The Dance of the Puppets: From Consciousness to Culture

The Dance of the Puppets: From Consciousness to Culture

Order and Class

In this third Thread on the same argument, that is, on the deformed doctrine of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose only importance lies in furnishing a useful occasion for interesting elucidations, we make a link between the formidable historical blunder of seeing (in Russia and everywhere else) the bureaucracy as a new social class, and an obvious confusion between the concepts of order and of class.

The word class, which Marxism has made its own, is the same in all modern languages: Romance, Germanic, Slavonic. It was Marxism which originally introduced the use of the word to mean a social-historical entity, even if it had been used before. The word comes from Latin, but it should be noted that for the Romans the classis was the fleet, the military naval squadron. The concept is therefore of a collection of units which act together, move in the same direction and which face the same enemy. The essence of the concept is therefore moving and fighting, and not (as in an assonance that is entirely …bureaucratic) classification, which later on took on a static meaning. Linnaeus classified botanical and zoological species metaphysically into fixed groups. Darwin demonstrated the evolutionary development from one species to another, de Vries provided the proof that at given turning points what we have is not extremely slow imperceptible changes, but sudden unforeseen mutations.

Those who reduce Marxism to an analysis in which society is catalogued according to economic interests seem really odd when posing as the modern completers of Marxism, considering they haven’t even assimilated its first vital keystrokes. Allegedly Marxism merely “began” the analysis of modern society, merely laid the foundations for a socialist programme, whereas it is these gentlemen who have taken on «the continuation of this analysis today, using the infinitely richer material that a century of historical development has accumulated, and which allows them to advance much further than Marx in their new elaboration of the socialist programme». To exercise our dialectical skills to dispel such pleasantries is too much to ask, when blowing a raspberry is quite sufficient.

So without taking such stuff seriously, we still deem it useful to take our argument a few steps further and reconstruct the organic presentation of Marxism, an edifice we know from the ground floor up so we don’t need to get new materials from anywhere else. These social analyses remind us, for whatever reason, of a cartoon about the military, still stuck in our minds from our schooldays. A new recruit looks at the notices on the toilet doors: “Privates”, “Corporals”, “NCOs”, “Officers” and says to himself, “These gentlemen must be producing something of much higher quality”.

Class therefore points not to a different page in the census report, but to historical motion, to struggle, to a historical programme. That the class still needs to find its programme is an expression devoid of meaning. The programme determines the class.

Yesterday

Pre-bourgeois societies

An Order is instead a division of a society which wants to remain as it is and to be guaranteed against revolution. To very varying degrees the social divisions presented by history have had an inherent tendency to lead to outbreaks of class struggle. Marx explained why Asiatic societies are obstinately immutable: the local mode of production, which is often still “communist”, does not result in conflict between the productive forces and the social structure. Hence the massive importance if in Persia, in India, in Indochina and in China, class conflicts are set off.

At a certain point the orders in medieval society are no longer able resist their transformation into classes; and it is navigation, trade, manufacture and new discoveries in mechanics that are able to accomplish this miracle.

In French instead of “order” they say “état”, and use the same word for the central political State, which under early feudalism existed in the background, having barely taken shape, and boiling down essentially to the military court of the emperor or monarch. When Louis XIV, during the full flowering of capitalist forces of production under the absolute monarchy, stated “L’état c’est moi”, I am the State, he meant the political State. According to the feudal organization of the orders, there were three of them. The first order, premier état, was the nobility, closed off in an hereditary group of families with heraldic titles, the second order, deuxième état, was the clergy, following the hierarchical organization of the Catholic church, the third order, troisième état, was known as the bourgeoisie, which in fact had no power although it was represented in the “estates general”, that is in the national assembly of the orders, which had no legislative powers much less executive ones, and was just a consultative body for the King and his government. The bourgeois back then consisted of merchants, financiers and functionaries. In the Paris and France of the time Parliament was understood to mean the judicial magistracy in its various grades, which, although serving the King, enjoyed a certain autonomy in a doctrinal sense at least, which capitalism has since removed.

Remembered from school, but when viewed from a Marxist perspective are seen in a new light. When the humble and not very decorative third estate became the powerful and revolutionary capitalist class, they asked themselves: what is the third estate? Nothing. What does it want to be? Everything!

But since with the capitalists a new class arrived on the scene, the workers in the manufacturing sector (it would not be wrong to say the free craftsmen were a constituted order as well, but they were organized in trade guilds, and only the professions had their place in the third estate) in what may be called its romantic period, liked to talk not about the new revolutionary class in bourgeois society, but of a new order, of a fourth estate.

No constitution in history has ever recognized such an estate. The feudal ones denied participation to orders of peasant serfs and proletarians, and the bourgeois ones noisily abolished all estates and recognized just citizens with equal rights.

Many well-known deviations from Marxism, whose thorough, documented autopsy reports we have in our possession, can be reduced to a confusion between class and estate, and we recall Marx’s indignation when Lassalle changed turned the Arbeiterklasse into the Arbeiterstand, an insipid workers’ estate. Repetita juvant [Repetition is useful].

These gentlemen, with their doctorates in the “material” from the century after Marx, cannot see that their material, their “infinitely richer” historical data, have not yet got up to the storming of the Bastille. Not analyse de la misère, but misère de l’analyse.

Labour aristocracy

At the beginning of the century, Georges Sorel, the brilliant and energetic founder of the doctrine of revolutionary syndicalism, accredited the expression labour aristocracy among his many followers. It was only after Lenin’s critique, which was based above all on precise guidelines laid down by Marx and Engels (especially for English industry), that our school designated as proletarian aristocracy, or rather the top part of the proletariat, the workers on a higher salary, the much sought after, skilled – and better educated – specialists, easily ensnared by conformist ideologies, and who were prey to, and supporters of, the opportunist leaders. But the way Sorelian syndicalism conceived of it was not as one part of the working class above the other parts; rather it considered the entire proletariat, the class of wage labourers, as an aristocracy in the societal complex, thus overturning the primacy and leadership of the opposed capitalist class, and deriding – only up to here were they right – their parliamentary democracy, which made a mockery of their equality before the State.

Syndicalism met with success because it countered the encroachments of legalitarian reformism during the period of prosperous and progressive, pacifist and idyllic capitalism. The syndicalists exposed the grave dangers of the kind of parliamentary action which wanted arbitration by the legal powers to replace the clash of economic interests in labor disputes, and it criticized the union leaders who stopped the workers from using violence in struggles against the bosses, and who repudiated the use of the general strike as a means of struggle.

At a certain point (for example in France and in Italy between 1900 and 1910) the entire problem of proletarian action looked as though it boiled down to a dialogue between reformists and Sorelian syndicalists. Only slowly did radical Marxism react to the grave deviations of the latter.

Sorel denied the function of the proletarian political party and saw the revolution as a direct clash between the red trade unions and the bourgeois State. He did not recognize the question of power in relation to historical phases as raised by Marxism, of class centralism: for him the struggles at the local, trade and company level were enough as long as they were inoculated against the poison of class collaboration, and thereby rendered capable of overthrowing bourgeois power and achieving the expropriation of the bosses. This illusory vision of the expropriating general strike not only ignored the necessary phases involved in social transformation, and reduced the conquest of society to conquering factories, but above all failed to recognize that if the plague of collaboration between classes keeps recurring, it is precisely because the struggles that have taken place within the confines of the factory, or at the local or national level, have not been able to rise to the level of the general unity of the political struggle of the world proletariat, which has its sole organ in the world communist party.

Sorel reduced dialectical determinism to a heightened and active class voluntarism, one place at a time, one group at a time; no different phases, neither as regards individuals in struggle, nor the group of which they were a part, in terms of their interests, consciousness and will. Pure proletarians, wage labourers standing side by side; and nothing more than that required to give them the will to fight and gain awareness of the objectives. Basically – as we never tire of repeating – it is action as an end in itself with no need of a general direction towards a distant historical point of arrival; and in this it just ended up falling back on pre-marxist philosophy, and, like its distant descendants today, speculated on a Marx’s comment – an ounce of action is worth more than a dozen programmes – which he made when lashing out at the programmers of day-to-day and contingent successes within the established order.

Neo-economism

Historically, the error of Sorel and his followers was revealed by the fact that in 1914, no less than the right-wing revisionists, these ardent, extremist left-wing revisionists passed over to the cause of the war along with most of their well-known leaders and workers’ confederations (suffice to recall Hervé, Corridoni etc.). And their error lay precisely in treating the revolutionary proletariat not as a class, in the potent sense that Marx attributed to it, but as a mere order. The society that these people today call post capitalism is supposedly distinguished by this: instead of workers being subjected to the lies of democracy under a bourgeois aristocracy, it is under a workers’ aristocracy. The fourth estate becomes the first: and that’s it.

For them, the serious problems of the movement’s theory and organization, resolved at the outset by Marxism fully and thoroughly, such that whoever tampers with it damages it, as Lenin and every other orthodox Marxist has repeated a hundred times over, can be blithely merged with the concept of aristocratic order. Someone born into the nobility has no need of education, culture, a role, or organization: all of that is part and parcel of his existence from birth, from his first wail: his consciousness of being a member of an elect estate is in his blood, and he will always set himself apart from the subjugated estates and from their human material. Alone or organized, ignorant or intelligent, he is by nature, will and automatic consciousness cut from one cloth: he’s a noble. He is inseparable from his income – just like the bureaucrat is from his salary.

The modern bourgeoisie is supposedly an estate hidden behind the abolition of orders and it only remains for it to meet its executioner: just as the bourgeoisie, the third estate, brushed aside the nobility and clergy, so the fourth estate will sweep away the estate of company bosses.

Having reduced the recipe to this, it only remains to tear out every brilliant page in which the master describes the epic deeds of the bourgeoisie over ten centuries, revealing itself as a class, abolishing not just some estates, but the whole system of estates; it only remains to tear out every page of Marx’s most important work, Capital, in which this social force appears on the scene, no longer linked like earlier ones to groups of persons or to personal types of dependence. Bourgeoisie does not bring order to mind, but risk.

Evidently they are not up to understanding what Marx or Engels meant when they wrote about the difference between the personal servitude that characterised the Middle Ages, and the labour power that characterises the modern period, between the rule over the person of the slave, over the power of the serf, and over the commodity.

These radical, drastic transitions between various forms of production and society are reduced to a simple succession of changing groups involved in the same banal activity: exploitation.

Only those condemned to their dying day to think like a corrupt bourgeois see exploitation at the centre of everything: relationships between people are just viewed as business deals; and the relationship between classes? Just a deal that went wrong!

Therefore, if the revolution is reduced to fighting for an aristocracy, to conquering power for an estate, we can understand where the famous discovery comes from, according to which the factory owners’ estate was replaced by the functionary’s estate, with the bureaucracy becoming the modern aristocracy: so just turn the proletarians in the workshops into aristocrats and the revolution is back on the right track! The automatic consultation of their conscience will be the salvation of all.

For just as those born into the nobility have an innate knowledge of correct social comportment so those who live within the boundaries of the factory walls and get a wage packet know everything about revolution, and have the physical sensation of exploitation.

And so there is no point having a programme of a society without classes and without a ruling class, that for all the more reason is without an aristocracy, and we entirely understand, as wished for by Sorel, that there is no point in having a party.

And entirely pointless also is the history which showed, in the tumultuous years after the storming of the Bastille, so many refined aristocrats forgetting the call of blood, and awaking from their private speculator’s indolence to the grandiose class task, the bourgeoisie of France, the capitalists of the world.

Democracy for internal use only

We all know about the trotskite opponents of Stalinist repression and their “proletarian democracy”. According to these various small groups the critique of bourgeois democracy entirely consists of condemning the way it blurs the outlines of the two, or more, opposed social classes, and in the fraud that since workers are more numerous than the bourgeoisie, the electoral system will operate in their favour. To tell the truth even this criticism would not hold up, since the proletariat attaining “full” class consciousness under a capitalist regime is to be ruled out. However, to the critique of “bourgeois” democracy and democracy “in general”, there is then made to follow not just tolerance, but a call for “internal class democracy”. It is stated that the entire Stalinist degeneration was due to having failed to achieve a mechanism of electoral delegation and a parliamentary type representation that functioned in the interests of the working class, allowing it to hold consultations, take control and make majority decisions on the State’s policies.

All of this is totally crazy. The historical form of democracy is that which corresponds to the politics of the capitalist class as it emerges from the womb of the feudal world, and it consists of representative bodies for all citizens, on which the ruling ideology declares the material power of the State to be based. Just as capitalist production is a necessary stage of economic development, so too, in given “areas” and in given periods, does the full legal development of democratic forms represent a necessary historical transition. When as regards Europe between 1848-1871, and Russia between 1902-1917, Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotski asserted as much, and as could be asserted for Asia today, they weren’t talking about democracy in general let alone the hybrid of proletarian democracy, but exactly and specifically about bourgeois democracy, that is, about a political form that corresponds, insofar as it was, or is still necessary, to the development of bourgeois revolutionary forms supported by the proletariat, as a preliminary step towards taking the next step beyond.

The political form of the specifically proletarian revolution is the dictatorship. Not a personal dictatorship, of course, but a class dictatorship which creates its own special and original organs, namely: the organs for controlling State power during the period of open struggle. But if the dictatorship of an estate or order can easily be identified with an “internal democracy within the estate”, the revolutionary class dictatorship is something far less banal, far less formalistic and not subject to the ups and downs of stupid vote counts. The dictatorship is defined by its strength and by where it directs that strength; one cannot say that it will build socialism on condition it is the right dictatorship, but that it is the true proletarian dictatorship when it is on the road to communism.

History is full of democracies within the estates. They are pre-capitalist forms, insofar as the bourgeoisie was the first, theoretically, formally and constitutionally, to implement democracy for all. The Greek and Roman democracies were democracies within estates: free citizens were equal but the mass of slaves and serfs were entirely excluded from power. In the Germanic feudal system, when the nobles or princes of a certain grade elected the king, it was a case of democracy being used within an estate, and so too in the cases when the barons elected the prince. This was the case in the oligarchic Italian and Flemish republics. Even within the ecclesiastic estate the Pope is elected by means of an internal democracy (and formerly bishops were too).

A posthumous mimicking of these countless antiquated systems can be found in the proposal for a workers’ parliamentarianism which can supposedly “freely” control the machinery of the dictatorship, in the State established after the workers’ revolution, and in which, quite clearly, private owners and company bosses, in so far as they have survived, have no political rights (which does not simply mean casting a vote, but having organizations, parties, offices, newspapers, platforms from which to speak, etc; influence upon education, art, the theatre etc.).

The Barbarists find this most embarrassing, as do almost all analysts of the Russian mystery. There are no longer proprietors and businessmen, and so the dictatorship should be cast aside and free elections to all posts re-established. But for fear of being lumped in with the pure social democrats, or having to confess they are no different from them, they say that the dictatorship consists of not giving the vote to … the functionaries. And so only non-functionaries can elect the functionaries, in order to then … hand everything over to them. This empty fiction is not therefore the product of a new doctrine, but of a narrowing down of the concept of revolutionary class to that of aristocracy, of the horny handed in place of the well-manicured, with an internal parliamentary mechanism to elect who knows who to do who knows what.

What the productive forces might be, what the relations of production are, what type of transition from one social mode of production to another is taking place and how this determines the clash of the various social classes, and what, therefore, reflects and sustains the power of the present day State, about such things they do not even think to wonder.

Madame Consciousness

Anyway all these hypothetical and fantastical devices for exercising control and choice will not work unless one admits, after however having accepted that is based it on the members of one class only, that not only every individual that belongs to it is conscious, but that the consciousness of each member of it is the same, without which the copying the fraudulent bourgeois election system becomes totally inexplicable. Because only with these presuppositions can it be assumed that the right historical direction will be the one indicated, at given junctures, by a numerical majority of votes cast by the workers.

If a pack of voting slips got lost on their way to the count, it could cause an 180 degree change in the path to revolution!

Worse still is when they want to apply the same formula under fully functioning capitalism, to rediscover the lost road to socialism and revolution by using analogous statistical pulse-takings of all proletarians,.

In their stupid work of control and critique – and whoever wrote it should be giving themselves a good dressing down rather than criticising others – we can get a glimpse of how easy it is to reverse the meaning of Marxist arguments by reading back to front, for example in Trotski, what they wrongly approve, and in other cases what they condemn, when it is right.

The drafters of inauspicious “documents” in which they pass everything through the sieve of their own wretched heads, in the name of freedom of criticism (they get any further than Luther, the biggest hypocrite of them all), grant their approval to Trotski when he says “Socialism, as opposed to capitalism, is built consciously”. But shortly afterwards, as we shall see, they engage in non-stop criticism of other theses by the same author. These poor creatures fail to see that before attaining the heights of a Trotski, who can be counted on not to produce isolated theses that are out of synch with a unified and organic line, they will need to eat a whole ton of humble pie.

And how do they paraphrase Trotski’s statement? By making him say something entirely different, to the extent that if his expression is rigorous and precise, the way his “auditors”, or pupils in this case, express it is totally wrong, especially as regards the blatantly bourgeois arrière-pensée: «therefore the conscious activity of the masses is the essential condition for socialist development». This meaningless thesis, which not only every right wing socialist but every bourgeois would subscribe to, is beneath Trotski, and more fitting of Bertoldo, who when granted the favour of being hung from a tree of his choice chose the strawberry plant. Well, any capitalist can fully accept socialism if the essential (!) condition for it is that it is preceded by the conscious activity of the masses.

This whole palinode is supposed to correct Marx who would practice no less than “empiricism” as regards the socialist programme, asserting that we only need to destroy the capitalist class and State to give free play to the construction of socialism. Marx is supposed to have had this ambiguous idea of the programmatic characteristics of socialist society, coming off with State planning of production, and so these documentarians now go on by attributing him an “unambiguous” notion of socialism, which boils down to this idiocy: eliminating exploitation! or inequality!

For much less than this was Herr Dűhring accused of “delusions of grandeur”.

For a description of socialist society we are happy to refer back to everything Marx wrote. But Marx dealt a death blow to utopianism! And how! Utopianism describes future society as it proposes it should be, and would like it to be, while Marx describes it as it will be. But the descriptions he gives of it are so salient and sharp in every field, that the belated and shallow, non ambiguous although decidedly antirevolutionary, egalitarianism and judicialism of Marx’s “patcher uppers” just seem like a rehash of centuries-old doléances.

Let us return to Trotski. Capitalism was not preceded by a conscious awareness of its characteristics, but socialism is. This concept has nothing at all to do with the purely idealistic notion of “conscious activity” of the masses, inevitably reduced to a conscious activity on the part of individuals, who are thereby raised to the motor cause of social events.

Ideology of the revolutions

We referred a while back [in the ‘Croaking of Praxis’, Ed.] to the classic passage about it not being possible to judge the epochs of social subversion by the consciousness they have of themselves. The leaders and promoters of the anti-slavery revolution disguised their fight against the form of production based on slavery, in which the real content of this historical transition was to be found, under a doctrine, complete and exhaustive, in which the motive force behind the action appeared as the liberation of the spirit from the flesh and the objective of a life in the after world. The activity of the masses was not conscious, they were not fighting for paradise, and neither did they know that in place of slavery a new form of servitude would arise. The consciousness of the change lay not with the masses, nor in any school, doctrine or group. Only afterwards did it become clear.

It was similar with the capitalist revolution against feudalism. It involved a transition to a mode of production based on wage labour, but the postulates, of a no less powerful philosophical and political school, were presented very differently, as the freedom of man or of the citizen … triumph of reason.

In these and many other transitions a new ruling class arose after the fall of the old one. But in the socialist revolution, which will abolish classes, there exists a sufficiently clear cut consciousness of its objectives in advance. From where and from whom does it arise? This is the point. To attribute to Trotski the idea that this pre-existing consciousness of the process must have developed in anyone lining up to fight for the revolution and against the obstacles that lie in its way, is absolutely ridiculous. For us Marxists it is enough that there is consciousness before the process; but not universally so, not en masse, not in a majority (a term without a deterministic meaning) of the class, but in a minority of it albeit a small one, and at a certain point even in a tiny group, or even – be scandalized o activists! – in a momentarily forgotten written text. But groups, schools, movements, texts and theses, over a long period of time, form a continuum that is nothing other than the party, which is impersonal, organic and unique, precisely because of this pre-existing consciousness of revolutionary development. Capitalism did not present a similar phenomenon, process and development: that is what Trotski said, and nothing else.

As usual, in order to show that Trotski was not one of those fools spewing out new documents, but someone who expressed theses that are the common patrimony of the party, that is, which overstep the limitations of peoples and generations, is rammed home again Marx’s central thesis that social revolutions derive from conflicts between material relations and generally have a deformed consciousness of themselves: true consciousness comes long after the clashes, the struggle and the victory.

Put aside the crap about the State taking over and planning a mercantile/monetary and wage labour economy, and, for once, listen. Do not prepare documents, Do not exercise the supreme right to free criticism, just do something anyone can do: just prick up your ears: clean out your auditory canal, and listen to Engels decisive words:

«With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked of from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones (…) The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him.

«Man’s own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history – only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

«To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism» (Engels, “Anti-Dűhring”, in MECW XXV, 270-271).

What other documents are you ever going to need? Stop coming up with such miserable constructs with your “so much richer” material.

The now pictured in this powerful quote from Engels is what will come after the social taking possession of the means of production and the ending of economic competition and commerce; that is, it will come long after the conquest of political power. Then, for the first time there will be conscious activity of men, of the human collectivity. Then, since there will no longer be classes.

Consciousness, as far as Marxists are concerned, is therefore not a condition, and much less an essential requirement, for class activity of all kinds, but is actually absent, since it will appear for the first time not as class consciousness, but as consciousness of a human society that is at last controller of its own process of development, which was determined from outside of it for as long as there were oppressed classes.

The revolution is the historical task of the proletarian class called into action by forces which, for the time being, it is unaware of. Awareness of the final outcome resides not in the masses, but only in the specific organ that bears the doctrine of the class, the party. Revolution, dictatorship, party are inseparable processes, and anyone looking for a way round it which pits one against the other is just a defeatist.

Today

Mademoiselle Culture

As far as “class” culture goes – we will soon see what kind of classism this is – Trotski is given a severe telling off. However in the cited passages he is only saying the same thing as that which was triumphantly taken up in order to launch conscious activity, and it wasn’t him who dreamt it up, or took out a patent on it: it is Marx’s, Engels’ and Lenin’s own theses we are talking about: what are we saying? in fact of hundreds and thousands of publicizers of the Marxist school, or as our good old Greek comrades used to say, of all the “archeiomarxists”, the old Marxists. Hardly updaters!

As though it wasn’t enough to have put one spoke put in the wheel of the revolution, the unachievable consciousness, they have another one. «The construction of communism presupposes the appropriation of culture by the proletariat, and this does not mean just the assimilation of bourgeois culture, but also the creation of the first elements of communist culture». Magnificent. All of this has only one sense: believing that to achieve wellbeing you have to have power, to have power it is necessary to have the will to struggle, for the will to struggle you need consciousness, for consciousness you need culture, that culture is not an expression of class, but an eternal “absolute value of thought” and that therefore it is not material factors that trigger action and shape ideology, but rather spiritual processes that condition historical struggle. Only someone who has this in mind, and either conceals it or is unaware of it, can write this way.

So Trotski then, who actually sets things out correctly, is “patched up” and set to rights. He took the liberty of saying that «The proletariat can at most absorb bourgeois culture». And also: «as long as the proletariat remains as such, it will not be able to absorb other culture than the bourgeois one, and when a new culture can be created it will not be a proletarian culture because the proletariat as a class will have ceased to exist». Such Trotski’s positions cause indignation, but reporting on the load of old twaddle with which they countered them is hardly worth the effort. They in fact express the essence of Marxist determinism very well. In school, the press, propaganda, church etc., as long as the working class is exploited, the dissemination of bourgeois ideology will always have an enormous advantage over the spread of scientific socialism. The revolutionary cause is bound to fail until it can count on a large section of the masses taking up the struggle, and not because they had liberated themselves from bourgeois cultural and economic influences, we don’t believe that for one minute, but due to the ineluctable thrust of the conflict between material productive forces, yet to become consciousness of the combatants, and much less then of scientific culture!

But the purely idealist backdrop to the – extremely old – position of the antibarbarist group is revealed in the prospect of this struggle between two cultures. Very soon it boils down to the struggle for one culture, for the culture.

The proletariat – before delivering itself from the much execrated exploitation, before it has the right to rise up – must supposedly construct the bases of a new culture through the assimilation of existing cultures. Does this mean the class must develop its own ideology in order to be able to fight? It means something worse! «A culture is never an ideology or an orientation, but an organic (?) whole, a constellation of ideologies and currents (organicity then, or just low grade eclecticism?)». And what on earth does this mean? The answer to that is explained by the deductions drawn from it. «The plurality of tendencies that constitute a culture implies that the essential condition for the creative appropriation of culture on the part of the proletariat is freedom of expression». So there we have it: but what the hell is this freedom of expression? Here is the clarification: «The reactionary ideological currents which are bound to appear in the transitional society must be fought, inasmuch as they are expressed in the ideological field alone (?!) with ideological arms and not with mechanical means limiting the freedom of expression».

So this then is the purpose of class culture, the communist culture they want to force on the proletariat before it takes power! When it has taken power it will have to respect all cultures and exercise its dictatorship in such a way that a bourgeois cannot put bombs in the machines, but can preach “reactionary” ideology and philosophy, it being obligated to fight him only by ideological means, and, tut tut! not with mechanical ones. The mechanical one evidently being a bash on the head with a truncheon or taking away his printing press. On the contrary, he will be asked to write for the communist newspapers, and to speak at meetings and he will be opposed only with a deferential philosophical “confutation” and with ideological weapons!

Those with the swords have the science

No more than this is needed – the final conclusion of an alleged study of the “socialist programme” to replace Karl Marx’s “empirical” and “ambiguous” one – to establish that it is fully-fledged idealism and bourgeois democratism we are dealing with, reeking of the accumulated mould of three centuries (at least). Freedom of expression! And what is there in this new addition to Marx that has not already been said by Enlightenment thinkers and protestants, whose doctrines have been crushed once and for all by Marxism?

Here it is a case not just of getting Lenin to back off, of making Marx retreat, but of diluting even the burning passion of the first communist, Babeuf, who entered the political struggle wanting to use physical force in the battle against powerful ideas.

Even Blanqui in his later years said “Those with the swords have the bread!”, understanding as he did that at certain key historical junctures economic claims are resolved by brute force. Do we really need to discuss our adversary’s culture then? And to allow him the freedom of expression to regain his lost cause, sword in hand? Babeuf and Blanqui, with such poor material, had clearly discovered that those with swords have the science.

The antibarbarists want to teach the dictatorship about the most unwarlike of limitations. But it is precisely this spineless demand that illustrates the abyss that separates Marxism from the various little groups who go on pilgrimages and do penance for the disgraceful affronts caused by the revolution – Stalinist though it is – to the extra-historical sanctity of freedom of expression.

All we need now is for the advocates of “conscious activity” to support a stupid slogan like: No to freedom of action. Yes to freedom of expression!

It is above all for this reason that, apart from the forms of capitalist State dictatorship operating in Russia, the function of the party as an agent of the dictatorship must be asserted. Because it is not just about repressing sabotage attempts and plots against the proletarian power, but of protecting the rigorous doctrinal unity of the communist current, which excludes all the others.

It would be pointless then to bind the bourgeoisie hand and foot, and even more so the sprawling, impersonal monster of capital, and then to respect their verbal apology. A nebulous workerist order might stoop to this suicide, but the proletarian revolution will triumph when, and only insofar as, its doctrinal organ, the party, imposes a gag on the freedom of expression of the slow to die ideologies and traditional cultures associated with the defeated classes.

These ultra-modern studies on the dictatorship of the proletariat and on the socialist programme are therefore nothing other than a complete undermining of both; they advocate for a return to a hypocritical contest of ideas that is in nothing dissimilar to that extolled by the very worst propaganda of the western bourgeoisie.

The circle therefore closes as only it must: with support for freedom and democracy “within the class” merely serving as the prelude to a complete relapse into the only kind of freedom and democracy that is historically possible until society is completely transformed by communism, i.e., bourgeois democracy and bourgeois freedom. Which coincide with the bourgeois dictatorship, and whereas the only free speech that they really allow is the cawing of crows and the prattling of gossips, in the revolutionary organization, it is precisely freedom of expression, first and foremost, that is curtailed.

The current period does not favour the proletarian class, the revolution and the revolutionary party. But when the hour arrives all three will re-emerge as one. What is urgent now, even within our movement small though it is, is to totally rid ourselves of any foolish nostalgia for this dissipative freedom to talk rubbish.