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Title: Suppress the Oppressors?
Author: Piper Tomkins
Date: 6th august 2021
Language: en
Topics: Marxism, social change, revolution, anti-statism
Source: https://antisystemic.blogspot.com/2021/08/suppress-oppressors-conceptual-failure.html

Piper Tomkins

Suppress the Oppressors?

One of the central reasons that historical Marxists have gravitated to

the idea of taking state power is that they have had a certain

conception of social revolution. In this conception the social

revolution can only happen when the underclass “imposes it’s will” on

the ruling class, usually by means of the state. This conception is best

expressed by Engels in his essay against anti-authoritarian radicals; “A

revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act

whereby one part of the population imposes it’s will upon the other part

by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon.”

The problem is that this conception of social revolution is a Jacobin

one. This reflects the extent to which this conception describes a

revolutionary movement as in the hands of the elites, rather than the

masses. By fighting for liberation one does not erect a new form of

social domination, but instead fights against all forms of domination.

The imposition of new domination simply means the capture of the

movement by elites, this is also known by the name of “Thermidor”, the

ultimate outcome of Thermidor being Bonapartism; the transformation of

the revolution into it’s opposite through the recreation of the social

forms the revolution destroyed.

This conception of “revolutionary dictatorship” is the same conception

that allowed communists who took state power to cover the Thermidorian

turn of the regimes they created with Marxist sounding justifications.

It’s permissible to replace worker-peasant control of society with

bureaucratic state control, because after all, our dictatorship is

revolutionary, we are imposing the will of our class on the former

rulers. It is this logic that allowed Lenin to conclude that even a

dictatorship of one individual could express the interests of the

working class. The end result is always the real subjugation of the

class supposedly doing the subjugating.

Despite the war with the Whites being won, and despite the constant talk

of it, there was no dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia. The party

ruled alone with the working class having essentially no influence in

the governing institutions. Additionally, statecraft required the old

Tzarist functionaries be grafted on to the new regime, military

authority even after the end of the war, and transformation of a layer

of workers into career bureaucrats. The stench of Thermidor became so

odious that even before the rise of Stalin proper Lenin set about trying

to challenge the fledgling bureaucracy even while his body continued to

fail him.

The Thermidorian nature of Marxist-Jacobinism helps to explain the

failure of the communists who took state power to use it for real

liberatory social change. Anarchists pointed out that the state was

elitist and would only preserve existing inequalities. An entity which

can only exist through the expansion of central power can only be a tool

in the hands of the ruling classes, the exploiters, and in our epoch;

the capitalists. For all of the communists who took state power in the

20^(th) century surviving meant recuperation into the capitalist

world-system. The laws of the world-economy imposed themselves on the

state structures which supposedly were controlled by those who wanted to

abolish these laws.

The result was that “actually existing socialism” was simply a

mercantilist strategy of capitalist accumulation. Socialist states could

only partially insulate themselves from the world-market while never the

less being drawn back into the world-division of labor. The Soviet

Union’s crumbling economy was the result not of some inherent

inefficiency of central planning, this “planning” in fact extended the

law of value on a world-scale. In reality the Soviet Union exchanged

political-economic liberalisation for being the west’s oil field.

The world-crises of overproduction that struck in the 70s eventually

made this exchange no longer profitable. Less dramatic changes of a

fundamentally similar type took place across the “capitalist world”

where private industry was supported by a social compromise of social

spending, protectionism, and negotiation between capital and labor. The

same exact forces that destroyed the Soviet Union destroyed the post-war

welfare state and organized labor in the west while replacing aid with

debt peonage in the Third World. None of the other actually existing

socialisms have fared much better.

The Chinese dream took off, but only because China lead the recovery

from 2008 by leaning into globalization and becoming the world’s

factory. That same “connectivity” has exnihilated it’s own base by

creating the covid crises. Cuba’s purchasing power was decimated by the

collapse of COMCON and it’s only recourse, tourism, was also wiped out

by covid, leading to the calamities that produced the recent protests.

North Korea is suffering badly under sanctions and agricultural

difficulties.(2) Vietnam and Laos have fallowed China’s path of market

liberalization. The long and short is that none of these societies have

the faintest glimmer of a positive alternative to the capitalist

world-system since they have been parts of it from the moment of the

“socialist state”‘s creation.

Anarchists already articulated an alternative to this conceptualization

in the 19^(th) century. Social revolution is resistance to all forms of

“imposed will”. The masses revolt against central power, resist all

attempts to impose it, and organize themselves through their own

self-activity. This is what preeminent Marxist-Humanist Raya

Dunayevskaya referred to as negation of the negation. There is no

re-imposition of top-down power, but a constant resistance against the

power from above, and constant production of power from below.