p.m.a.
23rd November 2007, 03:04
Since before the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent bankruptcy of state-capitalism and the vanguardist paradigm of revolution, a new tendency of communists has been developing in contradiction to the statist perverters: women and men who realize that the hope for a classless society cannot be achieved through the yielding of the state in any modernist conception of the word, but only through the collective participation of the multitude. We are the communists who have reconceptualized the revolution; we have rejected sundry authoritarianism and the cults of personality of the totalitarian hijackers of our noble name: as a result, we have evolved and moved on to a greater understanding of the reality of capitalism today, and the necessity for communism tomorrow. And with the increasing irrationality of the ruling class, with their wars and crises and lies, we realize that we are rapidly approaching the time when a massive reorganization of the social organism will be necessary — or humanity, as we know it, will perish to the barbarism of capital.
The definition of communism taught in schools today reflects the failures of the Soviet bloc nations. These nations are criticized rightly so – their history is that of mass murder and the impoverishment of the vast majority at the benefit of a party elite. But these countries embodied only one school of communist thought: that of the Bolshevik paradigm of party-socialism. The Bolsheviks devised their model in neo-colonial, proto-capitalist Russia: a country that lacked both a significant industrial working-class, and a national bourgeoisie capable of fending off international imperialist assaults. Thus the Bolsheviks took the bourgeois model of a political party as their foundation of praxis. A hierarchical model of political organization, the subsequent “Communist” Parties of Soviet authentication paralleled in structural function that of the political parties of modern time. Their revolution was consummated by the union of the organizational structure of the bourgeoisie with the justification of an ideology of the proletariat. And so was born a class of representative managers; facilitators of the revolution, who claimed to be furthering its interests until the working-class was developed enough to take over, justified by Lenin’s thesis of the “withering away of the state.”
The vanguard theory of revolution, however, has been shot down by history: every “Communist” nation produced only variations on the theme of state-capitalism. C.L.R. James, a Trinidadian-born Marxist and prominent social theorist on the topics of black emancipation and class struggle, made an in-depth analysis of the Soviet economy in his 1950 work State Capitalism & World Revolution. In it he concluded that the Soviet relations of production were derived explicitly from the Fordist and Taylorist methodologies devised earlier in the United States – and utilized in the rise of fascist Germany and Italy. A single worker in the U.S.S.R. had no more influence in the relations of production than a worker in the United States. The U.S.S.R. thus failed to develop socialism, and instead only reproduced industrial capitalist relations of production – with private ownership substituted by party ownership. James’ analysis has been proven by history: every “Communist” nation has since collapsed on its self, restoring capitalism outright (as seen with Russia’s neoliberal “shock therapy”); or it has incorporated neoliberal markets into a mutant “market socialism” which yields the same results (as seen in China).
Many bourgeois historians took this chance to decry communism and proclaim “the end of history” with the victory of capitalism and Western pseudo-democracy. But any fair and objective analysis reveals that the collapse of the Soviet bloc merely vindicated Karl Marx’s assertion that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes, as the Bolsheviks clearly tried to do. Instead, the paradigm for revolution must be deduced from the material conditions of the day: not from the models devised previously. Of the many metanarratives and philosophies of the modern era, Marxism is the only one which is not statically tied to the context of its own historical era: at its core is a methodology of analysis which allows for the perpetual development of its conclusions. Thus it is within non-Bolshevik Marxist trends that the most caustic analysis of capital is to be found, and subsequently the most emancipatory projection for the future.
Non-Bolshevik Marxism, for over eighty years, has maintained and updated its scathing critique of the capitalist mode of production. While the Bolshevik paradigm was devised for a specific era of resistance, fortunately many Marxists have refused to remain anachronistically bound to that era as the perverted Leninist parties do. As Marxist critique has evolved, from revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek to Antonio Negri and Harry Cleaver, new methods of struggle and resistance have been derived from the critique of capital. What began in “left-communist” movements calling for the council as the building block of revolution, has blossomed into full methodologies of horizontalism and autonomy as prefigurative means to maintain the Marxist projection for the future in Marxian -based and -influenced struggles today.
Autonomy as the foundation of revolution is the most important contribution applicable to our era. While the Bolsheviks centralized their revolution to a reactionary degree, autonomists seek to perpetuate decentralized struggle. Current network projects such as the Red & Anarchist Action Network embody this model, being a unified amalgamation of autonomous cells, crews, and individuals, making revolution in their relative areas, but uniting under a common hope for the future. With precedent set throughout history, from the Makhnovshchina in the Ukraine after the Russian Revolution, to the Autonomia/Autonomen across Europe in the ’70s and ’80s, horizontal struggle has shown to be very effective in both resisting state-socialism and capitalism, and only is becoming increasingly relevant.
Contemporary Marxist theory calls for the further yielding of decentralized tactics in struggles today. Multitude, the second part of Negri & Hardt’s Empire analysis, discusses the structure of autonomous movements worldwide. While modernist organization is hierarchical, adopting a pyramid structure, postmodern autonomy is built around a model of the distributed network , whereby there is no center of power, but instead a polycentric model of distributed nodes of power, networked in struggle. This model is adapted far and wide, from the Zapatista autonomous zone in the Chiapas mountains of Mexico, to the Palestinian intifada struggling against Israeli occupation. Even the current counterinsurgency in Iraq reflects netwar, and it is clear how modern vertical power structures are incapable of suppressing such movements in the right numbers. The distributed network structure provides the model for absolutely democratic organization, one that corresponds to the development of the post-Fordist forces of production today, as well as providing the most efficient weapon in the struggle against the ruling class and the contemporary power structure.
The inherently democratic nature of networks provides an innate resistance to tendencies of centralization prevalent throughout resistance: instead of iron-fist discipline, the values of creativity, communication, and self-organization are necessary for a network’s perpetuation. The advent of technology and the internet in our postmodern era provides the conduit through which decentralized horizontal resistance can be expanded into a post-capitalist society. The concept of representative democracy is obsolete when the fluidity of voices over the internet is far more representative of popular sentiment than the minority of voters in the country. The contemporary conception of the state is far less democratic than the projections of the future development of the internet will provide for us. With the abolishment of time and space by technology and information, the State is becoming the second intermediary, where the first now allows for the abolishment of capital as well. The network form thus has become less of a means of struggle, and more of an end in and of itself.
If the struggle commences through the network structure, post-capitalist society will be immediately imbued with the tenets of decentralization, horizontalism, and would become self-perpetuating with the communication between autonomous regional decision-making bodies through technologies as the internet. A freedom far greater than that imagined by pseudo-“Communists” and capitalist Democrats alike is for the first time feasible. It is only today that for the first time both the Marxist critique of capital and subsequent projection for the future is by nature parallel that of anarchism: for a post-revolutionary society can be organized embodying both principles. There can be no “post-revolutionary state” as the Leninists used to justify their horrors: the revolution itself is a non-institutionalized anti-state; a network of autonomous armed insurrectionists who refuse to revert back to centralized alienation. The suppression of the ruling-class by the multitude of the exploited and oppressed is finally feasible without centralization: the line between Marxist and anarchist is now nigh-invisible. And thus it is only through the unity of communists and anarchists that a revolutionary project is feasible.
But one does not need to be a self-identified “revolutionary” to know that something is seriously wrong with our society today. On the macro-level, the nations are working hard to institute a state of permanent war in the Middle East, and the economy is working harder than ever to displace the massive looming crisis. But on the personal level, one needs not to look long to find the masses of people who are disillusioned, apathetic, and pissed off – but no one seems to identify at what. The Spectacle has brought us to our knees, and blindfolded us as to the reason. We have reached frightening new levels of alienation, and its reflection in the larger picture is that of a world ravaged by war and poverty. It is clear that if something is not done soon, society is going to fall into a state of barbarism, the ultimate pitting of capital’s dollar over humanity’s life.
It is for this reason that this reconceptualization of communism is so important now more than ever. If the multitude does not begin to consider alternatives to capitalist domination, our world is going to be torn apart. Revolution is not inevitable, but the death of man is, unless revolution is made. I plead to everyone: let us rise up and throw off the shackles of the system, lest they suffocate us at last.
The definition of communism taught in schools today reflects the failures of the Soviet bloc nations. These nations are criticized rightly so – their history is that of mass murder and the impoverishment of the vast majority at the benefit of a party elite. But these countries embodied only one school of communist thought: that of the Bolshevik paradigm of party-socialism. The Bolsheviks devised their model in neo-colonial, proto-capitalist Russia: a country that lacked both a significant industrial working-class, and a national bourgeoisie capable of fending off international imperialist assaults. Thus the Bolsheviks took the bourgeois model of a political party as their foundation of praxis. A hierarchical model of political organization, the subsequent “Communist” Parties of Soviet authentication paralleled in structural function that of the political parties of modern time. Their revolution was consummated by the union of the organizational structure of the bourgeoisie with the justification of an ideology of the proletariat. And so was born a class of representative managers; facilitators of the revolution, who claimed to be furthering its interests until the working-class was developed enough to take over, justified by Lenin’s thesis of the “withering away of the state.”
The vanguard theory of revolution, however, has been shot down by history: every “Communist” nation produced only variations on the theme of state-capitalism. C.L.R. James, a Trinidadian-born Marxist and prominent social theorist on the topics of black emancipation and class struggle, made an in-depth analysis of the Soviet economy in his 1950 work State Capitalism & World Revolution. In it he concluded that the Soviet relations of production were derived explicitly from the Fordist and Taylorist methodologies devised earlier in the United States – and utilized in the rise of fascist Germany and Italy. A single worker in the U.S.S.R. had no more influence in the relations of production than a worker in the United States. The U.S.S.R. thus failed to develop socialism, and instead only reproduced industrial capitalist relations of production – with private ownership substituted by party ownership. James’ analysis has been proven by history: every “Communist” nation has since collapsed on its self, restoring capitalism outright (as seen with Russia’s neoliberal “shock therapy”); or it has incorporated neoliberal markets into a mutant “market socialism” which yields the same results (as seen in China).
Many bourgeois historians took this chance to decry communism and proclaim “the end of history” with the victory of capitalism and Western pseudo-democracy. But any fair and objective analysis reveals that the collapse of the Soviet bloc merely vindicated Karl Marx’s assertion that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes, as the Bolsheviks clearly tried to do. Instead, the paradigm for revolution must be deduced from the material conditions of the day: not from the models devised previously. Of the many metanarratives and philosophies of the modern era, Marxism is the only one which is not statically tied to the context of its own historical era: at its core is a methodology of analysis which allows for the perpetual development of its conclusions. Thus it is within non-Bolshevik Marxist trends that the most caustic analysis of capital is to be found, and subsequently the most emancipatory projection for the future.
Non-Bolshevik Marxism, for over eighty years, has maintained and updated its scathing critique of the capitalist mode of production. While the Bolshevik paradigm was devised for a specific era of resistance, fortunately many Marxists have refused to remain anachronistically bound to that era as the perverted Leninist parties do. As Marxist critique has evolved, from revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek to Antonio Negri and Harry Cleaver, new methods of struggle and resistance have been derived from the critique of capital. What began in “left-communist” movements calling for the council as the building block of revolution, has blossomed into full methodologies of horizontalism and autonomy as prefigurative means to maintain the Marxist projection for the future in Marxian -based and -influenced struggles today.
Autonomy as the foundation of revolution is the most important contribution applicable to our era. While the Bolsheviks centralized their revolution to a reactionary degree, autonomists seek to perpetuate decentralized struggle. Current network projects such as the Red & Anarchist Action Network embody this model, being a unified amalgamation of autonomous cells, crews, and individuals, making revolution in their relative areas, but uniting under a common hope for the future. With precedent set throughout history, from the Makhnovshchina in the Ukraine after the Russian Revolution, to the Autonomia/Autonomen across Europe in the ’70s and ’80s, horizontal struggle has shown to be very effective in both resisting state-socialism and capitalism, and only is becoming increasingly relevant.
Contemporary Marxist theory calls for the further yielding of decentralized tactics in struggles today. Multitude, the second part of Negri & Hardt’s Empire analysis, discusses the structure of autonomous movements worldwide. While modernist organization is hierarchical, adopting a pyramid structure, postmodern autonomy is built around a model of the distributed network , whereby there is no center of power, but instead a polycentric model of distributed nodes of power, networked in struggle. This model is adapted far and wide, from the Zapatista autonomous zone in the Chiapas mountains of Mexico, to the Palestinian intifada struggling against Israeli occupation. Even the current counterinsurgency in Iraq reflects netwar, and it is clear how modern vertical power structures are incapable of suppressing such movements in the right numbers. The distributed network structure provides the model for absolutely democratic organization, one that corresponds to the development of the post-Fordist forces of production today, as well as providing the most efficient weapon in the struggle against the ruling class and the contemporary power structure.
The inherently democratic nature of networks provides an innate resistance to tendencies of centralization prevalent throughout resistance: instead of iron-fist discipline, the values of creativity, communication, and self-organization are necessary for a network’s perpetuation. The advent of technology and the internet in our postmodern era provides the conduit through which decentralized horizontal resistance can be expanded into a post-capitalist society. The concept of representative democracy is obsolete when the fluidity of voices over the internet is far more representative of popular sentiment than the minority of voters in the country. The contemporary conception of the state is far less democratic than the projections of the future development of the internet will provide for us. With the abolishment of time and space by technology and information, the State is becoming the second intermediary, where the first now allows for the abolishment of capital as well. The network form thus has become less of a means of struggle, and more of an end in and of itself.
If the struggle commences through the network structure, post-capitalist society will be immediately imbued with the tenets of decentralization, horizontalism, and would become self-perpetuating with the communication between autonomous regional decision-making bodies through technologies as the internet. A freedom far greater than that imagined by pseudo-“Communists” and capitalist Democrats alike is for the first time feasible. It is only today that for the first time both the Marxist critique of capital and subsequent projection for the future is by nature parallel that of anarchism: for a post-revolutionary society can be organized embodying both principles. There can be no “post-revolutionary state” as the Leninists used to justify their horrors: the revolution itself is a non-institutionalized anti-state; a network of autonomous armed insurrectionists who refuse to revert back to centralized alienation. The suppression of the ruling-class by the multitude of the exploited and oppressed is finally feasible without centralization: the line between Marxist and anarchist is now nigh-invisible. And thus it is only through the unity of communists and anarchists that a revolutionary project is feasible.
But one does not need to be a self-identified “revolutionary” to know that something is seriously wrong with our society today. On the macro-level, the nations are working hard to institute a state of permanent war in the Middle East, and the economy is working harder than ever to displace the massive looming crisis. But on the personal level, one needs not to look long to find the masses of people who are disillusioned, apathetic, and pissed off – but no one seems to identify at what. The Spectacle has brought us to our knees, and blindfolded us as to the reason. We have reached frightening new levels of alienation, and its reflection in the larger picture is that of a world ravaged by war and poverty. It is clear that if something is not done soon, society is going to fall into a state of barbarism, the ultimate pitting of capital’s dollar over humanity’s life.
It is for this reason that this reconceptualization of communism is so important now more than ever. If the multitude does not begin to consider alternatives to capitalist domination, our world is going to be torn apart. Revolution is not inevitable, but the death of man is, unless revolution is made. I plead to everyone: let us rise up and throw off the shackles of the system, lest they suffocate us at last.