Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement

Gilles Dauvé, François Martin

Description

In the years following 1968, a number of people involved in the most radical aspects of the French general strike felt the need to reflect on their experiences and to relate them to past revolutionary endeavors. This meant studying previous attempts and theories, namely those of the post-1917 German-Dutch and Italian Communist Left. The original essays included here were first written between 1969 and 1972 and circulated amongst left communist and worker circles.

But France was not the only country where radicals sought to contextualize their political environment and analyze their own radical pasts. Over the years these three essays have been published separately in various languages and printed as books in both the United States and the UK with few changes. This third English edition is updated to take into account the contemporary political situation; half of the present volume is new material.

The book argues that doing away with wage-labor, class, the State, and private property is necessary, possible, and can only be achieved by a historical break, one that would certainly differ from October 1917… yet it would not be a peaceful, gradual, piecemeal evolution either. Like their historical predecessors—Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Amadeo Bordiga, Durruti, and Debord—the authors maintain a belief in revolution.

Sujets

• Working class
• Communization
• Ultra-leftism
• Capitalism
• Révolution

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629630557
• Langue: English

Extrait

Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement
Gilles Dauvé and François Martin
Voices of the Paris Commune
edited by Mitchell Abidor
From Crisis to Communisation
Gilles Dauvé
Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed
edited by Mitchell Abidor

Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement
Gilles Dauvé and François Martin
This edition copyright © 2015 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1–62963–043–4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014908066
Cover by John Yates/Stealworks
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
Note: Half of the texts in the present book were written and made public in France between 1969 and 1972. This anthology is published for the third time (or the fourth including a partial Japanese edition). Instead of adding yet another preface, the editors thought it better to end the book with a "postlude" in order to take stock of how times have changed since the 1970s.
In this PM Press edition, extensive changes have been made in chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4. Chapters 5 and 6 are new, and so is chapter 7 , the postlude.
CONTENTS
Preface to the Japanese Edition of No. 1 and No. 2 of Le Mouvement Communiste
Foreword to the 1974 Black & Red Edition
Foreworld: Out of the Future (1997)
1) The Untraceable
2) Wall Street v. Berlin Wall
3) 1968 and All That
4) Working Man’s Blues
5) High Hopes …
Chapter 1 Capitalism and Communism
1) Wage-Labour as a Social Relation
2) "Value" as a Destroyer … and Promoter of Community
3) Commodity
4) Capital
5) A World of Companies
6) Bureaucratic (or "State") Capitalism
7) Crisis
8) Proletariat and Revolution
9) Communism as the End of Economy and Work
10) Communisation
11) States and How to Get Rid of Them
12) Democracy?
13) Break on through (to the Other Side)
Chapter 2 The Class Struggle and Its Most Characteristic Aspects in Recent Years
1) May 1968, France
2) Strikes and Workers’ Struggles Since 1968
3) The Two Most Characteristic Aspects of the Strikes
4) Forms of Action Which Cannot Be Recuperated: Sabotage and "Down-timing"
5) Parties and Unions in the Face of the Communist Perspective
Chapter 3 A Crash Course in Ultra-Leftology
1) Out of the Past 90
2) Beyond Words and Beyond Belief
3) The German-Dutch Left
4) Bordiga
5) The Salient Point
Chapter 4 Leninism and the Ultra-Left
1) Party or Council?
2) Managing What?
3) The Historical Limit of the Ultra-Left
Chapter 5 Value, Time, and Communism: Re-reading Marx
1) The Origin of Value
2) Work Abolished, or Work as Our Prime Want?
3) Time as Measure
4) Community Planning
5) Council Communism and Labour Time
6) Bordiga’s Critique
7) Does Value Abolish Itself?
8) Marx as a Marxist
Chapter 6 The Bitter Victory of Councilism
Chapter 7 Postlude
1) Revolutionary Optimism and Historical Determinism
2) What Heritage Do We Renounce?
3) "Class": What Class?
4) Surge
5) The Proletariat as a Contradiction
Notes
About the Authors
PREFACE TO THE JAPANESE EDITION OF NO. 1 AND NO. 2 OF LE MOUVEMENT COMMUNISTE
The first two essays in this book were translated and published in Japan in the 1970s. Here is the 1973 preface, modified and abridged with new notes added. 1
In France, as everywhere else, what is usually known as Marxism has nothing to do with revolution. In this topsyturvy world, wage-labourers are exploited in "socialist" countries, while "communist parties" support capitalism in more ways than one. Communism has become a synonym for working hard and obeying one’s "socialist" boss. Most parties called communist have been and are nationalist, colonialist, and imperialist. As Paul Mattick wrote at the close of the Second World War: "Today every programme and designation has lost its meaning; socialists speak in capitalistic terms, capitalists in socialistic terms and everybody believes anything and nothing. This situation is merely the climax of a long development which has been initiated by the labour movement itself…. Only by standing outside the labour movement has it been possible to work towards decisive social changes." 2
The first condition for a minimum revolutionary action is indeed to "stand outside" and break with all forms of Marxism, whether they come from CPs or left-wing intellectuals. Marxism is part of capitalist society in its theory as well as its practice. 3
Nowadays, when the long counter-revolution which followed the post-1917 revolutionary movement is finally coming to a close, a new movement is rising. 4 At the same time, capital is trying to defang it, and is preparing to destroy it violently if it cannot be deflected. The re-emergence of revolution is accompanied by many forms of superficial criticism which do not go to the heart of the matter, and help capital adapt itself. Obviously radicalisation results from diverse experiences. But pseudo-revolutionary groups deliberately gather people on partial demands in order to prevent them to go any further. They claim to go back to revolutionary principles, but are ignorant of them. At best, their view of communism mixes a partial social re-shuffling with democratic worker control or management, plus automation. In other words, no more than what capital itself talks about. They "critically" support the official CPs, socialist parties, the USSR, China, Cuba, etc. These groups are counter-revolutionary. The argument that they organise workers is irrelevant: CPs do the same, which does not prevent them from repressing workers when they think it necessary. Trotskyism, Maoism, even anarchism in some bureaucratic and degenerated forms, are counter-revolutionary.
Past experience shows why demarcation lines are necessary. In 1939, the capitalist system could only recover through a full-scale worldwide war. Russia had been forced to develop capitalism after the defeat of revolution in Europe, and was ready to ally with one side or the other according to its State interests. Germany, Italy, and Japan were fascist. In the Western democracies, socialist and "communist" parties managed to rally the masses and persuaded them that unlike 1914–18, the new world war was to free mankind from the horrors of dictatorship. Trotskyism also supported this view and most Trotskyists took the side of the allied powers against Germany and Japan. Yet the triumph of democracy in 1945 has proved destructive. People no longer die in concentration camps except where there are concentration camps, as in Russia, China, etc. But millions starve. The extreme left (Trotsky and many others) had helped capitalism rejuvenate itself.
Marx had to fight against Proudhon. Lenin, Pannekoek, Bordiga had to fight against Kautsky. Pannekoek and Bordiga had to fight against Lenin, and later against Trotsky. 5
The present communist movement needs to assimilate its past, to fully grasp what really happened in 1917–21 and how today differs from yesterday. Communist revolution will not promote a further development of production: capital has already accomplished this in a large number of countries. The transitional phase will consist of the immediate communisation of society, which includes armed insurrection: the State’s military might cannot be underestimated. Besides, the working class has become such a potential social force that it is vital for capitalism to control it: this is the job of the unions and workers’ parties, so one must prepare to confront them.
This is only possible through the implementation of the communist programme: abolition of the market economy; creation of new social relations where labour does not rule the whole of life, but is integrated into it; destruction of economics as such, of politics as such, of art as such, etc.
Speaking of theory, one can and must use Marx’s works (which includes translating and publishing them when they are not available). Our motto is: Do not read the Marxists, read Marx! 6 It is also useful to study those who resisted counterrevolution: people like Pannekoek, Bordiga, etc., who despite misconceptions are relevant to our problems. Other groups, like the Situationist International, are also important, though they lack an understanding of capital. 7 Also it is important for revolutionaries everywhere to study the revolutionary past of their country.
Such activity implies a break with politics. Revolutionaries do not only have different ideas (or even actions) from pseudo-revolutionaries. What they are is different, and the way they act is. They do not try to enrol people in order to represent them and be a power in their name. Revolutionaries are not leaders, educators, memory keepers or information providers. We neither lead nor serve the proles.
Communists are not isolated from the proletariat. Their action is never an attempt to organise others, only to express their own subversive response to the world. Ultimately, revolutionary initiatives will interconnect. But our task is not primarily one of organisation: it is to convey (in a text or an action) an antagonistic relation to the world. However big or