Part 3 of 3
DRAFT OF PROGRAM, Anarcho-Syndicalism
Reply to Comrade MIYACHI TATSUO
Capital has both internal limits -- surplus value and profits come from unpaid living labor; and labor-replacing technology drives the amount of living labor towards zero; and external limits -- we live on a planet with finite resources and a geographically finite market. The general crisis of capital -- capital colliding with its internal and external limits -- has been and will continue to be the inescapable theme of the world economy today.
A crisis is an interruption. The interruption taking place in the heads of the world workers is rooted in the economy and the need for a cooperative society. If we cannot figure out the way to explain to the workers and a new generation of communist the framework in which we formulate strategy and tactics then all is lost. “All” of course is never lost and Bolshevikism is alive.
With a world economy on the verge of crisis, the American people and indeed the world proletariat, are unprepared ideologically. There is awareness that something is wrong and a compassion for the poor but very little sense of class identity. People are increasingly anti-government but not anti-capitalist. Any large-scale economic disruption that happens before the development of class identity on a broad and organized basis would give the Jesse Venturas and Pat Buchanan’s in our country free rein to capture the economic discontent with their dangerous ideologies.
History proves that, when things get objectively worse and worse, people don't automatically get more and more ideologically revolutionary. Sharp economic crisis and social disruptions haven't yet hit in the US. But when they do, they will throw more people into motion and most of these people will follow the path of habit and take up the solutions offered by the forces of reaction. People will respond to these economic and social convulsions with their political backwardness and the ideological rot the ruling class hands them to fight out the questions of the day and petty bourgeois theories of race -- unless they have taken up the ideological and political weapons of class to fight for their actual interests.
Consciousness lags behind the economic reality, but it catches up in leaps. Things will move faster in both directions, that is, towards both class identity and unity and towards fascism and reaction. Therefore, now is the time to prepare for the convulsions that will rock society and draw more people into struggle and debate.
This moment holds both great danger and great opportunity. Objective conditions are bringing our country to a fork in the road. People will determine which route our country takes.
>24. Tactics, which argue that social revolution, begins after taking over
> political power, is from lasting revolution theory that bourgeois revolution
> beginning in feudal system makes to last to proletariat revolution.
> The tactics succeeded in Russia revolution 1917, after that USSR
> established, and it formed 3rd international, thus encourage worldwide
> communist movement. In response that bourgeois class maintain its system by
> socialization of integument of valorization.
Actually, the Leninist were able to seize political power – the authority of the state, as the culmination of 25 years battling opportunism in the labor movement in Russia and defeating the various petty bourgeois trends in the working class movement. Lenin's July 4, 1920, Theses On the Fundamental Tasks of the Second Congress of the Communist International summarize the demands place on the communist as leaders of the working class movement.
The social revolution begins in the economy as the result of the injection of a new qualitative “substance” and the resultant reconfiguration of the productive forces constitutes an era or leap to established the predominance of the new quality over the old, and this entail the battle between classes and the struggle for power. At each quantitative stage of this process – in the past, a cyclical crisis has emerged as capital fought to reorganize itself and the communist fought to win over the workers to their class interest. The communist could not and cannot exceed the limitations of the class consciousness of the workers, who they are charged with educating in the art of the class struggle.
>Association principle usually is grasped as mutual aid and its altruist
> consisted of filling up other’s lack. Instead of political will unity as
> priority, front line of association movement which fills up other’s lack
> de-reify capitalist system globally, thus ring the funeral of capitalism.
“Political will unity” is understood to mean the organization of the communist into a compact mass, pursuing a common strategic line of approach in the various social movements. The “political will unity” of the communist is always the priority because it is the communist that are the advanced detachment of the working class; its leader and teacher. Presenting the question as the need to fight within the economy is no more than a demand for cooperatives as the priority for communist. This in my opinion is incorrect.
Form time to time I have used the words “associate society” or “society of associated producers.” When using these terms it has been clarified to mean a cooperative society where the distribution of the social product is no longer based on or governed by the contribution of ones individual labor, or “from each according to their ability to each according to their need.” If “society of associated producers” means fighting along a line of organizing the alternative economy, then I renounce the use of the term because I fight to combine the communist on the basis of “political will unity” in order to educate the workers in the need to fight for power and win status as ruling class in society to effect the social revolution in their class interest. I don't renounce the fight for cooperative but explain to the cooperative movement why the proletarians fight for status as ruling class is necessary.
If
> Association principle usually is grasped as mutual aid and its altruist consisted of filling up other’s lack<
is a translation of “from each according to their ability to each according to their need” on the basis of the working class raising itself as ruling class by defeating the bourgeoisie and consolidating the state power in its hands, then we are of one mind.
In other words Comrade MIYACHI TATSUO, your proposal as written and translated, deviates along the lines of Anarcho-Syndicalism, and the “Workers Opposition”in Lenin's party in the early 1920s. Between December 1920 and August 1921, Lenin wrote a series of articles on this matter. I have in mind his articles,“ Once Again on the Trade Unions, the current situation and the mistakes of Trotsky and Bukharin,” “The Party Crisis,” “Report on Party Unity and the Anarcho-Syndicalism deviation,” “Summing Up Speech on Party Unity and the Anarcho-syndicalist Deviation,” all located in Volume 32 of Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers Moscow, 1973.
The demand is always for the formation of the advanced detachment of the working-class – communist into a compact mass no matter what their individual sphere of work, be it trade unions or cooperatives or environmental concerns.
> 21. This time requires to break with political party and democracy which assume
> nation state. And now we must reflect association principle.
What is needed in America at this juncture of history is the formation of a broad Party of labor to raise the issues of the working class on a class basis “nationwide.” The question that squarely faces the workers is the class rule of the capitalist with its organization of the economy on the basis of the sell and purchase of labor-power. It is true that the workers have not learned on the basis of their own experience that capitalist production relations are the problem, but such specific learning and educating is the task of the communist.
The organization of a broad Party of labor is not a demand for a broad Communist Party of the Lenin-type, or even a demand for the amalgamation of the communist into a league type organization. Rather, a Party of Labor could wage the indispensable electoral struggle, which is sufficiently capable of introducing broad class demands and training the workers in the art of fighting for ones material survival in the advanced capitalist centers.
The world peoples still remain within the geographic boundaries of specific multi-national state structures, in as much as the integration of capital has brought the toilers of the world together, more than less in all the imperial centers and various national groups and advanced national groups exist in every pocket of the planet.
To “break with political party and democracy” is of course the historic political demand of anarchism. The exact opposite is urgently needed, that is the organization of the proletariat into a political party. When the demand “to break with political party and democracy” is combined with the demand to form associate society formations as the path to social revolution, we have the most classical political program of the anarcho-syndicalist, pure and simple.
In history the battle within the Soviet Party against the shouters for “workers democracy” came to a head with the so-called “Workers Opposition” who put forward the slogan demanding that the administration of the entire national economy be entrusted to an “All Russian Producers Congress.”
These oppositionist insisted that the interest of the trade unions were opposed to those of the Soviet state and the Bolshevik Party. They held that the trade unions, and not the Party were the highest form of organization of the working-class. Since that time the demand for the associate producers society combined with the alleged need “to break with political party and democracy” has been the calling card of the anarcho-syndicalist and the various political factions of Trotskyism.
History has conclusively proven that what the working class need is a party of steel to lead the working class and not a “revolutionary union movement” or producers organizations in the onslaught against capital. Anarcho-syndicalism is a historically observable social phenomenon within the Anglo-American proletariat of which I am part and parcel, dating back to the Industrial Workers of the World and running through our history down to the formation of the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers.
The specific historical deviation from Marxism, which has characterized my personal development, is in fact anarcho-syndicalism, which I could only recently break with after thirty years of trade union work. The historic passivity of the proletariat in the imperial centers tends to re-enforce this spontaneous striving as the result of the resistance of the trade union to the encroachments of capital.
It requires a remarkable person, which I am not, to withstand this historical evolved spontaneous “pressure” while laboring in the trade union movement for decades. This raises the question of the “political will unity” of the communist from the standpoint of the consolidation of a grouping or federation of professional revolutionaries.
What is meant is that a grouping or federation of professional revolutionaries is the key to maintaining the balance of revolutionaries, who as individuals charged with consistently finding their own bearing. A grouping or federation of professional revolutionaries is charged with maintaining the purity – if you will, of Marxism by not being absorbed in the “practical” social movement.
The radical petty bourgeoisie calls this “elitism” or “vanguardism” and misunderstands why the proletariat needs an elite or grouping of professional revolutionaries. All of us as individuals manifest a certain wavering and deviating because we are not and can never be immune to the interactive pressure in society that is the unity of all classes striving for material survival.
Communist of the Lenin-Stalin mode are required to frankly admit errors and separate themselves from faulty thinking and actions. This reply is my personal repudiation of my very own anarcho-syndicalist history, which I though I had broken with years ago only to discover that my formulation of the associate producers society was an anarcho-syndicalist formulation – damn. Let me stay within the realm of the cooperative society.
In other words Comrade MIYACHI TATSUO, you and I have put forth an anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist proposition that should be soundly rejected as a fundamental deviation away from the line of march of the communist as leaders of the proletarian revolution. I criticize myself and thank you for crystallizing my error of thinking.
Comradely
Melvin P.
- On perspective miychi
- Waistline2
