The Brooklyn Rail

The Future of Revolution is a brave and daring book with an original angle. It is not a publication to be expected at the current moment, with its increasingly reactionary political and social relations. This is a time of prohibitions. Politicians often no longer try to convince citizens, preferring to impose their will on people. A book about the future of revolution therefore is unexpected but a pleasant surprise. In discussing it, I will focus on what in my view are some of the most important issues it raises, because I cannot touch on all of them.

 

What is to be understood by “revolution”?

The Dutch Marxist Cajo Brendel (1915–2007)—in a book on the Spanish Revolution—defines this term as follows:

A revolution is not a change of government, nor a coup d’état that is carried out at night to be gazed at by the surprised public the next morning. A revolution is a process, a fierce struggle between two social systems, which extends over years and brings the whole of society into violent turmoil. Highs and lows alternate and only when the historical and social task of the revolution has been brought to an end will the turbulent period come to an end.¹

Most revolutions that have taken place were bourgeois revolutions, meaning that it was not the working class that took control over society and abolished wage labor, i.e., working for a boss and not being in control over the means of production and over the products that they make. Popular uprisings in the last century always ended in poorly functioning democracies or in outright dictatorships. The reason for this in most cases was that the working class was not strong enough, in terms of numbers and/or experience. In a retrospective on the events and developments in his lifetime, Paul Mattick (1904–81) concluded:

Until now the history of revolutionary Marxism has been the history of its defeats, which include the apparent successes that culminated in the emergence of state-capitalist systems. It is clear that early Marxism not only underestimated the resiliency of capitalism, but in doing so also overestimated the power of Marxist ideology to affect the consciousness of the proletariat. The process of historical change, even if speeded up by the dynamics of capitalism, is exceedingly slow, particularly when measured against the lifespan of an individual. But the history of failure is also one of illusions shed and experience gained, if not for the individual, at least for the class. There is no reason to assume that the proletariat cannot learn from experience.²

 

The role of the Paris Commune in the development of theory

Bernes’s starting point is:

the Paris Commune of 1871 … provided for the world a new idea of the path to communism strong enough to cause Marx and many others to revise prior conceptions which emphasized the conquest and instrumentalization of state power. … When Marx writes that the Commune revealed that “the working-class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes,” he discloses something that is forevermore true and likely always was true.

I fully agree with this and also with his conclusion, “that the planets of the movement of communist intellectuals … orbit the sun of the proletarian movement. This is the very essence of [Marx’s and Engels’s] materialism, which roots ideas in social practice.” But I do not agree with this parenthetical: Bernes speaks of the Paris Commune giving the workers’ movement entirely new insight, “despite its perhaps inevitable failure” [emphasis mine]. Does Bernes mean that its failure might not have been inevitable? What would have been needed for the Commune to become a success? The working class in those days was way too small—the vast majority of the French and other European populations were peasants, who could not and will not build a communist society, since they are oriented towards private property in land—and inexperienced to be able to overthrow capitalism. The Commune was a lighthouse, showing what was needed for the working class and what was going to happen in the future. In the short run, it was doomed to fail.

 

The difference between a bourgeois and a worker’s revolution

“In Spain, where social democracy and Marxism were weak, by comparison, socialism developed differently than in Germany and Central Europe. As in Italy, from the time of Bakunin onward, anarchism and republicanism tended to dominate, with syndicalism becoming powerful in the early twentieth century.” Why was Marxism “weak” (by the way, a very strange turn of phrase) in Spain?  Bernes speculates that:

[A] project of immediate socialization-from-below, unafraid of police or army repression, perhaps could have stabilized communism. This would require not just revolutionary will, not just clarity about what communism is, but also a distribution of the basic information which the revolutionary proletariat would need to socialize production.

This, to me, is a variation on the well-known view that the workers can only make a revolution when they are “conscious” (of what?)—when they have studied piles of books. And then you inevitably need intellectuals to explain all this, and then, just as inevitably, to lead those somewhat reckless workers into a glorious future. I prefer the extensive analysis of the social history of Spain written by Cajo Brendel. According to him, the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s never (not even between 1936 and 1939) exceeded the limits of a bourgeois revolution. From the coup d’état of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923 until the first parliamentary elections in June 1977—which, two years after the death of dictator Francisco Franco (1892–1975), formally abolished his dictatorship—revolution and counter-revolution alternated, on the understanding that the revolution sometimes left intact the social relations which had to be reversed, and that counter-revolution partly revolutionized the relations which it wished to leave intact. Brendel gives a detailed description and analysis of the social relations on the eve of the Spanish Revolution, which, in my opinion, gives a clearer picture of the conditions in that country than Bernes’s observation that Marxism was weak there.³

 

The birth of the workers’ council

A very important event in the history of workers’ struggles was, as Bernes says, the birth of the workers’ council as a means of struggle. The soviet first established in 1905 as a communication and coordination organ of the various parties involved in the uprising in St. Petersburg, was not a real workers’ council. In 1918, however, in the political vacuum created by the de facto surrender of the German army, the workers in Germany (as well as in Russia) organized themselves into soldiers’ and workers’ councils. The sailors of the German fleet kicked off on October 30 of that year with the completely unexpected, spontaneous refusal to be slaughtered for “the honor of the fatherland” in a naval battle with the British fleet that stood no chance in advance. This form of organization was a natural step, as Jan Appel (1890–1985), a trained metalworker in shipbuilding, realized during strikes in the arms industry in Hamburg in that year. During the revolution he was chairman of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards in Hamburg and one of the founders of the Spartacus League. In 1921 he was delegated by the KAPD (the German Communist Workers Party) to the congress of the Communist International in Moscow, where he put forward, says Bernes:

A new idea of the relation between organized communists and the self-organization of proletarians, where the party is amplifier and catalyst, promoting struggles and ultimately aiming to transform them into a conciliar dictatorship of the proletariat, a means by which proletarians themselves would lay claim to the entire productive apparatus, now organized toward production for common use not profit. As catalyst, the party would disappear through this process, dissolving into the thoroughly proletarian and communist councils whose conquest it facilitated.

What Bernes does not mention here is that in 1935 the Group of International Communists (GIC) distanced itself from this view; on page 54 he does write that the group “came to find a party redundant or even counterproductive.” According to the GIC, however, a party is not redundant, but decidedly counterproductive (more on this below).⁴

The Russian and German Revolutions led to an enormous acceleration in the development of theory, in which the self-determination of the masses came to the fore more and more emphatically. The fact that the German Revolution came to an end after a few years is largely due to the enormous confidence that the vast majority of the German working class had in the SPD at that time and because “the spontaneous enthusiasm of the workers was more for ending the war than for changing social relations,” as Paul Mattick wrote. According to Pannekoek “the spontaneous action did not correspond to the theory in their heads, the democratic theory, impressed by long years of social-democratic teaching.” ⁵ Under these circumstances, the SPD and the unions were able to convince the majority of the workers relatively easily and make the councils part of the structure of government. So, the German and the Russian Revolutions both were, in different ways, important but deadly experiences, clearly showing that “the revolution is not a party matter,” as Otto Rühle (1874–1943) put it.

 

The end of the party

As a sign that the GIC had abandoned the earlier point of view and to stimulate further discussion on the subject, Henk Canne-Meijer (1890–1962)—he was a skilled metal worker who later studied to become a primary school teacher—published an article “Das Werden einer neuen Arbeiterbewegung” [The rise of a new labor movement] in the April 1935 issue of the Rätekorrespondenz (the journal of the GIC). Jan Appel, who had moved to The Netherlands in 1926, became a “member” of the GIC and actively participated in the discussions on “The rise of a new labor movement.” I think it is a real pity that Jasper Bernes does not mention this article. It would have made parts of his book much better and more concrete. It is a groundbreaking article, in which Canne-Meijer—or rather, the GIC—analyzes why the working class in the 1920s and ’30s was in the greatest possible confusion and could not make headway against the world crisis that plagued it from 1929 onwards. In this analysis, the GIC explains that the old Second International workers movement was now obsolete, and that the time was now ripe for a movement of workers, painting a new perspective for future struggles, based not on the power of parties and trade unions, but on that of the workers themselves. To give an example of its lasting importance, I quote a short paragraph that helps us understand the present turmoil in the Western world, where a number of oligarchs are taking over economic and political power:

Economic concentration finds its political reflection in the concentration of political power in the hands of individuals. And by the side of the concentration of the political power in the hands of individuals, powerful capitalist groups which control the state, there appears the necessity of worsening the situation of the workers in order to re-establish the profitability of capital. This development is a development to Fascism and National Socialism; it is unavoidable in the wake of monopoly capital. It is synonymous with the end of the democratic development of society. The “democratic rights”—right to vote, right to organize, freedom of assembly, etc.—can no longer be tolerated.⁶

Some months later Anton Pannekoek (1873–1960) wrote an article, “Partij en Arbeidersklasse” [Party and Working Class], which is a further elaboration of the role of the party.⁷ In Pannekoek’s explanation of his view, shared with Canne-Meijer:

A party is a group based on certain ideas held in common, whereas a class is a group united on the basis of common interests. Membership in a class is determined by function in the production process, a function that creates definite interests. Membership in a party means being one of a group having identical views about the major social questions. … No doubt, if certain people holding the same ideas get together to discuss the prospects for action, to hammer out ideas by discussion, to indulge in propaganda for these attitudes, then it is possible to describe such groups as parties. The name matters little, provided that these parties adopt a role distinct from that which existing parties seek to fulfil. Practical action, that is, concrete class struggle, is a matter for the masses themselves, acting as a whole, within their natural groups, notably the work gangs, which constitute the units of effective combat. … The importance of these parties or groups resides in the fact that they help to secure this mental clarity through their mutual conflicts, their discussions, their propaganda. It is by means of these organs of self-clarification that the working class can succeed in tracing for itself the road to freedom. That is why parties in this sense (and also their ideas) do not need firm and fixed structures. Faced with any change of situation, with new tasks, people become divided in their views, but only to reunite in new agreement; while others come up with other programs. Given their fluctuating quality, they are always ready to adapt themselves to the new. … Faced with the passivity and indifference of the masses, they come to regard themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. But, if the masses remain inactive, it is because, while instinctively sensing both the colossal power of the enemy and the sheer magnitude of the task to be undertaken, they have not yet discerned the mode of combat, the way of class unity. However, when circumstances have pushed them into action, they must undertake this task by organizing themselves autonomously, by taking into their own hands the means of production, and by initiating the attack against the economic power of capital. And once again, every self-styled vanguard seeking to direct and to dominate the masses by means of a “revolutionary party”’ will stand revealed as a reactionary factor by reason of this very conception.

The sentence—“However, when circumstances have pushed them into action, they must undertake this task by organizing themselves autonomously, by taking into their own hands the means of production, and by initiating the attack against the economic power of capital”—comes to quite the opposite of Bernes’s opinion that the council communists “the council is the goal.” For the GIC and for Marxists like Paul Mattick and his political friends like Cajo Brendel—“member” of the GIC and the Dutch postwar council communist Groep Daad en Gedachte [Act and Thought Group]—councils are not so much a goal as a means to an end. The English group Solidarity also had close ties with Mattick and Brendel.⁸ All their publications have aimed to stress that “[t]he point is to pay critical attention to proletarian struggle, to listen to what it has to say and to criticize it on its own terms, to disclose what such struggles would need to learn in order to succeed.” This also demarcates the role that intellectuals can play in workers’ struggles as Bernes says, “It is only the emergence of proletarian self-activity that provides the conditions for an overcoming of the distinction between movement of communists and communist movement, as communist intellectuals join with and dissolve into proletarian self-activity or stand against it as obstacle.”

Bernes has written a fascinating book, but he regularly misses the mark when analyzing the social causes of important events. This is problematic for a good understanding of the history and of the possibilities for change of this society.