislation, execution-administration, and other areas. No so-called “bourgeois workers party” that lays claim to “Labour” or “Social-Democratic” or even “Democratic Socialist” labels aspires towards any of these goals, while “petit-bourgeois workers parties” do not aspire towards the last goal and seek to replace bourgeois hegemony with some other form of non-worker hegemony. For obvious reasons, vulgar “vanguardists” and their philosophical or conspiratorial circle-sects don’t bother with the first goal and substitute themselves for the working class in the third goal.]
Suppose such a worker-class movement (since real parties are real movements and vice versa) does come to power and implement a minimum program like the one in Chapter 5, but on the whole does not support the maximalist program of social abolitionism (in other words, the communist mode of production in all its forms) or harbours cynicism towards the notion of even wrongly perceived “vanguardists” and “elitists” being in power. What should these minority social revolutionaries, who even with sufficient mass do not have majority political support from the working class, do then?
Recall that the “struggle for socialism” is economic and not political, that open class struggle is political and not economic, and that broad economism misunderstands the respective characters of these struggle as being the reverse. In this scenario, the working class is already the ruling class, so unless the minority social revolutionaries irresponsibly break from the working-class political power, there is no conning of the class towards some form of political struggle. Here, all-out syndicalism, One Big Union arising from further globalization of trade union organization, and mass strike strategies can together be one of at least a few directional roads to social labour, especially given their intentions of non-violent social revolution. Concluding with Jack Harden and his proposal, Global Trade Unionism as the Vanguard of a Non-violent Marxist Revolution:
The problem I see with a vanguard party that does not consist entirely of the workers is that it presents the danger of a small group delegating what is in the best interest of the whole. The workers should be the ones making their own decisions. The global trade union would fit such a description for Marx. The proletariat should take it upon itself to organize and lead the revolution. Anything less might lead to more division than unity.
[…]
The concern about nonviolence is also relevant to what kind of society might emerge if created through solidarity and nonviolence in comparison to one created through violence and the competition of one class against another. I would argue that the violent competition of class versus class is just a remnant of our capitalist mindset. Marx might argue that revolution is the last use for such competition, and thereafter harmony will be the rule. However, constructing a society based on solidarity requires the fostering of such solidarity amongst all. This way, class antagonisms will be lessened on all sides, and the urge for violence reduced.
[…]
What happens after the strike? Who would be in charge? The strike would be a display of the solidarity of the proletariat against the wrongs committed against them under capitalism. The demands would certainly be the conversion of the capitalist structures to socialism. The proletariat would take charge of the means of production and distribution […] Ideally, the people would rule themselves in a democratic fashion. This is where the solidarity that was fostered previous to the revolution would show its strength. The people would feel actively involved in deciding what is best for everyone.
REFERENCES
Global Trade Unionism as the Vanguard of a Non-violent Marxist Revolution by Jack Harden [http://www.unh.edu/philosophy/media/pdfs/dialectic2009/3GlobalTradUnions.pdf]
The revolutionary strategy of centrists by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/620/macnair.htm]
“Imagine all the workers of the world truly, actually uniting… and then striking. It would be a world-transforming action.” (Jack Harden)
In Chapter 6, I wrote about one of the highest freedoms of class-strugglist assembly and association: all workplaces being legally considered to be unionized for the purposes of political strikes and even syndicalist strikes, regardless of the presence or absence of formal unionization in each workplace. This is deemed to be a directional measure, since it is tied explicitly to some form of revolutionary upheaval.
In my earlier work as quoted in Chapter 1, I wrote that one of the forms of extralegal “revolution” happens to be a euphemistically “well-defended” version of the suggestion of mass strikes by the likes of Bakunin, Sorel, and Luxemburg. When Lenin deemed strategies of strikes for revolutionary upheaval as being economistic, it was because the proponents misidentified the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat as being in the ability to withdraw one’s labour. From this, it was hoped that political struggles would grow out of economic mass strikes. That more basic political struggles rarely grow out of more basic economic struggles should dispel such illusory hopes.
Reconsider, on the other hand, revolutionary centrism as accounted by Mike Macnair in his profoundly true and important book on revolutionary strategy:
The centre tendency in the German Social Democratic Party and Second International was also its ideological leadership. In spite of eventually disastrous errors and betrayals, this tendency has a major historical achievement to its credit. It led the building of the mass workers’ socialist parties of late 19th and early 20th century Europe and the creation of the Second International. The leftist advocates of the mass strike strategy, in contrast, built either groupuscules like the modern far left (such as the De Leonists) or militant but ephemeral movements (like the Industrial Workers of the World).
[…]
For the centre tendency, the strength of the proletariat and its revolutionary capacity flows, not from the employed workers’ power to withdraw their labour, but from the power of the proletariat as a class to organise. It is organisation that makes the difference between a spontaneous expression of rage and rebellion, like a riot, and a strike as a definite action for definite and potentially winnable goals […] The second central feature of the strategic understandings of the centre tendency was that the socialist revolution is necessarily the act of the majority.
[…]
The centre tendency drew two conclusions from this understanding - against the left, and against the right. The first was rejection of the mass strike strategy. On this issue, the centre presented the anarcho-syndicalists and the left with a version of Morton’s Fork. The first limb of the fork was that a true general strike would depend on the workers’ party having majority support if it was to win. But if the workers’ party already had majority support, where was the need for the general strike? The workers’ party would start with […] a mandate for socialism, rather than with the strike. It was for this reason that the centre, in Bebel’s resolution at the 1905 Jena Congress of the SPD, was willing to demand the use of the mass strike weapon in defence of, or in the struggle for, universal suffrage.
The second limb of the fork was that the strategy of the working class coming to power through a strike wave presupposed that the workers’ party had not won a majority. In these circumstances, for the workers’ party to reach for power would be a matter of ‘conning the working class into taking power’. However formally majoritarian the party might be, the act of turning a strike wave into a struggle for power would inevitably be the act of an enlightened minority steering the benighted masses.
The argument against the right was also an argument against minority action - but minority action of a different kind. The right argued that the workers’ party, while still a minority, should be willing to enter coalition governments with middle class parties in order to win reforms. The centre argued that this policy was illusory, primarily because the interests of the middle classes and those of the proletariat were opposed.
[…]
When we have a majority, we will form a government and implement the whole minimum programme; if necessary, the possession of a majority will give us legitimacy to coerce the capitalist/pro-capitalist and petty bourgeois minority. Implementing the whole minimum programme will prevent the state in the future serving as an instrument of the capitalist class and allow the class struggle to progress on terrain more favourable to the working class.
It should be noted that Macnair did not dismiss the mass strike weapon for revolutionary upheaval, simply because, as a cynical political proverb goes, if voting changed anything, “they” would make it illegal. Majority political support by the working class for a program is not the same as mere electoral support for registered “parties,” since the latter can entail protest votes like modern Russian liberal dissidents voting for official Communists “for democracy” against the ruling elite in the Kremlin, and since the former can be found in other areas like spoiled ballot campaigns and especially membership itself in a political party.
However, there are two ways around Morton’s Fork as presented above, and both can intersect with one another. The first is when a revolutionary program is supported by only fifty-percent-plus-one of the working class. That is figure is a minority of the population as a whole is irrelevant (as pointed out on a class basis by an enraged Lenin in his primary counter-polemic with the senile renegade who was his most influential theoretical mentor), but the concern is that the program is not supported by a supermajority of the working class. The French Marxist Jules Guesde once said, “At all times there have been, if I may so express myself, two proletariats in the proletariat. One is the proletariat of ideas, aware, knowing what it wants and where it is going; the other is the proletariat of facts, undecided if not refractory, that has always had to be towed along. And it will continue to be thus up to the revolution.” Unfortunately, history has a tendency of not waiting.
The other way around Morton’s Fork is implied in the Communist Manifesto itself:
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
[Note: In modern parlance, the first two goals are the transformation of the working class in itself into a class for itself and the establishment of working-class hegemony at the expense of bourgeois hegemony. The third goal expresses itself in the implementation of minimum programs like the one in Chapter 5, whereby individual demands could easily be implemented without eliminating the bourgeois state order, but whereby full implementation would mean that the working class will have expropriated ruling-class political power in policymaking, legislation, execution-administration, and other areas. No so-called “bourgeois workers party” that lays claim to “Labour” or “Social-Democratic” or even “Democratic Socialist” labels aspires towards any of these goals, while “petit-bourgeois workers parties” do not aspire towards the last goal and seek to replace bourgeois hegemony with some other form of non-worker hegemony. For obvious reasons, vulgar “vanguardists” and their philosophical or conspiratorial circle-sects don’t bother with the first goal and substitute themselves for the working class in the third goal.]
Suppose such a worker-class movement (since real parties are real movements and vice versa) does come to power and implement a minimum program like the one in Chapter 5, but on the whole does not support the maximalist program of social abolitionism (in other words, the communist mode of production in all its forms) or harbours cynicism towards the notion of even wrongly perceived “vanguardists” and “elitists” being in power. What should these minority social revolutionaries, who even with sufficient mass do not have majority political support from the working class, do then?
Recall that the “struggle for socialism” is economic and not political, that open class struggle is political and not economic, and that broad economism misunderstands the respective characters of these struggle as being the reverse. In this scenario, the working class is already the ruling class, so unless the minority social revolutionaries irresponsibly break from the working-class political power, there is no conning of the class towards some form of political struggle. Here, all-out syndicalism, One Big Union arising from further globalization of trade union organization, and mass strike strategies can together be one of at least a few directional roads to social labour, especially given their intentions of non-violent social revolution. Concluding with Jack Harden and his proposal, Global Trade Unionism as the Vanguard of a Non-violent Marxist Revolution:
The problem I see with a vanguard party that does not consist entirely of the workers is that it presents the danger of a small group delegating what is in the best interest of the whole. The workers should be the ones making their own decisions. The global trade union would fit such a description for Marx. The proletariat should take it upon itself to organize and lead the revolution. Anything less might lead to more division than unity.
[…]
The concern about nonviolence is also relevant to what kind of society might emerge if created through solidarity and nonviolence in comparison to one created through violence and the competition of one class against another. I would argue that the violent competition of class versus class is just a remnant of our capitalist mindset. Marx might argue that revolution is the last use for such competition, and thereafter harmony will be the rule. However, constructing a society based on solidarity requires the fostering of such solidarity amongst all. This way, class antagonisms will be lessened on all sides, and the urge for violence reduced.
[…]
What happens after the strike? Who would be in charge? The strike would be a display of the solidarity of the proletariat against the wrongs committed against them under capitalism. The demands would certainly be the conversion of the capitalist structures to socialism. The proletariat would take charge of the means of production and distribution […] Ideally, the people would rule themselves in a democratic fashion. This is where the solidarity that was fostered previous to the revolution would show its strength. The people would feel actively involved in deciding what is best for everyone.
REFERENCES
Global Trade Unionism as the Vanguard of a Non-violent Marxist Revolution by Jack Harden [http://www.unh.edu/philosophy/media/pdfs/dialectic2009/3GlobalTradUnions.pdf]
The revolutionary strategy of centrists by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/620/macnair.htm]