http://anarchowhat.blogsome.com/2009/11/03/appearances-and-illusions-commonality-on-the-left/

Actual engagement in mass politics, its challenges etc., is critical. I think intuitively this is something that has informed my thinking but wasn’t made explicit in my own mind as it relates to the reconstitution of a radical left pole.

I have a few follow up questions for Farabundo M and others:

1) Is there a link between Lenin’s early Kautskyism and his return toward statist and authoritarian approaches during the civil war?

2) do you think it would have been possible for the Russian working class and peasantry to win the civil war, boost economic production to stop starvation and deprivation, etc. without resorting to the one-man management schemes and state capitalist measures that Lenin ultimately opted for?

3) If so, how can we learn from this in terms of revolutionary strategies for today? What can we learn from debates in the socialist movement of 1917-1922 about how to oppose imperialism today? In particular, how can we combine the need for workers’ self-management with the need for rapid economic and ecological reconstruction in areas from Detroit to Lagos to Gaza that have been ravaged by capitalism and white supremacy?

This last question overlaps with the discussion we are having on the Economic Crisis in the Third World post.

But as soon as the civil war brakes out, Lenin enters his third stage and adapts to war like conditions and goes all out against the Whites. This led to much more totalitarian conditions in which Leninist (both trotskyist, stalinist and maoist) argue that imperialism is the central cause, while the liberterian wing blame the Leninist dictatorial nature. What becomes a much more slippery slope is 1921 where Bolshevism is very much fused into statism. Lenin attacks the ultralefts in his famous “infantile leftist” book, crushes the Krondstant rebellion and introduces the New Economic Policy. Bukharin on the side tries to tear apart Luxemburg Accumulation book. With all this said, I think what is needed is Marxist anaylisis of Lenin and Leninism. It is neither simply totalitarianism nor revolutionary purity. And unfortunatly leftist have take an approach where you either accept him or reject him. How dialectical! Lenin stands as an outstanding disciple of Marx that changed the world. We should stand in the spirit of Lenin, by dedicating ourselves towards the development of revolutionary theory and organization against capital. Most stand in the spirit of Lenin by pushing Leninism. But such pushing doesnt seem to materialize much. Lenin mastered the three volumes of capital in his early 20s, and used such theory in guiding the organization he built. I think the same applies today. Mastering marxist revolutionary theory for the creation of a revolutionary organization is the task at hand. Lenin helps shed light on this process, but he is not the silver bullet that many attempt to make him into.

I’m not taking issue with Hamerquist’s essay on any of those points.

All I was arguing was that JFT/ Facing Reality did not assume that state capitalism was unbeatable or that it was the natural outcome of revolution as so many right wing critics of socialism have concluded.

If anything, they were TOO optimistic about the working class going through a phase of state capitalism and coming out the other end at the promised land of direct democracy. They couldn’t foresee that the breakdown of state capitalism could bring neoliberalism, not direct democracy, because the worker’s revolts during the mid-20th century were crushed.

So I guess the only issue I have with Hamerquist on this point is that when we draw from JFT/ Facing Reality we need to be more concerned about inoculating ourselves against their Hegelian optimism rather than any supposed pessimism on their part.

After writing that I almost feel like that’s a trifling point though…. the more important point, which I think you, Hamerquist, and I all agree on, is that an interventionist revolutionary organization is needed to build off of but not replace workers’ self activity and the “invading socialist society.” Also, I think we’d all agree that building such an organization will not lead “automatically” to state capitalism simply because the Bolsheviks were an interventionist organization and they helped build state capitalism.

“from my perspective the emergence of such forces is both a hopeful sign of mass discontent, and a dangerous obstacle to the autonomy of the class.”

mamos:

good thoughts.

I want to take up one aspect where I did have a question.

you take exception to what Hamerquist is critiquing about CLR James in Facing Reality:

“However, all that being said, I’m not sure if Hamerquist’s asessment of Facing Reality is totally accurate. Didn’t CLR James also say that state capitalism is an important experience the working class is going through and after going through it the next insurrections will lead to direct democracy (as he thought they did in Hungary and as he thought they were about to do with the wildcats in Detroit and in revolts against European social democracy?) Didn’t Facing Reality hold up the Hungarian revolution as a counterargument to the conception among some liberals and trotskyists that stalinist dictatorship could not be overthrown until the far distant future? If anything, it seemed they wrote that book to challenge the assumption that “There Is No Alternative.””

Is this what Hamerquist is questioning? Maybe I’m misunderstanding you.

As I understood Hamerquist’s critique, he is focusing on the question of revolutionary organization in Facing Reality as the problem. One of the problems of Facing Reality is that it has little role for such an organization beyond a propagandistic one. It seems this conclusion is partially connected to the weak side of CLR’s Hegelian-marxism (something I have a lot of affinity with) in at least two related ways.

The first is he assumes the social relations of production have reached a historical stage where it seems workers no longer need the mediation of the kinds of political activity that have historically been associated with “separate” political organization. Of social relations of production I’m specifically thinking here of workers’ self-conceptions, the culture of workers’ association and relationship to work.

The second is CLR builds the picture of a kind of abstract self-activity unmediated by any contradictions, reversals, antagonisms and tensions that won’t necessarily just work themselves out. This is what I had in mind when I referred to “happy hegelianism”. Anyway, there’s much more to this but I think the picture is clear.

You say:

“as far as I can tell Facing Reality thought that Stalinism in the USSR, social democracy in Europe, and Fordist/Taylorist facotry organization in the US created shop floor conidtions that would encourage workers to form workers councils to rebel against monotony, speed up, and divided job classifications. Folks would try to master the complexities of the production process, and this, combined with the educational potential of the modern mass media, could lead to revolutionary direct democratic possibilities opening up – what they called the “invading socialist society.”

But keeping what I just said in mind, then why didn’t the rank-and-file upsurge in the factories lead to major rebellions? Why didn’t this upsurge of struggle link up with the black freedom movement in a consistent way? And why was the student movement not connected with this development until it was too late? Why didn’t the “invading socialist society” take hold? Why did a period of reaction slowly, if not always clear at the time, take shape and take hold by the early 1980s?

We could think of many historical reasons for this: uneveness, deep divisions in the American working classes, the more complicated picture of union bureaucracy and workers self-activity than CLR’s Facing Reality gives, and a lot more.

However, in all of this there also has be some thinking about the organizational question and its particular political tasks. To be clear I don’t mean this in a subsitutionist way–that a revolutionary organization can substitute for the self-emancipation of the oppressed as a whole. Nor is this simply the missing link that solves the riddle of the whole 1960s and 1970s period. A look at the experience of the “New Communist” movement or the International Socialists confirms that.

So I saw Hamerquist seeing what is missing in CLR’s later work in the U.S. and Britain (the work in Caribbean and Africa of the 1960s and 1970s is different issue) is an appreciation for the role the revolutionary organization can and needs to play among many others types of organizations.

Beyond this I’d just build off of what mlove says in his response to Hamerquist. He agrees with your skepticism about immediate regroupment and lays out 4 criteria for how a broader process of gathering forces/ tendency building could proceed. (my summary adds a bit to what mlove lays out but my sense is he’d probably agree with me on these points):

1) we need to continue to be a majority people of color, multiracial tendency. We can’t merge with groups whose organizing culture is overwhelmingly white or who reproduce white supremacy. This is key to building multiracial org. today.

2) regroupment needs to be based on the expectations of a younger generation. Analysis can draw from Marxist, anarchist, libertarian socialist, feminist, nationalist traditions, etc. but we need to avoid focusing too much on well-worn debates among older generations of the Left. We can learn from earlier history by reinterpreting it in terms of new problems we face today.

3) as I said above, it will take movements and collaborative organizing to clarify and catalyze the process of regroupment.

4) The sensibility, the historical examples we draw from, etc. need to focus on direct democratic/ anti-state tendencies in communities of color, even if these are not explicitly called “anarchist”, “libertarian socialist”, or “Marxist.” The Intifada, the Kwanju uprising, the Oaxaca commune, Black Reconstruction, etc. should be our starting points. We need to connect with and be a part of similar developments that could happen today.

As mlove laid out, I think that Don Hamerquist’s peice on Lenin is most useful in terms of thinking of the possibilities and potential pitfalls of Left regroupment in the upcoming years. As the comments sections on the various Lenin pieces on Gathering Frorces have laid out, this question does seem to be percolating throughout the US Left right now, with parallel dynamics going on in Europe at a larger scale. Why are many Leftists talking more about working together now? My hunch is that many of us on the Left have a sense that there are tremendous tasks ahead of us but not enough forces to intervene to do everything that needs to be done. There is a deepening economic and political crisis. There are important but very uneven and isolated small upsurges against the system starting now… these alone cannot challenge capitalism but as folks go through these experiences new layers of militants and revolutionaries will emerge. The Left needs to think very carefully about how it can get invovled in these struggles and bring these new militants together into larger formations that can make more direct challenges to capitalism itself.

Also, as Hamerquists’ interventions over on the 3 Way Fight blog (and as Peter Little and C. Alexander’s comments over here) suggest, society could be starting to polarize and we are not ready for it… given this, Hamerquist thinks Lenin offers insight into insurgent politics, the need to bloc with rowdy minority in a crowd, workplace, etc. rather than getting tied up in parliamentary procedures or bureaucratic “long marches through the institutions.” There is the suggestion that if the Left doesn’t learn how to do insurgent politics then the Right could beat us too it.

Finally Hamerquist’s piece is useful because he firmly grounds his discussion of building revolutionary organization in a broader discussion of mass movement dynamics and working class self-activity. He draws out the useful aspects of the Leninist tradition that emphasize the self-emancipation of the working class and he rejects the aspects of the Leninist tradition that substitute the activity of the vanguard party for this working class self-activity. This is key. As we develop revolutionary organization we should be catalyzing, not replacing/ dominating/ directing what some call “spontaneous” working class insurgency and organizing. I think we can make this critiuque of the Leninist vanguard party without dismissing the real problems and dilemas the Bolsheivks faced and the sharp, precise ways Lenin addressed these problems. We have to take the questions Lenin was tyring to answer seriously even if we rightfully disagree with the disastrous answers he came to. Many of these questions remain unanswered today… the anarchist tradition has tried to pose alternative answers but I would argue this process is radically incomplete and needs to be taken much much further. In this sense, I like the way mlove puts it, we need to “think through and against lenin at the same time.”

__________
Now for the more specific points:

1. Hamerquist argues against anarchist polemics that dismiss the Bolsheviks as capitalists in disguise. Certainly, it is easy to point out, as Ron Taber did in his book on Leninism, that the Bolshevik party was for a capitalist revolution, not a socialist one for most of its history. Lenin rejected this in spring of 1917 and called for “all power to the Soviets.” Why then, was he unable to prevent the smashing of soviet power and the rise of state capitalism in Russia? Why did so many of his actions contribute to it? I agree with Hamerquist that we can’t just attribute all of this to bad faith on the part of Lenin because then we risk repeating the same mistake again. We need to zero in on what specifically went wrong and what specific mistakes did he make. Again, what questions was he asking and why did he end up coming with such terrible answers? .

I agree wth this. This is where the Johnson Forrest Tendency is useful – in books like Facing Reality and State Capitalism and World Revoltuion, they showed how the development of state capitalism in Russia was part of a larger process of the development of state capitalism globally which happened because of the increasing centralization and mass Taylorist factory organization of the means of production.

However, Hamerquist seems to dismiss the JFT’s contributions on this point. He writes, “I remember how difficult it was for the Facing Reality Crew [the name that the JFT took after their split] to explain why revolutionary political work was meaningful when state capitalism appeared as the ordained result of every conceivable political struggle and alignment of forces: “Organize a successful anti-capitalist insurrection – end up with state capitalism; get crushed by a fascist street force and lose to a totalitarian capitalist reaction – end up with state capitalism; shape a mass popular upsurge into a movement for basic structural reforms – end up with state capitalism.” Only a faith in some underlying teleology, not to be disrupted by meddling communists, differentiates this from various capitalist “end of history” and neoliberal “There Is No Alternative” conceptions.)

I agree that CLR James and Facing Reality (if not the rest of the Johnson Forrest Tendency) had trouble articulating a robust vision for what revolutionaries should be doing beyond recognizing and recording the self activity of the working class. In the link that mlove posted, Noel Ignatiev mentions how CLR James kind of side stepped his question when he asked him what revolutionaries should be doing. On Gathering Forces we posted similar critiques of Facing Reality from Loren Goldner. However, all that being said, I’m not sure if Hamerquist’s asessment of Facing Reality is totally accurate. Didn’t CLR James also say that state capitalism is an important experience the working class is going through and after going through it the next insurrections will lead to direct democracy (as he thought they did in Hungary and as he thought they were about to do with the wildcats in Detroit and in revolts against European social democracy?) Didn’t Facing Reality hold up the Hungarian revolution as a counterargument to the conception among some liberals and trotskyists that stalinist dictatorship could not be overthrown until the far distant future? If anything, it seemed they wrote that book to challenge the assumption that “There Is No Alternative.” I might be misreading things here, but as far as I can tell Facing Reality thought that Stalinism in the USSR, social democracy in Europe, and Fordist/Taylorist facotry organization in the US created shop floor conidtions that would encourage workers to form workers councils to rebel against monotony, speed up, and divided job classifications. Folks would try to master the complexities of the production process, and this, combined with the educational potential of the modern mass media, could lead to revolutionary direct democratic possibilities opening up – what they called the “invading socialist society.”

This critique aside, I do think that Hamerquist delves more directly and honestly into the quesitons the Bolsheviks were trying to answer than anyone else I’ve read including CLR James and the rest of the Facing Reality crew. In particular, he points out how the Bolsheivks were haunted by the spectre of the fall of the Paris Commune, the possibility of the revoltuioany cities getting choked out by a reactionary countryside. I’m
going to pull a quote out from his piece that I think is an outstanding summary of what went wrong during the Russian Revolution:

“There were real problems confronted in post revolutionary Russia that cannot be reduced to an abstract lust for
power by the Bolsheviks. As the likelihood of successful working class insurgencies in Europe diminished,
the strategic problems of holding together the poor peasant/working class popular base for Soviet Power grew
more pressing. The specter haunting the Soviets was not the Kolchaks or Denikins, the Allied Intervention, or
any other attempt of the defeated ruling class to retake state power, it was the ‘Revolutionary Paris, Counter-
revolutionary France’ dichotomy. The first generation Bolsheviks were always preoccupied with the memory
of the Paris Commune. (Remember the story of Lenin dancing in the snow when the Soviets survived a day
longer than the Commune.)
The Soviet response to the weakening of the strategic class alliance was to accelerate production, guided by
limited and narrow economic notions of the forces of production, to meet the sometimes conflicting demands
and needs of the working class (small) minority and the peasant (large) majority. That this was also Lenin’s
response can be clearly seen in his remarks to the 11th CPSU Congress. (Zizek uses some phrases from this
for one of his “ruthless Lenin” provocations.) This response was implemented through the party’s growing
monopoly of positions of governmental authority. Less and less priority was put on transforming the rela-
tions of production and reproduction through the expansion of democratic and participatory institutions,
and when moves in this direction potentially conflicted with economic growth, as they almost always did,
the initiatives were routinely crushed.
It was true that significant economic growth was needed to satisfy enough of the practical expectations
that people had of the revolution to maintain the class alliance between workers and peasants. However, when
the growth was not easily achieved, the increasingly centralized party authority opted for capitalist concep-
tions of industrial efficiency, Taylorism and one man management. The centralization of the party took on
an increasingly technocratic character, promoting notions that its leadership and “guiding role” could and
should be exercised through monopolizing positions of bureaucratic authority. This essentially ended any
discussions about alternative approaches. Where such alternatives emerged, including attempts to expand
popular control, they first were seen as disruptive and – rather quickly – as counter revolutionary.”

What’s great about this is Hamerquist is NOT using the technological underdevelopment of the means of production as an excuse for the Bolshevik’s solidification of state capitalist dictatorship. He leaves open the possibility of a more democratic/ libertarian way of reorganizing the economy to “satisfy enough of the practical expectations that people had of the revolution.” But he is challenging the Left, and particularly anarchist critics of the Bolshevik answer to this question to come up with better answers. I do think this is key – a revolution will lead to all sorts of expectations folks will have of immediate material improvement. If the economy can’t be reorganized to deal with questions like the destruction of midwest production centers (Detroit, Gary, etc.), or the ecological crisis, or the need for health care, then folks will go over to the counter-revolution. How can all of this be done in a direct democratic, less ruthlessly centralized way? I think it can be done, but we need to seriously think in through, as always building and expanding from the self-activity of the working class today and not from some technocratic blueprint for the kitchens and farms of the future.

Some of the specific questions of the working class-peasantry alliance does not apply to the class realities of the US, but we do still have to wrestle with the regional (and racialized) unevenness of US politics. For example, if the North became revolutionary and the South did not we’d be back in the same trouble we’ve faced in the past in this country: civil war. I just read an article about the rapid growth of all white “exurbs” – as people of color move into the suburbs a second round of white flight is happening again now, and these Crackervilles are breeding grounds of vicious white supremacy and anti-immigrant reaction. In particular, this seems like a disaster because it’ll make it hard for the increasingly majority people of color working class to win over elements of the petit bourgeoisie to the side of the revolution. If the petit bourgeoise is located in the same city as the working class then it can be persuaded through mass mobilization to support working folks…. but if it’s sequestered with the elites in racist compounds then it’ll be a lot harder to deal with.

For a long time, I was relatively convinced by Murray Bookchin’s idea of libertarian municipalism. He holds the Paris Commune up as a model and points out that cities have often been the bases of direct democracy. He imagines cities becoming autonomous polities, self-sufficiently integrated with the immediately surrounding countryside. I’m not so sure of this anymore. In a revolution, West Seattle will have more in common with Watts then it will with Redmond (home of Bill Gates). And if “Cascadia” (urban Seattle -Olympia-Tacoma, etc.) can’t win over the rural proletariat of Eastern Washington then we could end up in a civil war with white reactionaries. I think Wetzel gets at the same critique of Bookchin in his response to Hamerquist’s piece.

We need to think about how we can deal with all of these questions without reinforcing the capitalist domination of the city over the countryside or the general political domination of the coastal US over the interior. Anarchists and libertarian socialists need to come up with better solutions than building farming cooperatives and such in the countryside where many Brown and Black folks will not want to go. We also need to do better than simply focusing on urban movement building on the coasts without trying to do the difficult and often functionally illegal organizing that needs to be done in places like the decentralized manufacturing centers of small towns in the US South and along the US Mexico border. I want to make it clear this is a self-critique of my own organization too and something we need to seriously think about in the upcoming years.

Well, I better get to sleep so I don’t fall asleep at work tomorrow… I’ll finish up the rest of my points this weekend…..

apologies for the confusion. I agree the NPA is a different animal. I was kind of short hand on this point:

I was just trying to indicate that this question of regroupment is fairly widespread on the Left right now–both revolutionary left and the “left edge” of social democracy as you put it well.

But beyond those differences, and the basic fact I was trying to gives a heads up to, I think that even with regroupment on that “left edge” revolutionaries will have to deal with. The situation in Europe seems to be parties on the left edge without out roots in an independent working class movement–something I’ve followed mainly through International Socialist Journal, International Viewpoint, and WSWS. I’m not exactly sure what this would look like in the U.S. under very different conditions. If this was to be just another uniting at the top of progressive movers and headliners than that’s one thing, but if it fused with bases of activity in the class then I think revolutionaries have to take seriously how to relate this.

I think it will be useful to turn to Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party, the early Communist Party, the history of the labor party concept in the U.S., and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns to get some historical perspective.