Though Cowards Flinch

Alex Snowdon has an interesting article up at his place, discussing the actions of Lenin and the views of Lukacs as formulated in the shadow of the ‘actuality of the revolution’. This is in contrast to theorists such as Kautsky and Bernstein who, in the eyes of Lukacs, attempt to suggest that “the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat can quite easily be left to the future – to a very distant future.”

Lukacs answers such critics, “[R]evolution is already on [the working class] agenda.” Alex then draws out what Lukacs meant. “[S]udden twists and leaps are possible, however superficially stable things may seem. To make the most of new opportunities, revolutionaries require dynamism and flair in giving coherence and leadership (where possible) to the struggles that emerge.”

In the context of their time, these words represent the restatement of a revolutionary platform against the reformist currents of the Second International. Considered today, they need not refer to an imminent period of upheaval in which the proletariat will be constituted as a class-for-itself and will seize power, but simply the need to consciously relate our ultimate goal back to our day-to-day actions.*

This is what we activists need to do, and likewise we need to consider that sudden twists and leaps are possible. The initial line that the Socialist Worker took, for example, over the Lindsey Oil Refinery Strike sticks out in my head as being singularly unimaginative. Instead of calling for complete support for the strikers and concomitant engagement on the picket lines, there was a cursory denouncement.

Whatever the slogan involved, the wildcat strike was a qualitative leap beyond the innumerable ‘days of action’ beloved by the TU bureaucracy. And, as so often, it was what the working class was doing, rather than what was being openly said, that was crucial to the strike. Evicting BNP members who came knocking and appealing to the Portuguese and Italian workers are examples of class struggle in action.

In the end, the victory of the strike secured better terms and conditions for the migrant workers by including them in the NAECI agreement – and creating the conditions for future co-operation: liaisons between the unionised workforce and the migrant workforce. The key thing, however, was that this strike came out of the blue; no one really expected a militant wildcat action of such intensity.

Keeping the goal of knitting together the working class in view orientated multiple socialist organisations towards the correct view – to support the demands of workers, and to organise cells of communists at the scene to that end. This construction of grassroots networks between socialist parties and groups of workers is part of the creation of the proletarian class-for-itself out of the objective reality of a class-in-itself.

Bearing in mind that what we might call the visible parts of the revolution are not imminent, this type of organisational work takes on a huge importance. It’s not simply playing with numbers, which is what the Labour Party and other reformist one-time social democratic parties devolved into, in the days of mass parties. It is the creation of links, for education and action, each link being two-way.

By creating these links, we build the revolutionary party (i.e. the class will gather together in an overtly political organisation, with the capability and influence to organise – i.e. to lead – action). This is how we make ourselves responsive to the sudden twists and leaps. Far from being a purely organisational question, it is, as Gramsci asserted**, a political one, if we have the ‘end’ in view, i.e. the question of how the working class will organize and seize power, and re-arrange factory by factory the means and relations of production.

Startlingly, these links are largely absent today! Here is the key point for the activist. Most socialist groups accept the need for the creation of such links (those that don’t do so in practice, whether or not they do so in theory, will have a particularly lonely life) – but yet the links do not exist. In fact, I would go so far as to say that a fair amount of our activities – such as street stalls – tend to address political campaigns as exactly that game of “numbers through the gate” which Lukacs and Gramsci opposed.

A huge proportion of the workforce is un-unionised; by virtue of being un-unionised and thus unfamiliar with the traditions of the labour movement, it is more likely to perceive capitalism as ‘normal’, as here to stay. So the average stall about the Wars in Iraq or Afghanistan will pull people in, many of whom will donate or go on marches, and not relate the experience back to the other spheres of their life, preserving the artificial distinction between the individual’s ‘political’ and ‘economic’ existences, which capitalist hegemony creates.

Our activity has not adapted to this, and so a lot of the Left seems to me to ebb and flow with popular sentiment, rather than with the vicissitudes and requirements of actual class struggle, which, from a Marxist perspective, cannot but take place in the shadow of the actuality of the revolution.

I don’t speak of any particular groupuscule – I think all are guilty of this to some extent. We seem to wait around a lot, almost, in the impressionistic words of George Dangerfield, waiting for the working class to pick up and bodily hurl the trades union apparatus against the political and economic establishments. When a flicker of activity occurs, we flock around it, create links that may or may not be continuous from then on, and then we wait around some more.

One answer along the road, I think, is to be more pro-active in our industrial policy.

Lenin’s Twenty-One Conditions for Admission to the International, quoted by Gramsci, stated that revolutionaries “must conduct systematic and unflagging communist activity within the unions, the workers’ councils, the factory councils, the co-operative societies and all other workers organisations.” There’s no question about this, but it leaves out a vast number of workers who are the victims of the atomisation of our society, which appears to me all the greater in the so-called Information Age.

If the nature of the dialectic is grasping something in motion, i.e. a process, then Lenin refers to the activities of revolutionaries while the revolution waxes into its visible stage. We still fight the same battle, the battle with the Left-reformists, for control of the organisations of the working class, and the higher consciousness across the working class that comes with a victory there.

However in conditions where the Left-reformists have ceased the basic activities of unionisation, then the revolutionary party must take them on, and integrate them into the fight for control of the workers organisations. Recruiting workers to a union goes hand in hand with fighting and winning victories for workers as part of the organised labour movement. Lots gets done on this as regards migrant workers or out-sourced workers in London, for example. Yet vast tracts of every High St. in outer areas wouldn’t know a union if it bit them.

Winning symbolic victories is merely one part of the argument, when it comes to class consciousness. There is a lot of mundane work as well – and except for things we’ve done for decades, namely street stalls and campus meetings, we revolutionaries as a group don’t always seem as dynamic as Alex would like us to be, as I would like us to be. And if we wish to be dynamic, rather than adopt, for example, the reformist Left approach of a big, colourful conference with high flying speakers, we should be guided by Lenin and Lukacs, and the actuality of the revolution.

*Lukacs goes on in the essay mentioned above, “Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought”, to draw out some rather mechanistic conclusions that belie the fluidity and richness of Marxist thought. For example, that, “The development of capitalism turned proletarian revolution into an everyday issue.” What turned revolution into an every day issue was class struggle and organisation of that struggle by people.

This is not predetermined by capitalism. Today capitalism continues to exist, and ‘the revolution’, by which I mean the actual disruption and seizure of capitalist relations and means of production, is far off. Yet such inevitabilism as Lukacs may be guilty of is probably excusable when one considers just how rapidly Europe had changed in ten years between 1914 and his time of writing, in the early 1920s.

** See “Cell Organization and the World Congress” and “The Organizational Basis of the Party”, L’Unita, July 28th & August 15th 1925. Interestingly, I came across comments related to this which claimed that it showed Gramsci’s bureaucratic, proto-Stalinist tendencies. One idly wonders how many Compassites might choke on their so-called post-Marxism if they ever read deep enough into Gramsci to learn that.