💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › la-banquise-re-collecting-our-past.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:59:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Re-Collecting Our Past Author: *La Banquise* Date: 1983 Language: en Topics: ultra left, communization, communism, history Source: Retrieved on 2022-08-06 from https://libcom.org/article/re-collecting-our-past-la-banquise Notes: Translated from
« One cannot transform capitalist terrain into proletarian terrain »
Octobre, Nº 4, April 1938.
Most of this issue of La Banquise is devoted to a summary of the modern
revolutionary movement. Summing up the past, including the recent past,
and taking soundings of the contemporary period in order to recognise
some of its basic tendencies, is essential in order to know who and
where we are. You will only find an assessment here, not the complete
global summing up which will only be possible after the world
revolution. Each revolutionary grouping can only take stock by starting
from its own position, formation and particular experience. This text is
not a group introspection, nor is it an assertion of general principles
and movements which we pretend to describe as a whole, instead it seeks
to be both universal in its basis, through the aspirations and struggles
of which it is the product, and also particular, because its authors
participated in the world communist movement in specific places and
circumstances. It would be wrong, not to say untrue, to believe and to
instil belief in an absolute summing up : like every revolutionary group
we have a relative position and activity within the totality of a social
movement, that is expressed and influenced, but not created, by
collective efforts such as ours.
It is obvious, for example, that a revolutionary who has come from
anarchism would have conceived this assessment differently. He might
arrive at similar conclusions, however his trajectory would be
different. But just like us he would not have made Marx and the
communist left into a dead end.
On the other hand, we haven’t written about everything that we consider
important. The essential consideration was to deal with the things which
have formed us, but this does not mean that the contribution of other
critiques which are only mentioned or passed over in silence has been
negligible. For the same reason, to deal with our relations with la
Guerre Sociale and the Faurisson affair in a merely allusive way, would
have been unacceptable and absurd.
Fundamentally, the connecting thread of this text is the relation
between capitalism and the human activity from which, without ever
entirely exhausting it, it draws its dynamism. The proletarian movement
is neither based on feelings, nor on the hope that one day capitalism
will become truly unbearable. Revolt « with a human title », universal
and non-categorial, is certainly born from a limit of Capital, one which
is expressed amongst other things in economic crises, but which cannot
be reduced to them. Capital doesn’t find its limit in absolute misery,
or in the loss of the sense of life, but in the difficulties it has in
absorbing the energy of living labour, of the proletarian. While these
difficulties appear above all within the organisation of work, they are
also felt in the proletarian’s whole life, especially as Capital has
colonized the conditions of the reproduction of life.
It is in those periods when new forms of the integration of labour by
Capital are installed — in the middle of the 19 century, around 1914–18,
and at the present time — that the critique of the basis of capitalism,
rather than of its inevitable but secondary consequences, becomes
possible. More exactly, in such periods, critique can rise from effects
(poverty, unemployment, repression, etc.) to their cause : dispossession
by the market and wage labour.
Where can a society go which is based on work and yet which makes it
impossible ? To take shelter from the social consequences of the crisis
(unruly unemployed), it creates something which is an anomaly, if not an
absurdity, in terms of its own logic : it gives a wage (« social » and
not « productive ») without any equivalent work, a kind of insurance, a
little like the way in which it (badly) pays the disabled and the
elderly. Capital undermines its own coherence when non-work pays, albeit
less than work does, but in the same manner. Similarly, the collective
character of labour removes any sense of remuneration for personal
effort. The individual wage is no longer anything except an instrument
for dividing workers, whereas formerly individual wage negotiations
responded to real differences in the work they provided. In all of this,
as in automation, wage labour remains whereas work quite simply becomes,
not superfluous, but inessential in a large part of society and of
production. We are at the stage, already described by Marx, where all
individual workers participate in the production of value.
The struggles of unskilled workers, disputes in the space outside work,
the refusal of work, (in which the left and leftism only see reactions,
the consequences of exploitation), all contain something which confronts
those things which future revolutionaries will dissolve, because these
movements come up against (without being able to overthrow it) that
which capitalises human activity.
The reduction of everything to the minimum time necessary to accomplish
it, the accumulation of small blocks of crystallised time, this is the
domination of value. We devote the shortest time to the production of
things, and in the same way, to each act of life. We thus produce
objects incorporating the least possible time. The life of proletarians
is subjected to this search for productivity, to the point that they
partially internalise it. The secret and the madness of valorisation
consists in always trying to obtain more from less, a maximum from a
minimum. Something that is impossible, but which seems accessible by
means of technology incorporating an accumulation of past labour, and
turned into value by as small a living labour as possible.
On the way what becomes of the person who provides this living labour ?
In his life he knows the limit-experience of exhaustion which, in a
different context, Capital forces the earth to undergo. In the factory
as in the field, the obsession with productivity runs up against the
same limitation : the conditions which it must meet, in order to
constantly reduce the socially necessary labour time for the production
of goods, turn against it. When we say that in twenty years, output per
hectare has doubled or tripled, we forget that this increase presupposes
raw materials and energy. In the United States the relation between the
energy harvested in the form of grain and the energy given to its
production was quantified. Setting aside prices, « the valorisation of
the energy invested in 1970 was no more than 3/4 of what it had been in
1945 ». (L’Année économique et sociale 1978, Le Monde, 1979, p. 158.)
Like the fall in industrial profitability, decreasing agricultural
outputs are not insurmountable. But the solution depends on the social
balance of power. While the earth only opposes its inertia to
valorisation, proletarians are the active means for it and its critical
threshold. The crisis of valorisation, which is simultaneously both
cause and effect of action-reaction by proletarians, opens the
possibility of a break with a society based on the systematic search for
productivity.
Capitalism also finds itself in an open situation, which it dreams of
filling by means of technology. Machine automation combines tools and
programming. But the software remains separate from the hardware, the «
programme » is distinct from the purely mechanical and (re)programmable
part. The robot is typical of a world where to make and to learn, to do
and to direct, are kept as distinct realities. The robot is a worker
incorporating his boss. In spite of Taylor, man could not be made into a
machine, so the aim is to make machines into living beings. Specialists
in robotics constantly lapse into anthropomorphism : being
simultaneously « arm », « eye », etc, the robot joins together body and
head, muscles and intelligence. It is the ideal slave by which one
measures « the degree of servitude ». A research project, one of whose
creations was a machine for quadriplegics, was christened Spartacus. In
this vision the robot is to become the prosthesis of a Capital that
would be both disembodied, and freed from the harmful surplus of human
activity, reducing the living being to an unavoidable but controlled
pollution.
Our attempt at a summing up ends with the prospect (only a possibility)
of an upheaval as significant as the industrialisation of the first half
of the 19 century, or the appearance of a new system of production at
the beginning of the 20. However it would be misleading to wait until
proletarians simply revolted against the forward march of a system which
crushes them. Big social movements don’t have a motor, and cannot be
deemed equivalent, for example, to economic crisis or the disastrous
effects of technological progress. They are set in motion by the
contradictions of a universe revealing its faults and aberrations.
There is no guarantee that proletarians will profit from these
contradictions to play their own hand in a crisis which perhaps will
prove to be the transition to another form of production and of
capitalist society. Our action is founded on the double conviction of
the depth of present day contradictions, and of the lack of support,
expressed ideologically, of workers for Capital, unlike the support the
communist left had noted before the second world war or in 1944–5. Class
action, that is to say those practises which link proletarians, advances
matters inside heads through the durable cleavages it creates between
proletarians and everything that sustains capitalism. But this
proletarian experience is only revolutionary if it commits itself to
ways of breaking with capitalist solutions.
It is not enough just to see that under the domination of Capital, which
is capable of penetrating everything and of making durable workers
organisation into one of its relays, the introduction of permanent mass
structures by workers becomes an obstacle to the revolution. It is also
necessary to wonder why. Today the mere defence of the proletarian
condition is a dead end, an unrealisable path or a parasyndicalism. It
is not a matter of dissolving the defence of workers living conditions
into a tide of « new social movements », nor of making it the mainstay
or face of these neo-reformisms. The difficulty today, in theory and
especially in practise, comes from the fact that one can no longer
demand anything, that is to say, anything that positively exists in this
world, whether it be to defend it, to extend it or even less to
transform it in a progressive, proletarian-friendly direction. This is
why a revolutionary movement, and thus also groupings heralding
communism, have such difficulty in emerging.
The revolution will not be the sum of different movements, each fighting
in the name of its own specificity, even while they give pride of place
to a movement that would like to be of the workers. It won’t juxtapose
district committees, women’s groups, environmentalist circles... even if
these are overseen by factory councils. Each constituent part will not
first of all deal with its own condition, instead it will combine into a
whole that will not just change the school, the factory or the manwoman
relation, but will change those things, money and wage relations, which
lie at the root of everything, and thus will overthrow the sectors
through which Capital has either created or maintained specialisation.
People are not wrong to affirm the global expansion of the class of wage
workers (Simon Rubak, Classes laborieuses et révolution, Spartacus,
1979). But this enlargement is accompanied by a polarisation into two
extremes both of which reveal themselves as traps. Workers in the
developed countries (and recently in Poland : cf. our article in
issue 1. of La Banquise) still see themselves too much in terms of a
working class identity that is both archaic and capitalist. The hardest
fought and longest strike in France since 1945 was that at the Parisien
Libéré (1975–77), which simultaneously managed to be capitalist in its
objective of maintaining such a newspaper, trade unionist in its almost
total control by the CGT which turned it into a shop-window for its
capacity for action, and yet which was radical in its methods (taking
power over the newspaper, printing pirate editions, « rodeos » against
scabs, etc.)
At the other extreme, in the third world, proletarianisation is often
momentary, it does not unite around a common condition. The frequent
absence of working class identity goes hand in hand with a lack of
proletarian consciousness and practise. Where the workers of the
developed countries endeavour to escape proletarianisation by confining
themselves within their employment, if not their trade where they have a
qualification, those of the third world try to escape proletarian status
by making it a temporary phase of their existence.
It is never repression or the « pulverisation of the proletariat » which
overcomes revolutionaries, but their inability to understand what
happens and to situate themselves in relation to it. One of the
principal causes of the current weakness of small radical groups, which
at best pushes them towards a flight into activism, is our common
difficulty in understanding the forms of present day proletarian
experience, something we have less grasp of, than of the capitalist
context which endeavours to incorporate it.
This self-understanding of a social movement necessarily remains
partial. We will only look at one fragment of this movement, considered
from a particular angle. We will speak above all about France. Not
because it might have been the centre of a dynamic, but because we are
obliged to speak about what we know best, and communism has only been
strong enough to reach international dimensions for brief moments,
quickly followed by a contraction of perspectives back to the national
context.
---
« Once included into the production process of capital, however, the
means of labour passes through a series of metamorphoses until it ends
up as the machine, or rather as an automatic system of machinery (system
of machinery; automatic merely means the most complete, most adequate
form of machinery, and alone transforms machinery into a system). That
system is set in motion by an automaton, self-moved motive power; this
automaton consists of a large number of mechanical and intellectual
organs, with the workers themselves cast in the role of merely conscious
members of it. » (p. 82)
« (...) the necessary tendency of capital to increase the productive
power of labour and to bring about the greatest possible negation of
necessary labour. » (p. 83)
« In the same measure as labour time — the simple quantity of labour —
is posited by capital as the sole determinant of value, immediate labour
and its quantity disappear as the determining principle of production,
of the creation of use values. It is reduced both quantitatively, in
that its proportion declines, and qualitatively, in that it, though
still indispensable, becomes a subaltern moment in comparison to general
scientific work, the technological application of the natural sciences,
on the one hand, and also in comparison to the general productive power
originating from the organisation of society in overall production (...)
Thus capital works to dissolve itself as the form which dominates
production. » (p. 85–6)
« But in the degree in which large-scale industry develops, the creation
of real wealth becomes less dependent upon labour time and the quantity
of labour employed than upon the power of the agents set in motion
during labour time. And their power — their POWERFUL EFFECTIVENESS — in
turn bears no relation to the immediate labour time which their
production costs (...) » (p. 90)
« Once this transformation has taken place, it is neither the immediate
labour performed by man himself, nor the time for which he works, but
the appropriation of his own general productive power, his comprehension
of Nature and domination of it by virtue of his being a social entity —
in a word, the development of the social individual — that appears as
the cornerstone of production and wealth. The theft of alien labour
time, which is the basis of present wealth, appears to be a miserable
foundation compared to this newly developed one, the foundation created
by largescale industry itself. As soon as labour in its immediate form
has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labour time ceases and must
cease to be its measure, and therefore exchange value [must cease to be
the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased
to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the
non-labour of a few has ceased to be the condition for the development
of the general powers of the human mind. As a result, production based
upon exchange value collapses, and the immediate material production
process itself is stripped of its form of indigence and antagonism. »
(p. 91)
« By striving to reduce labour time to a minimum, while, on the other
hand, positing labour time as the sole measure and source of wealth,
capital itself is a contradiction-in-process. It therefore diminishes
labour time in the form of necessary labour time in order to increase it
in the form of superfluous labour time; it thus posits superfluous
labour time to an increasing degree as a condition — question de vie et
de mort [A matter of life and death] — for necessary labour time. On the
one hand, therefore, it calls into life all the powers of science and
Nature, and of social combinations and social intercourse, in order to
make the creation of wealth (relatively) independent of the labour time
employed for that purpose. On the other hand, it wishes the enormous
social forces thus created to be measured by labour time and to confine
them within the limits necessary to maintain as value the value already
created. The productive forces and social relations — two different
aspects of the development of the social individual — appear to capital
merely as the means, and are merely the means, for it to carry on
production on its restricted basis. IN FACT, however, they are the
material conditions for exploding that basis. » (p. 91–92)
« Labour time as the measure of wealth posits wealth itself as based
upon poverty, and DISPOSABLE TIME only as existing in and through the
opposition to surplus labour time; or the whole time of an individual is
posited as labour time, and he is consequently degraded to a mere
labourer, subsumed under labour. Hence the most developed machinery now
compels the labourer to work for a longer time than the savage does, or
than the labourer himself did when he was using the simplest, crudest
implements. (...) » (p. 94)
« Just as with the development of large-scale industry the basis on
which it rests, appropriation of alien labour time, ceases to constitute
or to create wealth, so, this development takes place, immediate labour
as such ceases to be the basis of production. That happens because, on
the one hand, immediate labour is transformed into a predominantly
overseeing and regulating activity; and also because, on the other hand,
the product ceases to be the product of isolated immediate labour, and
it is rather the combination of social activity that appears as the
producer. » (p. 94–95)
Marx, 1857–58 Manuscripts (Grundrisse), Marx Engels Collected Works vol
29, International Publishers, 1987.
« First, with the development of the real subsumption of labour under
capital, or the specifically capitalist mode of production, the real
lever of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual
worker. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various
competing labour-powers which together form the entire production
machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of
making commodities, or, more accurately in this context, creating the
product. Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one
as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the
third as manual labourer or even drudge. » )
Marx, Results of the Immediate Process of Production. in Capital I,
Penguin, 1976, pp. 1039–1040
« The product is transformed from the direct product of the individual
producer into a social product, the joint product of each collective
labourer, i.e. a combination of workers, each of whom stands at a
different distance from the actual manipulation of the object of labour.
With the progressive accentuation of the co-operative character of the
labour process, there necessarily occurs a progressive extension of the
concept of progressive extension of the concept of productive labour,
and of the concept of the bearer of that labour, the productive worker.
In order to work productively, it is no longer necessary for the
individual himself to put his hand to the object; it is sufficient for
him to be an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of
its subordinate functions. »
Marx, Capital I, Penguin, 1976, pp. 643–44.
Whether or not they are our contemporaries, we could point to numerous,
sometimes reciprocal, relationships between those groups and individuals
which have made us what we are. It would be absurd to claim any
organisational continuity. But might we not speak of an invariance, or
at least a doctrinal thread ?
No eclectic revolutionary exists who can be content to take his
inheritance just as he finds it. If today we read a profound thought
which transforms us in the work of Flora Tristan, tomorrow a second in
the work of Bakunin, later still a third in the work of Marx, this can
only enrich us if their contributions form part of a coherence that is
constructed and modified, but which still tends towards a unitary
critique. It is pointless to reject eclecticism in the name of a
doctrinal purity. Instead one rejects it almost naturally because a
communist movement exists. Moreover it is the conviction of that
existence which forms the difference between our « current », of which
La Banquise is an aspect, and other revolutionaries. Beyond a historical
clarification, this text will have achieved its aim if it illuminates
what the communist movement is, its nature as well as its present day
expressions.
Perhaps one day the human being will be a capitalised mutant. In the
meantime, it is comforting to note that they still haven’t succeeded in
manufacturing such beings, and we doubt they ever will. As past and
present history shows us, the human being is characterised, amongst
other things, by the fact that he engages in activity with other beings.
Through this relation, he transforms himself while transforming that
which surrounds him. This is what distinguishes humanity from the «
societies » of insects or of apes, etc. (See La Banquise no. 1 « For a
World without Moral Order ».) The communist movement is the human
tendency to make this activity and this relation the main element of
human life, a theoretical and practical tendency which appears
embryonically, without calling society into question, within elementary
acts of solidarity and help, and at the level of society, through a
revolutionary movement.
« The question of sovereignty thus leads straight to the communist
organisation, and by the same token arouses all those questions which
derive from the rational causes of the existence of a state of
society... What is society ?... Society only exists due to the fact of
the connection between men, putting in common their diverse faculties...
consequently, its object is to use these forces, this collective power
for the greatest good of all... » (La Fraternité de 1845, 1847)
99% of all known societies are based on man’s exploitation by man, and
on the oppression of groups by a dominant class, which interposes
mediations between beings and their activity : the State, religion,
politics, etc. Yet, this anticommunist world would not function without
the human tendency towards communism, however diverted and degraded it
is. One of the most alienated conditions of work is the need for
activity, just as the necessity to act and to go beyond oneself enables
the dispossession of yourself in religion, in politics and in art.
Communism is what one does and what one has in common with others. It is
a function necessary to all existence and to all action. Then, one will
ask, does « communism » exist everywhere ? Yes. The communist movement
is the coherent action and expression of this irresistible tendency,
which helps to assure the triumph of what is common to humans, their
being-together. Societies of exploitation play on this latent community
and the need which everyone has for it, the need to act together, and on
this basis they build up a string of small groups or individuals linked
together, above all, by the intermediary of the state or the market.
Gregariousness and individualism go hand in hand. Communism, on the
contrary, is the need to be and to act together, but without abdicating
your own autonomous existence and action.
The communist movement is thus, by nature, multiform and convergent. It
doesn’t fear doctrinal impurity. By contrast, the politician, himself,
must be either inheritor or founder. For politics filiation poses an
eternal problem. To regroup the separated it needs reference points,
ancestors and founders. And conversely, in the work of the specialists
in sceptical research, who need to seek without finding, a phobia for
tradition imposes itself.
In the economy, just as in the life of societies, despite the importance
of movements of long duration, for us the crucial moments are those
where communism leaves its everyday phenomenological reality to emerge
as an offensive social force. That was the case in the years before and
after 1848 and after 1917, which constitute key periods in its history.
In both cases however the proletariat did not go far enough forward to
become unified and truly act for themselves. These intense periods
remain no less decisive, in practise as well as « doctrinally ». On the
other hand, the long phases which followed these breakdowns increased
their dispersion — the theoretical fracturing corresponding to the
disintegration of the movement. In 1933 the journal Bilan noted in its
first issue that since 1923 « the vision of revolutionary development
all over the world (...) is no longer unitary ».
Turning back to these two pivotal moments — 1848 and 1917 — is more than
historical reminder. Summing up the debates which have animated the
revolutionary movement since the sixties, they make it possible to see
whether the open historical phase that has existed for about fifteen
years could lead to another of these intense periods. What you will read
about 1848 or 1917 also expresses the route travelled by an entire
generation. Obviously we don’t put Marx or the Russian revolution on the
same level as la Vieille Taupe ! But its necessary to know what la
Vieille Taupe thought about the Russian revolution in order to
understand it, and to know what we think of Marx in order to understand
us. This is not a matter of evaluating what we have borrowed from here
or there, nor of weighing the pro’s and con’s. Revealing the limitations
of a particular current counts for less than its overall movement and
the depth of its contribution. Rather it is a question of showing how
and why ideas, which in those periods were subversive, became
transformed into ideology.
« (...) ideology is not constructed from the errors of the radical
critique which gave birth to it, but from the historical truth which the
latter will have brought out, or contributed to bringing out. » (To
finish with work and its world, C.R.C.R.E no. 1, June 1982.)
Why constantly return to 1848 ? It is neither a matter of Eurocentrism,
nor of contempt for the millennia which preceded the industrial era.
Before the 19century, the communist movement was already present within
natural, that is to say social, communities, and also within those
artificial communities bonded together by religion or by a
semi-religious utopia. Moreover, before the 19 century there was already
a « working class ». At the beginning of the 16 century, it is thought
that the troops of Thomas Munzer primarily gathered together workers,
weavers and miners living in cities. In the Hanseatic cities at the
start of the 18century, in Leyden about 1670 and in Paris in 1789, at
least half of the population was made up of wage workers. It is
estimated that there were 1.5 million textile workers in the south of
Belgium and the north of France about 1795. While wage labourers were
numerous in the urban centres, they were also found in the countryside.
In short, society everywhere generated this vast layer of the uprooted
and dispossessed, those whom Sully called « men of nothingness ».
In any case, a low level of « development of the productive forces » has
never prevented the communisation of society. In those rare societies
near to communism which can still be seen today, where exploitation,
private property and coercive institutions are unknown, and where the
environment doesn’t pose a problem, material production is barely
developed.
Whereas communism locates true wealth in the act of production itself,
capitalism is animated by the need to produce. It considers the product
before the process, and this chronological impossibility obliges it to
organize itself in order to cheat time. For Capital, wealth is what one
produces. In communism wealth is what one does, and thus what one is.
Doing goes beyond the age-old alternative between « being » or
« having », which has recently been made flavour of the month through
theorizations of a homo ludens opposed to a homo faber. Doing is not
just the action of the producer; it doesn’t reduce intelligence to a
mere tool; it consists of the multiplicity of possible activities,
including doing nothing. Communist man is not afraid of wasting his
time. Communism goes beyond separations and exists as continual
self-creation : within it being is not one with what it does, and is not
what it does, but is the direction, the future of what it does.
By reinterpreting history, capitalism has finished by making us believe
that men have always wanted to enlarge surpluses and to increase
productivity, whereas it is Capital which has created the need to save
time and, in particular, to systematically reduce labour time. The
primitive community was not dissolved on the day that it first produced
an exchangeable surplus.
There was no threshold of growth beyond which the productive forces
would have necessarily generated commodities, classes and the State. The
deciding factor was social and not economic. In the same way, there is
no threshold of the « abundance » created by Capital, which must be
crossed in order to arrive at communism. The reason that capitalism can
make it possible to pass on to communism is also social. Capitalism
doesn’t restrict itself to developing the forces of production, it also
creates a mass of people who, at the right moment, have both the need
and the capacity to communise the world, to make common again everything
which exists.
Those primitive communities that we can describe as communist are the
exception. Theoretical communism is not a teleology; it doesn’t pretend
that industry was inevitably inscribed in the destiny of humanity. It
only takes note of the fact that human beings did not find within
themselves the means of unifying into a human species. If they had been
telepaths, perhaps the universality of the species would have affirmed
itself differently, by avoiding the long detour through class societies.
But as it exists today humanity will benefit from communising for itself
the means of production and communication created by Capital.
In the absence of modern industry, the followers of Babeuf could only
with difficulty make a revolution. The decisive absence in their time
was not the lack of an abundance of consumer goods, for material wealth
is not simply appreciated in terms of quantity (the revolution will
reorient production and close all those factories which are not
adaptable to communism). What the Babouvists lacked was this mass of
people, who possess the capacity to make their revolt succeed through
having universally unified productive forces at their disposal.
Technology is not so much used to produce goods in abundance as to
create the material basis of social ties. And it is only for this reason
that the capacity to produce a lot, to transport rapidly, etc., are
conditions of communism. The historic contribution of capitalism is the
product of one of the worst horrors it has committed. It has not allowed
man to become social or human, as a human species, while at the same
time it has uprooted him from the soil. Ecology would like to return him
there but man will only once again put down roots if he appropriates all
of his conditions of existence. Having given up the obsession with his
lost roots, he will put down new ones which will weave themselves
together ad infinitum.
The modern proletarian, who appeared in the 19 century, at the same time
as the revival of the word itself, is not more exploited than the slave
or the serf. The difference between them is qualitative : the
proletarian is the first whose exploitation is accompanied by a radical
dispossession of himself at the very moment when the conditions of a
communist revolution seem to have come together. Elementary struggle is
not a form of existence of the proletariat, because the proletariat only
exists as a group of proletarians acting collectively in a revolutionary
sense. Even if embryonically, the proletariat only exists as a
revolutionary force. Within society, there always exists both a diffuse
communist movement and isolated proletarians. Only occasionally, when
the communist movement passes to the offensive, is there a proletariat.
The proletariat is the agent of the communist movement. It tends towards
communism or it is nothing.
If the proletariat possesses reality only within a dynamic, the class
struggle, and cannot be reduced to a statistically measurable quantity,
it still doesn’t just have a merely negative existence — it also exists
in an internal relation to Capital. A necessary bond unites those who
will attempt a communist revolution and their reality within capitalist
social relations. They will only destroy the capitalist relation
inasmuch as they are a constituent part of it. Only the associated
labour which capitalism has generalised gives a consistency to the
connection between the productive activities of proletarians all over
the world. Failing which, this connection can only be ensured by
commodity exchange, by the coexistence of states or through moral force
as in utopia.
Until now, social movements, including the communist left in the 20
century, have wanted to organise men, to create a space in which to join
them together, because they had insufficiently coherent links between
them to rise up. But from the 19century, capitalist development has
created a condition of communism by giving birth to a real « man of
nothingness ». Whatever the scarcity or abundance of goods, this being
is totally denuded, for within his life activity has become secondary to
the market consumption of objects or services, which have now been
rendered essential. The proletarian is the person who is separated from
everything, and who enters into relation with this everything through
needs. Saint-Simon defined the industrialist as the « man who works to
produce or put at the disposal of the different members of society one
or more material means to satisfy their physical needs and tastes ».
Human action now comes second to its result, objectified within a
product which one must buy.
« Look at Raphaël [the hero of The Wild Ass’s Skin (La Peau de
chagrin)]. How the sentiment of self preservation smothers within him
any other thought ! (...) he lives and dies in a convulsion of
selfishness. It is this personality which corrodes the heart and devours
the entrails of the society we live in. As it increases, individuals
isolate themselves; the more ties, the more common life. »
(Balzac, preface to Romans et contes philosophiques, 1831.)
It was in opposition to this degeneration of human activity, in which
poverty became no more than the corollary of the level of consumption,
and in opposition to the new form taken by « wealth » that the communist
movement grew in the middle of the 19 century, through setting as its
goal the recomposition of a man who was not separated from his activity,
from others and from himself. In our opinion Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts are
the best synthesis of this immense aspiration toward a world without
mercantilism or individualism, a world where man is the principle wealth
of man. If for this alone, this text justifies Rosa Luxemburg’s formula
: that Marx thereby expresses a movement which goes beyond himself, and
which exceeds the theoretico-practical needs of his time.
In all periods it is communism which defines the revolutionary movement,
as opposed to the left and leftism. Its wholly negative affirmation
(against the State, against the trade unions, etc.), which in any case
would only really emerge after 1917, is merely a logical consequence of
this. If you really want to destroy the roots of capitalism and not just
organize it differently in order to better distribute its wealth, then
you must attack everything that helps it to function and tends to «
improve » it — the State, politics, trade unionism, etc. Communism is
not a mode of production but above all an entire mode of existence. « To
each according to his needs ? » Yes, but only because communism is
primarily activity. It is not constructed, it liberates the means of
life from capitalist fetters and transforms them.
Economic man is connected to the world by needs, which he satisfies by
producing objects and then by buying them. The revolution, which calls
into question the commodity, also challenges the being defined by needs.
Need implies separation : man needs objects produced outside of himself,
and his perpetually unsatisfied frenzy of consumption arises from this
separation, for it seeks within the object that which is no longer there
: the activity which produced it. In the same way, labour, however
pleasant it is, produces nothing directly for yourself and obliges you
to buy what you need elsewhere. Imposed by 150 years of capitalism, the
concept of need is the result of capital’s integration of human
activity, separated into two successive acts : to produce and to buy.
But, through its violence, the severing of the connection with their
roots in the first half of the 19 century provoked a democratic upsurge
which offered proletarians a substitute community, as political activity
came to compensate for the practical activity they were henceforth
deprived of. However the most outstanding aspects of the movement prior
to 1848, the most forceful texts, and the insurrectionary gestures, such
as the riots by Silesian weavers in 1844 which were theorised by all of
the radicals, showed the working class in the guise of a monster which,
emptied of any substance, could only attack the foundations of the
system. Having made a clean sweep of all previous community,
industrialisation no longer left any space except for a human community.
Engels said of Irish workers that with a few hundred lads of their
calibre one could revolutionise Europe. Balzac echoed this in his own
way when speaking in 1844 of « these modern barbarians which a new
Spartacus, part Marat, part Calvin, would lead in assault on the
wretched Bourgeoisie whose power has expired ». The fact remained that
the social vacuum created by Capital filled itself by itself. In 1848–50
the communists — Marx and Engels included — hardly put communism
forward, even as a distant programme.
Even in its most violent actions, the proletariat did not act as
communists. The Lyons insurrection of 1831, which brought into the open
the question of the working class, was only the self-organisation of
wage labour as such, the hierarchical structure of labour being
transposed into a military community. In June 1848, it was the working
class districts which took up arms but without leaving the arena of wage
labour. As with many other defensive movements, where proletarians are
killed on the spot without taking on their condition. In England, the
riots of 1842 and 1848 were the most violent until those in Brixton in
1982. But Chartism diverted energies into the demand for universal
suffrage. The immense crowd which united on Kensington Common in South
London on April 10, 1848 did not take the next step...
In 1847, Marx wrote : « Economic conditions had first transformed the
mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of
Capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests.
This mass is thus already a class as against Capital, but not yet for
itself. In the struggle (...) this mass becomes united, and constitutes
itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class
interests. » (The Poverty of Philosophy, in Marx Engels Collected Works,
Vol. 6, p.
211). But contrary to the theory the proletariat didn’t act for itself.
The achievements of the — democratic — revolutions of 1848–50 remained
on this side of the hopes of the previous day.
However the twenty years that led up to them were essential in the
formation of the communist movement, and not only theoretically : the
theory would not have approached communism as it did without a practical
movement. To cite only one example, it is sufficient to compare the
forms of organisation before and after 1848. The trade unions which
appeared after 1848 were a regression compared to the first workers’
associations, which had tried to unite professions and different skills
— a union of trades and not trade unions as subsequently. These
associations had combined utopian aspirations, social demands and
political reforms. The communist movement grew on terrain that on the
whole was reformist, but where the question of communism was raised. By
contrast the International Working Men’s Association, founded in 1864,
would above all be an organisation of labour.
In their practise, the proletarians of the first half of the 19 century
remained torn by the coexistence, within the same society, of two
opposed universes : that of Capital, which socialised the world by
uniting them at work, and their own life of not entirely atomised
exclusion, for Capital had not yet completely destroyed the old
collective ties, particularly in the industrial villages formed in the
18 century. At that time revolutionaries believed that they could solve
the contradictions between society and individual, wealth and poverty,
Capital and labour, thanks to a community that arose, not from the «
natural » coherence of activities, but from the practical realization of
a communal principle, whether it be profane or sacred. Saint Simon,
Owen, Cabet and Fourier wished to establish the community like a
business enterprise. Feuerbach compared humanity to a god : « The unity
of me and of you, is God », said Feuerbach. Certain utopians were
communist in that they wanted communism; but they did not want a
revolution.
A social movement, the proletarian movement was also international :
groups of exiles and craftsmen travelled all over Europe. Sometimes it
was also a political movement : many bridges connected it to the
democratic upsurge, which as we have seen ended up by absorbing it.
Cabet, for example, far from being an ivory tower thinker, had a
political career behind him. For a long time he had cherished the
project of rallying the republican opposition around the idea he held of
communism. « ... we, communists, we have always called for and always
will call for the union of all democrats ... » he wrote in 1845. He said
that at this time his paper Le Populaire had « perhaps a hundred
thousand readers ». And it was political failure which incited him to
found Icaria, his ideal society, « elsewhere ».
The real social bond between them being neither sufficiently strong or
visible, people tried to create unity on the basis of a principle that
stood outside the world, but which conformed to man’s essence. Against
the horror of Capital they opposed man’s nature. Utopianism coincided
with anthropology. As Feuerbach said : « Man’s essence is only contained
in the community... Man must lead a life in conformity with his true
nature : a “generic” life ».
Fourier’s strong point was that unlike Cabet he didn’t attempt to form a
« new man ». He started out from what exists, describing the human being
at length and making an inventory of his passions, in order to show,
beyond his function as producer, the plurality of his being. With the
aid of his classifications, he opposed a society, which in 1830 just as
today, primarily saw man as a worker. His critique went beyond the
capitalist era; Fourier took on a « civilisation » within which
capitalism, in his eyes, was no more than one moment, and proposed to
restore nature, which had been pillaged by men. That which humanity must
attain by the natural movement of its needs and actions, Fourier wanted
to organise by means of a plan. This would classify the passions in
order to harmonise them. Critical of science — he let himself be guided
by intuition — Fourier remained a system man. He privileged knowledge
and he looked for THE solution, whose application would depend only on
capitalist good will. Neither politics nor revolution had any place in
his thought, in which the proletariat remained an object.
After Fourier, utopia became radicalised. Always posing the question of
a different life, it wondered about the nature of the revolution which
would bring it into being, and about the forces which would make that
revolution. Prior to 1848 revolutionaries like Dezamy passed from the
problems of the human being to those of social groups and the struggles
which set them in opposition. They no longer started from man’s essence
but from his historical development, and began by making a critique of
alienated labour. The principal reproach they addressed to the utopians
was not of being visionaries, but of hoping to achieve their vision by
means of recipes, instead of conceiving of a solution starting from
existing conditions. By contrast, the theoretical communism of the
period from 1840–48 sought to pierce the secret of the irresistible
force of such a degrading system as capitalism. Rooting itself in
reality, it would espouse its contradictions and finish by being drawn
in to them.
It is to Marx’s credit that he was the first to show that the aspiration
for a human community, some aspects of which could be better expressed
by others like Fourier, can only succeed on the day that social life has
acquired a collective character for all men, and thus crossed a
threshold beyond which associated labour and common action made it
possible to make the revolution. In Capital, Marx would describe the
mechanism of this process, whose content had been outlined in the 1844
Manuscripts. But Marx was to lose the original communist thread through
involving himself in an analysis of capitalism from the inside, and no
longer from a communist perspective. Far too much he would see the
communist movement as being like the movement of the bourgeoisie, a
movement which expanded the development of the productive forces. His
contradiction was to have privileged political economy while making a
critique of it, and to have made a critical study of it without it
ceasing to be his theoretical horizon. Marx simultaneously criticized
Capital from a capitalist point of view and from a communist point of
view, but he forgot that the development of production is only useful to
the proletariat as the means of destroying itself as proletariat. Often
he studied the proletarian condition starting from capitalist
development and not from the social activity confined within in it.
However, he remained the only one, in his time, to offer an overall
vision of the historical process, from the original communities to the
reconciliation between man and nature. Since his work achieved the
greatest synthesis of the period, its contradictions were only the more
acute. The same movement simultaneously led him to develop and to
abandon the communist dynamic. In this way, he expressed in theory the
practical contradictions which the proletariat ran up against in the
middle of the 19 century, and heralded its subsequent conquest by
Capital and then its reappearance as communist proletariat in the 20
century. Marx was the product of the strength and the ambiguity of the
communism of his time.
« Marxism » — the subsequent use of Marx’s work — would resolve the
contradiction that ran through his work by neutralising its subversive
aspect. The tendency of revolutionaries like Marx to bury themselves in
the critique of capitalism in itself, was turned by Marxism into the
sole reality. It is the thought of a world incapable of thinking of
anything other than Capital. « Revolutionary » vis-à-vis pre-capitalist
societies and social strata, it identifies itself with progress and the
economy. In this way Marxism constitutes one of the dominant ideologies.
For theoretical communism Marx is no more and no less exempt from
criticism than Fourier or the communist left after 1914. Those who don’t
understand Fourier or Gorter don’t understand Marx, and vice-versa.
Theoretical communism, as expressed by Marx, cannot be completely
digested by Capital because it contains more than an exposition of the
internal contradictions of capitalism. This is not the case with
Saint-Simonism, for example, whose programme was entirely realised by
Capital : the development of production, the creation of an industrial
class, the reduction of politics to management, the generalisation of
labour. The « industrial system » is Capital. By contrast, even in those
texts by Marx most open to criticism, communism remains present, if only
in negative. To believe in a Marx fully realised by Capital, is to
believe in a Marx as described by Capital.
The qualitative weakness of the proletarian assault in 1848 enabled
Capital to absorb limited aspects of its revolutionary critique. But it
must be recognised that « Marxism » also contaminated revolutionaries,
as much at the end of the 19century as nowadays. The radical groups
which came after Marx believed that capitalist expansion would limit the
segmentation and division of the working class, by removing, for
example, the dominant position of English Capital, and by slowing down
the formation of a privileged working class strata. They did not see
capitalism’s capacity to create a new community, and to absorb the
organisations born from the terrain of the class struggle. The illusion
of the simplification of the communist question through capitalist
universalism remains a widespread idea. No matter what some say, in the
revolutionary ranks « the development of the productive forces » often
remains a good thing in itself.
What past failure hasn’t been explained by the insufficiency of the
degree of industrialisation ! And this error in perspective also deforms
the communist vision. It makes the constitution of the human community
depend on economic growth : « when the productive forces gush forth in
abundance ... » It results in brushing aside the risk of seeing the
emergence of conflicts in communism by postulating the existence of a
humanity that has finally become « good » because it has an easy life.
Both the Left and leftism justify authorities — whether « revolutionary
» or progressive — which they support in the name of the necessity to
manage scarcity. The revolutionaries explain proletarian failures by the
insufficiency of resources.
This illusion amounts to making us, in Guesde’s expression, « the sons
of horsepower ». It takes up the twin dreams — of capitalist and worker
— of being able to escape from exploitation thanks to technology and
automation. Capital dreams of passing beyond the wage-worker, the source
of conflict. Wage workers dream of passing beyond the capitalist, the
boss and the profiteer. The first longs for a machine which dispenses
with human initiative; the second for a machine which would rid them of
human management.
The appearance of « Marxism » at the end of the 19 century was the
product of the remoteness of the communist perspective, which fragmented
and divided itself into two monsters : Marxism and anarchism. (The
choice of the terms attests to the confusion — each having initially
been employed by the other camp before their use imposed itself on
everyone). These two monsters, which grew into two poles of theory and
practise, each erected a partial aspect of communism into the totality.
Marxism hypertrophied the concepts of economic growth and crisis, of the
seizure of power and centralism. Anarchism hypertrophied the concepts of
the liberation of men, of self-government and of autonomy. Isolated,
each of these aspects lost any subversive potentiality; one-sided, they
opened themselves to becoming agents of capitalist modernisation.
Anarchism rewrote history by reducing it to the fight between two
principles : authority and freedom. Marxism interpreted it from the
standpoint of the development of production. When the visionary
dimension remained, as in Bebel with his book on Woman and Socialism, or
in the work of Kropotkin, it was like a mutilated fragment. Anarchism
continued to preach certain modes of refusal of capitalism — free love,
communal life — but detached from a global vision. The synthesis
attempted before 1848 had shattered into pieces.
« As for me, I see a sufficient demonstration of the need for communist
revolution in the social tremors of the inter-war period. In fact, it is
the most sufficient of demonstrations... The disgusting international
situation, constantly aggravated, completely corresponded to this »
(G. Munis, Parti-Etat. Stalinisme. Révolution, Spartacus, 1975, p. 84)
The scale and the depth of the second great proletarian assault are
particularly explained by what proletarians had previously undergone and
undertaken — they had to rebel against what they had largely contributed
to creating. The defence of labour power, undertaken by the labour
movement up to the war in 1914, could neither prepare the revolution,
nor even unite workers. The trade unions never integrated the
unemployed. The latter conducted specific struggles (the big hunger
marches in the US after 1929), but for their own objectives : to obtain
work. During this period employed workers themselves demanded the
maintenance and improvement of their work. On this basis, the
straightforward defence of work, there could be no possible solidarity.
Thus the awakening in 1914 was painful — the proletariat discovered not
only that « its » organisations belonged instead to capitalism, but that
« the class » would only unite itself for radical action and in
violence.
The cynicism of a J. Gould, the American industrialist and
multimillionaire, who in 1886 declared : « I have the means to hire half
the working class to kill the other half » (quoted in F. Browning et J.
Gerassi, Le Crime à l’américaine, Fayard, 1981, p. 183), well expresses
Capital’s contempt for man. But most of the time the capitalists don’t
need to buy the exploited in order to hurl them against the others. The
violence of economic and political contradictions is sufficient to
organize one against another. All « defence of employment », from the
demands of the AIT, to the disguised xenophobia maintained by trade
unions today, ends in protecting wage workers against others.
Gould’s statement sums up his period — the employers strategy in the 19
century did indeed consist of lowering wages and lengthening the working
day, while forcibly opposing attempts at workers organisation. It would
not apply to the period which opened in 1914–18. But in 1909, Lozinsky
still published a rather pessimistic assessment, country by country, of
the situation of Capital and the working class. For him, growth didn’t
improve working class conditions, but sometimes aggravated them.
Democracy was a capitalist weapon. Their own organisations reinforced
workers’ submission to Capital. The factory, which organized workers,
only united them in servitude. Capitalist development didn’t strengthen
the communist movement.
« Then the engineers, the accountants, the technicians multiplied
themselves (...) Because one cannot leave the former savage near the
machinery, he might break it. No, it is necessary that the workers are
instructed and well trained (...) That is why the professors and
writers, these specialised trainers, multiply (...) The democratic state
signifies that the scientist takes the place of the police. It is for
this reason that social leaders multiply : deputies, politicians,
agronomists, statisticians, newspaper columnists, lawyers, etc. »
(J.Makhaïski, 1908, Le socialisme des intellectuels, Le Seuil, 1979, p.
198)
In the social life and evolution of organisations, what counts is their
function, not their initial doctrines. Whether it derives its origins
from anarchism or from socialism, syndicalism above all emerges as an
impotent reaction against reformism, and ends up by giving in to class
collaboration. Overly disappointed, former revolutionaries lapsed into
elitism. Thus in the work of Georges Darien, one of whose characters no
longer sees anything except a « dirty sale » between « a handful of
desperate recalcitrants » and « the aristocracy of money » (Les
Pharisiens, 1891, UGE, 1979, pp. 125–126).
« ... it was a beautiful day that they blended into one another,
proletariat and bourgeoisie, and despite their denials, walked hand in
hand. Through being affectionate, they were to end up by spanning the
muddy pit which separated them with state socialism, this pont d’Avignon
on which the horny handed proletarian dances a carmagnole with petty
industry and petty commerce, regulated by industrial tribunal ... »
(Id., pp. 124–125)
By contrast, after 1917 it was undoubtedly the communist movement as
such which reappeared in Russia, in Germany and elsewhere. Yet it would
never be the heart — that is to say the practical goal — of the social
agitation, which mainly remained in the wake of democracy. It emerged,
but only as programme.
« Why would we need money, all Petrograd is in the hands of the workers;
all the apartments, all the stores, all the factories and workshops, the
textile mills, the food stores, everything is in the hands of the social
organisations. The working class doesn’t need money », proclaimed
Bleikhman, a Russian anarchist worker in 1917.
But proletarians did not take the measures of communisation which would
have rendered market exchange useless. The council movement which
appeared in 1917 aimed at taking back control of productive activity. In
Russia it was a reaction to the impotence of the bourgeoisie. In the
United States and Germany it was a reaction against Scientific
Management. The defeat of 1919 was that of the skilled workers in the
Berlin metal working industries, who formed the heart of the USPD.
During the risings in central Germany in 1921, the workers who took
centre stage were unskilled, as at Leuna where B.A.S.F had created a
modern chemical plant, with an unskilled labour force supervised by
skilled workers from other areas. The workers at Leuna and elsewhere,
would resist repression and the divisions in their midst for a long
time. But their armed organisation was the proletariat in arms — a
proletariat which did not undertake to destroy itself as proletariat.
In the 19 century, far from causing « the ever expanding union of the
workers » (Communist Manifesto, section 1), struggles for wage demands
had split up proletarians along the dividing lines of the division of
labour. Accentuating a tendency which had already taken shape in
industrial unionism, after 1914–18 the community of struggle passed from
the craft union to the factory council, inside which collective labour,
which had been broken up and decomposed by Capital, tried to regain the
common existence it had lost.
Nevertheless, unlike the non-revolutionary « communists » such as
Fourier, the proletariat of 1917 no longer sought to act alongside the
state, or else to convert it. From the start of the 20 century, and
particularly after 1914–18, the movement explicitly set as its goal, not
the conquest of the state, but its destruction. As regards practise it
is sufficient to compare the collective suicide of the workers in the
old quarters in Paris in 1848 to the offensive of the red army of the
Ruhr in 1920 — even though the latter subsequently came to a halt,
consumed from within by democracy. As regards theory, we can contrast
the ambiguous declarations of Marx (and those of Engels which are
stripped of any ambiguity) about the possibility of a peaceful
transition towards socialism, with the theses of the communist
organisations after 1917.
But what does the demand for the demolition of the state mean if it is
limited to that ? If the proletarian movement is content to merely
occupy the centre of capitals (such as Berlin in January 1919) or to
confront the army, it rushes towards defeat. Where the state was weak,
as in Russia, proletarians might even overthrow it. But this only meant
taking its place and letting the « workers state » manage wage labour,
in other words manage capitalism. The proletariat conducted a critique
in deeds of the State, but not of Capital as a historic social relation.
In Russia and in Germany, it would almost always be a matter of
reorganising labour, of reforming the world of the economy, not of
communisation. The communist movement became bogged down on the terrain
of power.
When Italian workers occupied the factories in September 1920,
particularly in Turin, the government allowed the strike to deteriorate
by itself. The proletarians did not take the initiative. The State was
even clever enough to accept « workers control ». Once it is constituted
as a social force, the proletariat has nothing else to organise but its
own suppression. Its constitution must coincide with its selfsuppression
through the propagation of ever larger waves of communisation infecting
all activities and all social strata. In the absence of this process,
which it did not spark off after 1917, the « organised proletariat »,
and even « the proletariat in arms », was forced to give way before the
weight of capitalist relations which were not long in returning to
occupy the entire terrain.
In 1917–21 the language of the social movement remained political. Just
as the millenarians had believed they were realizing a divine principle,
the most extreme workers acted as if they were realizing a new principle
of power, based on workers self-organisation. They believed that they
had accomplished an advance compared to the party and trade union
bureaucracies, but they did not define communism. Political and no
longer religious, the movement secularised itself, but once again it
still acted starting from something other than itself.
Aroused by the Russian revolution, the wave of revolutionary and
reformist-demand struggles (the two combining and sowing confusion in
all minds) would reverberate from continent to continent over the next
twenty years. Everywhere the bourgeoisie would end up by taking back
what it had been forced to concede. In vain the English and Welsh miners
struck for weeks, even months, against wage cuts. In the United States,
around 1919, the IWW increased from 40,000 to 100,000 members, just
before disappearing. France passed a law establishing the eight hour day
but dismissed 18,000 railwaymen in 1920 — it was one of the most serious
defeats for French workers. Starting in Russia and central Europe the
wave of struggles swept as far as China (1926) and the United States.
Fighting a capitalism that was in the middle of modernization, American
workers succeeded in setting up... a trade union federation. But the
strength and ambivalence of their action was confirmed by the fact that
the CIO had difficulty in controlling them. In 1937 sit-in strikes,
which were pro- and anti-union at the same time, erupted just after the
agreement between the United Auto Workers and General Motors. In
exchange for recognition the trade unions had agreed not to support the
wildcat strikes, which were characterised as unofficial. Against this
agreement between the bosses and the unions, the workers occupied the
factories and, as at Flint in Michigan, used nonbureaucratic methods
which displayed a high degree of organisation, but they no less
continued to support the union.
It took the war to bring order to the American working class : after
Germany declared war on the USSR, the Communist Party which more or less
directly controlled one third of the members of the CIO, approved the
anti-strike clause signed by the unions. The confrontation in May 1937
between the workers of Barcelona and the Spanish Republican State,
marked the last revival of the wave of 1917. Once again the
contradictions in proletarian practise can be measured by the fact that
the majority of the insurrectionists belonged either to the CNT or to
the POUM, which did everything they could to stop them, and succeeded. «
A historical cycle was closed with the destruction of the Spanish
revolution : that of the first international offensive of the
proletariat against capitalism » (Munis, Parti-Etat. Stalinisme.
Révolution, Spartacus, 1975, p. 67) Once again the proletariat hadn’t
acted as a « class for itself ».
In spite of a global capitalist expansion the proletariat didn’t know
how to prevent either the — fatal — time-lag between the various
national uprisings or, in particular, the democratic corruption. It
recognised its enemies — who since 1914 had revealed themselves for what
they were. It did not do what was necessary to destroy them, since it
took on the visible enemies and not the things their power was based on
: the relations of wage labour and the market. Although, in contrast to
the 19century, it sometimes took the offensive, it continued to pursue
political action. In short, it only put forward « the tactical
requirements of the first stage of the new movements :
anti-parliamentarism, anti-unionism and anti-frontism » (Mouvement
capitaliste et révolution russe, Brussels, 1974). Consequently, the
communist left , which would occupy itself for years in attempting to
understand what had happened, would distinguish itself by its refusals :
refusal of trade unions, of the State (even, and especially, the
democratic State), of the Popular Fronts, of the USSR, of national
liberation movements, of the Resistance, and so on, and this because the
proletariat no longer intervened as a social force. This obliteration of
communism as a historic force was not necessarily more serious than that
in the second half of the 19 century, but it was certainly more
striking.
A communist movement, universal in nature, which had set out to conquer
the world in capitalism’s footsteps, had been led into not taking the
offensive except in the centre of Europe. Now it was necessary for it to
engage in drawing up an assessment, beginning with itself, and with the
contradictions of the counterrevolution.
The following revolutionary generation had the advantage of being able
to cast a clearer critical gaze on this period, but they were to run
into additional difficulties about being able to go back to the source
of theories, echoes of which had ended up becoming louder than their
initial sound.
The outbreak of the war in 1914 testified to the monstrous bankruptcy of
the bourgeois world and the workers’ movement. However, after bourgeois
humanism and wage-labour reformism had collapsed, side by side, in the
mud of the trenches, they both acted as if this catastrophe hadn’t
rejected the basis upon which they had prospered and driven millions of
beings into the abyss. Everybody applied themselves to recreating the
same pre-1914 situation, but better, more modern and more democratic,
whereas the whole of capitalist civilization had proved its failure,
confirming the apocalyptic forecasts of the revolutionaries and the
warnings of the more lucid bourgeois.
« We are the last [of the republican mystique]. Nearly the
après-derniers. Immediately after us begins another age, another world,
the world of those who no longer believe in anything, or who have any
pride and glory in it. » (Péguy, Our youth)
And, to still further increase the confusion, under a radical mask
Russia, the Communist International and the Communist Parties were also
supporting the reconstitution of a labour movement and a renovated
democracy, which didn’t take long before resembling their predecessors.
As distinct from those who vainly relied on activism, the communist left
understood the depth of the counter-revolution and drew out its
consequences. It affirmed itself as resistance to Capital and, because
of this, it proved incapable of leaving its entrenchment’s in order to
imagine the future outlines of a revolution different from those which
had occurred after 1917, beginning with the new situation, but above
all, with the invariance of the nature of the communist movement.
The ultra-left was born and grew in opposition to Social-Democracy and
Leninism — which had become Stalinism. Against them it affirmed the
revolutionary spontaneity of the proletariat. The German communist left
(in fact German-Dutch), and its derivatives, maintained that the only «
human » solution lay in proletarians’ own activity, without it being
necessary to educate or to organize them; that when they acted by and
for themselves the seeds of radically different social relations were
present in workers actions; that the experience of taking their
struggles into their own hands prepared them to take the whole of
society into their hands when the revolution became possible; that
proletarians today must refuse to allow themselves to be dispossessed of
even the most negligible actions by the trade union and party
bureaucracies, in order tomorrow to prevent any so-called workers’ state
from managing production in their place and instituting state
capitalism, as the Russian revolution had done. Finally it affirmed that
trade unions and parties had become elements of capitalism.
Before being reduced to the status of tiny groups, the German Left had
been the most advanced (and numerous) component of the movement from
1917 to 1921. Later, whatever its weaknesses, it remained the only
current to defend the exploited in all circumstances and without
concessions. In the same way, it refused to support any war, whether
anti-fascist (unlike the Trotskyists and a great number of anarchists)
or national (unlike the Bordigists), with the exception of the Spanish
War, during which, following in the footsteps of anarchism, it had gone
so far as to support the CNT.
Affirming within its theory the autonomy of the proletariat against
state intervention, it denounced everything that deprived the working
class of its capacity for initiative : parliamentarianism,
trade-unionism, anti-fascist or national fronts, such as the French
Resistance to German occupation, and any apparatus tending to constitute
itself into a party above the working class.
« The emancipation of proletarians will be the work of proletarians
themselves », says the Manifesto. But what sort of emancipation ? For
the German Left communism was confused with workers’ management. It did
not see that autonomy must be exercised in all fields and not merely in
production, that it is only by eradicating market exchange from all
social relations, from everything which nourishes life, that
proletarians will retain mastery of their revolution. To reorganise
production once more, is to give birth to a new administrative
apparatus. Anyone who puts management forward condemns themselves to
creating a managerial apparatus.
The management of our lives by bureaucrats is only one facet of our
dispossession of ourselves. This alienation, the fact that our life is
decided by others than ourselves, is not merely an administrative
reality which another form of management could change. The
monopolization of decisions by a privileged layer of decision makers is
an effect of the social relations of the market and wage labour. In
pre-capitalist societies, the self-employed craftsman also saw that his
activity escaped him as it entered into the price mechanism. Little by
little the logic of commerce tore away any choice from his actions.
However there was no « bureaucrat » to dictate his conduct. Money and
wage-labour already contain within themselves the possibility and the
necessity of dispossession. There is only a difference in degree between
the dispossession of the craftsman and that of the unskilled worker in
BMW. Admittedly the differences between them are not slight, but in both
cases their « ... work depends on causes set apart from them... »
(Dézamy, Code de la communauté, 1842). As for managers, they embody this
alienation. It is thus no more a matter of replacing them with workers’
councils, than it is of replacing the bourgeoisie with bureaucrats from
the trade unions and parties — the result would resemble the Russian
experience after 1917.
Caught in pincers between the SPD and the CIO — the two forms of the
counterrevolution born out of workers’ struggles — the German Left had
to oppose itself to both of them. But it had difficulty in seeing that
the IWW would have disappeared or become a reformist organisation. As an
autonomous workers’ organisation, the IWW retrospectively displayed all
the virtues. But it is not enough for a structure to be workerist and
anti-bureaucratic for it to be revolutionary. That depends on what it
does. If it takes part in trade union activities it becomes what the
trade unions are. Thus the German Left was also mistaken about the
nature of the CNT. Nevertheless, overall it showed that it’s too
superficial to only take account of the trade unions, and that it is the
reformist activity of workers themselves which maintains organised,
openly counter-revolutionary, reformism.
The German Left understood that the bourgeois world before 1914 had
given way to the capitalist world. It could recognise Capital everywhere
it existed, including the USSR, whereas it was not until 1945 that
Bordiga put things so clearly. Council communism ended up by confining
itself in councillism, but, immediately after the 1939–45 war, it saw
the necessity of leaving behind the theoretical framework defined
between the wars. In 1946 Pannekoek understood that the proletariat had
undergone « a failure linked with aims which were too limited » and that
« the real struggle for emancipation hasn’t started yet ». The purest
expression of the revolutionary proletariat after 1917, the German Left
also reproduced its limitations, which on its own it could not pass
beyond.
Inheriting the mantle of the ultra-left after the war, the magazine
Socialisme ou Barbarie appeared in France between 1949 and 1965.
Organisationally, the group which constituted itself around the journal
was not descended from the German Left but from Trotskyism, before soon
being joined by defectors from the Italian Left. Even if it never
claimed this filial relation itself, Socialisme ou Barbarie none the
less belonged to councillism, which it had come to as a result of a
reflection on bureaucracy, arising from a rejection of the Trotskyist
positions on the USSR.
One of Socialisme ou Barbarie‘s merits was that it looked for « the
answer » in the proletariat. Without populism or any pretence of having
rediscovered some kind of « workers’ values », it understood that
workers’ speech was indeed a condition of the communist movement. Thus
it supported forms of expression such as Tribune Ouvrière, published by
Renault workers. In this way it placed itself within the wider movement
which would culminate in May 68 and give birth to preliminary sketches
of autonomous organisation such as Inter-Enterprises. That a minority of
workers’ come together and take up speech is truly a condition of
communism.
Unions and workers’ parties offer their services to wage workers in
exchange for recognition and support, including financial support.
Extreme-left groups pretend to offer the waged a better defence of their
interests than the union and party bureaucrats, who they consider to be
too moderate. In exchange they demand even less : approval, however
half-hearted, for their programme. Interventionists or libertarians, all
see the same solution to the continuity between proletariat and
communism — they conceive the content of communism as being outside the
proletariat. Not seeing the intrinsic relation between proletariat and
revolution — except that it is the former which makes the latter — they
are obliged to introduce a programme.
Socialisme ou Barbarie showed that workers’ action contained more than a
struggle against exploitation and that it carried within it the germ of
new relations. But it only saw this in self-organisation, not in
proletarian practise — the monstrous avatar of human life produced by
Capital which, in erupting, might engender another world.
Providing that one doesn’t become entangled in questions of organising
and managing work, the observation of factory life makes it possible to
illuminate the communist direction of proletarian struggle. Thus, the
testimony of the American worker Ria Stone published in the early
editions of the magazine went further than the theorising on the content
of socialism done later on by Chaulieu (but publication of Stone’s text
wouldn’t have been possible without Chaulieu’s ‘error’).
Socialisme ou Barbarie broke with workerism. Lefort’s « The Proletarian
Experience » is undoubtedly the most profound text published by
Socialisme ou Barbarie. But he indicated the group’s limitations and in
so doing announced its impasse. In effect he continued to search for a
mediation between the misery of the workers condition and their open
revolt against Capital. However, it is within itself that the
proletariat finds the elements of its revolt and the content of the
revolution, not in any organisation posed as a precondition and which
would either bring it consciousness or offer it a base for regroupment.
Lefort saw the revolutionary mechanism in proletarians themselves, but
in their organisation rather than in their contradictory nature. So, he
too ended up by reducing the content of socialism to workers’
management.
Moreover, instead of the testimony of workers’ which Lefort wanted,
Socialisme ou Barbarie threw itself into workers’ sociology, ending up
by making everything turn on the distinction between direction and
execution. In this it differentiated itself from Information et
Correspondance Ouvrières (ICO) — which Lefort rejoined — a workerist and
councillist bulletin and group, a more immediate expression of workers’
autonomy, and from the Groupe de Liaison pour l’Action des Travailleurs
(GLAT) equally workerist, but concerned with publishing minutely
detailed analyses of capitalism’s evolution. Each in its own way, ICO
and GLAT would be present at the university centre at Censier, occupied
by revolutionaries in May 68.
The Hungarian Revolution gave a new vigour to Socialisme ou Barbarie,
while reinforcing its councillism. In effect, they saw in it the
confirmation of their theses at a time when the « council » form was
coming to prove that it was capable of acting in a manner totally
contrary to councillism, for example in giving support to a Stalinist
liberal. Before long, Socialisme ou Barbarie abandoned its old Marxist
reference points and threw itself into an intellectual wandering which
was to end in 1965. This evolution brought about the departure of the «
Marxists » who founded Pouvoir Ouvrier (PO) in 1963. And it was one of
PO’s member’s, Pierre Guillaume, who went on to found the bookshop la
Vieille Taupe two years later, which later on we will see the role of.
Like the Situationist International, but in a different way, Socialisme
ou Barbarie « clung » to the modernisation of Western society. Its
theses on bureaucratic capitalism and on bureaucratic society, born
simultaneously from the spectre of a seizure of power by the Stalinists
and from the overturning of French society which had been orchestrated
by the State, expressed the crisis which gnawed into the dominant
industrial model, particularly in France. By propagating slogans like «
Workers’ Power, Peasants’ Power, Students’ Power » (PSU tract in June
1968), by making « autonomous and democratic management » into the
number one objective, the May 68 movement popularised themes of
Socialisme ou Barbarie‘s, while at the same time demonstrating the
limits both of the group and of the entire movement.
In 1969 the journal « Invariance » concluded that : « ‘Socialisme ou
Barbarie’ wasn’t an accident. It clearly expressed a position diffused
on a world scale : the interpretation of the absence of the proletariat
and the rise of the new middle classes...Socialisme ou Barbarie
fulfilled its role of surpassing the sects because it opened into the
immediate, into the present, severing any attachment to the past... »
(Series I, no. 6. p29)
Following the example of the other currents of the communist left, that
known for simplicity as the Italian Left showed that the proletarian was
more than just a producer who fights to end his poverty (the thesis of
the left) or to end his exploitation (the thesis of leftism). It could
recognise in Marx’s work « a description of the character of communist
society » (Bordiga). It affirmed the anti-market and anti-wage content
of the revolution. And it got back in touch with utopia.
« We are the only ones to base our action on the future. »
Bordiga made an implicit critique of the division between science and
utopia that Engels had established in the Anti-Dühring, which he said,
rested on « a false basis ». He defined revolutionaries as « explorers
of the future ». For him, utopia was not prediction but the perspective
of the future. He restored to the revolution its human dimension and
even approached what, twenty years later, would be called ecology. But
he conceived of the revolution as the application of a programme by «
the party », not as a dynamic uniting men as they communise the world.
However, one can foresee that a movement of communisation, that destroys
the State, undermines the social base of the enemy, and spreads under
the effect of the irresistible appeal arousing the birth of new social
relations between men, will bond together the revolutionary camp far
better than any power which, while waiting to conquer the world before
communising it, would behave no differently than... a State. A series of
basic measures and their ensuing effects will permit an enormous saving
of material means, and will multiply resourcefulness tenfold. Communism
will bring about the abandonment of many sorts of production, which
result from « economies of scale » imposed by the needs of
profitability. Valorisation, which imposes concentration, pushes
capitalism towards gigantism, (megalopolises, a bulimia of energy) and
obliges it to disregard all non-profitable forces of production.
Communism by contrast will be able to decentralise, to use local
resources, and not because humanity centralised in a party will have
decided on this, but because the needs which arise from people’s
activity will impel them to live differently on this earth. Then the
conflict of « space against concrete » which Bordiga spoke about will
cease.
The Italian left, especially after 1945, put forward communism without
grasping it as a movement of human activity with the tendency to
liberate itself. After 1917, the proletariat had struggled without
attacking the foundations of society, and as a result radical groups had
the greatest difficulty in intellectually grasping the foundations of
social life and hence of the revolution.
Moreover, Bordiga did not draw out all the implications of his vision of
communism. Instead of defining the « dictatorship of the proletariat »
beginning from communisation, he confined it to a political
dictatorship, which from the start made it a question of power. The
German left had had the intuition that communism dwells in the nature of
being proletarian, without grasping the true nature of communism. By
contrast the Italian left understood the nature of communism but
deprived the proletariat of a role in implementing it in order to
entrust this to a party, guardian of principle, charged with imposing it
by force.
Certainly, Bordiga made a justifiably strong critique of democracy.
People often reproached democracy for separating proletarians, who were
united in action, through the vote, and instead they recommended « true
democracy » or « workers democracy », where decisions would be taken by
everyone in general assemblies, etc. However Bordiga showed that
democracy brings about this separation in decision making because it
separates out the moment of decision itself. To make believe that one
can suspend everything for a privileged moment in order to know what one
will decide and who will carry it out, and to create for this purpose a
process of deliberation and decision making : here is the democratic
illusion ! Human activity is only driven to isolate the moment of
decision making if this activity is itself contradictory, if it is
already traversed by conflicts and if antagonistic powers are already
established. The structure for the encounter of different opinions is
nothing but a façade masking the real decision, imposed by the prior
play of forces.
Democracy establishes a break in time, makes it as if one were setting
out again from scratch. One could apply to the democratic ritual the
analysis which Mircea Eliade makes of religion, where periodically one
replays the passage from chaos to order, placing oneself out of time for
a brief instant as if everything had again become possible. Democracy
has been erected in principle in societies where the masters have to
meet to share out power by complying with the rules of a game, even if
it means resorting to dictatorship (a permissible form of government in
ancient Greece) as soon as play is obstructed.
While demonstrating very well that the democratic principle is alien to
the bases of revolutionary action and of human life, Bordiga was
incapable of imagining the interaction of the subversive activities of
proletarians, and he could conceive no other solution than dictatorship
(of the party). The German left had fallen into the democratic error
through fetishism of the workers councils. Having failed to seize the
subversive capacities of the proletariat and their ability to centralise
their actions, the Italian left ran up against the false alternative
which it had itself denounced, and pronounced itself in favour of
dictatorship, even of implementing a monolithic discipline when
necessary.
Deeply contradictory, Bordiga implicitly criticised Lenin, social
democracy and Marxism — but only halfway. Returning to Lenin’s theses he
went so far as to write a long eulogy to « Left Wing Communism — an
infantile disorder », which misled a large part of the generation of
revolutionaries that appeared after 1968, who would only see Bordigism
as a variant of Leninism.
For the German left the unitary rank and file organisations of the
workers represented the class. For the Italian left unions represented
the class. The fact that workers found themselves in unions seemed more
important than what they did there. « The union even when it is
corrupted, is always a workers centre » (Bordiga 1921). From this point
of view the union always contained the potential for revolutionary
action. In both cases, the form — the organisation of workers — was put
before its content — the function of this organisation. Bordiga’s
fundamental error was to maintain the division between politics and the
economy inherited from the Second International, and which the Third
International did not call into question. The revolutionary offensive of
1917–21 had rejected this separation in practise but it had not gone far
enough to impose it within the thought of the whole of the communist
left.
« Proletarian consciousness can reappear insofar as the partial economic
struggles develop themselves until they reach the higher political phase
which poses the question of power » (Communisme, No. 1, April 1937).
No. It is necessary that the seeds of a social critique already exists,
as much in the initial phases of a movement as in the later, (how to
discover it, to help it mature, everything depends on this... ), a
critique which calls into question both economy and politics through a
refusal of realism (of demands compatible with the life of the business
enterprise), and of mediation (sharing power, placing any confidence in
organisations between labour and Capital).
Bordiga’s weakness arose from his inability to comprehend that communism
emerges from the needs and practises created by the concrete condition
of the proletariat. Bordiga posed the question of the TRANSITION from
workers economic struggles to politics. He inadequately distinguished
the revolutionary process. He knew that communism is not built, that the
revolution is satisfied to leap over the obstacles to a life for which
most of the elements already exist « in the entrails » (Marx) of
capitalism. But for him the revolution remained the action of a
political power which modified the economy. He did not see that
communisation and the struggle against the State are necessarily
simultaneous.
Speculation over the different forms of organisation (council, party,
workers mass organisations) and the separation in theory between
politics and economy testified to the fact that the proletariat, which
before 1914 had lost the sense of its unity, had hardly recovered it
after 1917. The organisation came to fill the vacuum left by the absence
of revolutionary action by proletarians. When social contradictions
don’t bring about a subversive movement, a theoretical master-key is
sought. Bordiga found it in the economic movement of the workers, which
was supposed to generate revolutionary action thanks to the assistance
of the party. This initial assumption replaced the vision of the
totality.
Invariance, which took up Bordiga’s theses, had begun to appear before
May 1968. At the bookshop La Vieille Taupe, Pierre Guillaume insisted on
the importance of this review to friends and customers. The principle
merit of Invariance was to have attracted attention to the richest
aspects of Bordiga’s theories, at a time when the International
Communist Party , which particularly undertook the management of the
Bordigist heritage, said little about them, even concealing the identity
of Bordiga in the name of party anonymity, preferring to stress the
refusals of the Italian left : the fight against antifascism, or against
educationism, etc.
Bordiga had seen in Marx’s work a description of communism. From its
first issue, written by Camatte and Dangeville, Invariance affirmed that
« Marx and Engels derived the characteristics of the party form from the
description of communist society ». But Invariance remained a prisoner
of the metaphysics of the party.
During the period 1917–1937 — and even less with the apogee of the
counterrevolution that marked the war and the post-war reconstruction —
the proletariat had not imposed itself for what it is — the result of
the practices and needs arising from its fundamental condition. To
resist the counter-revolution, the Italian Left constructed a
metaphysics of the proletariat, an entity which took the place of the
absent real movement, and its reference to the party was used to
preserve a revolutionary perspective, just as its distrust of «
anarchism » (a term which was used to include the councillism of the
German Left) served as a defence against the risk of deviation towards
democracy.
During the period between the end of the revolutionary assaults
following the 191418 war and the mid-1960s, the proletariat ceased to
exist as a social force in each of the countries in which it had
appeared — after 1921 in Germany, after 1926 in China and after 1937 in
Spain — but it hadn’t therefore disappeared.
The working class continued to act in the colonial countries among
others, but often as a support for a weak national bourgeoisie. Although
this role was determinant in its transformation into an object of
Capital, this didn’t entirely stifle an endemic state of rebellion.
Black Africa saw impressive strikes after 1945 : railwaymen in French
West Africa in 1947–8, general strikes in Dakar and Conakry in 1953. In
Guinea, Mali and the Ivory Coast an osmosis took place between the
indigenous trade unions and bourgeois democratic parties. And after
these countries gained independence, the single parties that governed
them had difficulty in controlling the tendencies towards
insubordination (the major strike by dockers in Ghana in 1961).
In the United States, despite the antistrike laws, in Germany under
Nazism, and in the Eastern European countries under Stalinism, a
rebellious fraction of proletarians continued to appear.
The general strike at FIAT in 1942, and the numerous strikes in Italy in
March 1943, were diverted away from a proletarian direction, and
reoriented by the bourgeoisie and the State towards a return to
democracy (the anti-fascist and proally u-turn of July 25 1943). Nazism
was unable to prevent either of the important strikes in Germany at the
end of 1941 and 1942. These were all of such an extent that the rebirth
of the « Italian left » was constructed on the idea of the rebirth of a
movement. (We should remember that on the eve of 1939 the group which
had first published Bilan and then Octobre wondered whether a revolution
wasn’t possible, and even theorised on the basis of its probability).
Equally, before the end of the war a debate began in the revolutionary
movement about whether a revolutionary outcome was possible. Munis did
not exclude this possibility. Bordiga did not believe in it. In fact,
the victorious countries — including Italy — were far too won over by
democracy, and as a result it succeeded in absorbing the social tensions
that to some extent reigned everywhere. In Germany, at a moment when the
State had collapsed, the existence of millions of demobilised soldiers,
foreigners of different origins and ex-prisoners created a situation of
disorder. But the different groups involved, although potentially
revolutionary, did not possess sufficient cohesion to affirm themselves
and seek something other than survival. Those excluded from production
were marginalized and appeared incapable of acting; those who were
integrated into it demanded its maintenance and democratisation, and
sought recognition. Relative working class passivity was also caused by
the repression exercised by the employers militia’s. The role of the «
industrial police » would only decline when Capital was able to go into
partnership with the workers, towards 1950. Until then they remained
necessary to prevent or repress the riots provoked by hunger (1947), and
the general strikes against monetary reform (1948).
« (...) A fragmentary working class autonomy exhausted itself, during
the decisive months after the wars end, in solving the most important
problems of existence of the class and, a long way behind this, came a
working class reformism that was impotent, but strong enough at the
right moment to retake control of all the embryonic attempts put forward
to construct an antagonistic workers power » (K. Roth, L’autre mouvement
ouvrier en Allemagne. 1945–1978, Ed. Bourgois, 1979, p. 21)
The period after 1947 witnessed very tough struggles in Japan; strikes
lasting several weeks led to a strike ban in public utilities (1948),
the laying off of 30% of the personnel at Toyota (1950) and massive
dismissals at Nissan (1953).
Capital’s strength derived as much from military or police violence as
from its economic dynamic. In West Germany the massive introduction of
assembly lines, and the equally massive recruitment of unskilled workers
to man them, involved the progressive elimination of the highly skilled
workers, and the marginalisation of the Communist Party (KPD), which
ended up being banned in 1956, and only reappeared as the DKP in 1969.
The German bourgeoisie invested in precisely those sectors where the
Communist Party was strong, the mines and the iron and steel industry,
in order to create « a new type of worker both “depoliticised” and
dominated by the machines » (Roth), thanks to the influx of refugees
from East Germany, and thus it recreated the division between Germans
and foreigners which had been maintained between 1942 and 1944. When the
refugees in their turn made demands (1956–57), Capital started to import
workers from southern Europe, and there would be a million of these by
1961.
We can thus see the permanence of workers resistance to Capital and the
generalisation of Scientific Management. In 1946, nearly three million
American workers struck against the fall in real wages, but the trade
unions dominated the strike. In 1959, 600,000 American steel-workers
went on strike for 116 days to preserve the unions consultation rights
over methods of production and obtained a paper victory. But none of
this prevented the post-war economic boom, still in its ascendant phase,
from swallowing these movements up. From the mid-1960s on the other
hand, there began a fall in industrial profitability, which is analysed
by economic experts today from a quasi-« Marxist » perspective.
Capitalism — the transformation of labour into commodities — dominates
the whole of society when it integrates into its cycle the conditions of
reproduction of the labour force, i.e. when it transforms the whole of
life into commodities. But this domination runs up against an obstacle
arising from the fact that one cannot reproduce human beings, even
proletarianised human beings, like mass-produced objects. Moreover, the
scientific organisation of work which breaks down work into individual
operations, enters into contradiction with the indispensable continuity
of the production process.
Finally, workers resistance also entailed a reduction in profitability.
In Italy, certain strikes in 1960 prefigured the events of 1969 by
calling into question, not just wages and working conditions, but the «
regime of the factory itself » (Grisoni, Portelli, Les luttes ouvrières
en Italie de 1960 à 1976, Aubier-Montaigne, 1976, p. 70 ), and also by
holding big assemblies within the factory. A strike by electrical
engineers (1960) mobilised whole districts, and students joined the
workers. In 1962 a strike at Lancia also broke out of the factory and
spread into the city. In the Milan-Genoa-Turin triangle, immigrants from
the South of Italy, less under the control of the trade unions and of
the Socialist and Communist parties, would form the spearhead of the
strikes during the ‘economic miracle’. These strikes culminated in 1962,
in Turin, where workers fought the police for three days and destroyed
the head office of the UIL, a trade union comparable to Force Ouvrier in
France. In West Germany, the years 1966–7 marked a sea-change in
capitalist attitudes, not only with respect to immigrant workers
(300,000 of them were expelled) but to labour in general. From now on
Capital imposed norms on those workers who in the past had escaped the
most restrictive tasks, as well as on white collar staff, thanks to the
introduction of cybernetics and data processing. Postmen, an expanding
sector of wage workers, were subjected to accelerated mechanisation and
launched strikes, poorly controlled by the trade unions, in the United
States and Canada (1970), the UK (1971) and in France (1974). In
Germany, students launched struggles (1966–7), and were soon followed by
the workers who struck in massive numbers in 1969. In France, the
strikes in the six months up to May 68, particularly the workers riot at
Caen, were the signs of a rebellion that began amongst unskilled
workers, and marked a break, albeit still only superficial, with the
prevailing consensus. Youth in the universities saw that their future
prospects in management were not as attractive as promised; young
workers no longer accepted workplace discipline as easily as the older
ones who were better integrated into Capital. The economic cycle (the
first signs of the post-war boom grinding to a halt) became combined
with a generation gap.
In the United States, for example, the young people of the Thirties and
Forties, unionised in the CIO, were the « integrated » of 1950–60, who
defended their privileges thanks to American trade union structures
(closed shop, union shop), and by playing the employers game of dividing
the workers. The movement of the Sixties was in part born outside and
against them, from a deterioration of the living conditions of certain
fractions of the working class (women, ethnic minorities, youth),
whereas the « standard of living » of middle aged, white, male workers
continued to rise. After 1950, American working class trade unionism
started to decline, new workers not unionising very much, and a whole
sector of the working class saw its conditions of employment, and of
health etc., start to deteriorate.
The end of the Sixties thus certainly marked a change. Rebellion became
radicalised more quickly, because at the same moment Capital was still
in an ascendant phase, yet this ascent was disrupted by failures. The
first restrictions in what Capital offered led precisely to a critique
of what it offered, and not, as in periods of recession, to the
requirement that it continued to offer the same thing as before, only
better if possible.
The bourgeoisie would counteract with political readjustments. In 1969,
Germany saw the arrival into power of an SPD-liberal coalition, the
legalisation of the communist party, desired by a fraction of the
employers, and the scrapping of the factory militias that had been
created shortly after the war and which numbered 60,000 men. The project
of factory self-policing, a mass organisation regrouping the silent
majority against the radical minority, was abandoned. The socialists in
power undertook to reinforce the machinery of the police and to
introduce exclusion legislation (employment bans). But the existence of
an alternative political solution — the left — doesn’t imply that it
must come to power every time there is a crisis. In France, for example,
a left-wing government which had remained in office since 1968, or even
1974, would soon have been used up. To remain credible and be able to
play its role, the left must remain as a hope, fulfilled from time to
time, but not too often. That is what happened in 1967 in France, when
the right won the legislative elections with only a one vote majority.
As the balance of power evolved in favour of workers, and repression,
layoffs and even unemployment proved insufficient to discipline them, it
became necessary to find something else; to turn against workers their
aspiration to no longer be pawns, as they put it. On one side this meant
contractual politics, and unitary trade-union representation. On the
other, it meant a movement to the left (sometimes even leftist) by the
trade-unions, and the ideology of self-management.
Industrial reorganisation, which was both cause and effect of chronic
working-class insubordination, led to the separation of a layer of
executants, deprived of any understanding of the work process, from a
layer of supervisors which had greater control of the whole of the
enterprise and formed (so the employers hoped) a new workers
aristocracy. But the bosses didn’t succeed in turning the trade-unions
into « associations of heads of department, assistants, timekeepers and
foremen with a certain support among newly qualified workers (...) »
(Roth, p. 121). In any case would this have been desirable ? It would be
dangerous for Capital to systematically exclude underprivileged
employees from any form of representation.
In any event, this reorganisation did not make it possible to prevent
conflict. Whereas in Germany in 1969 the middle managers and skilled
workers had taken the leadership of the movement after two days, in the
strikes of 1973 the unskilled, who amongst other things were demanding
flat-rate increases across the board, remained autonomous and went as
far as forming some non-trade union strike committees; however this did
not prevent the employers from successfully countering these strikes.
The centre of gravity of the class shifted. In FordGermany there was a
big movement but also a big defeat : the leadership were obliged to
squash a strike which went too far. The workers didn’t have the strength
(the will or the need) to go beyond the strike, even when it was quite
solid. Here we run up against the eternal problem : an occupied factory
can be a weak point if you entrench yourself into it as a stronghold,
for the State can always bring superior forces to bear. But if strikers
seek to leave the district or factory they control, they can be stopped
or forced back. How, therefore, can you avoid a withdrawal into the
workplace, while going beyond a simple work stoppage or refusal of work
? As the president of the works council in Ford-Germany in 1973 said «
There is no room here for improvements, either we shut up, or we make
the revolution ».
From the end of the post-war boom, the underprivileged sectors of wage
workers (those who had recently joined the labour force, poorly
qualified youth, immigrants, underpaid women) took militant action. The
first instances occurred in 1967–8 (car production workers in France)
and the examples then multiplied (post-office workers, casual workers in
Italy, etc). These struggles differed from the « crisis » actions linked
to employment, as at LIP in France or among steelworkers. Admittedly
they retained some elements of traditional demands : a uniform rise in
wages, longer holidays, the correction of the gap which had opened up as
wages had fallen behind those of other sectors (a widening of wage
differentials was one of the conditions of the post-war boom). And they
were not necessarily anti-union — 1968 was sometimes an opportunity to
establish trade unions in backward companies.
In France, this struggle of the new sectors of wage workers often
erupted in unusual companies, far from the large cities and the
traditional bastions of workers struggle like Renault — strongholds
which were also prisons, even without surrounding walls and gates.
Capital believed it had nothing to fear from a docile workforce in those
companies created during the industrial decentralisation of the 1960s,
which had made it possible for it to combat the resistance of skilled
workers to the scientific organisation of labour, in other words to
break up the « red » quarters by establishing « different » factories in
the countryside. These factories had been set up like new schools, and
the former peasants, women and young people had gone there to play their
role under the paternal leadership of a manager who had become the «
company head ». These employees began by demanding what bosses «
normally » granted proletarians. And their protest ended by leading them
to call into question not just their wages and terms of employment but
also those who managed (bosses), defended (police) and fixed (trade
unions) those conditions. May ’68 would see a vague realisation that all
these conservative forces lived off the established order and needed to
maintain it. Against them, or rather in spite of them, « May » would
imagine nothing more than generalised selfmanagement, which people would
speak of but not initiate. But the movement which appeared around 1965
was powerful enough not to be exhausted by the limits of May ’68.
In the United States there was the conjunction of a student refusal
(against the war in Vietnam), an abundant movement among unskilled
workers, and riots (following Watts in 1965) which questioned not the
relations of production but the relations of distribution, not Capital
in its entirety but the commodity form which it imprints on life. The «
revolutionary return » at the end of the 1960s was signalled by the
convergence, but neither the interpenetration nor the fusion, of actions
born within production alongside those bearing on commodity exchange. As
a social system modern wage labour synthesises the productive act inside
the business enterprise and the « free » disposal outside of it of the
money earned there. As long as the questioning only relates to one or
other of these spheres (work/outside work), the wage system preserves
its unity and strength.
A mistaken perspective, due to the rise of black nationalism in the
United States (counter-revolutionary like all nationalism), created a
belief in the existence of a specific and more radical black working
class movement. In fact the American proletarian revolt was no more
virulent among black workers than among white. Working class
conservatism, which exists among construction workers for example, was
no worse in the United States than in France. Support by American
workers for Nixon against the Vietcong was no greater than that of
French workers for the successive governments during the war in Algeria.
The events at Lordstown (Ohio) lie at the transition between two
periods. At the end of the 1960s, it was one of the last big
applications of fordism. To produce the Vega, General Motors attracted
young workers (the average age was 26), increased productivity,
increased the proportion of unskilled labour, and deskilled everything
while offering more money (as Ford had done 40 years earlier), but it
also introduced automation. In 1970 it was the first car manufacturer to
install automated assembly lines with machines from Unimation (the first
American manufacturer of robots). The other car manufacturers would wait
until the mid1970s to follow suit (Renault only in 1979). The rate of
production at Lordstown was double the global average (100 vehicles an
hour instead of 50). Designed to counteract the passive and active
rebellion of the young workers, the system led to a doubling of
absenteeism and latent sabotage. Capital had wanted to increase
production rates without proposing to increase the wage rates it had
paid the workers for a long time : but mass consumption no longer
compensated for the alienation of work as in 1920 or 1930, its novelty
was exhausted. The endemic revolt didn’t prevent the trade union from
leading and sabotaging the 1972 strike, which was undoubtedly « the
first great anti-automation conflict in the U.S. » (Le Quément, p. 197),
together with that of West coast dockers against containerization
(1971–72). The Lordstown struggle was settled with 800 workers laid off,
but it particularly showed the bourgeoisie that automation had to be
introduced gradually, or risked starting up disputes (already latent and
sometimes explosive) over industrial work. Thus automated assembly lines
coexisted with traditional assembly lines.
The American anti-war movement, pacifist as a whole, would nonetheless
play a subversive role in opposing the State and the army at war. It was
a critique of an expanding world which had entered into crisis (we do
not say decadence). Was it merely chance that it was in 1965 that the
United States sent 500,000 soldiers to occupy South Vietnam (not even to
wage war : it hardly engaged the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese
troops) ? This task force, which experts from the start said would be
ineffective, was a typical product of an overconfident Western
capitalism, as confident in its industrial model as in the superiority
of the form of war it conducted compared to that of « under-developed »
nations. The refusal of the war by a large part of American youth
attacked the very foundation of a contemporary civilisation that was
both commodified and statist. Through the same movement, American
pacifism accused the State and Capital of occupying everything, and of
not granting enough autonomy and social space to « the people ».
Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose last issue appeared in 1965, was, here
again, an appropriate expression of this real quest for a new world,
even if it didn’t take on the roots of the old.
The capitalist invasion of the totality of life, accelerated by the
cycle of prosperity which began in the 1950s, had produced its liberal
critique : works by Vance Packard on planned obsolescence, of Riesman on
the solitary crowd, of Henri Lefebvre on everyday life, etc. The more
slowly commodified industrial countries, like France, had for a long
time maintained a chilly attitude to « Americanism » (see in particular
Le Monde). About 1960, at a time when a practical critique by
proletarians coincided with an initial concern about the limit and
direction of this growth, the whole mode and even style of modern
capitalist life was in the hot seat.
In this context, the Situationist International (1957–1971), the meeting
point of the New World proud of its modernity, and of the Old World
undermined by mass consumption, uniting Germans, Scandinavians and
Americans on the one hand, and French and Italians on the other, would
make a decisive contribution to the critique of the generalised
colonisation by the market.
A product of the prosperity of the 1960s, the S.I. could undertake a
critique of the world without shutting itself into the
economy/production/factory/workers, while at the same moment workers, as
at FIAT in 1969, made the space outside work (housing and transport) a
starting point for their action. The S.I. reconnected with the critique
of political economy of the period preceding 1848.
Historical evolution forces us to see that waged life doesn’t just take
place in the workplace. The old workers movement, which disappeared as a
social network to give way to negotiating bodies, had extended its
ramifications to all aspects of the life of the proletarian. Today
parties and trade unions are salesmen who play the role of social
services and largely function like state administrators.
The S.I. criticised « urbanism », science and the techniques of
recreating social relations where the roots of previous collective bonds
had been torn up. Capital had destroyed both city and countryside,
producing a hybrid space, a town without a centre. (In this way Capital
created a space in its own image, that of a society without a centre,
but whose centre was everywhere.) The many attempts at experimental
model cities (like Pullman near Chicago, at the end of the 19century)
prevented neither social problems nor workers riots. The
workeremployer’s city, like the project of Nicolas Ledoux at
Arc-et-Senans at the end of the 18 century, failed because waged life
cannot have the workplace as its only centre. The « normal » modern city
integrates workers better because they need a capitalist environment,
rather than an employers’. This capitalist environment maintains a
community even if it is to a large extent (but not completely, far from
it) a market community constituted by the television and the
supermarket, with the car as a means of connection between disconnected
places. TV, supermarket and car still presuppose the existence of human
beings to watch, to go and to make them function more or less together.
Faced with the modern city the S.I. sought new uses for certain places.
It gave new life to utopia, to positive as well as negative utopian
visions. At first it believed that it was possible to experiment with
new ways of living but it ended up by showing that this re-appropriation
of the conditions of existence presupposed nothing less than the
collective re-appropriation of all aspects of life. It gave new meaning
to the requirement to create new social relations. Where most
revolutionaries debated « power », or the « withering away of the state
», it put forward revolution not as a political affair but as changing
the whole of life. A « banality » you say ? But a banality that was only
reintroduced into the revolutionary movement in the 1960’s, and thanks
to the activity of the S.I. among others.
A product both of the councillist left, (Guy Debord was a member of
Socialisme ou Barbarie for some months), and of its rejection, the S.I.
started from a critique of the spectacle as passivity, and the
transformation of all activity into contemplation, and this led it to
affirm communism as activity.
Iconoclastic, freed from the problematic of workers’ organisation
(unlike groups such as Pouvoir Ouvrier or ICO), the S.I. shook up the
ultra-left. But its theory of the spectacle drove it into an impasse :
that of councillism. More the expression of attacks on the commodity
than of an (absent) general movement against Capital, it didn’t produce
an analysis of the whole of the capitalist process. Like Socialisme ou
Barbarie, it saw in Capital a form of management depriving proletarians
of any power over their lives, and concluded that it was necessary to
find a mechanism permitting the involvement of all. To this it added the
opposition passive/active. Having conceived capitalism theoretically
more as spectacle than as Capital, it believed that in order to break
the passivity it had found a means (democracy), a place (the council)
and a form of life (generalised self-management).
The idea of the spectacle swallowed up the idea of Capital and effected
a reversal of reality. Indeed the S.I. forgot that « the most
significant characteristic of the capitalist division of labor is the
transformation of the worker from an active producer to a spectator of
his own labor » (Root and Branch : The Rise of the Workers’ Movements,
Greenwich, Conn. 1975. From A Break With The Past by Stanley Aronowitz).
The « spectacle » has its roots in the relations of production and of
work, in that which constitutes Capital. One can only understand the
spectacle starting from capitalism, not the other way round. Spectacle
and passive contemplation are the effects of a more fundamental
phenomenon. It is the relative satisfaction of the « needs » created by
Capital over the last 150 years (bread, employment, lodging) that causes
passivity in behaviour. The theoretical conception of the spectacle as
the motor or essence of society was idealistic.
Thus the S.I., following the German left, recognised revolutionary
spontaneity, but without showing the nature of this spontaneous
activity. It glorified general assemblies and workers’ councils, instead
of specifying the content of what these forms were supposed to achieve.
Finally, it gave in to the same formalism as the ultra-left which it
mocked, not seeing the beam in its own eye.
The S.I. showed the religious aspects of militancy — dissociated
practise in which the individual acts for a cause while making an
abstraction of his personal life, repressing his desires and sacrificing
himself for an objective outside himself. Even without talking about
participation in the classical political organisations (Communist Party,
Extreme Left.... ), permanent revolutionary action certainly sometimes
turns into militancy : entirely devoted to a group, obsessed by a
particular vision of the world, the individual becomes unavailable for
revolutionary acts on the day that they actually become possible.
But this refusal of militancy, instead of anchoring itself within a
practise, and within an understanding of the real relations which can
prevent the development of militant behaviour, contributed to the
requirement inside the S.I. for a radical attitude in all things. For
one militant morality it substituted another, radicality, just as
unworkable and just as intolerable.
Not satisfied with denouncing the spectacle, the S.I. undertook to turn
it back against the society that lived it. The Strasbourg university
scandal which heralded May 68 was a success. But the S.I. erected the
process into a system and misused it so much that it rebounded back
against itself. The repetition of the techniques of advertising and
scandal turned into systematic counter-manipulation. There is no such
thing as an anti-advertising advertisement. There is no good usage of
media to get across revolutionary ideas.
In opposition to militant false modesty the S.I. put itself centre-stage
and enormously exaggerated its impact on the world situation. Its
repeated references to Machiavelli, Clausewitz and other strategists
were more than just teasing. It was persuaded that an appropriate
strategy would allow a clever enough group to manipulate the media and
influence public opinion in a revolutionary direction. This is certainly
proof of its confinement in the concept of the spectacle, and
ultimately, of its incomprehension, through idealism, of the spectacular
phenomenon. When it presented itself as the centre of the universe, and
as the agent of revolutionary maturation, etc., one first thought that
it was being ironical. When it made a constant theme of it, one ended up
wondering if it didn’t believe the enormities which it spread about
itself.
The S.I. provided the best approximation of communism among the theories
which had a genuine social diffusion before 1968. But it remained the
prisoner of old councillist illusions to which it added its own
illusions about the establishment of a revolutionary « savoir vivre »
[‘art of living’]. It created an ethics in which pleasure took the place
of human activity. In doing so it didn’t get beyond the capitalist
framework of the abundance permitted by automation, and was content to
describe the end of work as an immense passionate leisure.
The Italian left had put forward communism as the abolition of the
market and had broken with the cult of the productive forces, but it was
unaware of the enormous subversive power of concrete communist measures.
Bordiga put communisation back to the day after the seizure of power.
The S.I. presented the revolution as an immediate and progressive
decommodification. It saw the revolutionary process within human
relations. Indeed, the State cannot just be destroyed on the military
level. As the mediation of society it must also be annihilated by
undermining the capitalist relations which sustain it.
The S.I. finished up in an error symmetrical to Bordiga’s. The latter
had reduced the revolution to the application of a programme. The S.I.
were to limit it to overturning immediate relations. Neither Bordiga nor
the S.I. saw the totality. The first conceived a whole abstracted from
real relations and practical measures, the second a whole without unity
or determination, the sum of partial points spreading little by little.
Incapable of theoretically dominating the whole of the revolutionary
process, they both resorted to organisational palliatives : the party
for one, councils for the other.
In his practise Bordiga depersonalised the movement to excess, going so
far as to deny and efface himself behind a self-mutilating anonymity
which permitted all the manipulations of the (Bordigist) PCI. By
contrast the S.I. affirmed the individual to the point of elitism, going
so far as to take themselves as the centre of the universe.
Although they were largely unaware of Bordiga the S.I. contributed as
much as him to the revolutionary synthesis that was outlined around
1968.
When Socialisme ou Barbarie rejected « traditional » revolutionary
theory for good, a minority left it and regrouped around the journal
Pouvoir Ouvrier. Pouvoir Ouvrier wanted to retain the good aspects of
Socialisme ou Barbarie, while ignoring the common thread linking the
origins of Socialisme ou Barbarie to its subsequent deviations. Pouvoir
Ouvrier fell short of the German Left on many points : trade unions, the
party, imperialism and the national question, etc. In fact different
ultraleft tendencies coexisted within it, united only on the questions
of the capitalist nature of Russia and worker’s management. At its head
was Vega, a former member of the Italian left who had joined Socialisme
ou Barbarie shortly after its foundation. But this ex-« Bordigist »
brought nothing of Bordigism to Socialisme ou Barbarie, having found in
the Italian left only a purer Leninism than that of the Trotskyists, and
supplementing this with the theses on state capitalism and workers
management.
A duplicated monthly magazine with a thousand readers, Pouvoir Ouvrier
acted as if it were read by 100,000 proletarians each week. In depth
articles were rare. Often these were by Pierre Souyri, under the
pseudonym Brune, who had been the author of two essential texts on China
published in Socialisme ou Barbarie.
In 1965, Pierre Guillaume, a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie and then
of Pouvoir Ouvrier, founded the bookshop la Vieille Taupe, in the rue
des Fossés-Saint-Jacques in Paris. Around it a current of reflection and
activity came together which was as interested in the Situationist
International, which for a while maintained relations with the bookshop,
as it was in the Italian left, at that time known almost entirely
through the filter of the International Communist Party (PCI). Pierre
Guillaume took part, for example, in the English edition of the
Situationist International text on the Watts riots. Pouvoir Ouvrier,
undoubtedly feeling vulnerable, to the point of fearing that this
(second) current could threaten the unity and life of the group,
organised an absurd disciplinary hearing in September 1967, at the end
of which Pierre Guillaume and Jacques Baynac were excluded for «
fractional work »... A good halfdozen of the other members resigned.
They formed themselves into an informal group which everyone called « La
Vieille Taupe ».
From its start, the bookshop refused a doctrinal label. It was not a
local section of Pouvoir Ouvrier (while Pierre Guillaume was still a
member), nor its bookshop. At a time when it was difficult to obtain the
essential revolutionary texts, very few being available for sale, many
out of print etc., it wanted to facilitate access to them. In 1965 the
mere fact of selecting texts by Marx, Bakunin, the Situationist
International, Programme Communiste (the organ of the PCI) and texts by
the ultra-left took on a theoretical and political meaning. In its way
la Vieille Taupe took part in the theoretical synthesis which is
indispensable at all times. It went beyond the sects without simply
taking in everything « to the left of the Communist Party », like the
bookseller and publisher Maspero (who at one time even refused to sell
Voix Ouvrière, the [Trotskyist] ancestor of today’s Lutte Ouvrière,
because it appeared too hostile to left wing parties and trade unions !)
In 1967, at a time when the Communist Party was more concerned to
publish Thorez and Stalin, the bookshop bought up the considerable
remainders of the material published by Costes, the only real French
publisher of Marx before the war. At the start of 1968, when the
Communist Party’s Editions Sociales version of Capital was out of print,
the only place where the three volumes could be obtained was La Vieille
Taupe. The bookshop distributed the unsold stock of Socialisme ou
Barbarie, but also that of Cahiers Spartacus which had published many
titles after the war, about the whole of the workers movement from the
extreme left to the extreme right. Thousands of copies of texts by
Luxemburg, Prudhommeaux etc., which had been gathering dust in a cellar
in the town hall of the V district were once again offered to the
public.
La Vieille Taupe did not deny the need for coherence. It only considered
that it could not be reached starting from just one of the radical
currents of that period (all of them one-sided), nor just by starting to
listen to workers (like Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières), nor
just by studying the forms which modern capitalism had taken (as Souyri,
who kept away from the unrest provoked by the split in Pouvoir Ouvrier,
would have wished). Instead it would involve a theoretical appropriation
of all of the currents of the communist left (and thus also of the
historical ground on which they had come into being), and of the
Situationist International, as well as a reflection on communism and, in
particular, on the contribution of Marx.
The small heterogeneous group which had come out of Pouvoir Ouvrier had
little or no « public » activities in the months preceding May 68.
Mainly, it collectively read Capital and started to assimilate the
components of the communist left, as well as of the Situationist
International. La Vieille Taupe was not a group; rather it was the
crossing point of various threads, with a dominant anti-Leninism, which
was thrown into a new perplexity by the arrival of Invariance.
It would be absurd to claim that the existence of this small regroupment
played a decisive part in May 68 or afterwards. What occurred there
under privileged conditions (because we were able to benefit from the
experiences handed down by various groups which had already sorted
through a mass of ideas and facts), also, of course, occurred elsewhere
— often in confusion, sometimes perhaps with greater clarity. What’s
important is that the process of theoretical maturation, without which
the shockwave of 1968 would have gone less far, related to the following
points : communism, the function of democracy and proletarian
spontaneity, and not to the string of non-problems that was conveyed,
even by part of the ultra-left (consciousness, leadership, management,
authority, etc). May 68 was not a revolution (!), but what this movement
actually was would not have existed without that maturation.
In this last section our angle of vision narrows still further, since we
will be speaking in particular of the things we did within a movement
which did not succeed in extending — and thus internationalising —
itself. To pretend to have a distant and objective point of view about
this would be dishonest.
Today at the end of the period covered by this very provisional
assessment, the only clear perspectives are those of Capital, although
we hardly know whether they will be successful. Present day speech is
that of Capital because the social initiative belongs to it.
There is no technological determinism; the solution (capitalist or
communist) to any crisis is social. Human activity, and in particular
the organization of work as expressed and shaped by Capital, have once
again entered into crisis. The current period is certainly
counter-revolutionary — a restructuring by crisis — but is also the
beginning of a new cycle of struggles integrating proletarian experience
of the « recovery » that began in the 1960s. The period from 1968–72 was
the beginning of a phase — now in the process of being superseded —
marked by a crisis of the Scientific Management of work. The search for
productivity, which increased exploitation, involved a great many tough
strikes in small and medium sized companies, and by the most exploited
workers in large companies, until roughly 1975. But these struggles for
wages and differentials only perpetuated those divisions between
proletarians, which are maintained by Capital, and managed by the bosses
and trade unions.
The difficulty in understanding the current period, and in acting,
arises from the emergence of a new organisation of work, which has not
been able to establish itself, and which is at the same time both cause
and effect of other struggles, the contours of which are not yet clearly
visible.
Proletarians often went beyond the framework of trade unionism, and
sometimes even fought against it. But a defence of its condition by the
proletariat could not enable it to reorganize society. Today, going
beyond that defensive posture only exists negatively. People dreamed of
self-management : who now takes it seriously ? People spoke a great deal
about ecology : who now believes it is possible to prevent the
development of the nuclear industry in France since the left in power
has accepted it ?
« All the current problems of the apprehension of the revolution, which
one finds to a greater or lesser extent in all the theorisations that
are made, stem from the fact that the proletariat can no longer oppose
Capital with what is within the capitalist mode of production, or
rather, can no longer make the revolution the triumph of that which
exists ... »
(Théorie Communiste, n° 4, 1981, p. 37)
In our opinion, May 68 in France was the peak of a shockwave which had
begun a few years earlier and which died away after 1972–4. The year
1968 itself was rich in both positive and negative events for communism.
In the United States, the antiwar movement became radicalised as the
fighting intensified (the Tet offensive) but didn’t link up with the
workers movement, while the riots in the black ghettoes tended towards
violent nationalism and (or) reformism. In Mexico a violent student
revolt ended in a carnage (300 dead) which reinforced democracy. In
Czechoslovakia the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops more closely united
«the people» around national and liberal solutions. The dominant
consequence worldwide was the democratic containment of a phenomenon
which had potentially (but only potentially) gone beyond democracy.
The explosion did not take place in either the most modern sectors of
the industrialised world, or those most in difficulty, but where the
boom over the previous twenty years was least well adapted to national
conditions. Between 1954 and 1974 the proportion of wage workers in the
French population rose from 62% to 81% (the increase above all affecting
those employees, technicians and middle managers who made up the new
middle classes). We witnessed the fusion of violent workers demands and
of anti-authoritarian, anti-repressive student aspirations which soon
extended to a good part of the new middle classes. The movement was also
anti-cultural in that culture formed a safety deposit box and was the
opposite of creativity. It thus revived the refusal of art and culture
which had appeared about 1914–18.
May 68 was more than a split between the trade unions and parties on one
side, and a great many workers on the other. It was also a demand for
existence, which in the absence in practise of a social breakdown,
appeared more as expression than action. People wanted to communicate,
to speak, to say that which could not be done. The rejection of the past
didn’t succeed in giving itself a content, and thus a present. The
slogans : « I believe in the reality of my desires », « Under the paving
stones, the beach », referred to a different possibility, but one which,
in order to become possible, presupposed ... a revolution. In its
absence, this demand could only become adaptation or madness. The themes
of May took the form of exhortations, replacing 19 century guilt with
the imperative of pleasure.
Indeed, aside from a weak minority, the workers, the bourgeoisie, most
of the « protestors » and the State, in short everybody, acted as if
there was an implicit pact prohibiting everyone from going too far. Sign
of its limit : people did not dare, did not even want to make a
revolution, not even begin it. Sign of strength : people refused the
political game of a pseudo-revolution, since a real one could only be
something total. Even in the rue Gay-Lussac the violence remained well
on this side of the working class violence before 1914, or that seen in
the United States in the Thirties. The confrontations between workers
and trade unions were less brutal than in the past, for example at
Renault in 1947.
In the factories in 1968 one hardly found the festive atmosphere of
1936. People felt that something had happened which could go further but
they avoided doing so. The atmosphere of gravity which reigned was
coupled with a resentment against the unions, a convenient scapegoat,
whereas they were only able to keep control through the behaviour of the
rank and file. The gaiety was elsewhere, in the streets. This is why May
68 could neither reproduce, or lead to, a revolutionary return during
the years which followed. The movement generated a reformism which fed
on the neutralisation of its most virulent aspects. History doesn’t pass
the dish around a second time.
The problem of the State was not raised : 1968 was not the start of a
revolutionary phase. A revolutionary movement will not be born from a
deepening of May but from a break with the period inaugurated by May. In
the will to go on mass strike there lay a refusal; in the manner of
conducting that strike, and in particular of abandoning it to the trade
unions, only in order to rebel against them at the end when they had
scuppered it, there lay an acceptance.
People criticised power while everywhere seeking to take it. They
ridiculed parties and groupuscules only to praise the March 22 Movement,
the bridge between leftism and the radicals (the Enragés for example).
They denounced politics only to be filled with enthusiasm for a February
1848 style fraternity (while awaiting April 1974 in Portugal). The
conjunction achieved between the struggles of workers, and those of
prospective middle managers kicking over the traces, sought a different
means than those proposed by the traditional right or left : the demand
for a modern « environment », for the advantages of capitalism without
the disadvantages.
A text written a few months later for Vieille Taupe by François Martin
(at the time unpublished), expressed this simple notion : in May-June
1968, everyone had thought and acted within the framework of democracy.
The Committee for the Maintenance of Occupations (CMDO), organised by
the Situationist International, called for the formation of workers
councils. To exhort the creation of a form and imagine that this will
give its action a revolutionary content, here is the democratic and
political illusion. May 68 realised the programme of the Situationist
International, as Hungary 1956 had realised that of Socialisme ou
Barbarie : in both cases, the councils. While Socialisme ou Barbarie and
the Situationist International were moments of the life of the
proletariat, they never expressed the whole of its life-cycle. Where
workers attempted to give life to democratic forms (the base committees
of Rhône-Poulenc at Vitry), they exhausted themselves in this task,
using up the energy which they then lacked to carry out the actions that
were necessary.
The June 1968 elections did not mobilise workers, (or anyone else except
the parties), either for or against them. They did not drown the
movement, which had already enfeebled itself through having failed to
take the initiative in mid-May, and which was simultaneously bogged down
in violence (the quasi-riot of May 24), in demands, and in the
construction of democratic structures parallel to the hierarchy in the
workplace. Today, political democracy is already present, one is no
longer stirred by it. But social democracy can still mobilise energies,
towards the goal of completing political democracy, and of finally
establishing a real and non-formal democracy, through introducing a
space for deliberation into the business, the school, the district, etc.
Everywhere, ’68 was a vast taking up of speech by the « interested
parties », though they never ceased acting as users, perpetually
concerned about reorganising the places — subway, campsite, business —
where Capital had placed them.
However it would be facile and misleading to reduce May ’68 to something
insignificant. The movement took on everything, but only reordered each
element of the whole, which itself was not attacked. This beginning of
the return of revolution testified to a lucidity, but in negative form.
There was no « dual power » but, at the climactic point of the strike
with De Gaulle’s speech on May 30, a dual absence of power. Neither
government or strikers controlled the situation, nor were they certain
of controlling themselves (De Gaulle was obliged to go and verify the
loyalty of the army). Bizarrely, at a time when people spoke so much of
management, one saw that the workers disassociated themselves from all
strike administration. Abandoning control of the factories to the trade
unions was a sign of weakness, but also of the fact that they were
conscious that the problem lay elsewhere. Five years later, in 1973, in
a big strike at Laval, workers purely and simply left the factory for
three weeks. Like the « de-politicization » of which so much has been
said, this loss of interest in the company, in work and in its
reorganisation, is ambivalent, and cannot be interpreted except in
relation to everything else. Communism was certainly present in 1968,
but only in relief, in negative. At Nantes in 1968, and later at SEAT at
Barcelona (1971) or Quebec (1972), strikers would take over districts or
cities, go as far as seizing radio stations, but would make nothing of
it : the self-organisation of proletarians « is possible, but at the
same time, they have nothing to organise » (Théorie communiste, n° 4,
1981, p. 21).
In any event, proletarians did not create new political, trade union, or
« unitary » organizations, as at the time of the German revolution.
Sometimes they tried to build democratic structures, which fortunately
would not survive the strike. But they didn’t feel the need to give
their strike a « soviet » form. Why ? The vehemence of their anti-union
response testifies to the fact that in many factories they had the
strength to impose democratic organs to manage the strike, if nothing
more than that. They could have but they did not try to. Their problem
lay elsewhere. The ambiguity of 68 lies here, in this refusal which is
only a refusal. One cannot exist by default.
The radical minority left the enterprise and met with other minority
elements, in the company of students, leftists and revolutionaries. The
CMDO was one of the places where leftism was kept on the fringes.
Censier was another. The first issue of Mouvement Communiste (1972)
would make an analysis of its action. (One can also find much
information in J. Baynac, Mai Retrouvé, Laffont, 1978, contradicting the
democratic interpretations of its author.) The relative coherence of
Censier, was due above all to the informal group La Vieille Taupe about
which we have spoken, quickly reinforced by GLAT, (contrary to what is
said, and not said, by Baynac, who also played an important role in this
group [Vieille Taupe] as well as at Censier).
A little before 1968, in Issue 11 of its review, the Situationist
International had responded to ultra-leftists that the Situationists did
not care about gathering workers around them to undertake a permanent «
workers » activity. The day when there was something to be done, said
the S.I. the revolutionaries would be with the revolutionary workers.
This is what happened.
Censier stimulated and coordinated the activity of radical, not to say
revolutionary, minorities, in numerous firms. The critique of the trade
unions, timid at first, became more scathing at the end of the strikes.
The extremist fractions, who were isolated in the workplace, found a
meeting place there. On the whole, the debate which was inaugurated at
Censier escaped the torrent of empty phrases which often poured out
elsewhere and demonstrated great lucidity, as testified by the Rapport
d’orientation of May 21, written by three people, at least two of them
from GLAT, and perhaps a fourth (Kayatti, a member of the S.I.) (Baynac,
pp. 161–63).
Where many would come to see Censier as a lesson in democracy, at the
time we saw a lesson about democracy : a demonstration of the
superficial character of the opposition between individual-bourgeois
democracy and collective-workers democracy. The problem of
minority-majority only arose for the members of ICO who were also
present in Censier, but who refused to join the activities of a minority
that risked imposing itself on the mass. The sterility of councillist
logic !
May 68 did not pose the question of communism. The gifts of provisions
to the strikers testified to a solidarity, not to the beginning of the
decay of market exchange. The communist perspective existed in the
undeniable relaxing of immediate relations, the breaking down of
sociological barriers, the life without money for several weeks, the
pleasure of acting together, in a word in this sketch of community which
can be seen in every great social movement, even nonrevolutionary ones
(Orwell in Catalonia in 1936). The various committees which were based
at Censier naturally debated what to do, and what was necessary in order
to go further. It is not so common that large assemblies numbering many
workers discuss communism.
The leaflet Que faire ?, about 100,000 copies of which were republished
and distributed, recommended what the movement needed to do to go
further, or even just continue : take a number of simple measures which
broke with capitalist logic, in order that the strike could show its
capacity to make society function differently; meet social needs (which
would rally the hesitant and the middle class who were worried by the
violence — the product of a deadlock, an impotent reaction in the face
of an impasse) through free provision of transport, health care, food,
through the collective management of distribution centres, through
striking against payments (rent, taxes, bills); and show that the
bourgeoisie and the state are useless.
Communism was only present in 1968 as a vision. Even the workers hostile
to the trade unions didn’t take the next step, the revolutionary
elements among them being the exception rather than the rule. An
additional proof of weakness was the confusion surrounding the rally at
Charléty at the end of May. Charléty was a political attempt to go
further, through an extension of the social movement at the level of
state power. Charléty was where many of the leftists were to be found,
but also the left of the trade unions (in particular the CFDT), and
where we also saw a celebrity who people had recently wanted to make a
national hero, the De Gaulle of the left : Mendès-France. Charléty was
the peak of the consciousness and political realism which the « May
movement » gave evidence of. On one side, the dream : councils. On the
other, the reality : a real reforming government, where many saw
themselves playing the role of Lenin to this Mendès-Kerensky. We can
smile about it today, but if the Mendès solution had carried the day,
many protestors would have supported it. One year later, two young
workers who produced a leaflet with La Vieille Taupe recalling the
revolutionary scope of May 68, stated : « We will not forget Charléty
»... In 1981, the election of a Socialist President, Mitterand, would
finally realise the hopes of Charléty.
After the end of the strike we all made the mistake of counting on a
clarification taking place. This misread the nature of the movement, and
forgot that in periods of revolution — or of shocks like 1968 — all
organisations and ideologies prosper, including the
counter-revolutionaries.
Leftism, in particular, came to attribute false revolutionary goals to a
« dress rehearsal », which in reality had not taken place. However the
post-May period could only be counter-revolutionary, a demand for
liberty in all directions, including in relation to the revolutionary
movement. Since the explosion had not modified the fundamental
structures, its energies dispersed in opposing outdated institutions,
social mores, etc.
Taking the place of Stalinism, leftism pushed capitalist dispossession
to extremes, while presenting itself as the remedy for that
dispossession. Capitalised man is deprived of roots. The leftist
readopted this dis-identification. Living in another world, the militant
projected himself into another self, « at the side of the proletariat »,
« with the socialist countries » or « for the third world ». The crisis
of leftism some years later, triggered the opposite phenomenon : the
search for identity. Henceforth everyone would now « search » for the
particular group within which they would find their « natural » roots
(feminism, regionalism, homosexual identity, etc).
All ideologies were revitalised, Leninism just as much as anarchism. We
should not regret their current decline. This bedlam of illusions
naturally led to their autocritique : people passed on from militancy to
everyday life. If « the individual is the form par excellence of
bourgeois existence, and egoism […] the essence […] of present day
society […] dispersed in atoms » (Marx), bourgeois society also always
reunites those atoms into groups. The privatisation of life, and the
increasing difficulty in having any collective non commercial activity,
entails a polarisation, where people either tend to deny themselves as
persons, in order to no longer exist except inside a group, or else
refuse all organisation in order to live only as individuals. A false
alternative is posed : is man initially « himself » or is he « social »
? Is activity menaced more by individualism or by the group racket ? The
idea that it’s only interior life or everyday life that matters merely
inverts the idea of the militant, that one must intervene on what is
external, not on oneself, without making any critique of it.
Militancy and the activism of everyday life engage with one another like
a warring couple who will never separate. Moral critiques of the
militant miss their target. The militant is not just a « poor bloke »,
starved of affection. Militancy is the unavoidable illusion of the
possibility of activity in a world which makes it almost impossible,
it’s a mystified means to escape the dominant passivity. You seek to act
for a reason other than your own condition, you step out of yourself,
you find a dynamism in realities or ideas that are external to your own
life : « the proletariat » or « the revolution » or, to be more modern :
« radicality » or « desire ».
After May people criticised everything, except the cement binding the
whole together, the totality itself. The absence of an offensive at the
centre of social gravity obliged critiques from every point of the
compass each to respect the limits of its own production. Within a
different general framework they would all have produced something else;
with nothing leading towards a revolution, they ebbed away. These
neo-reformisms were different from their predecessors : where the latter
had had a project at the level of society (to reorganise it around work,
constituted as a unified force), these gave up trying to change society
in order to merely arrange a free space within it.
The « liberation » of women, of sexuality, of mores, etc., is a
fragmentation. Within themselves people separate one function from the
others. Instead of going towards total, multiple being, people divide
themselves up, understand and defend themselves by turns as woman, as
consumer, as producer, as Breton, etc., whereas the interests of these
different categories oppose one another. People succeed in the amazing
feat of creating within themselves the divisions which Capital
endeavours to maintain within the proletariat.
In France, wherever self-organisation in the workplace had been
established, it collapsed after June 1968. The Italian « hot autumn »
[in French « mai rampant » trans] of 1969–70 saw the emergence of
councils, which even the head of the CGIL trade-union confederation
recognised had become transformed into para-tradeunion institutions.
These councils did not succeed in constituting themselves as mass
organisations embracing the whole of social life, gathering together,
not just producers, but the whole working population. There was no
longer a place for a traditional workers movement of that kind. The
modernist CFDT-style hope of a new working class that recomposed the
unity of work, and was capable of managing it, shattered on the reality
of the need for that numerous, malleable and not very skilled strata,
which is always necessary for Capital. Self-management only served to
make believe that it was possible.
« The Italian situation proceeds more slowly and ultimately reveals its
tendencies. »
« The first phase lasted from 1968 to the winter of 1971. The main
element was the birth of workers’ struggles independent of the influence
of unions and political organisations. Workers’ action committees were
formed as in France, with one essential difference : the French ones
were quickly driven out of the factories by the power of the unions,
which in practice compelled them to have no illusions about the
boundaries of the factory. In so far as the general situation did not
allow them to go any further, they disappeared. In Italy, on the other
hand, workers’ committees were at first able to organise themselves
inside the factories. (…) Many committees were formed in the factories,
in isolation from each other, and they all began to question the speed
of the line and to organise sabotage. »
« (…) The workers’ struggle itself met no resistance. This was in fact
what disarmed it. It could do nothing but adapt to the conditions of
capitalist society. The unions, for their part, (…) reshaped their
factory organisations according to the pattern of the “autonomous”
committees which appeared in recent struggles. »
Le Mouvement Communiste, n° 1, 1972 : « En quoi la perspective
communiste réapparaît. »
« (…) the more the importance of the sectors of research, of creation
and of monitoring develops, the more human work is concentrated in the
preparation and organisation of production, the more the sense of
initiative and of responsibility increases, in a word, the more the
modern worker reconquers, at the collective level, the professional
autonomy he has lost in the phase of the mechanisation of work, the more
the tendencies towards demands for management develop. »
(S. Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, 1963)
(Twenty years after Mallet’s theses, we can take note that trade
unionists, reformers and experts continue to inform us of a new kind of
industrial work in which the worker will escape his alienation, this
time thanks to robots. We intend to write an article about this
evolution.)
Even before the recapture of Censier by the police (July 1968), the
committees which met there had formed Inter-Enterprises, which continued
to meet for several months, bringing together informal delegates (not
explicitly mandated by their comrades) of the extremist workers
minorities. The Inter-Enterprises were more a place of exchange and
discussion than an active coordination. La Vieille Taupe, GLAT and ICO
participated. At the same time an attempt at collaboration between La
Vieille Taupe and GLAT ended in complete failure. The regular meetings
and debates of the Inter-Enterprises, while they seldom led to
collective action in the companies concerned, prepared the ground within
peoples heads, continuing the discussions started in May and June. The
leftists themselves made « concrete » proposals : to organize struggles
... At the same time the very name InterEnterprise indicated their
limits (that is to say those of May 68) : this was not a communist
organisation, only the means of a transition to something else which,
for the time being, was not imminent.
Of course the disappearance of the Inter-Enterprises did not mean the
end of selforganisation by a minority of workers, or of their conflicts
with the trade union apparatuses. The Committees of Action continued to
bring together protesting employees and radical and leftist elements.
Little by little, part of the workers ceased taking part in these
activities. Several dozen members or sympathisers of the Comité Hachette
d’Action Révolutionnaire, still members of the CGT, came one after
another at a union meeting to leave their union cards on the platform.
But a few weeks later, the majority joined the CFDT.
A small number of active elements in the Committees of Action wanted to
act on a different, revolutionary, basis and sought to discover this. La
Vieille Taupe was one of the poles around which they met. It also
brought into contact people from the same country (Italy), who had not
previously known one another.
The Situationist International progressively disappeared. Before 1968 it
had been the public affirmation of a future revolution. Afterwards it
affirmed the arrival of the revolution in 1968. The democracy of the
councils had been the dream of May. Instead of seeing in this the limits
of May, the S.I. read into it a proof that councillism was correct. The
theory of councils was appropriate to the French and Italian strikes,
but inadequate for a revolutionary movement which would go beyond the
limits of those strikes. To accelerate things the S.I. called for a
devising of scandals, of workers « Strasbourgs ». It congealed around
self-management, and became the herald of what existed by disguising it
as revolution : Italy, Portugal. Incapable of drawing up its own self
assessment, it substituted for this a mania for judging failures of the
morality which it flaunted and imposed : radicality. « I will kill
everyone and then I will leave » said Ubu. When he had judged and
condemned nearly everybody, there remained nothing more for Debord but
to perpetuate The Society of the Spectacle by turning it into images,
then in his last film, « In girum nocte... » , to exalt a nostalgia that
people would either find touching or annoying, and once again to
cultivate his distinctiveness. During this period the revolutionary
movement was assimilating what was essential in the S.I., while its mere
disciples drew from it a justification for an art of living which became
one with all the other so called « alternative » forms of life. « That
is why we adopted what was (at that moment) the extremest variety, which
by vigorous dialectic had succeeded, through the logic of its
revolutionism, in discarding the necessity for revolution. » (Victor
Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, OUP, 1963, p. 18).
The theoretical deepening within the work of a minority that was small,
but linked to a fraction of radical workers, themselves little capable
of positive action in their workplaces, spread not just to Italy and
Spain but to modern capitalist countries (Scandinavia, the United
States). We became aware of crossing over to a qualitatively new stage.
The re-evaluation of the heritage of the German left, and the
assimilation of what was best in the Italian left, was tackled publicly
by La Vieille Taupe in 1969 in a text on the ideology of the ultra-left,
written for a national and international meeting of Information et
Correspondance Ouvrieres (ICO). This pivotal text was important for
those who recognised themselves in it, but the attempt to debate with
the « councillists » (ICO, Mattick...) came to a sudden halt. At the
same time the International Communist Party (PCI), the straight-jacket
which imprisoned the Italian left, entered a crisis which led two years
later to the splitting away of the Scandinavians, over the German left’s
view of the trade-union question.
Although it was not clearly expressed, the point of convergence was the
conviction that the proletariat does not have to install itself as a
social force before changing the world. There is thus no workers
organisation to create, to arouse or to hope for. There is no
transitional mode of production between capitalism and communism. There
is no autonomous proletarian organisation outside of what the
proletariat does in order to communise the world and itself with it.
There is therefore no problem of revolutionaries being interior or
exterior in relation to the proletariat.
This conviction was enough to move us away from groups like Révolution
Internationale (formed in 1968) which after a councillist phase, took up
part of the heritage of the Italian left, Bilan and Internationalisme
(after 1945). An example of failed synthesis, allying a councillist bias
to a fetishism of the organisation, under the name International
Communist Current (ICC) the group quickly sank into the life of a sect,
comparable to the [Bordigist] International Communist Party, always in
competition with other groups.
Between 1968 and 1972, La Vieille Taupe was undoubtedly the point of
contact, and Invariance (led by Camatte) the theoretical catalyst for
this convergence between France, Italy and Scandinavia. Thus in 1969,
issues 6 & 7 of the first series of Invariance, reinterpreted a century
of the revolutionary movement by reintegrating the German left into it.
However the stimulative role played by Invariance did not eliminate its
original idealism, for it conceived of the proletariat more as a
historic entity than as the product of real relations and situations.
This re-appropriation of the past was not the work of archivists; some
proletarians took part in it for the same reasons as the others. Pierre
Guillaume could thus characterise the functioning of our community at
that time : when someone, who has the advantage over others of having
read a revolutionary text from the past, makes a historical exposition
of it, then if he is clear, his audience will know as much as him : he
is no more than « the agent of the details ».
The refusal to form a group, delimiting an interior and an exterior,
allowed those who met at La Vieille Taupe to move towards a common
coherence which others only possessed on paper. Within this theoretical
and practical community, a certain dynamic was at work, which put
everyone on an equal footing while integrating abilities and various
nuances of opinion. This collectivity, which for convenience, we will
call La Vieille Taupe, advanced step by step, each time associating
those who approved of the particular action being undertaken, without
them having to agree on a « programme » or a « platform ». But of
course, if somebody proposed such and such action to this or that
person, it was because they thought they had more in common with them
than just a desire for action. La Vieille Taupe didn’t try to make a
name for itself : our acts were our signature. Common activity was based
on a consensus which was often experienced as inspiring : there were
things to be done and said, and people often understood one another very
quickly. The absence of voting, and of legalism, gave the feeling of an
activity close to what one could consider as communist. Psychology, the
discussion of states of feeling and the influence of character and
emotional « problems » , were rejected.
This form of organisation encouraged irresponsibility. A questionable
text might be distributed, a harmful initiative taken, without people
coming to any necessary reservations or rectifications, because the
group didn’t have a definite existence. The most active individual,
Pierre Guillaume, was thus the least controlled by the common activity.
As for the absence of psychology, if we think of this with melancholy
when we see what a soup so many among us now swim in, and when we see
the extent to which disturbed behaviour became important in the
subsequent evolution, and in the splits which punctuated it, we should
also not forget that this refusal was in part a blindness which
sometimes led us to tolerate behaviour we would no longer put up with
today.
If the absence of formalism stopped us succumbing to the diseases of
sects :
doctrinal sclerosis and the organisation of organisation, the lack of
clearly defined perspectives, which we might have agreed on after a more
formal discussion, had the disadvantage of hindering a critique of our
activities, for this could not be based on any formulated agreement.
It’s true that this effort of formulation would have inevitably deprived
us of the support of part of the elements which circulated around La
Vieille Taupe. And it is not certain that this would have been a good
thing : we would perhaps have gained in precision, but a creative
profusion would have been lost, which only later bore fruit, in our
heads, and in those of others.
Nevertheless, this vagueness facilitated a Stalinophobic mania which
came close to making anti-Stalinism a requirement in the same way that
antifascism was for others (if it was against the Communist Party and
the USSR, it could not be bad...).
Its necessary to say again that hostility to the Communist Party, like
hostility to NATO, can be anti-revolutionary. For the communist movement
there is no « enemy number one of the peoples of the world ».
It ended up that La Vieille Taupe devoted much energy to placing «
banana skins » under the feet of Stalinists in order to throw them off
balance, and that it devoted much effort to scandalous acts, attacks on
a single terrain : that of ideology, which the enemy had controlled for
far too long without being seriously threatened. A violent action that
doesn’t include within itself its meaning (comprehensible to those with
whom you have something in common, and to whom you address yourself)
plays the enemies game. Writing « Too many murderers (massacreurs)
decorate this wall with flowers » on the mur des Fédérés [a memorial to
the dead of the Paris commune in Père Lachaise cemetery, which was
itself the site of the final resistance and subsequent massacre of the
communards on the 28 May 1871. The memorial was used as a place of
annual pilgrimage for the French Communist Party translators note], is
an act which contains within itself its impact, and whose significance
cannot be misunderstood except through bad faith or from an obvious lack
of interest in the issue. But a violent attack which doesn’t inscribe
within itself a possible clarification will be given its meaning by the
political powers, or by the media, and from the outside.
If a blow aimed at representations, (for example, the myth which the
Communist party maintains about itself), is addressed to radicals, it
can retain its meaning, and encourage the silent majority. But if it
attempts to address everyone, and change public opinion about the
Communist Party, it will simultaneously fail to reach both general and
minority consciousness. Yet La Vieille Taupe practised scandal without
being able to discuss it, except on rare occasions, and to little
effect.
In France, 1972 was a turning point. The year saw the apogee of leftism
and the last important occurrence of the anti-statist, anti-political
and anti-repressive demonstrations which had appeared in 1968. The
funeral of Overnay was the climax after which everything fell apart. It
was a large anti-Communist Party gathering : Overney, a maoist militant,
had been shot at the gates of Renault by the employers private police,
and Marchais [general secretary of the Communist Party] had not been
able to restrain this heartfelt cry : « We are not going to start again
as in 68 … ». The leftist stewards could hardly contain this enormous
demonstration, shot through with a riotous atmosphere, but unable to set
goals for itself. We saw one of our number, his voice competing with the
megaphones, recapture the slogan of the demonstration from the
Trotskyist stewards : « Marchais, bastard, the people will have your
hide », before the underlings intervened with a cry of « no
anticommunism ». In its violence, this slogan nonetheless showed the
limits of the demonstration. Within leftism, one part of Maoism
developed an anti-trade union and anti-Communist Party line, but within
a logic that was antifascist, populist and democratic.
Coming after a theoretical breakthrough in the work of revolutionaries,
the demonstration was interpreted as a sign of the appearance (finally)
of a radical current beyond leftism. A series of groups were born at
this time : in particular Négation in Paris and Intervention communiste
(which was to become Théorie communiste) in Aix. La Vieille Taupe
prepared to publish several texts, one of which was En quoi la
perspective communiste réapparaît by François Martin, developed from
several texts from 1968 and afterwards. Continuing the discussions which
had followed Overney’s funeral, at which a Vieille Taupe leaflet had
been well received, a number of workers who for a long time had taken
part in our activities criticized the lack of follow up to our action,
and called for the creation of a more coherent group. The leaflets, the
theoretical texts such as those by Denis Authier (preface to Trotsky’s
Report of the Siberian Delegation, for Spartacus), by Gilles Dauvé,
under the name Jean Barrot, and by Pierre Guillaume, and the informal
contacts, were no longer enough they said. Thus Mouvement Communiste saw
the light of day, with a bulletin of the same name, of which François
Martin’s text formed the first issue, and Capitalism and Communism the
second. Five hundred copies of each were published (a further 1000
copies of No 2 almost immediately afterwards), and they were distributed
in a few days, the greater part by direct contact, notably at workplaces
(Renault). We had the impression of moving forward.
The theoretical clarification, and the confluence between groups in
several countries, had created belief in the birth of a movement, few in
number, but coherent, able to make itself known, and to maintain a
minimum of active relations with the proletarian experience. Perhaps we
were right about the clarification taking place, but we were certainly
wrong about the formation of centres capable of reflection and even of
action. Overnay’s funeral was one of the illusions of May, of which it
formed the last gasp, and by no means the sign of a renewal. Even those
who had pushed for the formation of Mouvement Communiste dissociated
themselves from it almost at once. The links established with Négation
did not last. Our links with the more modern countries cooled and the
only close contacts we maintained were in Italy and Spain. The global
proletarian activity had facilitated the encounter and accumulation of
points of view which were often in sympathy, but it was not strong
enough to impose a synthesis which would have provided a better grasp of
the present : we did not get beyond an understanding of the past.
In these conditions, the book Le Mouvement Communiste (Champ Libre,
1972), which came out at the same time, could not be satisfactory. It
was a text by Gilles Dauvé, not of La Vieille Taupe or the group
Mouvement Communiste, which had hardly discussed or improved it. As the
forward to the Portuguese edition (1975) has already put it, the work
was an inadequate theorization, as partial, in its way, as most texts at
that time. Re-reading Marx in the footsteps of Invariance and Bordiga,
the book neglected to include Marx himself in its global critique. Its
concern to describe objective « laws » made it forget real relations. «
Value » no longer seemed to be the expression of social relations, but
tended to personify itself, and become a subject of history like the «
communist movement » , whereas value and communist movement are only
theoretical constructions which approach reality. The book constructed
an integrated model of contradictions instead of illuminating them on
the basis of practise. On closing the book, one might believe in the
existence of a proletarian movement automatically set in motion by the «
obsolescence » of value. Today it seems to us that the link between
capitalism and communism, and between Capital and proletariat, is far
from being as clear as we put it then. Communist transformation was
presented as a series of measures to be taken. While we said that it was
a question of a movement, we didn’t show in detail the subversive
effects of such immediate measures. Abstract analysis of the real
conditions, and idealism.
The Scandinavian split in the [Bordigist] PCI in 1971 triggered the
departure of part of the members of the French section. The crisis of
militancy, endemic within all political groups, did not orient these
ex-militants towards revolutionary action (which would it would first
have been necessary to define). It propelled them towards a search for «
life » in which they got lost. Their evolution conformed to a process we
often saw at work in our ranks : a kind of « life-cycle of the
revolutionary ». On the basis of an instinctive rejection of established
society, people pass from existential revolt to organised activity for
revolution, through a series of breaks which lead more and more to the
left. They make a critique of everything, of all forms of existence and
proletarian intervention, of the whole of the revolutionary or
pseudo-revolutionary past, glorified and deformed, until a limit point
is reached where the critique of everything also includes revolution and
proletariat which they end up rejecting as myths, unless, that is, they
theorize them as nothing more than abstract identities, philosophical
concepts out of reach of human action.
Invariance had obviously played a part in the crisis of the PCI, but its
own evolution, reflecting the quasi-general disarray, only contributed
to a lack of progress by some, and to a take-off into hyperspace by
others. Camatte, in taking up Marx’s phrase well summarized the
contradiction of the proletariat : « a class of capitalist society that
is not of capitalist society » (Series III, 1979, pp. 55–56). But he
resolved this contradiction in a strange manner : first the class is the
partycommunity, then the party is the class-community, and thus a
universal class, and finally it is humanity. Camatte had initially
relocated the failing class in the « party ». Instead of going on from
there to what it is that creates the proletariat, its experience, and
its contradictions, Invariance then relocated the party into being the
whole of humanity. The metaphysics of humanity replaced that of the
party. But it always remained a matter of a mediation between revolution
and the activity of men, because what it was in their practice which
could generate a revolution was poorly discerned.
Invariance translated into its own language capitalist omnipresence.
Camatte so well understood the absorption of the world by this
impersonal monster that he succumbed to its fascination, to the point of
seeing it everywhere. If Capital swallows everything, then proletarians
in their turn make themselves into cannibals, and their struggle
nourishes Capital with their flesh. Invariance showed how structuralism
expressed the strength of a system which in eternalising itself denied
history. In its turn, incapable of seeing in barbarism anything other
than barbarism, it no longer distinguished anything more than a totality
within which all previous distinctions (classes, production/circulation,
etc.) had been erased.
The second and third series of Invariance theorised a visible reality
which we run up against painfully : the omnipresence of Capital.
According to Invariance, against a totalitarian being which occupies the
entire social terrain, another subterranean, but equally omnipresent,
reality would oppose itself : the uprising of life.
Traditional revolutionary thought avoided speculation about the survival
of Capital by assigning it to external causes (social democracy,
imperialism, etc). Invariance resorted to an interiorization : Capital
survives because it has entered into us. The economic « death crisis »
is replaced by a revolt of our nature which has been scorned by Capital.
For Invariance, apart from this human nature, this something within us
which refuses to submit itself, Capital absorbs everything. This is to
forget that absorption must enter through the real relations between
humans. The opposition is not between an activity, that is capitalised
through and through, and human nature : if there is an opposition, it is
necessarily within capitalist activity itself, precisely because it is
set in motion by proletarians. It is this very activity that is
contradictory and perhaps offers an exit. The solution lies in the
social relation, not elsewhere.
« The worker himself is a Capital, a commodity… » (Marx), but he is not
these things passively. Invariance understood that Capital does not
proceed by itself, but through our own action. But Camatte concluded
from this that Capital had therefore triumphed for good : it had made
itself us, it incorporated us. However it is precisely through this
activity which it imposes on us that Capital is contradictory. As Lefort
said in the article previously cited, proletarians are in a situation of
universality.
With regard to Camatte who believes that the revolutionary movement, in
the sense we give these words, is dead, and who believes that the new
reality of Capital has removed any validity from the concepts of
proletariat and revolution, we should not take refuge in an attitude of
rigid contempt. Revolutionaries at the end of the 19 century justifiably
affirmed, against « revisionism » , that nothing essential had changed
since 1848. In 1914 however, (i.e. too late), they realised that all the
same something had indeed changed : the labour movement had become an
instrument of Capital. Revolutionaries should have recognised then that
revisionism was the expression of real problems which their refutation
by itself had neglected.
Camatte formerly provided many elements for revolutionary theory in our
time. Today he poses a real question badly. His wandering illustrates
the ambiguity of the period.
Castoriadis and Camatte saw in Capital something which devours
everything, and concluded by invalidating the concepts differentiating
the parts of Capital, to leave in place, in the work of one, a
bureaucratic pyramid, in the work of the other, an indefinable totality
which simultaneously integrates the human being and yet doesn’t succeed
in this. These are the thinkers of the new face of Capital, of the end
of the labour movement and the absence of the revolutionary movement :
because the latter does not display the characteristics which one might
have imagined in the 1960s, they have cut themselves adrift from the
moorings.
A group like the Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs révolutionnaires,
who notably published Militancy — highest stage of alienation in 1972,
went against this trend of « every man for himself ». Initially marked
by the Situationist International, they became acquainted with the
communist left, and effected a convergence with La Vieille Taupe.
Mouvement Communiste had not achieved a satisfactory collective
functioning, any more than La Vieille Taupe had. It became an organ for
publishing texts by Gilles Dauvé, amended by a few people. After
difficult discussions with Négation and others about what we could agree
to do, and a polemic about a memorial meeting for Leon Blum which we had
disrupted, we realised there was a crisis in our ranks. The fourth issue
of Mouvement Communiste « Révolutionnaire ? » (1973) contained some
valid remarks, together with others which were distorted, on the subject
of subversive action and the community. But it especially testified to a
revealing displacement in the centre of interest : it no longer
considered the proletarians, but the revolutionaries. Its hardly
surprising that this text proposed no real remedy for what was not a
disease but the state of the movement.
A « milieu » had aimed at constituting itself around a communist
ideology, with its own slogans (« abolition of wage labour » , « crisis
of value » ) in place of those of the leftists. Noting that it no longer
performed the role of a meeting place, and instead entertained a
clientele like any other bookstore, the bookshop La Vieille Taupe closed
at the end of 1972.
« All the elements of revolutionary theory exist in the marketplace, but
not their instructions for use.
This is not the province of a bookshop.
Revolutionary theory cannot exist apart from the establishment of
practical links in order to act and this action can no longer
principally be the affirmation and dissemination of revolutionary
theory.
(…) La Vieille Taupe must disappear. »
(Bail à céder, [Lease for sale] La Vieille Taupe poster, 15 December
1972)
Before 1968 there were groups unable to distribute their theory beyond a
circle of initiates. This was the reason for existence of the bookshop.
In 1972, revolutionary ideas circulated, amongst other reasons because
society needed revolutionary theory to understand and adjust its
contradictions. But any collective revolutionary effort was, and
remained, extremely fragile.
Failing to politicise workplace conflicts, after 1968 leftism had not
succeeded in its passage from the factories to the corridors of power,
and had withdrawn into struggles outside work, struggles around everyday
life (typical was the Maoist group Vive La Révolution (VLR) and its
journal Ce que nous voulons : Tout ! What do we want : Everything!).
After 1972, politics declined and the various neoreformisms of everyday
life flourished. Compared to leftist specialists in power, these
movements, in one sense, posed real problems. But each became bogged
down in its own speciality. By comparison the « communist » milieu had a
global point of view to oppose to theirs which seemed like their
opposite : more like a political discourse, a more distinctive point of
view, but unlike the others absolutely ineffective. All partial critique
was false, but the global critique lacked any point of application.
A social movement reappeared in Spain during the final years of
Francoism. Strikes followed one another, and repression only intensified
them. From the example of what had occurred in France, the need for a
theory of revolution for the current period created a renewal of
interest in the revolutionary past, Spain in 1936–39, May 37 in
Barcelona, and also their German and Italian forebears. But this
theoretical effort was accompanied by armed struggle, sparked off by the
encounter of official violence with revolutionary impatience. The
opposition of broad fractions of the population to a dictatorship which
was unsuited to modern capitalism, nourished within a number of
revolutionaries a belief in the virtue of example, or the necessity to
create a « fire » around which proletarian energies would concentrate
themselves.
The comrades with whom we were in contact were engaged in a double
process of clarification and confusion. La Vieille Taupe had for some
years been in contact with a group that had given rise to the Mouvement
de Libération Ibérique (MIL), which had published a translation of Notes
for an Analysis of the Russian Revolution (an ultra-left text by G.
Dauvé from 1967), and many other texts written by people either close to
La Vieille Taupe or who frequented the shop. The MIL possessed the dual
structure one generally finds in those organisations (like the IRA or
ETA) which seek to replace the state : a political wing and a military
wing. The first supported strikes and published texts, etc., the second
practised hold-ups and bombings.
A fundamental error of La Vieille Taupe and Mouvement Communiste was not
to have clarified their relations with the groups they met, particularly
the foreign ones. We debated with them and we criticized errors, but if
this criticism was accepted (often only in words), a formal agreement
then sealed a collaboration which left unacceptable positions in the
shadows. For example, the requirements of antiStalinism involved us in
distributing democratic leaflets about Czechoslovakia in 1970. And for a
long time we maintained a not very critical relationship with a small
Mexican party which, it transpired, sometimes participated in elections.
We knew about the illegal activities of the MIL. We had not warned it
strictly enough against the process which its practise placed it in, and
against the transformation of its members into professional
revolutionaries, unable to live other than through hold-ups, more and
more disconnected from the social movement, and using communist ideas as
an ideology, a justification for an activity which too closely resembled
that of Leninist groups.
Puig Antich, who wanted to stop armed actions, and sought to convince
the others to follow him, was arrested in October 1973 with several
other members of the MIL. They faced the death penalty. Members of the
MIL asked Mouvement Communiste for help in breaking the wall of silence
which surrounded these arrests, thus avoiding a speedy trial and
condemnation in the general indifference about them.
Two types of action were carried out in parallel. On the one hand, we
endeavoured to counter the account given by the Spanish State which
presented Puig and his comrades as gangsters : this struggle took the
form of the Vidal-Naquet committee (a traditional committee of
democratic personalities). In addition to this it was necessary to say
what we thought of the affair as revolutionaries (amongst other things
this took the form of issue 6 of Mouvement Communiste). Pierre
Guillaume, who four months later was to declare that this was not a good
text, devoted himself almost exclusively to contacting personalities and
journalists to put pressure on Franco. There was rapidly a separation
between these two activities. Could it have been otherwise ?
In any event, the revolutionary milieu either attacked us (Négation,
Révolution
Internationale), or remained indifferent, (GLAT). They accused Mouvement
Communiste of having one foot in anti-fascism. Le Fléau Social, which
had emerged from the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire and
broken with it, was the only organized group which supported us. Puig
Antich was executed, primarily no doubt because of the successful
assassination of Carrero Blanco, the Spanish prime minister, by ETA. But
even if he had lived, the assessment of this affair could only have been
negative : Mouvement Communiste had failed to clarify the questions of
violence and revolutionary solidarity, and had failed to make its point
of view intelligible to French and Spanish revolutionaries.
Revolutionaries don’t need martyrs. Communism is also made through
spontaneous solidarity. Our activity involves a fraternity without which
it loses its content. We are not an army which moves pawns around : and
this remains true even in the military phases of a revolution.
However as we have already said (see: For a World without Moral Order),
for us biological survival is not an absolute value. In the enthusiasm
of an insurrection, the concept of sacrifice loses any meaning because
the insurgents place themselves in the forefront of danger. But outside
of such a period of massive confrontation ? How do we express our
solidarity with a revolutionary threatened with death without altering
the meaning of his activity ? There is no precise answer to this
question. We can only set out some basic principles.
There is no such thing as a revolutionary purity which can be
irredeemably sullied by the smallest compromise. Puig Antich preferred
to be saved by bourgeois intervention than die in « revolutionary purity
». No-one in our ranks would have dreamed of opposing the fact that some
bourgeois democrats intervened to try and save his life. But the whole
point was to know how to bring about such interventions. It’s necessary
to take up the word democracy, and act in such a way that the democrats
do their work, but without concealing what we think of the democratic
version of capitalism : easier said than done. Revolutionaries cannot
arouse public opinion for when you place yourself on that terrain you
cease being a revolutionary. You can write to a newspaper to exert
pressure on behalf of someone, but never in order to put over basic
positions.
We have no cult of heroes and if a comrade disavowed his beliefs in a
time of danger, we would no more judge him than we would all those
proletarians who « agree » every day to subject themselves to the
dictatorship of wage labour. Simply, he would fall outside our common
activity. In the case of Puig it was one thing to contact this or that
personality to outline the truth, it was quite another to form a
committee which inevitably would live its life as a committee, and take
on an existence of its own, thereby crossing a limit beyond which
democratic logic overrode everything else. While he doesn’t seek death,
and while he doesn’t hesitate to benefit from the contradictions of his
enemies (in this case the struggle between democracy and dictatorship),
the radical in the war against social order cannot suddenly act as if he
will no longer take part, simply because he risks losing his life,
except at the risk of his activity losing any impact.
There was a fundamental ambiguity in this struggle, for trying to save
Puig and his comrades by trying to win recognition of their politics and
refusing the label « gangster » meant wanting to substitute one label
for another, and if Puig was a radical, he could hardly see himself in
the status of « political » prisoner, something we had reproached the
French Maoists for demanding. If we were going to struggle on the
terrain of democracy, the minimum would perhaps have been to proclaim
that we didn’t dissociate the case of Puig from that of the others
condemned to die by francoism. And in fact, for good measure, Franco
executed an « ordinary prisoner » at the same time as Puig. This unhappy
individual, far more than Puig, was the butt of this sick joke.
Our lack of clarity on this point was only one of a whole series of
errors. The error of the short initial text, written by Pierre Guillaume
and approved by Mouvement Communiste, which presented the affair to the
newspapers in a version halfway between our positions and what it was
necessary to say in order to be heard. The error of the inadequate 6
issue of Mouvement Communiste, which justified the violence of the MIL
by its Spanish context, and criticised only the escalation of the
violence, when the violence itself was wrong. The error above all of our
presence in or behind the Vidal-Naquet committee.
Issue 6 of Mouvement Communiste was the last. The pitiful Spanish
affair, in which it had failed on all counts, revealed the weakness of
Mouvement Communiste, made worse by the fact that it did not draw up any
assessment of its activity. G. Dauvé’s pamphlet Violence and
Revolutionary Solidarity (1974) endeavoured to take stock. The
criticisms it contained were never discussed between the ex-« members »
of Mouvement Communiste. This text was only partly satisfactory
for it did not tackle the actual principle of the activity in the
Vidal-Naquet committee. It ended with the following programme :
kinds of people (…).
break, notnecessarily with those who make a different analysis of
violence, but as a matter of principle with all those who are unable to
give a clear definition of their own use of violence.
contacts.
communistmovement. We would only displace the problem by centering it on
those groups which failed (…). The important thing is to see what these
failures were the sign and product of. »
Only the first two points were achieved in the years which followed. La
Banquise attempts to apply the two latter, mutatis mutandis. [changing
those things that have to be changed]
The lack of a common political line, as well as the lack of development
of principles of revolutionary action, had expressed itself in 1972 and
before then through an uncoordinated agitation. In 1973, when Mouvement
Communiste was confronted with a question of life or death, these
absences appeared fatal. The ties between the people who had produced
Mouvement Communiste became strained. If the actions of the group were
open to criticism the inertia of the rest of the revolutionary movement
confronted with the Spanish affair was no better. But the inability of
this milieu to take a common position on the issue, and to conduct a
collective activity which could have come down to the distribution of
texts, still had nothing to do with the drift into terrorism which took
the form of GARI.
Economic crisis has been overused to explain anything and everything.
Working class support for capitalism was successively explained by
prosperity (the carrot of wage rises) and by depression (the stick of
unemployment). Within our current some believed that crisis could only «
fuel » the proletarian subversion which emerged around 1968. Not because
misery would drive proletarians to revolt, but because the crisis «
revealed the fragility of the system and multiplied the opportunities
for intervention by the proletariat » (King Kong International, no 1.
1976, p. 3).
We don’t say « long live the crisis ! » nor do we bid any premature «
farewells » to Capital and proletariat. Some allow themselves to become
obsessed by the crisis and closely monitor the fall in the rate of
profit, as if beyond some critical threshold it would necessarily lead
to a social outburst. However, the question of crises is not an economic
question, and the fall in the rate of profit is only an indicator of the
crisis of a social relation. When Marxism, adopting a capitalist point
of view, wonders whether or not factories will close, it strips the
crisis of its social impact.
In the Second International, as in the Third, people nearly always
conceived of the class struggle as being external to the crisis.
According to this conception, when the economy enters into crisis, it
sets proletarians in motion, and what they then do has no relation to
their existence within the class of wage earners. For theoretical
communism, society is unitary, and class struggle, even reformist class
struggle, contributes to the crisis, in which the proletariat either is,
or is not, able to explode the social relations which constitute it.
« (…) Those who count on a crisis of overproduction, with its procession
of tens of millions of unemployed in every country, in order to produce
what they term “the awakening of the consciousness of the proletariat” ,
are very dangerously mistaken (…). The unemployed masses will seek work
and only work, for which it is necessary to restore the poisonous
circuit of commodities (…). Certainly, Lenin, Trotsky and even Marx
believed they could detect revolutionary possibilities in the customary
cyclical crises, but without ever considering them indispensable.
Reality stood in opposition to that hope, very obviously during the last
real crisis (1929–33) (…) unlike today the concrete problems of the
communist revolution didn’t take shape, distinctly, through all the
relations of capitalism, which more and more are experienced as useless
and intolerable constraints. It is from this, and not from the breakdown
of economic functions that the proletariat must organise itself against
the system. »
« Gambling on the crisis of overproduction means refusing to fight on
any terrain other than that most advantageous to the enemy (…). The
class actions which will awaken the revolutionary consciousness, first
of tens of thousands of workers, and then of hundreds of millions, must
be undertaken commencing from the conditions of labour, not of
unemployment, and commencing from political conditions and the
conditions of life under their multiple aspects (…). Today revolutionary
practise takes as its starting point the negation of all the functional
aspects of capitalism, and must oppose to each of those problems the
solutions of communist revolution. Since it’s been the position for a
long time that, whatever the capitalist economic situation, at least a
fraction of the working class will not undertake this kind of struggle,
there could be a crisis ten times greater than the last before
revolutionary consciousness was restored. For there can be no
consciousness, either within the proletariat, or among revolutionaries,
outside the struggle to change those structures and superstructures
which have become reactionary, and which oppress even when they function
under perfect conditions. »
« What must act as a reagent on the working class is not the accident of
a great crisis of overproduction which might make them regret the 10 or
12 hours of drudgery in the factory or office, but the crisis of the
system of work and of capitalist association, which, itself, is
permanent, knows no frontiers and worsens even with an optimal growth of
the system. Its disastrous effects spare neither the industrialised nor
the backward zones, Russia and its satellites no more than the United
States. This is the most important asset of the world proletariat. It
will render accounts better under « normal » conditions, where reality
does not appear masked by a situation of famine »
(G. Munis. Party-State. Stalinism. Revolution. Spartacus, 1975 pp.
96–97)
The deciding factor is never the take-off or inhibition of growth, but
the configuration of the social forces involved. In 1917–21, the
proletarian assault began during a political and economic crisis. After
1929, despite the ending of the economic boom (however limited) of the
1920s, the balance of power leaned heavily in favour of Capital, the
western bourgeoisies as much as the counterrevolution in the USSR.
Whereas in 1917–21 the proletariat had benefited (badly, but just the
same…) from the politico-social oppositions, in 1929, it was unable to
benefit from the depression. When the crisis of 1929 erupted, the
principal wave of the proletarian assault had already ebbed, and at a
global level the proletariat was beaten. Such is not the case today.
However Munis’s argument seems to have retained its value, as is shown
by the behaviour of proletarians since 1974.
That year a crisis appeared for all to see which ever since then hasn’t
stopped deepening. It attacked proletarians both directly : their
purchasing power decreased by 10% in the US in 1979 and 1980, as well as
indirectly : unemployment reintroduced sharper competition between them
and the children of the middle classes for low level employment. In
contrast to the 1960s the previously protected core of wage workers
(adult male nationals, that is to say skilled or unionised, or both) saw
its benefits cut. In its turn it now also experienced a loss of job
security. The bourgeoisie undermined the basis of its support in the
workers milieu, it rationalised production by eliminating the least
productive, and by allowing social services to deteriorate. In an
earlier period it had attempted to increase rates of work to make up for
lost productivity, something which had triggered many wildcat strikes at
the start of the 70s. From now on it attempted to fundamentally
restructure production. For the next seven years workers conducted
defensive struggles which generally achieved partial success. Neither
Capital or labour succeeded in imposing themselves, the latter merely
reacting to the blows of the former. The capacity of the system to
absorb these blows was striking.
The immediate issue in workers struggles was generally preserving wages
and employment intact. LIP was the most famous example of the
characteristic phenomenon of this period : communal defence against
factory closures. Such struggles, which constitute workers into
communities based on the workplace and then confine them within it, had
appeared before LIP, for example in the textile industry, and were not
confined to France or even Europe : Japan had also known many comparable
movements.
Contrary to what was said or believed by the workers in these work-ins,
at least those we know about, they didn’t seek to produce in a different
way while remaining wage workers, rather they were primarily in search
of a company : they became their own bosses while waiting for real ones.
« Outside these walls, we are no longer anything. »
Joe Toia, 49 years old, break-down mechanic at Chrysler, Detroit,
explaining why the workers refused to strike against their company which
was in difficulty.
These movements were born in reaction to industrial reorganisation.
Sometimes it happened that workers made Capital pay for their
downgrading, following the example of the metal-workers of
Baden-Wurtemberg in 1978, where the owners committed themselves to
guarantee equivalent employment, and their previous wages, to those
employees affected by technological evolution. Obtained after a 16 day
strike and 13 day lockout by 240,000 workers, the agreement concerned
40% of German metal workers. But such arrangements were the exception.
For the moment industrial reorganisation was once again in limbo, and
however much people understood the plan and the beginnings of its
realisation through robotics, they were equally unclear about the pace
of its introduction. The question was far from being a purely
technological one : the extent and rapidity of robotization, and the
forms taken by investments and innovation, depend on the relations
between classes. Generally, it seems that Capital can no longer recycle
those expelled from industry, as formerly it had recycled those expelled
from the countryside.
Today we better understand that the fall in profitability arises from
constraints on valorisation, which is threatened by the excessive
fragmentation of work, and from constraints on Capital’s reproduction of
all the conditions of life, because that reproduction includes services
which cannot be reduced to objects of consumption reproduced in series.
In the collective services, productivity cannot be the same as that of
industry. And if the State takes them over, it is to the detriment of
the capitalist collectivity.
One solution would be to pass from the machine system to a system of
automatic production, which has its own internal coherence (feedback,
self-regulation, programming, and not just a simple execution of the
orders given). The machines are to be brought under control, or in other
words regulated, by one another, the objective being to achieve
self-control. It is less a question of going beyond man than of making
him more productive. He is to be better supervised but, in particular,
things are to be organised so that even without monitoring work can only
be done well, the mechanical constraint being sufficient.
This is certainly another aspect of the capitalist utopia. When « job
enrichment » was supposed to remedy the « shattered work » (G Freidmann)
of the unskilled, people exaggerated the significance of the Volvo
experiment, which produced mediocre economic and social effects. With or
without the aid of electronics, proletarian self-exploitation will never
be a massive phenomenon.
To date it does not seem that Capital has the capacity to release and
put in place the enormous investments necessary for this restructuring.
A general depreciation in the context of a social upheaval, the form of
which we cannot envisage, would make it much easier. Devalorisation
brought about by crisis is more than an economic fact, it also means the
cards being re-dealt within the bourgeoisie, and political
reorganisation, with new forms of power and new mediations between
labour and Capital, something people have already experienced thanks to
the double shocks of 1914–18 and 1939–45.
From the point of view of the workers what is at stake, as at the time
of the introduction of the Scientific Management of work, is not simply
employment and remuneration. It is also a question of the transformation
of work itself, which capitalist evolution would like see more regulated
and better controlled by the enterprise. The choice is a social one : is
it necessary to transfer a given work station to a country with cheaper
labour ? But, then, what is to be done with the unemployed this creates
in the advanced industrial countries ? Or, do you robotize the factory ?
But then how do you respond to the workers demands ? In 1974, unskilled
French car workers, recent immigrants, advanced traditional demands. In
1983 the unskilled painters at Renault, many of them second generation
immigrants eager to remain in France, and working in a department
threatened with automation, fought to obtain the status of skilled
workers which would have guaranteed retraining after the modernization
of the section. Existing on the basis of these material divisions, the
trade unions hesitated to support these workers, but they could not
ignore them either.
Born out of the previous fluctuations in growth, the « new social
movements » thrived during the recession, which created difficulties in
all areas : housing, transport, leisure etc. Some of the users
themselves took charge of sectors which functioned too poorly. Among
them a fringe became radicalised, notably through violence.
This radicalisation of a margin inscribed itself through what was the
only genuine product of the crisis : the phenomenon of autonomy. As we
have seen, no mass working class organisations were created after 1968,
or after 1974. Although, with marvellous consistency, leftists continued
to attempt to produce them !
Occasionally, workers organisations were created, and not just in
France, but these never went beyond a local level. There was no longer a
place for any kind of anarcho-syndicalism or IWW. Autonomy in the sense
we use it here, represented the demonstration at Overney’s funeral
raised to the level of a social movement. That demonstration had
concretised the deep resentment of active fractions of the population
against social order, traditional politics and the existing
institutions. Such resentment, which to some extent was widespread in
the West, could take two opposing forms : that of the « alternative »
movement, condemned, either through tail-ending the existing
institutions or through creating new ones, to stimulate state reformism;
or else that of terrorism, which swiftly merged into a neo-Leninism from
which it returned to third-worldism, or maoist-populism. Against these
two temptations, constantly threatening to yield to one or other of
them, autonomy was the expression of the anti-political and
anti-capitalist resentment felt by strata that were more or less
marginalized according to country.
It’s no accident that autonomy proliferated to such an extent in Italy.
Because of the particularities in the formation of the national unit,
the Italian State was involved less actively, and in a less direct way,
than in France, within a less centralised social and political life.
Though a strong nationalised sector existed in Italy, its units became
fiefdoms escaping from State control. The Italian economy confronted the
crisis by relying on the initiative of privately owned companies and
even of illegal contractors, in the iron and steel industry (Brescia
region), as well as in textiles. Italian exports benefited from the
super-exploitation of a proletariat employed in a semi-legal sector of
small businesses. In 1979 it was estimated that 13,000 textile companies
with an average workforce of five employees exported as much as the four
largest French arms manufacturers.
Italian State strategy consisted of controlling nothing in detail in
order to better keep overall control. After 1969 Italian society
imploded, creating a vacuum in which initiative, escaping from central
control by the established order, returned to a multitude of groups and
tendencies. This occurred in all areas : the economy, the media (a
proliferation of privately owned radio and TV stations) and in politics
(conspiracies, terrorism, autonomy etc.). Autonomy made it’s way within
a society that was in the grip of a kind of civil cold war between these
centrifugal tendencies, while the conservative forces of Capital
employed themselves in playing off one against another. The conflict
undermined social cohesion without — for the moment — changing anything
essential. It was necessary to poorly understand the nature of the State
to see the imminence of revolution in Italian society, as the
Situationists did. But equally, it would be myopic to see only
confusion.
It is true that the violence often only filled a vacuum and that
following the example of May in France, words often replaced deeds. But
« armed struggle » , whether suicidal or manipulated, was the
autonomised aspect of a violence born in factories or cities, where
proletarians responded to pressure from the bosses and state, and to
control by the trade unions, with arson, sabotage and bombings.
Increasingly isolated from the majority of workers, it was more and more
driven to give an « example » to the masses in order to push them into
struggle.
Where there is nothing except violence, it is a sign of failure. A
proletarian movement can take on bosses or machines, whether selectively
or in an insurrection. But in erecting violence into a system, and in
pretending to make it the heart of a strategy, just as illusory as any
other strategy outside of the social movement, terrorism substitutes
itself for the latter. Violence limits itself to deepening the political
crisis and transforms proletarians into spectators of a contest which no
longer concerns them.
Italian autonomy was also a reaction by new working strata, neither
factory workers or traditional employees, who were abandoned by the
trade unions because they were too volatile to allow themselves to be
organised by them.
This mixture generated a new form of anarchism, sometimes coupled with a
revival of the communist lefts. The autonomes acted like anarchists by
standing up to authority in their practise, not through any utopianism.
From its beginnings, Italian autonomy was a much larger phenomenon than
French leftism, and was the product of a more virulent working class
violence, and of a far more widespread social rejection, than in France.
Workers autonomy was an effect of the crisis, not it’s solution. Many
proletarians no longer wanted the trade unions but they did not do the
things which would have rid themselves of them. It was a refusal of
politics which had neither the power or will to communise the world. For
if that were undertaken, people would no longer speak of autonomy —
necessarily people would act in an autonomous way in respect of all the
existing institutions, but through making them useless, by destroying
that which gives them a social function and base. « Autonomy » , as
such, is the reality of a proletariat which secedes, or departs
(temporarily) from the norm, but without any ability (and by itself) to
overthrow it. To theorise this gap is to justify a lack, to make a
shortcoming pass for its remedy.
After 1969, which saw the first united general strike with a social goal
(over housing), it was working class action which obliged the trade
unions to unite. The trade-union leaderships could not function as
authoritarian structures. Even less than the parties, they could not
form an apparatus that imposed itself on wage workers. The trade unions
had to be permeable to workers autonomy and to feed on it. As for the
numerous autonomous workers organisations which emerged over the last
ten years, not just in Italy, they formed a different structure, based
on a different rationality than trade union negotiations, but despite
everything they remained immersed in the capitalist organisation of
work. There is no obvious separation between demanding benefits in ones
work and participating in the organisation of that work. One leads to
the other. To demand the right to oversee working conditions and wages
is to begin to organize work. In the same way workers « rights » (to
meet, to communicate, to leaflet…) become trade union rights.
Thus, to the extent that they remain on the terrain of demands, these
autonomous workers organisations, as such, cannot propose a
revolutionary alternative. They become the focus of proletarian
experience only on condition that they leave the terrain which gave them
birth. Inevitably, however, the majority stuck to wishing to defend wage
workers better than the official organisations. Consequently these were
not potentially revolutionary structures, but equally, as they stood
they were not assimilable by the existing institutions, because their
anti-hierarchical nature and their rank and fileism was incompatible
with social order, including that of the trade unions. But the
institutions could digest some of the pieces.
After the shockwave of 1969–70, the trade unions attempted to renovate
themselves through democratic structures and « union power » inside the
enterprise. Their initiatives were given a battering in 1977, and the
leader of the CGIL was forcibly expelled from a university where he held
a rally. But autonomy, congealing in an immobilised situation, revived
the councillist errors of 1969–70. This could only be the
self-organisation of a fraction of society, standing apart from the
rest, directly taking certain aspects of its life into its hands
(squatting, the autoreduction of excessive charges). However in taking
themselves onto the social terrain, without any real connection between
production and the space outside production, these struggles ran up
against the same problems and reproduced the same contradictions found
in traditional factory struggles. The energies expended dispersed
themselves, and became lost in the space of an economy which was not
called into question.
In the more advanced capitalist countries, there were fewer
half-solutions. American, West German, Dutch and even Danish « parallel
» movements brought into being a real organised marginality, palliating
the deficiencies of normal Capital with a marginal capitalism. In these
countries, unlike France or Italy, the crisis of the Scientific
Management of work had not coincided with its final implementation. So
the US and West Germany saw a marginal ghetto, while Italy, in the form
of autonomy, gave birth to a movement that was confusedly radical.
Italian Autonomy was the most extreme wing of a leftism that was more
social and less political than in France. (In the same way that the
Italian Communist Party had for a long time been more « open » than the
French Communist Party : ten years ago it was proclaiming what the left
does today, stating in 1974 that it would accept austerity provided that
it served the needs of structural reform). Italian leftism profited from
an intellectual revival in the sixties, at a time when France by
contrast was undergoing structuralism, and in its wake Althusser, etc.
After 1969, Potere Operaio wanted to bring organisation to a double
movement (both workers and students) of unskilled workers, asserting a
collective being and the need to take political power, not in order to
manage or humanise production, but in order to change the whole of
society. There was an understanding that the revolution was not
primarily a working class problem, but this was still expressed within a
sociological-classist perspective. So instead of the working class in
the usual sense, they made out that most people were part of « the class
». This tendency towards a refusal of the ideology of work, even though
it was expressed within a political perspective, was undoubtedly the
furthest that leftism could go.
It was also an attempt to reunify proletarians through a return to the
council (with the aid of Gramsci), and to the unity of the class. On the
basis of the new reality of the worker as collective producer of surplus
value (in fact analysed by Marx, but perceived as new), Tronti and Negri
spoke of the mass-worker, of the collective worker, in other words of
union through the labour-process, when on the contrary it was necessary
to leave behind any pure and simple defence of the proletarian
condition.
The proposal of a guaranteed wage for everybody, employed and unemployed
workers, housewives, students and marginals sought to bring together the
working strata : everyone in fact, apart from a minority of bourgeois
and middle managers. These so-called « political » wages corresponded to
the concrete need to suppress the wage control zones in Italy, and for
uniform increases in wages. It was nothing less than a question of
creating a proletariat through the universal generalisation of wages.
The autonome platform chose a capitalist utopia for its theoretical
horizon. Its egalitarianism, simultaneously a standardization of the
proletarian condition, and a bringing together in common cause,
represented a search for a kind of unification which could only be
achieved in a revolution, and one with communist objectives.
In France, autonomy was especially composed of a fringe of out of work
youths, which is certainly not in our view grounds for condemnation. The
proletariat is also constituted on the basis of the unemployed, whether
more or less voluntary, of temporary workers, of petty delinquents, of
déclassé intellectuals. The strength and radicality of a proletarian
movement will be identified amongst other things by the fact that it
integrates those who are excluded from wage-labour, which will help it
not to confine itself inside the limits of the workplace. But in France
far more than in Italy, the autonomy which asserted itself as such was
centred on the violence of the marginal. The autonomes were
understandably disgusted with politics, the left and leftism. They were
right to refuse to play the game of democracy which is the best
guarantor of civil peace. But they lapsed into a fetishism of violence
and illegality. Neither of these things are absolute criteria of
radicality, and neither can transform into a subversive act something
which isn’t. Where it corresponds to a massive surge against the
existing institutions the practise of the breakaway demo is a critique
in deeds of politics. But when it becomes systematized to the point of
becoming an end in itself, it is as derisory and impotent as any other
pointless demonstration. This could be seen in the anti-nuclear demo’s
such as that at Malville (1977). Against the majority of peaceful
ecologists was juxtaposed a minority determined to fight, who merely
added their violence to a demonstration which overall was reformist.
Occupations of apartment blocks took on an important aspect of the
capitalist organisation of life. But reduced to the establishment of
ghettoes they lapsed into marginality, despite the violence displayed by
the occupants.
On March 23 1979, when the steelworkers of Lorraine who had been
condemned to unemployment by restructuring, responded to a call from
their trade unions and came to Paris to demonstrate, what happened in
the streets summed up very well the situation over the last few years :
the limits of the workers struggles, the impotent violence of the
autonomes and the public non-existence of the revolutionary current. A
great many of the steelworkers had come for a fight and had equipped
themselves accordingly. They substituted a destructive exaltation for
what they had not been able to do in their own industrial towns, that is
to say, go beyond the proletarian condition. A working class radicality
affirmed itself. This was not simply a defence of employment. The
devastation of the commercial and financial centre of Paris and the
seeking out of confrontation with the police expressed a hostility
towards the entire system. There is a qualitative difference between
rising up in your own town, « at home », and taking the dispute to the
geographical heart of the nation’s capital.
The trade unions were overwhelmed, but not called into question. They
had retained control of the material organisation of the demonstration
and busied themselves trying to limit the damage and the contact between
the workers and the autonomes. The latter took an active part in the
confrontation with the police and the destruction of property, but were
incapable of any other link or practical activity with the workers
except « fight ». No social project and no initial theoretical steps
animated these clashes. The characteristics of the movement which
appeared around 1968 persisted. It was essentially negative, gave itself
no concrete objectives, and still did not understand, within and through
its practise, that the destruction of capitalism involves positive
measures of social transformation. It would have been useful if we had
been present on March 23 1979, on our own terms. We certainly could not
have abolished the limits of this unrest, even less given it a programme
which it did not itself bear. That would be to lapse into leftism, in
other words the management of other peoples struggles — which is what
the ideologues of autonomy attempted in both France and Italy. The
dissemination of our ideas during this day of rage would have had no
immediate visible effects, but it is likely that it would have enabled
us to establish some links and that it would have left some traces.
Between 1968 and 1973 a revolutionary current had existed in France
which was homogenous enough to mobilise itself when necessary, without
being halted by the boundaries between groups. In 1977 a part of this
current derived from La Vieille Taupe and its environs had been able to
regroup in order to intervene over the Baader affair. But in 1979 this
current was too dislocated to intervene in a unified way. It kept silent
or was extremely discreet.
Within a social movement the absence of a project is not to be deplored
because it is necessary that every subversive gesture is accompanied by
its own theoretical explanation, and that everyone is able to define
communism. It is the situation of the proletariat which triggers it’s
activity, and consciousness only appears as consciousness of the act,
not in advance of it. Today, as ideology, autonomy is more or less dead.
But the practises which the autonomes had wanted to organise remain, in
a more diffuse way. The will to refuse the old world in every moment of
life, in isolation from any social movement, inevitably lapses into one
or other of the errors set out above — a margin more or less reduced to
beggary, or terrorism, or a synthesis of the two : delinquency with a
political justification. We don’t pretend to criticize those who have in
common with us a refusal of the old world, and a will to live this
refusal today in practise as far as possible, for the manner in which
they survive. But practices which ignore the social movement which
produce them are condemned to blindly charge towards reforms or towards
suicide. While it is true that politics and militantism feed on theory
that has degraded into ideology, a pure and simple refusal of theory
only results in becoming lost in the immediate, in other words in
submitting to Capital which organises that immediate reality, or else in
dying. « Without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary
movement... »
The sudden appearance of autonomy was the fruit of a social crisis that
is still insoluble, for Capital as well as for the proletariat. It
confirmed the existence, in factories and elsewhere, of a small minority
both resolute and ready to act. But act to what purpose ? Here the
theoretical deficiency is serious. The autonomes suffered to an acute
degree from a disease that is endemic within the revolutionary milieu :
the irresistible urge towards activism. Durutti had also wanted to act
without encumbering himself with chattering intellectuals. But in spite
of the myths maintained about him by the anarchists, the Situationist
International and even rock musicians, we should not lose sight of the
essential point : his need to act placed him in the service of the
republican state against a rival state form. While consciousness does
not precede action, it is an indispensable moment of it.
At a different level the evolution of GLAT also testified to the crisis
of revolutionary theory. In 1978 the group decided to continue its
theoretical work, but ceased publishing its bulletin, which for several
years had been one of the principal sources of intellectual nourishment
for revolutionaries, just at the moment when this thought and the
contribution of GLAT was most needed. GLAT said it could no longer see
the relation between it’s work and the rest of the world. Denying the
social function of revolutionary theory, it still intended to pursue its
research even more than ever, but with the sole end of helping
intellectuals go beyond themselves as intellectuals.
This extraordinary position was the counterpart of that held by Camatte
who at the same moment was affirming the need for theoretical wandering,
in the name of life. GLAT and Camatte thus showed their incomprehension
of the relationship between theory and everything else. GLAT forgot that
its bulletin, even without any perceptible response, nourished a
theoretical maturation. By preferring life to ideas, Camatte proved that
up to then he had granted the intellect a privilege which it cannot
possess, except on penalty of mutilating the individual, and even his
intelligence : he had wanted to insert the whole of life into the
theory. Once having seen the impossibility of this enterprise, instead
of taking theory as what it is — an approximation, the most adequate
possible form for a multiform reality, a perspective on the world which
does not contain the world but is contained by it, an effort of
comprehension which can never completely comprehend itself — Camatte
threw overboard any claim to coherence.
Capital’s triumph is not so much to export false ideas into the
revolutionary movement but to make it lose the sense of its relation to
society as a whole. Instead of developing the germs of the social
movement which appeared in 196872, economic crisis only added new
limitations to those of 1968, while producing a new generation of
revolutionaries.
« The present crisis of Capital has not produced the revolutionary
movement anew, paradoxically it has only deepened the crisis of modern
revolutionary theory. »
(L’Internationale Inconnue, la Guerre Civile en Pologne, 1976)
The death of Baader and his comrades (1977) and the reactions which it
provoked, notably in the press, gave two or three of us the idea of
producing a fake Monde Diplomatique. The initiative brought together
over a few days some energies which were momentarily isolated, and
others who were then organised elsewhere. The main part of it was
written and produced by the people who today produce La Banquise, with
the assistance of members and friends of la Guerre Sociale, and some
others. Part of the texts were reproduced in 1978 in Issue 2 of la
Guerre Sociale.
It was a reaction to the spectacular reinforcement of the State in a
period of crisis, which not only revealed its means of policing, but
also gathered behind it nearly the whole of the media and of the
political and intellectual forces. Far more than in the guise of the
police state that was so much denounced, the counterrevolution appeared
in the form of organised consensus. In West Germany, as elsewhere, the
police operation functioned thanks to the conformism maintained by
social inertia, and thanks to the guardians of the monopoly of speech :
intellectuals, journalists, politicians, professors, experts, etc., who
applied themselves to exacerbating and managing a popular hysteria which
was undoubtedly without precedent in Europe since the last world war.
The only discordant voices differed in calling for a « true » democracy,
as if this hysterical consensus was not precisely a product of
democracy.
Social inertia is made possible not by the « passivity » of the workers
who continue no less to conduct struggles, but by respect for the
limitations necessary for the normal functioning of capitalism and its
democracy. It is obvious that an active communist movement would have
found other forms of action, that were offensive in other ways, instead
of, or in addition to, this détournement of the media. We by no means
sought to turn its own weapons against the press. Confronting the
journalistic servility which is plain to see in the media, we didn’t
call for a « true » journalism which was less respectful of power.
We had chosen le Monde Diplomatique both for reasons of convenience —
its periodicity, and because the readership of this organ — left and
liberal intellectuals, was precisely who we particularly wanted to
attack. The technique of the forgery simultaneously made it possible for
us to make our positions known (distribution through bookshops and by
hand), and to attack the media through a process analogous to sabotage
in the sphere of production.
Deprived of the means of effectively attacking the State, for example
through a demonstration, or through any other more virulent act, we
intervened in the domain of ideas, and within a limited milieu. The fake
Monde Diplomatique did what the press is supposed to do in times of
crisis, and which it evidently does not do : it exercised a critical
spirit at a critical moment for power. To this end we employed irony and
concealment : a powerful weapon, but a weapon of the weak who cannot
conduct a frontal attack. We did what democracy did not do, but against
it.
We produced 2000 copies. A few hundred were sent to journalists and
personalities, creating a certain shock in the enemy ranks. We know for
certain that those in charge of the principle media it aimed at (Le
Monde) were rather inconvenienced by it. The other copies were
distributed very quickly in the anti-establishment milieu. Despite what
was imagined by journalists, in good or bad faith, the achievement of
such a fake, which cost us 4,500 francs in all, is within the reach of
anyone who gives themselves the means. The strength of social inertia
and the weight of received ideas are the real brakes on action that
breaks out of the usual political framework, not the material
difficulties.
Some readers or recipients took a while before realising that it was a
hoax. Should we conclude from this that the texts were not clear enough
? Rather it proves the destructuring character of such an action, which
shakes up the established frameworks of thought. And beyond that ? The
entire issue contained nothing of a democratic protest, communism and
the revolution were there. But the nature of such activity contains its
own limitations.
The production had been carried out in a pleasant and efficient
atmosphere, bringing into contact people who had been separated for a
long time, or who did not know one another. The network of contacts
which had been woven around La Vieille Taupe had been reactivated. We
wondered what to do next. Meetings over following weeks led to nothing.
It was a successfully conducted limited action, but that was all. We had
confirmed that the work undertaken in and around La Vieille Taupe had
left sufficient traces in people that they could on occasion form an
effective force of action. But there was no question of organising this
reserve of energies. Organisation is the organisation of tasks and no
other task appeared sufficiently urgent to weld these energies together.
However one of the key sentences of the fake was the last : Now, let us
speak of something else.
The texts in the pirate Monde Diplomatique displayed a flaw of which we
only later saw the implications. Although it repeatedly asserted that
the question was of little importance, and despite the fact that it
centred its critique on the spectacular and democratic consensus, the
fake Monde Diplomatique resolved the question of whether Baader had been
killed or had killed himself : it appeared to it that there was no doubt
that the truth was literally the reverse of what the media said, and
that it was extremely likely the prisoners of Stammheim had been killed
by others than themselves.
The paradox of a forgery aiming at a truth ! It was a mistake to dwell
on « literal » truth. Just as the « truth » of our Monde Diplomatique
was not its title, even though this was written in black on white, in
the same way the truth of the death of Baader was not the identity of
the finger which pulled the trigger on the gun. It is literally true
that this finger certainly had to possess one identity rather than
another. In the same way, it is surely true that the gas chambers had to
exist — or not. But for a revolutionary, the identity of the finger that
killed Baader, just like the existence or non-existence of the gas
chambers, is no more than a truth devoid of meaning, about as useful as
the proverbial knife without a blade for which the handle is missing.
Yet it was the problem of this truth which tore a little further apart a
French revolutionary current which was already well dispersed.
1979 : to my right, a « little professor » from Lyon who for some years
had been proclaiming the following « good news for humanity » : the gas
chambers in the Nazi concentration camps never existed, they were no
more than sinister prisoners gossip, taken up as war propaganda and
appointed as official truth by those forces — in particular Zionism and
Stalinism — whose interests converged on this point. It was the same for
the genocide of Jews, which « in the strict sense » had no reality. On
the first point the crackpot developed an argument that was sometimes
convincing, at least at first sight. He showed how fragile some « proofs
» of official history really are.
To my left, the representatives of the corporation of historians who,
after having for a long time opposed the deepest silence to the little
professor, declared in Le Monde : « it is not necessary to ask how such
a mass murder was possible technically. It was technically possible
because it took place (…) there is not, there cannot be a debate over
the question of the gas chambers ». Then, having put forward these
ethical premises, the corporation more or less entered the debate and
applied themselves to showing, sometimes in a convincing way, that the
little professor was not as rigorous as he claimed and on occasion was
even a forger.
Neither adversary spared themselves any considerations as to the
motivations of their enemy, whether they located these in
psychopathology or in the petty minded need to defend a nice little
earner, not to speak of the shadowy ulterior political motives which
both camps readily lent themselves to.
All this took place in the middle of an antifascist clamour from all
those who had the floor and intended to hang on to it : politicians of
every tendency merged together — from democrats in good standing to
ex-Vichyists and ex-OAS, passing from Stalinists and journalists in
search of a scoop through to the guardians of memory, without forgetting
those people who consider it important to communicate their opinion on
every digestive disorder of Western good conscience : the intellectuals.
The Faurisson affair occurred in France after two others which, at first
sight, it greatly resembled. First of all there had been a particularly
unsavoury journalistic « coup » : someone had gone to gather the senile
ramblings of a former Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Darquier de
Pellepoix, now retired to Spain. Then, with a great fanfare, the
European media had launched onto television screens a series produced in
the United States devoted to the tragic destiny of a Jewish family
during the Second World War. It was not the first time that the alarming
spectre had been brought out : was Nazism raising its head again ? But
thanks to the crisis, this question had more troubling resonances :
around it could concentrate the irrational fears which haunt men when
they identify their own futures with the extremely uncertain future of a
world which oppresses them. We thus had the uncommon sight of the
highest government authorities discussing the urgent necessity of
purchasing a television « series ». The first screening of Holocaust was
a moment of great national harmony. To listen to some everyday
conversations, the duty of any democrat that evening was to be in front
of his TV.
The attention of newspaper readers was drawn to Faurisson for the first
time, courtesy of Le Matin, which undoubtedly wished to mount an
operation of the same kind which L’Express had successfully conducted
with Darquier de Pellepoix. Knowing the circumstances in which an
interview was extracted from the little professor and the way they then
doctored and presented the interview in question, we might have been
shocked if we had been interested in that sort of thing (codes of
ethics), and if we still had any illusions about the profession of
journalist.
The socialist newspaper announced that in Lyon, a teacher was supporting
Darquier de Pellepoix. Moreover, Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, a frenzied
antiracist, had told Le Matin that Darquier’s « theory » was the same as
that of the « falsifier Rassinier ». What’s more Faurisson also claimed
to follow Rassinier. Rassinier being dead — and what Le Matin had not
thought to publish — Faurisson having declared that Darquier was the
very kind of man he had fought all his life, the little professor of
Lyon found himself alone against all. On one side the bad guy, on the
other side the good guys. Everything was thus in place for one of those
affairs which can only leave indifferent those who know what the society
of the spectacle is. We were about to witness one of those events
created from nothing in order to give breadth to the background noise,
so that not for an instant is there any break in the incidental music
which is the raison d’être of the media, the flow of pseudo-information
which prevents the proletarian from thinking.
However, a number of people, who nearly all had in common that they were
in favour of the abolition of wage labour (among them Pierre Guillaume,
Jean-Pierre Carasso, Hervé Denès and Christine Martineau) thought it
would be helpful to write to Libération in order to affirm that
Rassinier, who Bloch had made a spiritual ancestor of Darquier, far from
having been a Nazi had been a left-wing extremist, a member of the
Resistance deported to Buchenwald, and that he was still a socialist and
a pacifist when he formulated the theories which now earned him a
comparison with a Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.
What were revolutionaries doing in this mess ? Some of those who today
write La Banquise appended their signatures to this letter which
appeared under the title « Do You Know Rassinier ? ». Today we consider
that adding those signatures was a fundamental error, for several
reasons, the principal one being that this letter aimed, above all, to
prepare « the debate ».
Indeed, what was the debate about ? The official version and current
public opinion affirm that the Nazis deliberately massacred Jews. «
Revisionists » of the Faurisson type retort that the deportees died of
hunger and disease, etc. Instead of dipping a toe into this debate as we
did, and instead of losing themselves in it as some other
revolutionaries did, we would all have been better advised to respond :
« This debate is false. We will no more become specialists in Zyklon B
than in 1977 we claimed to have conducted the autopsy on Baader. A very
large number (which we will let you determine) of Jews, and Baader and
his comrades, were killed by the German State and the world capitalist
system. »
From the start, the interest of revolutionaries in the concentration
camps (and thus in Rassinier) formed part of an attempt to critically
analyse the war of 1939–45.[1] Understanding how Nazi atrocities had
been used, and even exaggerated, in order to justify the war and its
aftermath, helped us to better understand the false opposition between
democracy and fascism. It was for this reason that we had republished an
article from Programme Communiste : « Auschwitz ou le grand alibi », in
1971 and 1974. Today in 1983 after a four year campaign by the second
Vieille Taupe, which had been created for this purpose by Pierre
Guillaume, those who once read the works published by the bookshop la
Vieille Taupe, which had closed in 1972, are still unaware of what
Vieille Taupe 2 thinks about 1939–45, or about fascism. For four years,
the only question for Vieille Taupe 2 has been gassings and the right to
speak about them.
As we have said, those who met at the bookshop la Vieille Taupe
considered that their actions and their writings were their signature;
la Vieille Taupe was a link and a meeting place — everything except a
signature. Pierre Guillaume revived it in the exclusive form of a
signature which, whether he wanted it or not, drew all its interest from
a past activity which had nothing to do with its present activities. In
saying this, we are not putting ourselves forward as the supercilious
heirs of an activity of which he had been the principal organiser. Quite
simply, out of fidelity with what we once had in common with him, it is
necessary for us to oppose the Pierre Guillaume of today to that of
former times.
While Rassinier’s The Lie of Ulysses is an interesting document, and
while it stands out from the majority of writings on concentration
camps, and from the excesses displayed by some of them, this doesn’t
make it an exceptional work. Everything that some have wished to see in
it could have been brought out from other accounts, for example that of
the Russian deportee Martchenko, (My Testimony, La Seuil, 1970). Far
more than the book itself, it is the reactions it provoked which are
revealing.
Rassinier’s interest lies above all in his refusal of war propaganda.
When he leaves behind his hostility to brainwashing and begins to
explain the war and the Jewish question, he is entirely off his head :
not through errors of fact (we haven’t attempted to check his sources),
but above all through his angle of approach to these problems. The fact
that his work might disturb people changes nothing. The Moonies also
disturb people and unite a large Union Sacrée in opposition to them.
Does this make them interesting ?
To deal with the massacre of Jews during the war by devoting a hundred
pages to statistical calculations (one third of The Drama of the
European Jews, 1964) in order to determine whether 1,600,000 or
6,000,000 Jews died, is to peer at things through the wrong end of the
spyglass, and continues the Nuremberg Trials through contesting them. A
new and profound book on this subject would be documented, but it would
leave to one side the false problem of quantification. Everything has
been said when it has been shown how the figure of six million, at the
very least doubtful, has developed into dogma. One says nothing when one
elaborates rival statistics for oneself, just as unverifiable for
non-specialist readers as those one criticises.
Most of the documents and files which we have consulted were supplied to
us by Vieille Taupe 2. They show that Rassinier was inclined towards,
and supported throughout, by a pacifist, socialist (SFIO) and humanist
current, in the line of those state employed teachers of the III
Republic such as Dommanget, who were freethinkers and opponents of war.
When war came, in 1914, as in 1939, they generally accepted, if not
justified, it. But outside periods of war they maintained the
anti-militarist tradition and sometimes declared themselves to be
libertarians. After the scandal over The Lie of Ulysses around 1950–51,
this current, which had received Rassinier’s critique of brainwashing
favourably, faded away. Rassinier then buried himself in the Jewish
question and the gas chambers and disengaged from the left of the SFIO,
which was engaged in other struggles (against the war in Algeria). He
now rubbed shoulders more comfortably with the extreme right than with
the former pacifists and socialists, who in general gave into the cold
war. For la Vieille Taupe 2, « Rassinier unshakeably remained until his
death a socialist, pacifist, antiracist, internationalist (…) » (Pierre
Guillaume, forward to Ulysses betrayed by his own, p. 179). Rassinier
was a socialist, in the sense that he remained for twenty years in the
SFIO and even represented it in the Chamber of Deputies. His pacifism
excluded internationalism, which among other things presupposes breaking
with the « workers parties », and this explains why he agreed to travel
alongside the extreme right.
Considering that « warmongering had passed from the right to the left »,
that « Resistancialism was being maintained there » (rough draft of a
letter to Bauchet, 1964), and entirely preoccupied by peace, he first
and foremost reserved his blows for the left. For him, as for
antifascism, there existed a favoured enemy, but for him this was the
left, and in particular the Communist Party, not fascism. He judged the
right to be less dangerous — and this shocks left intellectuals — in
much the same way that around 1950 Sartre preferred the USSR to the USA.
He did not share the ideas of Bardèche, the editor of Défense de
l’Occident [Défense de l’Occident (Defence of the West) and Rivarol were
right-wing journals — translator], but all the same Bardèche was a «
good man (…) more a poet than an editor » (letter of Rassinier to
Faurrison, 3 January 1967); he found Défense de l’Occident or Rivarol
less harmful than l’Humanité [the Communist Party newspaper —
translator]. Rassinier did not merely become a « revolutionary without
revolution » writing wherever he could make his « scientific » studies
known. From the start of his postwar activity Rassinier followed a
precise political line : « Peace above all » — which was in no way
revolutionary. He ended up by placing his pacifism at the service of the
Western camp in the Cold War, and more particularly, of the
extreme-right.
In the issue of Rivarol for 1 January 1964 Rassinier set out his
viewpoint as follows : obsessed by the desire to justify the reparations
that Germany paid to the State of Israel, the international Zionist
movement « brought the reinforcement of the gas chambers and the six
million dead » to all of Khrushchev’s attacks on Europe. In so doing,
the Zionist movement will not fail to bring about that « not only the
horses of Cossacks come to water themselves in the waters of the Rhine,
but that their tanks are filled up on their way to the Sahara and that
their planes stopover on their way to drop their bombs on the United
States. »
The supposedly anti-racist Rassinier, who understandably found the
Stalinist discourse of l’Humanité disgusting, was not embarrassed in
1963–4 to write in a rag like Rivarol in which columns of the most
indecent racism were spread out at length.
By forcibly incorporating the Sudeten Germans in 1918 into
Czechoslovakia « whose culture and civilization were several centuries
behind them, the Allies insulted them : a little like that insult which
is offered today to those white Rhodesians who, under the cover of
democracy and anti-racism, the universal conscience would like to place
under the domination of negroes ». Rassinier, The Persons Responsible
for the Second World War.
If it means to make Rassinier better known Vieille Taupe 2 should
republish The Persons Responsible for the Second World War. In this book
the Second World War becomes the work of a conspiracy of arms dealers,
dominated by the Freemasons and Jews, supposedly influential even in the
SFIO. It would be necessary to cite thirty long quotes in order to give
the full extent of the abjectly anti-Semitic character of this work. The
Allies blame everything on Hitler. Rassinier begins by sharing out the
responsibility before making it weigh especially heavily on the Allies.
From our point of view it is just as absurd to say that Hitler wanted
war (the point of view of the Nuremburg trials) as that he didn’t want
war (the point of view of Rassinier). For revolutionary theory, the
outbreak of a modern war has little to do with the will, good or bad, of
statesmen.
« The Jews » enable Rassinier to turn to his own account a well known
view of the world : that old tradition, entirely foreign to
revolutionary critique, which explains world politics through the
schemes of an international network of financiers and arms dealers which
pulls all the strings. Rassinier joined those who identified this
network with the trans-national Jewish « community », opposing «
international capitalism » to national industry and labour.
Admittedly, one can separate an authors opinions from his work, but when
it is a question of anti-Semitic indulgence or prejudice in the work of
someone who studies the Jewish question and the concentration camps,
which rather a lot of Jews entered, one may fear that the author is no
more objective than advocates of the official version of history.
Why does Vieille Taupe 2 present a distorted image of Rassinier ? Why do
his ideas need to be accompanied by the image of an anti-racist man of
the left ? The original
Vieille Taupe had indicated the fundamental aspects of Bordiga without
denying his
Leninism, or hiding the fact that he had always approved of the
repression at Kronstadt, for example. We did not need to tidy up his
biography. The strength of the communist ideas he held was enough to
separate the valid positions from the erroneous opinions in his work. If
Vieille Taupe 2 dresses Rassinier up in the mask of an anti-racist and
internationalist, this is because all of its activity has as its
objective to influence the media. Its goal is that Rassinier and
Faurisson are acknowledged and accepted in the forum of ideas. It is
therefore necessary to make Rassinier presentable; so his biography will
be given a face-lift. This is an enormous regression compared to what
the Situationist International or the original Vieille Taupe had said :
when they spoke of subversive elements in certain « unused books », they
gave them a universal range by setting them within a critical theory.
There is nothing like this in the activity of Vieille Taupe 2, which
merely publishes Rassinier and Faurisson. It thus becomes necessary for
it to exaggerate the subversive, and even the merely acceptable, where
there is none.
At the end of 1978 when the Faurisson affair erupted, the question of
the concentration camps had been discussed amongst us for several years.
In 1977 a draft text had been given to la Guerre Sociale by Gilles
Dauvé. Modified with the direct or indirect collaboration of quite a lot
of people, and thus of Pierre Guillaume, it appeared in 1979 in the
third issue of la Guerre Sociale. The way in which we had intended to
speak of Faurisson became instead the desire to do something for him :
he had been attacked because of his heretical ideas on the Nazi camps
and after having been denounced by Libération; as for Faurisson himself,
he set his misadventures within a much larger context, against all
official propaganda, by stating that the campaign against Baader had
disgusted him. Serge Quadruppani addressed a letter (unpublished) to
Libération. Pierre Guillaume wrote the letter which Libération published
on January 22 1979, which we spoke of above. (quoted in Thion,
Historical Truth and Political Truth, pp 128–130). This letter, written
to protest against the assimilation of Rassinier with Darquier de
Pellepoix, gave just as false a picture of Rassinier as the one it
claimed to criticise.
Without even talking about its very questionable content, it was a
serious mistake to enter, even slightly, what was and always would be a
journalistic and political scandal, and nothing more. We did not have to
enter the arena of public opinion. Expressing the interests of a
movement in its entirety, in the form of a manifesto for example, is
neither to remain in an ivory tower, nor to project oneself into a cause
while forgetting everything else. But the signatures added to this
letter only encouraged some of the more clear sighted, those for example
who identified with the Guerre Sociale article on the camps, to look at
things from an angle of attack which no longer had anything to do with
revolutionary theory, and either to become more interested in what
interested Faurisson, like Pierre Guillaume, or to poorly distinguish
between their ideas and those of Faurisson, like the « infantrymen » of
la Guerre Sociale.
Meeting Faurisson should have opened our eyes to the difference in
nature between his research and our activity. During 1979, dealing with
Pierre Guillaume, we argued with him and we criticised him, but without
ourselves understanding the roots of the affair, and thus without trying
to make him understand : that revolutionaries cannot support Faurisson.
That’s not to say that we could have prevented him from reviving Vieille
Taupe for such a waste of energy. But in any event our responsibility is
great, because we were among those who knew Pierre best.
The idea that : « We who are revolutionaries in any case intend to
support him (...) because Faurisson is being attacked for having sought
for and spread the truth », presented in the Guerre Sociale leaflet Who
is the Jew ?, was false when the leaflet was distributed (1979). At that
time we neither understood this clearly, nor stated it clearly (the
leaflet is quoted in Mise au Point, pp 98–99)
Firstly, we don’t have to support Faurisson because we have no more in
common with him than with those who persecute him. The problem with
Faurisson is obvious : society distinguishes between murder and
involuntary death. It pursues the assassin and resigns itself to
workplace and traffic accidents, the « natural » consequences of a way
of life. But from the point of view of the human species, the important
thing is to avoid massacres and suffering, whether it is a matter of
murder or of the kind of violent death that is considered normal. The
death of a child strangled by a « sadist » excites the imagination more
than the death of thousands of others from hunger. The prosecutors at
Nuremberg reduced the deaths in the concentration camps to the first
example : they made them a crime. The lawyers for the accused at
Nuremberg reduced them to the second example : they made them an
accident. To try to prove that the Nazis killed without wanting to or
without wanting to systematically, is to adopt the point of view of the
defence lawyers at Nuremberg.
Analysing the 1939–45 war is not what interests Faurisson. His « passion
for the truth » takes the gas chambers as its object. That’s up to him.
But this selflimitation leads to the same result as the antifascist
campaign which presents the Nazis as monsters with sole responsibility
for the war. For Faurisson explores a minor point, and trains the
spotlight on this point, just like the other experts, thus obscuring
what surrounds this point and might explain it. By helping to focus
attention on the gas chambers, he dramatises them even more and
reinforces the myth. A great obscurity continues to reign over the whole
question of Nazism and 1939–45, which this focus helps to sustain. It is
only by leaving aside the gas chambers that one might consider them
seriously and hold the only discourse that is possible on this question
:
« Faurisson is attacked and persecuted for having affirmed that the gas
chambers are no more than a tall tale by prisoners. We are not experts
and we don’t want to become experts, therefore we won’t enter into this
discussion. But those who believe that by removing the gas chambers from
Nazism, one might weaken the horror which it inspires, only reveal their
grand-guignolesque view of what it is that makes human life truly
horrible. They attach the horror to images instead of seeing it where it
actually is : in the relations between men. In their conception, the
fact that a crude tall story was imposed on millions of poor wretches
would be less serious than the existence of a particular technique for
extermination. Yet, if the gas chambers were nothing more than a
sinister rumour among prisoners, it would be necessary to admit that in
order for such an enormous tall story to be imposed with such force on
so many people, these people must have been thrown into a radical
dispossession of themselves. However, the fact that this dispossession
indeed exists is a massive fact which no-one thinks of discussing.
« Whether or not the Nazi gas chambers had a concrete existence matters
very little to us. They exist today, as at the very least they existed
to the deportees, that is to say as an image derived from a horrible
reality. It is not necessary to have anti-Semitic ulterior motives in
order to discuss the possibility that this image did not correspond, or
corresponded only partially, to reality. Our task is to subject to
critique the part which this image plays in anti-fascist ideology, and
critique that ideology itself. In doing this, when this discussion and
these critiques will lead to us being characterised as Nazi’s, we will
have verified the totalitarian mentality of those who wish us ill. But
what qualifies us in our own eyes to undertake this task of
deconstructing an ideology, is precisely that we are not dispassionate
fanatics for truth — assuming such a type really exists. We believe it’s
possible to speak because we recognise that the gas chambers have a
basic level of existence : in the eyes of millions of deportees they
embody the real horror of what they experienced. « The gas chambers, if
they were not the means, would at least be the metaphor » (Y.
Chotard).This appalling image which has come down to us hardly gives us
any information about the real functioning of the camps. But it tells us
very well the feelings which they inspired in men. »
That is all there is to say on the question of the gas chambers. As for
the question of the camps, it is the analysis of 1939–45 which allows us
to situate and understand them. It is certainly not the camps which
enable us to understand Nazism. Just as in the same way it isn’t the «
Gulag » which explains the USSR, but the understanding of the history
and nature of the USSR which explains the Gulag.
The massacre of the Jews made it possible for democracy to save the
costs of a critique of Nazism. Apart from the work of specialists there
is no real attempt at understanding Nazism as a whole. The standard
image of Nazism held by most people concentrates on the worst horrors,
both real and imagined. This impression is formed according to a process
which is simultaneously spontaneous and organised, popular and
state-controlled. The article « The Horror is Human » in the first issue
of La Banquise analyses the process of projecting the horror of the
present onto the past.
Faurisson affirms that he is driven by a passion for the truth. But the
truth is only true through a social relation, as when one speaks of a «
true » behaviour, of an attitude that is appropriate to a situation, or
of a reaction which moves things forward. Truth never lies in the raw
fact, or in an inert thing or an isolated thought, it emerges from the
process of setting into relation (mise en rapport). It is constructed by
the gaze which falls upon it (see « Truth and Public Opinion » in this
issue). The truth about the camps undoubtedly includes the intentions of
those who ordered their construction, but it lies especially in the
conditions which produced them and in their operation. The truth of the
camps is not the dimensions of the buildings, the cost of the materials,
the number of deportees, the proportion of Poles, etc., or more exactly
these figures are only data which do not form the truth : they become it
through what is bound to be an organisation of the facts. The
controversy over the number of Jewish victims of Nazism distances us
from the truth of the camps.
Whether Faurisson wants it or not, he also organises the facts according
to his point of view. However, this point of view makes him absolutely
indefensible.
Faurisson searches for the authentic. An authentic document doesn’t
necessarily (and doesn’t often) speak the truth, we only know whether or
not it comes from the source from which it (or that one) says that it
comes. Authenticity means to remain faithful to ones own code. An
authentic being only exists in relation to norms, or to a restrictive
code. Truth, a social relation, is potentially universal, and falls
within the range of human activity. In this way the « truth is
revolutionary ». The truth does not lie in the work of Faurisson.
« (...) the number of Jews exterminated by the Nazis (or victims of «
genocide ») is happily equal to zero »
Faurisson quoted in Thion.
Faurisson’s detractors treat him as Nazi or a madman. But quite simply,
he plays with words. This denial of genocide only makes sense if one
gives the word the significance which the most narrow-minded antifascism
gives it. In this sense to say that the Nazis perpetrated genocide
against the Jews would mean that for a long time they had wanted and
planned the deaths of millions of Jews and that they then organised this
by exceptional methods. This is the meaning which one finds in the
Robert, a dictionary published after the Nuremberg trials : « Methodical
destruction of an ethnic group ». Faurisson speaks the same false
language as the
« exterminationists ». He also makes massacre a question of intentions.
He is on their terrain, and not on that of a revolutionary historical,
or even of a merely serious, critique. Even liberal historians can see
that the truth of the camps and the genocide does not lie in a history
of intentions.
There was a massacre of a large number of Jews because they were Jews.
And in our eyes, if words have meaning, there was genocide, whatever the
exact number of deaths. In the same way France committed a massacre at
Setif and in Constantinois in 1945 which killed between 4500 and 45000
Algerians. And there was a genocide of Red Indians.
We do not wish to discuss with people who deny massacres and racial
persecution by twisting words, but rather with those who try to explain
them, something which neither the revisionists nor the exterminationists
do. Faurisson is neither usable nor supportable because he reinforces a
confusion which revolutionary theory is precisely there to dispel.
In a text published by Libération on March 7 1979, Pierre Guillaume
wrote two sentences which could have summarised very well our position
on the content of this affair : « The anti-Nazism without Nazi’s which
reigns over the world is an outlet for a confused society which cannot
manage to face its own problems. One doesn’t fight against the
inexorable mechanisms of real oppression with stereotypical
representations (images d’Épinal) ». If this text had contained only
this, we would simply have observed that its publication in Libération
went against our principles : that is to say we don’t defend our basic
positions in the newspapers. Unfortunately it contained something else.
Shortly after the publication of this article Pierre Guillaume explained
why he had considered it useful to send his prose to the central organ
of neo-reformism.
After having explained the persecutions which had befallen Faurisson,
Pierre Guillaume continued : « it became vital for the development of
the situation to obtain support and thus to obtain the agreement of
everyone over the same text, without concession or second thoughts. This
text therefore had to include the famous sentence which seemed to render
Faurisson indefensible : « Hitler never ordered the execution of a
single Jew merely because he was Jewish » by showing that this sentence
was strictly true, even if Hitler did not give a damn about what became
of the Jews in practise »
This sentence indeed rendered Faurisson indefensible.
As to whether it’s really true that on « the level of strictly
scientific history » « Hitler never ordered the execution of a single
Jew merely because he was Jewish », having examined Faurisson’s
scientific work more closely, we are no longer so sure. But even if it
were true, this truth appears so severe, so restricted, that it is
reduced to nothing. When Pierre Guillaume adds : « even if Hitler didn’t
give a damn about what happened to the Jews », he himself shows the
inanity of this alleged truth.
A member of Herouth might say : « Begin never ordered or accepted that
anyone was killed at Sabra and Chatila because of his Palestinian
sympathies. » Faurisson would agree : where are the authentic documents
proving the contrary ? The truth is that one is always responsible for
one’s allies, and that even if it did not want it, the Israeli army at
least created the conditions favourable to this massacre (even without
speaking of the fact that it allowed the murderers to continue). The
Israeli board of inquiry itself recognised that the State had an «
indirect » responsibility. One could multiply sentences of this kind :
Guy Mollet [Socialist Prime Minister at the time of the struggle for
independence in Algeria — translator] never ordered or accepted that
anyone was killed or tortured merely because it was suspected that he
belonged to the FLN. Stalin never ordered...
It is strictly false to assert that Hitler didn’t give a damn about [ie.
was indifferent to — translator] the fate of the Jews. He wasn’t
organising their collective massacre from 1919 onwards, but he did
plenty in order that rather a lot of them died, and it is not really to
be the victim of antifascist propaganda to think that he did not mourn
their fate. Is it necessary to find written orders by Guy Mollet himself
in order to associate him with the Algerian torture ? Undoubtedly he did
not give a damn what happened to the militants of the FLN who fell into
the hands of the paratroopers during the battle of Algiers. In order to
be anti-Stalinist is it necessary to find orders written by Stalin
proving that he was directly implicated in the politics of his State ?
In reality, revolutionary critique doesn’t need the individual
culpability of heads of State, and it is the same for their innocence.
What determines our attitude towards them is not their good or bad will.
What makes them enemies is the fact that they are heads of State. But
Vieille Taupe 2 would seek to demonstrate that the Nazis, and
particularly Hitler, were not « guilty » of everything attributed to
them. To assert the opposite of the official version of something is not
the same as to criticise it.
How does Faurisson claim to defend the indefensible ? Here are the
explanations which he gives in Thion’s book :
« Hitler never ordered nor admitted that anyone was to be killed because
of his race or his religion »
« Explanation of this sentence : »
« Hitler and the Nazis said: “the Allies and the Jews want our
annihilation, but it is they who will be annihilated.” »
« Similarly, the Allies and the Jews said: “Hitler and the Nazis want
our annihilation, but it is they who will be annihilated.” »
« For one side as for the other, what mattered first was to win the war,
at the same time against the military and against the civilians (men,
women, the old, children all together). »
It is here that we disengaged from him. Hic Jacet Lepus. [Here is the
crux of the problem].
Hitler and the Nazis on one side, the Allies and the Jews on the other :
delimiting the sides involved in this way is historically false and it
ought to be odious to anyone who isn’t anti-Semitic; The Nazis — a
political party in power within a State — and Hitler — the head of that
party and of that State — form an easily defined whole. But, unless one
thinks, like the pre-war anti-Semites, that the Jews manipulated the
democratic regimes, it is false to present the Jews as a belligerent
entity. Faurisson clarifies in a footnote : « On September 5 1939, Chaim
Weizmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, declared war on
Germany. »
Apart from the fact that on the historical level this is a fiction, we
would point out that Weizmann was not at all, like Hitler or Roosevelt,
a Head of State capable of mobilising armies and citizens. Faurisson
continues : « For Hitler, the Jews were representatives of a hostile,
belligerent nation. » It must be noted that on this point Faurisson
shares Hitler’s point of view.
In its special issue devoted to the Jews on the 17 February 1939, Je
Suis Partout, the organ of French fascists and anti-Semites, wrote :
« The Jews — we believe we have demonstrated it sufficiently —
constitute despite their dispersion a perfectly homogenous nation, more
coherent from the racial point of view than all other human groupings.
For this reason they are subject to the great laws which govern the
relations between the different human communities of the world. However
the life of a nation is made up of the alternatives between peace and
war. (...) »
« The French people are at peace with Germany. The Jewish people are at
war with Germany. »
« It does not matter who started it. Let’s note that the Jewish nation
has a PERSONAL disagreement to settle with the Reich and that it
endeavours to settle it victoriously by mobilising under its standards
the greatest possible number of allies. »
Making racial criteria the sign of membership of a nation which one is
fighting, is a racist politics. To consider that this nation defined by
racist politics really exists, is to adopt a racist point of view.
Reducing the deaths of Jews during the Second World War to a banal act
of war, is to conceal racism as a fundamental component of Nazi ideology
and politics.
Certainly, « one doesn’t fight against the inexorable mechanisms of real
oppression with stereotypical representations ». But what are Faurisson
and Vieille Taupe 2 doing ? To the dominant stereotypical image,
outlined at Nuremberg and coloured by the projection of modern horror,
they oppose another stereotypical image : that of a war between the Jews
and the Nazis. This conception, which they share with the anti-Semitic
right, is no more false than that which turns an imperialist war into a
crusade against Absolute Evil. But it is no less false. Those who see in
the birth of the « myth » of genocide the work of a Jewish conspiracy
think according to the same pattern as those who see behind Faurisson’s
work the hand of a neo-Nazi international. Both of them have a
policeman’s conception of history.
Pierre Guillaume’s intentions are of little importance. It must be noted
that far from making it possible for our basic positions to be expressed
by drawing on the work of Faurisson, his activity only resulted in
giving ultra-left support to this Lyonnais crackpot.
At the beginning of 1980, having decided to put things in writing, J-P
Carasso, G Dauvé, C Martineau and S Quadruppani each wrote to Pierre
Guillaume expressing their profound disagreement with him. A belated
attempt to straighten things up regarding Vieille Taupe 2, but at least,
we dipped a toe into it.
Faurisson, we wrote, only violated a taboo without taking it apart, and
he remained on the terrain of myth. One doesn’t refute religion, and one
doesn’t seek to « convince » its followers, rather one shows its
function and its operation. In the same way one would not refute an
advertisement, something which is neither true nor false : its intention
is not to demonstrate, but to associate, in the same way that a myth
does, and is both elaborate and vivid in its variants. Thus it is
absurd, if one wishes to deconstruct, to seek to prove that the myth
lies.
« Working-class people (…) are drawing upon beliefs which, though rarely
considered, are still in most cases firmly there. These beliefs, some of
the basic Christian doctrines, they hold but do not examine. Nor do they
often think that they have much relevance to the day-to-day business of
living » (Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Penguin, 1958, pp.
115–16). This truth obviously applies to all classes. The same person
who shows immense common sense in his own life, will everyday swallow
without discussion the worst improbabilities about Jesus, or Stalin, or
the gas chambers, etc.
Pierre Guillaume’s response, a few months later, can be summarised as :
I’m sticking to my guns. Since then he has always pursued this course.
Roughly speaking, everyone more or less believes in the gas chambers.
But doubt about them is not some miraculous lever that might enable one
to raise the world or its ideology. It may be that doubt about them is
growing. So what ? To believe that one could intervene in order that the
abandoning of this belief was not achieved smoothly, and that this might
force people to reflect on the mechanisms of ideology, is a delusion
close to delirium. Why would the gas chambers form the providential
grain of sand, capable of jamming the mechanism of antifascist ideology
? There is no such grain of sand. To be convinced of this it is only
necessary to see to what extent the Faurisson affair was specifically
French.
The principal function of horrific mythology is to blind people to the
fundamental unity of the modern world. Concentrationist mythology
derived from the Second World War is only part of this set of
representations of barbarism, against which the only recourse is
supposedly democracy. But concentrationist mythology and the imagery of
the gas chambers are by no means the cornerstone of the dominant
ideology. They play a role of unequal importance according to country.
In the United States, an Arthur Butz, both « revisionist » and
anti-Semitic, can teach in a small university, without his theories
sparking off the journalistic and political hysteria of a « Faurisson
affair ». In Britain, a former officer in the special services could
organise a fake concentration camp in which people could pay to be
treated badly, whereas in France such an enterprise would have been
impossible, there would have been a mobilisation of organisations and
the intervention of the law.
As Pierre Guillaume had showed in his post-face to Kautsky’s Three
Sources of Marxism (Spartacus, 1969), there is no consciousness outside
of a practise within which this consciousness has a function. The
Leninist ambition to « make (people) become conscious » is ideological :
it is only used to give the donor of consciousness power over those to
whom he brings it. It wouldn’t occur to us to appeal for communism
through a leaflet. Even during a revolutionary period one would not «
appeal », one would express what one was doing. Public opinion is the
opposite of this : it develops a passionate interest in what it does not
do, in what it cannot change.
When the revolutionary horizon appears to be blocked, revolutionaries
readily cling to miraculous solutions. Vieille Taupe 2 believes in a
certain number of « principles» that are supposed to be subversive :
truth, honesty, scientific probity, the accuracy of information. It
fights in the name of the ideal of the media as against their real use.
It appeals to a moral code against the violation of that code. However
experience teaches us that any morality is made to be transgressed, and
that any code of ethics is fixed according to inevitable and foreseen
lapses. In the fake Monde Diplomatique, we didn’t reproach the press for
playing its role badly. On the contrary we noted that it fulfilled it.
The revolutionary movement does not appeal to an idea of justice against
breaches of that idea. It demonstrates that the university, the school,
the army, the law, the press, art, etc. etc., can only play the role of
guarantors of social order. Vieille Taupe 2 went from this to demanding
that the journalist produce the true duty of the journalist. There is no
difference between this demand and democratic campaigns for « true »
information, for a press that is « free from power and money », for «
access to culture by all », etc.
The important thing is not the fact that people believe or not in the
existence of gas chambers, but the reasons why they value this belief so
highly. It is not a matter of setting about the truth or falsity of this
belief, but of the historic causes which make it a taboo.
The Faurisson affair had harmful effects within society as well as in
the work of those who criticised it. At a time when the « Jewish
community » was about to constitute just one more ghetto, one more «
identity », at a time when the revolutionary movement had the task of
affirming the human species against the crystallization of « communities
» whether they be homosexual, Arab or Jewish... at this very moment the
harmful influence of Faurisson exerted itself in the revolutionary
ranks. Vieille Taupe 2 started looking for Jewish sounding names to sign
its letters and petitions. However, to speak of « Jews » as a banal
reality, whereas this is the first notion to be criticised, a notion
whose questioning undermines anti-Semitism and Zionism at the same time,
here was a practise which Faurisson helped reinforce among those who
found him interesting.
The conception of the Second World War as an « irreconcilable war
between Hitler and the Jews » proceeds, following the example of Hitler
or Begin, through the forced integration of everyone born to Jewish
parents into the « Jewish » bloc, by commanding that person to conform,
for good or bad fortune, to a community of « Jewish » destiny which
falls into the category of myth. Speaking of « the Jews » is to justify
the claims and practises of both the Third Reich and the State of Israel
in imposing their law on any individual who cannot prove their
non-membership of this « community ».
Just as much as the bombing in the rue Copernic or the shooting in the
Rue des Rosiers, the Faurisson scandal achieved the opposite of what
revolutionaries might wish for : it froze « persons born of Jewish
parents » into a defensive hysteria. Amongst other things, it is because
of Faurisson that today people still seek an identity according to
criteria which resemble the racial laws of the Third Reich like two peas
in a pod.
The Organisation of Young Revolutionary Workers (OJTR) had disappeared
at about the same time as Mouvement Communiste. At the beginning of 1974
the OJTR organised a national meeting which was a failure. Fortunately
this did not prevent it from publishing A World Without Money (3
booklets, 1975–6), in which for the first time, perhaps, and unlike
utopian and anarchist writings, the concrete mechanism of a communist
revolution was envisaged.
The author of this text, Dominique Blanc, then organised King Kong
International (1976). Typical of the period, the editorial, a synthesis
of essential communist positions, stood in sharp contrast to other minor
articles, and to a text on LIP which produced no critique of this rescue
operation of a company by its employees. It is never enough to indicate
the profoundly proletarian causes of social acts, it is still necessary
to speak of what effects they lead to. In the LIP affair, as in many
other cases, capitalism succeeded in penetrating inside the workers’
action and made it a capitalist enterprise (in both senses of the word)
which also, by virtue of the national and international impact it
experienced, had an anti-revolutionary function.[2]
With the second issue the journal changed its name to la Guerre Sociale
(Issue 1 1977). A text on the abolition of wage labour, distributed in
large quantities on May 1 1977, was rerun as an editorial. It coexisted
with at least two deeply erroneous texts, one on automation and one on
the refusal of work, which was one-sidedly interpreted as proof that
Capital was at death’s door. The clarification in issue 2 did not
develop matters.
Among the past and present participants in la Guerre Sociale, some had
taken part in Vieille Taupe and le Mouvement Communiste. In addition,
Gilles Dauvé contributed to Guerre Sociale by giving the first versions,
subsequently modified, of the texts on the State (published in issue 2)
and on the camps (issue 3, 1979).
Reading la Guerre Sociale and La Banquise will clearly show the
connections and convergences between them. In addition to the matters we
speak of below (and which are not trivial), La Banquise addresses two
criticisms to Guerre Sociale : firstly, Guerre Sociale does not get to
the bottom of the analysis of demand struggles; secondly, it has poorly
broken away from propaganda.
If Guerre Social is tempted by triumphalism (the articles already
mentioned in Issue 1, the articles on Denain-Longwy on Issue 2), this is
probably more than a sign of excessive optimism. The critique of the
workers’ movement, including wildcat movements, has not been carried to
its conclusion. Guerre Sociale wrote in its fourth issue (1982) :
« It seems to us that, regardless of the forms of organisation, whether
trade unionist or autonomous, the proletariat also expresses itself in
its elementary struggle of resistance to exploitation. Even if in this
way, it does not appear revolutionary. »
This is a theory that is, at the very least questionable, and requires
discussion. (See our positions on the definition of the proletariat).
Elementary resistance is a condition of the communist movement, but it
is only a condition. We don’t applaud all workers’ struggle (which can
be or become anti-proletarian), nor even all class struggle (which can
be reformist or even end up by imprisoning proletarians still further
within capitalism).
One cannot make a dead end of this issue. No regroupment will be made
solely on the basis of an understanding of communism and the revolution.
Still it is necessary to agree about what there is between now and a
revolution; about what the proletariat does and does not do.
In its first issues Guerre Sociale preferred to publish minor texts at
the expense of others that were more fundamental (on the Situationist
International for example), which were reserved for a more limited
distribution. Guerre Sociale often lagged behind A World Without Money.
The text on the crisis (issue 3) left to one side the main elements of a
previous duplicated analysis by Dominique Blanc on the subject. Guerre
Sociale produced too much simplification, and too much propaganda.
« It was a conference, that is to say of education and popularisation. I
would have liked that this conference while teaching me something, would
also have taught you something. This criteria of discovery is the only
one which appears valid to me when I write. »
(letter of Antonin Artaud to André Rolland de Renéville, 11 January
1933).
At the end of 1979, after issue 3, Dominique Blanc sent a circular
letter to the members of the group and to a series of people who had
collaborated with him in the past, as well as those he knew among the
editors of the fake Monde Diplomatique. Guerre Sociale, he said, was
undergoing the consequences of the general passivity. It was in crisis
and he wondered whether it was necessary to give it up or continue it. A
correspondence followed. The future editors of La Banquise recognised
the importance of the existence of a journal like la Guerre Sociale but
addressed to it the criticisms summarised above.
In the spring of 1980, a meeting took place in Paris, the minutes of
which were written shortly afterwards by the Lyons members of Guerre
Sociale. No minute are impartial, and ours would have been different,
but these are honest and we reproduce them in an annexe.
The meeting had proceeded in a general climate of goodwill, honest
critique and a refusal of polemic. Those who today produce La Banquise
had the feeling that we perhaps were entering a new period during which
a revolutionary regroupment was going to take place. In the following
weeks texts were written and dispatched to all the participants :
(subsequently published in two issues of La Frondeur; some pages were
incorporated in « The Horror is Human » in the first issue of La
Banquise). This text lapsed too much into mass psychology but initiated
a critique of Rassinier and Faurisson;
manuscripts;
modification became « For a World Without Moral Order » in the first
issue of La Banquise;
(Issue 1 of La Banquise, an extract of which would be published in
Indolencia, in Barcelona, and would be presented in error as having
emanated from Guerre Sociale).
Commitments seemed to have been honoured. But...
Dominique Blanc firstly considered that « Proletariat and Communism »
threw the proletariat out of the window, then some time after, declared
that the text on morals was closer to the positions held by Bruckner (a
modernist intellectual) than of Guerre Sociale, that this mush of «
immoralist moralism was worth nothing and explained nothing » and he
finished by characterising it as « Vaneigemist wanking » (in other words
sub-Situationist). His criticisms were expressed with a less and less
controlled aggression and left little room for argument. The text on
morals did indeed contain some very erroneous passages which have since
been corrected (amongst other things an uncritical presentation of the
myth of the « recalcitrant », and even a half-identification of the
recalcitrant with the revolutionary) but draft texts did not deserve
such fury.
In addition, disagreements were further aggravated by the Faurisson
affair. By mutual agreement between Pierre Guillaume and us it had not
been discussed at the meeting, since we were still awaiting (March 1980)
Pierre’s answers to our criticisms. Shortly afterwards, since Pierre
continued with fine energy along the path he had taken, we considered
that it was impossible to conceal our disagreements with him any longer.
Believing in preparing the future and not wasting it, we brought all of
it to the attention of those who had taken part in the March meeting.
Pierre reacted with a new letter which we also circulated. We wanted to
lance the abscess. It was nearly impossible for us to believe that
Vieille Taupe 2 would persist for long in its aberrations. We thought
that on the whole the members of Guerre Sociale would agree with us on
the content of our disagreement with Pierre, would make this known to
him and that he would find himself up against the wall.
But Dominique Blanc, while holding Pierre to be wrong on the question of
intervening in the media, concentrated all of his energy on criticising
our attitude and declared that Pierre’s was more « sympathetic » than
ours. To our great astonishment, he hardly drew any conclusion about the
content (should one support Faurisson ?) but declared Rassinier more
subversive and Pierre more sympathetic than us.
He chose to take what, for us, was a call for an essential discussion
and a warning, as an indictment, made against Pierre by people who were
equally guilty of the things for which they reproached him (letters to
the press, errors that were indeed open to criticism). Dominique Blanc
had rightly reproached one of his comrades for having attempted to get
the Nouvel Observateur to mention Guerre Sociale. Then what is to be
said about a systematic publicity campaign for Faurisson ?
Imagine a group publishing an article against democracy, one of whose
most eminent members, without whom the article could not have been
produced, then stands as a candidate in an election ? This was the
unacceptable confusion which Pierre created by taking part in a
revolutionary grouping while conducting a campaign for the
democratization of the media in favour of Faurisson. Here lay an
ambiguity that needed be resolved. Dominique Blanc refused to do so. As
a result the following autumn Guerre Sociale joined Vieille Taupe 2 in
the confusionist activism in defence of Faurisson.
The critique of « human rights » today forms part of minimum
revolutionary positions, for us, as without doubt for Guerre Sociale.
How can a group then allow itself to be more and more openly drawn into
a campaign for human rights ? And why exactly should the human in
question be Faurisson ?
An agreement had been entered into in March. We had the impression that
we had fulfilled it. We were alone in this view. Whatever the
disagreements with Guerre Sociale, they did not justify an attitude
which can be summarized as follows : Guerre Sociale deliberately chose
not to associate with people which it
characterised as sub-Situationist intellectuals or as drifting
dangerously towards Camattism. The text on morals, amended, is in issue
1, the ideas on the proletariat are in issues 1 and 2. Everyone can
judge for themselves the verdict passed on us by Dominique Blanc.
There undoubtedly exist between us important disagreements, as much over
the conception of the proletariat as over the critique of moeurs. These
disagreements would most probably have prevented a close collaboration,
at any rate in the same journal. But there was an opportunity to discuss
essential subjects and Dominique Blanc’s attitude prevented that.
In the circular letter which put a full stop to our relations with
Guerre Sociale and its network of correspondents we included these lines
which summarize our feelings about this episode : « That the whims of an
individual and the « obscure settling of emotional accounts » still have
so such importance demonstrates the weakness of the revolutionary
current. In the whole of this sad business this is what troubles us
most. » As long as the revolutionary current is weak, confrontations of
personality and character will retain their importance. Sometimes it is
necessary to produce a little psychology in order not to have to do so
later on. But in particular, it is necessary to find a mode of relations
between individuals and groups which marginalises paralysing emotional
behaviour. The gathering together of some individuals in La Banquise is
not an end in itself. We are open to any relations with groups and
individuals, but it is necessary that these relations are conducted on
terms which show that from the start we have a minimum in common. There
are rules of behaviour to be found between revolutionaries. After having
characterised us as Vaneigemist wankers and declared us to be less
subversive than Rassinier, Dominique Blanc appeared astonished that we
thereafter refused any discussion with him. He has just written us a
letter of abuse concerning the first issue of La Banquise. To this
letter[3] as to those which preceded it we will not be replying.
Everyone knows those leftists who patiently draw themselves up to heap
insults on their interlocutors before boldly returning to the argument.
We don’t practise this kind of angelism, not (or not only) out of
self-esteem, but because one can only discuss effectively with those
people with whom one at least has a common language. To insults, we
could only reply with insults, and we also do not want to sink into that
sort of petty sub-Situationist game.
After the very friendly meeting in March 1980, with only one exception,
the friends and members of Guerre Sociale to whom the texts and the
copies of the correspondence with Pierre Guillaume and Dominique Blanc
had been sent, expressed no reaction. Nothing. Why did they play the
white zombies we know them not to be. In its exposition of what had
occurred between issues 3 and 4 Guerre Sociale makes the following
allusion to this wasted spring : « Instead of growing in size, we
managed to damage some of our relationships and even those with whom a
more remote and more occasional collaboration might have been possible »
(issue 4, 1982, p. 43). The reader of la Guerre Sociale would learn no
more.
La Banquise, like any consistent revolutionary journal, works for its
own disappearance. Our activity only makes sense in terms of a movement
which one day will encompass all of the energies expressed here or there
in the form of groups or journals. We have nothing to do with the great
family of the ultra-left. On the other hand, we know that a sudden
appearance by the proletariat will soon settle the differences which
separate us from the other segments of the revolutionary movement. While
waiting, we will continue to seek among ourselves, and with those we
meet, a coherence that is never given from the start, but can only be
reached by clarifying points of disagreement as far as is possible, and
working though them. The original Vieille Taupe, le Mouvement
Communiste, Guerre Sociale and those who today produce La Banquise have
all made errors. The most serious of them would be to leave these errors
in the dark.
About 20 participants including 3 from the South-West, 3 from Lyons and
the rest from Paris. This report only deals with the meeting on Saturday
22, the discussion on the Sunday (with the participation of a comrade
from Aix-en-Provance) being more casual. We should indicate the very
limited number of women (2) and the relatively « advanced age » of the
participants.
The discussion began with a critique of la Guerre Sociale.
A critique of the contents of the review which became tangled up with a
critique of its functioning.
themselves in relation to the [question of the] existence of the review
in itself but in relation to what it has to say. Alongside important
texts like « Misery of Feminism », Question of the State » and « The
Camps… » coexist articles in which the arguments do not do justice to
the assertions, or which contain things that are completely false. This
concerns the editorials on New York (issue 2), on Denain-Longwy and Iran
(issue 3) in which reality is amplified with an optimism which masks a
lack of analysis, but which comes to reinforce a more general optimism
about the revolution, leading to the manufacture of a reassuring
communist ideology for the group and its readers. (A point of view
shared by Dominique from Lyons).
world is heavy with revolution, this is not because he sees it arriving
with Denain, but because of the contradictions of capitalism. DK
recognises the weakness of these articles or the false passages (the
army collapsed at lightening speed in Iran). Pierre pointed out the
mystery of the ultra-powerful Iranian army which apparently vanished
into thin air : « What became of the 7 company ? » (Pat) But these
deficiencies were the product of a concrete situation (the relation of
forces in the first issue), [the article on] Denain-Longwy had been
intended to be a posterleaflet — which explains its tone –the
commitments not held to — and the absence of some who should have been
present in the journal. Pierre in order to summarise the situation spoke
about the role of DK as editor in chief. « The beginning of the
beginning is nonetheless the existence of a journal... » (DK)
struggles, and that their violent character against the State did not
necessarily make them struggles for communism. « The steelworkers are
fighting to remain steelworkers. » The response of Quim is mentioned : «
because one always struggles against ». — Henri : in elementary
proletarian struggle there is something else; by their situation within
production, the fractions of the proletariat temporarily break the
functioning of the economy even if reformism is the logical conclusion
(contradiction of the proletariat between capitalism and communism).
Gilles spoke of the crisis of the proletariat. Everyone agreed in
recognising this as the number one problem (as can be seen at the level
of the concepts or terminology in which people interchangeably employ
working class, proletariat, workers…)
Gilles is astonished that essential texts like « Chant Funèbre » and on
the « S.I » have not appeared. Pierre spoke of the S.I as « style » and
of its subversive relation to communication. If the ultra-left and the «
milieu » have an especially defensive relation to the world, the S.I.
had shown a more offensive attitude. All those who had read Dominique
K’s text agreed in finding it important (Gilles, Gérald) even if its
style left something to be desired. But Dominique prefers to devote
himself to rewriting « A World Without Money ». Alain (Quillan South
West) did not agree with the publication of the text on the S.I. in the
journal, he fears that one would bring the myth back to life, and that
the journal remains connected to the same interlocutors and did not go
beyond a certain milieu (a point of view shared by Jacques (South-West)
François (Lyon). Gilles pointed out that he had written a text on the
S.I. which circulated in English.
In a slightly delirious form the South-West platform had raised the
problem as well as the questions « Who does the journal serve ? Who is
it addressed to ? » raised by Sylvie. Jacques thinks that it cannot
remain a theoretical journal without posing the problem of its links
with the social movement, of practical intervention in struggles and of
the organisation of communist fractions. Jean-Pierre responded, if it
was a question of acts of intervention, they could not be spoken about
in the abstract, it was necessary that there were specific things to
discuss and decide. Jacques is happy to accept that initially one
proceeds via a theoretical journal. In passing the remark of Gilles :
one should not pose the existence of the review in terms of the brainy
types who think and write for the others, it must enable the possibility
of a debate and a circulation of ideas and projects, even if some have
more capacity to formulate them. Indeed several people said nothing at
the meeting yet afterwards had an opinion on this or that question.
Workers and those who have never immersed themselves in politics and the
obsession with holding meetings will always be less at ease in meetings.
Don’t they just as much have a point of view ? Dominique K evoked his
permanent concern to be understood by people who have no reference to
the « classics ». He worries if theory is not communicable to those who
socially can understand it best (Problem of the autonomisation of
theory, having few ties with the social movement — and proletarian
atomisation reinforces this situation — to be tackled on Sunday).
one is committed and to avoid certain stupidities evoked in his letter.
Jean-Pierre explained the circumstances in which interventions were made
in the newspapers in connection with the Faurisson affair and its
repercussions. The discussion became bogged down over the question of
formal rules for example that the precise use of financial resources is
known. In fact behind the formal rules are rather principles that it is
necessary to make obvious when one goes beyond the circle of close
friends. Behind the rule about not intervening in the press (apart from
the defence of a revolutionary in danger) it is a question of the
principle of the communication of communist ideas.
Agreement was reached on the principle of a collective activity, the
problem being not to fill a possible fourth issue but that there is a
debate on the important questions tackled and thus of the concrete
contributions which will logically will provide a lot more material than
a fourth issue.
with a text of Gilles.
they will integrate it into a more general text on the crisis (social
crisis — economic crisis).
beginning with the transformation of the labour process.
ending on « the need to disassemble the mechanisms which assure the
production and reproduction of ideology and its deliriums, we always
await the watchmaker » An appeal is made to Pierre.
Gilles and the insights of Pierre. For its publication it is proposed
that it come out as a booklet. But who will rewrite it ?
With the help of some improvements it can come out (send suggestions to
Dominique), an Italian translation is awaited. A leaflet poster on
ecology is proposed with which one can intervene (the Ecology Days at
Perpignan — the national ecology conference at Lyon 1, 2, 3, 4 May).
All contributions must be sent quickly to the journals box number. José
is in charge of distributing texts with the assistance and support of
the people from Paris (photocopying). May 15 debate on texts.
Note — travelling by comrades from the provinces involved greater costs
and energy than for the Parisians (the more so since the majority of
them are unemployed). The minimum should be that costs are shared. On
this occasion it is proposed that the Parisian contribution is
transferred to the Spanish edition of « The Question of the State » «
Misery of Feminism… »
1980 in France : A strategy of tension aimed at the Jewish « community »
is at work. What begins with the nocturnal machine-gunning of synagogues
and schools culminates with the bombing in the rue Copernic. Israeli
State, Arab State, French politics, hard-line Palestinians, whatever the
forces behind these acts, it is clear that, as later during the war in
Lebanon, they aimed at securing a defensive crystallisation of the
Jewish community which all kinds of political apparatuses and
ideologists then applied themselves to manipulating. After the bombing,
a large demonstration of the Union Sacrée took place. In opposition to
the resurgence of a mythical neo-Nazi barbarism paraded many people who
had defended other cruelties, partisans of Stalinism yesterday and
today, former member of governments which had covered up torture in
Algeria, defenders of a Zionism which before possessing a State that
tortured Palestinians, had been a terrorist movement which slaughtered
many « innocent » victims.
In September 1980, on the initiative of Guerre Sociale, a leaflet
entitled « Our Kingdom is a Prison » was published, signed by various
ultra-left groups and widely distributed, in particular at the
demonstration after the rue Copernic bombing. This leaflet which
denounced antifascism would have been good, if it had not entered into
the debate over the gas chambers, and if it had not contained a
perfectly Faurissonian passage about the camps :
« The deportation and concentration of millions of people can’t be
reduced to a diabolical Nazi idea, it was above all lack of the labour
necessary for war industry which produced the need for it. With
diminishing control of the situation, as the war continued and gathered
together against it much greater forces, fascism could not sufficiently
feed the deportees or properly distribute food. »
(Cited in Mise au Point).
This passage was used as a pretext to reject everything valid in the
leaflet. But even so ! To come to speak like Faurisson... Representing a
regression as compared to issue 3 of Guerre Sociale which dealt with
deportation in all its aspects, the first sentence of this passage quite
simply skips over the Jewish question. Nazi anti-Semitism no longer
exists. Yet didn’t it play a role in the « deportation and concentration
» ? The official version explains everything through Nazi racism. To
forget Nazi racism is to take the opposite of the official version not
to criticise it. An historical « omission » on this scale doesn’t put
one in a good position to write a hard hitting leaflet on the opposition
between democracy and dictatorship. The democrats naturally jumped on
this lacuna.
The second sentence of this passage is just as deplorable. From the
thesis : Nazism wanted to kill, we pass to : Nazism could no longer feed
the deportees. Two equally reductive explanations. How can we explain
these preposterous statements, except through the Faurissonian influence
in our ranks ?
After Copernic and the orgy of sanctimoniousness which followed it, the
best response was the publication in Libération of an account of the
massacre of
Algerians in Paris in October 1961. That Libération did better than the
revolutionaries says a great deal about the disintegration of this
current.
Violently anti-Semitic doctrines had helped bring Hitler to power. These
doctrines, borne by a popular hysteria which they then inflamed, drove
Hitler to acts which cannot always be explained, even indirectly, by
military or economic motives, but which often concerned an ideological
logic. Ideology is not a mask, or rather the ideology and the skin soon
become one. Anti-Semitism, one of the things which cemented together the
team in power, as well as social order in the country, had its own
requirements. It also led to the forced emigration and repression, to
the concentration and extermination of a large number of Jews. To
consider that ideology has a relative autonomy is not in contradiction
with a materialist view of the world. The concentrationist events in
Nazi Germany involved purely economic and military needs, but they
didn’t only involve that. There wasn’t a conspiracy to exterminate that
was hatched from the origins of Nazism, but there was more than a chain
of circumstances due to the war. A continuity of verbal violence was
transformed into physical violence at first sporadic (Kristelnacht in
1938) and then general (the camps).
In the midst of the passions aroused by Copernic and by the general
hostility to
Faurisson, and in an atmosphere of hunting for neo-Nazis, « Our Kingdom
is a
Prison » stirred up a series of attacks on Guerre Sociale in the press.
Curiously Guerre Sociale countered with a leaflet distributed to the
typesetters at Libération and the editors of Charlie-Hebdo, newspapers
which had become caught up in this. The « Our Kingdom… » leaflet having
been distributed at a demonstration of leftwing lawyers, and Le Monde
having presented it as a « pro-fascist » text, members of Guerre Sociale
went to Le Monde and obtained the correction which one can read below.
Guerre Sociale had correctly characterised our letters addressed to
Libération at the start of the Faurisson affair as « stupidity ». And
yet here it was taking up this practise, not as we had done in order to
defend individuals, but in order to use the media to make their basic
positions known !
---
The authors of the leaflet entitled « Our Kingdom is a Prison »
distributed on October 10 at the Palace of Justice in Paris by two
persons who were immediately challenged, have asked us to clarify that
this is not a matter of a « pro-fascist » text (Le Monde 12-13October).
These leaflets denounced « the rumour of the gas chambers (…) a mythical
horror which made it possible to mask the real and banal cause of the
war », but they ended with a call for « communist struggle by
proletarians, the destruction of wage labour, of commodities and of
States ». Several libertarian organisations had taken part in drafting
this leaflet.
Le Monde, Saturday 18 October 1980.
Guerre Sociale and the others — in particular the group Jeune Taupe/Pour
une Intervention Communiste — genuinely mobilised for Faurisson,
bringing him and Vieille Taupe 2 « revolutionary » support and backing.
They turned themselves into experts before a court which they should
have challenged, in the same way as with any other court.
By entering the problematic of the existence of the gas chambers, Guerre
Sociale was obliged to become a new expert. Obviously a minimum of
documentation is necessary in order that you know what you are talking
about. But until the arrival of Faurisson, the majority of French
revolutionaries distinguished between questions which made sense inside
particular specialisms, and those which made sense for everybody, and
they were only interested in the latter. Everything that we understand
about the world, and the possibility of transforming it, never concerns
specialised knowledge, because everything that we know is inseparable
from what we have done and experienced. Faurisson, the victim of the
illusion of his own speciality (and what a speciality !) is no more than
an agent of details. His critique of texts can at best dissect writings,
never elucidate historical processes. Revolutionary critique challenges
all experts and all courts. However some radical groups went from this
to supporting an expert in the Nuremburg tribunal.
All textual critique presupposes an aesthetic, a norm, it is never the
work of a « neutral » researcher. Faurisson believes in a natural text,
in an undoctored narrative, in a state of words which precedes
interpretation and whose discovery would finally clarify the problem :
the document revealing the raw fact. This is the illusion of a « real »
existing in a pure form, prior to and underneath the interpretations
that recover it, and which can be extracted in that pure state.
There is no knowledge of history independent of the meaning one gives
it. The worst contemporary mystification, that which is the theoretical
presupposition of all the others, is objectivity, the negation of the
subjective-objective element of all thought. This is what State schools
and the bourgeoisie try to impose on us.
In 1981 a Mise au point de la Guerre Sociale showed that it had entered
into a polemic in which it had no function. « …one could appreciate and
support the work of Faurisson on an anti-capitalist basis…» (p. 41).
Like Vieille Taupe 2, Guerre Sociale rearranged Rassinier’s biography by
minimising his anti-Semitism. But is even a minimal anti-Semitism
acceptable ? Would Guerre Sociale defend with such ardour a historian
who was a « little bit » Stalinist writing about the victims of
Stalinism ?
Instead of making the distinction between our question and the question
raised by Faurisson, Guerre Sociale made a critique of him without
showing the radical difference in point of view. Faurisson and
revolutionaries do not look at things in the same way, thus they cannot
see the same things.
On the statement : « Hitler never ordered nor admitted that anyone was
to be killed because of his race or his religion », Guerre Sociale wrote
that Faurisson « says the opposite of the widespread current image of
the “final solution” and Hitler (…) in any event this sentence is far
too categorical (…) » (pp 38–39). The least one can say is that « too
categorical » is a wholly inadequate critique of such an outrageous and
erroneous assertion.
It is society, says Guerre Sociale, which « makes a question of
principle » out of the gas chambers (p. 40). The article in its third
issue had not made them an essential matter. But from the moment that
revolutionaries « supported » Faurisson, himself obsessed by gas, they
threw themselves into what was a « question of principle » for « society
», but not for them. Where did that lead them ? When Guerre Sociale was
unaware of Faurisson, it said rather more about the camps. Everything
which is important about Nazism and 1939–45 in this Mise au Point, is
without recourse to Faurisson.
This same booklet reproduced a hitherto unpublished letter by Pierre
Guillaume dating from 1979, which set out his initial theoretical
position in this affair (before the meeting with Faurisson). If this
text really summarised Pierre’s activity (however criticisable), that
activity would still have been on the terrain of communist critique.
Published a year and a half later, his letter now appears as a spurious
justification for Vieille Taupe 2. Spurious because it does not contain
the Faurissonian cohesion which developed subsequently, and which it now
serves to cover over with a theoretical cloak, with the assistance of
Guerre Sociale. Everything the letter says about the revolutionary
reasons for an interest in the concentrationist question does not
justify the exclusive interest in gassing, even less the exclusive
interest in Faurisson’s research into gassing. Today this letter, which
we had often asked Pierre to publish because it tackled the problem from
our point of view, is a mystification.
In this letter however, Pierre already denied Rassinier’s anti-Semitism.
Moreover, confusion already appears in a passage which it is remarkable
that we did not notice at the time. Concluding a discursion on the trial
of Lischka [one of those in charge of the deportation of French Jews —
translator], Pierre adds :
« (…) You will note that it is I who gives my support to Kurt Lischka.
And I hope that in his trial the rights of the defence are scrupulously
respected. » (p. 90)
A 1981 footnote clarifies this : indeed this much criticised passage now
seems to Pierre to be very open to criticism. « What I meant to say in
any case, was that, while I have nothing in common with a Lischka, I
want to have nothing in common with the horrible sanctimony of the Nazi
hunters. »
Between the dissatisfactions of a mainly theoretical activity (journals,
sometimes leaflets), and violent self-destruction (terrorism), the
problem of the gas chambers appeared to offer some revolutionaries a
springboard which might be used to advance the communist movement. Not
only did the gas chambers not advance the revolutionary critique of
Nazism, and of the mechanism of horror, it provoked a regression. People
lost sight of the totality. The demand for the « right to research »,
and for « freedom of expression » was to lead to its logical conclusion,
the defence of human rights.
In West Germany professional blacklists affected thousands of
progressives, leftists and revolutionaries for over ten years. It was
necessary to wait until the author of an iconoclastic book about
Auschwitz found the same treatment applied to him, before Vieille Taupe
2 launched a campaign in France for the defence of democratic liberties
in West Germany.
While writing favourable reviews in Guerre Sociale of books he had
published, Pierre Guillaume not only fought for the « freedom of the
researcher, the code of ethics of the historian and for freedom of
expression », but also for the training « of many lawyers (…) brought to
work on the seriously truncated text of a judgement published in the
Recueil Dalloz-Sirey. » (Leaflet of November 12 1982). The counter-trial
of Nuremburg, conducted through a legal battle which Guerre Sociale
never publicly criticised, led all the way to legalism.
As the notes in issue one of La Banquise indicated (pp. 60–63) official
history is constantly and seamlessly revised. Vieille Taupe 2 and Guerre
Sociale wanted to act in such a way that this revision could not take
place smoothly. However, within democracy the dominant ideology includes
its own critique. From which comes the risk that the exercise of the
critical mind only becomes confused with the normal evolution of
ideology and of the spectacle, and becomes no more than a moment of it,
albeit the most extreme, that which shakes things up, but only in order
to make them go on towards a supplementary « revision ».
In order not to break up on this reef, critique must take on the very
principle of revision, and not dedicate itself to demanding one. The «
revisionists » don’t denounce the « Ideas » page of Le Monde : their
great victory would be to appear in it. The entire programme of Vieille
Taupe 2, supported by the infantrymen of Guerre Sociale, is reduced to
seeking this kind of victory.
The case of the massacre at Sabra and Chatila is exemplary. The Israeli
State recognised and (to some extent) sanctioned this appalling crime.
That is the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship. Democracy
also massacres and says so. To what effect ? The purification of the
State and the reinforcement of the system as a whole.
What does it mean to fight for the recognition of the right to open a
debate ? To shift public opinion, to produce that which will one day
shape opinion. Perhaps tomorrow it will be accepted that there were no
gas chambers in the Nazi concentration camps. Such a revision will only
reinforce confidence in serious historical research and the eternal
virtues of democracy. The « stage setting by which the modern world uses
the misery and horror it produces in order to defend itself against a
real critique of that misery and of that horror », will by no means
change because one element of its décor is withdrawn !
In 1949, it was essential that Socialisme ou Barbarie asserted that
Russia was a capitalist country. Thirty years later, this opinion is
widely held, even in the work of people who don’t draw from this any
revolutionary conclusions. But in order that things are clearer today,
including in the heads of revolutionaries, it was necessary to state
that opinion, against the current, in 1949. That was a fundamental
question regarding the nature of a regime under which millions of beings
lived. There is nothing comparable in the question of the gas chambers,
a typical product of the world of ideology and information. One can
raise subversive questions from the nature of the USSR. In the question
of the existence of the gas chambers, there is only the question of the
existence of the gas chambers.
We’ve already said that we have nothing to modify or add to the
discourse of the left, which proves every day through it’s actions and
ideas that it works for the conservation of capitalism. The bourgeoisie
tries to get workers to participate in its attempts to exit from the
crisis. Giscard tried this through demagogy (the revaluation of manual
work), while Mitterand directly involved the representatives of labour
in the management of the crisis. However, perpetually attacking left and
right wing parties and trade unions, by making out that they are
constantly « exposing » their anti-revolutionary function, is to reduce
the critique of them to the denunciation of a scandal, while forgetting
to explain what the scandal is a product of. This kind of attitude
prevents any profound understanding of what the left really is.
The revolutionary movement also has nothing in common with leftism,
which devotes itself to support. What hasn’t it supported, from workers
struggles to Mitterand, passing through Maoism on the way...
Revolutionaries have nothing to support. Where a struggle has a
universal content, they can find a common language with those conducting
it, and the activity of revolutionaries naturally prolongs the struggles
in which they recognise themselves. But within our ranks anti-leftism,
spread over page after page, serves all too often as a convenient
pretext for not facing up to an examination of the situation of the
proletariat today. Leftism presents the Communist Party and the trade
unions as a screen standing between it and the masses. Revolutionaries
don’t need to imitate this by making out that leftism is Capital’s
ultimate weapon, and that it’s necessary to denounce it tirelessly.
Permanent denunciation is hypnotised by the object of its critique. It
only goes to show that you are overcome by the thing you attack the
most.
Critique of the left is meaningless if it just denounces it on a daily
basis, even if the left does participate in government. To understand
the Popular Front, or Molletism or Mitterandism, on the one hand means
understanding the way in which social conflicts are channelled towards
capitalist and statist objectives, and on the other means going to the
source of the left’s ideas, which in their essence are invariant, as
Programme Communiste once showed in a series of articles on the French
labour movement. The positions of the contemporary French left can all
be found in Hugo, Zola, Jaures and so on. So, for example, when people
talk of struggle in the field of ideas it would be better to show the
moral integration of the workers by capitalism in Les Misérables, than
to triumphantly hold up the umpteenth « scandalous » declaration of the
Communist Party. It is enough to see what the people of the left teach,
and would more and more like to see taught in schools : the recognition
of labour by Capital.
Groups like the [Bordigist] PCI or the International Communist Current
are sects because, despite anything positive they may say or do, their
existence amounts to a continual demarcation of themselves with regard
to the rest of the world. They exhort the proletariat to constitute
themselves as a class. Their principal enemy is always the group closest
to them. They live in and through competition. In their organisational
life only their crises are positive : for example that which led Bérard
to leave the ICC in 1974 to form Une Tendance Communiste, or that taking
place in the PCI today.
« The sect sees the justification for its existence and its “point of
honour”-not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the
particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it. » (Marx, letter to
Schweitzer, October 13^(th) 1868.)
Without being quite so confined within politics, the ultra-left has
poorly understood the critique which La Vieille Taupe once addressed to
Pouvoir Ouvrier. A newspaper like Révolution Sociale, in the strict
sense, has no readership. Something it has just acknowledged by ceasing
to appear. This kind of newspaper adds nothing to the force of
revolutionary work, because it only tackles basic questions through the
medium of topicality. And it cannot reach all proletarians, most of whom
are scarcely breaking with society, even though it is produced as if it
were to be read by hundreds of thousands of them. It contains no
satisfactory theory, nor does it advance the movement.
Such groups live within the illusion of propaganda. The revolutionary
movement does not transform false ideas into true. It sets out the
direction of the social movement of which it forms a part, and sets out
what that movement will be « historically constrained » to do in order
to succeed, which excludes any exhortation.
The publication of texts does not just circulate ideas. This is even
their secondary function. The dissemination of ideas establishes links
for something other than just thinking. But this « socialisation » is
much richer if the theoretical content has not been skimped.
The revolutionary movement is caught between two tendencies which it
will be necessary to go beyond. One tendency constantly resets its
watch, while casting a retrospective glance back over 150 years of
Capital, working class and revolution. It concludes that there is a need
to supersede the past. Its assessments always end by posing « Socialism
or Barbarism » , whether it be in 1914, 1917, 1945 or 1983.
The other tendency, more traditional, always describes movements which
have ended. Poland, Portugal… each case demonstrating the limitations of
proletarians and what they could do, if only… It calls for what has been
done previously to be done better.
The first attitude separates the past from the present. It puts forward
a past which was radically different from the present. The second
attitude repeats what it has always said. The first effects an historic
break. The second has a quantitive viewpoint: as it was before but next
time much further. The first breaks with all filiation, the second
acknowledges and claims it. It is the opposition between founders and
inheritors. These two tendencies can be illustrated by taking two recent
revolutionary works.
En finir avec le travail et son monde (Finishing with work and its
world) by the CRCRE (no. 1 June 1982, no. 2 December 1982) well
expresses the first attitude. A great many remarks, which in themselves
are true, are used to explain and justify everything. The failures of
the past all had causes which have now disappeared. This is an argument
constructed after the event. They admit no past or present errors
(either by themselves, or by us all). Everything happened as it had to.
They draw the meaning of their activity from themselves. It means the
creation of a « new frame of reference » , and a new view of the world.
We are not far from philosophy.
Poland 1980–82 by Henri Simon (Spartacus, 1982, English translation
Black & Red 1985), is an embodiment of the second tendency. It closely
analyses the Polish movement, which gives the text its great interest,
but this does not prevent it from confusing the pressure exerted on
Capital by labour with a questioning of the relation of Capital to
labour. We cannot be content to say « each struggle is only one step, as
long as Capital survives » (p. ?). This is true, but not every struggle
is a step towards communist action.
For Simon « To do (…) something that makes one’s work and life easier,
is acting in one’s class interest and undermining the foundations of the
capitalist system. » (p. 86 Black & Red edition)
This sentence sums up a view which should no longer go without saying in
our movement. « Class action » cannot be solely identified with
struggles for demands, but nor is it their opposite, it does not exclude
them. Rather it is born from and against them, and is their
supersession.
Simon’s work also reproduces the ultra-left error taken up by the
Situationist International : « In fact, while maintaining its position
and (presumably) preserving intact its repressive apparatus, Capital had
essentially lost all real power. Even the new union Solidarity, (…) was
already, even before functioning as an apparatus, reduced to the same
role as the pre-July 1980 institutions. » (p. 89 Black and Red edition)
Revolutionaries have difficulty in taking Capital seriously, and in
seeing its strength where it really lies : in its dynamism as much as in
its force of inertia. The « real power » of Capital undoubtedly lies in
both these elements, as we could see in France in 1968 and in Poland in
1980. This is precisely because the revolution is not a question of
power. Power arises from the relations of production, from the nature of
Capital as an omnipresent relationship. So long as you don’t confront it
as a social relation through attacks on the commodity and on wage
labour, so long as you restrict yourself to occupying its terrain
(France 1968), or to wanting to organize the economy better, in a
ferocious way certainly, but without communisation (Poland 1980–81),
then you don’t undermine the power of Capital. It’s power lies neither
in the street nor in the factory, let alone in government ministries.
Capital is a social relation which is embodied in a network of
relationships. Starting to produce a different relation by constituting
a different social fabric, this is how to attack the power of Capital.
Henri Simon repeats the error made about Portugal in 1974–5 (notably by
the Situationist International : see also la Guerre Sociale issue 2) :
« For a period of eighteen months, Poland was no longer a real state;
authority was constantly scoffed at and the economy seemed to be adrift.
»
(p. 136 Black and Red edition)
However the State was certainly there, even if asleep. On December
13^(th) 1981 it proved that at the right moment it could awake, all its
powers intact. Because the power of Capital had not been undermined.
Proletarian practise hadn’t attacked what was fundamental. And it is the
same for communist theory.
Protectionism doesn’t seem to offer a viable exit to the crisis, for the
economy has become far too internationalised over the last thirty years.
The third world has been only superficially industrialised, but deeply
urbanised. It is not uncommon for half the population of underdeveloped
countries to live in cities or on their periphery. The working class in
these countries is more organised than one might imagine. Nearly 40% of
Bolivian workers are unionised. The Union Marocaine du Travail numbered
20% of the working population in 1956. But proletarian riots, like those
which were crushed by the army in Egypt in 1971, seldom link up with
movements by workers. Thus during the unrest in Casablanca in June 1981,
the initiative for the action came from high school students and the
unemployed.
All forms of action by wage workers are found worldwide. The Hara jeans
factory in Thailand was occupied and re-started by the workers. In 1982
the free trade zone at Bataan in the Philippines was shaken by a strike
of super-exploited workers (short-time working, excessive work-rotas,
wages which literally corresponded to the minimum necessary for
survival). At the start a multinational corporation had wanted to force
200 workers to work on six looms each, instead of four. 10,000 strikers
supported these 200 rebels. The KMU, a trade-union formed in 1980, took
part in this movement. Repression provoked a response so massive that
the movement could no longer be repressed through anything short of a
general massacre, by firing on the crowds, as at Lena in Tsarist Russia
at the start of the century.
The bourgeoisie abandoned the arrests and dismissals, but the workers
did not win either. From then on they had to work five looms each. The
future will show what remains of the proletarian experience of this
strike, and what becomes of the KMU.
After the strike one of the responses considered by the bosses of Bataan
was automation. In Germany, after the great strikes by unskilled
workers, and the actions of Turkish workers in the factories and streets
in the 1970s, Capital responded with expulsions and modernisation. BMW
pushed robotization to a high degree. Volkswagen was the first to
manufacture and employ robots in West Germany. The tendency is towards a
reduction in the role of unskilled workers, perhaps with their
elimination as a strata in the vanguard of proletarians.
Throughout its history capitalism has taken on the most hybrid aspects,
and no-one knows what forms it might evolve. The « second serfdom » in
Eastern Europe (which began in the 17 century) was not a return to the
middle ages. The owners of these new serfs were not capitalists, for
they were not concerned about producing at the lowest labour cost. But
they formed part of a market and capitalist system. They only succeeded
in stifling the already flourishing market economy, to their own
benefit, inside their large estates. These monopolies were still at the
service of an international system that was indisputably capitalist.
Today once again, capitalism, a society of value in motion, shows
evidence of great flexibility of form, and in the rediscovery of old
structures.
« In the first factories as in certain factories today this
collaborative work, in which skilled workers and unskilled labourers are
harnessed to the common task, does not disappear in every case : the
owner pays the total price for the work and the workers organize it in
their own way (…) a great freedom for a wage of misery. »
(Les Temps Modernes, February 1981, pp. 13551356).
In the French clothing industry during 1970–75, some companies installed
assembly lines with fixed work stations. In 1975–6 some experimented
with « modules », partial self-organisation with a rotation between work
stations. After 1976, with the arrival of the crisis, and as work rates
increased, some set up work-groups which even had the possibility of
organising themselves outside the factory. We thus come back to a form
of jobbing which existed before the Scientific Management of Work. These
groups are set in competition with one another, transforming each of
them into a co-operatively run labour-Capital, a form of organisation
resembling that seen among the 20,000 illegal Turkish and Yugoslav
workers in the Paris region.
The development of Capital does not necessarily result in the
development of the most modern capitalist forms. Colonialism generated
regressive forms : castes in India, private property preventing the
transformation of ground rent into Capital, peonage in South America.
Capitalism has reintroduced variants of serfdom or slavery. Free labour
has mingled with forced labour. In Italy home-working has expanded over
the last ten years. According to some sources it employs between one and
two and a half million people.
Only in a distant future (if ever) will the society we are moving
towards be entirely robotised and without human labour. But the
proportion of workers in the population may perhaps be considerably
decreased, while the mass of unemployed, recycled and trainees, etc.,
grows much greater.
Instead of an improbable push button factory, we are moving towards a
situation in which whole sections of factories are robotised while
others remain semi- or barely automated. Robots and the reduced numbers
of unskilled workers co-exist within the same operation. To weld a front
suspension to a car, instead of 4 unskilled welders and 2 unskilled
labourers charged with setting in place and removing the pieces, there
are now 4 robot welders and the 2 unskilled supplying the operation to
be done. In engineering, they plan to keep the labourers (cleaners…),
automate the areas where unskilled workers are currently employed
(loading, handling, assembly in particular and machining), and keep the
skilled workers (rectification, fitting). At Renault-Flins, on the
assembly lines welding the body of the R18 which were automated in 1976,
they lost 56 unskilled workers jobs and gained 24 people employed in
maintenance, quality control and retouching. At Renault-Douai, this
tendency has been taken much further. Peugeot which already has 300
robots installed envisages bringing 2000 into service by 1990.
In 1978 an academic study declared that 20% of the labour force employed
in car assembly in the United States would be replaced by machines and
automation by 1985; and that 20% of all American industrial employment
would be restructured by 1989. According to a different forecast made in
1979, automation would eliminate 200,000 jobs in France by 1985,
including office jobs (through Computer Aided Design, optical character
reading and word processing, the electronic transfer of funds,
typewriters with memories, fax machines). According to the same study
50,000 jobs would be lost in France through robotization. Middle
management and
supervisors would also be affected by the « contraction of the
traditional hierarchical structure » (Quément, p. 191). Robotization
already affects some sections of car production, forges and foundries,
and the production of household appliances, large machines and aircraft.
« Lastly, it is to be feared that conditions of work regarding the
supervision and maintenance of automatic machines of the robot variety
is likely to involve modifications of behaviour because of the monotony
of the work, the isolation resulting from the break up of social
relations and the weight of responsibility arising from the significance
of the risk of breakdown that would cause a halt in production.
The strategic place occupied by the workers and the risks of a
deterioration of working conditions may in the long term generate new
conflicts.
(…) Installed to suppress aspects of the social and economic crisis,
this system generates others and allows us to foresee a gloomy future
for unskilled workers, dispossessed of their employment (…) » J. Le
Quément, Les Robots, La Documentation Française, 1981, pp. 191 et 193.
« (…) half of the 5000 soviet robots produced between 1976 and 1980
remain unused because of the refusal of the factory directors to stop
the assembly lines in order to install them. »
Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1982, based on a report by Gosplan.
In the industrialised countries the bourgeoisie and the state would like
to
compensate for the fall in employment through a development of the
service sector (however this sector will also be affected), and by
repatriating those industries which had previously been relocated to the
third world in order to take advantage of lower wages and more
favourable working conditions. This reindustrialisation of the
capitalist metropoles, which has already begun in the United States
(electrical engineering, electronic equipment), has been made possible
because robots are less expensive and more reliable than foreign labour.
However nothing will prevent the multinationals from establishing robots
in the third world if they consider it profitable.
Thus a profound modification of the economically active population, and
of social life in the previously industrialised countries, is taking
place before our eyes. There might even be a change in working time. In
our article on Poland we pointed out that in France the demand for a 35
hour week had not succeeded in mobilising workers. In 1978 there was a
powerful movement demanding a 35 hour week in the German metalworking
industry. But this remained the exception in a global context where
intermediate demands are planned by Capital (and by the trade unions
where they are strong enough to impose themselves on capitalist
management). People optimistically evoke the four day week (four eight
hour days) in the United States, with workers participation in the
reorganisation of work. On this latter point at least, there is no
capitalist progress : things are still as they were in 1930 or in 1950.
There is no workers participation to speak of (except in periods of
conflict when it is used to divert struggles onto the level of self- or
comanagement). Wage workers are wary of this right to participate in the
running of the enterprise : above all they continue to demand more money
and less work.
Only the union representatives knock themselves out to decipher the
accounts which the bosses agree to show them.
In any case, a four day week would not be a « proletarian gain ». The
ten hour day and the suppression of child labour, achieved in England in
the 19 century, also benefited the most modern Capital, which introduced
machinery to save on labour. The 8 hour day which was obtained after
1918 also facilitated the generalisation of relative surplus value and
the Scientific Management of Work. A reduction in working days would be
both a concession by capitalism and consistent with it, paid for through
a firmer grip over our entire lives. The French bourgeoisie has resisted
it because it knows that it is weaker than its rivals.
To the unemployment caused by the crisis, will be added that caused by
restructuring. Robotization involves such reserves of productivity that
even an increase in demand and in outlets will not lead to a
corresponding rise in recruitment. It will not prevent a reduction in
the work-rota’s of those in employment, but there will still be little
or no sharing out of the socially available work. The CFDT will keep its
reformist utopia to itself.
Currently, while waiting for the slow industrial reorganisation to be
put in place, two planned projects aim at mastering the dangerous
rebellious margin. The first of these projects has two tracks. It
juxtaposes a modern economic sector alongside a traditional sector with
a « more convivial and conventional way of life » capable of «
cushioning the blows » (report for the French 8 Plan under Giscard). And
it would multiply the institutions for managing those who are rejected
by economic growth : youth, migrant workers, the handicapped, the old,
children « at risk ». This project presupposes an open liberal economy,
which sacrifices certain social strata but then subsequently gives them
assistance.
The second project would integrate the dangerous strata and groups. This
accompanies a more statist and protectionist economic strategy, with
workers participation in the running of the state, through the trade
unions and left wing parties.
The first solution openly divides society between those who can cope and
the rest.
The second pretends to bring everyone together, from the boss to the
immigrant. In both cases it is necessary to manage a highly unstable
minority. State as policeman or State as provider, Workfare State or
Welfare State.
In the same way, confronted with the turmoil in the third world the
bourgeoisies of the developed nations conduct two interlinked policies :
either industrialising and assisting these countries through promoting
modern ruling classes, or barely industrialising them to the minimum
necessary for western and Japanese expansion, through promoting archaic
and comprador ruling classes. The second tendency prevails because it
corresponds better to reality. It responds better to the needs of world
Capital, because the right manages Capital better. The first strategy is
that of the socialist international as successfully employed in «
revolutionary » Portugal in 1974–5, and taken up once again by the
current French government, in particular in Central America. It is less
capable of application, because it presupposes that the less
industrialised countries are able to master their contradictions and
achieve democracy. However democracy implies a social equilibrium which
doesn’t exist anywhere in the third world. The « north-south dialogue »
and the rights of man in their liberal or social democratic variants,
remain as ideologies intended to absorb tensions. Reagan massacres and
Mitterand deplores the massacres, which is more a way of preventing the
start of massacres than of putting an end to them.
We don’t need to put social conflicts under the microscope. Past and
present history shows it all : the extraordinary capacity of Capital to
digest dissent, such as the dissent that the social movement (which is
sometimes communist) always gives rise to once again. Everything is in
crisis, and yet everything remains the same.
Everywhere the most important force containing the revolution, the
mediation between Capital and labour, is undermined. In the United
Kingdom the Labour Party has difficulty in retaining its working class
voters. In Germany the SPD is losing working class members and voters.
In the United States the trade unions are only making headway in the
civil service, they remain weak in the service industries which form an
increasingly large part of the economy. (Macdonalds has more employees
than US Steel). The AFL-CIO has been unsuccessful in limiting imports
and has lost ground within the Democratic Party. It is poorly
established in the new zones of development in the South and South-West.
The return of the French Communist Party into the government coalition
in 1981 aroused no-one, either in France or elsewhere. The Americans
didn’t initiate a global press campaign against the « communist menace »
in France. Conservative opinion played on old fears but it had to force
itself to do so and no-one seriously expected a profound change with the
arrival of the left into power. Militants saw in it only a springboard
for something to be done later on, since for them everything comes down
to creating the basis for real change through perpetual preparations for
the following day. The enthusiasm of May 1981 doesn’t cancel out the
loss of the Lefts representation of itself. In modern democracy, where
all programmes resemble one another, each party lives by the way it
represents itself. If its programme ceases to appear sufficiently
different from the others, it no longer has a programme. The Left has
more voters than in 1960, but it has just as much difficulty in
presenting a different image to that of the Right. In 1981 workers did
not vote for nationalisations, but against the effects of the crisis.
Social democracy and the Communist Party feed on the vital energy which
proletarians give them, and which they draw from them. The CFDT embodies
a lucid and impossible reformism in the midst of this bloodless and
vampiric Left — and not just politically, for on the directly social
level the left also feeds on the limited struggles by workers. In the
short term the CGT is more conservative than its rival, it better
represents industrial labour at the expense of total Capital. The CFDT
raises the problem of total Capital. But it does not yet form the
leadership of technicians or the service sector : its main federation is
that of the metalworkers. It seeks the means of ensuring standard
conditions for wage labour in France, while preserving global stability.
Hence its interventions in the third world and the East. The French
Communist Party and the CGT have no other long term interest than the
conquest of the state and unity with Eastern-bloc state capitalism,
something that is no longer the case for the Italian Communist Party.
The decline of the CGT in the trade union elections and especially the
weakening of its influence over militant activity by workers, still
don’t prevent it from clinging on. The general decline in the power and
solutions of the left, whether or not this is accelerated by its
presence in government, is a profound phenomenon, which we will only see
the extent of it when it is completed. Its internal collapse will still
hold some surprises. The effects will be a lot more violent than in
1968. We cannot assess the impact of a future movement by looking at
currently visible phenomena.
The foundations of all institutions are undermined. However that still
leaves something which is not an institution, even though it also has a
formal existence : democracy. Thanks to it the ruling minority at the
head of all the anti-revolutionary institutions (army, police, bosses,
trade unions, parties, etc.) will attempt to exploit the inertia of the
silent majority against the minority, which today is often reduced to
silence.
Parliamentary and trade union democracy are discredited. But democracy
as a mode of social relations is not, because it corresponds to
capitalist society. Capitalised man enters into relation with the world
through the needs that he satisfies (via the market). Democracy meets a
need, like money, and offers the same illusory freedom. The wage worker
is free to use his wages to buy whatever he wants. Democracy also offers
him a choice, just as limited as that offered by the supermarket. But
the illusion of choice doesn’t prevent either the reality of the need,
or its questionable but effective satisfaction. After all, there is
undoubtedly a difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. There is a
correspondence between democratic freedom and democracy as an
aspiration, on the one hand, and the freedom to work and the exchange
and expenditure of money on the other, a structural relationship which
does not involve psychology, but arises from the way in which men and
things enter into relation with one another under capitalism.
The current retreat of the extreme-left, the lack of interest in «
revolution », Reagan’s election, the « return to conformism among young
people » and all the other secondary phenomena which are exaggerated by
fashionable opinion — we are not bothered about these things. Such a
situation can turn itself around very swiftly. The problem lies rather
in the secular tendency of the proletariat to rise up without
constituting, in any more than an embryonic state, « the movement which
abolishes the conditions of existence ». Perhaps it will transpire that
this is a false question which needs to be posed differently. Today the
minimum requirement is to not avoid asking it, for that will only
rebound on those who avoid doing so.
There is nothing unusual about the annihilation which the minority with
revolutionary ambitions has been subject to. After 1914–18, it had to
learn that the whole of the workers movement served Capital, including
the « communist » organisations of the Third International. The
progression of the Russian revolution to counter-revolution, and the
liquidation of any revolutionary perspective by Stalinism, was also
difficult to accept. After having pronounced the supremacy of the
workers movement, people saw it collapse in Germany, the country where
it was strongest, yielding without resistance in the face of an openly
reactionary movement which knew how to give itself a popular base.
Capital’s ability to make war from 1939–45 without encountering working
class resistance, and the success of the post-war reconstruction, which
was achieved without much upheaval, was another unpleasant surprise.
Today we see a different reality which is also hard to swallow : the
non-constitution of an organised movement which is in any sense
coherent, and the absence of the lasting links which one might have
believed could have been forged after 1968. This absence of a coherent
movement, even in embryo, is all the more difficult to grasp when we
take note of the qualitative leap in the theoretical grasp of communism
and the revolution.
Between the organised groups of revolutionaries and the nuclei of
radical proletarians, few in number but capable of intervening within
their own milieu, there are practically no lasting relations. Since
roughly 1972, groups of revolutionaries have above all been publishers.
Nearly all of their activity consists of distributing theory, which they
get across through leaflets or magazines. Communists do not have to
support social action. They form part of it and either reinforce it or
else, given the circumstances, they hold aloof. To give support would be
to once again see revolutionaries as « outsiders » in relation to a
milieu which they must « penetrate ». But today, as an activity,
theorising is more cut-off from social life than in 1968–72, because
social life itself is more separated, compartmentalised and cut off from
its own roots.
Proletarians, and proletarian workers in particular, have lost neither
their numerical importance, nor their central role in revolutionary
activity. Even in the developed countries, wage labour will never be
embodied solely in the service sector (just as not all workers became
unskilled workers). Who lies at the heart of society ? Factory workers,
but also those employed in communications, the supply and distribution
of electricity (in France the EDF) and of water, hospital workers, and
so on. If they stop work, everything comes to a stop. They can bring
society to a halt and can break it up from the inside.
At the conclusion of this history of the last fifteen years, which is
also our own history, a situation very different to 1968 presents
itself. A transformation has not been successfully completed. A society
which is still based on wage labour has been forced to modify it and to
exclude one part of the workforce. The crucial point is to determine
whether the intervention of the proletariat in this transformation will
be the occasion for a revolutionary assault.
Capital’s strength is such that some people are led to see nothing more
within society, and thus within the activity of proletarians, than
capitalism, and they reread the history of the last 150 years, including
the proletarian assaults, as a series of capitalist transformations.
These people only adopt the opposite point of view to the common
ultra-left habit of interpreting everything as a step towards the
revolution. There isn’t a unique subject of history. Neither the
development of the productive forces, nor the search for community, nor
the proletariat are the sole engine of historical evolution. The
movement of history is neither a succession of adaptations to Capital,
nor of proletarian struggles, but a totality which includes all of this.
Capitalist society lives on the contradictory Capital-labour relation,
but it can also die from it. One drives the other to act, and vice
versa. Crises are those moments when this unity is called into question,
before being reinforced if the crisis does not have a communist outcome.
Revolution is the solution to this contradiction. To presuppose in
advance that the next great social crisis will be resolved in Capital’s
favour, is to reason on capitalist lines, and to speak for it.
What gives us hope, and encourages us to act, is a complex reality in
which, inevitably, the capitalist element is currently dominant. The
erosion of values and the devaluation of ideologies spares nothing. The
« refusal of work » is a polyvalent reality, the sign of something new
both for Capital and for communism. The « new social movement » is
embodied in the different varieties of misappropriation and rejection of
work, but also in clandestine work, in the black economy, in shared
work, in home-working, in temporary and subcontracted work and so on.
All of this had existed in the past but has been renewed by crisis and
restructuring.
People « no longer believe » in work, but this spectacularly displayed
disaffection counts for less than the underlying fact : that the old
critique of the organisation of work is now mixed up with a critique of
its basis. The former is the work of proletarians who want to reclaim
work, and along with it wage labour. The second abandons work,
considering it as a prison for mankind. The first seeks to reorganise
the productive act, the logic of which escapes proletarians — and which
will still escape from them even when reorganised. The second seeks to
destroy the obstacle which this productive act represents for the human
activity which it confines. Which of these two critiques will prevail ?
The positive affirmation of communism does not consist of replacing
theory with life. Texts like A World Without Money or For a World
without Moral Order consider the origins of the problems which
capitalism poses for humanity, and show not only how those problems can
be solved, but also what upheavals will presuppose and lead to that
solution. At that time « the negative truly includes the positive »
(Marx). Until now the positive has remained abstract, and was always
constructed somewhere else (utopia). The practical urgency, which first
appeared at the start of the 19 century, reappears today. Already some
formulas sound false. To speak of the « dictatorship of the proletariat
» or even of the « abolition of wage labour » without referring to the
process of communist revolution, is merely to employ slogans, and to
imitate leftism.
Expanding the theoretical horizon means attempting a unitary critique
which does not privilege the past at the expense of the present, or the
Eastern bloc at the expense of the West. The historical arc of
industrial capitalism, characterised by the emergence of the traditional
labour movement and its subsequent disappearance, (that is to say from
1789 or 1848 to date), encompasses a human reality that is too
restricted to allow us to grasp, not just what communist revolution is,
but even what has happened since 1789 or 1848. There is no need to
embrace zen in order to recognise that revolutionary theory has remained
too euro-centric and too concerned with the period from 1848 to 1914.
Unitary critique concerns time as well as space. The traditional labour
movement needed heroes, it treated the past in the mode of myth : the
founders (Marx or Bakunin), the mur des fédères, the martyrology...
After 1917 the revolutionary movement neither wanted nor was able to
break with this mythology. It was too weak to draw its imaginative
resources from within itself. So the communist left and the libertarians
maintained the mythology, all the while believing that they were
opposing real revolutionary movements to the counter-revolution which
had triumphed in the name of socialism or communism. Finally, the
radical recovery since 1968, (in particular in the Situationist
International), has largely tended to oppose Stalinism and leftism by
means of anti-bureaucratic myths : 1871, Makhno, Barcelona 1936 and so
on; and while this was inevitable to begin with, it will undoubtedly be
necessary to go beyond this. Generally the gaze cast on these events
generates a quantitive rather than qualitative critique, as if at those
times proletarians had only needed to continue onwards instead of
stopping in their tracks. In reality, the road itself was mined. On the
other hand the temptation to reinterpret everything as a moment of
adaptation to Capital is content to adopt the opposite of these
ultra-left legends. Let us take the past for what it was, and not exalt
it for our own ends, with the sole aim of filling the current vacuum
with illusions. One of the signs of the rebirth of a communist movement
will be the decay of all mythology, because there will no longer be any
need for it.
[1] However it is incorrect to write, as Pierre Guillaume has : «
Briefly, since 1970, Vieille Taupe has shared the essential theories of
Paul Rassinier. » (text sent to Libération quoted in Serge Thion,
Historical Truth or Political Truth, la Vieille Taupe, 1980, p. 139). Or
that « The Lie of Ulysses was unanimously accepted by Vieille Taupe
which recognised its radical importance at all levels. » (Pierre
Guillaume, preface to Rassinier, Ulysses betrayed by his own, la VT,
1980). The second assertion is very exaggerated. As for the first,
Rassinier’s « theories » were very little known, and still recently few
of those who defended him had read anything other than The Lie of
Ulysses and The Drama of the European Jews. Even today who has read «The
Persons Responsible for the Second World War » ?
[2] See the issue of Négation devoted to LIP.
[3] Like the whole of the documents relative to the questions tackled by
La Banquise, it goes without saying that this letter is at the disposal
of anyone interested in it.