Re: AUT: unions against the war??

[Chris Wright <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Neil, et al...

> my point here is that communists have to be scientific and
> study the pol. terrian of struggle/methods employed in the  big
> mass motions because just looking to objective criteria alone
> to bring the masses into revolutionary conclusions, determination,
> steadfastness to  wage a  good fight for rev. changes  is woefully lacking
> the social contradictions involve BOTH  objective and subjective
> factors at work. Yes, I think an Comm. internationalist Pol. currents will
> grow in influence to some degree and eventually new parties will be born --
> but mainly out of the new struggles growing themselves.  But also likely is
> that as the crisies deepen , reactionary  forces growth , maybe even coming
> originally from 'populism' of various sorts, is a big possiblilty too.

Well, aside from objecting to that notion of scientific, we do have to
study what is happening.  We should be trying to grasp the contours and
kinds of new forms of struggles taking place.  That is important stuff
to do because it can be helpful for us.. but to what end?  More on that
below.

Your notion of what is objective and what is subjective is very
interesting.  The masses and capital are objective forces, but our
engagement with them is the subjective force.  This is quite the
opposite of what I think on this matter.  It is the subjectivity of the
workers which to me matters and it is not something which can be talked
about in this way.  You pose the revolutionaries as the subjective
forces which can modify the 'object' called 'masses'.  This is how one
can talk about 'the masses', since one considers 'them' to require 'our'
assistance to 'come to revolutionary conclusions'.

For all of the criticism that happens of Lenin on this list, he at least
held, from 1905 onwards, the opinion that the workers did not need the
party/revolutionaries to come to revolutionary conclusions or to even
make the revolution.  In fact, in his discussion of the July Days in
1917, he said quite explicitly that the workers needed the party for one
thing: to hold power.  Not to take power, not to smash the state, not to
overthrow capital, but to hold power.  And still 'libertarian'
communists often fall into more archaic positions.  Of course, if the
issue is not the assumption of state power, then it seems that the
vanguard party is not necessary at all, is it?  Which means that the
real problem with Lenin is not his notion of the vanguard party, but his
very conceptions of revolution, communism and liberation.

Even worse this kind of talk after the experience of Hungary in 1956 and
of struggles in other places, where the revolutionaries have not told
people what to do (and where they have, they have made a worse mess of
things.)

I believe that workers need organization and I believe that the
revolution requires revolutionaries.  We can do things which most
workers cannot, but most of it is not around the role of 'organizer of
the masses', of the directors and professional revolution managers.  We
have important critiques to offer of stuff like Populism, of the history
of the workers here and elsewhere, etc.  We can provide a lot of
information that people find useful and we can help people to link up.

I am profoundly convinced, Neil, that you are still thinking in the
framework of Social Democratic/Engelsian notions of objective and
subjective.  And I mean that in a specific way: even the council
communists maintained some theoretical notions that were directly
inherited from Social Democracy.  Aufheben's critique of them in the
"Theories of Decadence or Decadence of Theory?" series is really apt on
that.  I do NOT mean it as some jab regarding the desire for a
bureaucratic, parliamentarist party.  I know you are not going there and
neither am I.

> So, yes to  a degree, communists have to wage a battle for the hearts and
> minds of workers doing so  politically Organized -- things don't stand
> still
We agree formally and partially, but what are we talking about here?

I agree that we can make a unique contribution to the critique of
bourgeois ideology.  I agree that we can play a role in clearing away
that clutter, as a part of the process of defetishizing.  We HAVE to
make that contribution.

We can defend the complete autonomy of workers in struggle, fighting
against any attempts to impose bureaucratic/hierarchic/what have you
forms of organization that demobilize the workers and undermine our
self-organization and initiative and sense of class unity.

In other words, we have to battle against bourgeois ideology
theoretically and practically, but not because we need to win workers to
communism (something which, at most, five thousand people in a country
of 285 million, will not do) since 'communism is the real movement of
the class', ie the actual struggle of the workers ourselves, not a state
to be achieved or an idea to convince people of.

After that, most of what we do is not specifically
communist/revolutionary per se (I am leaving out issues of what role we
would play in councils during and after the revolution.)  Everything
else we should be doing is what non-communist workers will do themselves
in struggle.  Nothing else we do will be unique.  Communists did not
teach workers to form councils.  Communists did not teach workers to do
a sit-down strike.  Communists did not teach workers to have wildcats.
Communists did not teach Black people to do sit-ins.  Communists did not
teach Black people to burn down shops in Watts.  Communists did not
teach women to burn their bras or organize in the home.

In fact, communists have a really piss poor record in coming up with
innovative ways to struggle.  Part of that has to do with communists
suffering from all the same mess as everyone else.  We are not, in
general, less fetishized.  '2nd Wave' feminism in part grew out of a
critique of the chauvinism of the New Left and Old Left men.  Black
nationalism had such a strong foothold because most white Leftists acted
like white folks and thereby alienated the majority of Black and Latino
workers getting active.

But even more important, new forms of struggle only come from the
'spontaneous' (and this is really an abused word, since it is only
spontaneous to people who are on the outside and didn;t see it coming)
struggle of the oppressed and exploited themselves in their specificity.
Let's be clear, this is not spontaneity in the usual sense.  Spontaneity
here is more like finally finding a solution based on the collective
working together on this problem, in specific, concrete conditions, over
a great deal of time.  It is not 'spontaneous' in the sense that it just
popped into someone's head.  I could make an argument that one would
have to go to Hegel's notion of spontaneity here for help, but I'll
leave it at that.

I am sorry if this seems like a long digression, but I don't think it
is.  We have to take stock of exactly what we can and cannot expect of
pro-revolutionaries before we decide what we are going to open our yaps
about in public.  What can and must we do?

It is NOT winning the hearts and minds of the billions of workers to
communism.  That is a pipe dream which will divert serious people into
years and years of wasted effort.

IMO, the issue is relentless critique, but critique in a broad sense,
not just written words (that is important enough.)  Critique in the
sense of the SI against art, the disruption of daily life, the
disruption of the familiar, disruption of the avante-guardists and
vanguardists and the reformists/liberals and the rest.  This has its own
problems, but there are ways to do this, it seems to me, that the DIY
scenes, the Linux/Open Source movement and the events in Chiapas and
Argentina have all pointed to in different ways and in different
situations.  It also means critique by the refusal to organize
ourselves, the revolutionaries, in alienated/fetishized ways.  It means
acting towards each other and towards our class in a different way, eg
NOT as 'the masses', as 'us' and 'them' or as 'militants' to
'multitude.'  We have to go beyond that crap, which means recognizing
finally what we can do that is uniquely communist.  On that, I really
think Marx's pithy little point in the Manifesto is still vastly
underrated and misunderstood.

It does not seem active enough to activists, nor does it seem bossy
enough to junior bureaucrats.  It involves no pedagogy (making
information available and sharing ideas is not assuming the
teacher/taught relation of pedagogy, of assuming superior
consciousness), no convincing people of anything, no proselytizing(sic),
no standing on a corner hawking newspapers, no recruitment (though that
does not mean Situationist aversion to people joining!), etc.

It involves finding whatever means of communicating we can.
Publications are fine, including the 'full fountain pen' type newspaper
and and leaflets and jouranls.  So are tapes and CD's of materials.  So
is getting local access cable shows or access to the radio waves (though
contrary to Guattari on radio and minitel, it is not the cure-all) or to
theatre.

It means deciding what we are communicating, which as I have emphasized
is critique of every aspect of bourgeois ideology, especially the stuff
that has become commonplace even, as a friend of mine put it,
ubiquitous.

It means circulating struggles through our communication, through
creating spaces where people can meet, talk, engage, non-commodified
spaces.  That might at times mean taking over spaces, etc.  The details
are situation-specific.

In relation to this war, it means what we do put out has to relentlessly
critique the war propaganda and it has to have something to say about
the anti-war movement and its different wings.  It has to say it all
from a communist perspective, but clearly and in understandable
language.

I was thinking about No War But The Class War, therefore, in relation to
the US.  Its a good idea.  The name is a bit much for the US scene, but
the attitude is right on. I am not fond of the militaristic sound of
'class war' as something we are happy about.  I mean, yeah, there's a
class war, and we are going to fight it to the end, we have no choice,
but its to end war forever, not because the class war is bloody glorious
or anything.

But I tend to agree with Harald's last post on this (and on Thomas and
Harald's assessments of the influence of existing Leftists like ANSWER
in the anti-war movement.)

Cheers,
Chris

ps - I am trying to work through exactly the questions of organization
raised here for myself.  Sorry if this reply is a bit muddled,
therefore.  I have a combination of Debord, CLR James, Lenin, Marx,
Pannekoek, etc. my own questions, and some random stuff running through
my head right now.



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