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

[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/human...1500434-1.html]

[Bilan]

One more Kautsky quote...one more...and so help me!

[Die Neue Zeit]

"So help you," indeed ( ):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/broad-econ...399/index.html