The following are notes developed for Brer Rabbit’s RED Hot Summer Study Group (a project of the Voice Collective in Louisiana).
Originally posted to
Kasamaproject.org, June 15, 2011
Communist vision: With agency and mass politics at the center
By Brer Fox
Early on in our work as an actual collective there was a meeting
between Louisiana folk gathered around the Kasama Project and a number
of local anarchists. The anarchists were tasked with leading this
particular discussion and they initiated an introductory exercise:
Everyone had to say what they fear most.
The various revelations were thought-provoking, but there was one
response that resonated with me profoundly. A charming anarchist
organizer, five years my senior, said:
“What really terrifies me is the thought that most people only get to
feel like real, creative subjects for fleeting moments in their lives,
instead of every day. This makes me incredibly sad.”
Over the past few months this remark has haunted me—acting as a
somber lei motif running through the varied, sometimes frenzied and
depressing moments of my life (including work and interpersonal
relations); and on the other hand it has had a very encouraging effect. I
have been inspired.
It has prompted me to think more deeply about regrouping for and
reconceiving the communist movement for a real revolutionary
transformation of society. It has made me look more closely at the
features of existing society while asking with a somewhat new emphasis
what—fundamentally—is communist revolution supposed to look like, and
what sort of results are we going for?
What I am going to say here is by necessity basic (I don’t have exact
prescriptions of what we need to do), and shouldn’t be surprising.
Nevertheless I think that it is something worth saying, and rather often
for that matter, considering the general weakness of the global Left
after decades of setbacks and which exists as scattered fragments and
dead-ends, with flowers of hope jutting up here and there. It is
important for forging a revolutionary politics that can connect with
real people’s lives here in our own time.
My basic points are as follows:
1) Existing society radically limits the agency of the vast majority
of people, giving them little control over the basic conditions of their
lives. They are systematically prevented from re-constituting their
society, that is, building the world anew as the current set-up becomes
more and more odious.
2) At its very heart, communist revolution must be about overturning
this state of affairs, that is, empowering the people in their masses to
take control of their own lives by re-constituting society on a
fundamentally new basis (and this is only possible with communist
revolution).
3) Overall, communist revolutions that have resulted in the
establishment of socialist state power have not brought about such an
empowering of the masses in sustained ways, but we must study the
historical sequences in which there have been important struggles over
the soul of socialism, in the form of the acute development of the basic
contradiction between the bureaucratic-authoritarian tendencies and the
genuinely liberatory dimension of 20th century socialism as it
developed within the context of the party-state (the Chinese Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution is the highest or most developed example
in the pages of socialist history).
4) Many existing socialist and communist organizations still do not
adequately deal with the question of mass agency, and do not emphasize
it as the core of the revolutionary vision.
5) In this period of reconception and regroupment, there should be
theoretical and organizational struggle to re-emphasize this part of the
revolutionary vision and deepen it. Let’s put it at the center. Let’s
make it inform all our communist preparations and let’s exude this
yearning and vision in our interactions with others. As Matthew says in
the Gospels, don’t light a candle and hide it under a bushel.
Where we are right now
Right now we are in a unique position to reconceive and rebuild the
communist movement worldwide. There are several features of the current
period that should be grasped in this regard.
1) For several decades now the world has experienced a revolutionary
low tide. We are still only just beginning to emerge from this trough,
though it is not completely clear whether we are in for another dip or
whether things are going to pick back up in a huge way. Nevertheless,
this does mean that we have an opportunity for deep reflection and
thinking. For the most part around the world, we are not utterly
occupied with raging street battles and so on, and are not forced deep
underground. We have some time for things like study groups and reading
circles, as well as more direct forms of investigation connected with
on-the-ground organizing.
2) We know that most existing strategies aren’t yielding much in
terms of results, though we shouldn’t be overly voluntaristic here and
underestimate the conjunctural nature of mass upsurges (the Russian
revolution was possible in part because of WWI, the Chinese revolution
overlapped with the sequence of the Second World War, etc.)
3) We have a hell of a lot of historical experience of revolution to
draw from—more than any previous generation of revolutionaries. And we
have an incredible ability to access this information and discuss it. We
can study everything from the Paris Commune to current uprisings in the
Middle East. Lenin didn’t have the benefit of knowing the history of
the USSR or what would happen in Vietnam during the 50s, 60s and 70s. We
do.
4) Even though we have been in a lull period for some time now, that
is undoubtedly changing. Major national polls are showing that the
up-and-coming generation in the U.S. is increasingly critical of
capitalism and are more open to alternatives. Communist, socialist and
radical organizations across the country are experiencing growth
(though, unfortunately, not as dramatically as the far Right). This slow
but exciting trend has even been discussed recently in the New York
Times, which is not exactly known for its detailed coverage of the
radical Left. [link] Then there is Wisconsin. There is the Middle East
and North Africa. There is India and Nepal. There is Greece and Spain.
I claim that for communists this is a time to ask big questions about
the communist project. The opportunity is ours. Let’s dare to be really
bold and uncompromisingly radical. What will be the leading visions of
our movement?
Part of this involves rethinking the communist movement’s
relationship to the question of mass agency. On one extreme, there are
groups and tendencies out there which have very rigid—though often
nice-sounding—conceptions of what socialist democracy should look like;
some of these one-sidedly reject the experiences of actually-existing
attempts at socialism, as though these were monolithically bureaucratic,
technocratic and authoritarian historical sequences without a hint of
liberation and mass participation.
But to the other extreme, there are far too many groups and
tendencies out there which seem to have jettisoned any vision of
socialism and communism that puts human liberation—real empowerment—at
the center. Is that really too idealistic?
Fundamentally, are we for liberation, or not?
This jettisoning is, in my view, one of the most problematic
developments that we encounter in the existing communist landscape, and
these groups, like others, are growing and are getting a hearing among
some segments of the people. If some who openly identify themselves as
communists declare that the Kim Jong-il’s Korea is a vibrant example of
socialism, why would masses of people want to join our movement, and
what will our movement be about? Why would large numbers of people be
moved to overthrow the shitty conditions of U.S. and other societies for
the type of system that they have built in the DPRK? In short why would
people—and why should people—trade old oppressions for new ones?
Marx and Engel’s vision in the German Ideology
In our attempt to think agency afresh, it is important to revisit the
ways that communists have dealt with this problematic in the past. Marx
and Engels discuss agency at length in part one of the German Ideology,
for example, in a way which I find particularly exciting. I realize
that the “early Marx” is not regarded highly in some quarters, but there
is a core here whose spirit—I believe—should infuse our communist
movement. We should exude the aspiration that people—consciously,
collectively, can be in control of the basic conditions of their lives
and of the direction that their society is taking.
In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels say that in historical
society so far the social order confronts people as something foreign
and fundamentally out of their control. Even though human beings
(especially past generations) have created this order, it confronts us
as a godlike power to which we are ever subjugated. We are produced as
subjects by institutions that are bigger than us and give us little room
to breathe. None of us chose class society. None of us chose racial,
gender and sexual oppression, but we are trapped in them like someone
who has wandered into an expanse of thorns and becomes more entangled
the more s/he tries to free herself. Or more accurately, it is like
being born into a world of briars, and having to survive in what little
spaces are available for movement, grasping what we can find here and
there. In our desperation, we have to be cruel and cunning to maneuver
in such a world. We are not like rabbits who can glide through the
thorns with ease, or like a bird in the air or a fish in the water.
Marx and Engels say,
“This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we
ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our
control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our
calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up
till now.” (53)
They go on:
“The social power, i.e. the multiplied productive force, which arises
through the co-operation of different individuals, since their
co-operation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their
own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the
origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot
control, which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of
phases and stages independent of the will and the action of man, nay,
even being the prime governor of these.” (54)
This is how Marx and Engels characterize previous and existing
historical society. It is nothing short of a nightmare vision of the
world in which we live, and I think that the accuracy of such a
description will ring true to the people we encounter as we work to
build a new revolutionary movement. As we have discussed over and over
again, it certainly rings true for those of us in this study group.
To use my own experiences as an example, when I look back at the
institutions that I have been involved in throughout my life, lack of
agency is a primary feature that runs through it all. I attended public
high school in a small Louisiana town with a black population over 60
percent and a poverty level well above the national average.
The school felt more like a prison, with bland uniforms, high fences
and police officers always on duty to make sure that people didn’t step
out of line. A culture of ultra-conformity pervaded all spheres. There
was nothing resembling a diversity of classes to choose from and
education was utterly non-participatory. Students had no say in shaping
the curriculum and were in fact treated like blank receptacles into
which expert knowledge was to be deposited. Students were tracked early
on for either university education or whatever else was
available—probably prison or minimum wage jobs (Louisiana has the
highest rate of incarceration in the entire U.S., making the “school to
prison pipeline” analysis especially pertinent here).
When I went to a local state university the situation wasn’t
altogether different. The ubiquity of the police was even greater—the
university, of course, had its own police station, and on one occasion I
found myself laying against the hood of one of their cars as they felt
up my junk just for walking in a park at night. That’s pretty typical,
and not the worst example of police abuse. But it is amazing how we have
learned to take such outright authoritarianism for granted. I guess
that twelve years of primary education and authoritarian home life
prepare us pretty well for the “real world.”
At the university a greater diversity of courses were offered, but
overall, students were not real participants in shaping their education.
With occasional exceptions, especially in graduate programs, students
did not have much say in shaping their curricula, and were instead—much
like in high school—treated as blank slates to be deposited with
information as they were processed through this highly-bureaucratic,
late-capitalist institution. Overall, it was an education that failed to
connect with real people’s lives in transformative ways. My most
positive experiences within the university system centered around
student organizing and discussion with professors and instructors in the
interstices of the educational system. These were examples of us going
very much against the grain, and were not part of the institution’s
normal functioning.
Then the current economic recession set in and Governor Bobby
Jindal’s state government started pushing through devastating austerity
measures. There were severe, and ongoing, cuts in education and
healthcare. University students from around the state formed anti-budget
cuts groups on their own campuses, came together in a coalition, made
headline news rallying at the state capital. Faculty at various schools
threw their support behind the students’ initiatives. Unions and primary
educators became involved.
And what was the result?
The budget cuts continued. Departments were closed down. Professors
and staff were fired. Funds dried up. Commercials appeared on the state
universities’ radio stations featuring university system leaders
delivering an eerily-fascist, or even perversely religious, message.
They literally said that everyone who was concerned about the budget
cuts needed “to have faith in their leaders” and that everyone would
have to pull together during some tough times, and that the system would
certainly come out better than ever and would be more efficient. That
was such a relief! It’s wonderful to see American democracy in action.
There was no response to the movement from the state government’s
various apparatuses—no engagement, no dialogue. It was clear that
students, faculty, staff and concerned citizens had no real voice in
what was happening. Cuts were going to continue. Well, that’s not
entirely true. Just before the first (and largest) rally at the capitol,
Louisiana’s number one newspaper, the Advocate, ran an article
featuring state police Colonel Mike Edmonson. He said that there would
be a large police presence at the capitol in case “anarchist fringe
groups” decided to “cause some problems,” in which case they were “going
to act pretty quickly.” He went on to say, “We’ll have enough
[security] to control the crowd. But I don’t want to make it look like a
police state.” Perhaps look is the operative word here. To Colonel
Edmonson’s and the state police’s credit, this is more engagement than
the student movement got from the other branches of state government,
and about equal to the engagement of the university system bureaucracy
(remember the fascist radio announcements).
My experiences in the workforce have been about as inspiring. I’ll
describe them, at the risk of belaboring my point even more. In the late
neoliberal U.S. economy, it is becoming increasingly clear that the
university is not the ladder of social mobility that it was for some
time. Most college graduates I know are not working in their fields, and
in fact most are either chronically unemployed, or are underemployed,
working part-time, low-wage jobs.
My first job prospect when I departed the university setting was
working with seniors at a health unit in a very rural, majority black
parish. It’s the sort of place where there just aren’t any jobs.
Nevertheless, it looked like they were going to be able to hire me at
the health unit. I started working there as a volunteer and I absolutely
loved it. It was something that I could see myself doing for years, and
I bonded deeply with those who came there for help. I stayed on for a
while as a volunteer, while it became more and more apparent that I was
not going to be hired. The hospital system was a target of budget cuts
and there was nothing that could be done. They were cutting back, not
expanding. This experience really made me feel my lack of agency.
Then I spent time working at a family-owned rural grocery store that
had been around since the late 1930s. In fact it was owned by members of
my own extended family, started by second-generation Sicilian
immigrants who, like others of their generation, were able to rise from
poverty by using a reserve of family members as a ready labor force,
ultimately going from non-Whites to becoming part of the White
petty-bourgeois establishment during the post-war years when social
mobility was dramatically more attainable for certain sectors of the
population.
I am not idealizing the petty-bourgeoisie, but we live in a
capitalist system, and it is important to recognize the role that they
have played in the culture and life of this country. In small towns and
rural areas, especially, the appearance and disappearance of a little
enterprise is no small thing. The petty-bourgeoisie have been movers
behind local festivals, for example, which offer some break from the
dreariness of everyday life under capitalism. They provide spaces for
people to interact with others, so forth and so on.
By the time I started working in the store after several years of
being a student worker it was on its last legs. In just over a year the
business withered to an unsustainable level. Around a month ago the
store closed for good. The family has sold off a few beef cattle and is
ransacking the old service station that used to be connected to the
store for scrap metal. (Just yesterday, the station’s roof collapsed,
resulting in yet another financial liability.) This is the more genteel
version of a more general phenomenon around these parts. Even further
down in the food chain, rag-tag bands of teenage boys are known to be
stealing the doors off people’s house trailers and so on, to get the
copper inside.
This is obviously not a good situation for me, but it’s also pretty
depressing to see the larger social fall-out amid an overall scene of
grinding rural poverty. For one thing, people lost jobs, and some of
those people had worked for this business all their lives. There aren’t
many jobs out there to replace the ones lost, and there is, in fact, a
world of difference between petty-bourgeois paternalistic exploitation
and the kinds of exploitation one would experience working for Wal-Mart.
Exploitation is exploitation, but a worker is in a different situation
when their boss knows all their kids’ names, and will personally loan
them money, for example, rather than being just another face in a
low-wage workplace with an insanely-high turnover rate.
On top of that, the store’s primary customers at this point were
older people who had been shopping there all their lives, and for whom
the store was a principle venue of social interaction (picture the
cultural desert of a town that has a prison but not a coffee shop,
especially for people who can’t get around well) and very local low
income people, many of whom do not have access to a motor vehicle. Lots
of these folk shopped at the store because it was relatively easy to get
to on foot. In an environment characterized by horrendously
inconvenient and unsustainable rural sprawl, having such a place to shop
was very important for these people. Now they are forced to walk or
bike much longer distances to get the things they need in a humid
subtropical climate where summer temperatures hover around 100 degrees
Fahrenheit. Today the heat index was 114. This is what the ongoing
process of advanced monopolization looks like; it is an irreversible
feature of capitalism and it speeds up during economic crises. In this
immediate local case, the appearance of Wal-Mart on the scene is
predominantly to blame.
I could certainly go on about the deleterious consequences of the
store’s closing (and am actually inclined to do so) but let’s allow this
to suffice: A principle theme of the process I just described—like the
others—is that, fundamentally, the ordinary people involved in the
organization in question, either as member-participants or as community
affected, had no say in the changes that were occurring. For all intents
and purposes they were subject to the machinations of largely-invisible
elites and titanic economic forces seemingly beyond anybody’s control.
This is everyday life for most people.
Again, in the German Ideology, Marx and Engels point out the
strangeness of such a situation, where the human-made world seems to act
upon us like an alien power. Using the example of trade, they say:
“…how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than
the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules
the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation
which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate
of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune
to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise
and to disappear…” (54-55)
When the whole of society is structured around production for private
accumulation, then our world is continually swept up by forces
seemingly out of people’s control. But powerlessness to shape human
reality is most acute for the economically exploited and oppressed
majority, who are continually the victims of all kinds of horrors, and
who are systematically excluded from institutional arenas in which they
could shape the course of change.
A communist vision for the 21st century needs to ground itself in deep awareness of this fact:
That powerless is a principle feature of life for the vast majority
of people in capitalist society, and powerlessness takes a multitude of
forms depending upon where people are geographically, where exactly they
fit in the economic order, and how their lives are penetrated by the
many systems of oppression, the list of which we are now so used to
reciting like an incantation, perhaps in hopes that we will chance upon a
magical combination of words and we will all rise up to cast these
chains into the flaming rubbish heap of history. Such is the level of
our desperation.
Secondly, a communist vision for the 21st century needs to ground
itself in a deep commitment to reversing this state of affairs. We need
to affirm that the socialist revolution we’re working towards will put
the masses of people in control of society. Again, in the German
Ideology, Marx and Engels complement this ugly assessment of
actually-existing society with their conception of communist society:
“…with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the
communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the
destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves
produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved
into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual
relation, under their own control again.” [Italics added] (55)
When we speak of communism amongst ourselves and all the people we
encounter, these guiding ideals should never be far from the surface.
The Maoist Rupture: Putting mass politics in command
The project for a new society that Marx and Engels elucidate in the
German Ideology is unequivocally radical, and hinges on profound
commitment to increasing human agency on a mass scale. This has,
overall, been the intention driving the communist movement across the
world. But as we are reconceiving and building up the rudiments of new
revolutionary forces, let’s also be unequivocal and sober in our
assessment of how we got where we are today.
We must not leave critique up to anti-communists on the Left and
Right. We must accept that despite incredible achievements in the
social, political, military, economic and cultural spheres, 20th century
socialist regimes—overall—were not effective at creating conditions for
mass agency. There are many reasons for this, including factors
internal to the movements themselves and because of imperialist
interference. Some revolutions started out promisingly (Russia, China)
and descended into authoritarian technocracy and ultimately capitalist
restoration, while other regimes were imposed from outside (e.g., the
socialist regimes in Eastern Europe) and had no mass basis to begin with
(which is not to say that there weren’t homegrown, even vibrant,
communist movements in these places).
By the time the Chinese revolution was seriously underway, the first
socialist state power—the USSR—was already far down the road of
authoritarian bureaucratism. It had achieved much, and there were
subordinated elements of mass agency in the society, but its overall
trajectory was not in the direction of liberation.
Mao and those of similar mind in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
were aware of the problem of bureaucratization early on in the course of
the Chinese Revolution. At the end of the Long March (a major retreat
of the Chinese communists from their rural base area on the northwest
side of the Jinggangshan mountains) the CCP set about creating a new
base area in the backwater of Yan’an. The communist movement was in
shambles and they were forced to build it from the ground up. This base
area existed from the mid 1930s until the late 1940s. As they created a
vibrant revolutionary state and society in miniature, the issue of
bureaucratization came to the fore, as it would repeatedly for the
duration of the revolutionary period in China. In his seminal 1940
essay, On New Democracy, Mao did not hesitate to address the
increasingly bureaucratic nature of the Party’s work. He identified
bureaucracy as a killer of revolution.
In Maoist theory, it is made clear that the real object of socialist
development is the actual transformation of social relations. Developing
forces of production is not an end in itself. As historian Rebecca E.
Karl put it in her 2010 biography of Mao,
"For Mao, the whole point of
the revolution was the practical one of creating the conditions for the
masses to transform their own lives.” (118)
The history of the Chinese revolution is an amazing one, and it is
important to note the vast and exemplary extent to which the revolution
was successful in marshalling the participation and creativity of the
masses. Besides the theoretical orientation of the Maoists in the
Chinese communist movement, a principle factor in the mass-based
character of many revolutionary sequences is the concrete way in which
the revolution developed. The Chinese revolution was not a brief
insurrection leading to a coup, but rather a multi-decade process in
which the communist movement grew among the people (the majority of whom
were peasants), transforming actual relations and consciousness on a
large scale before the CCP took state power in 1949.
Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s the CCP was well on its way to
becoming as rigid as its Soviet counterpart. Right-wing tendencies among
the Party bureaucracy and elites were leading the way. Proponents of
this road were emphasizing stability, order, authority and economic
development as opposed to fundamental social transformation. (It is
partly understandable given that China was emerging from disasters of
the Great Leap Forward period, but the non-revolutionary trajectory was
discernable to the most radical revolutionary leaders.)
The Maoists developed a powerful analysis through which they sought
to show how class struggle continued under socialism, the transition
period between capitalist and communist society. They came to believe
that, in regard to socialism (as it was developing within the context of
the party-state), the party bureaucracy itself was the breeding ground
of a new elite, a proto-capitalist class who would thwart the aims of
revolution and restore capitalism. (Though these capitalist
restorationist tendencies were not seen as necessarily conscious or part
of a vast counter-revolutionary conspiracy, as line differences were
conceived in Stalin’s USSR.)
The Maoists, of course, turned out to be right. In post-Mao China,
the restoration of capitalism proceeded at a rapid, though controlled
pace, showing simultaneously that, being a transitional phase combining
elements of both capitalism and communism, socialism’s revolutionary
gains can be reversed; and that, despite what seemed so clear in the
pro-capitalist euphoria that followed the collapse of nearly all of the
socialist regimes, democracy is not the natural shell of capitalist
economy.
The struggle of the Maoists against the bureaucratic rightists in the
CCP reached its apex with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, an
amazingly complex and contradictory historical sequence which lasted
from 1966-1976 (the year of Mao’s death) based on one periodization,
though the main phase was from 1966-1969. On the one hand the Cultural
Revolution was an elite power struggle among top Party leaders who were
fighting over the course that Chinese economic, political and cultural
development would take. But it quickly became a mass movement of
students and workers—and this was the Maoist leaders’ intentions. For an
all too brief flowering, the people in their millions were struggling
over political theory, forming a dizzying array of independent student
and worker organizations, criticizing Party bureaucracy and exercising
power to fundamentally change the direction of Chinese society. They
were taking revolution into their own hands. They were becoming
political agents in extraordinary ways that dramatically highlight the
hollowness of claims about democracy made by capitalist and
actually-existing socialist regimes then and now.
It is difficult to overstate the degree to which the Cultural
Revolution constituted a rupture with the hegemonic vision of socialism
that had reigned for so long. Even more dramatically than their
counterparts in the West, the revolutionaries of 1960s China were
reviving the struggle over the heart of socialism and the communist
project—a struggle that had been repressed for far too long.
In order to gain from these experiences so that we might reinvigorate
the communist movement today (and put mass agency at the center) I
think that we must appreciate the Cultural Revolution’s full weight and
world historic import. I am in agreement with Alain Badiou’s assessment
in The Communist Hypothesis when he argues that the fact of the Cultural
Revolution indicates the effective end as a viable emancipatory
strategy of the previous phase of socialist revolution embodied in the
form of the party-state. (In Badiou’s terms the party-state strategy is
saturated, that is, filled to its limit, exhausted, spent. It belongs to
a previous historical sequence and not to a future one.)
For the most part the actors in the Cultural Revolution did not
envision themselves as attempting to overthrow the party-state order,
but rather as attempting to revive the Party and put it on a
revolutionary footing once again. But the actuality of the Cultural
Revolution, as Badiou explains—and as I said towards the beginning this
article—represents the highest development anywhere of the contradiction
between the genuinely emancipatory dimension of 20th century socialist
revolution and the form of the party-state. The formation of independent
revolutionary organizations, and non-party-based administrative
apparatuses (e.g. the Shanghai Commune) constitute a tentative
going-beyond what was possible or even thinkable in the previous
socialist hegemony. The Cultural Revolution was in excess of the
party-state, even as it was part of the party-state sequence, and even
as it ultimately failed to yield a sustainable alternative. The contrast
between this moment in Chinese history and the return to law and order
afterwards shows just how excessive (in the best and worst sense) the
Cultural Revolution was.
In his letter to Slavoj Žižek (also included in the Communist
Hypothesis), Badiou argues convincingly, I think, that those of us
working to revive communism today should take the Cultural Revolution as
our starting point. It is a problem which poses questions for us to
solve. 1917 was the historical answer to the failure of the Paris
Commune, its “real historical answer,” (274) as Badiou puts it. In his
view, the Cultural Revolution is our Paris Commune, a Sphinx who asks us
to solve the contradictions of Leninism in order to move ahead with the
next phase of revolutions. This Sphinx asks us basic questions: What is
revolution? How can socialist revolution result in mass agency? What is
the nature of the new revolutionary institutions; are they to remain
static and entrenched, or are they just provisional mechanisms for
creating a different set of conditions in which new forms of agency can
be developed? What organizational forms will be best suited to the next
phase of revolution, and how will they be different from one location to
another?
On this last question, I am not as quick as Badiou to declare that
the revolutionary party as such is saturated, even if the
one-party-state, for us, is a dead end. I think that the experiences of
contemporary revolutionaries in India, Nepal, and parts of Latin America
are showing that the revolutionary party has not lost all utility, and
can still be a powerful vehicle for mass movement. But I am convinced
that we must seriously problematize how previous revolutionary parties
have been structured, and how the party is to relate to the people and
the state. I think that we must also work towards a flowering of new
revolutionary organizational forms that can exist alongside
revolutionary parties, and therefore prevent the identity of party and
state which, in my view, inevitably leads to bureaucratic and
authoritarian degeneration. All of this is necessary if the next
revolutionary sequences are to be based on a mass politics that can
sustain itself over time. My strong suspicion is that even with the
taking of state power, these sequences will have to be a lot more
anarchic than many 20th century Marxists and their progeny have
supposed.
Wrapping up…
I suspect that I’ve made my points clear, and perhaps too
repetitiously, so I won’t attempt to sum everything up here. I will just
close with a few final comments geared towards fleshing out my
intention.
Largely what prompted me to prepare these notes for the Brer Rabbit
Study Group—as I hinted at in the very first section—is my concern over
certain trends and organizations that are gaining a voice today among
the U.S. communist movement and who have a decidedly non-emancipatory
view of revolution. I am disturbed by their politics in a most visceral
way. There is much that I find genuinely nauseating. How many other
people have had this same reaction? How many other people get turned off
of radical politics generally—and revolutionary communist politics,
most importantly—at precisely a time when our movement needs to be
growing? I find it troubling when I’ve been told by long-time radical
activists that I’m the first communist they ever met and liked. Doesn’t
that suggest that our movement has some big problems?
In a recent discussion Kasama’s Jed Brandt put this particular
problem in a rather polarizing and elucidating way. I applaud this. He
said,
“Some people don’t make the distinction between the iron fortitude
that is required to dedicate ones life to serving the people and the
kind of iron will that is required to drive a tank over a crowd of
unarmed people.”
This is a point which needs to be very much at the fore as we attempt to revitalize the communist movement!
A Study Group participant made a comment in a similar vein. We were
discussing what it means to be a revolutionary today, and how figuring
this out is a big problem characterized by a great deal of uncertainty.
There is much disagreement about how revolutionaries should be, and what
they should be doing in our present circumstances. He accepted this
relative uncertainty as a real condition that we must confront, but
suggested that we have some pretty strong indications. He commented that
there are “degrees of freedom” within which we can, with some
conviction, be said to be revolutionary, and that there are certain
territories into which we might venture that are indubitably “something
else.” Applauding at something like the Tiananmen Square massacre would
be one of those something elses, a point at which our conception of
socialism becomes indistinguishable from fascism, and we plummet
headlong from revolution to reaction and even barbarism.
Entering into this new period of uncertainty and upheaval, let’s be
clear on these points: We are for revolution and we are for liberation.
We are not for something else.
If we care about real people and their lives we must be able to
accept that the vast majority of people on the world has rejected
authoritarian socialism. We can’t deny the lived experience of people
who were rejoicing in the streets when the Berlin Wall came down, for
example. People don’t want that, and communists today should not either.
This kind of nostalgia and dishonesty is not helping our cause one bit.
Finally, let’s revisit Mao’s famous quotation,
“The masses and the masses alone are the motive force of history.”
This idea is key. We should read this, on the one hand, as a banal
statement of fact (historical change occurs because of the productive
activity of millions, and now billions, of people); but at the same time
we should understand this statement as a prescription—performatively,
as they say in linguistics. It is a reality that we are trying to bring
about. For it is true that masses of people are pushing this cart along,
but they are not yet doing it as consciously and voluntarily organized
agents. It is up to us to make this happen. It will require tremendous
effort and sacrifice, because all the forces of the existing world are
pitted against such a rupture with the previous course of human history.
But as far as I’m concerned, if we are not going to try, I’d rather not
go on living.
Sources
- Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London and New York: Verso, 2010).
- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970).
- Rebecca E. Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century
World: A Concise History (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2010).
