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<a href="http://www.variant.org.uk/35texts/NeverWork.html">http://www.variant.org.uk/35texts/NeverWork.html</a></p>
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<p class="style3" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica,
sans-serif;"><big><font size="7"><big>Never Work!</big></font><br>
<font size="3"><big>Karen Elliot</big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
<br>
When Guy Debord of the Situationist International
(SI) graffitied the slogan “Never Work!” onto the
walls of a Parisian street in 1953, he struck a blow
in solidarity with the radical current of left
communism which locates the wage-labour relation as
the central pillar of capitalist relations and
therefore the prime locus of attack. It is, of
course, a banality that we need to work in order to
produce for our basic needs. But what is at question
here is the nature of that work, for whom, and to
what end? Useful work? Or useless toil? As Raoul
Vaneigem of the SI argued, every appeal for
productivity comes from above: “It is not from
‘productivity’ that a full life is to be expected,
it is not ‘productivity’ that will produce an
enthusiastic response to economic needs.”<sup>1</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Never mind.
The aim of capital is not to produce useful
products, or fully-rounded citizens; the chief aim
is to augment capital through an increase in profit
in a perpetual system of self-valorisation. The
means of this valorisation is that peculiar form of
commodity: labour-power. Labour power, in contrast
to fixed capital (the means of production), creates<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>surplus
wealth</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>for
capital</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>over
and beyond the immediate needs of the worker. This
is the ABC of capitalist ‘growth’. The drive to
productivity and the concomitant tendency to force
down wages and conditions at every opportunity is
thus clear from capital’s perspective.<br>
That work should be valorised universally comes then
as no surprise. The recent welfare reform proposals
of the former Work and Pensions Secretary, James
Purnell, maintain that work is<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>the</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>best route
out of poverty. As George Monbiot has recently
commented, the political value of any project that
claims to produce jobs, especially in times of
recession, is given hyperbolic status. Yet, as
Monbiot goes on to argue, “the employment figures
attached to large projects tend to be codswallop”;
the promise of jobs is routinely used “to justify
anything and everything”.<sup>2</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Jobs, even
when they do arrive, are far from guarantors against
poverty. As Louis Wacquant in his recent study of
advanced marginality has argued, it is a “delusion”
to think that bringing people back into the labour
market will durably reduce poverty: “[t]his is
because the wage-labour relation itself has become a
source of built-in insecurity and social instability
at the bottom of the revamped class structure”.<sup>3</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Wacquant
cites Wal-Mart, the largest US employer, as a prime
example of endemic “working poverty”. Wal-Mart pays
its “sales associates”, the most common company
position, $13,861 (nearly $1,000 dollars under the
federal ‘poverty line’ for a family of three); one
half of its employees are not covered by the
company’s medical plan. This ensures that thousands
of Wal-Mart’s staff must resort to welfare to meet
their basic needs on a normative basis (welfare
which is effectively a state subsidy to disguise
Wal-Mart’s pathetic wages).<br>
As the – ever so faint – spectre of Keynes
re-emerges, Wacquant warns against undue faith in
national, social-democratic measures of reflation
for alleviating entrenched poverty: “[i]t is high
time for us to forsake the untenable assumption that
a large majority of the adults of advanced society
can or will see their basic needs met by lifelong
formal employment (or by the permanent employment of
members of their households) in the commodified
economy”.<sup>4</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Wacquant
also casts doubt on the ability of the traditional
trade unions to deal with the new conditions of
urban marginality which effectively cut off large
sections of advanced urban populations from
macroeconomic trends: “… the trade unions are
strikingly ill-suited to tackle issues that arise
and spill beyond the conventional spheres of
regulated wage work”.<sup>5</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri recently re-iterated this
point: “… the old trade unions are not able to
represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the
mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with
short-term contracts. … the old unions are divided
according to the various products and tasks defined
in the heyday of production … these traditional
divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no
longer make sense and merely serve as an obstacle.”<sup>6</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Moreover,
the trades unions’ narrow focus on issues relating
to the workplace has meant their renunciation of
wider political demands, and deepened their
isolation from broader social movements.<br>
Evidently, the drive to productivity and the
valorisation of work is to be expected from the
point of view of capital. However, the question is
how have social-democratic institutions, nominally
of the Left, come to be complicit in the subjugation
of labour through the mantra of productivity? After
all, socialism is not capitalism and the refusal of
the wage-labour relation and the struggle against
alienation must be at the heart of all those
theories which seek an exit from capitalism.<br>
<br>
</big></font><font size="4"><big>The Advent of the
Industrial Christ</big></font><font size="1"><big><b><br>
<br>
</b>“ ... every image of the past that is not
recognized by the present as one of its own concerns
threatens to disappear irretrievably.”<br>
<b>Walter Benjamin</b></big></font><b><font size="2"><big><sup>7</sup></big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
</big></font></b><font size="1"><big>Benjamin’s most
significant disagreement with social democracy was
with its technocratic conformism which construed
production as beneficial to workers<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>per se</i>:
“[n]othing has corrupted the German working class so
much as the notion that it was moving with the
current … from there it was but a step to the
illusion that the factory work which was supposed to
tend toward technological process constituted a
political achievement”.<sup>8</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For
Benjamin, the Gotha Programme (which gathered
together the two main wings of the German socialist
movement in 1875) merely resurrected the Protestant
work ethic in secular form by narrowly defining
labour as the source of all wealth and all culture.
Indeed, the Social Democrat, Josef Dietzgen, echoed
Lamartine, the French writer, poet and politician,
who had earlier proclaimed the “advent of the
industrial Christ”<sup>9</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>by
declaring: “[t]he saviour of modern times is called
work”.<sup>10</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Friedrich
Ebert, the Social Democrat turned war patriot,
meanwhile declared that socialism “means working
hard”.<sup>11</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Benjamin
thought this reverence of work without reference to
its alienating effects was fallacy and confusion. It
amounted to a vulgar conception of labour and its
proceeds that privileged distribution over
production while downplaying the fact that
labour-power was still bought and sold in the
marketplace like any other commodity.<br>
Benjamin’s critique of Social Democracy drew from
Marx’s evaluation of the Gotha Programme’s
resolutions. For Marx, it was a profound mistake to
put the principal stress on distribution; on the
potential of a ‘fair’ distribution of the products
of labour through ‘equal rights’, as long as
distribution remained a concomitant feature of the
exploitative mode of production itself. In Marx’s
analysis, this half-hearted form of socialism merely
borrowed from technocratic forms of bourgeois
political economy by treating distribution as
totally independent of production. This ideological
manoeuvre was made possible by disavowing the real
relations of production under capitalism which
rested then, as they do now (albeit in historically
contingent forms), on the ownership and control of
the means of production and the exploitation of
labour-power for surplus value (profit). The
ideological cleavage of distribution from production
by the German socialist movement meant that the
presentation of socialism would tend to rest
thereafter on the minimal question of distribution
rather than the maximal one of production: of reform
rather than revolution. In 1875, Marx could already
comment: “[a]fter the real relation has long been
made clear, why retrogress again?”.<sup>12</sup>The
question remains a potent one.<br>
<br>
</big></font><font size="4"><big>The Law of Wages</big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
“Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has
nothing to sell but his labour power, that he must
sell it to an enterprise to be able to live, that
everything is a commodity, that social relations
revolve around exchange, are the result of a long
and violent process.”<br>
<b>Gilles Dauve</b></big></font><b><font size="2"><big><sup>13</sup></big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
</big></font></b><font size="1"><big>The basis of
capitalism and wage-labour lie in pre-capitalist
forms of primitive accumulation, defined by Marx as
“nothing else than the historical process of
divorcing the producer from the means of
production”.<sup>14</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This
transformation in the structure of servitude, from
feudal to capitalist exploitation, was no simple
progression through homogenous empty time. The
expropriation of the immediate producers was
accomplished, as Marx observed, with “merciless
Vandalism”, and inscribed in the annals of history
in “letters of blood and fire”. It is enough to cite
the exploitation of gold and silver of the Americas
through slavery; the “entombment” of the aboriginal
population of Australia in mining operations; and
the turning of Africa “into a warren for the
commercial hunting of black skins”<sup>15</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>to intimate
the “rosy dawn” of primitive accumulation in
colonial settings. Closer to home, the Enclosures of
England<sup>16</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and the
Clearances of Scotland<sup>17</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>are the
chief British markers of those violent rounds of
primitive accumulation, where “great masses of men
are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of
subsistence and hurled as free and ‘unattached’
proletarians on the labour market”.<sup>18</sup><br>
The capitalist system<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>presupposes</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the
separation of labourers from all property by which
they can realise their labour. Once divorced from
the means of production, the producer is immediately
transformed into a<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>wage-labourer</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and their
means of subsistence and production transformed into
accumulated capital. This then reproduces the
original separation on a continually expanding
scale: “[i]t cannot be otherwise in a mode of
production in which the labourer exists to satisfy
the needs of the self-expansion of existing values,
instead of, on the contrary, material wealth
existing to satisfy the needs of development on the
part of the labourer”.<sup>19</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Wealth
generated from past, ‘dead’ labour (accumulated in
the form of machines, factories, new technologies of
production) is set in motion by ‘living’ labour to
accumulate more value, which is then invested in new
branches, new machinery. New technologies reduce
necessary labour power and contribute to a reserve
army of labour which holds the pretensions of the
prevailing labour force in check: “[t]he greater the
social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent
and energy of its growth, and therefore, also the
absolute mass of the proletariat and the
productiveness of its labour, the greater is the
industrial reserve army. The same causes which
develop the expansive power of capital develop also
the labour power at its disposal”.<sup>20</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Higher
productivity on the part of the worker leads
inversely to higher unemployment and higher
pauperisation rather than higher wages: “[t]he
higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is
the pressure of the labourers on the means of
production, the more precarious, therefore becomes
their condition of existence”.<sup>21</sup><br>
This inexorable fact of capitalism was what led Marx
to argue for its supersession, not merely its
amelioration through social-democratic means. Reform
under capitalism can only ever be partial and
piecemeal under a system whose<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>raison
d’être</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is
the extraction of surplus value from labour by the
owners of capital. This essential system of
‘squeezing’ is why the workplace has traditionally
been the scene of “a constant silent war, of a
perpetual struggle, of pressure and
counter-pressure”.<sup>22</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The iron law
of value precludes a diminution in the degree of
exploitation of labour and a rise in the price of
wages that might seriously undermine the continual
reproduction, on an ever-enlarging scale, of the
relations of capital.<br>
<br>
</big></font><font size="4"><big>Distribution or
Production: Reform or Revolution</big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
The means of this ‘perpetual struggle’ between
labour and capital has of course been the subject of
major discussion, and rifts, within the Left.
Crucially, the debate between Eduard Bernstein and
Rosa Luxemburg at the end of the 19th century marks
a key juncture in the antagonistic relationship
between social democratic and revolutionary thought
within socialism. Bernstein, Engel’s literary
executor and one of the most influential figures
within reformist Marxism, argued in a series of
articles under the title<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Problems of Socialism</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(1897–98)
that the ‘final goal’ of socialism would be achieved<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>through</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>capitalism,
not through capitalism’s destruction. As rights were
gradually won by workers, he argued, their cause for
grievance would be diminished and consequently so
would the foundation and necessity of revolution.
For Bernstein, capitalism had overcome its
crisis-prone tendencies of boom and bust: the
‘anarchy’ of the market, he argued, was being
re-constituted by the formation of new mechanisms
within capitalism and by social-democratic measures
for higher wages. These tendencies proved to
Bernstein that the capitalist order was capable of
reform through legal and parliamentary means.<br>
Bernstein’s ideas were of major significance for the
future of the international labour movement. At the
turn of the century, the German Social Democratic
Party (SPD), of which Bernstein was a member, was
the largest socialist organisation in the world. His
arguments represented the first time that
‘opportunist’ currents within the movement were
given open theoretical expression. Yet for
Luxemburg, Bernstein’s theory posited the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>opposition</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of the two
moments of the labour movement by emphasising
‘minimum’ aims (immediate parliamentary reforms)
over ‘maximum’ aims (the revolutionary overthrow of
capitalism). It tended to “counsel the renunciation
of the social transformation, the final goal of
Social Democracy, and, inversely, to make social
reforms, which are the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>means</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of the class
struggle, into its<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>end</i>”.<sup>23</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Luxemburg
was not<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>a
priori</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>opposed
to social democracy;<sup>24</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>instead,
counter to Bernstein, she argued that there was an
“indissoluble tie” between social reforms and
revolution, but that the struggle for reforms was
only the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>means</i>,
the social revolution the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>goal</i>.<br>
By treating the mode of exchange as independent of
the mode of production, Bernstein had fallen into
“one of the fundamental errors of bourgeois vulgar
economics”:<sup>25</sup><br>
“Vulgar economy, too, tries to find the antidote
against the ills of capitalism in the phenomena of
capitalism itself. Like Bernstein, it believes in
the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>possibility</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of
regulating the capitalist economy. And, still in the
manner of Bernstein, it arrives in time at the
desire to<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>palliate</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the
contradictions of capitalism, that is, at the belief
in the possibility of patching up the sores of
capitalism. In other words, it ends up with a
reactionary and not a revolutionary program, and
thus in a utopia.”<sup>26</sup><br>
For Luxemburg, Bernstein’s theories led not to the
realisation of a new<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>socialist
world</i>, but to the reform of capitalism – not
to the elimination of capitalism, but to the desire
for the attenuation of the abuses of capitalism.<br>
The principal instruments for Bernstein’s proposed
reform of society were the co-operatives and the
trade unions; the first to increase wages and lessen
commercial profit, the second to do the same for
industrial profit. Yet for Luxemburg, co-operatives
were merely a hybrid form of capitalism: small units
of socialised production remaining within capitalist
exchange. They were coercively obliged to take up
the role of capitalist entrepreneurs in order to
stand up against their competitors in the market.
The intensification of labour – exploitation of
labour as commodity – is concomitant. For Luxemburg,
this contradiction accounted for the usual failure
of contemporary co-operatives. They either became
pure capitalist enterprises, or, if the workers’
interests continued to predominate, ended by
dissolving. Bernstein thought the failure of
co-operatives in England was due to a lack of
“discipline”, but for Luxemburg this language merely
resurrected the authoritative axioms of the status
quo, expressing “nothing else than the natural
absolutist regime of capitalism”.<sup>27</sup><br>
Trades unions, according to Bernstein, were another
prime instrument in the “struggle of the rate of
wages against the rate of profit”.<sup>28</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>While
Luxemburg defended unions as an expression of
working-class resistance to the oppression of the
capitalist economy, she also argued that they
represented only the organised<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>defence</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of labour
power against the attacks of profit. Trade unions,
however, were not able to execute an economic
offensive against profit. The activity of unions,
she argued: “does not take place in the blue of the
sky. It takes place within the well-defined
framework of the law of wages.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The law
of wages is not shattered but applied by
trade-union activity</i>”.<sup>29</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Luxemburg
argued that the workers share was inevitably reduced
by the growth of the productivity of labour. These
objective capitalist conditions transformed the
activity of trade unions, subject to successive
cycles of boom and bust, “into a sort of labour of
Sisyphus”.<sup>30</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Bernstein’s
theory that capitalism had resolved its inner
contradictions was of course mercilessly exposed in
the global Depression of the 1930s, not to mention
the current crisis.<br>
Trade unions and co-operatives, without challenging
the mode of production, provide the economic support
for a theory of revisionism. Luxemburg’s critique
lambasted Bernstein’s regression to idealist forms
of social justice<sup>31</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and his
attempts to constrain socialist struggle within the
field of distribution: “[a]gain and again, Bernstein
refers to socialism as an effort towards a ‘just,
juster, and still more just’ mode of distribution”.<sup>32</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>This
problematic tendency in trade unions became clearer
with time. In 1948, the Dutch communist and advocate
of workers councils, Anton Pannekoek, concisely
summarised the role of trade unions as an
“indispensable function” of capitalism: “[b]y the
power of the unions capitalism is normalized; a
certain norm of exploitation is universally
established. A norm of wages, allowing for the most
modest life exigencies, so that the workers are not
driven again and again into hunger revolts, is
necessary for uninterrupted production. … Though
products of the workers fight, kept up by their
pains and efforts, trade unions are at the same time<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>organs of
capitalist society</i>”.<sup>33</sup><br>
<br>
</big></font><font size="4"><big><i>Ersatz</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Marxism</big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
Bernstein and the German and international socialist
movement were indelibly shaped by Engels’ famous
preface to Marx’s<i>Class Struggles in France</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(1895).
Evaluating the French Revolution of 1848, Engels
argued that belief in an imminent socialist
revolution had become obsolete: revolutionary street
fighting had been superseded by parliamentary
tactics as the most effective means to socialist
change. The text represents a ‘classical’
documentation of the opinions prevailing in German
social democracy at the time, and the tactics Engels
expounded went on to dominate German social
democracy, in Luxemburg’s phrase, “in everything
that it did and in everything that it left undone”.<sup>34</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In 1918,
Luxemburg, battling against reformist
social-democratic tendencies in Germany, argued that
the preface represented the chief document of “the
proclamation of the parliamentarism-only tactic”.<sup>35</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For
Luxemburg this was the beginning of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>ersatz</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Marxism, the
‘official’ Marxism of social democracy – an ideology
which has provided an illusory unity to the
socialist movement ever since.<br>
What remained hidden in this seismic shift of
socialist tactics was the fact that the preface was
written by Engels under the direct pressure of the
SPD parliamentary delegation. The delegation pressed
Engels, who lived abroad and had to rely on their
assurances, to write the preface, arguing that it
was essential to save the German labor movement from
anarchist and allegedly adventurist deviations.
Engels died the same year he wrote the preface, and
with him went his protestations at the revision of
the document, whose most radical passages were
doctored to appease the Reichstag which was then
considering a new anti-socialist law.<sup>36</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With Engels
buried and Marx long departed, the theoretical
leadership of the international socialist movement
passed over to the social democrat, Karl Kautsky,
who still proclaimed revolutionary Marxism even as
he led the way on a reformist path. Luxemburg had
already come into conflict with Kautsky when he
suppressed her insurrectionary article on mass
strikes for the sake of party unity and
parliamentary grace. Her critique was typically
direct: “Marxism [under Kautsky’s leadership] became
a cloak for all the hesitations, for all the
turnings-away from the actual revolutionary class
struggle, for every halfway measure which condemned
German Social Democracy, the labor movement in
general, and also the trade unions, to vegetate
within the framework and on the terrain of
capitalist society without any serious attempt to
shake or throw that society out of gear”.<sup>37</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With Engels’
text wielded with biblical status, Kautsky, “[t]he
official guardian of the temple of Marxism”,
attempted to neuter the revolutionary movement in
the name of Marxist orthodoxy. For Luxemburg, the
craven capitulation of the German social-democratic
movement in the face of German Imperialism in 1914
for short-term political gain was the inevitable
result of Kautsky’s reformist strategies.<sup>38</sup><br>
Luxemberg’s critique of both Bernstein and Kautsky’s
social-democractic vision found favour with George
Lukács in his early writings. Both attacked
‘scientific’ Marxism for starting from the
assumption that society progresses mechanically and
teleologically, and for imagining a definite point
of time, external to and unconnected with the class
struggle, in which the class struggle would be won.
For Lukács, the a-historical view of vulgar Marxism,
preoccupied with the isolated ‘facts’ of the
specialist and reified disciplines of bourgeois
political economy, lost the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>active</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>dialectical
side of Marx’s thought wherein theory and action,
subject and history could be realised in praxis.
Instead, the scientific view preached a
contemplative, still ideological faith in scientific
progress: a theory of ‘evolution’ without
revolution; of ‘natural development’ without
conflict. Drawing productively from Marx’s analysis
of commodity fetishism, Lukács argued that the
scientific view had been seduced by the fetishistic
character of economic forms under capitalism. Such
forms isolated the various interacting elements of
capitalist relations and masked the contradictory
and hierarchical relations between men which lay
behind the processes of production: “the reification
of all human relations, the constant expansion and
extension of the division of labour which subjects
the process of production to an abstract, rational
analysis, without regard to the human potentialities
and abilities of the immediate producers”.<sup>39</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For Marx,
these formal objective conditions, if understood
subjectively and in their<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>totality</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>by the
working class, would provide the conditions for
their eventual emancipation. Far from a static or
objective scientific account of history, Marx’s
theory, famously given expression in the eleven<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Theses on
Feuerbach</i>, was an endlessly relevant call to
engagement: “[t]he philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is
to change it”.<sup>40</sup><br>
Beyond the economic fatalism that has always been
intimately bound up with the social-democratic
project, and which has always left it to arrive on
the scene of struggle too late, Rosa Luxemburg saw
in the early days of the Russian revolution,
especially in the explosion of mass strikes, direct
democracy and the formation of soviets (workers
councils), the “will to power of socialism”.<sup>41</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>While
Kautsky declared the conditions for revolution
“unripe”, Luxemburg viewed the unbridled radicalism
of the Russian workers as an exemplary example,
evidence that “the masses do not exist to be
schoolmastered”.<sup>42</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Yet even as
she extolled the power of the soviets for crippling
Tsarism and for the transformation of all existing
class relationships, as early as 1918 Luxemberg
condemned the Bolshevik Party for its suppression of
direct democracy and the will of the soviets.
Despite the Bolshevik Party’s public condemnation of
social democracy it would adopt, in crude and
distorted form, many of the major flaws of the
scientific determinism so typical of orthodox
Marxism. Luxemburg, murdered by order of the German
Social Democratic Party, would not live to see the
results.<br>
<br>
</big></font><font size="4"><big>The Russian Tragedy</big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
“The mirage of Leninism today has no basis outside
the various Trotskyist tendencies, where the
conflation of the proletarian subject with a
hierarchical organisation grounded in ideology has
stolidly survived all the evidence of that
conflation’s real consequences.”<br>
<b>Guy Debord</b></big></font><b><font size="2"><big><sup>43</sup></big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
</big></font></b><font size="1"><big>Despite
Alexander Berkman’s initial euphoria at being placed
in the epicenter of potentially “the most
significant fact in the whole known history of
mankind”,<sup>44</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>his analysis
upon leaving Russia was that the revolution had
already been “done to death” by an authoritarian,
dictatorial Bolshevik Party. Like Luxemburg, Berkman
saw the significance of the Russian Revolution in
the movement that lay behind the slogan “All Power
to the Soviets!” For Berkman, the initial power of
the revolution lay in the unity of the revolutionary
forces against the provisional, reformist Kerensky
government. Bolsheviks, Anarchists, the left of the
Social Revolutionary Party, revolutionary emigrants,
and freed political prisoners had all worked
together leading up to October 1917 to achieve a
revolutionary goal: “[t]hey took possession of the
land, the factories, mines, mills, and the tools of
production. They got rid of the more hated and
dangerous representatives of government and
authority. In their grand revolutionary outburst
they destroyed every form of political and economic
oppression”.<sup>45</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Immediately
after the revolution, as a means to establish direct
democracy and workers’ control over the means of
production, the organised labour movement formed
shop and factory committees co-ordinated by the
soviets.<br>
Berkman, however, would soon watch in horror as the
Bolshevik Party declared the autonomy of the shop
committees superfluous, filled the labour unions
with its own representatives, and banned all public
press except Bolshevik publications. Under Bolshevik
authority the workers would now be bound by the
industrial, scientific principles of productivity,
with the shop committees subjected to the ideology
of the ruling party. The hoped-for dictatorship<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>of</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the
proletariat over the bourgeoisie had swiftly moved
under Bolshevik rule to a dictatorship<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>over</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the
proletariat. The soviets’ fate under the Party was
sealed: “[a]ll who interpreted the Social Revolution
as, primarily, the self-determination of the masses,
the introduction of free, non-governmental Communism
– they are henceforth doomed to persecution”.<sup>46</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The brief
era of direct democracy was soon crushed under the
weight of bureaucratic authority: “[t]he peoples’
Soviets are transformed into sections of the Ruling
Party; the Soviet institutions become soulless
offices, mere transmitters of the will of the center
to the periphery”.<sup>47</sup><br>
Under the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921, which
encouraged private enterprise to trade for profit,
the position of the worker was returned to that of
the worker under capitalism: “[t]he city worker
today, under the new economic policy, is in exactly
the same position as in any other capitalistic
country. … The worker is paid wages, and must pay
for his necessities – as in any country”.<sup>48</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
conditions experienced by the Russian worker
replicated the worker’s fate under other capitalist
regimes of private ownership: “[s]hops, mines,
factories and mills have already been leased to
capitalists. Labour demands have a tendency to
curtail profits; they interfere with the ‘orderly
processes’ of business. And as for strikes, they
handicap production, paralyse industry. Shall not
the interests of Capital and Labour be declared
solidaric in Bolshevik Russia?”.<sup>49</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>To cement
these policies, the 10th Congress of the Communist
Party of Russia in 1921 put a decisive veto on
workers’ opposition when the demand to turn the
management of the industries over to the proletariat
was officially outlawed. The outcome of these
authoritarian policies was seen in the infamous
crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion by the Red Army
and later in the rise of Stalin: “[h]ere with us –
or out there with a gun in your hand – but not as an
opposition. We have had enough of opposition”.<sup>50</sup><br>
Berkman was not alone in his analysis. As early as
1920 in his<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>World
Revolution and Communist Tactics,</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Anton
Pannekoek argued from within the communist movement
that the Russian state had developed into state
capitalism. The suppression of direct democracy and
the soviets in the name of scientific Marxism led to
a system of production which Pannekoek, with the
benefit of hindsight in 1948, articulated quite
precisely: “[t]he system of production developed in
Russia is State Socialism. It is organized
production with the state as universal employer,
master of the entire production apparatus. The
workers are master of the means of production no
more than under Western capitalism. They receive
their wages and are exploited by the State as the
only mammoth capitalist. So the name State
capitalism can be applied with precisely the same
meaning”.<sup>51</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In Guy
Debord’s later phrase, the Russian bureaucracy
resolved itself into “a substitute ruling class for
the market economy”.<sup>52</sup><br>
For Debord, Lenin was simply a faithful Kautskyist
who applied orthodox Marxism to the prevailing
conditions in Russia. This ideology, asserting that
its whole truth resided in objective economic
progress overseen by the ideological representatives
of the working class<i>,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>could
only ever reflect the specialisation and division of
labour inherent within the Party hierarchy: “[i]n
consequence the speciality of the profession in
question became that of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>total
science management</i>”.<sup>53</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>By usurping
the name of revolution for a system of workers’
exploitation, Leninism and Bolshevism made the name
of communism an object of hatred and aversion among
workers and foes alike. For Debord, the moment when
Bolshevism triumphed for itself marks the
inauguration of the modern spectacle, the point at
which a false banner of working-class opposition was
advanced. It was the moment when “<i>an image</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of the
working class arose in radical opposition to the
working class itself”.<sup>54</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The unity
that Lenin demanded masked the class divisions and
alienating working conditions on which the
capitalist mode of production is based: “[w]hat
obliges the producers to participate in the
construction of the world is also what separates
them from it. … What pushes for greater rationality
is also what nourishes the irrationality of
hierarchical exploitation and repression. What
creates society’s abstract power also creates its
concrete unfreedom”.<sup>55</sup><br>
To the detriment of the working class, the orthodox
Marxist line in its Bolshevik form held sway over
the international labour movement up until the early
1950s, until the mutinous rebellions against Russian
bureaucracy in East Berlin<sup>56</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and Hungary<sup>57</sup>helped
put the questions of alienation and wage-labour,
which lay at the heart of the production process,
back on the agenda of class struggle.<br>
<br>
</big></font><font size="4"><big>Workerism And The
Return Of Class Agency</big></font><font size="1"><big><br>
<br>
“From the working-class point of view, political
struggle is that which tends consciously to place in
crisis the economic mechanism of capitalist
development.”<br>
<b>Mario Tronti</b></big></font><b><font size="2"><big><sup>58</sup></big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
</big></font></b><font size="1"><big>Tronti was a
key figure within the strand of Italian Marxism
known as Operaismo (‘workerism’) that emerged in the
early 1960s as a response to the conservatism of the
Italian Communist Party (PCI). Franco Piperno,
associated with Operaismo, captured the general
perception of the PCI within the movement when he
identified the Party as: “the working class
articulation of capitalist social organization”.<sup>59</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>As opposed
to the term ‘workerism’ in its narrow sense (evoking
the industrial proletariat at the expense of other
social groups), Operaismo was concerned with the
heterogeneous, ever-changing dynamic of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>class
composition</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>in
contrast to the eternal, unchanging working-class
subject of the Party. As its most famous proponent,
Antonio Negri, noted, Operaismo was initiated as an
attempt to reply politically to the crisis of the
Italian labour movement in the 1950s in the
aftermath of World War II. For many workers – after
their prominent role in the struggles against
Mussolini and the Wermacht – the future held out the
promise of socialism, or, at the very least, major
improvements in work conditions and pay alongside
more participation in the production process. Yet
Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the PCI, had other
ideas. Above all, Togliatti sought a programme to
unite the broad mass of people against the group of
capitalists yoked to fascism. The decisive arena for
political gains, according to Togliatti, was in
formal, parliamentary politics where accommodation
with other groups was deemed a necessity. The quest
for these political objectives, within the
Constituent Assembly and the Constitution, led
inexorably to the subordination of working-class
antagonism and the struggle for fundamental economic
change.<sup>60</sup><br>
Togliatti, saw productivity as<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>the</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>path to
Italy’s salvation: the resumption of economic growth
within the framework of private ownership would
ensure the construction of a “strong democracy”. As
the “[t]rue children of the Comintern”, the PCI were
willing to concede shop-floor organisation for
unitary economic reconstruction through “the
restoration of the managerial prerogative” within
the factories. Hostage to nationalist ideology and
private forms of management technique, the PCI
facilitated the extraction of high levels of
exploitation from the workers by placing labour
discipline and productivity at the top of their
agenda. As one Fiat worker put it when Togliatti and
Christian Democrat leader De Gaspari came to visit
his factory: “[t]hey both argued exactly the same
thing; the need to save the economy. … We’ve got to
work hard because Italy’s on her knees, we’ve been
bombarded by the Americans … but don’t worry because
if we produce, if we work hard, in a year or two
we’ll all be fine. … So the PCI militants inside the
factory set themselves the political task of
producing to save the national economy,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>and the
workers were left without a party</i>”.<sup>61</sup><br>
Such compromise had predictable results. In 1947,
the historic left was expelled from the De Gaspari
government and an intense regime of accumulation was
established based on production for international
markets, underpinned by low wages, low costs and
high productivity. Workplace organisers,
disorientated and disillusioned by PCI policy, were
mercilessly attacked as Italian capital sought
labour docility through the disciplinary law of
value. This was the context for the development of
autonomist Marxism, which in its most militant sense
expressed itself as a radical new rationality
counter-posed to the ‘objective’ occult rationality
of modern productive processes. Raniero Panzieri’s
‘The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx versus the
Objectivists’<sup>62</sup>written in the early
1960s, was, according to Sandro Maccini, “the first
demystifying analysis of technological rationality”<sup>63</sup>produced
by an Italian Marxist. Against the ruling PCI,
Panzieri argued that the struggle for socialism must
come from below in the form of “total democracy”.
New class formations were required in the economic
sphere, “the real source of power”, so that the
“democratic road” would not become “either a belated
adherence to reformism, or simply a cover for a
dogmatic conception of socialism”.<sup>64</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Union work,
he said, had devoted itself for too long to
political questions “with a capital P” whilst
ignoring the reality of changing work conditions.<br>
Togliatti, and others within the CPI, following the
outline of orthodox Marxism, had led the Italian
left to believe that productivity and technological
progress somehow stood apart from class antagonism.
Instead of accepting the reigning production
relations as ultimately rational, beneficial and
eternal, however, Panzieri, returned in earnest to
Marx (an unusual step at that time for a ‘Marxist’)
to theorize machinery as accumulated ‘dead labour’,
fully determined by capital which utilised
technological development to further the
exploitation and subordination of ‘living labour’.<sup>65</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Elements of
the Italian left, in thrall to social democracy,
were obsessed by the productivist idea that
technology could liberate humankind from the
limitations of environment and surroundings. But for
Panzieri, these elements passed over the crucial
question of the ownership of the workplace and the
role mechanisation and automation played in
increasing the authoritarian structure of factory
management and organisation.<br>
Panzieri, criticised the Leninist belief that
socialist planning was entirely neutral and that
science and technique were socially disinterested
forces. Instead, for Panzieri, planning was a form
of “social despotism” which hid the social
relationships of domination and exploitation behind
the language of bourgeois political economy. Denied
of this understanding by a blind ideological
adherence to scientific Marxism, the consequence of
Lenin’s policies in the USSR was, for Panzieri, “the
repetition of capitalist forms in the relations of
production both at the factory level and at the
level of overall social production”.<sup>66</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
autonomists’ great contribution to debates around
the negation of capitalism was to re-instate, after
decades of suppression in the name of productivity,
the idea of<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>alienation</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and
antagonism at the heart of the production process,
positing a radical rupture from the ‘golden chains’
of the wage-labor relation in Italy and beyond. News
also travelled from abroad. In the aftermath of May
‘68 in France, Massimo Cacciari would state that
liberation<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>from</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>labour, not
merely the liberation<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>of</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>labour, had
become the key aim of revolutionary politics. When
young Renault workers in France, during May ’68,
demanded a minimum wage of 1000 francs per month (an
exorbitant and impossible demand), Bologna and
Daghini saw that the demand, which threatened to
“blow up” the labour market, was symptomatic of a
desire on behalf of the workers, “to negate their
own figure as producers”.<sup>67</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
“strategy of refusal” first posited by Mario Tronti
in 1965 was now a widespread actuality.<br>
<br>
</big></font><font size="4"><big>Mai ’68<br>
<br>
</big></font><font size="1"><big>“Forward to a
communist society without capital or waged work!”<br>
<b>10 May Group, 1968<br>
<br>
</b>When Rene Resiel of the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Enragés</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>put forward
his demands at the student occupation of the
Sorbonne University in 1968 – “the abolition of
class society, wage-labour, the spectacle, and
survival” – he gave voice to the theory of the
Situationist International and its radical critique
of everything. Against the reasonable demands put
forward by the emissaries of social democracy, the
SI and their followers exhibited the greatest of
contempt for the “pseudo thinkers of details” and
the maximum disrespect for all those who would
attempt to find a concord with capital within the
left parties. The unacceptable demand became the
chief tool of breaking with all the dead generations
of the past. Work, for so long the ABC of
social-democratic thinking, duly came in for a
kicking. In 1967, Raoul Vaneigem declared his
opposition to the wage-labour relation thus: “every
call for productivity under the conditions chosen by
capitalist and Soviet economics is a call to
slavery”.<sup>68</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>With work –
“the punishment for poverty” – widely defined as
“hard labour”, society as a “racket”, and trade
unionists as “cops”,<sup>69</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Vaneigem
argued that every appeal for productivity is always
an appeal from above at the behest of the commodity.
In the “post-scarcity” era, the alleged imperative
of production under the former imperative of
survival was no longer valid: “from now on people
want to live, not just survive”.<sup>70</sup><br>
The role of the SI in May ‘68 is deeply disputed,
but it is clear that the theory of the spectacle,
associated first and foremost with Debord, held
considerable sway. Debord’s writing, which reworked
the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Lukács, among many
others, borrowed deeply from Marx’s concept of
commodity fetishism, whereby in the production and
exchange of commodities the relations<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>between
people</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>assume
the form of relations<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>between
things</i>. In this he returned to early Lukács
who had engaged in a similar project in the late
1910s. In order to produce commodities for exchange,
the workers’ labour and what they produce come to
dominate their life. Commodity relations take on a
mysterious force: the products of labour are turned
against the worker, appearing now as an autonomous,
alienating power, a “social hieroglyphic” which
elides the human labour that produced the commodity.
While Marx concentrated on alienation within
production, asserting that at least the worker had
access to non-alienated relations outside of work,
the SI argued that the restless expansionism of
capitalism and its need to secure new markets had
extended commodity relations, and thus alienation,
into all areas of social experience. No longer a
mere adjunct to production, consumption is integral
to the circulation of commodities, the accumulation
of capital, and the survival of the economic system.
For Debord, extending Marx’s original thesis beyond
production, modern society had produced The Society
of the Spectacle, a “vast accumulation of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>spectacles</i>”
and a concrete inversion of life which created a
social relationship between people mediated by
images. The SI project embodied a refusal to
co-operate with this logic of commodity exchange and
a radical negation of the capitalist relations that
reproduce the abstract, alienating equivalence of
the spectacle.<sup>71</sup><br>
Much of the language, tactics and expressions of the
events of May ‘68 seemed to affirm the theories of
the SI: “[t]hat the increasing modernization of
capitalism entails the proletarianisation of an
ever-widening portion of the population; and that as
the world of commodities extends its power to all
aspects of life, it produces everywhere an extension
and deepening of the forces that negate it”.<sup>72</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The first
signs of what was to come emerged from the student
milieu of Strasbourg University in November 1966,
when students in collaboration with the SI produced
‘Of Student Poverty Considered in its Economic,
Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly
Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for its
Remedy’. The pamphlet, which should be essential
reading for the student of today, ridiculed student
privileges and the illusory forms of rebellion
adopted as specialised ‘roles’ within the milieu.
Students must understand one thing, the pamphlet
declared: “… there are no ‘special’ student
interests in revolution. Revolution will be made by<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>all</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the victims
of encroaching repression and the tyranny of the
market”.<sup>73</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Hastily
translated into more than ten languages, the
pamphlet encouraged widespread discussion of
Situationist analysis. The publication of Guy
Debord’s<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Society of the Spectacle</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>and Raoul
Vanegeim’s<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Revolution of Everyday Life</i>in 1967 further
intensified these discussions. New student
agitations persisted throughout the first half of
the year including the formation of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Enragés<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></i>and
the<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Mouvement
du 22 Mars</i>, two groups which would have a
significant impact on the May events. Yet far from
being a mere student revolt, the May events
sustained a general wildcat strike of ten million
workers alongside a critical position that
encompassed every aspect of capitalist life.<br>
In terms of the economic and political analysis of
orthodox Marxism, the events were simply
unthinkable, yet the general wildcat strike, with
three weeks of action, brought the country to a
halt. On 19 May,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>The
Observer</i><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>called
the revolution “a total onslaught on modern
industrial society”. It went on to describe the
contemporary conditions: “[i]n a staggering end to a
staggering week, the commanding heights of the
French economy are falling to the workers. All over
France a calm, obedient, irresistible wave of
working-class power is engulfing factories,
dockyards, mines, railway depots, bus garages,
postal sorting offices. Trains, mail, air-flights
are virtually at a standstill. Production lines in
chemicals, steel, metalworking, textiles,
shipbuilding and a score of industries are ground to
a halt. … Many a baffled and impotent manager is
being held prisoner in his own carpeted office”.<sup>74</sup>Rene
Vienet’s highly subjective<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Enragés
and Situationists in the Occupation Movement,
France, May ‘68</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>left the
best general account of the events from a
Situationist perspective:<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>
Everyday life, suddenly rediscovered, became the
center of all possible conquests. People who had
always worked in the now-occupied offices declared
that they could no longer live as before, not even a
little better than before. … Capitalised time
stopped. Without any trains, metro, cars, or work
the strikers recaptured the time so sadly lost in
factories, on motorways, in front of the TV. People
strolled, dreamed, learned how to live. Desires
began to become, little by little, reality.<sup>75</sup><br>
The May ‘68 events presented impossible demands
irreducible to higher wages or the details of
workplace organisation. The radical critique of
existing capitalist relations was evidenced
throughout the events: e.g. the Schlumberger factory
workers who stated that their demands “had nothing
to do with wages” before going on strike for the
highly exploited workers at the nearby Danone
factory. Similarly, the workers at the FNAC chain of
stores declared: “[w]e, the workers of the FNAC
stores, have gone on strike not for the satisfaction
of our particular demands but to participate in a
movement of ten million intellectual and manual
workers. … We are taking part in this movement
(which is not about quantitative demands) because
ten million workers don’t stop work at the same time
for a pay rise of F6.30 or 100 centimes, but to
challenge the legitimacy of the whole leadership of
the country and all the structures of society”.<sup>76</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The Censier
worker-student Action Committee likewise declared:
“[i]t’s not a case of demanding more of this or more
of that. It’s a case of demanding something else
altogether. … In this way the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>totality</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>of demands
will appear, and their incalculable number will
produce the evidence that the capitalist regime
cannot really satisfy the least of them”.<sup>77</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In a
strident document signed by ‘Some postmen’ (usurping
beautifully the status of ‘roles’ endemic to the
specialized division of labour under capitalism) the
postmen stated with exemplary simplicity that, “open
struggle against the ruling class” would be the
condition of their emancipation: “[t]he renowned
participation that power can afford us is in fact
only integration into its system of exploitation. We
have fuck all to do with helping them with their
profits”.<sup>78</sup><br>
The reaction to all this revolutionary activity by
the established unions is shrouded in infamy. Vienet
succinctly described the trade-union
counter-offensive: “[t]he trade-union strategy had a
single goal: to defeat the strike. In order to do
this the unions, with a long strike-breaking
tradition, set out to reduce a vast general strike
to a series of isolated strikes at the individual
enterprise level … the union leadership assumed the
task of reducing the entire movement to a program of
strictly professional demands”.<sup>79</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The
Communist Party’s trade union, the biggest in
France, meanwhile played the heaviest
counter-revolutionary role in the May events: “[i]t
was precisely because the CGT had the most powerful
organization and could administer the largest dose
of illusions that it appeared all the more obviously
as the major enemy of the strike”.<sup>80</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>While the
workers, six million by 20 May, soon to be ten
million, voted for a perpetuation of the general
wildcat strike and the occupation of the factories,
the leadership of the CFDT and CGT, the main union
organisations in France, were agreed on the basic
social-democratic principle of the necessity for
negotiations with state and management.<br>
The result of these meetings, triumphantly produced
by Seguy, the leader of the CGT, on 27 May at the
rebellious Renault-Billancourt factory was the
‘Grenelle agreement’, concluded by the timeworn
social-democratic triumvirate: the unions, the
government and the employers. The agreement would
raise wages 7% and lift the legally guaranteed
minimum wage from 2.22 to 3 francs. The days lost in
the strike would not be paid until they were made up
in overtime. Given that “[a] higher percentage of
French workers than ever before, across every sector
and in every region of the country, had been on
strike for the longest time in French history”,<sup>81</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>the poverty
of the ‘gains’ agreed by the union leaders was
dwarfed by the scale of the movement. The workers
knowing full well “that such ‘benefits’ would be
taken back in kind with imminent price rises”<sup>82</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>famously
rained down insults on Seguy and rejected the
agreement. The unions learned their lesson. The
refusal of the agreement was met with an
acceleration of integration by the CGT: rigged
ballots, false information (e.g. informing
individual railway stations that the other stations
had gone back to work), prevention of secondary
picketing, and organised train delays which
prevented workers’ solidarity. By these methods, and
acting in collusion with the hated national riot
police (CRS), the CGT were able to bring about the
resumption of work almost everywhere. Ultimately,
the CGT and the CFDT proved themselves perfect
instruments for the integration of the working class
into the capitalist system of exploitation.<br>
For Vienet, the future for the radical left would
now involve an unequivocal fight against the
reformism of its own unions. He criticised many of
the groups in May ‘68 for remaining entrenched in
their own stale ideology, drawing proud experience
from past working-class defeats and the traditions
of the ‘dead generations’: “[t]hey seemed to
perceive nothing new in the occupation movement.
They had seen it all before. They were blasé. Their
knowing discouragement looked forward to nothing but
defeat, so that they could publish the consequences
as they had so often done before”.<sup>83</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Yet May ’68
for all that it was defeated, astounded almost
everyone by its very existence in modern capitalist
conditions. That the unthinkable took place at all
suggests that it can take place again.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b><br>
<br>
</b></big></font><font size="4"><big>Times change</big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
“…the revolutionary organisation must learn that it
can no longer combat alienation by means of
alienated forms of struggle.”<br>
<b>Guy Debord</b></big></font><b><font size="2"><big><sup>84</sup></big></font><font
size="1"><big><br>
<br>
</big></font></b><font size="1"><big>Capital’s
response to the show of strength by working-class
organizations in the sixties and early seventies
marked a shift to what has broadly been termed
‘post-fordist’ or ‘flexible’ modes of accumulation,
a shift characterised by increasingly flexible
labour processes and markets, intensified
geographical mobility of capital flows, rapid shifts
in consumption practices, and the
erosion/destruction of Fordist-Keynesian modes of
labour regulation and control. Beyond a few notable
exceptions such as the miners’ strike, the
working-class in the advanced capitalist countries
has been in disarray ever since, even if struggles
elsewhere, in South America, India, and China for
instance suggest that global capital might meet its
nemesis in an ever-expanding global proletariat. But
if the fight over the global workplace is not just
to become, in Panzieri’s expression, “either a
belated adherence to reformism, or simply a cover
for a dogmatic conception of socialism”, then we
might do well to return to, and update, Rosa
Luxemburg, who brilliantly theorised the inexorable
destruction immanent to capitalism’s incessant drive
for self-expansion, and whose intense opposition to
reformist compromise suggests a pro-revolutionary,
fiercely anti-capitalist alternative to contemporary
capitalism.<br>
In her speech to the Founding Congress of the
Communist Party of Germany (Spartacus League) in
December 1918, Rosa Luxemburg argued that the Erfurt
Program, “the founding document of the Second
International”, authored by Karl Kautsky in 1891,
had imprisoned German Social Democracy within a
hopelessly reformist paradigm. By placing immediate
minimum aims (parliamentary reform) in the tactical
foreground, while relegating maximum gains (the
revolutionary overthrow of capitalism) to the misty
realms of a utopian future, the Erfurt Program
created a new dichotomy within the movement. The
tactics of piecemeal attrition were now<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><i>opposed</i><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>to the
overthrow of capitalism; and minimum and maximum
aims were presented in separate, distinct realms
instead of combined in a productive dialectical
tension. By defining themselves in direct opposition
to the Erfurt Program, Luxemburg and the Spartacus
League expressed their profound disagreement with
the strategies of the dominant reformist German
Social Democratic movement: “[f]or us there is no
minimal and no maximal program; socialism is one and
the same thing: this is the minimum we have to
realize today”.<sup>85</sup><br>
This tension, between minimum and maximum demands,
falsely separated in the Erfurt Program of 1891,
suggests a theoretical stratagem that might avoid
the illusory hopes of reformist practice, while
circumventing the isolating, and isolated, ghetto of
‘more radical than thou’ Puritanism. Raoul
Vanegeim’s advice to those seeking a way out of
capitalism, prior to May ‘68, offers a way of
understanding which acknowledges that none of us are
born ‘radical’, that solidarity will be central to
any mass movement, while at the same time
challenging the stasis of purely reformist measures:
“it is impossible to go wrong so long as we never
forget that the only proper treatment for ourselves
and for others is to make ever more radical
demands”.<sup>86</sup><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>One such
demand, if we are really serious about an exit from
capitalism, should return us to the continuing
resonance of Guy Debord’s salutary statement: ‘Never
Work!’<br>
<br>
<b>Notes<br>
</b>1. Vaneigem, R, The Revolution of Everyday Life,
Rebel Press, 1994, p.55.<br>
2. Monbiot, G, ‘Snow jobs’.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/04/01/snow-jobs/">http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/04/01/snow-jobs/</a><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>
3. Wacquant, L, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Study
of Advanced Marginality, Polity Press, 2008, p.251.<br>
4. Ibid, p.253.<br>
5. Ibid, p.246<br>
6. Hardt, M, Negri, A, Multitude, Penguin, 2006,
p.136.<br>
7. Benjamin, W, Illuminations, Pimlico, 1990, p.247.<br>
8. Ibid, p.250.<br>
9. Cited in Benjamin, W, The Arcades Project, The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p.123.<br>
10. Benjamin, W, Illuminations, Pimlico, 1990,
p.250.<br>
11. Debord, G, The Society of the Spectacle, Zone
Books, p.67.<br>
12. Ibid, p.616.<br>
13. Dauve, G and Martin, F, The Eclipse and
Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, (Revised
Edition), Antagonism Press, 1997, p.18.<br>
14. McLellan, D, ed, ‘Primitive Accumulation’, in,
‘Karl Marx: Selected Writings’, Oxford University
Press, 2001, p.522.<br>
15. Ibid, p.376.<br>
16. See, e.g, Thompson, E.P, The Making of the
English Working Class, p.233-259.<br>
17. See, e.g, Prebble, J, ‘The Highland Clearances’,
Penguin.<br>
18. Mclellan, D, ed, see above, p.365.<br>
19. Mclellan, D, ed, ‘The General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation’, in, ‘Karl Marx: Selected Writings’,
Oxford University Press, 2001, p.522.<br>
20. Ibid, p.519.<br>
21. Ibid, p.520.<br>
22. Pannekoek, A, ‘Workers Councils’, AK Press,
2003, p.8<br>
23. Anderson, K, and Hudis, P, (eds), The Rosa
Luxemburg Reader, Social Reform or Revolution,
Monthly Review Press, New York, 2004, p.129.<br>
24. The term’s meaning has shifted over the years to
a reformist definition, but for Luxemburg it
approximated something closer to current definitions
of ‘direct’ democracy.<br>
25. Ibid, p.149.<br>
26. Ibid, p.145.<br>
27.<a
href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch07.htm"><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch07.htm</a>.
This revised version of ‘Social Reform of
Revolution’ from 1908, includes the critical chapter
5, ‘Co-operatives, Unions, Democracy’, which is
absent from the original draft of 1899 featured in
‘The Rosa Luxemburg Reader’ cited above.<br>
28. Ibid.<br>
29. Ibid.<br>
30. Ibid.<br>
31. “The old war horse on which the reformers of the
earth have rocked for ages”, Luxemburg, R, Ibid.<br>
32. Ibid.<br>
33. Pannekoek, A, ‘Workers Councils’, AK Press,
2003, p.61.<br>
34. Luxemburg, R, ’Our Program and the Political
Situation’ (1918),<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/31.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/31.htm</a><br>
35. Ibid.<br>
36. Ibid. At this time, Rosa Luxemburg did not know
the full details of the falsification of the
document. These only came to light later on. “It was
not Engels who wrote the seemingly revisionist views
cited here. The Party leaders, arguing that because
the Reichstag was considering passage of a new
anti-socialist law it would be dangerous to give
them grounds to attack Social Democracy, eliminated
all the passages in the Preface which seemed too
radical. Engels protested, but died before any
changes could be made”.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>
37. Ibid.<br>
38. See Luxemburg’s ‘The Junius Pamphlet’ (The
Crisis in German Social Democracy).<br>
39. Ibid, p.6.<br>
40. Mclellan, D, ed, ‘Theses of Feuerbach, in, ‘Karl
Marx: Selected Writings’, Oxford University Press,
2001, p.171.173..<br>
41. Anderson, K, and Hudis, P, (eds), The Rosa
Luxemburg Reader, The Russian Revolution, Monthly
Review Press, New York, 2004, p.310.<br>
42. Ibid, Introduction, p.12.<br>
43. Debord, G, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Zone
Books, p.80<br>
44. Berkman, ‘A Russian Tragedy’, Phoenix Press,
p.14. Berkman’s account of his arrival, in fact,
exhibits an almost religious faith in the
possibilities for world transformation that the
revolution seemed to open up.<br>
45. Ibid, p.36.<br>
46. Ibid, p.45.<br>
47. Ibid, p.40.<br>
48. Ibid, p.29.<br>
49. Ibid, p.31.<br>
50. Cited in, Debord, G, ‘The Society of the
Spectacle’, Zone Books, p.72.<br>
51. Pannekoek, A, ‘Workers Councils’, AK Press,
2003, p.78<br>
52. Debord, G, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Zone
Books, p.72<br>
53. Ibid, p.68.<br>
54. Debord, G, ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, Zone
Books, p.69<br>
55. Ibid, p.46.<br>
56. Benno Sorels account is related by Hardt and
Negri in ‘Multitude’, Penguin, 2006: “...he
emphasizes that the most important demand of the
factory worker was to abolish the production quotas
and destroy the structural order of command over
labour in the factories. Socialism, after all, is
not capitalism!”.<br>
57. See for example, Anderson, A, ‘Hungary 56’,
co-published by Active Distribution, AK Press,
Phoenix Press.<br>
58. Cited in, Debord, G, ‘The Society of the
Spectacle’, Zone Books, p.66.<br>
59. Ibid, p.117.<br>
60. This section on workerism and post-war Italy is
broadly drawn from Wright’s account in ‘Storming
Heaven’.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>
61. Ibid, p.10. Original citation in Partridge, H,
‘Italy’s Fiat in Turin in the 1950’s’, in Nichol’s,
T (ed) Capital and Labour: A Marxist Primer,
(London: Fontana).<br>
62.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/panzieri.html">http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/panzieri.html</a><br>
63. Citation, Ibid, p.45.<br>
64. Ibid, p.18.<br>
65. Marx put the argument very well in his ‘General
Law of Capitalist Accumulation’: “The law of
capitalist accumulation, metamorphosed by economists
into a pretended law of Nature, in reality merely
states that the very nature of accumulation excludes
every diminution of in the degree of the
exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price
of labour, which could seriously imperil the
continual reproduction of, on an ever expanding
scale, the capitalist relation. It cannot be
otherwise in a mode of production in which the
labourer exists to satisfy the needs of self
expansion of existing values, instead of, on the
contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the
needs of development on the part of the labourer”.
McLellan, D, ‘Karl Marx: Selected Writings’, Oxford
University Press, p.515-521.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>
66. Cited in Wright, S, ‘Storming Heaven: Class
Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist
Marxism’, Pluto Press, p.45.<br>
67. Ibid, p.115.<br>
68. Vaneigem, R, ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’,
Rebel Press, 1994, p.53.<br>
69. Untitled tract by the Vandalist Committee of
Public Safety, April 68. See Vienet, R, ‘The Enrages
and Situationists in the Occup[ation Movement,
France, May ’68, Rebel Press, p.127.<br>
70. Vaneigem, R, ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’,
Rebel Press, 1994, p.53.<br>
71. This section is more or less freely appropriated
from Sadie Plant’s excellent overview of the
Situationsit International. See, Plant, S, ‘The Most
Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a
Postmodern Age’, Routledge, p.23.<br>
72. Vienet, R, ‘The Enrages and Situationists in the
Occupation Movement, France, May ’68, Rebel Press,
p.71.<br>
73. Cited in, Plant, S, ‘The Most Radical Gesture:
The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age’,
Routledge, p.94.<br>
74. Cited in, Ibid, p.98.<br>
75. Ibid, p.77.<br>
76. Ibid, p.151.<br>
77. Ibid, p.150-151.<br>
78. Ibid, p.152.<br>
79. Ibid, p.62.<br>
80. Ibid, p.85.<br>
81. Ross, K, ‘May ’68 and its Afterlives’, The
University of Chicago Press, p.68.<br>
82. Vienet, R, ‘The Enrages and Situationists in the
Occupation Movement, France, May ’68, Rebel Press,
p.92.<br>
83. Ibid, p.105.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><br>
84. Ibid.<br>
85. Luxemburg, R, ’Our Program and the Political
Situation’ (1918),<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/31.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/31.htm</a><br>
86. Vaneigem, R, ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’,
Rebel Press, 1994, p.150.</big></font></big></p>
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