"The independence of the working class" as a political goal

[JimmyJazz]

Recently I saw NHIA use the phrase "the independence of the working class" to identify the political goal of Marxist/revolutionary socialists. Before I read that, I really couldn't have told you in a single sentence what it is that Marxists fight for (in the short-term that is, since obviously in the long term they fight for socialism).

What do you think about "the independence of the working class" as a political goal for revolutionary Marxists?

As the political goal for revolutionary Marxists?

Is this independence something that should last forever, or just until a "genuine" national workers' party is formed?

If you answered the latter, how do you respond to the history of endless betrayals by such parties, and numerous such parties lapsing into openly reformist ways?

Or, does it refer to independence from one's actual nation*, rather than from simply all national parties? This seems to me to have been Marx's position**.

But if this is the case, doesn't it imply the need for a world party? How could a national party EVER hope to maintain independence from the government of the nation it exists within? How could it not fall for the temptation to sacrifice revolutionary integrity for votes in national elections?

How could it stand up and fully defend revolutionary victories in other countries if it was always focused on winning over public opinion at home, in a capitalist country, still under the sway of a bourgeois culture and a privately owned media (not to mention privately owned politicians--and politicians do have a powerful role in shaping national discussion)?

Please note that simply saying "we support membership of national parties in a revolutionary International association" doesn't necessarily solve anything. (See: practically the entire 2nd International. And I'm sure there were also parties in the 3rd and 4th Internationals that lapsed into reformism, maybe someone can tell me if this is true and give me some examples of parties that did).

I guess what I'm doing is talking myself into the need for a world workers' party in the place of all national revolutionary parties. This is something I've long felt in my gut was the Marxist thing to do, but I've never thought it out too explicitly until now.

I will admit that it seems highly unlikely (bordering on impossible) that a "world party" could seize upon local conditions to lead a national revolution in any country. It simply would not be close enough to things on the ground, not to mention that being a truly internationalist organization, it would always garner immense hatred from the patriotic elements of every nation. So I guess that to really support this idea of a world party, you'd have to have some vaguely Autonomist Marxist ideas about working-class revolution (i.e., that a vanguard party isn't required, and working class revolution is fairly spontaneous). Which is really not my view at all, I think leadership is crucial.

When I look at history and present conditions, here's what I see in summary: at the same time as national victories seem unlikely or impossible under a world party, the tendency for national mass parties to slip into reformism seems virtually guaranteed and unstoppable. Argh!


*By which I mean, at the very least, one's national government and national ruling institutions.

**"The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation..."--Marx & Engels, itals. original to the text of the CM on marxists.org

[Die Neue Zeit]

I'll get some CPGB material on this fundamental concept at some point (naturally by CPGB comrade Mike Macnair). I have also stressed all the above in my programmatic work (the notion of "class strugglism" and my adoption of Bordiga's concept of having an international party proper).

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

A few things:

The political independence of the proletariat from bourgeois parties and politics is a requirement to succeed in smashing the capitalist state and creating a proletarian one in its place.

Marx and Engels spoke of this necessity long ago, and others have been forced to repeat it many times since then in order to combat class collaborationists and reformists who attempt to tie the working class to its exploiters.

Second, as Marx and Engels pointed out: "Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie." They helped establish an International, not just a party in "their own" country.

Cuba assisted revolutionary movements and imperialist-oppressed countries in struggles against imperialism as a part of the necessary fight for the extension of socialism. Che spoke of the impossibility for the construction of socialism to succeed in one country and he fought for international revolution through the formation of International Proletarian Armies linked together either informally or formally (e.g. through "Coordinating Committees").

Today, we do need a world party. The proletariat is international, and its party must be as well. National sections of that party must deal with the conditions they face, but the overall goal has to be world socialism. The two are tied into each other. PoWR is set up on that basis.

[Tower of Bebel]

We want to defend the interests of the working class, not the bourgeois or petit-bourgeoisie. Therefor marxist revolutionaries cannot:
- manage the capitalist state;
- make their party depend on capitalist funding;
- ignore the working-class character of the movement (so no alliance between workers and peasants if that means that the workers depend on the peasantry as a whole) and;
- try to achieve socialism through the capitalist state.

So we need an independent, working-class party that fights the capitalist state and struggles for international socialism.

[Yehuda Stern]

The independence of the working class, however, also means its independence from reformist and centrist politicians, who are the agents of the capitalists in the labor movement. It is not restricted to bourgeois parties and therefore if a Marxist is fighting for a broad reformist party he is only doing half his job. If such a party already exists, then Marxists may work in it under some conditions. But under no circumstances, except very specific situations, should a Marxist advocate a reformist party as his full program.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ I don't think you got the gist of the original post. It's not as easy as "reform" or "revolution." There are reformists who do not acknowledge or underemphasize class struggle ("social democracy," lots of "democratic socialists," etc.), and there are those who emphasize it (as the only means to achieve the radical reforms proposed).

There is also a difference between vulgar centrism (revolutionary rhetoric combined with blatant opportunism) and revolutionary centrism (promoting class struggle as a means to achieve radical reforms in the minimum program while keeping in mind the concept of social revolution).

[Yehuda Stern]

I don't think you got the gist of the original post. It's not as easy as "reform" or "revolution."

I think I did, and it really is.


There are reformists who do not acknowledge or underemphasize class struggle ("social democracy," lots of "democratic socialists," etc.), and there are those who emphasize it

All the means is that they want the workers to pressure the ruling class into granting concessions. It's important, but it's hardly class independence.


here is also a difference between vulgar centrism (revolutionary rhetoric combined with blatant opportunism) and revolutionary centrism (promoting class struggle as a means to achieve radical reforms in the minimum program while keeping in mind the concept of social revolution.

I don't believe there is. The two are identical in all but rhetoric. These days, their social base isn't even very different.

[Die Neue Zeit]

All the means is that they want the workers to pressure the ruling class into granting concessions. It's important, but it's hardly class independence.

It's HOW they want the workers to pressure the ruling class into granting concessions that is the key. Most "reformists" these days prefer this to occur through the prism of "social issues" (which only divides the working class) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/fetishizing-social-movements-t89791/index.html).


I don't believe there is. The two are identical in all but rhetoric. These days, their social base isn't even very different.

Yeah, and this office worker is so petit-bourgeois. :rolleyes: Please elaborate on how Lenin was NOT a revolutionary centrist (assuming you've read the relevant CPGB articles).

[ckaihatsu]

In the interests of making things clear and accurate I'm quoting Rakunin's principles here because they provide a solid definition and program for working class independence:



We want to defend the interests of the working class, not the bourgeois or petit-bourgeoisie. Therefor marxist revolutionaries cannot:
- manage the capitalist state;
- make their party depend on capitalist funding;
- ignore the working-class character of the movement (so no alliance between workers and peasants if that means that the workers depend on the peasantry as a whole) and;
- try to achieve socialism through the capitalist state.

So we need an independent, working-class party that fights the capitalist state and struggles for international socialism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ But what about electoral laws that mandate state electoral funding (through bans on corporate and union donations)?

[Yehuda Stern]

These laws should be fought, but of course revolutionaries can still not accept funding from the state. That's like saying that if a state makes Marxism illegal, we should become reformists.

[BobKKKindle$]

The slogan of "political independence" is not just concerned with organizational independence (the need for workers to form their own independent organizations which are not dependent on reformist parties or any other component of the bourgeois political apparatus, including the state) but also ideological independence - the need to break the cultural and ideological links between the workers and their respective ruling classes which support the illusion that there is a unity of interests between two groups which are, from an objective viewpoint, mutually opposed. The influence of bourgeois ideology was recognized by Marx, and this is what gives rise to the existence of multiple political strata within the proletariat, each defined by its level of class consciousness:


The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.

The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach, Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook

The means by which these links are broken, thereby allowing workers to view the world as it really is, and recognize the existence of class antagonisms and the common set of interests shared by all workers throughout the world, regardless of nationality, is the vanguard party.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Class-Strugglist Labour: For the Politico-Ideological Independence of the Working Class

"'Peaceful' decades, however, have not passed without leaving their mark. They have of necessity given rise to opportunism in all countries, and made it prevalent among parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other 'leaders'. There is no country in Europe where, in one form or another, a long and stubborn struggle has not been conducted against opportunism, the latter being supported in a host of ways by the entire bourgeoisie, which is striving to corrupt and weaken the revolutionary proletariat. Fifteen years ago, at the outset of the Bernstein controversy, the selfsame Kautsky wrote that should opportunism turn from a sentiment into a trend, a split would be imminent." (Vladimir Lenin)

The aforementioned words, especially that last sentence, were written just after the outset of the mislabeled “First World War” by a Lenin who recalled earlier remarks made by a Kautsky who actually spoke against vulgar “centrism” – the advocacy of any sort of “unity for unity’s sake” (false unity) with class accommodationists by, naturally, accommodating them. This is something that both “social-democratic” historians and “democratic-socialist” activists – and even most Marxists – ignore in portraying a consistently vulgar-centrist caricature of the leading theoretical authority in the Second International (or at least in its Marxist wing), as if he never succumbed to senility (which he certainly did when he descended into vulgar “centrism” and then renegacy).

It must be said that the concept of “class-strugglist labour,” which is for the politico-ideological independence of the working class, is ironically not a principle apart from class strugglism, social labour, and class-strugglist social labour’s transnational emancipation. From the initial perspective of class strugglism, the twin recognition that only human labour (both manual and mental) and its technological, labour-saving equivalent – as opposed to, say, the “dead labour” of capital (in actual fact “undead,” given the context of Marx evoking the fictional Dracula) – can produce value apart from natural value production and that class struggles over these are, by far, the primary driving force of all written human history and of the modern world necessarily leads to at least one fork in the road: between siding with the numerous struggles of human labour and opposing such struggles for the sake of outright class accommodation (the usual “reformism”). Along the path of siding with the numerous struggles of human labour comes the inevitable maturity of realizing that they are most effective when conducted by a politico-ideologically independent working class steeped in its unified class consciousness and organization. From the ultimate perspective pertaining to the transnational emancipation of labour in terms of both the working class and work itself, emancipation has to start from somewhere in the working class itself. Some would prefer emancipation to start on the basis of economic determinism, otherwise known as “vulgar Marxism,” but this only leads to the narrow economism of focusing exclusively on immediate economic struggles and to the economic reductionism of reducing the dynamics of reality to exclusively economic factors.

Regarding the latter perspective, consider the history of factory committees in the Russian Revolution, as noted by Peter Rachleff of the Macalester College in Minnesota and quoted in my earlier work:

Whereas the Soviets were primarily concerned with political issues, e.g., the structure of the government, the continuation of the war, the factory committees dealt solely with the problems of continuing production within their factories. Many sprang up in the face of lock-outs or attempted sabotage by the factory owners. It was through these committees that workers hoped to solve their initial problems--how to get production going again, how to provide for themselves and their families in the midst of economic chaos. Many workers were faced with the choice of taking over production themselves or starving. Other workers who were relatively assured of employment were influenced both by the burst of activity which characterised the revolution and the worsening economic situation. If they were to remain secure, they had to have a greater say in the management of their factories. They realised that they needed organisations on the shop level to protect their interests and improve their situations.

While very admirable in terms of going beyond the class-accommodationist collective bargain-ism of even the trans-Atlantic Workers Uniting union, their rejection of political questions, which also forms the organizational basis of revolutionary syndicalism (an extreme form of “red” tred-iunionizm, in fact), compromised their class independence from even a Bolshevik party whose demographics would eventually be based more upon the petit-bourgeois peasantry and especially upon the “scientific management” coordinator class that was emerging from the czarist shackles on the technical and managerial intelligentsia, with Lenin as their own spokesperson:

We must raise the question of applying much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system [...] The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced countries. It could not be otherwise under the tsarist regime and in view of the persistence of the hangover from serfdom. The task that the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope is – learn to work. The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect, like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work [...] The possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our own ends.

Therefore, while the concept of the transnational emancipation of labour facilitates the merger of revolutionary socialism and the necessarily singular worker-class movement (the usage of “worker-class” instead of “working-class” puts emphasis on the merger of worker demographics and class issues), the politico-ideological independence of the working class facilitates the merger of transnational emancipation and the numerous struggles of human labour, whether socioeconomic, sociocultural, or sociopolitical. While capable of achieving a vulgar merger between those struggles and grossly abstract forms of “socialism,” the various decentralized social movements, dubiously funded non-government organizations, trade unions, syndicates, factory committees, and even “vanguardist” circle-sects are all incapable of achieving the two detailed mergers mentioned above. What organizational form, then, can facilitate both those mergers? The historic International Workingmen’s Association, or First International, bolded repeated what Marx explicitly stated in the Communist Manifesto and restated repeatedly throughout his political life (up to and including his partial drafting of the program of the French Workers’ Party):

In presence of an unbridled reaction which violently crushes every effort at emancipation on the part of the working men, and pretends to maintain by brute force the distinction of classes and the political domination of the propertied classes resulting from it;

Considering, that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes;

That this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes [...]




REFERENCES:

Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/dec/12.htm]

Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution by Peter Rachleff [http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/raclef.htm]

The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm]

Resolution of the London Conference on Working Class Political Action by the International Workingmen’s Association [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/politics-resolution.htm]

[Die Neue Zeit]

Class-Strugglist Labour: “Workers Only” vs. “Workerism”

“We face great and difficult battles, and must train comrades-in-arms who are resolved to share everything with us and to fight the great fight to the end.” (Karl Kautsky)

Central to the politico-ideological independence of the working class – the concept of “class-strugglist labour” – is the imperative that the worker-class political party be exclusively proletarian, while at the same time take a firm position against sectoral chauvinism. Just a few years after writing his authoritative commentary on the historic Erfurt Program, Kautsky confronted a resolution proposed by one Georg von Vollmar (the German inspiration for the “socialism in one country” concept) that would have ended this proletarian separatism of the international proletariat’s first vanguard party, the then-Marxist Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD). As noted at sufficient length by historian Gary Steenson of the California Polytechnic State University, this arose out of issues with the German peasantry:

Serious concern for the peasantry among social democrats began shortly after the end of the outlaw period when south German branches of the party realized that they had very nearly reached the saturation point of their popular appeal if they could not attract the votes of rural workers and small farmers. The issue was then further stimulated when, for the first time in German history, a political association of farmers, the Bund der Landwirte, was formed. The ability of this group to rouse political interests among small farmers and its severely anti-socialist stands-it was essentially a front organization for the very conservative large landowners of the East Elbe region of Prussia-served to force the issue on the SPD.

Led by Georg von Vollmar, the south German forces gained sufficient support to get the 1894 Frankfurt party congress to pass a resolution calling for the adoption of an agrarian policy to be grafted onto the Erfurt program. Two things about the campaign particularly rankled Kautsky. One was the almost vituperatively anti-theoretical posture of the major proponents of the agrarian program. Over and over again these people scornfully rejected any theoretical objections to including peasants and small farmers among party membership and to making special programmatic concessions to try to win their votes. Quite naturally Kautsky resented this attack on his special bailiwick. Kautsky also opposed the suggestion that the exclusively worker character of the party should be violated. This was contrary to what was for him the most important basic political principle of any socialist party.

For a time it seemed that perhaps Kautsky had chosen the wrong side on this issue because Bebel sided with Vollmar and the south Germans. Actually Bebel had never been entirely happy with the exclusively worker party; he had tried to keep worker out of the name of both the SDAP and the SAPD to avoid offending possible non-worker followers. But the issue did not come up again in the intervening period, largely because of the radicalizing impact of the anti socialist law. In 1894 Rebel was securely in control of the party, and the number of issues on which he lost at parts congresses was very small.

In the end, however, Bebel, not Kautsky, chose the wrong side this time. Even though a major theoretical dispute on the agrarian question preceded the 1895 Breslau congress at which the new policy was voted on, the issue was not so much one of facts and theories as it was an emotional one. At Breslau the agrarian commission selected the previous year presented its report to the delegates, and Kautsky offered a counter-resolution calling for the rejection of the commission's proposal. Vollmar was unable to attend the congress, so Bebel delivered the major attack on Kautsky's resolution, arguing primarily that even if the agrarian program was ineffective, it did not cost the workers anything, and it might win the party some new supporters.

Clara Zetkin and Kautsky both gave strong speeches in favor of preserving the proletarian purity of the party. Zetkin met with prolonged stormy applause when she closed her presentation with a stirring call for the party to reject the agrarian program and thereby "hold firmly to the revolutionary character of our party." Kautsky conceded that the new program might win the SPD some voters but added that such followers would only desert the party "at the decisive moment." He concluded with an emotional appeal to revolutionary solidarity: "We face great and difficult battles, and must train comrades-in-arms who are resolved to share everything with us and to fight the great fight to the end." Such entreaties got a sympathetic response from the delegates, most of whom shared the prejudice of urban dwellers against what Marx referred to in the Communist Manifesto as "the idiocy of rural life." By a vote of 158 to 63, Kautsky's resolution passed.

Kautsky, in his vigorous defense of proletarian separatism, undoubtedly recalled the remarks of the non-worker Frederick Engels regarding non-workers (specifically the petit-bourgeois intellectuals who existed before the long-past proletarianization of intellectual work through professionalization) and worker-class organization:

It is an unavoidable phenomenon, well established in the course of development, that people from the ruling class also join the proletariat and supply it with educated elements. This we have already clearly stated in the Manifesto. Here, however, two remarks are to be made:

First, such people, in order to be useful to the proletarian movement, must bring with them really educated elements. This, however, is not the case with the great majority of German bourgeois converts. Neither the Zukunft [fortnightly Berlin magazine] nor the Neue Gesellschaft [monthly Zurich periodical] has provided anything to advance the movement one step. They are completely deficient in real, factual, or theoretical material. Instead, there are efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them, and among whom one is more confused than the other, thanks to the process of decomposition in which German philosophy finds itself today. Instead of first studying the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of wanting to teach it. Hence, there are among those gentlemen as many viewpoints as there are heads; instead of clarifying anything, they only produce arrant confusion — fortunately, almost always only among themselves. Such educated elements, whose guiding principle is to teach what they have not learned, the party can well dispense with.

Second, when such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions. In so petty-bourgeois a country as Germany, such conceptions certainly have their justification, but only outside the Social-Democratic Labor party. If the gentlemen want to build a social-democratic petty-bourgeois party, they have a full right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, conclude agreements, etc., according to circumstances. But in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitates tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time.

As I said in my earlier work, the “time” was in 1879! In the time since, petit-bourgeois elements within the various Marxist parties – revolutionary and otherwise – had the tendency to “serve” in a leadership capacity, leaving the working-class rank-and-file to do all the grunt work. The Bolsheviks were no exception!

On the other hand, there is the ever-looming danger of sectoral chauvinism, especially manual “workerism,” based on a key misreading of Das Kapital. This “workerism” ranges from “mere” theoretical errors to the fetish for manual work itself on the part of some de facto cults posing as political sects – as a result of grave theoretical errors. One such “mere” theoretical error was made by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the co-authors of Empire (hailed by utopian New Left academics as a 21st-century Communist Manifesto but criticized by Marxists), as noted by Finn Bowring:

The real interests of the mass worker, however, are now represented by groups opposed to reformist trade unions and the Communist Party. This era marks the rise, in Italy, of the 'operaismo' movement (literally, 'workerism'), which in 1973 dissolved (or evolved) into 'autonomia'.

[...]

There is a massive expansion of tertiary labour, as activities regarded by Marx as 'unproductive' moments in the circulation of capital--communication and media, transport, education, health and social care, finance, advertising, entertainment and the production of culture--become extensively regulated by the wage relationship.

Most of those who are familiar with Marxist theory are unaware of the fact that, in the manuscript for the third volume of Das Kapital (not the finalized compilation by Engels), Marx suggested that the divide between “productive” and “unproductive” labour was becoming more blurred even in his own time, due to the extension of value production from mere physical goods into services (notwithstanding the continued existence of a class divide between a “middle-income” professional worker and, for example, a police officer). This extension is the natural result of the ever-expanding division of labour, as commented upon by Adam Smith himself. Continuing with Bowring:

The hegemonic form of work in the new post-industrial economy is 'immaterial labour'--'labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication' (Hardt, 1999: 94). 'Today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of co-operative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks.' (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 294) This work ranges from the manipulation and analysis of computer symbols to the 'affective labour' of human communication and interaction. Service industries involving the creation and manipulation of affects are no less immaterial, according to Hardt, in the sense that the products they create are intangible: 'a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion--even a sense of counectedness or community'. 'What affective labour produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower.' Consequently, 'the instrumental action of economic production has merged with the communicative action of human relations'. (Hardt, 1999: 96)

[...]

The new class subject that emerges in this society is, in Negri's view, the 'social worker' (operaio sociale), sometimes translated as 'socialised worker' or 'diffuse worker'. This term is used to convey the fact that the productive capacities of the workers are embedded in, and work directly on, social networks of communication and cooperation which spread well beyond the domain of the factory: hence also the term 'social factory', which was employed by a number of Italian Marxists and feminists in the early 1970s. In the 1990s, Negri and Hardt defined the social worker--though they increasingly began to use the term 'multitude' instead--as 'characterised by a hybrid of material and immaterial labouring activities linked together in social and productive networks by highly developed labouring co-operation' (Hardt & Negri, 1994: 274). The productive abilities of these workers are not the exclusive result of formal or occupational training, but are increasingly a self-acquired prerequisite for informal participation in the world of everyday life. In Maurizio Lazzarato's account, capital today draws on a 'basin of immaterial labour', which continually 'dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities'. Consequently, 'it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work.' (Lazzarato, 1996: 137-8)

When Empire was written in 2001, Hardt and Negri farcically repeated the two-class model popularized by the Communist Manifesto, and the concept of “multitude” was expanded to include albeit-destitute petit-bourgeois elements (peasants in less developed nation-states). In short, manual “workerism” and any other form of sectoral chauvinism inevitably leads to the exact opposite of the politico-ideological independence of that class of manual, clerical, and “middle-income” professional workers – the proletariat!



REFERENCES:

“Not One Man, Not One Penny!” German Social Democracy, 1863-1914 by Gary Steenson [http://faculty.goucher.edu/history231/steenson.htm]

From the mass worker to the multitude: a theoretical contextualisation of Hardt and Negri's Empire by Finn Bowring
[http://www.articlearchives.com/humanities-social-science/history/1500434-1.html]

[Die Neue Zeit]

Class-Strugglist Assembly and Association: Self-Directional Demands

“The original organizations of the proletariat were modeled after those of the medieval apprentices. In like manner the first weapons of the modern labor movement were those inherited from a previous age, the strike and the boycott. But these methods are insufficient for the modern proletariat. The more completely the various divisions of which it is made up unite into a single working-class movement, the more must its struggles take on a political character. Every class-struggle is a political struggle. Even the bare requirements of the industrial struggle force the workers to make political demands. We have seen that the modern state regards it as its principal function to make the effective organization of labor impossible. Secret organizations are inefficient substitutes for open ones. The more the proletariat develops, the more it needs freedom to organize.” (Karl Kautsky)

In the first chapter, a modern approach to programming class struggle and social revolution was outlined, based broadly on the game theory concepts of maximax and maximin, with the latter entailing immediate, intermediate, and threshold demands. Explained earlier in this chapter was the historical and long-term necessity of ensuring that the immediate and intermediate demands being raised “make further progress more likely and facilitate other progressive changes” (Robin Hahnel) as well as enable the basic principles to be, through the emphasis on transnational “ pressure” (class struggle) for legislative implementation, “kept consciously in view” (Karl Kautsky) – thus being consistent with the maximin concept. Nevertheless, in between the maximax and the maximin are demands of a “directional” (as opposed to pseudo-“transitional”) nature which, either individually or combined, would necessitate a revolutionary departure from bourgeois-capitalist social relations specifically (as opposed to coordinator-capitalist, petty-capitalist, and even perceived “socialist” social relations) or from all forms of capitalist social relations altogether. In the case of the latter, at least one demand that is seemingly peripheral but is crucial for the departure was examined in Chapter 2.

One more detail completes this modern approach to programming class struggle and social revolution: some demands are, in the broad sense, “self-directional.” With this particular type of demand, some aspects of it pose immediate concerns, other aspects intermediate ones, still other aspects threshold ones, leaving the remainder to pose directional concerns. The freedom of specifically class-strugglist assembly and association, free from anti-employment reprisals, police interference such as from agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement – as opposed to the liberal hollowness of “freedom of assembly and association” – is one such “self-directional” demand, as pointed out by an enraged Lenin in his primary counter-polemic with the senile renegade who was his most influential theoretical mentor:

Under bourgeois democracy the capitalists, by thousands of tricks – which are the more artful and effective the more “pure” democracy is developed – drive the people away from administrative work, from freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc.

[…]

You, exploiters and hypocrites, talk about democracy, while at every step you erect thousands of barriers to prevent the oppressed people from taking part in politics. We take you at your word and, in the interests of these people, demand the extension of your bourgeois democracy in order to prepare the people for revolution for the purpose of overthrowing you, the exploiters.

Indeed, consider even the most narrowly economistic take on class-strugglist assembly and association, otherwise known as unionization rights (mere collective bargaining “rights,” to be more precise). Right after featuring Lars Lih’s critique of broad economism, the very next issue of the Weekly Worker published these insightful remarks by Mike Macnair (if only limited by a binary, offensive-defensive approach to minimum demands) on the peculiarly British take on anti-union laws:

The use of democratic demands in connection with defensive struggles against the effects of crisis is the use of selected elements of the minimum programme which are particularly relevant to the crisis.

The first and most fundamental of these is (partially) shared by all the left ‘action programmes’: abolition of the anti-union laws. The slogan should be expressed as “abolition”, not “repeal”: trade unions are illegal at common law (the first anti-union Act of Parliament was the Confederacies of Masons Act 1424; picketing has been unlawful since around the 1240s) and even repeal of everything passed since 1970 would still allow judges to invent new means of penalising unions or reinvent ancient ones.

“Partially shared” because there is a more general democratic principle involved: freedom of association.

[…]

The struggle for freedom of association is a struggle for a general democratic demand. But it is also the struggle for the most elementary need of the working class as a class: to organise itself freely and independently of the capitalist state. Conditions of economic crisis and recession make this need more, not less, urgent.

However, mere abolition is insufficient. In the United States, the current push by unionized labour to have the card-check Employee Free Choice Act passed is driven by frustration over anti-employment reprisals sanctioned under current labour law, the National Labour Relations Act of 1935. These reprisals occur in between the required two elections to have union representation (the latter occurring via secret ballot, hence the right-wing hysteria to preserve secret-ballot “rights” in this area), ranging from threats to disciplinary action to unlawful terminations that see their lawsuit resolutions too late (not that the issue of pro-unionization intimidation during the card check process should be ignored, but that has always been playing second fiddle by far).

Next, consider the historical role of “the pigs” – police officers (not even the bourgeoisie are called “the pigs” by the class-strugglist left) – as obstacles to class-based assembly and association, including but not limited to the usage of agents provocateurs to incite violence, the suppression of mass strikes and wildcat strikes in general, the forced enforcement of lockouts or outright unemployment in response to sit-down strikes or even “recovered” factories, and so on. For the purposes of this lengthy chapter, this more direct consideration of the bourgeois-capitalist state’s “principal function [of making] the effective organization of labor impossible” will indeed be limited to the usage of agents provocateurs, especially in recent years. That even paleoconservative reactionaries like Alex Jones and liberals like Steve Watson can mutually identify this expression of bourgeois-capitalist authoritarianism and (at least inadvertently) link it to class struggle is something to note:

[In 2007] peaceful protestors at the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit in Montebello captured sensational video of hired agent provocateurs attempting to incite rioting and turn the protest violent, only to encounter brave resistance from real protest leaders.

Quebec provincial police later admitted that their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protest at the North American leaders summit in Montebello, Que.

In Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organisation meeting, the authorities declared a state of emergency, imposed curfews and resorted to nothing short of police state tactics in response to a small minority of hostile black bloc hooligans. In his film Police State 2, Alex Jones covered the fact that the police allowed the black bloc to run riot in downtown Seattle while they concentrated on preventing the movement of peaceful protestors. The film presents evidence that the left-wing anarchist groups are actually controlled by the state and used to demonize peaceful protesters.

At WTO protests in Genoa 2001 a protestor was killed after being shot in the head and run over twice by a police vehicle. The Italian Carabinere also later beat on peaceful protestors as they slept, and even tortured some, at the Diaz School. It later emerged that the police fabricated evidence against the protesters, claiming they were anarchist rioters, to justify their actions. Some Carabiniere officials have since come forward to say they knew of infiltration of the black bloc anarchists, that fellow officers acted as agent provocateurs.

At the Free Trade Area of Americas protests in Miami in late November 2003, more provocateuring was evident. The United Steelworkers of America, calling for a congressional investigation, stated that the police intentionally caused violence and arrested and charged hundreds of peaceful protestors. The USWA suggested that billions of dollars supposedly slated for Iraq reconstruction funds are actually being used to subsidize ‘homeland repression’ in America.

Now, consider the formal political disenfranchisement (including, among other things, the right to vote) of criminals, many of whom upon release become law-abiding taxpayers, yet are not formally enfranchised. “How would it feel to work and pay taxes, and be excluded from the democratic process?” asks the American Civil Liberties Union on this status applying to 5.3 million Americans (evoking the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois slogan “No taxation without representation!”):

The recently reauthorized Voting Rights Act went a long way towards redressing imbalances. But it left one group of citizens behind. Says US Congressman John Lewis: "I just think the American people got to rise up. And not be quiet. Find a way to get in the way. And I think here today, we must see this as an extension of the civil rights movement. It is time for the American citizens to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble."

[…]

Today, we face increasing disengagement and disenchantment with the political process. High incarceration rates and felony disfranchisement exacerbate that, creating a culture of indifference […]

Not that the ACLU has nothing to say internationally. On the contrary:

Prisoners vote in a large number of countries, and some countries have more tailored bans on prisoner voting. For example, disfranchisement is rare in Norway, where courts are only allowed to disfranchise those convicted of treason, electoral fraud and national security breaches, and Poland permits courts to disfranchise those convicted of extremely serious offenses and sentenced to over three years in prison.

Some lawyers argue that American disfranchisement policies are likely to be in contravention of international human rights instruments that guarantee the right to vote, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which has been ratified by the United States. The racially disproportionate impact of the law may also contravene the non-discrimination policies in the Covenant and in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the US has also ratified.

Particularly worrisome is the potential application of this formal political disenfranchisement to class-conscious workers convicted of some extra-legal class-strugglist activity that falls far short of “treason” (hence the emphasis above on the Polish situation)!

Special emphasis must be given to the immediate (not “intermediate”) application of this demand within the armed forces. For example, until a few years ago, trade-union rights (at least the “right” to collective bargaining, if not the right to strike) existed in the German armed forces. With all the jingoistic appeals to “patriotism” in the United States, what has been relatively ignored is the sad treatment of many military veterans by the bourgeois-capitalist government itself! Consider this Associated Press article from late 2007:

Military veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

[…]

Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.

"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

[…]

The Iraq vets seeking help with homelessness are more likely to be women, less likely to have substance abuse problems, but more likely to have mental illness – mostly related to post-traumatic stress, said Pete Dougherty, director of homeless veterans programs at the VA.

Overall, 45 percent of participants in the VA's homeless programs have a diagnosable mental illness and more than three out of four have a substance abuse problem, while 35 percent have both, Dougherty said.

In his pathbreaking The Road to Power, Kautsky emphasized the need to actively break the loyalty of rank-and-file military personnel to their respective bourgeois-capitalist governments:

To in the age of railroads and telegraphs, of newspapers and public assemblages, of countless industrial centers, of magazine rifles and machine guns it is absolutely impossible for a minority to cripple the military: forces of the capital [city], unless they are already completely disorganized. It is also impossible to confine a political struggle to the capital [city]. Political life has become national. Where these conditions exist a great transfer of political power that shall destroy a tyrannical regime is only to be expected where all of the following conditions exist […] Confidence in the ruling regime, both in its power and in its stability, must have been destroyed by its own tools, by the bureaucracy and the army.

If the reader here thinks that this emphasis is too “Caesarian,” it is only due to a relative lack of knowledge on the socioeconomic causes of this original “March on Rome” (farcically repeated by the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini in 1922) and on the politically incorrect cause of Julius Caesar’s assassination, as asserted by Michael Parenti in his The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome: his “tyrannical” land reform proposal to redistribute common land seized by patricians either in the Senate or with Senate connections, naturally to demobilized soldiers and proletarianized peasants. History eventually repeated itself with Oliver Cromwell’s short-lived assault on the British aristocracy, but moreover with the Soviet legacy posed by the ascendancy of the “Caesarist” praktiki (practical full-timers) around Joseph Stalin at the expense of the uniformed “Bonapartists” around Leon Trotsky and of the intellectually “aristocratic” Bolshevik Old Guard.

Once more, this real yet class-based freedom of assembly and association – free from anti-employment reprisals, police interference such as from agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement – is the basis of politico-ideological independence for the working class, of winning “the battle of democracy” mentioned in the Communist Manifesto, and of class-strugglist democracy itself, with the working class ultimately capturing the full political power of a ruling class in accordance with the slogan “WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”



REFERENCES:

The Class Struggle (Erfurt Programme) by Karl Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ch05.htm]

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

Crisis and defensive demands by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/751/crisisand.html]

Learn more about the Employee Free Choice Act by the American Rights at Work Education Fund [http://freechoiceact.org/index.php/petition/pages/araw_learn_more]

Police Used "Agents Provocateurs" At UK Bush Protests by Steve Watson [http://www.infowars.net/articles/june2008/260608Provocateurs.htm]

Democracy's Ghosts: How 5.3 million Americans have lost the right to vote by the American Civil Liberties Union
[http://www.democracysghosts.com/]
[http://www.democracysghosts.org/democracy/democracy.html]
[http://www.democracysghosts.org/intsituation/intsituation.html]

Out of uniform and on the street by Kathy Matheson, The Associated Press [http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/08/america/NA-GEN-US-Homeless-Veterans.php]

The Road to Power by Karl Kautsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch06.htm]

The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti [http://www.michaelparenti.org/Caesar.html]