Frontier Socialism: Self-Organisation and Anti-Capitalism 3030523705, 9783030523701

Citation preview

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Frontier Socialism Self-Organisation and Anti-Capitalism

Monica Quirico Gianfranco Ragona

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14812

Monica Quirico · Gianfranco Ragona

Frontier Socialism Self-Organisation and Anti-Capitalism

Monica Quirico Turin, Italy

Gianfranco Ragona Turin, Italy

Translated by Angelina Ione Zontine Bologna, Italy

Chiara Masini Bologna, Italy

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-030-52370-1 ISBN 978-3-030-52371-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: traffic_analyzer/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Image This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. v

vi

TITLES PUBLISHED

12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels Before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition. 30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century.

TITLES PUBLISHED

vii

31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy. 33. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism. 34. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century. 35. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World. 36. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation.

Titles Forthcoming

Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaures: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina George C. Comninel, The Feudal Foundations of Modern Europe James Steinhoff, Critiquing the New Autonomy of Immaterial Labour: A Marxist Study of Work in the Artificial Intelligence Industry Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci

ix

x

TITLES FORTHCOMING

Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Capital After Classical Sociology: The Faustian Lives of Social Theory Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Note” V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity

TITLES FORTHCOMING

xi

Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Kei Ehara, Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in Mid-Century Italy Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class: Three Essays on Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism

Acknowledgements

This book was to all intents and purposes written together and the authors share scientific responsibility for the results. Monica Quirico carried out the final editing for Chapters 3, 6, 7 and 9 and the second Interlude and Gianfranco Ragona Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5 and 8 and the first Interlude. We have limited as much as possible in-text citations; however, in each section the sources we have made use of are listed under References. The Italian edition has been presented and discussed in several Italian cities. The translation has been funded by the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society (University of Turin). We are particularly grateful to our life partners, Diego and Laura. In different and unique ways, they have reminded us that what made the 1970s so unforgettable was the human and political solidarity that—in the north as in the south, among intellectuals as well as the subproletariat—mobilized individuals around values of justice and equality, and, at the same time, how the loss of this feeling over the following decades produced, and continues to produce, absurd, unfair and sometimes even cruel effects, especially for subaltern subjects.

xiii

Contents

1

Introduction 1 Hope and Disillusionment in Greece 2 What Socialism After Socialism? 3 A New Path to Self-Government References

1 1 8 11 19

2

“Revolution Is Not What the Revolutionaries Believe It to Be”: Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) 1 Life and Works 2 A Road for the Liberation of Workers 3 Analysis of Capitalism 4 Revolution References

21 21 23 30 34 38

Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation: Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) 1 Life and Works 2 Marxism, Class Initiative and Gender Autonomy 3 The Difficult Transition to Socialism 4 Class and Self-Government References

41 41 45 46 50 54

3

xv

xvi

CONTENTS

Interlude 1: Resistance or Revolution? The Spanish Civil War 4

5

Self-Management and Communism: Paul Mattick (1904–1981) 1 Life and Works 2 Marx and His Epigones 3 Mixed Economy and State Capitalism 4 Against Bolshevism, for a Workers’ Democracy References

67 67 70 74 77 82

Workers’ Struggles Under Neocapitalism: Raniero Panzieri (1921–1964) 1 Life and Works 2 Marx and Marxism 3 Monopolistic Capitalism: The Factory-Society 4 Workers’ Control References

85 85 89 93 98 103

Interlude 2: Lotta Continua: The Dilemmas of a Revolutionary Group Between the Hot Autumn and the Restoration of Capitalism 6

7

Revolutionary Reformism: Rudolf Meidner (1914–2015) 1 Life and Works 2 Marxism and Democracy 3 Beyond Private Property 4 The Debate Over the Wage Earner Funds and Their Neutralization References

130 133

A Communist Theory of Politics: Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979) 1 Life and Works 2 Marxism and the State 3 Economic and Political Crisis in Monopolistic Capitalism 4 Seizing the State and Direct Democracy References

135 135 136 142 147 152

121 121 124 126

CONTENTS

xvii

8

In the Midst of the Crisis 1 The Chilean “Laboratory” 2 The Legacy of 1968 3 The “Hayekization” of the World, or Keynes’ Defeat 4 Amidst the Rubble: Alan Bihr’s Paths to Renewal References

155 155 158 162 165 170

9

(Tentative) Conclusions 1 A Compact Current? 2 The Movement of Movements 3 At the Intersection of Class, Gender and Ethnicity—And Environment 4 Between Disaster and Hope References

173 173 180

Index

183 188 192 195

About the Authors

Monica Quirico is Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History, Södertörn University, Stockholm. She has extensively researched Swedish politics and labour movement, often in comparative perspective (Sweden-Italy); in this field, she has conducted lessons and seminars at international conferences and workshops and has published several books and articles, in Italian, English and Swedish. Her publications include: 2019, with Åse, Cecilia and Wendt, Maria. “Gendered Grief: Mourners’ Politicisation of Military Death”. In Gendering Military Sacrifice. A Feminist Comparative Analysis, ed. Cecilia Åse and Maria Wendt. 145–176. London-NY: Routledge; with Ragona, Gianfranco. 2018. Socialismo di frontiera. Autorganizzazione e anticapitalismo. Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier; 2014. Socialdemokratin och EU . In Det långa 1990-talet. När Sverige förandrades, ed. Anders Ivarsson Westerberg, Ylva Waldemarson, Kjell Östberg, 193–213, Umeå: Borèa; 2012. “Model or Utopia? The Meidner Plan and Sweden in Italy’s Political and Trade Unionist Debate (1975–1984)”. Scandinavian Journal of History 37: 646–666; 2007. Il socialismo davanti alla realtà. Il modello svedese (1990–2006). Roma: Editori Riuniti. Gianfranco Ragona is Associate professor of History of Political Thought at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Italy. His main research interests are: History of Socialism, History of Marxism and Marxology, German Anarchism and Judaism.

xix

xx

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

In this field, he has conducted lessons and seminars at national and international conferences and workshops and has published several books and articles. His publications include: 2019. “La «nuova democrazia» di Kurt Eisner”. In Il Pensiero Politico. Rivista di Storia delle Idee Politiche e Sociali 52: 240–252; 2019. G. Landauer, Appello al socialismo, ed. G. Ragona. Rome: Castelvecchi; with Quirico, Monica. 2018. Socialismo di frontiera. Autorganizzazione e anticapitalismo. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. K. Marx, F. Engels, Scritti. Novembre 1867-luglio 1870. Eds. G. M. Bravo, M. Ceretta, G. Ragona; Milan: Edizioni Pantarei; 2018. K. Marx, F. Engels, Scritti. Ottobre 1871-novembre 1873. Eds. G. M. Bravo, M. Ceretta, G. Ragona. Milan: Edizioni Pantarei; 2013. Anarchismo. Le idee e il movimento. Roma-Bari: Laterza; 2011. Gustav Landauer. A Bibliography (1889–2009). Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura; 2010. Gustav Landauer. Anarchico, ebreo, tedesco. Rome: Editori Riuniti University Press.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1

Hope and Disillusionment in Greece

Greece, 25 January 2015: Syriza, the radical left coalition founded in 2004 on the wave of the counter-globalization movement and transformed into a party in 2012, won the general election with over 36% of the vote, barely missing out on securing the absolute majority of seats. Its programme included radically re-negotiating the country’s debt with the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) as well as a National Reconstruction Plan centred on four priorities: escaping the humanitarian crisis, restarting the economy, boosting employment and revitalizing democracy. “Hope wins”, Syriza rejoiced on social media. It seemed to mark a happy end to the exhausting economic, political and institutional crisis that had begun a few years earlier when Punchinello’s secret (of having presented the European Union falsified financial data to ensure Greece’s entrance into the eurozone) was made public, a crisis that the governments and economic and financial powers of various countries speculated on for years. In fact, the socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou put an end to the pantomime in 2009. The following year the country, on the verge of bankruptcy, was forced to ask for international aid; the funds were granted, but with a quid pro quo: Greece was required to implement a brutal and relentless series of structural reforms. Over a three-year period, the Greek GDP fell (by 25%) along with its real public spending, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_1

1

2

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

while the number of unemployed rose. There were cries of humanitarian disaster (increased infant and senile mortality, the spread of AIDS and other diseases that were believed to have been eradicated) and political emergency, in that the extraordinary conditions favoured the rebirth of Nazism (with the Golden Dawn party catalysing a part of the popular protest). Up to that point, such an apocalyptic scenario had been unthinkable for a European public stupefied by propaganda asserting the providential unavoidability of continental unification. Syriza reacted to the crisis by rediscovering mutual aid, creating public clinics and pharmacies, selforganized soup kitchens, work cooperatives for the unemployed, markets for direct producer-to-consumer selling and collective schools. One of the party leaders, Yannis Albanis, explained: We won because we went into the streets, the squares, the areas where everything was missing […] and we were the first to take care of the people’s needs. It is no longer a time to lock ourselves away and hold discussions among party officials; today we must go to the places where the conflict arises and where need is felt. (Pucciarelli and Russo Spena 2015)

Support for self-organization practices (mutual aid but also street protests) and the anti-austerity programme bore fruit: the 2012 general election crowned Syriza as the second-leading party in the country, behind New Democracy, and the main opposition power; in the 2014 elections, Syriza obtained over 26% of the vote to become the majority party and went on to triumph in the following year’s elections (although the percentage of votes it won forced the party to ally with the anti-EU right-wing party Independent Greeks). Throughout Europe, the anti-capitalist left was shaken: after years (decades?) of opaque and self-referential leaders, Syriza’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, finally offered an internationally key figure who could be taken as a model for his ability to trigger a virtuous circle between bottom-up mobilization and institutional victory. Waves of politicians and intellectuals set out from all over Europe, from Rome to Stockholm, to converge in Athens to celebrate this new beginning for Greece and Europe as a whole.

1

INTRODUCTION

3

At the end of the first phase of negotiations, Tsipras, considering the conditions set by creditors for paying off the debt to be unfeasible— because they were based, once again, on restrictive measures that would have been the final blow for a country that was already dying—called a referendum for 5 July 2015. The verdict of the Greek people was clear: 62% of voters rejected the creditors’ plan. The European left rejoiced: if an instrument such as the referendum held in the de-democratized capitalism of the European Union had succeeded in upsetting political, institutional and financial balances that until the day before had seemed unquestionable, maybe it was possible to change course. The end is well known. Indeed, the spell was broken almost immediately, the very next day after the referendum: the controversial finance minister Yanis Varoufakis resigned, on the urging of Tsipras himself. He had been working for some time, with the help of American economist James Galbraith (and with Tsipras’ consent, according to the version Varoufakis has always maintained) on a plan B: replacing the euro with an electronic currency, to be understood as a prelude to a possible return to the drachma, in case creditors were stubborn with their claims. Some scholars have compared the negotiations between the Tsipras government and the Troika to the negotiations in Versailles at the end of World War I: the stakes were never economic—repaying a debt everyone knew could never be collected—but rather purely political. It was a matter of redesigning European geopolitics in the name of English and French supremacy, in the case of Versailles, and of the primacy of Germany and transnational financial powers, in the case of Greece (Fumagalli 2015)— even at the cost of producing further humanitarian disasters and political setbacks. Varoufakis has said that Tsipras, immediately after the referendum, disclosed to him his fear of an imminent coup d’état: this struck a nerve, in a country such as Greece. It may even have been an all-too-obvious card to play. No one knows what really happened during the negotiations between the EU and IMF, on the one hand, and the Greek Government, on the other. What is well known is that, a few days after the referendum, Tsipras accepted the agreement with the EU that voters had rejected. The early elections of September 2015, convened by the Prime Minister himself to acknowledge the political crisis that his about-face had triggered, confirmed the relative majority of Syriza (which had split, in the

4

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

meantime). However, complying with the parameters imposed by creditors seemed to inexorably erode the consensus the party enjoyed, turning it into a target for the same street protests it had previously sparked and for which, above all, it had provided a political outlet. After what was described as the humiliation of the Greek Prime Minister in Brussels, left-wing European parties’ political tourism to Athens came to an abrupt end; the image of “young Alexis”, whose face had been splashed across all the protest banners for months, was hastily put back in the warehouse. Many Western Marxists, comfortably seated on their sofas, had hoped that the Greeks would sacrifice themselves on the altar of ideology, experiencing what happens to a country that rebels against international finance and thus acting as a Guinea pig for the left of other countries. Those same people now branded Tsipras a “traitor”—an indelible stigma in the tormented history of the left. “Contradiction is the name of the left in power”, Costas Douzinas wrote (Douzinas 2017), recalling that in Brussels Tsipras had been forced to choose between capitulating and leaving the euro, i.e. between a bad option and a worse one. Just as if playing out a Greek tragedy (indeed), two moral laws collided: it was not possible to preserve Syriza’s identity and at the same time ensure the survival of Greece. Tertium non datur: whatever decision Tsipras made, he would have paid for it. Once he had accepted the agreement (albeit in a tempered form, compared to the one the EU had offered the week before) would it have been “more leftist” to resign, thus leaving the country to the centre-right? Syriza’s time in government (bearing in mind that government and power do not coincide) can be read as an attempt to hold together an ethics of responsibility and an ethics of belief: to accept the EU memorandum so as to avoid leaving the eurozone (an option that the majority of Greeks opposed) and at the same time—albeit not without contradictions and misunderstandings—to encourage social opposition to the very policy of sacrifice that the government had committed itself to implementing. Working both inside and outside the state, Poulantzas, one of the leading figures of this book, might have said. To complete the picture, it should be remembered that Syriza used the country’s primary surplus (what is left to the state after having paid all expenses, but before having paid the interest on the debt) accrued thanks to its having achieved the creditors’ objectives, to launch redistributive measures which were undoubtedly late in coming but nonetheless alleviated the difficulties of the weaker social groups.

1

INTRODUCTION

5

Was it worth it? We do not have a definitive answer. It is worth reflecting, however, on the fact that Syriza, despite losing the elections in 2019, did obtain 31.53%: a percentage that is now unimaginable not only for the few remaining left-wing parties in Europe, but also for the more tried-and-tested social democratic (or rather, social liberal) parties such as the Nordic ones. It is also remarkable that the Nazis did not succeed in securing a place in the parliament. Instead of crying “betrayal”, we prefer to wonder about the limits of a “national path to socialism” in a context as rigid as that of the European Union and transnational financial powers. In 1973, capital used the military coup in Chile to cancel an attempt at carrying out a democratic transition to socialism; in 2015, capital showed that it no longer needed armed force (at least, not in Europe) to proactively curb Greece’s milder—yet nonetheless completely heretical, in a parameter-led Europe—idea of exiting the crisis with measures to support the popular classes, on the one hand, and increase taxes on assets, on the other. Today, in fact, all that is required is to threaten to suspend aid to a country crippled by the spiral of state and individual indebtedness which led many people, in Berlin as well as Brussels and Washington, to close their eyes to its political-financial problems. Nevertheless, the gaze of a large part of the anti-capitalist universe (the remaining parties, but also the intelligentsia and associations) inexorably stops, in fact if not in principle, at the borders of their own country (or even neighbourhood). We think that nationalism is the curse of the left: it was evident in the Soviet Union, China and many other situations, not least of which the state of abandonment in which Greece found itself. We have always been opposed to the European Union in that it expresses a hegemonic neo-liberal design; however, sovereignism, even when permeated by “social” tones, also horrifies us—and in fact regularly leads to reactionary stances, beginning with positions on immigration. Today more than ever before, socialism either exists without borders or it does not exist at all; not (only) to ensure moral superiority, but—to be frank—as a result of some sort of “historical necessity” imposed by capital. In the face of this challenge, the conclusion to be drawn from both the Greek case and the anti-capitalist mobilizations of the early twenty-first century is that organizations and movements such as Social Forums, Occupy Wall Street, Los Indignados, No Tav and more have invested heavily in experimenting with alternative forms of sociality

6

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

(the occupation of public space, permanent assemblies, autonomous networks of production and distribution) without concerning themselves too much about what the issues that used to be central to communist and socialist movements (organizational form, alliances between different social subjects, direct or representative democracy). When they have managed to cross the threshold of power, they have been either pulverized (like Syriza) or forced to strike a precarious balance between being against the system and moving within it (like Podemos in Spain). On the whole, criticizing and opposing capitalism require new movements to engage in a great effort of theoretical and practical innovation: This is both their strength, in that they are not trapped in the models inherited from the past, and their weakness, because they have no memory; they were born out of a tabula rasa and failed to complete the process of mourning the defeats of the Twentieth century. They are creative but also fragile because they do not have the same strength as movements that, conscious of their history, acted in the wake of a specific tradition. (Traverso 2017)

At the level of planning and organization, indeed, weakness and fragility seem to characterize all of the currents of antagonistic mobilization that have managed to reach beyond minorityism: capitalism seems everlasting between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in part because these attempts have not even made it as far as imagining a completely new society; they have only—perhaps in the name of realism—proposed limited corrective measures to render the system liveable, but without effectively envisioning the conditions of a radically different common existence. The strong hypotheses of the socialism of the past are unable to inspire the disheartened, frustrated, exploited and always, albeit in different ways, oppressed masses on different continents. It was these basic observations that gave rise to the idea for this book; they were bolstered by the fact that, as we were conducting the final editing of the text in view of the English translation, the coronavirus struck the world, changing rhythms, habits, living and working conditions, and certainties. Suddenly, the concluding section we were discussing and drafting based on a critical reading of a group of original contributions about the conditions of possibility for a project of anti-capitalist emancipation (defined as socialist, communist or otherwise, it does not matter much at this point) seemed out of date. And all of a sudden many of those interesting writings

1

INTRODUCTION

7

seemed to have aged as well (Dieterich 2006; The Invisible Committee 2009–2017; Honneth 2017; Wright 2010, 2019; Douzinas and Zizek 2010; Sunkara 2019). The pandemic—or rather, the way it is being managed—has imprisoned us in a sort of kairòs, an exceptional temporal conjuncture or, rather, a suspension of temporality, in which the darkest legacy of the past converges with the prospects of a dystopian future. On the one hand, after so much talk about “post-” this and that, the wholesale inertia of transnational institutions, beginning with the European Union, has contributed to pushing us back into the paradigm of political modernity in its most aggressive version: the supremacy of the nation state, which is sovereign precisely in that it determines a state of exception. On the other hand, in the face of this resurgent Leviathan (which will be temporary, of course, but can always be resuscitated for future emergencies) the social fabric of modernity (starting with class aggregations) has come undone. What we have instead is a de-socialized society that, as Naomi Klein has noted, embodies the most daring utopia of Silicon Valley: a network of individuals enthralled by the internet and physically, as well as morally, distanced out of fear of their neighbours and proximity itself. In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler writes that “when bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space (including virtual ones), they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which […] delivers a bodily demand for a more liveable set of economic, social and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity” (Butler 2018, 11). Aggregations take on political significance even before they make explicit claims. What then becomes of collective action when the imperative of social coexistence is physical distancing? In this regard, two observations seem to offer hope. First, that in the midst of the pandemic the workers’ movement—which many believe to be doomed—has managed to mobilize from Europe to the Americas. The bodies of workers have taken the aggregation imposed on them by the process of capitalist valorization (to produce even at the cost of health) and turned it against the law of profit in order to defend their basic rights. Without indulging in nostalgia for some reductive vision of workerism, we think it is worth reflecting on this wave of resistance on the part of a movement that had been cut off from the narrative of the liquid society.

8

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Second, it is encouraging that the outbreak of the pandemic prompted several waves of protest around the world: initially to urge authorities to adopt measures to contain the virus, then to protest against the dismantling of social policies and then again to deal with the emergency not by handing over personal freedom and intelligence to the state, but rather by building solidarity networks to protect society’s most vulnerable members, from the elderly to prisoners, from the unemployed to illegal immigrants. The killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police on 25 May 2020 triggered a worldwide mobilization against racism that showed that activists were able to combine the proven techniques of the “Black lives matter” movement with the creativity and courage required in a historical moment in which struggles may be criminalized by invoking national unity in the name of the health emergency. In very different contexts such as the United States and Hong Kong, activists have been able to escape from the dichotomy of violence vs. non-violence; while refusing to reproduce the brutality of institutions, they have also physically resisted the attacks of police and army forces (Chattopadhyay et al. 2020). For our part, while avoiding endeavours of pre-packaged speculation that represent no more than exercises of the imagination, we are convinced that past and present struggles, analyses and failures can offer fertile grounds for drawing lines of action and critique that not only guide the construction of a society beyond and against capitalism, but make this task a constant topic of contemporary discussions. It may lead to squabbles, but not over which identity to defend; rather, to understand, for example, the most effective way to safeguard pluralism in a socialist society. Although we only partially agree with their practical proposals, we find Wright and Hanhel’s discussion of “the level of detail to which post-capitalist visions should aspire, the future of markets, and whether a revolutionary strategy has a credible role to play in anti-capitalist politics” (Hahnel and Wright 2016, V; see also Wright 2010) to represent a highly useful methodological suggestion.

2

What Socialism After Socialism?

The terms communism and socialism have a long and, to some extent, surprising history. One of the first instances of the word “communist” dates back to the sixteenth century, and it was subsequently used to refer to the communion of goods preached by certain Anabaptist sects.

1

INTRODUCTION

9

As such, it was generally used in the field of religion and, especially, peasant life. Conversely, in the nineteenth century, the critics of industrialization who took on the physical, moral and political consequences of workers’ exploitation were called, or called themselves, socialists. As some scholars noted, therefore, communism originally referred to a human communitarian nature understood as something worth recovering; socialism instead imagines a new form of sociality to be built progressively throughout history (Grandjonc 1989; Cole 1953–1960). Marx opted for the word communism, while coming to terms with his previous philosophical conscience: “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things”, he states in The German Ideology (1845). The very founders of what was later defined “scientific socialism” were also the authors of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In one of the many reprints of the essay, Engels clarified the terminological choice he and Marx had made: “By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand, the adherents of the various Utopian systems (…) on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks, who, by all manners of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances” (Engels 2010, 516). Later on, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx made a distinction that was destined to endure: on the one hand, he identified the “socialist” phase of the proletarian revolution (when state power is in the hands of the working class, but the social product is still distributed according to the principles of bourgeois civil law and work corresponds with access to the basic goods needed to live); on the other hand, he indicated a later and superior phase, actual communism, in which unequal law prevails and the society achieves the motto “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. Later in the twentieth century, communism and socialism often indicated different political projects (revolution and reformism), although Western communist parties had little to do with traditional-style revolutionary transformation (modelled on the seizing of the Winter Palace). Focusing on the world of anarchism, another thread of modern socialism, matters become—if possible—even more complicated. At first glance, anarchists have long opposed communism or, rather, they have incorporated anti-communism into their own genetic code: this can be seen from the time of the repression of the Kronstadt Commune (which though was not a completely anarchic event) and Machnovšˇcina (the Ukrainian libertarian movement led by Nestor Machno) to the

10

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

shocking events in Spain where the fratricidal clash between anarchists and communists in the days of Barcelona’s mayo sangriento emblematically represented the end of revolutionary hopes. And yet, in struggles, these same anarchists often stood side by side with communists, councilists and socialists, beginning from the foundation of the First International. Furthermore, thanks to its theorists (first Kropotkin, who was an exponent of anarcho-communism) and militants, anarchism has invested passion and sacrifice in the cause of libertarian communism, in Europe and in the Americas. How should these terms be used today, when any choice of one or the other re-opens old wounds, feeds long-standing divergences and thwarts new alliances? In a distant past, in the last thirty years of the sixteenth century when religious wars were spreading blood across Europe, some figures who today we would call “intellectuals” (including Michel de l’Hospital and the famous Jean Bodin) proposed an original ethical solution to move towards establishing peace and saving the basic conditions of civil life: to delve into the roots of faith and seek its common foundations. They were called “politiques” because they did not propose to sweep away the past, and yet they were equally concerned about the present and the disastrous consequences a permanent conflict might have had on their world. They thus looked on these doctrinal disputes with a disenchanted gaze. This analogy is merely evocative, in part because socialism, communism and anarchism are certainly not (or should not be) faiths. On closer inspection, however, these “politicist” thinkers with their primary focus on the commons have something to offer any contemporary observer who is aware of the vertical crisis of capitalist civilization, a civilization that appears devoid of alternatives and seems to constitute an insurmountable horizon in which the new “normal” features both war and terrorism and refugee and migrant detention camps—a civilization in which resignation reigns in the face of crisis or mass youth unemployment in the “central” countries and endemic poverty in the “peripheral” countries of the globalized world, in which it is acceptable to repress dissent while politics is, at best, reduced to mere public entertainment. If this is the external enemy, the memory of the communists’ “permanent night of St. Bartholomew”—as Boris Souvarine defined the Stalinist purges that decimated generations of Bolsheviks, beginning with the old guard (Souvarine 1983, 766)—should serve to make those still yearning to overcome capitalism aware of the dangers hiding in the revolutionary process itself whenever a specific party, or worse, an individual, is assigned

1

INTRODUCTION

11

the role of repository of historical truth. In the light of these historical experiences, and in the face of the civilizational void generated by post-democratic capitalism, it is unavoidably disheartening to watch the spectacle of constant quarrelling between representatives of the “classoriented” left (we use this term well aware of the varying meanings both the term left and the concept of class can assume, as we hope will clearly emerge in the following pages of this book). Surely opposition to the present state of affairs does exist, but it appears to be literally pulverized: looking at Europe, there are dozens of acronyms (parties, groups, coordinating committees, study centres, etc.) that somehow refer to communism. There are also a number of perspectives that can be identified as different forms of anarchism and political groups campaigning in elections at different levels still make continuous references to Trotsky—think of France, for example. Except for rare and ephemeral exceptions, however, the various groups with links to the different meanings of socialism have gradually lost any sentimental connection with the lowest strata of their people; they take a stand, lobbing accusations back and forth, to protect their own sectarian identity. Perhaps it would be useful to move beyond the obvious jokes about the divided left to reason about the historical, and possibly even anthropological, factors behind what appears to be an original curse. It is not in any way our intention to identify extenuating circumstances that would excuse the cultural, and sometimes human, pettiness of the leadership of the class-oriented left. However, it is worth recalling that those tasked with administering the existing world do not have to invent anything; they only have to remember, bolstered by their economic, cultural and coercive supremacy, to oil the gears in the most profit-maximizing way. Anyone, be they party or movement, who instead would like to build another world is obliged to make it up out of thin air or nearly so while grappling with such inferior mediatic, financial and “military” resources that their work remains almost invisible.

3

A New Path to Self-Government

If “socialism” means building a community based on equality, i.e. selfgovernment and social control of the economy, then we may argue that the term has not remotely lost its explanatory and evocative significance; rather, even a century after the “mother of all revolutions”, it continues to effectively express the drive to critique the current world order (call it

12

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

neoliberalism or turbo-capitalism) and the need to transform it. Both the Social Democrats and the Leninists equated the socialist movement with a regime—the Soviet one. In reality, however, both before and after the USSR, this movement has actually proven capable of developing theories and giving rise to actions that engage with the problem of the state and forms of political democracy but also go beyond them. They have been able to envision a community for which exhausting the function of the state is not the aim of more or less rigid “historical laws”, but the result of experiments and struggles carried out in the immediacy of clashes between the classes. This book proposes an eccentric perspective on the tradition of twentieth-century socialism, taking the term in its broad sense to encompass currents of communism, anarchism, social democracy and their various adaptations. In so doing, it seeks to break down the identitybased boundaries which, in some cases, have represented the richness of the proposals put forward by often-divergent individual thinkers or schools of thought yet also created the structural boundary of a tradition complete with a consolidated “gallery of heroes” (from Lenin to Gramsci, from Laski to Latouche, etc.), inflexible distinctions (Western socialism vs. real socialism, for example) and disputes. At first glance, this is an audacious endeavour: What do figures with such different intellectual training, party affiliations and historical backgrounds have in common? A vague longing for social justice? Positionality at the margins of consolidated traditions? Perhaps an ethics that, in the rigid correlation between means and purposes of action for social and political change, characterizes the project-oriented aspect of their socialism? The methodological hypothesis that French sociologist Michael Löwy formulated at the end of the 1980s aids us here. In striving to study the relationships between a diverse group of Jewish and libertarian thinkers in the context of Mitteleuropa between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he proposed a radical—although ultimately overlooked—shift in historiographic and linguistic perspective. Introducing the volume Redemption and Utopia (1988), he pointed out that the social sciences insist on using a positivist type of lexicon, frequently used by physics or biology: causal relationships, dependency relationships, cause-effect relations, or even influence and dependence. In fact, the very field in which words are applied seems to force scholars to manoeuvre within the narrow boundaries of reassuring traditions. Löwy therefore suggested tapping into a more extensive and meaningful linguistic constellation and, in case

1

INTRODUCTION

13

studies, to employ the concept of “elective affinity” in order to observe “convergence”, the “combination”, “confluence” or “attraction” among phenomena, processes, actors, cultures and so on. “By ‘elective affinity’ I mean a very special kind of dialectical relationship that develops between two social or cultural configurations, one that cannot be reduced to direct causality or to ‘influences’ in the traditional sense” (Lowy ¨ 1988, 6). Löwy stressed the relationship between cultural forms, libertarian social utopia and Judaism displayed by a series of intellectually and politically eminent individuals, providing a number of clarifications regarding the geographical context (Mitteleuropa) and temporal context (the period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) in which the two cultures encountered each other, clarifications which were needed to avoid falling into genericism. We do not seek to imitate the French scholar’s approach, nor to hold him responsible for our deductions; however, we cannot deny that reading those pages of his work motivated our efforts to understand how figures that are seemingly unrelated yet advocate for analogous theoretical and political ideas may be situated side by side. In following the paths connecting up the main arteries of twentieth-century socialist tradition, therefore, we have identified relations of elective affinity among figures who at first glance may seem distant and dissimilar, sometimes not only chronologically and geographically: the anarchist Landauer and social democrat Meidner or the conciliarist communist Mattick and Italian socialist Panzieri, to mention only two such eccentric combinations. Of course, all the thinkers treated in this book share the powerful idea that the socialism of the future should be based on the self-organization of social subjects. The unprecedented, and thus risky and debateable, nature of our endeavour should not, however, be taken as mere intellectual divertissement: we are convinced, in fact, that today both the messianic wait for a socialism updated for the twenty-first century and the dogmatic repetition of whatever “Leninist”, “Marxist” or “Social Democratic” orthodoxy are forms of reactionary utopia. Recovering the word “socialism” to indicate the common purpose shared among our authors, that of building a society under the banner of equality, thus seemed to us an unavoidable necessity. The fact that most of the thinkers included in the volume are dead, and indeed have been so for some time, should be seen, we suggest, not as a sign of the outdated nature of socialism, but as proof of the continuity of the social, economic, ethical and environmental problems that capitalism generates and which cannot be resolved within the scope of

14

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

its boundaries. We have chosen “minor” and/or minority thinkers in the light of the observation that the dominant currents of twentieth-century socialism (Leninism, on the one hand; Social Democracy, on the other) have failed to offer an alternative that is simultaneously viable and radical to the inequalities that capitalism, in its changing forms, constantly gives rise to. Our “frontier” socialists deviate from the classical tradition: they are often pluralist, even experimentalist, as far as organizational forms are concerned; they are democratic, including through the often (but not always or necessarily) difficult form of conciliarism, a form that represents one of the more advanced manifestations of democracy (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Rancière 1995; Abensour 2004; Breaugh 2007). They do not believe that “simply” seizing political power will carry us to the “rising sun”, nor do they believe, therefore, that the revolution will be a sudden event and violent rupture of the historical trajectory. They are intellectuals, in a non-academic sense, and all of them, with no exception, are militants. Militant socialist intellectuals, in any sense of the term (communist, anarchist and so on), are not those who illuminate the path—the figure Michael Walzer described in evoking the Platonic myth of the cave (Walzer 1991)1 to bring elements of truth (or revolutionary consciousness) to the ignorant, unaware and foolish masses deceived by the shadows. Militant socialist intellectuals, in short, are not people who draw on the superordinate world of knowledge—always elitist and, after all, always bourgeois—for slices of truth, systems of ideas or programmes of action to hand down to their subordinates. Militant socialist intellectuals are there in the fray alongside their subordinates, because political ideas are not the prerogative of a narrow circle of elect individuals; such ideas are also formulated and assessed in places distinct from studios or libraries, and in ways that are unusual: in taverns, bars, factories and working-class neighbourhoods; in workers’ clubs, mutual aid societies, trade unions, party schools or popular universities—the kinds of places that our “troupe” attended frequently. In this book, however, we do not propose to invent a new tradition or a different identity some sect can then invoke, perhaps to comfort themselves in the face of their failure. We humbly propose a route, one that may be—and hopefully will be—enriched by figures, moments, movements and currents that we have neglected or overlooked (Poggio 1 Unlike the Italian translation, the original edition The Company of Critics (New York, Basic Books, 1988) does not mention the term “militant intellectual”.

1

INTRODUCTION

15

2010–2016). Our research, therefore, does not seek or claim to be exhaustive; we are aware, for example, that its approach is Eurocentric (although the sections on Chile and Rojava were among the most engaging for us to write). After all, we had to come to terms with our own possibilities and capabilities; our research interests and, above all, our political passions. And the reader should keep this in mind. We are likewise aware of the polysemic character of terms such as selfgovernment, self-organization and self-management which we cite or use extensively in this volume. While self-government especially in its English interpretation has a long history that blends with the idea of local institutional autonomy from the central power in keeping with the principle of people’s direct participation in the res publica, in the history of the workers’ movement this term has indicated a new form of government, the “self-government of producers”, an expression used by Marx (and later borrowed by Lenin) to refer to the Paris Commune. This use of the term implies an ascending conception of power, a decentralized institutional organization and the possibility of directly choosing officials and delegates in accordance with the imperative mandate. In his work (especially from the Two Red Years), Antonio Gramsci views the self-government of the working class as the embryo of the new order, which for him also means the new state. The expression “self-organization”, for its part, recalls the idea that the working class can and should directly express its political ability without the intermediation of the upper classes, as enshrined in the Communist Manifesto: “The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of that majority”. It is also true that in the second half of the twentieth century, especially the years of mass protest, references to self-organization carried with them a critique or refusal of the party-form as the specific mode of class organization. Finally, the self-management lemma, mostly found in the economic sphere, has over time been widely used and even superimposed on the other terms, at least in its general meaning of subordinates’ ability to take over the management of their own affairs. Of course, the word self-management has been used in opposition to the bureaucratization and hierarchy of political parties and trade unions, observed in both the Social Democratic and Leninist traditions, but it manages to link the economic sphere of labour liberation to political and social liberation through worker democracy, a direct and participatory form of democracy:

16

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

In this perspective, self-management may be defined as the encounter: of a project to radically transform society, its structures, behaviours and representations; of a specific form of organization of social relations inside and outside of labour, based on the recognition of people’s fundamental equality and respect of differences […]; of a constituent movement that denies all processes of institutionalization and separation seeking to perpetuate or renew hierarchical relations of command, bureaucratic structures and all the ways in which power and knowledge are expropriated; this gives rise to its counter- and unconstitutional spheres. (Corpet 1982, 74)

In contemporary so-called Western countries, any organizing by subaltern subjects that diverges from the forms of the dominant party or trade union is viewed with mistrust because it potentially challenges the fragile political and social structures that currently prevail. While “official” trade unionism is recognized by power and often inclined to negotiate rather than contesting the conditions of labour exploitation, workers self-organizing around their interests are often criticized for representing a return to corporatism or, worse, for undermining and potentially subverting democratic structures. Who knows, a strike might even be called for without previous authorization by the state and the bosses! Local struggles linked to environmental concerns and advocating for a model of community life alternative to capitalist forms challenge hegemonic conceptions of “development” as they defend the health of the majority and the environment. An example is the No Tav (No to the High-Speed Train) movement and its more than twenty years of activism between Italy and France. Such struggles are likewise very often accused of being subversive and potentially “terrorist”, and their most visible participants sentenced to many years in prison by a rigid and cruel judiciary system in collusion with the dominant powers. These reactions stem precisely from the fact that such movements display original and autonomous forms of organization that run counter to the canons of existing parties and organizations. Thinking about ways of organizing struggles and aspects of life that are intertwined with struggles (mutual aid to resist police repression and cope with criminal trials or to ensure decent living conditions for those who lose their jobs after a court sentence or are forced to leave their homes and jobs after being subjected to a residence ban, etc.) is a priority for all those who criticize capitalism and imagine a life beyond it: “our” thinkers

1

INTRODUCTION

17

tried to do so, with different outcomes but converging in the belief that emancipation from capitalism cannot occur under the leadership of the ruling classes or in the forms that they impose on political and social conflict. It is a matter of retrieving and updating the concept of the selfpraxis of the proletariat that Marx had indicated to the subaltern classes of his time as the way to transform the world (Rubel 1976, 127–146). We chose a hybrid approach, selecting both theoretical insights and some concrete cases of self-organization and self-management. As for the former, we have not set out to provide a one-dimensional portrait; on the contrary, we have stressed the contradictions and unresolved questions not driven by meticulous severity, but rather because we ourselves share these same doubts, and we are convinced that it is only by setting off from the issues that our militant intellectuals tried to deal with, often without succeeding in delivering definitive answers, that we can re-launch a discussion about socialism. How can the self-management accompanying the initial phase of a change process be institutionalized, without subjecting it to bureaucratization and, thus, distorting it? How should we set it up so that, on the one hand, it can withstand the reactions—including armed ones—of the capitalists and, on the other hand, is it able to administer an economy as complex as that of the twenty-first century? Is it possible to do without an organization (be it defined as a party or in some other way) whose raison d’être consists in bringing together the plurality of instances of self-management as part of the process of socializing the economy? These instances, if not coordinated, risk ending up like islands: they may initially be happy, but eventually they would be doomed to shipwreck—or worse, reabsorption by the market economy: “many revolutions have broken out spontaneously, but never has a revolution been won spontaneously” (Mandel 1973, p. 52). Our heretical socialists have pondered these issues in historical contexts marked by deeply different challenges: Gustav Landauer and Alexandra Kollontai lived through the incubation phase of the October Revolution (and Kollontai also experienced its downward trend); Paul Mattick and Raniero Panzieri witnessed the extraordinary capacity of monopolistic capitalism in bringing about ideological mobilizations and, at the same time, the irreversible detachment of Soviet socialism from its social base; Rudolf Meidner and Nicos Poulantzas experienced the apex of the cultural hegemony of the workers’ movement and, at the same time, the dawn of its crisis, due to both exogenous factors (production transformations) and endogenous ones (the “rivalry” with other, newly-born social

18

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

movements). In the 1970s, the fragmentation we have described in the second-to-last chapter (which is intentionally dedicated not to a single author or social movement but rather to a series of trends along with Alain Bihr’s assessment of them) displayed innovative and radical features: it marked the end of a long era which not only bore a series of real and metaphorical collapses but also offers some lessons which can be useful for the future and, perhaps, show that not all hope of redeeming the subordinate classes is lost, as we have tried to suggest in the final chapter (here as well, with a certain humbleness and without claiming to write recipes “for the taverns of the future”). In relation to the cases of self-organization we have chosen to dwell on, titling them Intermezzos, we would like to specify that it was not our intention to offer a summary of the history of the Spanish Republic nor of Lotta Continua, overviews that other authors have already provided and in more extensive forms. Rather, we seek to ponder the challenges that these movements had to face: identifying a revolutionary subject (traditional or innovative? Unitary or plural?) and consequently defining a politics of alliance; transitioning from spontaneity to more structured forms of struggle and self-management (in short, the Gordian knot of organization); relations with institutions; the issue of violence (enacted both against and by the movement); and the contents of a future society, with a specific focus on the relationship between bottom-up democracy and representative democracy. In relation to the most recent protest movements (which have been numerous and creative, though often invisible and scattered: movements of Roman artists or undocumented Mexican immigrants, Italian researchers or Argentinean workers, to provide only a few examples) and those to come, our position is that: One could say, “but oh, they do not last,” and sink into a sense of futility; but that sense of loss is countered by the anticipation of what may be coming: “they could happen at any time! (Butler 2018, 20)

1

INTRODUCTION

19

References Abensour, Miguel. 2004. La démocratie contre l’État. Marx et le moment machiavélien. Paris: Le Félin. Breaugh, Martin. 2007. L’expérience plébéienne. Une histoire discontinue de la liberté politique. Paris: Payot. English edition: Breaugh, M. 2016. The Plebeian Experience. A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom, trans. L. Lederhendler). New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, Judith. 2018. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press (reprint edition). Chattopadhyay, Sutapa, Lesley Wood, and Laurence Cox. 2020. Organizing Amidst Covid-19. Monographic Issue of Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements 12 (1). Cole, George Douglas Howard. 1953–1960. Socialist Thought, 5 vols. London: MacMillan. Corpet, Olivier. 1982. Autogestion. In Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, ed. Georges Labica and Gerard Bensussan, 69–75. Paris: Puf. Dieterich, Hans. 2006. Der Sozialismus des 21. Jahrhunderts. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Demokratie nach dem globalen Kapitalismus. Berlin: Kai Homilius Verlag. Douzinas, Costas. 2017. Syriza in Power: Reflections of an Accidental Politician. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons. Douzinas, Costas, and Slavoi Zizek (eds.). 2010. The Idea of Communism. London and New York: Verso Engels, Friedrich. 2010. Preface to the 1888 English edition of The Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Collected Works, ed. Engels Marx, vol. 26, pp. 512– 518, August 1882–December 1889. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Fumagalli, Andrea. 2015. “Grecia: e ora?” Effimera. Critica e sovversioni del presente, 29 June. http://effimera.org/grecia-e-ora-di-andrea-fumagalli/. Accessed 4 December 2017. Grandjonc, Jacques. 1989. Communisme/Kommunismus/Communism. Origine et développement international de la terminologie communautaire prémarxiste des utopistes aux néo-babouviste, 1795–1842, 2 vols. Trier: Schriften aus dem Karl Marx-Haus. Hahnel, Robin, and Erik Olin Wright. 2016. Alternatives to Capitalism. Proposals for a Democratic Economy. London and New Yok: Verso. Honneth, Axel. 2017. The Idea of Socialism. Towards a Renewal. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. Laclau, Ernest, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London and New York: Verso. L wy, Michael. 1988. Rédemption et utopie. Le judaïsme libertaire en Europe Centrale. Une étude d’affinité élective. Paris: PUF. English edition: L wy, M.

20

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

2017. Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, trans. H. Heaney. London and New York: Verso. Mandel, Ernest. 1973. Contrôle ouvrier, conseils ouvriers, autogestion, 3 vols. Paris: Maspero. Poggio, Pier Paolo (ed.). 2010–2016. L’Altronovecento. Comunismo eretico e pensiero critico. Milan: Jaca Book. Pucciarelli, Matteo, and Giovanni Russo Spena. 2015. Mutualismo vs austerità: il segreto del successo di Syriza. Micromega, 12 February. http://temi.rep ubblica.it/micromegaonline/mutualismo-vs-austerita-il-segreto-del-successodi-syriza/. Accessed 30 October 2017. Rancière, Jacques. 1995. La Mésentente. Politique et philosophie. Paris: Galilée. Rubel, Maximilien. 1976. Le concept d’autopraxis du proletariat. Autogestion et socialisme (33–34): 127–146. Souvarine, Boris. 1983 [1977]. Stalin. Milan: Adelphi. Sunkara, Bhaskar. 2019. The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. London and New York: Verso. Traverso, Enzo. 2017. Il sole dell’avvenire nel xxi secolo. Il Manifesto, 18 January. https://ilmanifesto.it/enzo-traverso-il-sole-dellavvenire-nel-xxisecolo/. Accessed 5 May 2020. Walzer, Michael. 1991. L’intellettuale militante. Critica sociale e impegno politico nel Novecento. Bologna: Il Mulino. Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. London and New York: Verso. Wright, Eric Olin. 2019. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist for the 21st Century. London and New York: Verso.

CHAPTER 2

“Revolution Is Not What the Revolutionaries Believe It to Be”: Gustav Landauer (1870–1919)

1

Life and Works

Born in Karlsruhe in 1870, Gustav Landauer received his political education in Berlin in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a key period for the development of political Marxism and the German Social Democracy party (SPD) that took Marxist thought as an ideological polestar. Bismarck promoted special legislation to suppress this incipient socialism, positioning it on the wrong side of legality in the name of the struggle against “terrorism”. In 1890, after twelve long years of this repression, Wilhelm II’s ascent to the throne marked the beginning of a completely new phase. The workers and their organizations regained vitality, and along with this shift a series of conflict points that had long been latent erupted to the surface. One of these in particular was a current of opposition consolidated within the SPD that an elderly Friedrich Engels had defined with a hint of contempt as “the revolt of men of letters and students”. Newspapers, specialized journals and some very active militant intellectuals targeted the party and its programme with harsh critiques, arguing that it led workers to integrate into the system. Aiming to recover the revolutionary spirit of the early days that had been betrayed by high-ranking bureaucracy, the so-called Young sought to create a new political formation, the Union of Independent Socialists

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_2

21

22

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

(1891–1894). This group failed to consolidate into an actual organization, however, instead of maintaining the structure of a rather fragmented movement without the drive needed to expand nationally. It was in this context that Landauer appeared on the political stage as a collaborating author with and, later, the editor of a weekly periodical that was popular in Berlin and beyond. Although it bore the name “Der Sozialist” (the socialist), this weekly soon became markedly anarchist. His positions were rather peculiar, however, positioned on the boundary between anarchism and socialism, and they remained so even later in life. At the beginning of the new century, Landauer temporarily withdrew from public life following the failure of the first attempts to reignite the German and international revolutionary movement: in Germany, the reformist and revisionist perspective represented by Eduard Bernstein took hold in practice if not in theory; at the European level, instead, the move to expunge anarchists from the Second International (Landauer himself was present at the famous congresses in Zurich in 1893 and London in 1896) marked a serious fracture in the socialist world. He turned to philosophy, his great and perennial passion, focusing in particular on positivism and the cult of progress that prevailed at the time. On the political level, instead, he engaged with the “propaganda of the deed”, especially in a brief but incisive text entitled Anarchist thoughts on Anarchism (Landauer 2010, 84–91), published in 1901. In general, however, he maintained a marginal position in the debates of the German anarchist world. He returned to the fore in the period between the publications of two key texts, his most important book Revolution published in 1907 and Call to Socialism, the text of a conference he held in 1908 in Berlin and then replicated many times even outside Germany, published in 1911. In 1908, he also founded the Socialist Alliance, an anarchist organization based on federalist ideas that had its own press outlet, “Der Sozialist” (1909–1915), which carried on the legacy of the old newspaper by the same name published between 1891 and 1899. Finally, the heretical character of his anarchism emerged during the 1918–1919 German Revolution: he took part in the second phase of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, holding ministerial positions, and during the repression, he was brutally killed by counterrevolutionary troops.

2

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

23

A Road for the Liberation of Workers

Cooperativism was at the foundation of Landauer’s vision and political action. He approached it at the end of the nineteenth century, both to delineate the contours of a free and egalitarian future society and to indicate the means for achieving this objective. There is a clarification to make regarding this point, however. The cardinal element of the ethical conception of Landauerian anarchism lies in coherence between the means and the ends of action directed at changing society, and this coherence had direct repercussions on the “policies” of the movement and its critical stance towards so-called authoritarian currents. In reality, it is true for every anarchist that the means employed to dismantle existing society must prefigure the life of the future: if the future society is to be founded on self-government, the means employed to build it cannot be politics, that is, parliament, the government, etc. Furthermore, it is completely inconsistent to yearn for a society without a state and pursue this aim by trying to seize political power, thereby reinforcing the same apparatus of oppression that anarchists actually seek to erase. Of course, having established this general principle, flesh-and-blood anarchists have always had to deal with the real, everyday experience of men and women fighting for change, and from time to time, in their concrete actions, consider and even accept the extent of what is realistically possible. In some cases, for instance at the time of the attacks between the last part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, anarchists found themselves in a difficult position, with a strategy hinging on bombs and revolvers to create the conditions for a harmonious and peaceful world, and employing extreme practical individualism to achieve the utopia of libertarian communist society. Although some observers judged such acts to be at least morally justifiable, soon after prestigious figures such as Kropotkin, Malatesta and Landauer himself distanced themselves from violence against men and symbols of power as inconsistent with the foundations of anarchist ethics (Adamo 2004). When Landauer tried to map out “A Road for the Liberation of Workers” in 1895, delineating a pathway for consumer and production cooperatives to follow to pave the way for a free and egalitarian society, it was these premises that constituted his point of departure. The young, passionate anarchist certainly did not view the revolution, understood in the broad sense as a profound process of liberation of the exploited and oppressed, as the outcome of historical evolution or

24

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

a spontaneous event: rather, he saw it as the undisputed result of a vast effort of creating material and spiritual conditions that transcended the restricted sphere of the “political”. Therefore, he believed, it should not be prepared exclusively or even mainly within political parties, nor did it lay in the conquest of state power. In “A Road for the Liberation of Workers”, unsigned brochure bearing the significant date of “1 May 1895”, Landauer stated that society had to be transformed beginning with the creation of autonomous class power, separate from the forms of established power. Any temptation to enter the system at any level was to be rejected. A serious transformative movement must refuse to take action through the “circles of rulers” and instead concentrate on consolidating alternative forms of association. It was this current of thought that reinforced ideas of “practical socialism” and “positive political work” (Landauer 1895, 7). Landauer targeted authentic revolutionaries, those who eschewed the high-sounding phraseology of storming heaven, and sought to draw their attention to this thinking. It was a matter of creating “a space in which we can move ‘freely’”, he argued, with “organizations that in some way protect workers from the exploitation, violence and deception to which the holders of economic power expose them” (Landauer 1895, 6). This conviction gave rise to the principle of self-organization, understood as both the aims and the means of social transformation: this principle was to both shape actions and organizations in the present as part of a patient project of reforming and reconstructing society, and mould the future society founded on the inseparable values of equality and freedom. Landauer appreciated the trade unions’ preferred forms of action, especially boycotts, precisely because he considered it an instrument of struggle that framed workers as consumers. In his analysis, therefore, he distinguished between passive boycotts, those that consist in simply refusing to buy or consume a specific commodity, and active boycotts, instead involving a broader mobilization of worker-consumers bound together in consumer cooperatives. This step would make it possible, first of all, to marginalize all commercial intermediaries, actors who Landauer considered real “parasites” of market society. Workers’ autonomous organization of consumption would pave the way for the self-organization of production: in this case as well, it was not a matter of conquering industry in order to manage it on the basis of new principles, but rather of building a parallel economy completely different to the economy dominated by modern capitalists. Ultimately, the problem of capitalism concerned not

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

25

only the modalities and quantities of production (the “how” and the “how much” that define the exploitation of live labour), but also its aims (i.e. “what” it produces and “for what ends”). It was this understanding that led Landauer to argue that the objective must extend beyond developing a dense network of consumer cooperatives; it should also include the idea of creating production cooperatives alongside them, built using the savings obtained from the former and supported by the work of their members. In line with these premises, Landauer did not imagine that cooperatives would operate under the protection of the state, as one of the founding fathers of social democracy, Ferdinand Lassalle, had theorized in the past, nor in a hypothetical period of transition. He likewise did not believe that they should be set up to compete in the market, in contrast to certain exponents of anarchism, especially overseas, who later emphasized and in some cases even extolled the virtues of market competition. In his perspective, rather, “cooperativism absolutely presumes the overcoming of commercial traffic and so-called free trade” (Landauer 1895, 19). This vision clearly displays some naïve features, however, such as envisaging that “bourgeois society will have before its eyes in all its imposing greatness its heir, free socialism, when all the workers with the possibility to do so will have joined together to satisfy their consumption directly at the source, evading intermediation”. Yet Landauer also came to terms with reality when he stated that “It is not yet a socialist society, but only a society of workers, isolated as much as possible in itself, within bourgeois society. Certainly, much more than any revolution, a society of workers represents a first step in the direction of the socialist society” (Landauer 1895, 22) in which work will be reunited with its conditions of existence, the means of work and the profound essence of human beings. In short, cooperativism for Landauer represented an opportunity to develop socialism within existing society and, at the same time, the longsought-after economic form of future society. At this level of examination, however, his analysis displays some theoretical weaknesses. Even assuming that a cooperative system was actually implemented, what relationship would it have with the existing state? And again, if the aim of socialism was to build a stateless society, how was the state to be overcome? And what form of organization of the “social power” would be instituted to replace it? Unlike many anarchists, Landauer did not believe that a powerful mass movement would demolish the state through revolts and insurrections. Regarding this point, he was puzzled by the theoretical void he detected

26

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

in the founding “fathers” of the doctrine: Bakunin himself, who in his youth had sanctioned the principle of “creative destruction” (Bakunin 1842, 1002),1 failed to provide any more precise indications. First of all, Landauer did not consider the state to be a simple “thing”, i.e. a set of institutions that compel individuals through coercion, but rather a historically-determined social relation. As such, in his view the state was not eternal, not something that had existed forever and ever. He attributed its birth to the decline of feudal society that had given rise to modernity, erasing in the process communal-type secular forms of life. He wrote in 1907: The Christian era was not represented by the feudal system; nor was it represented by the village or district organization with its commonly owned land and its common economy; nor the Reichsversammlung; nor by the church and monasteries; nor by the guilds, crafts, and brotherhoods with their own judiciary systems; nor by the independent streets, precincts, and parishes of these towns; nor by the unions of towns or the unions of knights; nor by any exclusive and independent forms of social organization. The Christian era was characterized by the totality of these forms – forms that were interrelated and organized without ever creating a social pyramid or totalitarian power. The social priority of the Middle Ages was not the state but society, or, to be exact: the society of societies. What was it that united all these wonderful multiple social forms, allowing them to proceed to higher forms of unity without them becoming uniform? What allowed them to form social institutions without hierarchical domination? It was the spirit that came from the individuals, their characters, and their souls. It was this spirit that filled the social forms, and that returned from there to the individuals with even more strength. (Landauer 2010, 130–131).

Now, this spirit, this sense of belonging to the universe and form of coexistence and this set of reasons for life and criterion for organizing (or “stratifying”) interests were replaced by the state, a mere surrogate; due to its provisional nature, however, the state cannot be considered illegitimate. Moreover, Landauer did not pass moral judgement, either on the

1 J. Elysard alias Bakunin clearly states: “The impulse to destroy is an impulse to create as well”.

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

27

era that preceded the state (which, as he knew very well, was also characterized by misery, exploitation, degradation and religious oppression) or on the age of the modern state. Above all, this comparison is aimed at underlining that the state is always a social relation which cannot simply be destroyed but must at most be replaced with a different social relation. Therefore, the state is legitimate to the extent that associated individuals are unable to build an alternative relation to one characterized by domination, oppression and exploitation, a relation characterized instead by solidarity, reciprocity, equality and freedom. This is why Landauer insisted on the emancipatory character of cooperation: separating oneself from state-based community in his view did not mean so much (and only) moving to the countryside, away from laws and gendarmes; rather, it meant immediately starting to build different social relationships within socialist communities, spaces where the goods necessary for life would be produced in harmony and according to the agreement between producers, thereby making capitalism and its state superfluous. The link between cooperation, communitarianism and critique of the state represents the essence of Landauer’s socialist and anarchist thinking, a vision that is clearly alternative to that conveyed by the hegemonic Marxist currents of the time. Landauer engaged with Marxism and Marx’s conceptions in Call to Socialism, which reads: Karl Marx artificially bridged the two components of Marxism, science and the political party, creating something apparently completely new, which the world had never seen before, namely scientific politics and the party with a scientific basis and a scientific program. That really was something new and, moreover, modern and timely, and furthermore it flattered the workers to hear that precisely they represented science, indeed the very latest science. If you want to win the masses, then flatter them. If you want to incapacitate them for serious thought and action and make their representatives archetypes of hollow infatuation, mouthing a rhetoric which they themselves at best only half understand, then convince them that they represent a scientific party. If you want to fill them completely with malicious stupidity, then train them in party schools. The scientific party, thus, was the demand of the most advanced men of all times! (Landauer 1978)

The problem is this: on the one hand, Marx believed that he had discovered the fundamental laws determining the movement of society, which

28

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

necessarily pushed towards socialism; on the other hand, however, the protagonist of the movement is the political party of the working class, a party that was, however, subordinate to that same science of society. Landauer was correct about the fact that Marxism, as a party ideology, could be bent to justify contingent policies based on the opportunity of the moment or to distinguish friends and enemies both inside and outside. Of course, always operating in the name of Marxism, the party had succeeded over time in organizing workers, keeping them united in the dark periods of Bismarck’s exceptional laws. The party had successfully built class alliances, beginning with the peasants, and had set up a dense network of schools to provide both factory and agricultural workers with a basic education, as well as mutual-aid or recreational associations: in short, it had built a sort of parallel society within the official nation. On the other hand, it had laid the foundations for that “negative integration” that a later twentieth-century scholar, Günther Roth, identified as a way of subjecting the working class to dominant bourgeois values, imbued with nationalism, imperialism and militarism (Roth 1963). Faced with such ambivalence, and despite having before him all the elements for a more nuanced evaluation, in his 1911 writing Landauer felt the need to affirm that Marxism—his true target of theoretical critique—was the legitimate offspring of Karl Marx, thereby attacking the figure of Marx himself. It is interesting to note that, in the world of anarchism, there seems to have been a repeated need to personalize the attack by targeting a historical ideology. Nonetheless, a keen and original thinker and militant activist such as Landauer could have recognized that Marx’s thought displayed points of continuity with a tradition, Humanism and Renaissance, which he himself valued in his writing about Revolution. It was not the unknown genius Étienne de la Boétie, who did not appear in the Marxist library, but rather the pragmatic visionary Niccolò Machiavelli who provided an interpretive key for understanding the relationship between determinism and will in history, the focal point of Landauer’s critical analysis. In The Prince (chap. 6), Machiavelli stated that: But let us turn to Cyrus and the others who acquired or founded kingdoms. They are all most admirable. […] If we examine their actions and lives, we see that the only gift that Fortune accorded them was the opportunity that gave them the substance they could mold into any form they

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

29

pleased. Without that opportunity, their skill would not have flourished, and without that skill, the opportunity would have presented itself in vain.

Just as with the Florentine secretary, the virtue of the prince can and must be manifested in propitious opportunity, where the subject is not able to predetermine or decide. In the same way, the party—the organization of the collective will of labour in the industrial age—is virtuous if it manages to understand and intervene in the historical and social conditions that in fact transcend its ability to create them. Marx, however, tirelessly warned that Capital, being a critique of classical political economics, was not a description of historical necessity but a revolutionary book. As such, he asserted, it can only be fully understood if read together with the Manifesto of the Communist Party: the critique of the economy, on the one hand, and the political programme, on the other hand. Marx often expressed himself using the lexicon typical of positivism at its peak: while in the introduction to the first volume of Capital he spoke of a general law regulating the development of society, the whole meaning of his opus magnum is contained in the short but incisive paragraph dedicated to fetishism; this section is a paradigmatic example of method in which he notes that it is always social relations, and therefore actual men and women, that underly historical laws, thus rendering any attempt to associate his thought with some form of deterministic nature philosophy of history completely incoherent. The task that Marx attributed to the “scientific” party of the working class was primarily an intellectual and moral one, that is, a cultural and critical endeavour, a work of revelation and clarification necessary for collective action. And indeed this is the point Gramsci reiterated years later in his Prison Notebooks where, tellingly enough, he refers specifically to Machiavelli. Landauer’s critique of the historical stance of the German Social Democratic Party was thus well founded; to attribute it to Marx’s perfidious and obtuse intention, however, was a first-level theoretical error. That is, if we exclude the undocumented but reasonable hypothesis that demolishing the historical figure of Marx that social democrats had taken as the “founder” of a new science, almost a demigod incapable of error, was the only way he found to insinuate himself into the kind of fideistic knowledge he saw as having impregnated the working masses. The paradox lies in the fact that Landauer displayed an intellectual attitude similar to that of Marx, although expressed in a different language. In Landauer’s case,

30

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

it was a language borrowed from the neo-romanticism of the end of the century, steeped in mysticism. He used the term “spirit” to refer to the special and exceptional conditions in which a common feeling emerges in the masses, a yearning for change, an eagerness for the freedom of equals and a true “spirit of change” to use the later words of his friend Martin Buber. He argued that waiting should not replace the effort of culturally and materially preparing the subjective energies, a preparation necessary to intervene with the appropriate instruments and at the right moment: the spirit would not suddenly appear in the world, out of the blue. Rather, it would be generated by all the preliminary work carried out by flesh and blood “revolutionaries”. This interplay of subjectivity and objectivity, creative and innovative faculties capable of shaping reality alongside luck, the unyielding concreteness of reality that transcends individuals, represented the profound significance of that Renaissance virtue that both Marx and Landauer revisited.

3

Analysis of Capitalism

A fundamental difference between Landauer’s and Marx’s analyses lies in their evaluations of capitalism. The anarchist author did not propose a classist vision of capitalist society and, only on rare occasions, did he focus on the economic bases of the exploitation of labour. He acknowledged social classes, but he did not believe that a specific one, in particular the workers of modern industry, necessarily had to be granted a privileged role in the process of freeing society from exploitation and oppression. After all, the revolution was not an event but a long historical period between the decline of medieval society and future anarchy, therefore a historical period that is still ongoing. Second, the real turning point of civilization would take the form of regeneration, that is, a great spiritual, intellectual and moral transformation affecting all individuals. It was therefore not a matter of pre-arranging insurrections and assaults on state power, but of creating examples of a good life within existing society, examples that progressively expand to an ever-larger scale. Of course, Landauer did not reject the revolution as it was traditionally understood; however, he was convinced that single processes of redemption, such as the great French Revolution, were nothing more than “miracles of heroism” that failed to establish anything stable in the absence of a preliminary transformative endeavour focused on changing consciousness. All

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

31

those who harboured the spirit of utopia were welcome to join in this endeavour, regardless of their social background. The spirit of regeneration would not, however, suddenly and magically rain down on humanity; it was rather a matter of paving the way for such a spirit by creating institutions of communal life that prefigured the society of the future. To this end, between 1908 and 1915 the Socialist Alliance—an organization he directly created—bought “free land” to colonize, purchasing the necessary goods on the market and building cooperative companies to produce the goods needed to live. Landauer’s incorporation of the utopian experimentation of early socialism—which, on an intellectual level, was combined with his admiration for Robert Owen but also Proudhon’s banks of exchange—went hand in hand with his reclaiming of certain currents of so-called monetarist socialism, in particular the work of Silvio Gesell. Gesell was a heterodox economist who became involved in the Bavarian Republic alongside Landauer in 1919, with Gesell serving as the Commissioner of the people in charge of finance.2 Landauer did not set out to define the operational functioning of the future society in detail. However, if identifying an aim is necessary for setting up the proper means to achieve it, in a certain sense the means themselves prefigured the society to be built. Therefore, the task of defining a pathway for exiting the society of the state and capital also included envisioning the general traits of the longed-for community of the future. The perspective proposed by Gesell was similar in many ways to eighteenth-century Scottish utilitarianism. As a utopia, this model pursued the generalization of private property while on the level of the analysis of economic reality it asserted that the only function of money was to promote organic social turnover. On this basis, Gesell hypothesized that workers must fight in the here and now to secure the full proceeds of their work, profits which tend to be drained by the dynamics of a monopoly-dominated market lacking in real competition. This thinker was certainly not a bizarre or eccentric character, considering that Keynes himself went on to cite his ideas on currency in his General Theory (Keynes 1936, 353–358); what Landauer drew from Gesell above all was the conviction that landowners and money holders take land and money

2 Gesell’s works are collected (Gesell 1988–1997).

32

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

out of circulation, causing a general impoverishment of society: it was thus worth it to immediately fight for and implement the spread of small-scale private property and the introduction of a currency that would lose value over time, thus favouring its transformation from a means of hoarding to a simple, low-cost and therefore easily accessible instrument of exchange. Landauer, on the other hand, viewed private landownership as the main cause of the material misery affecting the majority of society: The great mass of men is separated from the earth and its products, from the earth and the means of labor. They live in poverty and insecurity. There is no joy and meaning in their life. They work at things that have no connection with their life. They work in a way that makes them dull and joyless. Many, entire masses of men, often have no roof over their head. They freeze, starve, and die miserably. (Landauer 1978, section 3)

The market, dominated by money, was the second main cause of social suffering, because “a stoppage in the market and the slow circulation of permanent money also cause our energies to stop and our soul to stagnate” (Landauer 1978, section 7). Referring to Proudhon’s complaint that “Private ownership is theft and slave-holding” (Landauer 1978, section 7), Landauer did not exclude the possibility that the new social system might retain the institution of ownership and therefore the possibility of producing goods for trade: Private property is not the same thing as ownership; and I see in the future private ownership, cooperative ownership, community ownership in most beautiful flowering; ownership by no means only of the objects of direct use or the simplest tools, but also the so superstitiously feared ownership of means of production of all sorts, houses and land. (Landauer 1978, section 7)

Finally, Landauer believed that misery and slavery in the society of that time were caused by surplus value. Here lies a weak point of his theory. He identified surplus value as lying in the difference between the price of goods and their actual value, accepting that this value be determined by the labour-time necessary to produce them: “Value”, he wrote, “is what the price should be but is not”, that is, it was not reflected in the market price. His view was different from that of Marx, who believed he had discovered the origin of surplus value at the heart of capitalist

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

33

production, although it only manifested at the level of circulation, that is, at the monetary level: the workers are compelled to hire themselves out, to surrender the results of their work-achievement to others for commercial use, in return for a certain compensation, a disproportion arises between the value of the products they have produced and the price of the products they can buy for their own use. The precise point at which they are robbed can be disregarded here, (…) remember that all profit of the capitalists arises from the discount which they force the workers to accept, no matter at what point, from the proceeds of their work, because of their difficult situations (…). Surplus value, like wage or price, is a relation and arises in the entire flow of the economic process, not at a particular spot. (Landauer 1978, section 7)

Workers’ condition of necessity can, in fact, be traced to the totality of the social conditions of a given epoch: in the era of capitalism, however, that totality had at its core the production process specific to large-scale capitalist industry. Here, once again, Landauer failed to grasp the allencompassing dimension of Marx’s thinking: Marx had never argued that the economic sphere alone could serve as a criterion for generally explaining a historical social structure; rather, he more modestly posited that no analysis which overlooks the economic sphere can be considered satisfactory. In short, according to Marx, economics alone does not describe a social formation, but without economics nothing can be understood of a society. Landauer saw matters differently: The cause of surplus value is not work, but the hardship of the workers. The hardship of the working people lies, as said above, outside the production process, and all the more so the cause of this hardship, and so on, in the circulation of the entire profit and land ownership economy (…). Not the capitalist production-process is the ultimate cause of the origin of surplus value. (Landauer 1978, section 7)

In line with various anarchist stances, Landauer considered capitalist exploitation to be a form of oppression; he was therefore convinced that the dominant social relationship in his time was that of the state, and that it had to be replaced with a different form of social relations based on the community. Here capital as “common spirit” could be allowed to

34

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

exist since, in his view, it is nothing more than an accumulation of knowledge and know-how aimed at satisfying primary and intellectual needs, handed down over time and through a given collective legacy (Landauer 1978, section 7). Therefore, he did not deny its social utility considering that “Capital, now, is merely the anticipation and advance payment of the expected product, [it] is precisely the same as credit or mutuality” (Landauer 1978, section 7). Capital understood in this sense is a category, that is, “the unifying spirit in its economic function”, and in the future society, it was to materialize as an institution providing credit, “similar” to the exchange bank that Proudhon had proposed over half a century earlier (Landauer 1978, section 7). For the future, Landauer accepted market freedom based on reciprocity and with the exchange of equal values among producers: socialism, therefore, would establish an economy in which all people work for themselves without exploiting the work of others, fully enjoying the proceeds of their own efforts and freely sharing in the products deriving from the division of labour. The capital “of a working man or a group of working men is their possibility to produce certain products in a certain time”, it is “credit” (the means of work and food) and, at the same time, “collaboration” and free circulation throughout the community. In envisioning exchange in the future society, he wrote: That is the task of socialism: to arrange the exchange economy so that each one even under a trading system works only for himself; so that men stand in thousandfold association with one another and yet nothing in this union is taken away from anyone, but to each is given. It will be given not as a gift from one person to another; socialism intends neither renunciation nor robbery; each receives the output of his work and enjoys the strengthening of all by the division of labor, exchange and a working communality in extracting the products of nature. (Landauer 1978, section 7)

4

Revolution

World War I was a moment of epochal rupture: it disrupted political space, changed people’s mentalities and overturned fundamental social structures and intellectual expectations. In a word, it represented the end of the old nineteenth-century world and the beginning of a new era, tragic and glorious at the same time. Landauer, a man of the nineteenth century,

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

35

experienced the conflict on the side of the opposition, as he was a consistent anti-militarist and pacifist; as a matter of fact, he believed that it was only in peace times that the anarchic-socialist project had the chance to develop. Although he was deeply attached to the German cultural tradition, he did not respond to patriotic calls, and he likewise did not hesitate to denounce Germany’s “faults” in having “planned” the beginning of the “useless massacre”. He was not afraid, however, of pointing out the revolutionary possibilities on the horizon: he took active part in the events occurring in Germany between the autumn of 1918 and the following spring as a member of the Provisional Council of the Bavarian Republic, supporting Kurt Eisner and his project for “new democracy” that sought to combine traditional parliamentarianism and the new-born system of councils. Finally, after a hot-headed young reactionary murdered the Prime Minister, Landauer was appointed as the People’s Commissioner for Culture. This did not put an end to his theoretical reflection, however. In the so-called revolutionary edition of the Call to Socialism, he wrote a new introduction dated 3 January 1919 explaining that he felt the need to dissociate himself from the idea that socialism, having come back into vogue, was the product of progress and, therefore, that the ruin of prewar capitalist societies brought with it socialism as if automatically. He wrote: Capitalism, furthermore, has not displayed the anticipated progressiveness of slowly and peacefully transforming itself into socialism; nor has it produced socialism by a miraculous sudden collapse […].The government has collapsed; socialism is the only salvation. It certainly did not result as a blossom of capitalism […]. Nor can socialism be added to the beautiful body of society as an apex of national wealth and a sumptuous economy; it must be created almost out of nothing amid chaos. (Landauer 1978, Forward to the Second Edition)

With this assertion, he sought to call revolutionaries back to the difficult task of building completely new institutions even though the outcomes could not be fully anticipated, rather than letting themselves be lulled by the idea that it would be sufficient to seize state power and rename it “socialist”. Russia, for example, had surprisingly inaugurated a new era of revolution. Looking at this example, Landauer expressed optimism despite his anti-Marxist doubts. In the new forward to the Call,

36

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

he affirms that, if the Bolsheviks had as they claimed succeeded in overcoming their doctrinalism and accepting federalism and freedom, thereby rejecting centralism and the authoritarian principle, then such a development meant that the spirit of change was taking solid root throughout Europe (Landauer 1978, Forward to the Second Edition). The importance Landauer assigned to “positive work” and the construction of the “new” is even more evident when he addresses the temporarily dispossessed old classes, warning that: A political revolution in Germany had not yet occurred; now it has been completed, and only the revolutionaries’ inability to construct the new economy, in particular, as well as the new freedom and self-determination, could be held responsible if a reaction should bring about the reestablishment of new privileged powers. (Landauer 1978, Forward to the Second Edition)

The arrival of the revolution, in short, did not substantially change the perspective he had expressed in previous years. He continued to highlight the need to economically reform society while also encouraging social subjects to engage in self-determination, but he was obliged to remodel certain elements of this vision. First, he confirmed that the revolution was more a spiritual process than a political one, consisting of a profound change in worldview; as such, he argued, it can never be anchored in the past. Revolution “breaks the law” currently in force and creates new ones, that is, it builds new institutions, at that moment embodied in the councils. Landauer viewed workers, peasants and soldiers as aggregates rather than individuals, which profoundly modified the meaning he attributed to “democracy”. In an emphatic 1918 speech, he stated: The man who stands alone is a lost being, a being exposed above all to any form of demagogy. Man must organize himself with others, exchange advise, act in concert. There must be no more isolated individuals leaving the house and going to the polling booth, where they find the urn ready with the slot in which they put the ballot paper, and then return home. (Landauer 2011, 281)

Individuals are always part of a community, but human belonging is plural (professional, family, gender, etc.), that is, a rich assemblage of trends,

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

37

experiences, stimuli, expectations and utopias that take root in people in their relationships with others, giving rise to something new. Politically speaking, therefore, Landauer viewed the democracy of individuals, in the liberal sense, as nonsense, because such democracy is merely a random sum of opinions; democracy, he sustained, should instead be “articulation, mutual relationship”, that is, a way of living and being together more than a method of government. In order to make effective decisions on matters of general interest, Landauer envisioned setting up “collective assemblies of common belonging which send delegates and that these delegates always remain in contact with the people gathered together in assemblies organized by sector of belonging, which are not to adopt forms of autonomy separate from the people or against the people” (Landauer 2011, 281). The idea of organizing social power that follows from this vision is clearly inspired by federalism. In Landauer’s model, however, it is the various communities that are the active subjects, not miniature states. Delegates operate among the different levels, but with a specific mandate to avoid any deleterious separation between the real people and the legal people, between the governed and the rulers, between the parties and the citizens: “We do not need any dictatorship of the parties. We need new objectives, new ways, a new type of democracy” (Landauer 2011, 282). To achieve this goal, Landauer did not exclude some form of political professionalism a priori. The field of politics is not framed as separate and autonomous from all the other fields of human action, however. He thus hypothesized that civil society would mobilize, normally but continuously, in every area that touches on collective interests: from the home to transport, from schooling to health care. It was this arrangement he had in mind when he stated: I see in what began (and in revolutionary terms is called: Councils of workers, soldiers, peasants, as in all revolutions) the structuring of all the people into organic corporations; I see in all this the renewal of a decadent, deplorable and unworthy parliamentarianism, which disappeared, died and buried, defeated by the revolution and which will not reappear in any form whatsoever. (Landauer 2011, 282)

As we so often find in the revolutionary decrees of the past, these words convey a message for the future. Accounts of democratic and egalitarian utopia frightened the ruling classes in every corner of Europe, however:

38

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

reactionary soldiers, White Army troops, and professional assassins, mobilized to snuff out the spark that risked transforming old Europe and the world before it could really catch fire. They left in their wake deaths, prisoners and exiles, injuring and scarring communists, anarchists, socialists and radical democrats alike in that, despite their divisions, all were united by the same fate deliberately imposed on them by the ruling classes of the time.

References Adamo, Pietro (ed.). 2004. Pensiero e dinamite. Gli anarchici e la violenza [Thought and Dynamite. Anarchists and Violence]. Milan: M&B. Bakunin, Michail. 1842. Die Reaktion in Deutschland. Ein Fragment von einem Franzosen. Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst 251: 985–1002. Cohen-Skalli, Cedric, and Libera Pisano. 2020. Farewell to Revolution! Gustav Landauer’s Death and the Funerary Shaping of His Legacy. The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 28: 184–227. Gesell, Sylvio. 1988–1997. Gesammelte Werke, 18 voll. Lütjenburg: Fachverlag für Sozialökonomie. Keynes, John M. 1936. The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. London: Macmillan. Landauer, Gustav. 1895. Ein Weg zur Befreiung der Arbeiterklasse. Berlin: Mareck. Landauer, Gustav. 1907. Die Revolution. Frankfurt a.M.: Rütten & Loening. English edition: Landauer, G. 2010. Revolution and Other Writings. A Political Reader, trans. G. Kuhn, 110–185. Oakland: PM Press. Landauer, Gustav. 1911. Aufruf zum Sozialismus. Berlin: Verlag des Sozialistischen Bundes. English edition: Landauer, G. 1978. For Socialism, trans. D.J. Parent. St. Louis: Telos Press. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gustavlandauer-call-to-socialism. Landauer, Gustav. 2008. La Communauté par le retrait et autres essais, trans C. Daget. Paris: Éditions du Sandre. Landauer, Gustav. 2008–2017. Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. S. Wolf, vol. 13. LichHessen: Edition AV. Landauer, Gustav. 2009. Un Appel aux poètes et autres essais, trans. C. Daget. Paris: Éditions du Sandre. Landauer, Gustav. 2010. Revolution and Other Writings. A Political Reader, trans. G. Kuhn. Oakland: PM Press. Landauer, Gustav. 2011. Der Krieg und die Revolution. Nation, Krieg und Revolution, 272–288. Ausgewählte Schriften. Essen: Verlag Edition.

2

“REVOLUTION IS NOT WHAT THE REVOLUTIONARIES …

39

Landauer, Gustav. 2020. Briefe 1899–1919. In von Wolzogen, ed. Hanna Delf. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. Leder, Tilman. 2014. Die Politik eines “Antipolitikers”. Eine politische Biographie Gustav Landauers, 2 voll. Lich-Essen: Edition AV. Lucet, Anatole. 2019. Anarchist Against Violence. Gustav Landauer’s Subversion of the Rational Paradigm. The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence III (2): 104–122. Lunn, Eugen. 1973. Prophet of Community. The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Maurer, Charles B. 1971. Call to Revolution. The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer. Detroit: Wayne University Press. Newman, Saul. 2020. Gustav Landauer’s Anarcho-Mysticism and the Critique of Political Theology. Political Theology 21: 434–451. Ragona, Gianfranco. 2010. Gustav Landauer. Anarchico, ebreo, tedesco. Rome: Editori Riuniti University Press. Ragona, Gianfranco. 2011. Gustav Landauer. A Bibliography (1889–2009). Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Roth, Günther. 1963. The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working Class Isolation and National Integration. New York: Bedminster Press.

CHAPTER 3

Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation: Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952)

1

Life and Works

Alexandra Mikhailovna Domontoviˇc (Kollontai was her first husband’s last name, maintained after their divorce) was born in St. Petersburg in 1872 to a family of the old Russian nobility. She was the first woman in history to be appointed minister (1917) and later ambassador (1924). This future revolutionary’s keen awareness of her own privileged position led her to rebel against institutions and forms of injustice. The first manifestation of this rebellious spirit can be seen in her choice to marry for love (to a rather poor cousin and engineer, Vladimir L. Kollontai) in 1893 instead of following her family’s advice and accepting a marriage of convenience as her sister had done. This was the first “scandal” in a life that constantly oscillated between a wholesale rejection of established customs (especially patriarchal norms) and an obstinate search for a unifying sentimental bond: “Love with its many disappointments, with its tragedies and eternal demands for perfect happiness still played a very great role in my life” (Kollontai 1971, 7). This fluctuation also reflected the transition an entire generation of revolutionary women underwent as they shifted away from traditional gender roles in pursuit of a new, autonomous identity. During a 1896 visit to the textile factory of Krengolm, Kollontai had a first-hand view of the extremely difficult labour conditions of the industrial working class as well as the degree of class consciousness they had © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_3

41

42

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

achieved. This experience constituted a decisive turning point in her education. She made the decision to relocate to Zurich to study economy, in 1898, and dedicate all her energy to the revolutionary cause. Separating from her family, not only her husband but also her beloved son born in 1894, later led to divorce. The following year, Kollontai became a militant member of the Russian Social Democratic Party. In the following years, she cultivated an interest in Finland to the point of becoming Russia’s foremost expert on the matter, first in the Menshevik party and later in the Bolshevik party. Kollontai also carried out her tireless efforts to organize Russian women workers and ensure that they received political training, thus laying the foundations for a mass movement. At the same time, she was a prolific publicist and lecturer. Indeed, her political-social thinking is mainly presented in her articles and speeches rather than published volumes. She joined the Bolshevik fraction in 1904 only to leave it just two years later over disagreements about the role of representative democracy. Her first attempt to establish an independent women’s organization within the Russian Social Democratic Party dates back to that time. Two years later her long exile began. This period as a persona non grata on Russian soil lasted until March 1917, during which time she stayed in several Western European countries as well as the United States. She established relationships with some of the most important leaders of the international labour movement, first and foremost the leaders of the SPD (which she joined in 1909), in particular Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, but also the reformist married couple Mr. and Mrs. Webb. At the outbreak of the war, she redoubled her efforts to promote an antimilitarist position: she was one of the organizers of the Zimmerwald conference and her pamphlet Who Needs War? (1915) circulated widely. In June of the same year, she joined the Bolshevik party and began a lively correspondence with Lenin; once back in Russia and appointed (the first female) member of the Soviet executive committee, she was the first to support Lenin’s April Theses. Arrested in July, while still in prison she was elected member of the committee of the Bolshevik party. When she was released in October, her top priority was to organize the first congress of women workers (eventually held in November 1918). In the aftermath of the revolution, she became the Minister (Commissioner) for Social Affairs, devoting herself to founding a state centre to care for mothers and newborns. It was

3

CLASS STRUGGLE AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION …

43

this latter project that made her the target of malicious and unfounded accusation of wanting to “nationalize” women and children. Not only was there a bitter, violent campaign against her, she also came under attack for opposing the Brest-Litovsk Treaty: Now began a dark time of my life which I cannot treat of here since the events are still too fresh in my mind. But the day will also come when I will give an account of them.[…] There were differences of opinion in the Party. I resigned from my post as People’s Commissar on the ground of total disagreement with the current policy. Little by little I was also relieved of all my other tasks. […]The Revolution was in full swing. The struggle was becoming increasingly irreconcilable and bloodier, much of what was happening did not fit in with my outlook. (Kollontai 1971, 40)1

Her opposition to the treaty led her to resign from the post of minister; however, alongside Inessa Armand and Nadezhda Krupskaya, she remained committed to founding a women’s organization within the party. This organization was finally created in 1919 (under the name of “Zhenotdel”) and in November 1920, at the death of Armand, Kollontai served as its leader, although only for a few months. The following year, she joined Workers’ Opposition, the group of trade unionists that grew up in 1920 around the figure of Alexander Šljapnikov; she spoke on behalf of the group in 1921 at the 10th Congress of the Communist Party. At that same congress, all the fractions were banned, including Workers’ Opposition. Kollontai became increasingly isolated; later, she was the only member of the group to survive the Stalinist persecutions, thanks in part to her prestigious diplomatic posts in Norway (where she became the first female ambassador in history, in 1924), Mexico and, between 1930 and 1945, Sweden. This was a golden period of exile for the Russian revolutionary in which she developed contacts with political and intellectual personalities from all over the world, winning them over with her competence (including diplomatic skills) and determination. At the same time, in 1926 her refusal to focus on USSR internal politics reflected the larger defeat of the most ambitious (or perhaps only) attempt in the history of the Communist movement to face the women issue head-on. Unique among Bolshevik leaders, in fact, Kollontai did not limit herself to asserting that women should be actively 1 Author Italics.

44

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

included in politics and economics, she also reflected on the kind of revolution that would be needed to break with a centuries-old tradition of servitude: a revolution in everyday life. These themes were completely foreign to the cult of the heroic mother that was gaining ground with Stalin’s rise, and in fact, Kollontai’s ideas and struggles were met with ridicule.2 Scholars have long been fascinated by the reasons that drove Stalin to only exile Kollontai rather than having her executed, and even to award her a high honour (the Order of Lenin) in 1933. It is currently impossible to form one single answer to this question, given the scarcity and contradictory nature of available sources. Indeed, opinions diverge as to Kollontai’s degree of “opportunism”, on the one hand, and Stalin’s assessments, on the other hand. As for the first point, how should we read her choice to step back from the leftist Opposition and fractions in general—as well as from the creative spirit of the masses she had previously praised—in the name of the unity of the proletariat, as expressed on the pages of “Pravda” in 1927? Was this a public act of submission to Stalin, to safeguard her life and privileges, or perhaps even more so, to protect her son and family who had remained in the Soviet Union? If instead Kollontai experienced diplomatic exile as a form of “passive resistance”, as Alix Holt hypothesizes, why a year after returning home (1945) did she express appreciation of Soviet socialist achievements for women when in reality they had been pushed back into the role of “angels of the hearth” once they were no longer useful to the war effort? This last episode suggests that Kollontai was motivated to “settle” with Stalinist politics not only by her understandable and well-founded fears for her own and her son’s safety. It seems she was also incapable of admitting that such an ambitious project (socialism and the liberation of women), a project to which the revolutionary woman had dedicated her entire life to the detriment of her own private sphere, had in fact failed. As for Stalin’s reasons, some hold that his chivalrous spirit prevailed, preventing him from having a woman executed; according to others, it was a matter of cost-benefit analysis (a death sentence for a figure with the 2 Lenin himself, who together with Trotsky had initially supported Kollontai in her plan for emancipating women, did not even mention her in the writings collected in The Emancipation of Women (from the Writings of V. I. Lenin. 2010. NY: International Publishers Co), just as he ignored the problems, unresolved, that she raised.

3

CLASS STRUGGLE AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION …

45

international reputation of Kollontai would have aroused more hostility than agreement). And finally, a perhaps more daring reading suggests that the fundamental reason for his clemency lay in their common enmity for Trotsky.3 Kollontai spent her final years in a country that had opted to forget about her. When she died on 9 March 1952, the Pravda did not even publish an obituary for her.

2

Marxism, Class Initiative and Gender Autonomy

Kollontai approached Marxism in the last years of the nineteenth century and the reading she developed of it was deterministic and salvific. She interpreted historical materialism as a scientific principle and class struggle as the natural law governing historical processes. Kollontai’s analysis of capitalism focuses on the subordination of women rather than the exploitation of productive work. Consistent with her orthodox reading of Marxism, she identified the source of female oppression in private property; the readings of Marx and Engels as well as August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, published in 1883, which Kollontai read in 1895, and was deeply affected by it, played a fundamental role in the development of her analyses in this sense. However, while embracing a linear vision of the relationship between the revolution and the empowerment of women, she insisted on the need to establish autonomous women’s organizations: she never ceased to express her admiration for Clara Zetkin even though she moved beyond Zetkin’s “quantitative” approach to the problem of women’s inclusion in the revolutionary process and, after 1917, did not agree with her view on the role of the Bolshevik party. As Kollontai gradually gained experience, first as an agitator and later as a prominent figure in the Bolshevik government, the tension between her trust that socialism was able to achieve equal gender opportunities and

3 Stalin would have greatly appreciated the correspondence between Lenin and

Kollontai, which she donated to the State Archives, because it contained a great deal of contemptuous expressions that both correspondents addressed to Trotsky. In his biography about Trotksy, Isaac Deutscher recounts that it was Kollontai, as the Russian ambassador in Stockholm, who pressed the Swedish authorities to deny the Bolshevik leader an entry visa (Deutscher 2003).

46

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

her awareness that the economic-social revolution was not sufficient to ensure this outcome became increasingly acute. After abandoning Soviet domestic politics to focus on her diplomatic posts, Kollontai insisted more and more on the need for a cultural and “emotional” revolution. This stance rendered her even more eccentric in relation to the dominant currents in the international workers’ movement of the time. Another element that tempered, if not actually challenged, theoretical rigidity and drew her closer to Rosa Luxemburg (the two revolutionaries met for the first time in Finland, in 1906) was her confidence in the intrinsic positivity of mass action, together with her distrust of institutions. The utopian component was more accentuated in Kollontai’s thinking as compared to Luxemburg’s, both on the anthropological level (faith in the natural inclination of the proletariat to collectivism) and on the institutional level: while Luxemburg was aware that the virus of bureaucratization can also take root in trade unions, Kollontai saw a strenuous defence of the independence and centrality of the trade union— before and after the revolution—as the most solid bulwark of autonomous proletarian creativity. She was very close to Lenin in the years before the revolution and the months immediately following it—in her autobiography, she writes that they shared ideology and intent. And yet it is impossible to derive a univocal conception of the party from her publications, which were often fragmentary even in terms of form (conferences, articles for daily newspapers, etc.). It is nevertheless significant that as early as 1906, in disagreeing with the Mensheviks who denied that Russia might ever hold a revolution based on Marxist orthodoxy, she wrote a pamphlet invoking a republic based on local self-government by both factory and agricultural workers, and female workers. At the time, such a perspective probably appeared more anarchist than Marxist.

3

The Difficult Transition to Socialism

The year 1920 marked the end of two situations that up to that point had conditioned internal debates over how to transform the mode of production: the civil war, with the victory of the Red Army, and the fideistic expectation that the revolutionary hotbeds scattered throughout Europe might fan the flames of a global revolution. At the same time, the new state was suffering from a worsening political-economic crisis, a condition

3

CLASS STRUGGLE AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION …

47

that soon (1921) led to the Kronstadt revolt and, later, to the adoption of the new economic policy. The debate on the relationship between trade unions, the party and the state in the new society was thus reopened. At the 1919 Pan-Russian Congress dedicated to trade unions, Lenin was still able to calmly outline the thesis that they must ineluctably be nationalized; the following year, however, it became increasingly evident that there was a yawning institutional and ideological gap between the new state bodies that the party created and occupied and the trade union demand for autonomy. Trotsky was the most intransigent representative of the group pressing to merge unions into the state (a position that helps us understand his enmity with Kollontai) and later Bukharin supported this position as well. Trotsky rejected the idea of trade union organizations playing an independent role because his experience as commander of the Red Army had led him to believe that production itself needed to be militarized. There was clearly no room for union autonomy in his state dirigisme. The opposite position was defended by Šljapnikov, who was Minister of Labour in the government until December 1918 before becoming chairman of the metalworkers’ union, and the group of trade unionists gathered around him. In the run-up to the 10th Congress (1921), Kollontai committed to using her brilliant and passionate style to write the booklet outlining the group’s theses as Šljapnikov had formulated them. Moreover, her engagement with the new group can be seen as the natural continuation of the critical view she had expressed regarding SPD bureaucratization even before the war. Kollontai explained that what united the members of Workers’ Opposition was in fact the awareness that millions of workers faced unsustainable living and working conditions, but also the will to hold the line of class politics. During the three years of constructing the Soviet state, in fact, the working class had watched its importance in political life decline, realizing with concern that a new social class was forming made up of high-ranking soviet and party officials (the latter of whom, unsurprisingly, very rarely supported Workers’ Opposition). Kollontai admitted: We had forgotten that the proletariat can make serious mistakes and slip into the mud of opportunism not only during its struggle for power, but also during the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Kollontai 1973, 72)

48

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Before proposing an alternative platform, Kollontai examined the factors causing the party’s crisis: alongside objective difficulties (backwardness and economic crisis; international hostility), there was also the problem of the prevalence of the rural element in society and the influence exerted by other lower-middle class strata. Another issue was that the great bourgeoisie had survived and was infiltrating the party (she referred to experts and technicians), pushing the country’s economic course towards capitalism. Kollontai focused on this last aspect in particular, analysing transformations in the army alongside those in the economy. The new state’s tasks did not include transforming the army in terms of class, because the armed forces were destined to disappear with the advent of communism; in order to win the war, there was no choice but to accept the authority of the old military officers. However, Kollontai admonished, this same process must not be reproduced in the economic sphere: To debar the workers from the organization of industry, to deprive them, that is, their individual organizations, of the opportunity to develop their powers in creating new forms of production in industry through their unions, to deny this expression of the class organization of the proletariat, while placing full reliance on the “skill” of specialists trained and taught to carry on production under a quite different system of production – is to jump off the rails of scientific Marxist thought. (Kollontai 1961, 8)

Aside from her dogmatic tone, Kollontai’s posing of this (rhetorical) question addresses a crucial problem: Can the construction of a communist economy be entrusted to the heirs of the middle class, who will manage it on the basis of a vision and practice they drew from capitalism? The key point here has to do with the degree of continuity between successive production modes and the nature of the role played by “technicians” (see also Philips Pryce 1921). According to Kollontai, the bureaucratization plaguing the party stemmed from the growing influence exercised by elements external and hostile to communism. The elephantiasis of the apparatus was not the only harmful symptom of this involution; the main issue was the tendency to negate democratic processes: in the eyes of Workers’ Opposition, the fact that the Bolshevik leadership viewed bureaucracy as an antidote to the (unpredictable) initiative of the masses represented the greatest threat to the fate of both the party and the proletarian state.

3

CLASS STRUGGLE AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION …

49

In the face of this erosion of the Bolshevik political organization, Workers’ Opposition viewed the trade unions as a tool for economic, political and moral regeneration. Kollontai reminded readers that the antagonism between trade unions and the state was rooted in the fact that there are divergent answers to the question of who should build the communist economy, and how so. The author provided an account, albeit inevitably partisan, of the different positions on this issue, an overview that is quite valuable for understanding why the debate within the Communist Party in those crucial years was so heated. Despite their apparent variety, these positions can all be seen to derive from one of the two following approaches: that of Workers’ Opposition and that of all the others (Lenin, Trotsky and Kamenev, above all). As Šljapnikov summarized in a December 1920 report, the choice is between bottom-up development, i.e. driven by workers through their class organizations (the Pan-Russian Trade Union Congress), and top-down development, implemented through state bureaucracy (in this case, the Supreme Economic Council, created in December 1917). The power in this latter actor was concentrated in the hands of senior party officials who seemed to have inherited the stigmata of bourgeois individualism. Kollontai clarified that Workers’ Opposition identified the unions with their practical knowledge of production as the only organisms capable of solving the problems associated with establishing a communist economy; bureaucratic and socially heterogeneous bodies would not have been able to do so. Kollontai also referenced the soviet “machine”, describing it as “separated from direct vital industrial activity and […] mixed in its composition” (Kollontai 1961, 4). Created with the main intention of fostering autonomous action on the part of the masses, the Soviets ended up paralysing such action. In a party whose leaders did not trust the economic management capacity of the working class on the grounds that it supposedly lacks the necessary knowledge, however, everyone defended the Soviets. Kollontai’s distrust of the Bolshevik leadership also emerged from an analysis of the way their class composition had changed with respect to 1917: she was well aware of this phenomenon, and yet the conclusions she reached were in sharp contrast to those of Lenin and the other leaders. Many exponents of the working-class vanguard died in the civil war, and the survivors took office in the various sections of the party and state. Given the obligation to work, people not originally from the working class entered the ranks of the industrial proletariat.

50

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

In the light of these demographic and anthropological class changes, the fact that the majority of the party insisted on the need to educate the masses (in 1921 expressed in the Theses of the Group of Ten, which bore Lenin’s, Zinovyev, Kamenev’s and Stalin’s names) can be interpreted as an urgent attempt to ensure that communists enjoyed the greatest possible influence in society at large and in factories in particular. While the Ten did allow the unions to remain independent (albeit in a way brimming with ambiguity) in order to perform their function as a “school of communism”, Trotsky instead reiterated need for them to be reabsorbed within the state. What they had in common was the refusal to grant the unions managerial power over production. While the limit of Šljapnikov and Kollontai’s thinking was that they had an insufficient understanding of the general context (both internal and external), the Ten, as well as Trotsky, proved unable to respond to the challenging issues raised by Workers’ Opposition: the erosion of democracy and the material and political decline of the proletariat.

4

Class and Self-Government

Through Kollontai’s pen, the group of trade unionists opposed this idea of the proletariat’s alleged economic “illiteracy” by arguing that not even the rising bourgeoisie had any technical advantage over its predecessors; however, “creativeness and the search for new forms of production, for new incentives to labour, in order to increase productivity, may be generated only in the bosom of this natural class collective” (Kollontai 1961, 33) and cannot be dictated from above by decree. The task of the party, if anything, is to “create the conditions” for a different mode of production. While these are the cornerstones of the Workers’ Opposition vision, it should be noted that they were translated into a precise politicalinstitutional platform in the 1921 booklet. Despite having architected the revolution, Kollontai and her associates saw the vanguard of the party as losing sight of its points of reference— historical materialism and class politics—to flounder in the quicksand of bureaucracy. It was clear to them that the first step in overturning this degeneration lay in combating party bureaucracy. It is worth emphasizing that the group called for democratic principles to be respected not only in normal times, “but also for times of internal and external tension. This is the first and basic condition for the

3

CLASS STRUGGLE AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION …

51

Party’s regeneration, for its return to the principles of the programme […]” (Kollontai 1961, 40).4 In line with its inspiring principles, Workers’ Opposition proposed a series of measures aimed at clearly distinguishing between party and state and ensuring that the former not be “contaminated” by elements extraneous to the proletariat, thereby restoring democracy both within the party and in society as a whole. These were partly “reclamation” measures (expelling all individuals who were not part of the proletariat from the state administration and the party)5 and partly antidotes to the overlapping of party and state, a condition they deemed lethal: while the former was created to pursue the interests of the proletariat, the latter aimed at integrating inter-class interests (in addition to the working class, these included peasants, those remaining from the previous society and the newly born bureaucratic caste). Kollontai and her group thus felt it was essential that all the party offices—from local to national—be brought back to their class function, prohibiting two-thirds of officials from taking on multiple (party and state) positions. It should be noted that these thinkers not only did not see holding simultaneous positions in both the party and the union as dangerous, they identified such transversal position-holding as a means of immunizing the party against the pro-capitalist drift. Nevertheless, the Workers’ Opposition platform also expressed a higher ambition, one that converged with the agenda of the Group for Democratic Centralism (which included Smirnov, Sapronov and Osinskij). This latter was the only other faction that dared to challenge the authority of the leadership at the time, and in fact, the two groups presented their proposals together at the 9th Congress. The ambition in this case was to re-establish democratic principles in the core of the new state, principles such as freedom of opinion and criticism, transparency in decision-making and the rank-and-file taking priority over management in analysing Soviet policy problems. Part of this plan was a proposal to reinstate elections for

4 Italics added. 5 Kollontai points out that the elimination of such elements from the party must be

“complete and thorough”, noting that the non-proletarians who approached the party out of genuine conviction rather than opportunism did so during the first phase of the revolution, and not later. She also clarifies that the expelled members will be able to appeal for re-entry into the party provided they agree to perform a manual job ahead of time.

52

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

choosing officials, thus breaking the chokehold of the appointment-based system. Indeed, this system was judged to be unhealthy for the party and the new state because it undermined equality by removing “appointees” from under collective control. The measures listed so far were meant to stop the trend of bureaucratization that was distorting the original line of the Bolshevik party. Workers’ Opposition went even further, however, if the aim was to establish proletarian self-government once and for all, the relative importance of the party and unions had to be reversed, gradually transferring economic direction from the bureaucracy (either party or state) to a body elected directly by the workers. In so doing, the group sought to overcome the oppositional relationship between the Supreme Council of the Economy (a bureaucratic body) and the Pan-Russian Congress of Trade Unions. The Congress was to be guaranteed a position of dominance by granting it veto power over all economic and administrative appointments; vice versa, the candidates proposed by the trade unions would not answer to the party and could not be removed from their positions by it. Moreover, self-government was to be exercised not centrally but at the level of individual production units, preparing the workers (or rather their representatives) in each of these units for the task of economic leadership. Fully aware of the accusations that had been levelled at her group, Kollontai concluded the booklet by stating that the Workers’ Opposition proposal was not the expression of trade unionist tendencies but rather the embodiment of the party’s own real agenda and reasserting her trust in both the party and Lenin himself. Workers’ Opposition was mainly opposed to the militarization of the economy, and living labour itself, that Trotsky had initiated. Nonetheless, the group ended up clashing with Lenin himself: in the face of the Kronstadt revolt and peasant uprisings during the 10th Congress, it became increasingly important for the party to suppress forms of disunity. When Kollontai spoke on behalf of the dissident group, the leadership had already opted to ban fractions, and her decision to take a stand almost caused her to be expelled, not to mention making her the target of crude sexist attacks. Despite heavy pressure, a few months later (at the end of June) Kollontai courageously decided to speak on behalf of Opposition at the 3rd Congress of the Communist International to criticize the NEP; on that occasion, Lenin left the task of denigrating her and her supporters to Bukharin and Trotsky.

3

CLASS STRUGGLE AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION …

53

By then, the group was being compared to the Kronstadt rebels and all of its leading exponents were first politically erased (Lenin already did so during the 10th Congress) and then, under Stalin, physically eliminated as well. Their programme (at the time and in subsequent reconstructions) was accused of being vague and anarcho-syndicalistic and suffering from a poor understanding of reality. Of course many of the elements in the booklet Kollontai wrote remained incomplete: How should production be concretely managed, and by whom? More than the proletariat as an indistinct mass, Workers’ Opposition appears to have imagined this role performed by workers’ representatives—the unions, at both factory and national levels (also involving the trade associations, up to and including the Pan-Russian Congress). If so, how might representatives be prevented from taking the road towards bureaucratization, becoming caught up in the same authoritarian drift that the group had condemned in the party? And how should conflicts within the proletariat and trade unions be managed? It was likewise unclear, moreover, how Workers’ Opposition intended to regulate relations between trade unions and the party: they clearly sought to ensure the pre-eminence of the former, but what role did they envision for the latter beyond generic supervision? And how to channel the party’s relationship with the state? This tangle of unresolved theoretical and political-institutional knots arose once again, in a wholly different historical and geographical context (Sweden in the seventies), on the occasion of Rudolf Meidner’s proposal to establish wage-earner funds.6 The most striking aspect of Kollontai’s participation in Workers’ Opposition, however, is the way her “feminist” activism (although the revolutionary did not like the term feminism, as at the time it referred to emancipationist struggles by bourgeois women) is so completely separated from her adherence to the trade union platform. The text she wrote does not even mention the problem of ensuring equal participation and representation for women in the new trade union-led economic and social system.

6 See Chapter 6 infra.

54

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Kollontai’s silence, out of synch with her tireless commitment to women’s self-organization throughout the revolutionary process, can be interpreted as a tactical step backwards in the face of the trade union leaders’ lack of awareness on these issues. The point worth underlining here, however, is that this step backwards points to the difficulty in bringing together feminism and Marxism. Another sign of such difficulty is the fact that Kollontai’s work has been received quite schizophrenically, studied as either Marxist or feminist and only rarely as Marxist feminist. As Cinzia Arruzza reminds us, the two traditions have struggled to develop a shared language and coordinate their efforts in a shared project of anti-capitalist struggle, with both more often falling back on identity-based positions.

References Bailes, Kendall K.E., and Imbert Maria-José. 1965. Alexandra Kollontai et la Nouvelle Morale. Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 6: 471–496. Braun, Tina. 1998. Peace Profile: Alexandra Kollontai. Peace Review 10: 295– 301. Brodsky Farnsworth, Beatrice. 1976. Bolshevism, the Woman Question, and Aleksandra Kollontai. The American Historical Review 81: 292–316. Brodsky Farnsworth, Beatrice. 1980. Alexandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans. 1973. Emancipation Through Communism: The Ideology of A.M. Kollontai. Slavic Review 32: 323–338. Clements, Barbara Evans. 1979. Bolshevik Feminist. The Life of Alexandra Kollontai. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Condit, Tom. n.d. Alexandra Kollontai. Marxist Archive. https://www.marxists. org/archive/kollonta/into.htm. Accessed 6 May 2020. Deutscher, Isaac. 2003. The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929–1940. London: Verso. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1918. The new woman. In The New Morality and the Working Class. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1918/new-mor ality.htm. Accessed 6 May 2020. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1961 [1921]. The Workers Opposition in the Russian Communist Party: The Fight for Workers Democracy in the Soviet Union. London: Solidarity Pamphlet no. 7. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kol lonta/1921/workers-opposition/index.htm. Accessed 6 May 2020. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1971. The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman, ed. Iring Fetscher (Afterword). New York: Herder & Herder.

3

CLASS STRUGGLE AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION …

55

Kollontai, Alexandra. 1973. Autobiografia di una comunista sessualmente emancipata. Introduction by Viviana Visani, Comment by Iring Fetscher. Milano: Palazzi. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1977. Kära kamrat! Allrakäraste vän!, ed. Britta Stövling. Stockholm: Gidlund. Kollontai, Alexandra. 1980. Selected Writings, ed. Alix Holt. New York: W. W. Norton. Kollontai, Alexandra. 2008. Alexandra Kollontajs dagböcker 1930–1940. Introduction by K. Wahlbäck. Stockholm: Bonnier. Lokaneeta, Jinee. 2001. Alexandra Kollontai and Marxist Feminism. Economic and Political Weekly 36: 1405–1412. Porter, Cathy. 1980. Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography. London: Virago. Philips Price, Morgan. 1921. My Reminiscences of the Russian Revolution. London: George Allen & Unwin. Raether, Gabriele. 1996. Aleksandra Kollontaj: libertà sessuale e libertà comunista. Pomezia: Erre emme. Roelofs, Joan. 2018. Alexandra Kollontai: Socialist Feminism in Theory and Practice. International Critical Thought 8: 166–175. Wahlbäck, Krister. 2008. Kollontaj och hennes dagböcker: en presentation. In Aleksandra Kollontajs dagböcker, 7–49. Stockholm: Bonnier.

Interlude 1: Resistance or Revolution? The Spanish Civil War

Between 1936 and 1939, the Spanish Civil War ignited worldwide hopes of a revolutionary transformation under the banner of self-government of and by the people, workers and farmers, representing a watershed event in the history of anti-capitalist movements and anarchists in particular. Beginning from the struggle against Francisco Franco’s coup, with the initial collaboration between the various components of the anti-fascist forces, the events of that historical moment highlight a set of problems typical of the revolutionary movements of the twentieth century: the relationship between civil war and social revolution, the relationship with state power and between state power and the demands of selfgovernment, and the problem of political and social alliances between workers and farmers and between the cities and the countryside. The Context On 28 June 1931, Spain held its first free elections after the fall of Primo de Rivera’s fascist regime. Socialists and Republicans took power. King Alfonso XIII had left the country a few weeks earlier, at the same time as the Republic was proclaimed, which seemingly opened the door onto a period of social and political improvement. Incipient industrialization called for radical agrarian reform in an economy that was still characterized by large agricultural estates and an extremely polarized distribution of wealth. With the 1933 general elections, the Republican

58

INTERLUDE 1: RESISTANCE OR REVOLUTION? THE …

government proved incapable of bringing about the necessary transformations, however, and this led to the resurgence of the right wing, supported by the army and a rather backward clergy. The anarchists, profoundly entrenched in the deep strata of the population in some areas of the country, especially Aragon and Catalonia, tried to launch a bottom-up process of modernization favouring experiments of selfmanagement and spreading education. They even posed the issue of birth control. They acted through two main organisations. The first one was the CNT, National Confederation of Labour, established in 1910 and soon to become a landmark actor. In this not-yet-industrialized context, the population of workers comprised mainly craftsmen and farm labourers (with groups of industrial workers concentrated in some big cities, such as Barcelona) and the CNT as a trade union was a key reference point. The second was FAI, the Iberian Anarchist Federation that had been created in 1927 under the dictatorship. This organization composed homogeneously of committed anarchists was arranged in federally-coordinated but autonomous local groups. Before the 1936 election, fascism was gaining strength on the larger European stage. The Communist International had turned a corner in 1935, however, and abandoned its line of Social Fascism. In this climate, the left-wing parties tried to re-establish unity. Even the anarchists voted for or supported the Popular Front, which in fact won. The atmosphere seemed to be changing once again, so much so that, at the congress of Zaragoza held in the spring, the CNT charted an optimistic route forward, pointing to libertarian communism as a project to be pursued in the immediate future. This prospect hinged on developing self-management, and the CNT itself encouraged and supported this goal beginning at the municipal level. In terms of positive content, the trade union aimed to overcome the gap between manual and intellectual work, a precondition for achieving the egalitarianism that would then characterize community life. On the more general political level, this vision involved the free municipalities, towns and cities, farms and industrial companies, being managed by assemblies in which every participant was granted the right to speak and become involved and decisions were made by the majority even while guaranteeing minority positions: a true direct and self-managed democracy.

INTERLUDE 1: RESISTANCE OR REVOLUTION? THE …

59

Resistance, Revolution and Self-Management On 18 July 1936, a few weeks after the congress, however, Francisco Franco staged a military coup, the Pronunciamento. The CNT together with all the socialist and democratic forces organized the Resistance, which took hold in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Malaga, Gijon and Bilbao in particular. The socialists, who boasted a more long-standing tradition, were represented by the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party); the communists, grouped together in the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), were a minor but rapidly expanding force in the mid-1930s. They both believed that winning against fascism was the first step to any revolutionary experiment, and thus counted on receiving support from those sectors of the upper classes who adhered to democratic ideals; on the other hand, the anarchists and exponents of the Trotskyist POUM, the pan-Marxist workers’ party, did not believe that the Resistance could be seSimpleParated from the social revolution, and therefore set about launching innovative social experiments in regions where they held the majority. They achieved effective results by collectivizing the land, but also factories and services. Self-management touched the military sphere first of all, with the constitution of militias that also served the policing and supply functions understandably necessary in that period of war. The workers themselves socialized and self-managed companies as well; metallurgical and textile companies based in Catalonia were converted to the war-time endeavour, with wages increased and working hours decreased. The construction and tertiary sectors (from traditional trades such as large-scale distribution and personal services, to the artistic and entertainment sectors) also underwent collectivization. The banking sector had a different destiny: resistant to collectivization, of course, it was soon nationalized and then passed under the direct control of the government. Barcelona was the beating heart of the revolution: On 19 July in Barcelona, workers occupied the tram company. Three days later, the vehicles began to once again circulate in the city, repainted with the colours of the CNT. On 21 July the railway workers occupied the Northern Railways and the MZA (Madrid-Saragossa-Alicante), creating revolutionary committees to defend the stations and organize the service. Various “service committees” were set up: councils for the workshop, depot and traction, train crews, personnel working on the tracks, operators and train drivers. On 24 July in Manresa, near Barcelona, the CNT and UGT (socialist General Workers’ Union) led the occupation of the General Railway Company of Catalonia and took over the management

60

INTERLUDE 1: RESISTANCE OR REVOLUTION? THE …

of the service and work facility. On 31 July, the Generalitat of Catalonia acknowledged the right of the trade unions to organise all the technical, productive and administrative activities of the General Railway Company of Catalonia; a delegate was appointed to supervise the operation. On 25 July, the employees of the shipping agencies (including the famous Transatlantic Company) occupied the port offices and forced the Generalitat to acknowledge the collectivization. Between 25 and 31 July, water, telecommunications, energy and lighting services were collectivized throughout Catalonia. (Neuville 2015, 514–515)

From an institutional point of view, workers’ councils guided the collectivization process, in turn electing as executive bodies corporate committees made up of delegates with different skills. Trade unions promoted links between the sectors, partly to ensure the sufficient circulation of products. Again thanks to the efforts of the CNT, water and energy services were collectivized in Barcelona. The network of cooperatives also developed very rapidly. In the countryside, particularly in the provinces of Tarragona and Lleida, “revolutionary committees” organized the occupation of land. Large estates became collective, but small owners were left with a choice: they were not forced to agree to collectivization, in open contrast to the case of the first Soviet five-year plan. In agricultural towns, the People’s Committee governed and the general assembly held sovereignty. Of course, the process of collectivization also involved serious problems: in the countryside, for example, this process was forced to grapple with a peasant mentality that distrusted collectives; in cities and factories, the main challenge facing this movement was the need for specific technical skills. On a cultural level, the Spanish Revolution counted on the activity of Ateneos Libertarios, a group that had been active in the country for decades and succeeded in spreading a new and richer store of knowledge among the working classes, including but not limited to humanist ideas. In the anarchist sphere, furthermore, the group Mujeres libres played a key role: this women’s organization with a journal by the same name proposed a radical course of female emancipation through self-valorisation under the banner of capacitatión. Women also participated in the civil war in terms of combat, although often not in the front lines especially following the process of militarization.

INTERLUDE 1: RESISTANCE OR REVOLUTION? THE …

61

The Problem of Politics and the Military Issue At the dawn of the civil war, the power balances characterizing the anti-fascist front varied greatly from region to region. In Catalonia, anarchism resting on a worker and popular base effectively held power and was embodied by the Committee of anti-fascist militias. At the beginning of the conflict, the communists represented the minority and were aimed at allying themselves with the democratic bourgeoisie. At the end of September, a unitary government was formed, partly because the militias had a military need for weapons and ammunition they could not obtain on their own. The CNT anarchists held the Ministries of Health, Economy and Procurement; one of their major leaders, García Oliver, played a role, albeit informal, in the Ministry of Defence and the militia committee was soon incorporated into this ministry. In the Basque Country and Asturias, the communists were stronger, led by prominent militants such as Dolores Ibárruri, nicknamed “the Pasionaria”, and these regions hosted active nationalist currents. The military issue was central: the militia was countered by the traditional model of an army (so-called militarization) with its typical hierarchies, although in this case driven by an ideology of resistance and democracy. Even the anarchist anticlericalism that was powerfully expressed in other areas was kept at bay here. In Valencia and the eastern part of the region, the People’s Executive Committee took power, experiencing tensions similar to those that developed in other regions. The first of these conflicts was over whether to militarize or maintain the militias, but this tension was quickly dismissed. In these areas, however, the famous Colonna di Hierro or Iron Column took hold, an anarchist militia faithful to the principles of direct action and opposed to any form of collaboration with the government. The communists enjoyed widespread support in this area thanks in part to their political support for small landownership, in opposition to collectivisation. In Republican Andalusia with its large population of farm labourers, the anarchists were very deeply-rooted and worked to spread the shift to collective landownership, albeit with inconsistent results. Madrid, the capital that fought the coupists off at the city gates throughout the entire conflict, was instead a fertile ground for some of the most collaboration-oriented projects to flourish: the militias were soon replaced by the people’s army, partly because of the growing weight of the Communist Party fuelled by Soviet aid. However, the CNT gradually gained a foothold among workers who had traditionally been represented by the Socialists and the UGT.

62

INTERLUDE 1: RESISTANCE OR REVOLUTION? THE …

In the end, the leading role played by anarchists and POUMists clashed with the communists and socialists’ increasingly strenuous efforts to corral the revolution within established institutional boundaries. And the clash was dramatic. The unitary government led by Francisco Largo Caballero, a member of the Socialist Party known as the “Lenin of Spain”, also included anarchist representatives such as Federica Montseny, Juan García Oliver, Joan Peirò and Juan López Sánchez. These representatives all came under harsh critique from a part of the anarchist movement. They held the Ministries of Health, Justice, Industry and Trade, respectively, in the period from November 1936 to May of the following year, when the government fell. In fact, 1937 represented a turning point in the Spanish Revolution. On 3 May, Barcelona became the stage of an armed conflict among the anti-fascist forces themselves that gave rise to an irreSimpleParable falling-out between the Stalinist communists (loyal to Stalin), on the one hand, and the forces of the POUM (soon to be branded illegal) and CNT-FAI, on the other. The spark that ignited this conflict was an attack on the telephone exchange staged by a group of communist soldiers. These forces sought to force out the anarchists, who controlled communications at the time, and establish their own governmental delegate in a key location. As has been keenly noted, this episode “may also be read as a symbol of the intolerance of institutional power towards a real power based on controlling strategic points” (Venza 2009, 133). The escalation of violence was impressive: between 3 and 7 May, hundreds fell victim to this fratricidal conflict in the heart of the anti-fascist front. The casualties included Camillo Berneri, one of the most lucid minds in Spain at the time. There were multiple factors behind this true war-within-awar: disagreements over the aims of the general struggle (social revolution or anti-fascist resistance?), over the way the struggle itself was organized (militia or regular army?) and over how the social nature of the USSR and its role ought to be interpreted, with anarchists and Trotskyists calling it counter-revolutionary and spreading news about the ongoing Stalinist purges. Yet in the eyes of posterity, such a clash only appears completely politically ridiculous. At any rate, the lines of disagreement turned out to be insurmountable and the ruptured front was ruinous for both the outcome of the anti-Franco resistance movement and the destiny of the revolution.

INTERLUDE 1: RESISTANCE OR REVOLUTION? THE …

63

Past Questions and Current Problems The trajectory of the Second Spanish Republic leaves unanswered a series of questions which are important for any revolutionary movement: the relationship between war and revolution, spanning the twentieth century from St. Petersburg to Berlin, from Munich to Budapest and Barcelona; the relationship between revolutionary social change and power, particularly state power, leaving unresolved the crucial issue of the extent to which institutions originally developed in a capitalist context can be used for the purposes of socialism. The anarchists in Spain experienced this problem particularly keenly, although the revolutionary forces as a whole appear to have been unprepared to deal with it: the 1936 revolution came about unexpectedly, without previously laying the theoretical and practical foundations that would have allowed it to make the great leap beyond the society of dominion. How then can such a historically important issue as the relationship between power and revolution be faced without reducing it to a mere question of ideology or abstract political identity, if the aims behind the revolution are not clear? Perhaps a revolution is won before the revolution actually begins… If we accept the idea that power is not an object, that is, a mechanism, but rather a relationship, it follows that it is modified or destroyed by creating different or even alternative relationships. In this sense, social change in the name of self-management was inextricable from the struggle to resist Francoism, because they were two sides of the same issue. The forces involved in the struggle seemed to lack a full awareness of this series of links, however. It was no coincidence that, as part of the historical and political appraisal carried out after the fact, some anarchists came to believe that one of the causes of their defeat was the lack of a science of anarchist politics: investing all of their efforts in the “spontaneous aspect of the social sphere does not succeed in fulfilling the need for a general direction of emancipatory movement” (Berti 1998, 856). This clear and brave insight gave rise in turn to considerations about the long-term political shortcomings of not only international anarchism, but also the entire centuries-old revolutionary movement. As a preliminary point, however, it is important to make the slightly naïve yet necessary distinction between a weak and very general version of the concept of politics and a strong and specific vision: when politics is considered a sphere of collective life, revolutionaries throughout history have delved into the political and proposed lines of action for transforming communal life; on the other hand, when politics is

64

INTERLUDE 1: RESISTANCE OR REVOLUTION? THE …

treated a seSimpleParate and specific sphere with its own rules, forms and historically-determined institutions, anarchists and revolutionaries in general tend, at least at the beginning, to deny politics on the grounds that it is a sphere distinct from the economic, cultural and social ones; in a word, distinct from civil society. From this point of view, therefore, even the Spanish revolutionaries of the 1930s lacked a proactive political line and science of politics, one that went beyond rejecting the existing state or, alternately, conquering it: in one way or another, they allowed themselves to be acted upon by a politics determined by other subjects, in the battle for hegemony. And yet, it should be acknowledged that, over time, the anarchists specifically have been able to reveal the most pervasive mechanisms of power, uncovering its psychological repercussions on individuals and groups as well as the political contradictions embedded in party structures which are too often the sole purview of oligarchies of professional politicians, blind to the needs of the masses. Furthermore, it is worth noting how consistently anarchists have condemned the deceptions of democratic ideology, the assembly system and nationalistic and patriotic ideologies that undermine any desire for active participation in the life of the polis. These insights are the fruit of an anarchist political science, a critical and negative science that may indeed be partial but is nonetheless serious, authentic and aimed at self-government, the guiding star of any revolution. What the Spanish anarchists thus lacked was the ability to bring to its logical consequences the typical trait that has distinguished anarchist doctrine from its beginnings, namely anti-dogmatism. The other currents of international socialism involved in the civil war, from social democracy to communism, also suffered from this lack, in some cases even more so. It consisted in the conviction that there is one primary path, a direction that is not only primary but also solitary and unique, for achieving social transformation, that is, demolishing the centuries-old rule of the state and capital. This is a solid rule, rooted in the consciousness and even the spontaneity of the social subjects who suffer the effects of capitalism. At the same time, however, there is a question that over time has received only axiomatic answers: whether state institutions or even the market may be modified so as to bring about change, or whether only social spontaneity holds the thaumaturgical potential to generate great transformation. The twentieth century was tasked with demonstrating that the only overall plan for transforming a society based on capital and the state likely to succeed is one that simultaneously tackles all the sides

INTERLUDE 1: RESISTANCE OR REVOLUTION? THE …

65

of its tetragonal physiognomy. It remains a mystery how best to combine different perspectives, that is, to harmonize into a single perspective multiple divergent visions, each of which is deeply-rooted and categorical because they often demand of their adherents the kind of heroic selfdenial that can only derive from an almost religious faith in one’s aims and methods. Answering these questions is the key to resolving the enigma of an unprecedented social configuration. Proceeding not based on slogans but in a way that is historically operational, that is, which provides directions for future action and holds the power to set in motion a true turn in civilization. Without forgetting that, in politics, the ethics of principles goes hand in hand with the ethics of responsibility, and this latter invests anyone aiming to construct a socialist society with the obligation to answer for the reasonably predictable consequences of their actions. For this array of reasons, any plan for escaping capitalism must be able to reflect on power in a non-dogmatic way, unhesitatingly questioning the myth of state neutrality but also admitting in the most disenchanted possible way that it is sometimes acceptable to mediate and compromise with existing institutions if the aims and perspective are clear and welldefined: after all, one of the specific competencies of politics, sometimes forgotten even in “frontier socialism”, is to “not depart from good, when possible, but know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity” (Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter 18).

References Berti, Giampietro. 1998. Il pensiero anarchico dal Settecento al Novecento. Manduria-Bari-Roma: P. Laicata Editore. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 2019 [1972]. Anarchy’s Brief Summer. The Life and Death of Buenaventura Durruti. London: Seagull Books. Madrid, Francisco, and Claudio Venza (eds.). 2001. Antología documental del anarquismo español. Vol. I. Organización y revolución: De la Primera Internacional al Proceso de Montjuich (1868–1896). Madrid: Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo. Neuville, Richard. 2015. Catalogne, la classe ouvrière avait pris le dessus. In Encyclopédie internationale de l’Autogestion, 513–523. Paris: Syllepse. Paz, Abel. 2007 [1986]. Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, trans. Chuck. Morse. Oakland (CA)-Edimburgh: AK Press. Ranzato, Gabriele. 2004. L’eclissi della democrazia. La guerra civile spagnola e le sue origini. 1931–1939. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Woodcock, George. 1986 [1962]. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 4

Self-Management and Communism: Paul Mattick (1904–1981)

1

Life and Works

Paul Mattick’s life unfolded in two distinct parts: the first in Germany, from his birth until 1926, and the second in the United States, where he settled at the age of twenty-two. A factory worker, communist and councilist, he was an active militant in the time he spent in Europe and in the first years after emigrating. Later, his engagement became more and more focused on intellectual activity, through both the magazines he helped put out and the discussion circles in which he participated: he published books and numerous essays in different languages, developing a strong critique of both the Western capitalist world and so-called Soviet state capitalism. His most famous work, Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy, printed in 1969, constitutes the highest point of the development of his thinking. Mattick was born in Pomerania, in the city of Słupsk, currently Poland, but moved to Berlin with his family as a child. His father, a militant social democrat, had a job with Siemens there. The activism modelled by his father led him to the left, and as soon as he turned 14, he enrolled in the Freie Sozialistische Jugend (Free Socialist Youth). He was hired by Siemens as well and participated in the early stages of the German Revolution to represent the apprentices, thereby becoming involved with the Spartacists and then the Communist Party (Kpd, Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands—Communist Party of Germany). In the party 1920 split, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_4

67

68

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

he took the side of the Kapd (Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands—Communist Workers’ Party of Germany) like many other young people and founded a newspaper, “Rote Jugend” (Red Youth), with his comrades. This project was financed in part through acts of “revolutionary expropriation” which, in some cases, were actual burglaries. It was in this context that Mattick was arrested for the first time. In the main events of the following years, he was always at the centre of the action. In March 1920, during Wolfgang Kapp’s coup d’état attempt, he took part in the workers’ and democratic resistance. While the councils were being reformed in the Ruhr basin alongside a real “red army” that opposed the Freikorps operations, in Berlin Mattick risked his life in the attempt to seize weapons abandoned by the Putschists: the authorities caught him and he barely survived a harsh beating, while other comrades were shot on the spot. A year later, he was on site for the March strikes. These actions, widespread and radical in the Leuna factories in Mansfield but more limited in Berlin, were the stage on which the attempt to extend the revolt launched by the Kapd and its associated union, the AAU (Allgemeine Arbeiter-Union—General Workers’ Union), ultimately failed. Mattick once again played a leading role in the 1923 strikes in the Ruhr basin, coinciding with the Franco-Belgian occupation. As a factory worker in Cologne, he joined the workers’ council of the Deutz engineering company and contributed to organizing a massive strike that called for the intervention of the military; Mattick and his comrades resisted in part through sabotage. Shortly after, in Leverkusen, he was involved in the strike in the Höchst factories and the clashes with the paramilitary groups of the Sipo (Sicherheits Polizei—Security Police), troops specialized in repressing workers and socialists. He was arrested again and witnessed violence and torture against workers in police custody. In the following period, his militant actions were on the edge between legality and illegality; after all, revolutionary expropriations were a form of struggle among others. Mattick belonged to groups that were armed, and yet soon his main weapons became those of critique. He wrote for “Kaz” (Kommunistische Arbeiterzeitung—Communist Workers’ Journal) and other magazines and came to see the link between manual and intellectual work as crucial. In 1926, he moved to America, where the second phase of his life took place. He worked in a factory and continued to study. Politically, he came into contact with what remained of the IWW (Industrial Workers of

4

SELF-MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNISM …

69

the World) and established connections with other German immigrants. He relaunched the old “Chicagoer Arbeiterzeitung”, founded back in 1876, and carried this project forward through ups and downs until 1924. Under his direction, ten issues were published between February and December 1931. He was not wholly satisfied with the trade unionism of the IWW, however, and for a period of time, he became involved with the Proletarian Party, born as a branch of the American Socialist Party. In the midst of the 1930s crisis, he preached direct action and spontaneity, becoming involved in the unemployed movement. Based on the principles of self-organization and mutual aid, this movement sought to solve the material problems of a class sector that was facing serious hardship. It was one of the largest social movements ever to have developed in the United States: animated by socialists and communists from different backgrounds, the movement was equipped with council-type of structures and it succeeded in involving people to such an extent as to worry the government. In the middle of the decade, however, following the introduction of President Roosevelt’s Work Projects Administration with its massive public works programme, the movement declined; when the country finally made its industrial recovery during the Spanish war, the movement came to an end. In October 1934, Mattick started his major organizational enterprise, beginning to publish “International Council Correspondence” by the United Workers Party. He organized and led a reading circle focused on Capital, and in 1936, this circle took the name Groups of Council Communists of America. In February 1938, the magazine, with 29 issues published up to the end of 1937, became “Living Marxism”. Under that name, it was published until the fall of 1941, at which point it became “New Essays”, the name it retained between the fall of 1942 and the winter of 1943. In the pages of these journals and in the hundreds of articles that followed (his bibliography includes over six hundred essays, books, reviews and articles), Mattick developed his conception of council communism and delved more deeply into his understanding of Marx, becoming one of the leading experts on Marx in the United States. His intention, however, was to build on Marx’s work, not to construct yet another new Marxist school. Having obtained American citizenship, during World War II Mattick alternated between factory work and periods of unemployment. He lived in New York and for a number of months in Vermont, far from the frenetic political activity that had characterized the previous phase of his

70

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

life. He focused more and more intensively on his studies, in particular exploring the issue of capitalist economies’ tendency to crisis and laying the foundations for his 1969 opus magnum. In the latter part of his life, coinciding with the rise of the new movements between the 1960s and 1970s, his perspective gained widespread visibility and he was invited to give many lectures on both sides of the ocean and at many European universities. Until the end of his life, he remained a steady exponent of council communism and a supporter of workers’ autonomy and the principle of economic self-organization, together with Pannekoek, Korsch, Rubel, Gorter and Rühle as well as other, lesser-known figures.

2

Marx and His Epigones

While exhibiting a wide range of interests (from economics to epistemology), Mattick’s passionate, and at the same time lucid, relationship with Marxism seems to eschew theoretical acrobatics in favour of an approach aimed at rendering the relationship between theory and practice as fluid and creative as possible. This was such a crucial element of his work, in fact, that it is rather difficult to distinguish a specifically “theoretical” component of his writings. Rather, his engagement with the thought of Marx and his more or less faithful disciples very often led to political clashes over current affairs. After all, such a merging of practical and theoretical is consistent with Mattick’s more mature vision of the circular relationship between ideas and action. In the course of his intellectual exchange with Maximilien Rubel, Mattick pointed out to his friend that, although Marx had completed Capital, he would not have been able to provide an exhaustive interpretation of a system as dynamic as capitalism because such a task is beyond any one individual’s capabilities. This observation was entirely coherent with Mattick’s tendency to emphasize the anti-dogmatic character of Marxism, an approach he drew from Rosa Luxemburg: the Marxian reading of history is true to itself only if it remains ever ready to rise to new challenges. Hence, any claim to serve as the guardians of truth and pass judgement in the name of some alleged loyalty to Marxist orthodoxy is groundless. Mattick’s critical gaze fell mainly on Kautsky and Lenin, in whom he detected theoretical and strategic continuity. Mattick viewed the former— the popularizer par excellence of Marx—to be the embodiment of the ambivalence typical to the German workers’ movement, containing both

4

SELF-MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNISM …

71

revolutionary and reactionary aspects side by side. While spreading the “verb”, Kautsky ended up disseminating a mystified version of Marx’s work, representing a Marxism purged of its revolutionary power in favour of a social reformism that ends up colluding with the bourgeoisie. On the surface, Mattick’s thesis was paradoxical: Kautsky was not a “renegade”, Mattick asserted, and he did not set out to redeem his reputation. Rather, his provocation was intended to highlight the fact that Kautsky’s faith in democracy as a viaticum to socialism and his taking the side of the legal struggle (the one perpetuating the power of the party’s bureaucracy and workers’ union) were nothing more than the logical corollary of the long-standing strategic choices of the SPD. The party for its part had emerged in a historical context—that of the expansion of capitalism— which progressively undermined confidence in the revolutionary action of the masses. The yawning gap between Kautsky and Marx can be measured precisely in their different conceptions of the relationship between theory and practice. Marx, the most enlightened of the bourgeois revolutionaries—so much so as to be the closest to the proletariat—developed the core of his theories in revolutionary times, but was then able to accept the challenge of reality. As Mattick wrote in 1939: Like many of his contemporaries, he underestimated the strength and flexibility of capitalism, and expected too soon the end of bourgeois society. Two alternatives opened themselves to him [Marx]: he could either stand outside the actual development, restricting himself to inapplicable radical thinking, or participate under the given conditions in the actual struggles, and reserve the revolutionary theories for ‘better times’. This latter alternative was rationalised into the ‘proper balance of theory and practice’, and the defeat or success of proletarian activities became therewith the result of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ tactics once more; the question of the proper organisation and of correct leadership. It was not so much Marx’s earlier connection with the bourgeois revolution that led to the further development of the Jacobinic aspect of the labour movement called by his name, but the non-revolutionary practice of this movement, because of the non-revolutionary times. (Mattick 1939)

Even while holding firm to the analysis of the overall developmental lines of capitalism, Marxian thought took changing historical conditions into consideration (it should be recalled that Mattick believed the history of

72

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

capitalism and of Marxism to be overlapping) (Mattick 1983, 74). Kautsky’s Marxism, on the contrary, represented an “orthodoxy” opposed to real practices and, as such, forced to retreat from reality: in Kautsky’s thinking the mantra of class struggle had to bow to a context that was not revolutionary, and indeed, the disseminator of Marxism ended up bowing to this same context. While in Mattick’s view Kautsky’s limit lay in his complete incapacity to understand the osmotic relationship that Marx and Engels had identified between ideas and action, Lenin’s faults were far more serious and could be effectively summarized with the term “opportunism”. Mattick attributed his fundamental political error—accepting council democracy (Soviets, the expression of class consciousness) only to the extent to which and as long as he was able to control it—to a theoretical aberration: as a matter of fact, Mattick argued, Lenin saw the party rather than mass action as the heart of the revolution. Mattick branded this idea “idealistic, mechanistic, one-sided, and certainly not Marxist” (Mattick 1934, 3) and framed it as clashing not only with theory, but also with historical evidence. On the theoretical level, Mattick reminded his readers that, for Marx, class consciousness is more than an ideological phenomenon to be propitiated, so to speak, from the outside: the very fact that the proletariat exists, regardless of its ideological maturity, gives life and form to this consciousness. Similarly, Marxism goes beyond a theory simply reflecting the proletariat’s position of strength in capitalist society; it is rather a direct expression of class struggle: “the workers, whether they will or not, whether they are conscious of it or not, whether they know Marx or not, are unable to act otherwise than in accordance with Marxism, if they wish to maintain themselves and thereby at the same time to serve the general progress of mankind” (Mattick 1934, 6). He therefore insisted on the Marxian concept of “geschichtliche Selbsttätigkeit” as presented in the 1848 Communist Manifesto and translated over time as “typical historical activity”, “historical initiative” or “historical spontaneity”. Mattick’s reading of this concept suggested the working class’ self-liberation from below or, as Rubel later pointed out, the “historical auto-praxis of the proletariat” (Rubel 1976, 773). In short, the communist revolution could not be a party matter but could only take place in the form of councils, a

4

SELF-MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNISM …

73

weapon of struggle and means of managing production and distribution in the future society (Group of International Communists 1990).1 The task of the party is valuable, yet not decisive, Mattick wrote. In so doing, he touched on one of the aspects he felt was most important: the idea that revolutionary consciousness may appear in forms other than those of political organization, or even in the absence of political organization; in fact, such consciousness is nourished not only by relations of production but also by the increasing socialization of productive forces, the most influential being the proletariat. Far from crystallizing in the form of the party, he argued, class consciousness lies in class struggle—it is the latter which is decisive. Marx did not posit any separation between the class and the party, Mattick clarified, and the existence of the party simply derives from the fact that “only minorities can do consciously what the masses themselves are compelled unconsciously to do”; yet he added, significantly, that “The minority is a part (though not the decisive part) of the revolutionary process; it does not produce the process but is produced by it” (Mattick 1934, 4). In relation to the contradiction between Leninism and the historical process, Mattick drew on Luxemburg to assert that one of the foundations of dialectical materialism is the idea that the methods of struggle suited to a given historical phase, and to a specific geographical area, lose all their effectiveness if they are mechanically transferred to a different context, and this is exactly what Lenin and his International tried to do. Mattick observed in reviewing the theoretical clash between Luxemburg and Lenin that history has proved the former to be right. Although he acknowledged that Luxemburg’s analyses were, inevitably, influenced by her (albeit troubled) militant involvement in the SPD and sought to position them in historical context, he credited the Polish revolutionary with an insight the importance of which is hard to overstate: “The need to destroy the legend of Lenin, as a prerequisite for a radical reorientation of the workers’ movement”. Mattick seemed to swing between two different interpretations of the Bolshevik leader’s relationship with Marxism, although the second did end up prevailing with time. The first was a continuist, though demeaning, interpretation that cast Lenin as connected to the bedrock 1 Throughout his entire life, Mattick repeatedly introduced and mentioned the text written by the Group of International Communists of Holland, Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution (1930).

74

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

of Marxist tradition while denying him the slightest theoretical originality (suggesting rather that he merely re-proposed ideas which had been developed by Marx himself, as well as Engels, Kautsky and Plekhanov). The second was an antinomic interpretation which denies Lenin’s belonging to Marxism, instead—in another act of provocation—placing him in line with the Second International.2 Similarly to the history of the Second International, albeit with its own marked internal tensions, Marxism had the function of legitimizing a reformist policy and colluding with the bourgeoisie. In the parable of Leninism, therefore, it was used to paint subversive rhetoric over a line of thinking which was initially non-revolutionary (lacking, in a backward country such as Russia, the very presuppositions of proletarian revolution) and later openly hostile to revolution in that it aimed to establish a form of state capitalism—a real bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie.

3

Mixed Economy and State Capitalism

Mattick’s thinking on capitalism was fundamentally characterized by the revival of value theory, which he considered the only way of capturing the essence of the system. Over the decades, his reasoning was developed without any significant ruptures, always maintaining the fundamental distinction between the use value and exchange value of goods, in line with the first book of Capital. He thus insisted on describing labour power as a commodity among others, never forgetting that it, too, has an exchange value (the value the entrepreneur “spends” on the market and the worker dedicates a part of the working day to reproducing) and a use value which allows the individual worker to provide his service well beyond its exchange value. “Obviously, the ‘equal’ exchange between capital and labor in terms of value is based on the fact that part of the social labor is not exchanged at all, but is simply appropriated by the buyers of labor-power” (Mattick 1969, 22). After all, if all goods were exchanged on the basis of labour-time equivalents, there would be no possibility for profit: accepting the law of value thus means admitting that

2 Mattick embraced the critique developed by Pannekoek in Lenin as philosopher, in which the famous astronomer demonstrates Lenin’s theoretical estrangement from historical materialism (Pannekoek 1975).

4

SELF-MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNISM …

75

capitalism is based on the appropriation of unpaid labour, i.e. exploitation. Mattick’s entire theoretical framework revolved around this simple observation. The fundamental theories of the German-American Marxist on this subject insistently stressed the centrality of the moment of production, the site in which living labour produces new value while fixed capital, in contrast, only transfers into goods what it already possesses. This leads to the objective confirmation that capitalism yearns precisely for that surplus value, certainly not to satisfy social needs. Furthermore, in order to increase surplus value, productivity must be constantly improved, reducing the labour time that labour power requires to reproduce goods and investing in fixed capital as part of each new cycle. As this renewed, widened and improved fixed capital increases, however, the problem of the production of surplus-value worsens: this is the well-known Marxian theory of the “tendential fall of the profit rate”, which Mattick referenced tirelessly, since he viewed it as the profound cause of recurring crises. Mattick clarified that: Since the overall capital, equal to any particular capital, changes its organic composition in the course of accumulation - the constant capital increases faster than the variable capital - the profit rate, which must be commensurate with the total capital but is generated only by the variable part, is bound to fall. (Mattick 1971, 14)

Capitalism without accumulation is a system in serious distress. Yet, when the expansion of production fails to guarantee the adequate profitability of the surplus value invested, the process slows down and the economy collapses. Of course, Mattick acutely noted: The capitalist crisis is an overproduction of capital only with respect to a given degree of exploitation. If the latter is sufficiently increased accumulation can proceed, for it was halted only because the accumulated capital proved too large in relation to the rate of profit it was able to bring fort. (Mattick 1969, 38)

Crises may be opportunities, therefore, because they lead to processes of reorganization, of purging the market of minor capitals, of adopting regulations and of transforming the workforce. At the same time, however, crises certainly do not lead to the “abolition” of the workforce, as some

76

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

post-worker fantasies posited in subsequent years. In this regard, Mattick specified: A distinction is often made between the “classical working i.e., the industrial proletariat in the Marxian sense, and the modern working population, of which only the smaller part is occupied in production. But this distinction is artificial, for what differentiates the proletariat from the bourgeoisie is not a particular set of occupations, but the former’s lack of control over their existence resulting from the lack of control over the means of production. Even if more workers are now engaged in non-productive socalled service industries, their social position vis-à-vis the capitalists remains unaltered. (Mattick 1969, 169)

Is capitalism really destined to collapse? On the one hand, while inspired by Grossmann’s work on the Breakdown of the Capitalist System (Grossmann 1992), Mattick’s perspective did not resort to any mechanistic theory of the rise of communism or seek to wrap up issues of power and the revolutionary subjectivity once and for all. On the other hand, Mattick viewed capitalism’s inherent unsustainability—the end being inevitable but its timing impossible to predict—as the logical result of the law of value. However, he was aware that counter tendencies do exist in reality—tendencies such as technological innovations, apparently creating opportunities to “spare” labour but actually increasing exploitation and disrupting the class, and their social and political impact: There will be overwork for some, unemployment for others. The employers will not cut working hours without cutting wages; and the more fortunate workers will insist on working enough hours to support their customary style of life. In place of shorter hours, there will be growing unemployment. Capitalism must attend to its victims well enough to secure their quiescence; but the system will bear this loss only if the increasing productivity of labor compensates for it. (Mattick 1969, 113)

His analysis highlighted an important point that has also been captured by other economists with different orientations, including Keynes: crisis represents the “normal” state of capitalism, not some aberrational moment in an otherwise progressive and harmonious line of development. State intervention is increasingly decisive, Mattick argued, because crises caused by excess capital may lead to disastrous consequences for society as a whole, with massive long-term unemployment and the impoverishment

4

SELF-MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNISM …

77

of large sectors of the population. It was therefore necessary, beginning in the 1930s and throughout the post-war period, to stimulate production and consumption with ever greater vigour, overcoming the narrow limits of private capital: this was the era of the “mixed economy”, with public intervention pursuing stability to save capitalism from itself. As Mattick pointed out: A “mixed economy” can be a mixture in which private capital dominates, as presently in Western Europe and, to a greater extent, in the United States. Or it can be one in which state-ownership is predominant, such as existed in the early years of the Bolshevik regime in Russia. (Mattick 1969, 81)

Mattick implicitly raised a crucial question, namely whether the underlying tendencies of capitalism, with its propensity for stagnation and collapse, can effectively be overcome by political means, whether accompanied by the image of “friendly” capitalism ensuring profit for capitalowners and stability and well-being everyone else, or by the image of a capitalism controlled by party technicians. In truth, he believed that both cases represented contradictory utopias (visions which were very widespread in the Glorious 1930s) because they assume models of society in which use value prevails over exchange value while exploitation, money and surplus value actually continue to reign even when associated with the adjective “socialist”. Mattick viewed the mixed economy to be a sort of limbo, but one from which humanity would eventually emerge. Such an economy would be transcended, either by an overbearing and aggressive form of capitalism, if the “patient” were to regain his strength, or by unprecedented forms of communism based on councils, if capitalism were to be permanently relegated to the museum of antiquities.

4

Against Bolshevism, for a Workers’ Democracy

In Mattick’s thought, the critique of state capitalism as a historical form of mixed economy in the East parallels his political critique of Leninism and Bolshevism. Together with Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Otto Rühle (who founded the Spartacus League with them and Franz Mehring) and Pannekoek also provided him with valuable elements for critique, in particular his critical assessment of the bureaucratization of the workers’

78

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

movement. The Bolsheviks, in spite of their “all power to the Soviets” slogan, conceived the construction of socialism as the task of the state rather than the outcome of the councils’ activity and struggle. In the phase of capitalist stabilization following the struggles of the initial post-war period, Russia was the first country to liquidate its workers’ movement through the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party. As was already the case with Lenin, Mattick’s judgement oscillated between acknowledging the good faith of the Bolsheviks (who were genuinely convinced that state capitalism represented a step towards socialism) and accusing them of opportunism and careerism. It is certain that, by eliminating the authentically proletarian forces of the revolution and committing themselves to constructing state capitalism, the old Bolshevik guard paved the way for its own liquidation with the advent of Stalin. By adopting Rühle’s analysis, Mattick synthesized the political, and human, failures caused by an avant-garde conception of class struggle as follows: In aspiring to lead the bourgeois revolution in Russia, Lenin’s party was highly appropriate. When, however, the Russian Revolution showed its proletarian features, Lenin’s tactical and strategical methods ceased to be of value. His success was due not to his advance guard, but to the soviet movement which had not at all been incorporated in his revolutionary plans. And when Lenin, after the successful revolution had been made by the soviets, dispensed with this movement, all that had been proletarian in the revolution was also dispensed with. The bourgeois character of the revolution came to the fore again and eventually found its ‘natural’ completion in Stalinism. (Mattick 1978b, 102)

Mattick’s critique targeted not only Social Democracy in both its reformist (Kautsky and the Spd) and revolutionary (Lenin) manifestations, he also turned his critical gaze on so-called left-wing communism. After all, the council communism that Mattick defended was not a mere variation of left-wing communism, as people might believe. In the same way that the opposition between the II and III International was more apparent than real due to the theoretical and strategic continuity highlighted by Mattick, the complaints of III International dissidents (beginning with Trotsky) were not only overly dramatic, they also failed to shift the axis of the problem. They were trapped in the conviction that class unity is built beginning from organizations, rather than from struggles; they believed that it was simply a matter of replacing the ruling

4

SELF-MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNISM …

79

group in power (the Bolsheviks in Russia and their satellite parties elsewhere) with a truly revolutionary group. Mattick warned that “The unity of the dead form is the death of the fighting spirit of the working class” (Mattick 1934, 1). Mattick reminded readers that the task of revolutionaries is to understand how revolution may develop in the current world. In Marx’s work, the path towards socialism remained deliberately indefinite (Marx was keen to analyse the past to better understand the present; he did not want to act as a prophet). Nevertheless, Mattick pointed out, Marx viewed socialism as concerning all of society, not simply the state: the dictatorship of the proletariat was only to be necessary until the new order had been stabilized. Marxian indications may be generic, but that does not mean they should be ignored or misinterpreted. First social democracy and later Bolshevism went against these indications and in so doing ended up draining the concept of “association of free and equal producers” of its meaning. They erroneously identified the tendency to centralization and not the self-organization of producers and consumers as the element of socialist society already present in the capitalist mode of production. Mattick believed that, to challenge Soviet hegemony over the international workers’ movement and regain confidence in the possibility of creating a form of communism neither statist nor autocratic (Mattick actually used the term “totalitarian” in relation to the USSR) but rather pluralist and libertarian, the key lay in council communism. The beginning point, he suggested, must be the “counter-history” of communism, those struggles that remained mostly interstitial—because they were crushed by social democracy and its subsidiaries—but which nevertheless enjoyed moments of considerable success. Mattick identified a precise historical genealogy of council communism; in his writings, he repeatedly stressed the fact that this was not a utopia but a real possibility (although not a necessity) that had emerged in history and as such might reappear. He identified a first, embryonic, historical manifestation of councilism in the Paris Commune and did not fail to highlight the legacy of this project in Marxian thought as the turning point from statism to the self-government of the working class. He defined the first stage of council communism strictly speaking in the Russian Revolution of 1905, although in this context the councils still represented an expression of bourgeois democracy, as indeed Lenin had proclaimed. Later, the 1917 Revolution placed them back at the centre

80

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

of the scene, and not only as proof of the creative force of the proletariat but also as the only real choice, given the counter-revolutionary role the traditional workers’ movement had played for some time: “the emergence of the council system proved that spontaneous movements did not necessarily result in shapeless mass efforts, but were able to produce organizational structures that were not merely temporary” (Mattick 1977, 66). In Russia as in Germany, however, the councils were unable to consolidate the power they had achieved to build a socialist society. In the case of Russia, this was due to backward socio-economic conditions; in the German case, it was due to the “trivial” fact that the workers were not revolutionaries (the decisive point which left-wing communism had ignored). In addition to the importance of objective conditions, Mattick stressed the fact that the revolutionaries lacked the subjective inclination to reflect on past errors: “One of its shortcomings, perhaps the greatest, was the fact that the Councils had absolutely no clear position regarding their role in the socialist organization of production and distribution” (Mattick 1970). Mattick sought to provide a contribution to this fundamental point. Analysing the October Revolution and the failed revolution in Germany, Mattick concluded in various writings and often with reference to his friend Pannekoek that the decisive push towards socialism would come from the contradiction between the relations and forces of production, rather than from a party: “Only by standing outside the labour movement has it been possible to work towards decisive social changes” (Mattick 1978b, 87). Unity thus was to be achieved through a common struggle—and not under a party acronym—led by the masses themselves and coordinated by the bodies they spontaneously form. These bodies were to exercise legislative and executive power together during the transition phase and, presumably, in communist society. Mattick clearly did not seek to avoid the question of what type of institutional structure, so to speak, council communism should have: “We therefore raise as the immediate slogan of working-class power: the workers bring all social functions under their direct control; they appoint all functionaries and recall them. The workers take the social production under their own management through combining together in shop organizations and workers’ councils” (Mattick 1935a, 18).

4

SELF-MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNISM …

81

What do these slogans actually mean, however? Mattick insisted that the desire to put an end to the impoverishment of large sections of the population was not sufficient for revolution; in short, the logic of “the worse, the better” does not apply. Rather, the proletariat had to show that it was motivated not only by the understandable desire to put an end to a situation that had become intolerable, but also by the determination to rebuild society on the basis of new human relations. In considering the principle of regulating relations between production and distribution in a new way, Mattick drew on and adopted a text by a Dutch collective associated with the council movement called the International Communist Group. Mattick defined their Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, published in 1930, as “the first attempt on the part of the Council movement in Western Europe to address the problem of the construction of socialism on the basis of the Councils” (Mattick 1970). In fact, the collective proposed a new unit of measurement, “average social production time”, destined to replace money, and thus value and waged work, whether such work was carried out for a private individual or for the state. While recognizing that it was not licit to speculate on the condition of the economy that would be formed in the aftermath of the revolution, Mattick clarified that it was nevertheless possible to begin considering “the procedures and instruments which are necessary for the establishment of certain desired social conditions, in this case conditions which are considered to be communist” (Mattick 1970). By using the measurement unit suggested by the Dutch communists and endorsed by Mattick, workers could be eligible to what they produced in proportion to their labour time, calculated not individually but according to its average social value. This might appear to be a variation on that socially necessary labour time that Marx had used to calculate surplus value; in reality, Mattick explained, once capitalist relations collapsed, the law of value was bound to fail as well. Labour time would remain the necessary measurement unit of social production, but in communist society it would be regulated so as to satisfy social needs rather than producing profit. Mattick did not avoid the issue that Marx had previously faced: seeing as people have diverse individual capacities not to mention needs, calculating the distribution of goods on the basis of individual working time would only generate new forms of inequality. Yet Mattick believed that social development itself would provide a solution to this problem: unlike capitalism, a communist economy would produce such an overabundance of consumer goods strictly necessary to

82

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

meet human needs so as to make the calculation of individual quotas for product distribution redundant. Mattick appreciated the Dutch counciliarists’ concern with ensuring that producers themselves self-determine distribution so as to obviate any need for an apparatus of experts and administrators to formulate goodsdistribution criteria. However, he warned that it was not enough to put the producer and the product in direct contact; the priority was production, not distribution. Indeed, he argued, production must be subject to the conscious control of workers. Even in a communist society, supervisory institutions would thus be unavoidable but without affecting the autonomy of producers, an autonomy that would be expressed through the councils representing the individual units of production. Mattick spoke explicitly of the “central administration” (Mattick 1970) of production. However, he did not go so far as to define how these supervisory bodies would be coordinated or how it would be ensured that they respect the autonomy of workers—in other words, how to prevent central bodies from once again becoming an oppressive state. After all, what he wrote about the Dutch text was applicable to his analysis as well: it was not a programme defined once and for all, but one of the first attempts to deal with the problem of the functioning of a communist economy and society. However approximate its argument might appear, it still remained a precious starting point for reasoning along the path towards communism.

References A number of works by P. Mattick are on the following websites: https://www. marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/. Bernstein, Irving. 1970. Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bourrinet, Philippe. 2001. The Dutch and German Communist Left: A Contribution to the History of the Revolutionary Movement. London: International Communist Current. Buckmiller, Michael. 1981. Bibliographie der Schriften von Paul Mattick 1924–1981. Internationale Wissenschaftliche Korrespondenz zur Geschichte der Deutschen Arbeiterbewegung 17: 197–224. Grossman, Henryk. 1992 [1929]. The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System, trans. J. Banaji. London: Pluto press.

4

SELF-MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNISM …

83

Group of International Communists of Holland. 1990 [1930]. Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. London: Movement for Worker’s Councils. Kuhn, Gabriel (ed.). 2012. All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Oakland: PM Press. Mattick, Paul. 1934. Leninism or Marxism? Introduction. International Council Correspondence 5: 1–4. Mattik, Paul. 1935a. Workers’ Councils and Communist Organization of Economy. International Council Correspondence 7: 7–18. Mattick, Paul. 1935b. Revolutionary Marxism. International Council Correspondence 8: 1–6. Mattick, Paul. 1939 [1978]. Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler. In AntiBolshevik Communism, ed. P. Mattick. London: Merlin Press. https://www. marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1939/kautsky.htm. Accessed 8 January 2020. Mattick, Paul. 1946. Rebels and Renegades and Other Essays. Melbourne: Workers’ Literature Bureau. Mattick, Paul. 1969. Marx and Keynes. The Limits of the Mixed Economy. Boston: Porter Sargent Publisher. Online edition http://www.kavoshgar.org/book/ MK/Marx%20&%20Keynes.pdf. Accessed 8 January 2020. Mattick, Paul. 1970 [1930]. Introduction. In G.i.k. Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. https://libcom.org/library/introd uction-paul-mattick. Accessed 13 January 2020. Mattick, Paul. 1971. Introduzione [Introduction]. In Marx, l’economia politica classica e il problema della dinamica [Marx, Classical Political Economy and the Problem of Dynamics, 1969], ed. H. Grossmann. Bari: Laterza. Mattick, Paul. 1972. Critique of Marcuse: One Dimensional Man in Class Society. London: Merlin Press. Mattick, Paul. 1977. “Consigli e partito” [Councils and Party]. Marxiana 2: 66. Mattick, Paul. 1978a [1945]. Otto Rühle and the German Labour Movement. In Anti-Bolshevick Communism, ed. P. Mattick. London: Merlin Press. Mattick, Paul. 1978b. Anti-Bolshevik Communism. London: Merlin Press. Mattick, Paul. 1981. Economic Crisis and Crisis Theory. London: Merlin Press. Mattick, Paul. 1983. Marxism. Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? London: Merlin Press. Pannekoek, Anton. 1975 [1938]. Lenin as Philosopher. A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Bases of Leninism. London: Merlin Press. Plutte, Christoph, and Marc Geoffroy (eds.). 2013. Die Revolution war für mich ein großes Abenteuer. Paul Mattick im Gespräch mit Michael Buckmiller. Münster: Unrast.

84

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Pozzoli, Claudio. 1976a. Paul Mattick e il comunismo dei consigli [Paul Mattick and the council communism]. In Il comunismo difficile [The Arduous Communism], ed. C. Pozzoli, 11–338. Bari: Dedalo. Pozzoli, Claudio (ed.). 1976b. Il comunismo difficile. I comunisti dei consigli e la teoria marxiana dell’accumulazione e delle crisi. Bari: Dedalo. Ragona, Gianfranco. 2014. L’avventura della rivoluzione. Il comunismo dei consigli di Paul Mattick. Critica Marxista 3–4: 65–72. Ragona, Gianfranco. 2015. Capitalismo e democrazia in Paul Mattick. Un carteggio inedito. Il pensiero politico 1–2: 326–337. Roth, Gary. 2015. Marxism in a Lost Century. A Biography of Paul Mattick. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Rubel, Maximilien. 1976. L’autopraxis historique du prolétariat. Économies et Sociétés. Cahiers de l’Ismea (série S, “Études de marxologie”, n. 18) 4–5: 773– 812.

CHAPTER 5

Workers’ Struggles Under Neocapitalism: Raniero Panzieri (1921–1964)

1

Life and Works

In the same way as Mattick and Landauer, Raniero Panzieri displayed the characteristic features of a political militant who tirelessly feeds off cultural sources, the results of empirical research and theoretical reflection. Having graduated in Law in 1945, Panzieri was appointed to a teaching post at the University of Messina in 1948. He shortly decided not to pursue an academic career, however, opting instead for direct and intense engagement in the ranks of the workers’ and socialist movement. He played a major organizational role in this movement and dedicated all his creative intelligence to it. Considering the narrow time span in which he was active (less than twenty years between 1945 and 1964, the year of his sudden death), his contribution does seem quite extraordinary. In 1944, Panzieri became a member of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), joining the political current led by Rodolfo Morandi, a leading leftist figure. The Italy that emerged from World War II was a backward country with a distorted trajectory of development; it needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. In this context, Panzieri first became active in cultural organization, supervising the publication of magazines and bulletins, before being entrusted with reorganizing the Socialist Party in Sicily. He lived there until 1953, coming into contact with a peasant world in turmoil. He stood up against the agriculturalists to make claims for land redistribution as promised by the 1944 reform passed thanks to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_5

85

86

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

communist Minister of Agriculture Fausto Gullo, and supported the farm labourers in resisting the violence of landowners and, often, the mafia as well. In the same period, he also took part in the political struggle at the national level and worked with famous periodicals, such as Movimento operaio, Mondo operaio, Opinione and Ragionamenti. Together with his wife, Pucci Saija, he translated the second book of Capital and some of Marx’s early writings, as well as the Engels’ study of the Situation of the Working Class in England. He organized conferences and meetings focused on cultural freedom, Southernism (an issue he studied in depth, in part as a member of the secretariat of the National Committee for the rebirth of Southern Italy). At the end of the 1950s, while serving in key party positions (he was a member of the Central and Management committees), Panzieri underwent a political and intellectual evolution: on the one hand, he became increasingly impatient with the traditional party organization; on the other hand, and certainly on the basis of his experience in Sicily in which he began to understand and admire grassroots mobilization, he developed an analysis of “neo-capitalism” with theses about workers’ control over both production processes and its organizations. These new considerations of his were also shaped by the impact of de-Stalinization—Panzieri along with the rest of the social-communist world actively kept abreast of the 20th CPSU Congress and later events in Poland and Hungary—and the growing attention garnered by the Chinese model. He made a trip to China in 1955 and met Mao Zedong, shortly afterwards co-authoring the famous paper “Sulle contraddizioni all’interno del popolo” (On contradictions within the people) (Mondo operaio, 1957). In the same year, he published an individually authored essay dedicated to the workers’ councils in China. On the internal level, then, while a bitter but in-depth debate raged on politics and culture among communists, socialists, secularists and liberals, he took a position against any form of partisanship in culture. In this same period, he also associated with Lucio Libertini, an important figure in the socialist and communist world and Panzieri’s co-author for the 1958 publications Sette tesi sulla questione del controllo operaio (Seven theses on workers’ control) (Libertini and Panzieri 1958) and Tredici tesi sulla questione del partito di classe (Thirteen theses on the class party). The two shared a critique of Stalinism but refused to equate it with communism tout court. They also resisted the temptation to relegate the yearning for revolution to the position of historical relic in favour

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

87

of the kind of market-embracing, peaceful and conflict-free reformism which shortly after the German Social Democratic Party paradigmatically adopted at its congress in Bad Godesberg (1959). At this point, Panzieri was ready to take the last transition of his life: he moved to Turin, the most typical Italian example of a Fordist onecompany town by virtue of hosting the Fiat car manufacturing company, and gave up all his positions in the PSI managing bodies to take a job at the prestigious anti-fascist publishing house Einaudi. In his work as an editorial consultant (characterized by openness towards the international scene), what stands out is the interconnectedness of political and cultural perspectives. For instance, Panzieri proposed editions or translations of Marx’s early work, in opposition to the rigidity gradually coming to characterize the kind of pseudo-scientific Marxism that dominated much of Italian left at the time. He suggested publishing work by Rosa Luxemburg, to highlight her attention to workers’ councils and critique of the inflexibility of the Leninist conception of the socialist party and state, and work by foreign sociologists, such as Charles Wright Mill’s famous study of white-collar workers. He oversaw the publishing of Wealth and Power in America whose author, Gabriel Kolko, frequented the circles closest to Paul Mattick. Panzieri also struck up a correspondence with Kolko that went on to last until his death. In Turin, he gathered around him a group of friends and founded the famous Quaderni rossi (Red Notebooks) journal. In the larger European panorama, this initiative stood out as fresh and innovative, iconoclastic and disruptive, rigorous but not without its own contradictions and intense internal tensions. The magazine’s focuses included issues of direct democracy, the analysis of neo-capitalism, the effort to recover the historical history of the councils, i.e. from between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the labour management councils after World War II, and methods of social investigation based on inquiry and research. Panzieri’s experiment took place in a context characterized by intense migration flows from Southern to Northern Italy and the resulting profound change in the traditional matrix of the working class. The composition of this class needed to be analysed and understood through observation and the objective examination of reality, not through the convenient lens of ideology. Indeed, this was the only way to effectively grasp the development of capitalism, given its ability to redefine and reinvigorate itself through innovation in the form of fixed capital (machines and the machinery system) and variable capital (living labour). To this end,

88

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Panzieri also set out to recover German and American schools of sociology by making “socialist” use of them to examine Fordism during the Glorious Thirties, rejecting both the philosophical approach typical of the Italian tradition and any political attempt to convert Quaderni Rossi into the nucleus of a new party. The first issue of the journal was published in June 1961 and was very well received by workers and some trade unions as well, particularly in Turin. As a result of the numerous presentations Panzieri gave in various Italian cities, groups were created to link up with the journal. The attitude of the union changed rather rapidly, however, and particularly after the events of July 1962: when metalworkers in Turin went on strike following years of repression and silence, it led to the violent Piazza Statuto (a city square) skirmishes. Left-wing parties and unions and their press outlets accused the Quaderni Rossi group, and especially Panzieri, of acting as provocateurs, that is, of having incited the workers to clash with the police forces. For Panzieri, this represented a traumatic event but also confirmed that much of the left was incapable of understanding the spontaneous character of struggles led and enacted directly by the new working class: a population of workers that were younger than those who had fought in the Resistance and was often uprooted by virtue of comprising women and men who had immigrated from the South en-masse in the previous decade. Panzieri tried to mend these breaches even while maintaining his critique of the left’s traditional organizations, but he ended up being gradually marginalized. He was dealt another hard blow in 1963 when he was fired from Einaudi, ostensibly due to different views surrounding the publication of Goffredo Fofi’s research Southern Italian immigration to Turin but really also due to his nonconformity with the cultural policy that prevailed in that period in “his own” party and, above all, in the Communist Party (PCI) with Einaudi as its authoritative mouthpiece. Meanwhile, some editors at the Quaderni Rossi pushed to detach even further from those leftist mass organizations: Toni Negri abandoned the group to embark on a path that followed partly in the wake of workerism while partly diverged from it, defining politics as an immanent power lodged in the social sphere that stands counter to the power of the state (with the latter now fully displaying its capitalist function). Mario Tronti and the Roman group also moved away, but for the contrasting reason that they were convinced of the need to provide an immediate political outlet for the initiative behind by the magazine.

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

89

The Quaderni Rossi project continued until 1965, with five issues published up to 1964, the year of Panzieri’s death, and a sixth one the following year. For a long time, the magazine remained a paradigmatic testimony to that brief but innovative historical moment with its ponderous essays and in-depth analyses but also the various bulletins that accompanied it over time, meant to represent a more effective way of keeping track of the evolution of class-based struggles and developments: these included the Cronache dei Quaderni Rossi (Red Notebook Chronicles), Quaderni Rossi - Cronache operaie (Red notebooks – Workers’ chronicles), Lettera dei Quaderni Rossi (Letter of the Red Notebooks) and Quaderni Rossi - Notizie e documenti di lavoro (Red notebooks – News and Working Documents).

2

Marx and Marxism

Panzieri’s relationship with Marxism underwent three main phases. In the first phase, the period of his theoretical training, he studied Marx’s writings and found they contained an indomitable yearning for freedom, characterized by a kind of attention to the economic side of human action that never slips into economicism. In a note from 1944, he commented: “Man’s slavery in the economic sphere is his slavery in every order of activity. To liberate the economy is to liberate mankind itself” (Panzieri 1982, 5)1 stressing that: Indeed, only the doctrine of historical materialism grants a full, revolutionary meaning to the ‘economic hypothesis’ of socialism; only historical materialism shows the way that in reality the economic transformation is the transformation of the whole of society, of every human action, of the fundamental condition of man. (Panzieri 1982, 7)

Young Panzieri thus developed a clear rejection of all fatalisms. History is not a metaphysical subject with aims of its own, he believed, achieved by using human beings as docile instruments; rather, the opposite is true: “the subject of history is man” (Panzieri 1982, 11), and it is humans, not a superior entity, who produce the social relations in which they participate. Showing he was aware of the most recent developments in academic inquiry, Panzieri believed that the discovery of Marx’s long-neglected 1 All quotations from this source have been translated from Italian.

90

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

early writings did justice to “that monstrous and arbitrary complex of metaphysical imaginations of which official Marxism for the most part consisted” (Panzieri 1982, 52). These writings, however, “do not authorize [us] in any way to correct the overall interpretation of Marx’s thought in the sense of opposing the economic-sociological positivism of his old interpreters with a ‘philosophism’ and humanism that would likewise bring Marx’s thought […] back to the field of metaphysics” (ibid.). The target of his critique in this case was Auguste Cornu’s work. Indeed, Cornu was one of the first scholars to study Marx’s writings prior to the Communist Manifesto, and Panzieri accused him of having legitimized a reading of Marx’s thought in terms of the philosophy of history. He admitted that those early, often fragmentary, works such as the Economic and philosophic manuscripts or the German ideology did contain “metaphysical residues”, but argued that these traces could not be used to construct the image of Marx as a philosopher, confusing the essence of a rigorous and coherent work of societal critique with superficial “concessions to the language of contemporary ideology” (Panzieri 1982, 114). He developed the second phase of his thinking on Marxism on these grounds, in the years of de-Stalinization. The epochal events of the fateful year 1956—already mentioned here—constituted real breaks in the line of continuity, forcing Socialists to objectively acknowledge “the qualitative rupture that has occurred” (Panzieri 1982, 180). On the one hand, Panzieri was concerned about the overall interpretation of the Soviet experience, asserting that it had to be purged of “overall justifications” and “absolute condemnations” (Panzieri 1982, 177); on the other hand, he focused on the topicality of Lenin’s thought, emphasizing in particular his “rejection of the (reformist) ‘subordination’ of the working class to bourgeois power and society” (Panzieri 1982, 181; see also ivi, 185–187). Regarding relations with the USSR, Panzieri very clearly called for recovering the primordial internationalist character of the workers’ movement, which “can in no case be deformed into passive respect for a state power” (Panzieri 1982, 180). Regarding Leninism, and in particular Lenin’s conception of the party, he acknowledged it was historically important for breaking away from social-democratic degeneration, economicism and even opportunism; however, he questioned one of its theoretical cornerstones: “the concept of the party-guide, which establishes an absurd identity between the working class and the party”

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

91

(Panzieri 1982, 181).2 According to Panzieri, the party is an instrument at the service of the class, never the other way around, and not even union activity is to be subordinated to the line of political organization. Of the October events, therefore, he saw councilism as the most valuable and, precisely for this reason, while thoughtfully recognizing the exceptional conditions that the revolution had encountered, he stigmatized the dismissal of the Soviets and at the same time advocated for the “creation of new forms of direct democracy” or “socialist democracy” (Panzieri 1982, 197–199). In this phase, Panzieri fluctuated between acknowledging Lenin’s political rank and displaying a certain libertarianism borrowed from one of his masters, Rodolfo Morandi, who had advocated a vision of Marxism based on coherence between tactics and strategy, that is, the ethical harmony between the means and ends of socialist struggle. The third moment in which Panzieri’s Marxism took shape coincided with the Quaderni Rossi project, at which point it became very evident that “his Marx” lay mainly in a sharp critique of political economy. Panzieri’s most original contribution to the Marxist discussion of his time consisted in his attempt to use Marx to examine the contemporary transformations of capitalism and to identify instruments for directly intervening in social struggles. He consolidated this approach by reading the pages of Capital dedicated to cooperation, machines and large-sized industry and formulating an updated interpretation of the famous Fragment on machines from Grundrisse, publishing the Italian translation in the Quaderni Rossi (Marx 1964, 289–300). The Unpublished Chapter 6, with the concepts of “formal subsumption” and “real submission” of labour to capital, was another of Panzieri’s favourite texts (Marx 1994).3 Focusing on neo-capitalism characterized by the drive to plan and the consolidation of oligopolies and monopolies, Panzieri stressed the issue of labour exploitation, especially the moment of production in the Fordist factory, that is, the site of class struggle and moment in which the growing despotism of capital clashes with the antagonism of the working class. This focus led him to believe that science and technology were not at all

2 For a comparison with the Social democratic model, see passim. 3 This text, delivered similarly to others to the “gnawing criticism of the mice”, had

been published in the Soviet Union in 1933.

92

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

neutral, thus eliminating any illusion as to the impartial character of development. He condensed his reasoning on this issue in one of his most important essays, Sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo (The capitalist use of machinery), which originally appeared in 1961 in the first issue of the journal (Panzieri 1961). In this essay, he sets off clearly and unequivocally from Marx and namely the idea that simple cooperation is a fundamental form of capitalist production and Marx’s focus on the capitalist for having appropriated the productive power developed by the labourer as a social labourer (Marx 1887). The division of labour in manufacturing, in which the craftsmanship of individual workers is still central, forces capital to “wrestle with the insubordination of the workmen” (Marx 1887); it was the introduction of machinery in large industry that radically changed the balance of power. Panzieri derived from Marxian analysis the firm belief that technological growth is a “way of existence of capital”, and that “the capitalist use of machinery is not, so to speak, a mere distortion of, or deviation from, some ‘objective’ development that is in itself rational, but that capital has determined technological development” (Panzieri 1961, 55). Ultimately, technology, development and progress are indelibly branded with the attributes of capital as a result of the purpose for which they were forged. Consequently, the increase in the organic composition of capital (i.e. the relationship between machines and human labour) is not an objective factor for transforming existing relations into socialist relations, as a substantial component of the Marxist-oriented political parties had claimed after World War II. As Panzieri insisted, there is no way to prove the existence of a technological base capable of supporting the development of socialism: on the contrary, “The new ‘technical bases’ progressively attained in production provide capitalism with new possibilities for the consolidation of its power” (Panzieri 1961, 56). In a subsequent essay, Plusvalore e Pianificazione (Surplus value and planning), he clarified some points of his analysis, beginning explicitly from Marx’s examination of the production process as outlined in the fourth section of his magnum opus and linking it to the Fragment on machines by Grundrisse. Panzieri highlighted the fact that the first book certainly includes “a theory arguing the ‘unsustainability’ of capitalism at its highest level of development, when the ‘superabundant’ productive forces come into conflict with the ‘narrow base’ of the system” (Panzieri 1964, 285–286). However, in order to avoid slipping into errors of

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

93

perspective, it is important to keep in mind that nineteenth-century capitalist society is not the same as neo-capitalism: taking the opportunity to provide a fundamental methodological insight, Panzieri specified that “it is necessary to put aside all the contingent aspects of Marxian thought in order to grasp in it some powerful indications as to the overall dynamics of capitalist development” (Panzieri 1964, 286). In fact, he asserted, there is still truth to the observation that capitalism is dynamic, capable of modifying itself by reacting to the very contradictions that it produces; that is, capitalism is able to overcome its own limits while maintaining unchanged only one constant, the one that determines its life or death: “the (tendential) growth of the power of capital over labour power” (Panzieri 1964, 287). This critical vision clearly rejects every mythology surrounding capitalism’s last and supreme “stage of development”, typical of Kautsky’s orthodox social-democratic model and Lenin’s revolutionary model but generally found in every rigid, schematic, “school” form of Marxism. The real challenge of the present, according to Panzieri, consists in identifying the proper equilibrium between the empirical analysis of the changes observable in the society of capital and a scientific explanation freed from “models […] that escape from historical development”. Indeed, he concluded that both Marxist-oriented intellectuals and political forces were failing to grasp a central feature of the contemporary system: the “recovery of the fundamental expression of the law of surplus value, plan, from the level of the factory to that of society” (Panzieri 1964, 288).

3

Monopolistic Capitalism: The Factory-Society

To analyse the capitalistic mode of production as a global phenomenon, Panzieri drew on Marx’s interpretation, valorizing its complexity and depth but also acknowledging some of its limits; for interpreting Italian capitalism specifically, instead, he referred mainly to Gramsci. Indeed, Panzieri considered Gramsci extremely topical, viewing his thinking as extraordinarily valuable precisely for its insights into even the most recent developments in the dominant economic system. In a series of documents he wrote between 1957 and 1958 (sometimes together with Lucio Libertini), Panzieri clarified that the Italian bourgeoisie never really pursued national interests: the alliance between the northern industrialists and the agricultural bloc of Southern Italy produced a corporatist and parasitic class. Fascism represented nothing

94

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

more than the utmost expression of the primacy of this particular bourgeoisie; through it, the bourgeoisie began to transform Italian capitalism in a monopolistic direction. After the war, thanks to its subordinate relationship with large-scale American industry, the bourgeois hegemony achieved a new balance, no longer based on the alliance between northern entrepreneurs and southern landowners but instead on the more direct hegemony of monopoly capitalism. This hegemony shifted the interests of agrarian capitalism in line with its own interests and intensified its control over society as a whole, from the economy to politics (as Gramsci had already perceived). And yet the argument that the development of productive forces hinges on state intervention does not, he argued, justify the proposal floated by left-wing parties to help the bourgeoisie, or some parts of it, in constructing a full-fledged (bourgeois) democracy. Indeed, Panzieri replied both in theoretical terms and with a new “sociology” of Italian capitalism to the “neo statist” positions, both those that were openly Keynesian (the state as a corrective to the system’s shortcomings) as well as those nominally Labourist (the state above the parties, as a gateway to the extinction of capitalism) yet ultimately stemming from Keynes as well. He critiqued the idea that bourgeois democracy represents an unavoidable stage within the framework of linear socio-economic development on the grounds that it is schematic and mechanistic. It is not a matter of “exalting an intellectualist revolutionary voluntarism” (Libertini and Panzieri 1973a, 106) he wrote together with Libertini, but rather of remembering that political forces should not rely on pre-packaged models but rather begin by comprehending the specific reality in which they operate. At that time, monopolistic capitalism in Italy had not yet reached its apogee—not to mention that the country did not have the proper conditions for developing that welfare state so dear to neo-statism. As Engels had already noted in the nineteenth century, Italian capitalism was, and continued to be, an inseparable mixture of excessive development (industrial and financial poles) and semifeudal survival elements: beginning with the South, inequalities were increasing, exacerbated by the emergence of mass unemployment as a structural element of the Italian economy. Panzieri viewed the advent of monopolies as the main obstacle to development: in fact, by exacerbating the dualism of the economy, they were even more anti-Southern than competitive capitalism; indeed, they tended to Southernize the whole of Italy; their policies were anti-national.

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

95

Undeniably, the bond between the state and the monopolies was ever closer, but this was not to be understood as control of the former over the latter; rather, it reflected the state’s exasperation of its role as the business committee of the bourgeoisie, which secured the direct hegemony of the monopolies through a “neo-totalitarian” set of policies. As Panzieri and Libertini clarified: The question of power is essential for monopoly. Unlike what occurs in a competitive capitalist economy, there is no monopolistic profit without the power of the monopoly; without its controls multiplying at all levels. And there is no economic power without political power. (Libertini and Panzieri 1973a, 113)

The neo-totalitarianism the two authors cite is inherent in the transition from rigid dominance over the individual productive unit to rigid dominance over the state. Although the historical left had identified planning as the antechamber of socialism, in this framework Panzieri developed a critique of this drive. The debate on this issue had already erupted after World War I, and Panzieri’s contribution changed with the passing of the years. In 1947, he wrote that planning and capitalism were irreconcilable because the former, understood as a general economic programme, actually presupposed socialism. When taking his distance from the Socialist Party and launching the Quaderni rossi, however, he revisited this issue together with a reconsideration of the role played by science and technology. His thoughts focused on productivism, and to some extent the mechanicism of the 1940s gave way to an analysis of the transformations of capitalism centred on their political implications, that is, both their repercussions on living labour and, at the same time, workers’ negation of capital itself (with all due respect to a metaphysics of the “development of productive powers” understood in abstract terms). Panzieri pointed out that capitalists buy individual labour power on the market, not the combined power of the multiplicity of workers at work in the form of productive cooperation. This led him to develop a thesis with significant political consequences: Thus, beginning from the fundamental form of its mode of production, beginning from cooperation, capital “subsumes under itself” a planned working process. Far from appearing to be at odds with the operation

96

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

mode of capital, at the level of direct production planning is immediately revealed to be an essential aspect of that same working process whose development is conditioned by the development of capital. There is, evidently, no incompatibility between planning and capital. (Panzieri 1964, 263)

The postulate according to which a planned economy is ipso facto a socialist economy is thus false, he asserted: planning cannot be “considered in itself, abstracted from the social relationship that can be expressed in it (in its various forms)” (Panzieri 1964, 283). Rather, according to Panzieri, planning always represents a form of despotism of capital in relation to labour; the technology and machines at the service of capital conceal “the will of the capitalist to ‘extract’ the maximum labour power” behind the apparent natural development of social power (Panzieri 1964, 267). If planning has been consubstantial to capitalism since its inception, Panzieri pointed out the elements characterizing the stage of monopolistic capitalism in a speech he gave in Siena in 1962 when presenting the first issue of Quaderni Rossi. This talk was later published under the title Lotte operaie nello sviluppo capitalistico: That part of the process that in the early stages of capitalism appeared to be an important yet specific, self-referential, element, that is, the factory, becomes general: the factory tends to pervade, to permeate, all of civil society […] the factory disappears as a specific moment. The same type of process that dominates the factory, typical of the productive moment, tends to impose itself on society as a whole, thus the features characterizing the factory - the particular type of subordination of living labour-power to capital, etc. - tend to pervade all levels of society. (Panzieri 1976, 40)

The category of “society-factory” (which was the focus of the second issue of Quaderni Rossi, opened by a lengthy essay by Mario Tronti) expresses precisely the capacity of capital to overcome the “despotism in the factory/anarchy in civil society” dichotomy. This thesis proposed by Panzieri signalled a break in his thinking from that of Lenin. Having reached the highest level of its development, he argued, capital needs to “plan itself” (Panzieri 1976, 42) and the main agent of such planning is the state. Unable to grasp the meaning of these processes, having succumbed to the “mythology” of public intervention as an agent of socialization and overestimated existing political institutions,

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

97

the left-wing parties limited their struggle to the political-institutional sphere (an important yet insufficient step, Panzieri pointed out); this occurred precisely at the point when, in the aftermath of the 1953 elections (involving growing support for the PCI and PSI), the bourgeoisie launched its offensive in the sphere of production, imposing low wages and intense exploitation as well as retaliating and discriminating against trade union activists. The introduction of new production techniques played a decisive role in the repression of workers, Panzieri noted, proof that technology is far from neutral. With an argument that surprisingly enough reflected Mattick’s thinking concerning the ineliminable downward trend of the surplus-value rate, Panzieri observed that the increases in labour productivity generated by the development of machines reduced the time needed to reproduce the value of labour power, thus increasing surplus-value and thereby decreasing the number of workers employed. As a result, relative surplus-value increased and yet did not necessarily succeed in “offsetting the decrease in surplus-value caused by the decrease in the relative number of exploited workers” (Panzieri 1964, 269). After all, the priority of neocapitalism is to ensure the conditions for its own survival by consolidating its dominance, a priority that comes even before maximizing profit. As Panzieri wrote in The capitalist use of machinery: This does not mean, of course, that the possibilities for overthrowing the system do not increase at the same time. But these possibilities coincide with the wholly subversive character which working-class ‘insubordination’ tends to assume in face of the increasingly independent ‘objective framework’ of the capitalist mechanism. (Panzieri 1961, 56–57)

The time-worn message that the revolution will arrive as soon as production relations are transformed into a straitjacket for the further development of productive power was set aside; in fact, he asserted, productive power does not constitute so independent a social variable that the problem of change may be shifted to the level of property relations, that is, the sphere of politics. In reality, the opposite is true: change may only occur by acting at the heart of the capitalist process, in which dead labour takes over living labour under the planned and despotic guidance of capitalists. In short, the transformation of existing social relations (an eventuality, rather than a historical necessity) depends

98

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

not on technical factors but rather on the subjective element of workingclass insubordination. This class, therefore, is tasked with building an alternative rationality: The working-class struggle thus presents itself as the necessity of global opposition to the capitalist plan, where the fundamental factor is an awareness - let us call it dialectical awareness - of the unity of the ‘technical’ and ‘despotic’ moments in the current organization of production. The relationship of revolutionary action to technological ‘rationality’ is to ‘comprehend’ it; not to acknowledge and exalt it, however, but rather to subject it to a new use: the socialist use of machines. (Panzieri 1961, 63)

4

Workers’ Control

Beginning in the 1940s, Panzieri’s anti-state socialism began to focus on the effort to liberate the potential for self-government inherent in social forces. Over the years, however, his thinking evolved to become undeniably more and more class-focused. In 1947, Panzieri wrote in an ecumenical spirit applauding the management councils on the grounds that they were functional to the workers’ task of taking part in the national reconstruction, voicing the point of view of Italy’s healthy powers (although he later criticized them for being subordinate to collaborationist currents). In 1956, he still assigned the working class the role of custodian of the interests of the country. The analysis he developed in Seven theses (1958) was, so to speak, hybrid; on the one hand, the class focus was reinforced: The defense, in this situation, of the revolutionary autonomy of the proletariat manifests in the bottom-up creation of institutions of socialist democracy before and after the conquest of power, and in the party returning to its role as an instrument of the political formation of the class movement […]. Making this assertion definitely does not mean that the question of power, the essential condition for the construction of socialism, has been forgotten: however, the socialist nature of power is determined precisely by the base of workers’ democracy on which it rests, and that cannot be improvised in the aftermath of the revolutionary ‘leap’ in the relations of production. This is the only serious, non-reformist method of opposing the prospect of bureaucratic socialism (Stalinism). (Libertini and Panzieri 1973a, 113)

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

99

On the other hand, however, the thesis of the “revolutionary autonomy of the proletariat” still coexisted with an inter-classist and productivist vision of its role. However, Panzieri had already echoed Landauer, Kollontai and Mattick in the intensity with which he underlined that working-class democracy is the current-day prefigurement of socialism—or, to state it another way, that means and ends are inseparable in the revolutionary process: “we must stress that the elements which are extraneous to our struggle for socialism tend to be absent even in the socialist power of tomorrow” (Panzieri 1973, 138). Later, on the Quaderni rossi period, both capitalist domination and worker insubordination assumed a degree of radicality that led Panzieri to redefine the specifics of his political proposal, thus taking up the Marxian lesson on the virtuous circle between theory and praxis in the best possible way. Presenting the first issue of the journal, Panzieri framed the new cycle of struggles that began in Italy in 1960 as a point of reference, warning observers not to be misled by their seeming fragmentation, given that in reality these movements were claiming rights. Rather, this open conflict represented the most significant aspect of the political situation of the time because, considered as a whole, it called into question both workers’ subordination and their very condition. In other words, in spite of the diversity of aims characterizing these new struggles, they posed a challenge to capitalistic relations of production. That is, they did not merely question the particular working conditions in a given company, but rather targeted capital tout court. Panzieri did not hesitate to acknowledge that, if workers had reached such a degree of maturity, it was partly thanks to the class-based trade unions, or at least the communist one CGIL; indeed, even before 1960, unions had once again been engaging critically with changes in the capitalist mode of production. Panzieri’s invitation to consider even apparently spontaneous strikes as the fruit of trade union work, at least to a certain extent, is certainly worth noting; as he pointed out, the unions’ work had “made its considerable contribution to creating a workers’ consciousness suited to the level capital has reached” (Panzieri 1976, 28—although the same cannot be said of the parties, in our opinion. Nevertheless, Panzieri observed, it is the political and not merely tradeunionist implications of struggles that undermine the traditional relationship between the working class and its organizations. These tensions stem from both workers’ expectations that the principle of working-class

100

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

democracy also apply within the bodies representing them, and from the tendency to assign the union functions it is unable to perform, that is, the political duty to overthrow the system. Judging these expectations for the unions to be unreasonable, Panzieri reiterated that he was wholly blameless for the anarcho-unionist currents that were often attributed to him. The problem facing the workers’ movement is not so much that trade unions are not up to the task, he asserted, but rather neo-reformism and the bureaucratization of the unions’ political organizations; when Panzieri moved away from the PSI and suggested that the esteemed intellectuals of the PCI had “misunderstood” the theme of workers’ control, this disagreement was exacerbated. The working class is going through an “exciting” phase, Panzieri stated in 1962, because for the first time in its history “it is called on to fight directly for socialism” (Panzieri 1976, 47). In the face of such a great challenge, it would be disastrous to remain anchored to outdated schemes; rather, it is necessary to develop a programme suited to the new aspects of existing class relations, grasping first of all that even strata such as technicians/experts and intellectuals were now facing proletarian conditions. With the old policy of alliance becoming impractical, the only effective priority for the workers’ parties might be the unitary re-composition of the class. Panzieri had always stressed the importance of political intervention, and the synergy between research and political action emerged here in all its potentially subversive force: in a seminar on the subject organized by Quaderni rossi shortly before his death, he explained that inquiry was a tool for avoiding any possible mysticism of the workers’ movement, by scientifically investigating the degree of consciousness workers had achieved and thereby increasing it. Although Romano Alquati finds that Panzieri’s thinking was limited by his tendency to grant research a role outside of struggle per se, on this occasion Panzieri explicitly asserted the centrality of “on-the-spot investigation”, that is, inquiry conducted in the midst of the clash, to bring to light the changing values that struggling workers experience while transitioning from normality to a conflict situation (from a stance of rights-claiming to demanding equality for all). Inquiry is an integral part of the work of recomposing the class, Panzieri noted: by establishing contact with the workers and discussing ideas with them, researcher-militants foster a process of training (consciousness-raising), thus playing a political role.

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

101

Precisely because intellectual work blurred directly into political intervention without mediating elements, Panzieri and Tronti’s disagreement on the priority of research, whether capitalist development or workers’ insubordination, affected not only methodology but their very interpretation of revolutionary subjectivity and relations with political organizations. Panzieri wrote: We must investigate what capital is like to decide on the political significance of these struggles. […] The check is always at the level of capital, it can never be only at the level of the workers. On the contrary, the workers’ level is only really built if it is positioned at the level of capital. (Panzieri 1976, 33)

In other words, as he pointed out in his seminar on inquiry hold in 1964, the working class transforms from a spontaneous movement into a political movement when, to borrow an image from Lenin, it encounters socialism as a “voluntary, conscious, scientific fact” (Panzieri 1976, 92). Tronti overturned this perspective, arguing that the independent variable lies in workers’ struggles, as they are the engine of capitalist development.4 The different methodological premises of these two thinkers gave rise to different interpretations of the struggles at Fiat in July 1962, of the separation between the masses and the trade unions, and of the depoliticization and withdrawal into private life following the signing of the metalworkers’ contract in 1963. Panzieri was only lukewarm in embracing the workers’ refusal to work and the blockage of production, while Tronti idealized them as a direct manifestation of proletarian autonomy; Panzieri viewed the union’s hostility to new forms of struggle as a factor weakening the entire workers’ movement, forcing it to re-open discussion on “exciting” scenarios, while Tronti saw it as a (revolutionary) class victory over (reformist) organizations. As for the wave of withdrawal, while Panzieri attributed it to a misunderstanding of the new meaning of class struggle (a challenge to capital in its entirety) and the consequent inability of the movement to set up new organizational structures, Tronti considered such withdrawal to 4 In the above-cited essay La fabbrica e la società, Tronti anticipated the thesis he went on to develop in Workers and Capital (Tronti 2019), cast “fierce one-sidedness” (Tronti 1962, 22) as the method to be followed. He did not, however, intend this to represent “an arbitrariness of the mind”, but rather “a real objective process of development, which is not to be followed, but to be anticipated” (Tronti 1962, 23).

102

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

be only superficial in that the class showed it was determined to radicalize the conflict with new methods of struggle. Tronti moved on from the thesis of the irreducibility of revolutionary subjectivity which he had advocated in the 1960s to instead support a strategy of entering into the PCI in the following decade, in keeping with what he saw as the need to shift the conflict onto the grounds of state politics. On the contrary, Panzieri went down the opposite path between the 1940s-1950s and the 1960s, first invoking PCI and PSI political unity and later asserting the autonomy of the revolutionary subject, although he also recognized that it was necessary to dialogue with the historical organizations of this subject in the effort to transform them: We must, at least, pose ourselves the practical problem of a connection and expression of certain groups, both inside and outside the parties, on the level of a revolutionary Marxist orientation, in forms which are organizationally open, that is, avoiding any small sects, the serious error that all the minor groups of leftist workers have fallen into up to now. (Panzieri 1973, 268–270)

In a letter written in a moment of acute discouragement due to the isolation he experienced after having moved away from the PSI, he confessed: “the possible fate of [becoming a] small sect terrifies me” (Panzieri 1973, 271). Repeated efforts to lock Panzieri in one or the other cage of the Leninism/Anti-Leninism dichotomy overlooked not only the fact that his intellectual talent was not reducible to pre-established frameworks, but also that in his analysis brought together both the (Leninist) centrality of organization and the (councilist) emphasis on its instrumental function. His commitment to the unity of the class remained intact over the years. The political organization is defined as such by virtue not of its form, but of its ability to bring the requirements for “management” emerging from the struggles back together in a unified project aimed at breaching the false objectivity of economic development, replacing it with workers’ control: in Panzieri’s vision, the proletariat takes on a managerial function at the very heart of production, not limiting itself to a single company but coordinating the various production units while also incorporating (this idea, outlined in Seven theses, anticipated the fusion of factory and city in a joint struggle that was to take place at the end of the 1960s) local bodies of democratic representation into the process

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

103

of defining production programmes. Panzieri expressed the relationship between workers’ control and the conquest of political power as follows: Far from potentially representing a ‘surrogate’ for the conquest of political power, workers’ control would thus constitute a phase of maximum pressure on capitalist power (as a threat explicitly directed at the roots of the system). Hence, workers’ control must be seen as a preparation for situations of ‘dual power’, in connection with the wholesale conquest of political power. (Panzieri 1961, 71)

References Bologna, Sergio. 2011. L’operaismo italiano. In L’Altronovecento. Comunismo eretico e pensiero critico, vol. II, Il sistema e i movimenti, ed. Pier Paolo Poggio, 205–222. Milan: Jaca Book - Fondazione Micheletti. Corradi, Cristina. 2011. Panzieri, Tronti, Negri: le diverse eredità dell’operaismo italiano. In L’Altronovecento. Comunismo eretico e pensiero critico, vol. II, Il sistema e i movimenti, ed. Pier Paolo Poggio, 223–248. Milan: Jaca Book Fondazione Micheletti. Fasulo, Fabrizio. 2014. Raniero Panzieri and Workers’ Inquiry: The Perspective of Living Labour, the Function of Science and the Relationship Between Class and Capital. Ephemera. Theory & Politics in Organization 14: 315–333. Ferraris, Pino. 2011. Raniero Panzieri: per un socialismo della democrazia diretta. In L’Altronovecento. Comunismo eretico e pensiero critico, vol. II, Il sistema e i movimenti, ed. Pier Paolo Poggio, 381–401. Milan: Jaca Book - Fondazione Micheletti. Ferrero, Paolo (ed.). 2005. Ranieri Panzieri. Un uomo di frontiera. Milan: Punto Rosso. Libertini, Lucio, and Raniero Panzieri. 1973a [1958]. Sette tesi sulla questione del controllo operaio. In Panzieri, Raniero. La crisi del movimento operaio. Scritti interventi lettere, 1956–1960, ed. Dario Lanzardo and Giovanni Pirelli, 104–117. Milan: Lampugnani Nigri (in English, Seven theses on workers’ control. https://libcom.org/library/seven-theses-workers%E2%80% 99-control-1958). Libertini, Lucio, and Raniero Panzieri. 1973b [1958]. Tredici tesi sulla questione del partito di classe. Ibid. 187–222. Mancini, Sandro. 1976. Introduzione. In R. Panzieri. Lotte operaie nello sviluppo capitalistico, ed. S. Mancini, vii–xxxiii. Turin: Einaudi. Mancini, Sandro. 1977. Socialismo e democrazia diretta. Introduzione a Raniero Panzieri. Bari: Dedalo.

104

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Marx, Karl. 1996. Capital. Vol. 1. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 35. Maskow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl. 1964. Frammento sulle macchine [Fragments on Machines]. Italian trans. R. Solmi. Quaderni Rossi 4: 289–300. Marx, Karl. 1994. Chapter 6. Results of the Direct Production Process. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 34, 354–466. Moskow: Progress Publishers. Pagliarone, Antonio. 2012. Il romanzo delle nostre origini. In Un omaggio a Paul Mattick. Contributi per una critica marxiana radicale. Dalla critica alle teorie delle crisi ad una nuova organizzazione economica e sociale, 24–32. Milan: Connessioni Edizioni. Panzieri, Raniero. 1961. Sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo. Quaderni Rossi 1: 53–72. Now in Panzieri 1976, 3–23. English edition: Panzieri, R., The Capitalist Use of Machinery, trans. Quintin Hoare. https:// libcom.org/library/capalist-use-machinery-raniero-panzieri. Last accessed 22 January 2020. Panzieri, Raniero. 1964. Plusvalore e pianificazione. Appunti di lettura del Capitale. Quaderni Rossi 4: 257–288. Now in Panzieri 1976, 51–85. Panzieri, Raniero. 1973. La crisi del movimento operaio. Scritti interventi lettere, 1956–1960, ed. D. Lanzardo and G. Pirelli. Milan: Lampugnani Nigri. Panzieri, Raniero. 1975. La ripresa del marxismo leninismo in Italia, ed. D. Lanzardo. Milan and Rome: Sapere Edizioni. Panzieri, Raniero. 1976. Lotte operaie nello sviluppo capitalistico, ed. S. Mancini. Turin: Einaudi. Panzieri, Raniero. 1982. L’alternativa socialista. Scritti scelti 1944–1956, ed. S. Merli. Turin: Einaudi. Panzieri, Raniero. 1986. Dopo Stalin, ed. S. Merli. Venice: Marsilio. Panzieri, Raniero. 1987. Lettere, ed. S. Merli and L. Dotti. Venice: Marsilio. Panzieri, Raniero. 1994. Spontaneità e organizzazione. Gli anni dei “Quaderni Rossi” 1959–1964. Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini. Pianciola, Cesare. 2014. Il marxismo militante di Raniero Panzieri. Pistoia: Centro di documentazione di Pistoia. Pizzolato, Nicola. 2011. Transnational Radicals: Labour Dissent and Political Activism in Detroit and Turin (1950–1970). International Review of Social History 56: 1–30. Rizzo, Domenico. 2001. Il Partito socialista e Raniero Panzieri in Sicilia (1949– 1955). Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino. Tronti, Mario. 1962. La fabbrica e la società. Quaderni rossi 2: 1–31. Tronti, Mario. 2019 [1966]. Workers and Capital, trans. David Broder. New York: Verso. Vv. Aa. 1995. Ripensando Panzieri trent’anni dopo. Conference proceedings (Pisa 28–29, January 1994). Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini.

5

WORKERS’ STRUGGLES UNDER NEOCAPITALISM …

105

Wright, Steve. 2002. Storming Heaven. Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto Press. Zanini, Adelino. 2010. On the ‘Philosophical Foundations’ of Italian Workerism: A Conceptual Approach. Historical Materialism 18: 39–63.

Interlude 2: Lotta Continua: The Dilemmas of a Revolutionary Group Between the Hot Autumn and the Restoration of Capitalism

The revolutionary group “Lotta continua”, founded in Turin, the city of the Fiat company, in the middle of Italy’s “hot autumn”, brought together students and workers. In its short and tumultuous existence (1969–1976), the group experienced all the dilemmas that anti-capitalist movements have historically faced: the boundaries of the revolutionary subject (the contours of the working class and its relationship with the sub-proletariat), the problematic alliance between class and gender, the issue of organization (avant-garde vs. masses), the relation with the institutional sphere and the use of violence (the institutional and fascist as well as the revolutionary). Lotta continua’s shifts, at times even Uturns, reflected its efforts to calibrate the struggle against capital and the role that the group was called on to play in relation to a moment of acute social conflict which nonetheless foreshadowed an unprecedented counter-offensive on the part of capital. In the period 1967–1968, student movement rose to public attention also in Italy. After students staged occupations and struggles on university campuses and in high school classrooms, they shifted their attention to the working class, leafleting factories on a regular basis. This was the outset of what has been described as “The biggest, most prolonged strike wave in history” (Bambery 2019) or “Italy’s ‘long May’”, as well as “quite easily the most radical, interesting, and, in the end, violent of all the world’s ‘1968s’” (Foot 2003, 8). The “battle of Corso Traiano” marked a turning point. Named after the avenue running through a working-class neighbourhood of Turin, this

108

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

one-day strike for housing reform organized by the trade unions on 3 July 1969 erupted into heated riots, with locals residents defending students and workers from the nearby Mirafiori Fiat factory against vicious police repression. This clash was a run-up to the largest mass mobilization of workers in Italian history, primarily taking place in the country’s industrialized North but eventually spreading to other areas as well, including the severely underdeveloped South. Referred to as the “Hot Autumn”, this wave of struggle gained worldwide attention. It is not by chance that 1969 was also the year in which the first of a series of bombings took place (in Piazza Fontana, Milan) targeting common civilians (including children) on the country’s streets and trains: it also represented the advent of the “strategy of tension”, a backlash orchestrated by the so-called deviated intelligence agencies in collusion with neofascist groups that sought to imbue the population with a climate of fear so it would turn to the state for protection. The epicentre of this “Hot Autumn” was Mirafiori. At the time, the factory was Europe’s largest car manufacturing facility in terms of workforce (50,000 employees). It was there, and specifically out of the student-worker assembly held regularly in the factory in those months, that “Lotta continua” (Continuous Struggle) was born. Of the multiple revolutionary groups that emerged in Italy at the end of the 1960s, Lotta Continua is unique in having experienced both the broader clash with the system and electoral competition in its seven years of life, to finally implode on the occasion of its second, and last, national congress. The group found itself grappling with all of the issues that the militant intellectuals profiled so far had placed at the centre of their analyses: Landauer’s idea that socialism must be built here and now, and not only in the factory; Kollontai’s warning not to relegate women’s emancipation, and the larger moral and sexual revolution, to the position of a secondary effect of class struggle; Mattick’s certainty that nothing good can be expected of the official organizations representing the workers’ movement and that, on the contrary, class struggle must target such organizations as well; and finally, Panzieri’s celebration of the revolutionary autonomy of the proletariat. The strategic choices made by Lotta continua, along with its repeated course-changes, did not simply stem from the “provisional” character of its leading members’ working style or, conversely, opportunism on their part. Rather, these choices appear to be the result of a constant tension

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

109

between an often-fideistic investment in the thaumaturgical power of struggles (by workers but also other groups) and an awareness of the need for an organization that directs these struggles towards the goal of a more general clash with the bourgeoisie. Many movements faced this same dilemma, but in the case of Lotta Continua it was exacerbated by a particular conjunction of historical factors: namely, the fact that the group was poised on the ridge between the peak of social conflict and the beginning of the capitalist counter-offensive. The oscillation also derives from the fact that the group raised the bar in terms of both theoretical insight and political activity, so much so that it represents the most significant of the extra-parliamentary leftist groups that developed in the late 1960s for its ability to both mobilize and at the same time to analyse Italian and international capitalism of the time. Lotta Continua’s evolution set it on a path distinct from the classical schemes of Marxism but yet not univocal. It reflects the expansion of the category of revolutionary subject, an expansion that went hand in hand with the unceasing reformulation of the role of the avant-garde and the relationship between leading figures and the masses (in short, the question of organization). The outcomes of the anti-capitalist struggle— which in the whirlwind pace of those years’ events were tallied on a nearly daily basis—and the role Lotta continua ought to play in those struggles gave rise to positions on the relationship between the masses and avantgardes, on the one hand, and between the movement and institutions, on the other. These positions were destined in turn to change over time, often taking abrupt turns that confused many militants (in part because they were often handed down from above and not accompanied by a collective reflection on previous strategies). In contrast, the group’s thinking on the issue of force appears more stable. Nevertheless, in the wake of the state and neofascist violence characterizing that period, Lotta’s position shifted from supporting defensive violence to promoting avant-garde violence, and this shift gave rise to misunderstandings and lacerations. At the same time, it remained faithful to the principle that coercive actions against the enemies of the proletariat must maintain a grassroots character if they are to deserve the label of revolutionaries; hence the condemnation of the solipsism displayed by the Red Brigades.

110

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

The following sections are dedicated to these issues: the revolutionary subject, organization, relations with institutions, and violence. The Revolutionary Subject On 1 November 1969, the first issue of a newspaper was published in Milan. Taking the title of the joint worker-student leaflets that had been distributed for months in front of Mirafiori, it heralded the consolidation of a national organization: The idea of this newspaper is to identify the links connecting workers’ struggles with those of students, technicians, and proletarians in general, in a revolutionary perspective. By now there is a widespread need felt among the masses for an instrument through which to intervene more generally in the class struggle, one which represents an element of continuity and overall political maturity in the alternating phases of struggle. (Editorial Board 1969, 3) 1

The group that was forming brought together multiple different currents: that of the student movement (from Turin, but also from Trento, Pavia and the Catholic University of Milan) and the Pisan group “Potere Operaio” (Workers Power, established between 1966 and 1967 and, like Lotta Continua, out of the encounter between university students and factory workers), from which Lotta continua drew analyses of Turin-based workerism. Adriano Sofri, one of the founders of LC, nurtured not only intellectual admiration for Panzieri but also personal empathy for his morality and sobriety. When encountering factory-floor struggles, the specifically studentlinked issues were shortly relegated to the background, even to the point of being stigmatized as “studentism”; however, the claims-making platform which prevailed in this case was not that of the traditional workers’ movement but rather the disruptive subjectivity of mass workers, young and often immigrants from the South. Relegated to performing repetitive tasks in the factory and abandoned to urban blight in the dormitories where they slept, they felt totally detached from the mediating logic of the trade unions and reformist parties, and not at all represented by them. In this regard, it is quite understandable how Lotta Continua ended up representing an unprecedented breeding ground for the politicization of 1 For the first few years of publication, the articles were not signed by specific authors.

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

111

subjects who up to that point had been effectively excluded from public space: these new workers and then, beginning at the end of 1970, a varied sub-proletariat as well. The group decided to act within this mixed population under the slogan “Prendiamoci la città” (Let’s take over the city) in an effort to unite the proletarian struggles in the North with the uprisings in the South. Although the workers’ struggles did not die out after Italy’s Hot Autumn, they did begin to be reabsorbed by the unions. Lotta Continua thus continued to raise the ante, pointing to the explosion of social struggles as the decisive factor in that historical phase. Taking over the city, the newspaper explained, means fighting not only against capitalist production but also for “the collective right to a communist social life, free from need, healthy and capable of happiness” (Editorial Board 1970, 3). Workerism—not empty verbiage but a term consecrated by the real supremacy assigned to workers in all initiatives—therefore gave way to an updating of the class composition as it expanded to encompass the organized unemployed labourers of Naples as well as conscripts and prisoners. This shift represented an overturning of priorities for action and as such had its share of tensions between traditional revolutionary subjects and these heterogeneous, unpoliticized social groups. Moreover, it was accompanied by a rather cursory treatment of the middle classes on the theory that they were destined for proletarianization and, therefore, would either be incorporated into the ranks of revolutionary subjects or neutralized if they opposed this process. Of the multiple spheres in which LC intervened (including the army and prisons, transport, school, prices and the role of women), the movement to occupy houses had particular social impact. These occupations, accompanied by setting up collective services such as canteens and kindergartens, reached their peak in Milan, Rome and Turin. While it is true that the group based its project of “taking over the city” on the most advanced struggles without considering how generalizable these might really be, it is worth recalling that this line of action provided more backward contexts (starting from Southern Italy and Naples in particular) with the opportunity to embark on a trajectory of politicization not constrained by the straitjacket of Turinese and Milanese examples. The “Let’s take over the city” agenda was dismissed by Sofri—albeit without either assessment or self-reflection—as gradual and naive, and in 1972, the group turned instead to an all-out struggle. This shift was rendered inevitable, as argued by the group leadership, by the reactionary

112

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

turn characterizing the country’s political framework and the fascistization of the state. With this new focus, the workers’ insubordination once again took centre stage. The novelty, compared to previous conceptualizations of the centrality of the working class, was that in this strategy the working class was no longer identified with the relations of production strictly speaking and took up a position within the broader category of proletariat; at the same time, however, from the workerism of the past it retained “a sort of a priori (and mandatory) optimism” (Bobbio 1988, 123). It was distinguished from the spontaneity of 1969 by the acknowledgement that the working class did not begin and end with these new blue collars, however; indeed, the group realized that it would have to come to terms with the history of the workers’ movement—and its organizations. Having acknowledged that this all-out struggle had not erupted as hoped, the group underwent an organizational and institutional shift between the autumn of 1972 and 1974. This development continued to draw inspiration from a workerist conceptual framework, which made it difficult to strike up dialogue with emerging subjectivities: young people (with LC paying the price for having relegated student-specific issues to the back shelf) and, above all, women. Up to that point, the steering committees had only paid attention to female comrades as workers or militants; critiques of the patriarchal system permeating all areas of life, both public and private, had been glaringly absent. With a large number of women becoming politicized through engagement with the revolutionary left, such issues could no longer be circumvented. In the early 1970s, however, the feminists of LC (and other revolutionary groups) were given the same treatment Alexandra Kollontai had suffered under more than half a century earlier: their demands for full participation in the life of the organization were ridiculed or met with accusations that they were undermining the cohesion of the working class and distracting from the centrality of the capital-labour contradiction. This incomprehension was exemplified by a physical clash that took place on 6 December 1975 in Rome. Several feminist groups had organized a women’s-only demonstration in favour of abortion rights and the women comprising the security forces (group members charged with providing popular selfdefence) ended up fighting with their counterparts from Lotta Continua when the group tried to insist on participating in the protest as a mixed organization, both men and women. That same evening, many female militants attended the hastily-convened meeting of the group’s national

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

113

committee to assert their agenda. Although Sofri applauded his female comrades’ barging into the meeting (and into LC’s political platform more generally) as an assertion of the primacy of the social, this breach between the feminists and the other two main group components (the workerist and “military” ones) was never mended. Organization This continuous reshaping of the contours of the revolutionary subject went hand in hand with a constant but often fruitless debate as to the organizational form best suited to pursuing whatever strategic approach prevailed at the time. Moreover, these shifts and turns were consistent with the thesis the steering committee had formulated as early as autumn of 1969 according to which organization constitutes a process rather than a datum to be established once and for all. At the same time, however, behind this fluidity there was a consistent premise which Sofri had held to since the time he worked as a militant for Potere Operaio. Although the Leninist formula had become untenable in the light of the osmosis between economic and political struggles and the proletarization of intellectuals, Sofri pushed for the avant-garde that had been formed by multiple occasions of social opposition to unite. It was the student movement that provided him a model for the paradigm of inner vanguard, that is, not institutionalized and therefore not detached from the masses. What Sofri salvaged from Leninism was precisely an awareness of the need for political direction, that is, the realization that relinquishing struggles to self-organization for its own sake amounts to a form of contempt for the masses, not respect. This theoretical approach ended up providing the guiding line for the group’s pursuit of a new organizational form. Given this point, historical accounts that seek to periodize the group’s evolution into “spontaneist” versus party-centric phases, with the second presented as a “degeneration” of the first, are misguided: in reality, the so-called movementist phase was already characterized by a clear—even acute—search for political direction, while the institutional turn continued to hold firm to the assumption of indomitable social conflict. Of course, this element of continuity did not spare Lotta Continua from ambiguity and disorientation in the transition from one phase to the next. While the first months of LC activity revolved around assemblies (with the right to take the podium reserved almost exclusively for workers), it became clear at the first national conference (Turin, 25–26 July 1970)

114

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

that the group needed an adequate organizational structure lest its struggles end up disbanding and dissolving. The debate focused on the “party vs. movement” dilemma and eventually generated an organizational framework based on three levels of coordination: at local headquarters, at the regional level and at the central office with a national executive committee at the top. The principle of delegation had been introduced previously and was reiterated and agreed on at the conference, on the condition that it be revocable and temporary. Participants did not feel the need for mechanisms to protect internal democracy (after all, there was no significant dissent among the ranks of LC at the time). The second national conference (Bologna, 24–25 July 1971) unfolded along a more structured pathway, preceded as it was by a pre-conference reserved for only delegates. This choice also reflects an effort at consolidation among LC members. The organizational outcome that emerged from the conference involved a more settled structure in the North (the national headquarters were in Milan) and a more unstable one in the South, although LC was extremely active there as well alongside the underprivileged. The following year, a “discussion on Lotta Continua” developed that invited participants—as it was pompously phrased—to come to terms with Marxism-Leninism, or in other words to reflect on the group’s organizational form. However, assessments of its strengths and weaknesses were quite divergent: for some the problem lay in the steering committee’s excess of schematism and centralism while others bemoaned the lack of coherence in building a party. It was this latter criticism to prevail, based on an evaluation of the phase LC was experiencing at the time: although the group did not give up its belief in the continuation of social conflict, it resigned itself to a long-term perspective involving engagement with power relations in society as a whole, but also within the workers’ movement. It was this resignation that led the group to return to the Leninist idea of a vanguard struggling to achieve hegemony. That is, Lotta continua recognized that the leading front of workers’ autonomy must compete with other avant-gardes (from the trade unions and the Communist Party, PCI) and that these others could not be dismissed offhand as the tools of the ruling class. The LC leadership’s harsh self-criticism, deploring an organizational model entrusted largely to improvisation, voluntarism and charismatic power, was a prelude to its rediscovery of a party inspired by the Third International tradition, while

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

115

also encompassing democratic centralism and a national secretary (Sofri).2 The organization formed an apparatus that was liberated from the dogma of workers-only leadership but yet constrained by the irremovability and indisputability of the steering committee. Although on paper dissent was welcomed, in practice it was neutralized by the kind of “party patriotism” Sofri in particular was skilled at kindling. Of the many “lessons” subsequent anti-capitalist movements can draw from the case of LC, the need to radically rethink the relationship between leaders and rank-andfile activists is certainly an important one. As Sofri himself admitted in 1975 after the feminist irruption at the national committee meeting, the fact that this dissenting current has gone so far as to “distort” an orderly session of the group’s highest political leadership structure shows that such leadership has become, to some extent, an “institution”, that this very leadership holds the possibility of a resistance to the new things taking form in the movement. (Sofri 1975, 6)

After 6 December 1975, the party that had been built so laboriously and non-linearly found itself pulled in multiple different directions (workers, women, security forces and young people). At the last conference (Rimini 1976), in fact, the steering committee did not even attempt to weave it back together, refusing to make the organization into a federation of components without also proposing an agenda on which members could find common ground. On the contrary, Sofri did not hesitate to explicitly note how the roles had been reversed: the target of contestation in this case was the same historical LC leaders who had themselves attacked the “revisionists” of the PCI a few years earlier.3 Relations with Institutions There is no doubt that the group “institutionalization”—in the twofold sense of “bureaucratization” and striking up a relationship with the world of politics—entailed not only the unresolved question of revolutionary subjectivity but also elements which were potentially disruptive for the organization’s stability. LC leaders were aware of this risk from the 2 Luigi Bobbio’s assessment (it was “an obligatory choice”; Bobbio 1988, 130) can be compared and contrasted with those of Nicos Poulantzas and Alain Bihr on the new movements outlined later in this volume. 3 This resembles a declaration of the iron law of the oligarchy; to lighten its impact, it must be remembered that Sofri had fallen out of love with the group (LC) long ago.

116

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

beginning but decided nonetheless to proceed, in the conviction that worker and proletarian autonomy required a critical leap forward. Up to 1971, elections were regarded as useless and even harmful: LC participants saw struggle, not the vote, as the decisive force. The following year, even while reiterating that elections are a fraud, LC decided to “accept this battleground” (Editorial Board 1972, 5) (the campaign for early political elections) as well. The intention was not to run for election, or even encourage abstention, however, as this latter was still seen as an endorsement of the electoral game. The group instead sought to promote a general platform of struggle beginning with the demand for a guaranteed universal income. The mistaken assumption behind the group’s unprecedented interest in electoral politics was that the PCI was out of the game because the bourgeoisie no longer needed its complicity to maintain order, preferring to rely on the violence perpetrated by neofascist squads. In a striking reversal, in the first months of 1973 LC gave up hopes of an all-out struggle to acknowledge that “revisionism” had effective social roots among workers and begin to work for a PCI electoral win, a position reinforced by the coup d’état in Chile: a left-wing government (tactics) appeared to be the most favourable terrain for fostering workers’ autonomy (strategy). The “protracted crisis of imperialism” required the group to adapt its tactics to an inevitably lengthy process. Albeit its intense schematism, the LC’s new line of action appears to have been the most complex attempt made by the “1968 generation” to insert the problem of revolutionary rupture into the specific Italian context without falling into either extremist and unrealistic declaration of principle or the rehashing of old models. (Bobbio 1988, 146)

The first test of this new institutional line came with the campaign for the referendum on divorce (1974). The LC politicized the question by framing it as a referendum against the Christian Democrats (DC) who had held power since 1948. From the result—the pro-divorce forces enjoyed an overwhelming victory—the group once again drew overly confident conclusions regarding the imminent collapse of the DC party and (as argued in particular by Guido Viale) Italian capitalism. In the national conference of January 1975 that formalized the “PCI in power” agenda, LC was also excessively optimistic about the workers’ struggle (which in reality was waning) and their ability to use the PCI for their revolutionary purposes, when in fact this party played a crucial role in the judicial repression of mass movements. Paradoxically, what led the group to change

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

117

course once again was the electoral success of the Communists in the local elections of 1975 (33.5%). Since a left-wing government—the goal driving LC to support the PCI in the elections—was perceived as fastapproaching (indeed, already under construction at the local level), it was then a matter of preparing a pre-emptive opposition to it. The outcome was that, while worker mobilization was on the defensive, struggling with productive restructuring and an economic policy that foisted the cost of the crisis onto the working class, Lotta Continua threw itself headlong into the task of constructing a revolutionary opposition. This work materialized in the presentation of a joint electoral roll (Democrazia proletaria, Proletarian Democracy) together with the group the Manifesto (born out of a split in the PCI) and the Pdup (Partito di unità proletaria, Proletarian Unity Party). The 1976 results were catastrophic, however, not only in terms of the roll’s negligible electoral success (about half a million votes) but also and above all because the development Lotta Continua was really focused on, the fall of the DC, did not come about. On the one hand, this shift from the primacy of the social to the primacy of the political reflected a non-pre-constituted analysis of the relationship between tactics and strategy. On the other hand, however, it subjected the organization to internal and external pressures that it was no longer able to govern because it was no longer supported by workers’ struggles. What is more, the institutions which LC accepted to face up to were the same (at least some of them) that were working against popular movements by covering for or even instigating right-wing terrorist attacks and neofascist violence. Although the organization was well aware of this phenomenon (and conducted important counter-inquiries into it), it was not adequately addressed in the analyses underpinning the group’s parliamentary turn. State and Revolutionary Violence For many activists, the massacre in Piazza Fontana (12 December 1969) marked a loss of innocence: the experience was transformed from joyfilled militancy to a political commitment shadowed by the awareness that someone was willing to massacre helpless people just to stop the protests.

118

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

A few years later, the coup d’état in Chile (11 September 1973) fuelled fears that Italy might come to a similar end. 4 Lotta continua’s stance on the Allende government was ambivalent. On the one hand, it included the three years of Unidad Popular (the Chilean centre-left coalition) in its genealogy of revolutionaries (together with the Commune and revolutionary-phase Soviets, not those fossilized by the regime). On the other hand, it accused Allende of a series of errors, the most serious that of underestimating the problem of force. This was an issue LC had been obliged to grapple with from the beginning, not only because it witnessed the strategy of tension but also because it was repeatedly targeted with incriminations, arrests, trials, searches, assaults and executions. Indeed, the writer Erri De Luca who was among the LC leadership compared the movements of those years to Orpheus descending into Hades in an attempt to bring his beloved, Eurydice (a name evocative of justice), back among the living. According to De Luca, his generation was the most heavily persecuted for political reasons in the history of Italy, even more so than the generation of anti-fascists. In LC alone, these victims included Mario Lupo (Parma, 1972, stabbed to death by fascists), Tonino Micciché (Turin, 1975, murdered by a security guard), Piero Bruno (Rome, 1975, killed by the Carabinieri), not to mention militants assassinated after the organization had formally dissolved but its offices and newspapers remained operational (Pier Francesco Lorusso, killed by the Carabinieri in Bologna, March 1977; and Walter Rossi, killed by fascists in Rome, September 1977). Lotta continua was well aware that rising to meet provocations can lead to isolation and lend legitimacy to the bourgeois logic of dichotomous extremisms. The group responded to both institutional and neofascist attacks with a theorization, and practice, of violence that was initially conceptualized as defensive but subsequently, in the face of the mounting of police repression and fascists taking to the streets from 1972 onward, began to also consider pre-emptive, avant-garde violence. Inevitably entrusted to restricted groups of militants (the security force),

4 On 27 October 1973, Dario Fo staged his play People’s War in Chile in Turin. Some

actors in the company and militants of LC security force acted out what could have been the launching of a coup d’état, complete with fake policemen bursting into the theatre. The scene was highly believable and audience members reacted with intense apprehension but also great steadfastness in asserting their sense of political belonging. Cazzullo (2006, 162).

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

119

this approach was never confused with the subjectivism of the Red Brigades and other armed groups. LC defined terrorism in contemptuous terms, even though some individual episodes did provoke an ambivalent reaction stemming from the group’s concern that its condemnation of armed action not overshadow the need for violence (and some sort of “proletarian justice”) as part of a revolutionary strategy. Although individual manifestations of violence did cause disagreement, it was not such individual cases but rather the move to transform the security force into a separate body of the organization that proved divisive in the long run. This move was driven by a self-referential logic that ended up twisting the understandable need for defence (including preventive) into the pursuit of head-to-head clashes as an end in themselves (exactly what the role of the security force was supposed to curb). In this case as well, it was especially women who spoke out about the problems of internal democracy involved in such a process, critiquing the shift as a slide into military and macho mentalities. The last LC congress was the scene of an actual physical rift between the various components of the revolutionary group-turnedparty: workers, feminists, young people and security forces met independently and even went to sit separately in different parts of the auditorium. It was a scale model of the crisis erupting from the effort to rethink the revolutionary subject and its relationship with politics—and force—in the context of Western capitalism, the same issues subsequent anti-capitalist movements found themselves grappling with as well.

References Bambery, Chris. 2019. The ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969: When Italy Erupted. Socialist Worker. https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/18837/The+Hot+Aut umn+of+1969%3A+when+Italy+erupted. Accessed 25 May 2020. Barilli, Francesco, and Sinigaglia Sergio (ed.). 2008. La piuma e la montagna. Storie degli anni’70. Rome: Manifestolibri. Bobbio, Luigi. 1988 [1979]. Storia di Lotta continua. Milan: Feltrinelli. Cazzullo, Aldo. 2006. I ragazzi che volevano fare la rivoluzione. Milan: Sperling & Kupfer. “Cultural revolution - Lotta Continua”. https://libcom.org/history/cultural-rev olution-lotta-continua. Accessed 25 May 2020. De Luca, Erri. 2013. Notizie su Euridice. https://www.deriveapprodi.com/ 2013/11/notizie-su-euridice/. Accessed 22 May 2020.

120

INTERLUDE 2: LOTTA CONTINUA: THE DILEMMAS …

Dowson, Ernest (ed.). Take over the City: Community Struggle in Italy Lotta Continua. https://libcom.org/library/take-over-city-italy-1972-lottacontinua. Accessed 23 December 2019. Editorial Board. 1969. Questo numero del giornale. Lotta continua, 7 November. Editorial Board. 1970. Prendiamoci la città. Lotta continua, 12 November. Editorial Board. 1972. Ciò che ci riguarda è il programma generale di lotta. Lotta continua, 17 February. “Fighting For Feminism: The Women’s Question in an Italian Revolutionary Group”. https://libcom.org/library/fighting-feminism-womens-question-ita lian-revolutionary-group-0. Accessed 23 May 2020. Foot, John. 2003. Modern Italy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ginsborg, Paul. 2003. A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943– 1988. London: Palgrave Macmillan. “Interview with Guido Viale”. https://libcom.org/library/interview-guidoviale. Accessed 23 May 2020. Keach, William. 2009. “What Do We Want? Everything!”. 1969: Italy’s “Hot Autumn”. International Socialist Review. https://isreview.org/issue/67/ what-do-we-want-everything. Accessed 25 May 2020. Lenzi, Antonio. 2016. Gli opposti estremismi. Organizzazione e linea politica in Lotta continua e ne il Manifesto-Pdup (1969–1976). Reggio Calabria: Città del Sole. Lumley, Robert. 1990. States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978. London: Verso. Many issues of “Lotta continua” are available on the “Erri De Luca Foundation” site: http://fondazionerrideluca.com/web/archivio-lotta-continua/. Sofri, Adriano. 1975. Le cose buone, le cose cattive, e il modo di affrontarle. Lotta continua, 12 December. Tarrow, Sidney. 1989. Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy 1965– 1975. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Voli, Stefania. 2015. Soggettività dissonanti. Di rivoluzione, femminismi e violenza politica nella memoria di un gruppo di ex militanti di Lotta continua. Florence University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Revolutionary Reformism: Rudolf Meidner (1914–2015)

1

Life and Works

One of the best-known economists in Sweden, Rudolf Meidner is remembered even among the general public for two theoretical works both located at the border between economics and politics: the 1951 model named after him and his colleague Gösta Rehn, and his 1975 proposal to establish wage earner funds. Meidner’s life can be read as a compendium of the twentieth century, the period Hobsbawm defined as the “age of extremes”, fuelled by high hopes as well as immense catastrophes. Meidner was not merely a spectator of these events; indeed, he spent his entire life endeavouring to pinpoint the foundations of a democratic—and socialist—society. Meidner was born to a Jewish family in Wroclaw, the capital of Silesia, which was part of the German Empire at the time (later transferred to Poland in 1945). His youth was touched by the political and economic crises of the initial post-war period. As a teenager, he was drawn to the international solidarity movement supporting Sacco and Vanzetti (1927) and this marked the beginning of his political radicalization. Two years later, a tragedy in Berlin left him deeply scarred: police chief and social democrat Karl Zörgiebel had prohibited May 1st festivities and, when communist workers gathered to celebrate despite the ban, he ordered his men to open fire on them. The resulting thirty victims drove Meidner to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_6

121

122

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

reject the SPD, its willingness to settle with the right and the army and tendency to always identify the left as the enemy. He began to study law, first in his hometown and then in Berlin. In the city, he attended the 30 January 1933 festivities for Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and, shortly after, witnessed the fire in the German parliament building. The political situation pushed him to leave Germany. He was deeply disappointed by the German workers’ movement, incapable of defending democracy and organizing an effective opposition to Nazism. At the same time, he acknowledged that the triumphal march of the brown shirts was due in part to soaring unemployment rates. His biographical experience translated into a theoretical-political insight: an economic crisis fuelling unemployment can easily turn into a political crisis that jeopardizes democracy itself; hence, full employment gained a privileged position in his theories. Although Meidner had originally wanted to cultivate a small plot of land in Canada, he eventually chose Sweden as his second homeland. He arrived in Stockholm on 2 April 1933 and enrolled in the faculty of economics there; his teachers included Gunnar Myrdal, one of the key figures, in the academic milieu, of the “pre-Keynes Keynesianism” that Minister of Finance and Social Democrat ideologue Ernst Wigforss was introducing as a cornerstone of the anti-crisis policy adopted by the social-democratic government that took office in 1932. After graduating in 1938, Meidner struggled to obtain a residence permit for employment reasons, which made it difficult to support himself and his family. Although tormented by news that his relatives and friends were facing Nazi persecution in Germany, he nevertheless managed to bring his mother and sister to Sweden. In 1943, he finally obtained Swedish citizenship and two years later was tasked with overseeing the research section of the Trade Union Confederation, the LO (LandsOrganisationen), that Myrdal had recently established. Despite receiving many job offers from outside, he remained with the union until his retirement in 1979, with the exception of an interval at the end of the 1960s when he went to head the new department of labour market policies at the University of Stockholm. On returning to LO, he declared that he felt at home again. As a trade union economist, he took part in the debate on the course of post-war societal development. He spoke in favour of democratic planning, seeing it as an instrument through which politics affects the economy and workers influence their companies. He was opposed to any move to return to the previous status quo, that is, the laissez-faire of the

6

REVOLUTIONARY REFORMISM: RUDOLF MEIDNER (1914–2015)

123

early inter-war period that had ushered in the crisis. In the light of this stance, in the second half of the 1940s he had a very critical view of the social-democratic government’s liberal turn, yielding to entrepreneurial pressure to welcome higher unemployment rates as a way of curbing inflation. In response to this shift in the workers party, he began to meet with his former fellow student Gösta Rehn, at the time co-director of the research section of the LO, to reflect on alternative economic policy instruments. Their joint theoretical effort resulted in their presenting the report The trade union movement and full employment to the 1951 LO congress. Their analysis focuses on a restrictive monetary and fiscal policy, an active labour market policy (in particular, incentives to foster mobility between sectors and areas) and a solidaristic wage policy. While not directly challenging the market economy, the objectives were ambitious: full employment, economic growth, equality and low inflation. While the last point represented a break with Keynesianism, the emphasis on full employment and, therefore, state intervention distinguished this model from a monetarist approach. Solidaristic wage policy, to be implemented through centralized bargaining, had two aims. On the economic level, Rehn and Meidner viewed it as a guarantee of price stability and economic growth. It is on the political level, however, that this policy deserves particular attention: by refusing to fix wages according to company competitiveness and instead setting them on the basis of the “equal pay for equal work” principle, solidaristic wage policy embodied a commitment to wage equalization across the board. In addition, Rehn and Meidner tried for an even more challenging achievement in the long run: redistributing national income in favour of wages. Although their views did not completely overlap (Rehn was more liberal, while Meidner reflected the most radical soul of Swedish social democracy), both mistrusted the market economy’s ability to deliver both socially and economically desirable results. Their proposal came to be known as the “Rehn-Meidner model” and, from the late 1950s onwards, many considered it to be the very foundation of the Swedish model or, in the wording of a hostile economist, its “bible”. Considering Meidner’s crucial contribution to formulating a thoroughly reformist economic policy such as the one implemented by the Swedish Social Democrats, it may at first glance seem surprising that he ended up being targeted by bourgeois propaganda in the fiery climate of the 1970s because of a project that would lead to subverting ownership relations by progressively shifting the majority of shares in medium and

124

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

large-sized companies from private capitalists to the community of wageearners. On closer examination, however, the two theoretical programmes share the same view of the relationship between private property and democracy, clearly having been influenced by Marxist theories.

2

Marxism and Democracy

Meidner approached Marxist and Marxian literature at the tender age of thirteen: first Kautsky and Bebel, then Marx himself. He struggled to read Capital but was intensely impressed by the Manifesto, later defining it as the starting and ending point for most of his political thinking. Together with some fellow students, he founded a circle dedicated to studying Marxism that naturally developed into the Socialist Student Union, founded in 1929. The Union challenged the official course of study, imbued with conservatism and nationalism, with a radical programme of discussion and mobilization. In the same year, 15-yearold Meidner wrote a draft constitution for a future socialist society in which he raised themes that went on to remain central throughout his work, not least the proposal to create wage earner funds. He clarified that socialism must not aim for equality understood as levelling down; rather, it should combat the concentration of wealth and power that always represents a threat to democracy. Furthermore, Meidner rejected parties as an effective way of representing citizens, instead suggesting in his draft that they be represented on a professional basis (from entrepreneurs to the unemployed). The 1929 text thus represents an initial attempt to imagine an alternative to capitalism—the foundation of which, private property, corrodes democracy—that does not take the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat; if anything, he sought way of enhancing social and economic democracy. Curiously, while drafting this “constitution” in which he dissociated himself from liberticidal, humiliating versions of socialism, the young Meidner (who was already inclined to leave Germany) applied for a visa at the Soviet embassy. He wanted to visit what at the time he thought constituted a fascinating theatre for the construction of a workers’ state. However, the undemocratic nature of the USSR (both internally and in its relations with foreign communist parties) drove him away from that model and the journey he had planned to take. In the early 1930s, therefore, he was driven to seek an alternative to both corrupt social democracy and military communism. This rejection of the Soviet regime did not,

6

REVOLUTIONARY REFORMISM: RUDOLF MEIDNER (1914–2015)

125

however, undermine his relationship with Marxism; on the contrary, Marxist thought provided him with the conceptual framework for a class-based interpretation of emerging Nazism (an alliance between high finance and the army against the proletariat that relied on the consensus of the middle class). Once Meidner arrived in Sweden, this interpretation consolidated his conviction that the main duty of a workers’ movement seeking to build democratic socialism was to combat the concentration of power and wealth, overcoming the private property/nationalization dichotomy. Meidner retained this approach in his adopted home, where he was able to join the debate going on in Swedish social democracy (and Ernst Wigforss’s contribution in particular) regarding the need to formulate ownership relationships that were neither privatistic nor centralizing. In 1975, he laid out the premises of his plan to set up wage earner funds using a markedly Marxist vocabulary: The history of industrialism is the history of the creation and succession of class struggles. During the early days of industrialism, a small social group obtained and later developed its own ownership rights over the means of production. The vast majority of the population was only able to earn a living by selling its labour force to those owning the means of production. In socialist countries, these class struggles were resolved by the state eliminating the owners of capital and gaining control over the apparatus of production. This solution was never achieved in ways that could guarantee a democratic system […]. (Meidner 1976, 26)1

Almost a quarter of a century later, the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto offered Meidner the opportunity to draw conclusions about his relationship with the Marxist legacy. In an article included in an anthology published in 1998, he observed that Marx’s text, although outdated in its most contingent parts—and unacceptable in its call for a violent revolution—continued to be just as significant in the neo-liberal age: it was not the Manifesto that needed updating, but the workers’ movement. The economic-social processes of the late twentieth century confirmed the three cornerstones of Marxian analysis (the relationship between structure and superstructure; history as a class struggle; the proletariat necessity to liberate the whole of society in order to liberate itself). He found 1 All quotations from this source have been translated from Italian.

126

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

that internationalization, an issue Marx had already identified as requiring analysis, has taken the form of the European Union and the domination of multinationals. It certainly has not, however, reduced the exploitation of the subordinate classes; rather, it has generated new segments of marginality. How can the classless society called for by the authors of the Manifesto be achieved in the age of triumphant neoliberalism? In answering this fundamental question, Meidner welded together elements from his entire theoretical and militant trajectory: capital, until then used by individuals for their own selfish interests, could be collectivized and used to meet citizens’ needs. This is not a matter of utopia; on the contrary, as Meidner wrote, the task appeared more feasible at the end of the twentieth century than in 1848. In fact, such a shift would require converting the gigantic pension funds already found in the main industrial countries to this purpose. In this brief, commemorative writing, Meidner did not go into detail on this proposal; by going back a few decades, it is possible to fully understand the meaning he attributed to collective wage earner funds, a topic that many countries discussed between the late 1960s and the following decade, and yet only in Sweden, thanks to Meidner, it assumed a disruptive power.

3

Beyond Private Property

At the beginning of the 1960s, Meidner had good reason to be satisfied with the impact his theories had enjoyed. The social-democratic governments that succeeded one another uninterruptedly from 1932 onwards acknowledged full employment as priority of their economic policy. Thanks to Sweden’s impressive economic growth, it was possible to build a universalistic welfare state and the trade unions consistently supported the solidaristic wage policy. Beginning in the mid-1960s, if the unions’ approach deviated from the Rehn-Meidner principle of “equal pay for equal work”, they did so to replace it with the even more radical principle of “equal pay for different jobs” in keeping with the need to reduce the pay gap among different productive sectors in favour of low-income workers. And yet, right at that moment in the midst of the radicalization wave sweeping over Swedish society, certain trends emerged that threatened to jeopardize the cornerstones of the Rehn-Meidner model: inflation, the

6

REVOLUTIONARY REFORMISM: RUDOLF MEIDNER (1914–2015)

127

first seeds of a structural crisis in capitalism that irreversibly undermined confidence in the unstoppable nature of growth, and an intolerance for wage equalization on the part of the middle classes. In addition to these factors, the 1971 LO congress developed an internal, critical self-reflection. Meidner himself acknowledged that solidaristic wage policy gave rise to some adverse effects: more competitive companies, not being required to pay wages proportionate to their high profits (to avoid fuelling inequalities among workers), had a surplus that was not redistributed in the form of wages. By remaining in the hands of entrepreneurs, this surplus widened the gap in wealth between capital and labour. On the same occasion, the Metalworkers’ Federation in particular openly raised the question of capital formation—a matter rendered more urgent by the economic crisis—and investment planning, on the condition, however, that power and wealth not end up more heavily concentrated in the hands of a minority. The secretariat of the Trade Union Confederation created a research group to look into the various types of funds, appointing Meidner as its director. In August 1975, he presented an initial report entitled Wage earner funds in which he proposed an employee-managed fund be established by transferring an annual share of the companies’ profits. While up to that point economic imperatives had prevailed in the discussion on funds, now the component of equality and democratization came to the fore. Such equality was to be achieved through workers’ control over the production system: Although […] this thinking developed historically as a complement to the solidaristic wage policy, the real weight of the motivation lays in the struggle of the workers’ movement to achieve greater justice and social democracy. Discarding the idea that society can commandeer the means of production - an unrealistic idea in contemporary Sweden - there are only two ways to counter the concentration of assets and, consequently, power: on the one hand, by using the tax system to control or confiscate wealth growth and, on the other hand, involving groups other than those who traditionally own capital in this growth. (Meidner 1976, 29)

The programmatic nature of this plan scared the middle class—and the Social Democratic Party as well. This was not the same kind of call for vague socialization that had appeared at other moments in the history of socialism. Rather, the trade union economist had a well-developed plan,

128

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

arranged in successive steps and with a very clear objective: moving away from the ideology that had begun to prevail in Swedish social democracy in the 1920s according to which the key factor was not ownership but rather public control over the economy, Meidner explicitly presented his plan as stemming from a Marxian legacy, recalling that bringing about social transformation inevitably involves challenging private property. Declaring his own theoretical vision was not enough for Meidner, however. Indeed, his ongoing concern was how to keep the long-term objectives and short-term programme together (or, to quote his phrasing, the ideology, the Weltanschauung and the plan for the next two years) and to assert a vision of the future as an antidote to bureaucratization and opportunism. Politics must be simultaneously reformist, that is to say, engaging with reality on a daily basis, and also utopian in the sense of driven by the desire to build a different future. This point helps us to understand Meidner’s highly detailed explanations of how the transition from private to collective capital would take place. He did not claim that his plan was definitive: on the contrary, the text was discussed for months by the labour movement and Meidner took the workers’ observations into account when drafting a new version of the proposal, presented at the LO congress in May 1976. The distinctly Marxist phrasing had been toned down, but the central ambition remained: to transform the property structure. Contrary to the first report, the intermediate steps had now been specified. He did speak about the content and use of the funds, the size and nature of the companies involved in the process, the timeframe for the change and the crucial issue of managing capital collectively. The funds were to be established by annually transferring a portion of the company’s share capital rather than its liquidity, to avoid interfering with its self-financing, prevent inflation risk and favour new investment. These requirements led Meidner to identify individual companies as the source of the funds themselves. Keeping these precautions in mind, the expected result was to redefine ownership structures (the progressive increase in the company’s profits was to go hand in hand with an increase in the stocks held by its workers). The funds were to be coordinated first by sector, then regionally and finally centrally; the latter measure was intended as a fund serving to equalize the various subordinated funds. In fact, Meidner was concerned with not only levelling asset disparities between capitalists and employees, but also balancing them among wage earners. He also envisaged a central

6

REVOLUTIONARY REFORMISM: RUDOLF MEIDNER (1914–2015)

129

fund to prevent sectors and regions with lower profits from being penalized by the new system. For the same reason, all the activities to be financed through fund yields (Meidner referred to short-term activities, mainly research and training on the economy and working conditions) were aimed at all workers, not only the employees of the companies included in the system. Once again, his concern for equality led him to reject the system of individual profit-sharing, an arrangement that would have increased inequalities. This was the reason he rejected the German model: it aimed not at fairness but at transforming employees into small-scale capitalists, to oppose communism. As far as the scope of application of the funds was concerned, Meidner proposed to exclude the public sector because it does not drivel the concentration of assets in private hand. Instead, he included all private companies with more than 50 or 100 employees. The question of the minimum threshold was left open, but Meidner clarified that, in the first case, the system would involve 2% of companies and two-thirds of their employees; in the second case, it would be 1%, with 60% of total employees. In both cases, the numbers would be sufficient to break up the concentration of (private) capital, 80% of which was clustered in companies with over 100 employees. The funds were to be administered by workers’ representatives. In this plan, however, Kollontai’s “utopia” was formulated with an eye to not only equity but also economic expertise. Far from representing a natural outgrowth of familiarity with the production process as the Russian revolutionary had supposed, Meidner thought such competence had to be developed through a vast educational endeavour designed to close the administrative skill gap between wage workers and private shareholders. The Swedish bourgeoisie was primarily alarmed by Meidner’s estimate of the time needed to implement the plan; although the timeframe was quite lengthy, the mere fact that such timing could be calculated rendered the proposal itself dangerously “tangible”. Meidner and his collaborators outlined different scenarios depending on the profit rate of each company (varying from 5 to 20%) and the number of shares allocated to the fund (from 10 to 20%). Assuming a profit of 10% and a transfer of 20% to the fund, it would take approximately thirty-five years for the fund to acquire the majority of the share capital or, in other words, for wage earners to gain control over the company. However, as Meidner noted, the fund would have acquired increasing influence long before holding the share majority. Conjecturing about the long-term activities of these funds, the

130

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

two options that received the greatest support in the inquiry among trade union members were purchasing shares and providing financial support to companies in crisis; both revealed that workers were interested in using the fund yields for industrial policy measures. Consequently, Meidner believed that wage earners would most likely not want to give up its say regarding issues that go beyond the sphere of the company to more rightly fall under the purview of economic policy (i.e. the responsibility of government).

4

The Debate Over the Wage Earner Funds and Their Neutralization

In the final part of his report, Meidner anticipated three types of attacks that his work would receive: the entrepreneurial front would denounce his report as threatening the foundations of the (capitalist) economy; the left would object that this was a reformist illusion; and the trade union movement would assert that work, not property, was the basis of wage earners’ power. All the objections Meidner envisaged were in fact raised. In the over forty years since it was first published, the Meidner plan has been accused: of seeking to Sovietize Sweden (even more recently, polemical analysis have asserted that its application would have been disastrous for Swedish freedom—and competitiveness); in contrast, of failing to call capitalism into question; and of seeking to replace the Soviet-type single party with an all-powerful union according to a corporative scheme that penalizes any citizens who do not belong to the wage earners collective. It was the reaction of the Swedish bourgeoisie that caused the Meidner plan to collapse; however, the Social Democratic Party (SAP, Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti), the historic partner of that same union on behalf of which Meidner had proposed transferring ownership from capitalists to wage earners, also played a decisive role. Beginning with the publication of the first report, the bourgeois press in raised the spectre of revolution, insinuating that Meidner was “the most dangerous man” in the country. Swedish entrepreneurs were alarmed that the two branches of the labour movement, the (social-democratic) party and the trade union, were closing ranks on them. With the first Palme government (1969–1976), the SAP launched an ambitious programme to reform labour law (including the law on codetermination), and the union unexpectedly relaunched socialization just before the 1976 elections, all

6

REVOLUTIONARY REFORMISM: RUDOLF MEIDNER (1914–2015)

131

uphill for the party. The leaders of both organizations were divided as to the feasibility of the plan and, in part, its desirability. One obstacle was the awareness that, if implemented, the plan would significantly shift decision-making power over the economy from the party to the union. Moreover, the discussion about property lay outside the reformist tradition of Swedish social democracy that Palme had committed to adapting to the spirit of the 1970s and which, in his view, was best represented by the law on codetermination. From the beginning of 1976, the social-democratic leadership developed a precise strategy to neutralize the Meidner plan that consisted in shifting the focus from ownership to capital formation, thus reassuring companies. After its electoral defeat (which Palme framed as not primarily a result of the debate on socialization), the SAP strategy was twofold: it formally recognized that the project was important and, at the same time, argued that it needed to be directed towards goals compatible with the demands of an economy in crisis. Joint commissions representing the party and union (with members of the party predominating in both cases) presented reports in 1978 and 1981 that were consistent with this approach. At the end of the three-year period, Palme advocated that the board administrating the funds represents all citizens rather than only workers, thus definitively curbing the ambitions of the union. It is worth recalling that Meidner did not avoid the issue of representation; indeed, he wrote: We criticise the concentration of economic power not because those holding such power are incompetent, irresponsible or possessed of bad will. Our criticism is grounded in the fact that the concentration of power is undemocratic and deprives citizens of their right, duty and joy to have a decisive influence over their own and their group’s situation. Hence the need to grant real democratic content to the power of the collectivity of workers and to create a control apparatus that prevents decisions from being made over the heads of the masses. Workers must view the establishment of their funds as an essential moment in the process of democratizing society. (Meidner 1976, 36)

Although the solutions Meidner proposed to solve the problem of representation or the internationalization of the economy (the funds were also presented as an antidote to the overwhelming power of multinationals) may appear inadequate or at times naive, he cannot be accused of having ignored these problems. Nonetheless, the Social Democratic Party did

132

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

not split hairs when deciding to dismiss his proposal definitively on the grounds that it was incompatible with the new economic policy guidelines adopted at the end of the 1970s: to promote competitiveness by sacrificing the public sector and wages. After all, as early as 1978 in a long interview with Mondoperaio (the theoretical magazine of the Italian Socialist Party), Meidner had critiqued SAP for the way it changed his plan. As he reminded readers, however complex his project might have been, it did have a precise aim: to subtract 10–20% of profits from companies per year and transfer it to workers in the form of shares. The aim of the 1978 revised and corrected version was much harder to grasp, Meidner stated. The second Palme government definitively demolished the ownership reform plan, presenting a proposal in 1983, the Edin plan, that was no longer based on the results of a joint commission union-party, but of groups of experts (in keeping with the technocratic turn in the Social Democratic Party): the funds were linked to the already-existing pension system (so as to eliminate their explosive charge) and modified to limit their impact. Social equalization was completely removed from the debate. The history of the Meidner plan suggests two general considerations about the limits of reformism. The progressive but implacable weakening of the wage earners’ funds that occurred without openly rejecting their underlying principles represents a masterpiece of “subsuming” subversive demands within the capitalist logic. The centre-right would never have carried out such an operation so successfully; indeed, only a social-democratic party could have accomplished it with such mastery. This was not enough for the bourgeoisie, however, and it is here that the second consideration arises. The entrepreneurs’ desire for revenge did not diminish in either 1978 or 1983; rather, the (powerful) Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (then named SAF, Svenska Arbetsgivareföreningen) launched an extremely harsh ideological and organizational counteroffensive against the wage earners’ funds. Palme’s murder (28 February 1986), still unclear today, was the result of a hatred campaign against him fuelled by all the actors of the business world (starting with SAF) who had accused him of aiming to transform Sweden into a satellite of the USSR and framing him as politically if not directly responsible for the funds project. This was a paradoxical fate for a reformist such as Palme, who was actually hostile to the Meidner plan from the beginning.

6

REVOLUTIONARY REFORMISM: RUDOLF MEIDNER (1914–2015)

133

Perhaps more than a paradox, however, it can be seen as a litmus test of just how (im)permeable to change a capitalist economy can be. Marxist-inspired Swedish historiography has shown that the Meidner plan was the peak of the workers’ movement’s hegemony over Swedish society and that it triggered relentless reactions on the part of the bourgeoisie which paved the way for the triumph of neoliberalism. The Swedish trade union endeavoured to carry out an experiment that, in terms of radicality, not even the most confrontational workers’ movements (in Italy and France) dared; it is debatable whether it represented the peak of reformism (the most advanced in the world, in Sweden in that period) or an (attempted) revolutionary break. Respecting the low profile that Meidner maintained throughout his life, the most appropriate definition seems to be the following: it was a project that, through a gradual approach, aimed to revolutionize ownership relations in order to ensure workers’ self-government.

References Åsard, Erik. 1985. Kampen om löntagarfonderna. Fondutredningen från samtal till sammanbrott. Stockholm: Norstedts. Ekdahl, L. 2001 and 2005. Mot en tredje väg. En biografi över Rudolf Meidner, vol. 1; Tysk flykting och svensk modell, vol. 2, Facklig Expert och demokratisk socialist. Lund: Arkiv. Erixon, Lennart. 2018. Progressive Supply-Side Economics: An Explanation and Update of the Rehn-Meidner Model. Cambridge Journal of Economics 42: 653–697. Gumbrell-McCormick, Rebecca, and Richard Hyman. 2019. Democracy in Trade Unions, Democracy Through Trade Unions? Economic and Industrial Democracy 40: 91–110. Meidner, Rudolf (with the assistance of A. Hedborg, and G. Fond). 1976 [1975]. Il prezzo dell’uguaglianza. Piano di riforma della proprietà industriale in Svezia. Cosenza: Lerici. Meidner, Rudolf. 1980 [1976]. Capitale senza padrone: Il progetto svedese per la formazione collettiva del capitale. Rome: Edizioni Lavoro. Meidner, Rudolf. 1998. Vad är det för fel med det kommunistiska manifestet? In Manifestet 1848–1998. Kommunistiska Manifestet med kommentarer och analyser av 14 forskare och samhällsdebattörer, 217–231. Stockholm: Atlas. Meidner, Rudolf (with the assistance of Anna Hedborg and Gunnar Fond). 1978 [1975]. Employee Investment Funds: An Approach to Collective Capital Formation, ed. prep. by T.L. Johnston. London: Allen & Unwin.

134

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Östberg, Kjell. 2009. När vinden vände. Olof Palme 1969–1986. Stockholm: Leopard. Pontusson, Jonas. 1992. The Limits of Social Democracy: Investment Politics in Sweden. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Pontusson, Jonas, and Sarosh Kuruvilla. 1992. Swedish Wage-Earner Funds: An Experiment in Economic Democracy. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 45: 779–791. Quirico, Monica. 2009. Introduzione. Olof Palme, un politico per vocazione. In Tra utopia e realtà. Olof Palme e il socialismo democratico. Antologia di scritti e discorsi, ed. and trans. by Monica Quirico, 9–46. Rome: Editori Riuniti University Press. Quirico, Monica. 2012. Model or Utopia? The Meidner Plan and Sweden in Italy’s Political and Trade Unionist Debate (1975–1984). Scandinavian Journal of History 37: 646–666. Sjöberg, Stefan. 2003. Löntagarfondsfrågan - en hegemonisk vändpunkt. En marxistisk analys: Uppsala Universitet. Viktorov, Ilja. 2006. Fordismens kris och löntagarfonder i Sverige. Stockholms Universitet.

CHAPTER 7

A Communist Theory of Politics: Nicos Poulantzas (1936–1979)

1

Life and Works

Nicos Poulantzas was born on 21 September 1936 in Athens, where he studied law and graduated in 1957. He carried out his studies after the civil war, that is, in a context of widespread anti-communism; in this period, it was difficult to even come into contact with Marxist works, and in fact he came across this body of work indirectly, through French philosophy. In his early years, he was politically involved in EDA (Eniaia dimokratiki aristera—United Democratic Left), an organisation that had taken on the legacy of the Resistance movement. At the beginning of the 1960s, after serving in the Navy, he moved to Germany where he studied for a year, spending some of this time in Munich and some in Heidelberg. It was in 1961 that he finally reached France, and this country became his chosen home. He frequented the intellectuals associated with the magazine Les temps modernes, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; one of these was the feminist philosopher Annie Leclerc, who he married in December 1966. Poulantzas collaborated assiduously with Sartre’s journal, a publication that was both extremely popular and highly controversial at the time; here, he published his first writings on the space of the political in Marxist theory, addressing in particular the unresolved issue of the state albeit still with a distinct legal philosophy approach. After earning a degree in Philosophy of Law from the University of Paris (1964) with a dissertation dedicated to the issue of the Rebirth of Natural © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_7

135

136

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Law in Germany, he began his academic career at the newly founded Paris VII University, where he taught sociology as a Maître de conference (researcher in charge of teaching) alongside Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and other radical intellectuals of the time. He also held seminars at the École pratique des hautes études. In the meantime, after putting aside his initial infatuation with Lukács’ philosophy and Sartre’s existentialism, he joined the circle of brilliant young Marxist structuralists—including Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière—that had formed around the prominent figure of Louis Althusser. He always followed Greek political events closely, and this undoubtedly influenced the direction of his scientific interests (as evidenced by his books on the different forms of fascism and dictatorships) in the face of the division that split the Communist Party in 1968. While Greece was governed by the fascist regime of the Colonels (1967–1974), he adhered to the so-called interior faction that was harshly critical of real socialism and advocated a democratic path to communism. Poulantzas committed suicide in Paris on 3 October 1979.

2

Marxism and the State

The Marxian and Marxist foundations of Poulantzas’ theoretical thinking are evident in all of his work. Driven by the need to shed light on the concepts developed by the different “schools” of thought that engaged with Marx, he explored a materialistic conception of history while paying special attention to the notion of “relations of production”: this point reveals the first theoretical specificity of his Marxism, namely the aim of redefining the base-superstructure model. He rejected any “economistformalist” interpretation of the first element of the dichotomy, “a constant temptation throughout the history of Marxism” (Poulantzas 2014, 15) according to which there is a separate and autonomous economic materiality. Rather, he held that struggles, politics, beliefs and passions are directly rooted in the base of society, a base which includes the relations of production and therefore of exploitation. Poulantzas was convinced that the base cannot be represented as a set of autonomous and “unchanged” elements that give rise to the essence of the political (likewise characterized as exterior and derivative):

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

137

The constructivist image of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, which is supposed to allow the determining role of the economic sphere to be visualized after a fashion, cannot in fact provide a correct representation of the articulation of social reality, nor therefore of that determining role itself. It has even proved to be disastrous in more ways than one, and there is everything to be gained from not relying upon it. For my own part, I have long ceased to use it in analysis of the state. (Poulantzas 2014, 16)

This means that the economy is never an impenetrable space separate from other areas of human and social life: the political thus lies in the heart of the production of goods. Evoking Marx in terms of the twenty-fourth chapter of Capital focused on original accumulation, Poulantzas states that: “The position of the State vis-à-vis the economy is never anything but the modality of the state’s presence in the constitution and reproduction of the relations of production” and therefore “a mode of production does not arise out of the combination of various instances, all of which possess an inalterable structure before they come into relation with one another” (Poulantzas 2014, 17). A mode of production is never a sum, only a totality (albeit one affected by tensions and contradictions) the constituent elements of which have substance only in the mutual relationship, not before. For these reasons, Poulantzas’ most interesting contribution to Marxist theory can be summarized in his intention to acknowledge the centrality of relations of production, or rather “the primacy of the relations of production over the labour process – over what are often referred to as ‘productive forces’ and understood to include technology and the technical process” (Poulantzas 2014, 26). He stresses this point so strongly because he seeks to refute the widespread idea that relations of production are dependent on technique and instead recognize “the primacy of relations of production over productive forces”. Such forces do indeed have a materiality of their own, he argues, “but they are always organized under given relations of production”. This thesis has often held the attention of Marxist scholars because, on the historical level, it concerns the interpretation of the transition from feudalism to capitalism—a shift which Poulantzas did not believe could be explained by the technological leap hypothesis (the steam engine) alone—and, on the political and planning level, it concerns the foreshadowing of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Again according to Poulantzas, this latter transition will not

138

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

be brought about by the enormous development of productive forces, as many Western and Eastern Marxists believe. This move to place the relations of production in a central position solves the rigid and economistic division between the base and the superstructure once and for all in that these relations are also political and ideological: “This elementary datum is at the root of the state’s presence in the constitution and reproduction of the relations of production as the factor which concentrates, condenses, materializes and incarnates politicoideological relations in a form specific to the given mode of production” (Poulantzas 2014, 27). As far as the “mode of production” is concerned, Poulantzas provides conceptual clarification by distinguishing it as an “abstract-formal object” from the “concrete social formation” in that the latter is always an articulation of several modes of production overlapping at a given place and time. The author stresses these categories in order to tackle the central focus of his scholarly life, namely the analysis of the state: The state really does exhibit a peculiar material framework that can by no means be reduced to mere political domination. The state apparatus – that special and hence formidable something – is not exhausted in state power. Rather political domination is itself inscribed in the institutional materiality of the state. Although the State is not created ex nihilo by the ruling classes, nor is it simply taken over by them: state power (that of the bourgeoisie, in the case of the capitalist State) is written into this materiality. Thus, while all the state’s actions are not reduced to political domination, their composition is nevertheless marked by it. (Poulantzas 2014, 14)

Poulantzas’ point is that the state must be rooted in a materiality that is structural and yet goes beyond the “economic” to also concern the whole range of struggles between classes, including elements that Marxists scholars have traditionally considered “superstructural”. This does not completely blur the division of tasks between politics and the economy: indeed, under capitalism the state does take on its own specific tasks as part of a division of labour but this division also involves a common, shared goal, namely fostering capital. The author himself underlines that “The separation is nothing other than the capitalist form of the presence of the political in the constitution and reproduction of the relations of production” (Poulantzas 2014, 18–19).

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

139

The main function of the state consists in organizing the long-term political interest of the power bloc, that is, the merging of different fractions of the dominant class (as well as remnants of past production modes) in a relationship of conflictual unity under the hegemony of one of these fractions. Poulantzas stresses the fact that the state is able to pursue the political unity of the ruling classes only on the condition that it also maintains its own relative autonomy from these fractions, for example by responding to the demands of the dominated classes if this serves to ensure the long-term objective (the perpetuation of capitalism). The state, in fact, is characterized by both competition among the various fractions of the ruling class and class struggle between capitalists and the exploited.1 In developing his discourse, Poulantzas is aided by some of the leading figures of the Marxist tradition, especially Gramsci and Lenin. He takes on a critical approach. Indeed, the theories of these two thinkers represent two sides of the same problem, seen respectively from the West and the East: whether to conquer state power from the outside through a coup d’état, a “war of movement”, or else to secure power gradually through a patient “war of position”, the approach Gramsci views as the only viable option after the post-World War I defeat of the revolutionary movements. According to Poulantzas, neither position moves away from the theoretical framework of third-internationalist Marxism. Nevertheless, Gramsci seems to inspire him much more powerfully than Lenin: in 1979, he confessed to having studied the Prison Notebooks when meeting Althusser—and through the Italian journal Critica Marxista, linked to the Italian Communist Party—and having been struck by theirs charm and influence (Poulantzas 1980, 12). The Italian thinker, moreover, represented one of the inspirations behind Poulantzas’ original reflection on historical materialism, specifically in terms of his insights on the entanglement of base and superstructure and his acknowledgement that ideologies are a powerful historical factor of transformation. Indeed, the notion of hegemony with the dialectic of domain and direction proved highly useful for his analysis of the state, especially considering that Gramsci had

1 In a 1977 interview, Poulantzas clarifies “by power bloc I mean the classes and class fractions which occupy the terrain of political domination […]Thus when I speak of power bloc, I do not mean the set of strata supporting the state power, rather those participating in the terrain of political domination, therefore those enjoying power bases of their own within the State apparatus” (Poulantzas 2009, 81).

140

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

originally brandished it in part to contest the Marxist orthodoxy and its adherence to a kind of philosophy of history marked by the development of productive forces: he had rejected the idea of economic structure as a field that is separate, autonomous and, albeit ultimately, decisive for historical transformation. It is true that in one of his first books, Political Power and Social Classes (1968), Poulantzas does not appear to grasp the essence of the concept of hegemony, reproaching Gramsci for having stressed the element of consensus to the detriment of the element of force and for having not fully believed that a subaltern class might affirm its own vision of the world before having seized political power. Later, however, Poulantzas does acknowledge Gramsci’s influence, especially in analysing the role played by the state and its apparatuses in organizing and intellectually directing the masses, with the specific involvement of the “extended State” or “integral state” in relations of production and their reproduction. Finally, it is worth noting that, in examining modern forms of the authoritarian state, Poulantzas clearly identifies the role of the petty bourgeoisie as the mass base of fascism, the “ape people” that Gramsci evoked in one of his most powerful writings about incipient fascism (Gramsci 1978, 176; Poulantzas 2009, 38–39). In his last work, furthermore, he emphasizes the decisive role the state plays in ideological relations in that ideology is embodied in state apparatuses, the arena of class struggles; once he acknowledges this element, he goes on to reaffirm that this must not “lead to underestimation of its repressive functions” (Poulantzas 2014, 29). Nonetheless, Poulantzas’ view of Gramsci is somewhat ambivalent: Well, even in my Gramscian moment, my relationships with Gramsci was ambiguous enough […]. It is clear that Gramsci had some crucial insights concerning the State and politics, but their importance must not be exaggerated, because I have the impression that Gramsci for the most part stiffened in the concepts of the Third International […]. Although Gramsci spoke of ideological apparatuses and contradictions internal to the state, he continued to view the state, in its hard core, as a monolithic block without cracks. This is why Gramsci’s position does not differ fundamentally from Lenin’s […]. Gramsci was not able to go beyond that idea, despite his unquestionable merits, which, moreover, isolated him inside the Third International. (Poulantzas 2009, 205–206)

Poulantzas’ relationship with Lenin, an unavoidable reference point for both orthodox and critical Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, must also

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

141

be read in the light of his interpretation of the state. His relationship with Lenin’s thinking became more distant as his interest in Gramsci increased, even though he saw both of them converging in their vision of the state as a “thing”, an “object” to be conquered from outside (Poulantzas 2009, 182). Poulantzas approached Lenin as he was interested in “his firm support for the direct and grassroots democracy of the Soviets […] the Lenin who wrote State and Revolution is the most important Lenin” (Poulantzas 2009, 182–183). On the contrary, he rejected the author of What Is to Be Done?, the old 1902 book dedicated to the thesis of the “party of functionaries” in charge of imbuing workers with class consciousness from the outside because he viewed this reading as containing the seeds of centralism, the “party-state” and thus statism (Poulantzas 2009, 183). Regarding this point, the Greek thinker did not hesitate to identify some Leninian conceptions (in particular, his underestimation of representative democracy) as the embryos of Stalin’s degeneration. Although Poulantzas refused to place Lenin and Stalin on the same level, he did adopt Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolsheviks: Rosa Luxemburg, a militant of the “workers’ councils”, reported the danger that if the Soviets had destroyed the democratic institutions, the Constituent Assembly… the resulting centralization of power would have ended up destroying the Soviets themselves, and with them every form of democracy. And this Leninist conception is still very much alive today in the dispute of the communist movement. (Poulantzas 2009, 228)

In summary, Poulantzas came to engage with the classic themes of the Marxist tradition under the banner of historical criticism. He seems to have sought to gather some of the loose threads left by Marx, Lenin and Gramsci and knot them back together in the name of a deep and wide-ranging attempt to establish a Marxist theory of the political and a perspective for overcoming capitalism and its state that revolves around two poles: direct democracy and, at the same time, representative democracy. This was a vision rooted in the belief that there would not be another October Revolution in Europe. On the basis of these positions, together with Ralph Miliband Poulantzas generated one of the most interesting debates to sweep over Marxism in the second part of the twentieth century focused on the issue of the state. This discussion took place in the columns of the famous

142

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

New Left Review between 1969 and 1976 and consisted of four articles (Poulantzas 1969, 1976; Miliband 1970, 1973).2 A detailed account of this lengthy and multifaceted debate is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Barrow 2002), but what stands out about Poulantzas’ position is his defence of the concept of the relative autonomy of the state. In his view, however, such autonomy is necessarily linked to the actual class struggle taking place in a specific geographical and historical context. In this way, he reaffirmed his own classist approach against any deviation on the part of official contemporary sociology; in its assertion, there can be “classes without class struggle”. According to Poulantzas, however, the classes maintain a foundation in the material “structure” even though their clashes take the form of a “practice” occurring on different levels. Answering Miliband’s critique that he had reintroduced an artificial distinction between economics and politics and thus connected state power back to the power of the dominant class, he specified that a social class cannot be determined from a solely economic point of view because political and ideological class determinations are already present “at the heart of relations of production”. This is clearly a profound conviction and it constitutes a uniting thread in a work that is otherwise fragmentary and difficult at times. Thanks to this thread, indeed, he is able to make an unparalleled contribution to Marxist theory.

3 Economic and Political Crisis in Monopolistic Capitalism The corollary of this thesis on the relative autonomy of the political is a detailed formulation of the category of crisis, which Poulantzas developed both in relation to capitalism considered in terms of its historical evolution and by analysing the contradictions that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. To at least partially respond to the accusation of politicism that was often levelled at Poulantzas, it is worth remembering that he set off from purely economic grounds: in fact, he held that the crisis had originated in the tendential fall of the profit rate. Once clarified this point, it is clear that his main concern was the political rather than the productive repercussions of this phenomenon. He addressed this issue in a number of

2 Ernesto Laclau took part in the debate as well, on a different occasion supporting Poulantzas’s views and yet criticizing him for excessive formalism (Laclau 1975).

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

143

writings as well as a collective volume he edited in 1976 titled The Crisis of the State (Poulantzas 1979a). First, however, it is necessary to clear up misunderstandings concerning the two most widespread, albeit opposing, meanings of crisis as well as the determinism underlying a certain vision of the link between economic and political crisis that is deeply-rooted in the Marxist sphere. The bourgeois economics casts crises as having a “dysfunctional” role in that they supposedly interrupt the harmonic operation of the capitalist system; in contrast, third-internationalist currents of thought view crisis as an element that is inherent in the very evolution of capitalism and destined to bring about its implosion. Poulantzas responded to the bourgeois conception by stating that crises, far from constituting an anomaly, actually contribute to the reproduction of capital by activating, in a concentrated form, a series of trends that counter the tendential fall of the profit rate. And to the parties and intellectuals of the workers’ movement convinced that capitalism is always in crisis (i.e. on the point of collapsing), he replied that such a conception dissolves the specificity of the concept itself and remarked that it is naive to proceed backwards, so to speak, beginning from political instability and tracing back to the specific economic crisis that supposedly caused it. The two levels are not necessarily synchronic, in fact; political and state crisis may erupt later than economic turbulence (as happened in Germany, with the economic crisis braking out in 1929 and political crisis in 1933) but also, sometimes, before it (France’s May unrest exploded when nobody was talking about recession yet). It follows that economic recovery is not at all destined, in itself, to put an end to political crisis. The latter, in addition, must be distinguished from the crisis of the state. This latter consists of “substantial modifications of the balance of forces in the struggle among the classes” (Poulantzas 1979a, 11) both in the power bloc and in the bloc’s relationship with the dominated classes; these changes also have repercussions on state apparatuses and affect extra-state spheres of legitimacy and alliances among classes. The definition of crisis that most effectively captures the complexity of the phenomenon is a “specific conjuncture of condensation of contradictions ” (Poulantzas 2009, 29). Such an interpretation does not preclude the possibility of distinguishing between different crises, nor of grasping the overall scope of the crisis if it affects the economy and politics. In this case, Poulantzas clarifies, it is a matter of a crisis of hegemony (to borrow

144

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Gramsci’s vocabulary) or structural crisis (to use the most recent terminology). It is precisely this type of crisis that affects monopoly capital, a force which Poulantzas interpreted differently over the course of time: he initially contested the theory of state monopoly capitalism embraced by orthodox communist parties (including the French one) and later ended up accepting the fundamental thesis as to the merger of the state and monopolies into a single mechanism. Although Poulantzas considered the concept of state “intervention” to be mystifying (assuming as it does that there is an external relationship between the state and the economy, while instead, as outlined above, he saw the political as constitutively present in relations of production, albeit with relative autonomy), he acknowledged that in its monopolistic stage the state undergoes a transformation that is not merely quantitative, but also qualitative. With the consolidation of industrial giants employing intensive technologies, integrating large-sized production units and aiming to both colonize the international market and guarantee safety and stability at home, state involvement in the process of accumulation becomes more necessary and comprehensive, extending to cover all spheres of social existence: in fact, capitalism becomes a way of life. It is this two-fold development—on both international and domestic levels—which ensures that the national state remains a privileged area of activity for class struggle even though its (relative and formal) autonomy from the economy undoubtedly appears to be threatened by globalization. In monopoly capitalism, state “interventions” are aimed at counterbalancing the tendency for the profit rate to decline (this explains, for example, the illusory nature of any project of transformation which relies on augmenting public capital, as this latter is also subject to the laws of the market economy). While in the past the state was satisfied with cushioning the social impact of unbridled economic crises—think for instance of the New Deal—today it directly assumes functions that were previously exerted by crises, such as creating unemployment and inflation. The novelty that led scholars to legitimately interpret crises in the 1970s as hegemonic consists in the fact that some of those interventions began to act to exacerbate the crisis rather than resolving it: precisely because of their genealogy, such interventions also touched on the political-ideological level. The interventions Poulantzas had in mind were a series of policies that were strengthened precisely as a result of the economic crisis, such as

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

145

measures to support certain fractions of capital (monopoly capital, both foreign and national) to the detriment of others and interventions in the social sphere (in the fields of healthcare, housing, education) aimed at increasing the rate of (relative) surplus value through the reproductionenhancement of the workforce. The measures in favour of monopoly capital work to exacerbate the unequal development of national capitalism (an outcome which Panzieri had already identified and highlighted), dismantling the myth of national unity fed by the bourgeois state and paving the way—and here Poulantzas’ words sound quite prophetic—for the rise of regionalist movements. As for social policy measures, although these may be designed to integrate the popular masses, they actually have the opposite effect of politicizing the struggles of these masses outside of the productive sphere. Since the state is obliged to limit its range of action in times of economic crisis, the areas of intervention become battlegrounds because the masses identify the state as being responsible for the crisis. In other words, the more the state intervenes in society, the more it is penetrated by society, thereby weakening itself. As Poulantzas concludes, this is the reason why contemporary economic crisis is also a crisis of the state, and the state responds on the one hand by reformulating its legitimacy, that is, the ideology that serves to connect the various sectors of its apparatus, and on the other hand by reorganizing its ideological apparatuses. The state thus responds to crisis, the same crisis it helped to create by intervening to stem the tendential fall of the profit rate, by generating a qualitatively new form of state: authoritarian statism, a recurring theme in Poulantzas’ later work (see also L’État, le pouvoir, le Socialisme, which is mentioned several times here) that forecasted the political and cultural regression launched by the Reagan-Thatcher duo. Poulantzas believed that representative democracy is, historically, the form of state most functional to the hegemonic struggle of the bourgeoisie, as its flexibility allows it to break down and neutralize class conflicts. On the contrary, the state of exception, identified in some historical moments as the only effective solution to a conflict that cannot be managed through democratic confrontation between the classes, has the disadvantage of being rigid and therefore not sufficiently reactive to new outbreaks crisis, putting it at risk of breaking apart. The new form of state that Poulantzas observed in his time differed from both of the forms seen in the past. In fact, it could not be hastily interpreted as a return to fascism, perhaps camouflaged in some way;

146

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

unlike fascism, it did not represent a state of exception. Rather, it took the form of normal state operation, albeit with an authoritarian character that distinguished it from the democratic-parliamentary state. Despite this clarification—that the capitalist state cannot be identified tout court with fascism—Poulantzas did not fail to remind his readers that fascism may constantly appear within the range of possibilities: in every capitalist state, even the most democratic one, there are elements, in an embryonic state, that can lead to a certain kind of fascism. In all these states collateral forms and circuits exist that are kept frozen, to be used in the event the process evolves unfavourably to the dominant classes. (Poulantzas 2009, 220)

The osmosis between normal (democratic) and exceptional elements may give rise to more or less authoritarian forms of state, as Germany and France, respectively, witnessed in this period. In spite of this variety of possible outcomes, the common feature is the decline of representative democracy. Poulantzas identified the strategic axes of this process: power, he argued, moves from the legislative to the executive bodies with the aggravating element of “mixing up” the three constitutional powers. The result is that repressive apparatuses take on a more incisive role without, however, a corresponding reduction in the role of ideological apparatuses. Rather, ideological apparatuses undergo a reallocation process that “shifts” legitimacy procedures from the educational system to the media and from parties to the state administration. In terms of public discourse, these changes translate into populist rhetoric that carelessly mixes traditional cultural currents such as authoritarianism and irrationalism with a kind of anti-state neoliberalism that also includes 1968-type libertarian themes—which, according to Poulantzas, “proves once again capitalism’s prodigious capacities for cultural integration” (Poulantzas 1979b). In terms of how power is materially exercised, although Poulantzas often criticized Foucault in his writings, in a 1979 interview he acknowledged that Foucault had successfully grasped the microphysical transformation of power. Despite this point, however, Poulantzas appears to have been more interested in exploring how the above-mentioned collateral circuits (now outside of democratic control and easy to turn to repressive ends) develop within the state and what new role public administration plays. In his analysis, state administration becomes the real party of

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

147

the ruling classes, addressing socio-professional groups directly without resorting to traditional mediators such as political parties.

4

Seizing the State and Direct Democracy

How to take advantage of the contradictions that emerge within the power bloc as a result of the internationalisation of capital and the new role of public administrations? And what society to build on the ruins of the capitalist mode of production? Poulantzas attracted critique from various sides for his answers to these questions, with critics claiming that he had remained Leninist despite having criticized Lenin’s thinking in What Is to Be done? or that he had maintained a form of statism which stemmed from Bolshevik thought but later assumed a social-democratic form. In reality, the oscillations in his thinking reflected his involvement in the political turmoil of the time. Greece, Portugal, Spain and Chile were the main points of reference he used to develop his ever-changing reasoning on the question of conquering power, the strategic node of alliances and the fundamental principles of a socialist society. One point remained unchanged: his awareness that any democratization process, and even more so the transition to socialism, inevitably provokes a response from the bourgeoisie, and that this reaction may at times be quite brutal. In order to contain this risk as well, he drew a two-fold lesson from the events of the first half of the 1970s (particularly developments in Greece and Portugal): to be victorious, a revolution must rest on a mass foundation, coordinating working-class organisations and their allies along a single front; its strategy cannot consist in constructing a double form of power, that is, a counter-state to oppose the capitalist state. In the absence of mass action, the outcome of the struggle against a state of exception is only bourgeois democracy. Indeed, the Carnation Revolution in Portugal and specifically the rapid neutralization of its subversive potential are emblematic of this point. The case of Chile, however, shows that even when the transition to socialism has been achieved (at least formally), the incapacity to cultivate, in practice, an alliance between the proletariat and other social classes (the petty bourgeoisie), after having propagandized it during the election campaign, paves the way for the reaction mentioned above. As these two cases illustrate, Poulantzas constantly stressed that workers undergoing a process of proletarization must also be “won over”

148

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

and cultivated, lest they end up drifting to the right. Taking for granted that all wage earners have the same common interests in shrugging off the yoke of capitalist exploitation and that the task of workers’ parties consists solely in bringing these interests to light, the problem of alliances suddenly disappears (such alliances would seem superfluous if it is superficially assumed that all employees are [and identify as] workers). Therefore, hegemonic struggle is no longer an issue. On the contrary, the greatest difficulty that the proletariat faced, according to Poulantzas, was that the popular alliance had to be built by bringing together different classes (those characterized in the economic system by unproductive work) to be identified on a case-by-case basis. He stressed the fact that these were classes, not layers: it is debatable whether technicians were proletarianized in the sense of being “won over” to the cause of the working class or whether they constituted a separate class (the new petty bourgeoisie), but it must be clarified that they did not constitute an ill-defined “layer”. The second lesson Poulantzas drew from contemporary events and which came to constitute one of the characteristic points of his analysis was that it is not enough to win elections, or even occupy parts of the state (including its upper echelons) and render them democratic, if workers did not simultaneously achieve control over the public apparatus in its rough materiality—not to mention the fact that the bourgeoisie as a countermovement may shift power or reverse it from one sector of the apparatus to another in a sort of game of three-card Monte. The goal must be to radically transform the state rather than occupying it—lest the same dynamics of the bourgeois state be reproduced—or destroying it (indeed, he wrote that the expression “breaking the state” was no longer meaningful). Managing the inertia of the state apparatus was difficult even for the bourgeoisie, but it would prove to be even more so for the left. This explained the need for a two-fold strategy: a struggle within the state […], on the strategic terrain of the state. A struggle, in other words, whose aim is not to substitute the workers’ state for the bourgeois state through a series of reforms designed to take over one bourgeois state apparatus after another, and thus conquer power, but a struggle which is […] a struggle of resistance, a struggle designed to sharpen the internal contradictions of the state, to carry out a deep-seated transformation of the state. […] [And, at the same time,] a struggle outside the institutions and apparatuses, giving rise to whole series of instruments,

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

149

means of coordination, organs of popular power at the base, structures of direct democracy […]. (Poulantzas 2009, 123)

Poulantzas’ fertile obsession was the coexistence of these two levels of change; he viewed any pondering over the “within or outside the state” dilemma as a waste of time. With the same resolve, he relegated the dictatorship of the proletariat to history (casting as Stalinists those who wished for it as a form of return to socialist origins) and liquidated as theoretically contradictory and politically irrelevant thinkers who believed that the only way to fight statism was to locate themselves in “society” conceptualized as a place radically different from the state, as if the two spheres could be interpreted as entirely separate compartments. In a series of interviews from the second half of the 1970s, Poulantzas targeted Castoriadis but also Althusser, the latter because in a 1978 interview for the Italian newspaper “il Manifesto” he had incited the masses to organize themselves outside the state in order to totally subvert it, without addressing the problem of representative democracy. Poulantzas also targeted the trend he defined as the “Deleuze-Foucault-Guattari current”, that is, theorists of “singular micro-revolts, scattered resistances, isolated experimentations – this is the only way, according to these theorists, of avoiding a strategy that would risk imprisoning social movements within the nets of statist politics, stripping them of their ‘autonomy’” (Poulantzas 1979b). Not only would this level of struggle on its own fail to scratch the surface of the Leviathan-state, Poulantzas objected, but such movements, tolerated in the framework of the state’s “repressive permissiveness”, would also end up being reabsorbed by neo-corporativism and institutionalized neo-clientelism. How might the risks underlying social movements’ relationship with both the state and (working class) parties be avoided? Poulantzas dedicated a massive and sometimes oscillating theoretical effort to exploring this problem. It is his laborious and inconclusive search for a balance point, however, that makes his thinking more current than that of theorists who insist on the primacy of the social at all costs, often adopting apodictic tones. Poulantzas found it disastrous how little the workers’ parties understood social movements while at the same time wondering how much such parties should and could be transformed in order to “win over” social movements; this encounter takes place on an uphill slope in that such movements originate outside the factory, characterized from the

150

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

outset by an inter-classist physiognomy and claims which are at least partially distinct from traditional ones. The fact that these movements have not yet succeeded in creating original forms of organisation to protect them from being reabsorbed by the parties further complicates the framework: I believe this conception of the party as the sole centralizer, although it is a very thin centralization, to not necessarily be the best solution. I am increasingly convinced that we must have autonomous social movements whose type of organisation cannot be the same a party organisation. (Poulantzas 2009, 189)

He supported left-wing euro-communism3 and its concern for social issues based on the tragic understanding that neither the workers’ parties nor the new social movements were up to facing the challenge of the capitalist crisis. There was thus a need, more urgent than ever, to rethink and organize this dualism. Moreover, Poulantzas did not, as mentioned above, reach definitive conclusions. He was tempted by the proposal made by Pietro Ingrao (a leading figure of the left wing of the Italian Communist Party) to democratize the state (and, even before that, the workers’ parties) so that social movements might be inserted into it. On the other hand, he had learned from the case of Austro-Marxism that the materiality of the state apparatus is impermeable to movements and they only end up dissolving. The emphasis on self-organisation and self-government must not, however, obscure a cornerstone of Poulantzas’ theory, namely the importance of also safeguarding representative democracy (which, it is worth remembering, was won through mass struggle), since it cannot be set aside as a mere political form of class rule. Poulantzas warned that history renders both the “original Leninist solution” (fully replacing representative democracy with direct democracy) and the reformist solution (to democratize the state but suffocate movements from below) unfeasible (Poulantzas 1979b). Even while

3 Eurocommunism was a current of the Communist Parties limited to Southern Europe

that developed between 1968 and the beginning of the 1980s. Its representatives called for the independence of the different national Communist parties from Chinese and Soviet politics and were also critical of the weak internal democracy characterizing the Communist parties themselves. Regarding left-wing Eurocommunism, see in particular Philip Spencer (Spencer 1979).

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

151

disagreeing with much of what he saw as Norberto Bobbio’s “socialdemocratic silliness” (Poulantzas 2009, 130), Poulantzas acknowledged the importance of the problem Bobbio raised: if socialism is to be democratic, it must preserve formal freedoms, and this can only be ensured by maintaining certain forms of representative democracy, albeit in a radically different form. With bitter sincerity, he pointed out that the working class needs democracy not only to safeguard the freedom of its enemies, but also to “defend itself from itself” (Poulantzas 2009, 235) once it has secured power. As he admitted, “it must be said, we also have fears for ourselves” (Poulantzas 2009, 131). History shows that no class, not even the working class, is a natural guarantor of freedom. In order to be democratic, therefore, socialism must defend freedom by means of specific institutional devices and protections: good intentions are not enough. Poulantzas did admit that this perspective blurs the line between reformism and revolution. However, his overriding concern was not terminological minutia but rather the urgent need to understand how the two forms of democracy might be integrated. In this case as well, Poulantzas did not offer one single response. After all, he did not have the presumption—or really the time— to resolve all the dilemmas facing the workers’ movement since 1917 once and for all. Poulantzas posited an indispensable role for the workers’ councils in the quantitative and qualitative transformation of democracy. However, he also identified two areas of concern, one related to the transition phase and the other to the functioning of decision-making bodies in the new socialist society. He saw it as potentially fatal to try to overturn existing power structures by centralizing, according to a step-by-step approach, the entire array of different counter-powers in a single body because such a long and far from being uncomplicated process would set the stage for a reaction on the part of the bourgeoisie, a reaction that was sure to occur. Moreover, once a post-capitalist society was established, there would be an inevitable risk of corporatism if all power were concentrated in the hands of the councils. If politics was to be the purview of all citizens and not simply the privilege of a caste of professional politicians, the new society would require a host of different decision-making bodies, and this arrangement would require some form of centralization. In Poulantzas’ view, such a structure could only be guaranteed by either the party or

152

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

representative institutions. As history had proven party rule to be untenable, all that remained was parliamentary democracy, to be employed for at least a reasonably extended period of time and without undermining the centrality of direct democracy. Both assumptions—that local self-government runs the risk of particularism, and that national representative bodies guarantee the “people’s will”—are highly debatable. In Poulantzas’ writings, the creation of mechanisms to ensure the valorization of direct democracy within a framework that bolsters and guarantees representative democracy remained a wish in that it was not translated into a specific political-institutional design. Moreover, he did not hesitate to express his doubts: For my part, I am asking whether, and to what extent, a certain irreducible tension between these two dimensions of the process is a risk to be assumed, and what’s more, whether or not this tension is an integral part of a dynamic in the transition to democratic socialism. (Poulantzas 1979b)

Poulantzas grappled with specific theoretical issues, namely the question of how to set up a virtuous circle between working-class parties and social movements in times of struggle and between representative democracy and practices of self-management after conquering power. These same issues can be read as prefiguring the momentous turning point that shortly after obliterated both left-wing parties and movements or, at any rate, transformed them to the point of unrecognizability. It is for this reason that, despite writing in the 1970s, a historical moment that represented the highpoint of social conflict, Poulantzas appears as a thinker of the crisis: not the crisis of capitalism, but the crisis of the projects aimed at subverting it (a term he might not have liked). In the end, these projects not only failed to provide answers to the questions he raised, they simply stopped raising such questions altogether.

References Barrow, Clyde W. 2002. The Miliband-Poulantzas Debate: An Intellectual History. In Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered, ed. S. Aronowitz and P. Bratsis, 3–52. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cavazzini, Andrea. 2010. Lo Stato, il marxismo, il comunismo: un dibattito tra Althusser e Poulantzas. Critica marxista 1: 68–73.

7

A COMMUNIST THEORY OF POLITICS …

153

Chilcote, Ronald H., et al. (eds.). 1990. Transitions from Dictatorship to Democracy: Comparative Studies of Spain, Portugal and Greece. London and New York: Routledge. Emadian, Baraneh. 2019. The Quandary of Multiple States as an Internal and External Limit to Marxist Thought: From Poulantzas to Karatani. Rethinking Marxism 31: 72–91. Gallas, Alexander. 2017. Revisiting Conjunctural Marxism: Althusser and Poulantzas on the State. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 29: 256–280. Gramsci, Antonio. 1978 [1921]. Il popolo delle scimmie. In A. Gramsci, Scritti politici, vol. 3, ed. Paolo Spriano II, 176–179. Rome: Editori Riuniti. https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1921/01/ape-people.htm. Hall, Stuart, and Alan Hunt. 1979. Interview with Nicos Poulantzas. Marxism Today 7: 194–201. Jessop, Bob. 1985. Nicos Poulantzas. Marxist Theory and Political Strategy. London: Macmillan. Jessop, Bob. 2017. Nicos Poulantzas on Political Economy, Political Ecology, and Democratic Socialism. Journal of Political Ecology 24: 186–199. Laclau, Ernesto. 1975. The Specificity of the Political. The Poulantzas- Miliband Debate. Economy and Society 1: 87–111. Liguori, Guido. 2012. Gramsci conteso. Roma: Editori Riuniti University Press. Martin, James (ed.). 2008. The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State. London and New York: Verso. Miliband, Ralph. 1970. The Capitalist State—Reply to N. Poulantzas. New Left Review 59: 53–60. Miliband, Ralph. 1973. Poulantzas and the Capitalist State. New Left Review 82: 83–92. Nowak, Jörg. 2017. Nicos Poulantzas’s Analysis of Gender Relations and the Concept of Individualisation. International Critical Thought 7: 252–266. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1969. The Problem of the Capitalist State. New Left Review 58: 67–78. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1973 [1971]. Political Power and Social Classes. London: NLB. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1974 [1970]. Fascism and Dictatorship. London: NLB. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1975 [1974]. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. London: NLB. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1976. The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau. New Left Review 95: 63–83. Poulantzas, Nicos (ed.). 1979a [1976]. La crisi dello Stato. Bari: De Donato.

154

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Poulantzas, Nicos. 1979b. The State, Social Movements, Party: Interview with Nicos Poulantzas. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/12/18/ state-social-movements-party-interview-nicos-poulantzas-1979/. Accessed on 23 March 2020. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1980. Repères. Hier et aujourd’hui. Textes sur l’État. Paris: Maspero. Poulantzas, Nicos. 2008. The Poulantzas Reader. Marxism, Law and the State, ed. James Martin. London and New York: Verso. Poulantzas, Nicos. 2009. Il declino della democrazia, ed. Enrico Melchionda. Milano: Mimesis. Poulantzas, Nicos. 2014 [1978]. State, Power, Socialism. London and New York: Verso. Resch, Robert P. 1992. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sessions, David. 2019. Nicos Poulantzas: Philosopher of Democratic Socialism. Dissent 66: 83–93. Spencer, Philip. 1979. The ‘Left’ Face of Eurocommunism. International Socialism. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1979/ isj2-005/spencer.html. Thomas, Peter. 2000. Bringing Poulantzas Back. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 2: 199–206.

CHAPTER 8

In the Midst of the Crisis

1

The Chilean “Laboratory”

The crisis that in the 1970s began to plague both Eastern and Western societies alike and spread in waves until the end of the 1980s marked the end of the historical trajectory of the current of thought and activity outlined in this book (with a few exceptions, as we will see). So what was this “global” crisis affecting central populations as much as peripheral ones? The period of social conflict lasted until the end of the 1970s, but the turning point that paved the way for the reaction by capital can be identified as early as the beginning of the decade, in 1973. This was the year of the Chilean coup, an event of international magnitude that cast a fatal shadow over the very existence of both the traditional workers’ movement and more radical forms of protest. The events that took place in a part of the American continent were representative of the dissolving and, at the same time, constituent character of the ongoing crisis. In common with the authors presented here, Unidad popular, the coalition that came to power in 1970 and acted as the motor of change, rejected any rigid dichotomy between reform and revolution. Indeed, it was “based on a clear and defined program of revolutionary transformations implemented through existing legal channels” (Corossacz 1975, 84). When assessing Salvador Allende’s Chile, the nationalization of banks and companies has been a object of endless debate. Many such discussions have, however, forgotten that the president’s objective was not to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_8

155

156

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

configure state capitalism in a new way, but rather to “[create] an area of social ownership” (Allende 1970) jointly administered by workers and citizens’ representatives, the latter being considered the hinge between each individual productive unit and the national economy as a whole.1 In the countryside, then, the idea was that the farmers’ councils would ensure the implementation of the agricultural reform. When the economic crises induced by anti-popular forces both inside and outside the country began to impact on the daily life of citizens more intensely, supply and pricing councils were also established to bring together consumers and small-scale retailers in working-class neighbourhoods and thereby create a wholesale distribution system organized by businesses (both public and private) under the direct control of consumers themselves. These councils quickly became one of the most effective forms of mass mobilization in terms of protecting the interests of the working class and government policies (and in fact the right soon began targeting them, calling into question their legitimacy). However, what many accounts, even from the left, have overlooked is the role played by a component of popular struggle, the cordones industriales which, despite being self-organized, nonetheless managed to set up precise structures and goad the Unidad popular (criticizing its compromises with the Christian Democrats, the harbingers of reactionary backlash) while at the same time attempting to resist the bourgeois counterattack. These cordones industriales were basic workers’ coordinating bodies developed in October 1972 in response to the lock-out of truck owners, an impasse which they contributed decisively to neutralizing. Together with the comandos comunales, local coordination committees, the cordones took charge of the food, health, education and mobility needs of the population during the most intense period of the economic crisis; they bypassed the Central Unica de los Trabajadores (CUT, Workers Central Union) to directly self-manage hundreds of companies scattered throughout the country. Strengthened by this experience, the workers’ coordinating groups began to pose the problem of seizing power, but in this case and given their critical stance on state power,

1 In 1971, Unidad popular stated that they considered it extremely important to encourage workers’ participation in state enterprises through production committees and boards of directors, in which the workers of each enterprise were to directly and democratically elect their delegates to give a decisive boost to both production and the transformation of the character of the state; Corossacz (1975, 83).

8

IN THE MIDST OF THE CRISIS

157

the power they had in mind was not that of the state. Such an embryonic form of popular power might have changed history, Michael Löwy wrote, if only it had had time to consolidate—and if internal left-wing divisions had not proved fatal. The left wing of the Socialist Party and the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) supported the new bodies of grassroots democracy. Unidad popular, in contrast, condemned “the occupation of small and medium-sized factories by workers: the statalization, intervention and requisitioning of businesses must obey a government plan and not the anarchy of the voluntary impulse of a few isolated people” (Corossacz 1975, 108). The coup was thus aimed not only at ousting Allende and the socialist forces in the government, but also at repressing this experiment in grassroots democracy. As the Italian socialist Riccardo Lombardi keenly noted right before the events, the US offensive against Chilean democracy—like the war against the Vietnamese people—reflected a will to destroy even the simplest attempt to build an economic system alternative to capitalism and, moreover, controlled by people’s movements (in the industrial sector as well as in the countryside). In hindsight, we can argue that the “Chilean lesson” is the one Western capitalism taught to social movements and working-class organizations throughout the world, raising the spectre of the tragic epilogue to that peaceful and democratic attempt to achieve socialism. During Allende’s three years in power, Chile was indeed a laboratory thanks to is ultimately unsuccessful endeavour to combine the seizure of state power with struggle from below. This was even more true after 11 September 1973, however. After the coup, it became a laboratory for the authoritarian neoliberalism that took hold transnationally just as Poulantzas had foreseen, corroding Western democracies thanks to its three main tools: economic exploitation (elevated to the nth power through a brutal policy of privatization, outsourcing and deregulation of the labour market); repressive apparatuses (as Poulantzas warned in this case as well, an everavailable remedy for suppressing the discontent caused by these policies); and renewed legitimacy, twisting the issues and claims of 1960s and 1970s movements in a spiral of narrow-minded and rapacious individualism.

158

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

2

The Legacy of 1968

The long season of struggle that began in the late 1960s and included the Chilean case continued among centrally located groups, especially in Europe, for approximately a decade before coming to an end with the defeat of the workers’ movement and “new social movements”. This end was due to repression, both actually carried out in squares and factories (with the complicity of traditional parties and trade unions, in many cases) and only threatened, brandishing the spectre of the Chilean coup. It was, however, also due to the epilogue of a process of internal disintegration (partly fuelled, in countries such as Italy and Germany, by the emergence of armed struggle). There was also an unresolved tension between traditional and new forms of militancy (such as feminism). The lingering legacy of that season has been an injection of anticapitalist thought, imagination and sociality that is difficult to overestimate. At the same time, it has taught a doubly bitter lesson: on the one hand, the unsuccessful encounter between the new movements and the traditional left (which often took on the characteristics of a ferocious contrast); on the other hand, the inability to develop organizational models which were both stable and truly alternative to the models of the working-class parties and unions both of the groups formed at the turn of 1968 (who in many respects took on the rhetoric, rituals and hierarchies of the traditional Leninist party) and of the 1977 movement, placing the osmosis between the personal and the political at the centre of the struggle. As Alain Bihr, a French sociologist2 who keenly engaged with these issues just after the defeat, critiqued:

2 Born in Strasbourg in 1950, Bihr taught philosophy in high schools and obtained his doctorate in Sociology in 1990 at Paris VII University, then joined the ranks of scholars, first as a researcher and then, beginning in 2002, as a professor. His interests ranged from research on social inequalities to studies on the far right, the decline of the nation state and the history of capitalism. His works include: 1991. Du «Grand soir» à «l’alternative» . Le mouvement ouvrier européen en crise. Paris, Les éditions ouvrières; 1992. Pour en finir avec le Front National. Paris: Syros/Alternatives; 2000. Le Crépuscule des étatsnations. Transnationalisation et crispations nationalistes. Lausanne: Édition Page deux; 2001. La Reproduction Du Capital. Prolégomènes à une théorie générale du capitalisme. 2 voll. Lausanne: Édition Page deux; 2006. La Préhistoire du capital. Le devenir monde du capitalisme. Lausanne: Édition Page deux; 2010. La Logique méconnue du “Capital”. Lausanne: Édition Page deux; 2012. Les Rapports sociaux de classes. Lausanne: Édition Page deux.

8

IN THE MIDST OF THE CRISIS

159

self-organization practices, innovative with respect to the Fordist period, will in most cases remain limited and confined, both spatially (to the department, factory, neighbourhood or site) and in terms of time (content and objectives developed in particular struggles rarely survived). These struggles will maintain a dispersive and fragmentary character, lacking as they do the connections and organizational support that might have ensured their coordination and convergence. (Bihr 1991, 69)

It was the feminist movement in particular that questioned the formulas and organizational practices of the new movements—the current from which the feminist movement itself also derived. The feminist critique condemned the patriarchal character of such models, maintained through structures and mindsets that were in many ways third internationalist. The organizations of the new left responded to what they perceived as a challenge to the well-rooted ideal of the revolutionary subject (blue collar, white male) with paternalistic condescension, if not explicit mockery, driving the feminist movement to definitively detach from the other movements and pursue separatism. For both leftist groups and neofeminism, this was a big chance missed: the former missed the chance to take up the challenge embedded in the practice of “starting from oneself” rather than from pre-constituted schemes and hierarchies, while the latter gave up a class perspective (supplanted by the “symbolic universe”, class issues went on to become increasingly marginalized within feminist thought). This failed encounter led to a “cruel twist of fate”, as Nancy Fraser has defined it: Rejecting “economism” and politicising “the personal”, feminists broadened the political agenda to challenge status hierarchies premised on cultural constructions of gender difference. The result should have been to expand the struggle for justice to encompass both culture and economics. But the actual result was a one-sided focus on “gender identity” at the expense of bread and butter issues. Worse still, the feminist turn to identity politics dovetailed all too neatly with a rising neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to repress all memory of social equality. In effect, we absolutised the critique of cultural sexism at precisely the moment when circumstances required redoubled attention to the critique of political economy. (Fraser 2013)

160

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Similarly to Fraser, the German political scientist Wolfgang Streeck, in a book on the 2008 crisis in which he focuses particularly on longterm processes, reproaches feminism; in Streeck’s view, it encouraged the “rehabilitation” of paid work—which the workers’ and students’ movement had previously dismissed as a form of exploitation destined for extinction—by interpreting it as a means of liberation from the thousandyear-old slavery of unpaid female labour (within the domestic sphere). His condemnation of this shift he sees as produced by feminist claims fails to take into account, however, the fact that access to the labour market has favoured the politicization and mobilization of women, as Lidia Cirillo has noted. Both Fraser and Streeck grasped only one side of the process, going so far as to say that the new structure of production was bolstered by the support of women who, attracted by more flexible employment, accepted the extreme precariousness of which they also were the main victims.3 Streeck also includes young people among the “accomplices” of the new labour market, as they lack familiarity with the paradigm of permanent jobs and have been infected by the 1968-era rhetoric of anti-statism and anti-authoritarianism. After all, even if we admit that there have been “deviations and reversals of the practices and values they were the bearers”, the movements’ contribution to the “renewal of the ideological arsenal of developed capitalism” (Bihr 1991, 161) represents a problem that must be addressed in any assessment of it. Think, for example, of the paradoxical results produced by anti-statist critique and mass pleading for more individual freedoms: indeed, the regeneration of capitalism took place under the slogan “more (business) freedom, less state”. This certainly did not happen so that the watchwords of 1968 could triumph; quite the opposite: while some of the demands made by the struggles of that era did end up being met, they seem to have been corrupted. Using words similar to those of Poulantzas, theorists such as Bihr and, in more recent years, Streeck, have acknowledged that the hegemonic mode of production is quite capable of incorporating the disruptive drive of the new movements, bending it to its own advantage and using it as the basis of renewed legitimation. It is clearly misleading to consider 1968 as the cause of 3 As Enzo Traverso pointed out, by bragging about the “business women saga” (Traverso 2016, 21), neoliberalism claims to have solved the problem of the emancipation of women, completely obscuring the problem of economic inequalities between men and women and among women themselves.

8

IN THE MIDST OF THE CRISIS

161

the evils characterizing the following era, relegating history to the background and reading events through a “Spirit of the Time” lens.4 The fact that the season of the “new movements” was followed by a season of “conservative stabilization” does not mean that they were linked by a cause-effect relationship, nor that everything was predetermined. We must not forget that in Italy, for example, the strategy of tension and the obscure activities of figures and structures in the deviated secret services played a crucial role in toppling the new movements. It is true, as we mentioned, that some of the claims this new generation of students and workers posed to the “system” were not completely ignored; on the contrary, in some cases, they were accepted and contributed to the real and profound transformation of societies that experienced the effects of the economic boom in culturally traditional settings in a contradictory way. In Gramscian terms, this process could be defined as a “passive revolution”, that is, the effective change that takes place when a society absorbs the demands of the subordinate classes and partly implements them yet without affecting the established power structures, and even possibly by co-opting the individual representatives of opposition organizations. To cite one of the many possible examples, therefore, the demand for radical school reform, new courses of study, a different relationship between teachers and learners (an old tenant of nineteenth-century socialist and libertarian thought), that is, the drive to modernize the university system and the critique of knowledge as an instrument for reproducing consolidated power relationships were translated into legislative changes that transformed school systems by orienting them towards the market while leaving intact the original privileges and a fundamentally class-based approach. This is the result not of the 1968 struggle, but of its defeat. Similarly, the mobilization spreading among Fordist factories of the time aimed at breaking the chains of capitalist control over the work process (when the students’ anti-authoritarianism with its critique of hierarchies as well as the demand for direct democracy, with the rebirth of the councils and desire for freedom not only of work but also from 4 In The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, although concerned to shake off the accusation of having pictured 1968 as the forerunner of neoliberalism, indulge in reading a continuous relationship between the demands expressed in the cycle of struggles of those years and the launch of a new form of capitalism, which cleaned up the statist and planning vocation/inclination of Fordist capitalism. Boltanski and Chiapello’s magnifying glass focuses specifically on the claims of autonomy, creativity and authenticity.

162

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

work, made its way into the factories) set in motion a profound process of capitalist reorganization. It ended up freeing work but by producing fragmentation, unemployment and precariousness, thus removing the ground from under the feet of a strong, united working class. In this case as well, however, precariousness is the result not of 1968 struggles but of the neutralization of these struggles. Finally, the attempt to renew socialist thought, and in particular the communist project, by freeing it from paralysing orthodoxy, from rigid, dogmatic and ineffective models that could not be refashioned, gradually gave rise to “new” and “newist” socialist thought that was based on civil rights but progressively consigned the project of workers’ emancipation to oblivion. This shift, once again, reflects the failure of 1968, not its product.

3 The “Hayekization” of the World, or Keynes’ Defeat The 1970s crisis was long, exhausting and disruptive for the workers’ movement and the popular masses. As such, it was also a crisis that refashioned the global capitalist order in a way disturbingly reminiscent of Friedrich A. von Hayek’s vision “of making the capitalist world immune to the interventions of democratic politics” (Streeck 2014, 239). A crisis is not a “natural” event, as common sense would often instinctively have it; rather, it is the outcome of, on the one hand, the development of the capitalist production mode and, on the other, precise strategic choices by the ruling classes. Indeed, many scholars have come to agree on this point: their analyses recognize the fact that the breakdown of the social pact between capital and labour, that is, the outflow from “the multiple constraints that post-1945 capitalism had had to endure” (Streeck 2014, 4), was highly significant. The pact had supported and enabled European and, more generally, Western political systems in the so-called Glorious Thirties. In fact, the crisis emerged first and foremost at the economic level with the decline of Fordism as the dominant mode of production in the central countries. The leading industrial sectors underwent a slow but inexorable decline in productivity from the 1960s onwards, due to both intrinsic limits (the progressive growth of the organic composition of capital, that is, the increase of fixed capital over variable capital) and the workers’ opposition to their being increasing exploited and the associated intensification of conflict.

8

IN THE MIDST OF THE CRISIS

163

However, it was between 1973 and 1979, namely between the first and second world oil crisis, that the profitability of capital had its most drastic slowdown. During this same period, the post-war compromise that had earlier been targeted by revolutionary groups was definitively rejected— but this time by capital. This counter-offensive caught the movements in a state of fragmentation and organizational “delicacy” which undermined their ability to withstand the blow of an epochal crisis. It performed a dual function: on the one hand, as Marx had noted, it served to settle relations among capitalists through market competition when the mass of circulating capital reached such a point as to no longer guarantee adequate rates of profit; on the other hand, it neutralized the economic, social and political prominence of the working class through restrictive economic policies and a colossal reorganization of production: Almost all Western governments will pursue these objectives. Even those that were a priori, politically speaking, most alien to them (for example, the German or French Social Democrats). The offensive will be conducted under the banner of liberalism in its various variants (monetarism, economics of supply…). The key areas will become fighting inflation (through restricting credit, which aims to prevent any inefficient use of capital, eliminating mechanisms for indexing wages on prices…) and de-statalizing the economy. (Bihr 1991, 80)

The role of the state changed considerably: while in the time of Fordism it acted to guarantee the compromise between the classes, and in so doing and in terms of certain functions appeared to be super partes, in the vortex of the profound changes of this period it was deprived of certain fundamental tasks of economic regulation. At the same time, the state function of maintaining order was reinforced, so as to safeguard the new system of accumulation. In the neoliberal rhetoric, aims such as contesting power and authoritarianism and resisting repressive apparatuses under the critique of democracy being nothing but a façade—aims which had been points of strength for the various movements of 1968—were recast as attempts to empty out the nation-state and democracy in favour of transnational demands. On closer inspection, however, the state did not give up its functions in the 1970s at all: rather, it underwent a transformation. In fact, a slow yet inexorable process of “de-democratization of capitalism through the de-economization of democracy” (Streeck 2014, 5) was set in motion thanks to a strategy based on the savvy use of money;

164

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

precisely through state-owned banks, money “served to defuse potentially destabilizing social conflicts, at first by means of inflation, then through increased government borrowing, next through the expansion of private loan markets” (Streeck 2014, xiv). Flooding the economies with money meant generating an illusion of success and nurturing people’s confidence in future prosperity. In other words, it was a way of “buying time” by defusing conflicts and, in so doing, laying the conditions for a real “secession” of capitalism from democracy. In Europe, the crisis of state budgets translated into the erosion of a specific and consolidated model of the welfare state that had served to guarantee the “pact” allowing forms of democracy, albeit imperfect, to coexist for approximately three decades with a mode of production whose very motive principle contained an inherent problem. Streeck emphasizes the changes leading from the fiscal state—the state that in the Glorious Thirties drew its resources from taxation, usually progressive, with capital agreeing to contribute to the welfare state—to the debtor state, which instead had to borrow money to guarantee those services, and later had to support the privatization of aid and welfare (because if it is true that the capital was unwilling to bear the costs of the welfare state, the move to take on some of the fundamental services previously provided by the state offered capital an unprecedented opportunity for valorization): the elimination of postwar social rights through marketization ran parallel to the development of a new form of democracy (what Crouch calls “postdemocracy”), in which political participation was redefined as popular entertainment and disconnected form policy, especially in the sphere of the economy. (Streeck 2014, 73–74)

For the workers’ movement, the new global picture was tantamount to a total collapse: the movement was, in fact, completely unprepared to face the new situation, because its traditional organizations (social democratic, socialist and, in many contexts, such as Italy, even communist) privileged strategies that involved intervening in the very level, the state, that was now so badly disrupted. In the same way, the very foundations of the conflict in the sites of production (the size and standardization of the Fordist factory) were radically reshaped as the labour force was rendered more and more precarious and atomized. The triumph of capitalism over democracy—in political fora as well as in the workplace—had the

8

IN THE MIDST OF THE CRISIS

165

outcome of freeing accumulation from politics and the possible corrective measures that it could have introduced. The Chilean case and, in other ways, a number of “new movements” from the second post-war period had begun to implement a rational alternative involving “Democracy without capitalism, or at least the capitalism we know” (Streeck 2014, 173). Such an alternative is hardly imaginable today, however, in large part because “the type of labour movement that once helped to form the Golden Age of the post-war era belongs to history and will never again arise as historical subject” (Schmidt 2014, 187). It is difficult to imagine that, in that part of the world we define as the West, the movement will ever reappear as the bearer of anti-capitalist and socialist demands. From a materialist point of view, moreover, the new forms of labour exploitation (“the paradigm of flexible accumulation”) appear more pervasive and underhanded (by virtue of being more indirect and diversified) than they were in the era of the Fordist factory; it follows that “it is no longer possible to identify a single worker subjectivity, rather there is a plurality of subjectivities with corresponding styles and models of behaviour that cannot be standardized. The process of social recomposition thus cannot be based exclusively on working conditions” (Bologna and Fumagalli 1997, 161). The aims and means of twenty-first-century socialism should be radically rethought, albeit in a context in which resignation to existing conditions seems to rapidly envelop any whiff of protest. And yet it is also true that—as Marx recalled in 1856—everything seems pregnant with its contrary.

4

Amidst the Rubble: Alan Bihr’s Paths to Renewal

Alongside the official, “monumental” yet already discredited history of communism, there was another, apocryphal history, born out of the October Revolution, that paved the way for many other events from the Spanish Civil War to the Cuban Revolution and 1968. According to this vision, the twentieth century had created a symbiotic link between barbarity and revolution, oscillating constantly between one and the other. After the shock of November 1989, however, this dialectic was buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Instead of unleashing new revolutionary energies, the collapse of state socialism seemed to have depleted the historical trajectory of socialism itself. (Traverso 2016, 18)

166

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

The Soviet regime’s economic planning, providing for rigidly centralized production and distribution policies in the hands of a hypertrophic and irremovable bureaucracy, was destined to collapse under the pressure of turbo-capitalism and the financialization of the economy. With its implosion, however, the libertarian currents of Marxism and anarchism, even if they never felt represented by Soviet developments except in the very first months of the October Revolution, ended up being scrapped as well. Although social democracy had already adopted (neo)liberal positions at the beginning of the 1980s, this very position was overwhelmed by the institutional and ideological collapse of its historical enemy, communism. Indeed, reformism was in turn discredited for having shared the “statist” approach with the revolutionary soul of the labour movement. Such an approach had been under challenge, first by the libertarian critique of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s and then by a socio-economic system that was no longer Keynesian. After 1989, the ruling classes used the label “collectivism” to definitively delegitimize all the representatives of a history—that of the workers’ movement—that they sought to rid themselves of once and for all. The response by European social democracy, victim of its own complicit blindness (having overestimated capitalism’s attachment to democracy), consisted in irreparably liquidating this history in order to embrace with apostate zeal the magnificent and progressive fortunes of a market freed of any kind of corrective mechanism. How to chart a path through the real and symbolic walls that had collapsed in the 1989-1991 three-year period? This is the question raised by Alain Bihr, already mentioned above as a keen interpreter of the 1970s crisis. In his 1991 book From “Storming Heaven” to the “Alternative”, he examines the crisis by analytically distinguishing among three levels, economic, ecological and cultural, even while addressing the phenomenon as a whole in its impact on capitalism, and therefore the workers’ movement. At the same time, however, he notes that the crisis also represented an opportunity in that it set in motion a deep process of rethinking. Bihr’s positive proposals along these lines, which were completely overlooked at the time they were formulated, represent an original socialist, democratic and self-management perspective, connecting him to the tradition we have reconstructed, from Landauer to Poulantzas, by means of elective affinity. Some central elements of his theoretical proposal arise, in contrast, from an examination of contemporary conditions. For example, in analysing the ecological nature of the crisis, he critiques the productivism

8

IN THE MIDST OF THE CRISIS

167

characterizing the different ideologies of the twentieth-century labour movement as a cult of production for production’s sake (Bihr 1991, 111). Thus, in the face of the intrinsically destructive character of capitalism, the socialist mode of production must be guided according to needs and replace the principle of profit maximization with the principle of “maximizing social efficiency” (Bihr 1991, 203). This is not an abstract statement, because it actually calls for the new workers’ movement to question what should be produced (and Bihr thus suggests producing something else) and the way it should be produced (and he thus urges producing in other ways ). All of this rethinking requires decentralizing the productive apparatus and renouncing gigantism wherever possible in order to ensure direct control over processes. Partly on the basis of this principle, Bihr suggests creating an economy operating alternative and parallel to the official one, to begin immediately building a “network of alternative enterprises” led by workers by means of “self-managed democracy”, rejecting the permanent delegation of power and promoting the “turnover of roles, overcoming the division between executive and management roles, and implementation roles” (Bihr 1991, 206–207). This would constitute a beginning, that is, a practical attempt to exit capitalism. Is this idea no more than a utopia tossed out into a world now hopelessly disenchanted? It does not appear so if we follow his reasoning, an argument that moves from economic experimentation to social experimentation. In this case as well, in fact, Bihr’s proposal is to strive to foster a parallel form of sociality aimed at spreading and implementing alternative values, paving the way for a broader struggle for hegemony. This by no means implies avoiding current struggles, giving up conflict or active participation. Quite the opposite. However, it does entail striking a balance between the different moments of political intervention, understanding when it is necessary and appropriate to stay within the system, bringing the struggle and conflict into existing institutions, and when it is necessary and appropriate to stay outside, providing an example of a different way of living and laying the foundations for the socialist institutions of the future. What is striking in Bihr’s reasoning is the lucidity with which he perceives all the risks inherent in such an experimentalist perspective, when he warns that alternative practices may be “manipulated and become ways of managing and even self-managing economic marginalisation and social exclusion” (Bihr 1991, 210). How to achieve these goals? Bihr’s “strategy” is based on the idea that we need to set aside the myth of the revolution as a cataclysm. In this case as well, he shares this idea with many of the other thinkers presented in this book. Change, on the other hand, “is necessarily a

168

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

wide-ranging effort”, requiring, in the first place, making the most of the possibilities that concretely exist here and now: “This may become reality if an organized construction of counter-powers in society is put in place” (Bihr 1991, 225). It is a matter of acknowledging that the objective capitalist reality is a cogent one over which individuals do not have direct and immediate control but which they can overturn, in favourable circumstances, if and only if they are able to intervene with a surplus of subjectivity. And such subjectivity must be prepared. After all, the socialist evolution of the world is not an event implicit in any historical necessity: only the organized subjectivity of human beings who know how to read and interpret reality and intervene accordingly may pave the way for a different history of humanity. This is the argumentative context in which Bihr’s emphasis on “counter-powers”, the cornerstone of his entire theoretical construction and means through which a renewed workers’ movement may seek to challenge the state for control of society, must be framed. A “counter-power” opposes the monopoly of dominant groups on the social practice and is “a structure capable of dissidence or secession from society” (Bihr 1991, 226).5 The aim of counter-powers lies in revolution, that is, the integral socialization of social power. Bihr’s idea is that a network of counter-powers should spread into the heart of society, promoting the “self-management of struggles” and the dissemination of “alternative logics”, that is to say, wide-ranging or circumscribed projects completely different from those imposed by capital or the state: a real “counter-society”. In this way, there is no longer any opposition between reformist and revolutionary practices, since counter-powers deal both with immediate issues and problems and with “historical” or longer-term objectives. And their objective is not even to seize the levers of state domination but to replace them, that is, to replace the monopoly of social power by one or more dominant classes with “a power deriving from the self-activity of the masses, which re-appropriate the direction, organization and control of social practice” (Bihr 1991, 231). For this reason as well, it is important to self-manage social processes, both micro and macro, to “learn to do without the state” (Bihr 1991, 232).6

5 Italics by the author. 6 Italics by the author.

8

IN THE MIDST OF THE CRISIS

169

Such a strategy requires organization, and it cannot be embodied by a traditional political party aiming to capture state power by transforming society through decrees; the party form is to be abandoned, since it has developed alienating forms of militancy and exasperated centralism, functioning similarly to the very state it sought to appropriate by bureaucratizing itself and ending up confusing immediate objectives and historical perspectives, that is, the means with the ends. Therefore, at least in Western social formations, it is necessary to imagine federalist type of structures that harmonically combine “the real autonomy of the basic elements” with “central direction” (Bihr 1991, 235). It is a matter of conceiving organisations in which power is transmitted through a bottom-up process: the basic bodies should be granted maximum “tactical” autonomy, and direct democracy should guarantee everyone the possibility of participating in strategic decisions. There would be central bodies, but they would be composed of delegates with a limited mandate that could be revoked at any time. On the ethical level, then, the life of the new organizations of the workers’ movement “should become the ongoing evidence that a different society is possible” (Bihr 1991, 236). The “paths to renewal” clearly imply strengthening the proletariat, and yet, Bihr specifies, although the working class is the primary bearer of the weight of exploitation, it is not the only class that is a victim of capitalism: If we continue to believe that the centrality of the class struggle of the proletariat aimed at human emancipation is well founded, it seems instead necessary to abandon any position of organizational centrality within the workers’ movement, both by the party (as in the Social Democratic model) and by the trade union (as in the revolutionary trade unionist model). What we would like to see as the future model of the workers’ movement is based on a plurality of organisations of different nature (associations, mutual societies, trade unions, specific movements, political avant-gardes), each active at its own level and in its own field, but capable of converging its actions into networks of local federated counter-powers so as to pave the way for a global counter-power in society. Each type of organization would have its own role and none would have the right to absorb or direct the others. (Bihr 1991, 248)7

7 Italics by the author.

170

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

This pluralistic and experimentalist organization of a renewed anticapitalist and socialist movement does not in any way deny the role of avant-gardes; it does, however, seek to avoid at all cost the crystallization of such frontline actors into a “general staff”, that is to say, an immovable elite considered infallible and tasked with leading the masses to revolution: If the avant-garde thus locates itself within the movement, it constitutes its exploratory head, the advanced point; the general staff instead locates itself outside the movement, it seeks to guide it according to a strategy or a plan of struggle designed from the outside. (Bihr 1991, 250)

In Bihr’s thought, socialism moves out of its “classical” phase, with the class, its intellectuals, the union, the party and conquering the state, to enter the (still) hazy phase of experimentalism, pluralism and critique of the traditional conception of revolution—a phase which, in the absence of better-suited definitions, we are forced to define “post-classical”.8 This phase seems to have made its first appearance in the new movements stirring the social panorama in the transition between the two centuries.

References Adamo, Pietro. 2016. L’anarchismo americano nel Novecento. Da Emma Goldman ai Black Bloc. Milan: Franco Angeli. Allende, Salvador. 1970. “First Speech to the Chilean Parliament After His Election. https://www.marxists.org/archive/allende/1970/september/ 20.htm. Accessed 25 February 2020. Aruzza, Cinzia. 2013. Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism. Malta: Merlin. Balestrini, Nanni, and Primo Moroni. 1997 [1988]. L’orda d’oro 1968–1977. La grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale. Milan: Feltrinelli. Bihr, Alain. 1991. Du «Grand soir» à «l’alternative» . Le mouvement ouvrier européen en crise. Paris: Les éditions ouvrières. Bologna, Sergio, and Andrea Fumagalli (eds.). 1997. Il lavoro autonomo di seconda generazione. Scenari del postfordismo in Italia. Milan: Feltrinelli.

8 Regarding the concepts of “classical” and “post-classical” used in relation to anarchism, see Adamo (2016).

8

IN THE MIDST OF THE CRISIS

171

Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello. 2017 [1999]. The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso. Corossacz, Anna (ed.). 1975. I mille giorni di Allende. L’azione del governo di Unidad popular in 125 documenti. Quaderni di Mondoperaio. Supplement to no. 12, December. Cirillo, Lidia. 2015. Per una storia delle storie del femminismo. Communia Network. http://www.communianet.org/gender/una-storia-delle-storie-delfemminismo-5. Accessed 20 May 2020. Elgueta, Edson. 2018. La Batalla de Chile: los cordones industriales y el debate sobre la toma del poder. https://www.laizquierdadiario.cl/La-Batalla-deChile-los-Cordones-Industriales-y-el-debate-sobre-la-toma-del-poder-112982. Accessed 20 May 2020. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden—And How to Reclaim It. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commen tisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal. Accessed 14 October 2013. Lombardi, Riccardo. 1973. La lezione cilena. Il Ponte 29: 1368–1370. Löwy, Michael. 2004. “Prefacio” to Gaudichaud, Franck. Poder Popular y Cordones Industriales. Testimonios sobre el movimiento popular urbano, 1970–1973. Santiago de Chile: Lom Ediciones, Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana. Also available at www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=5430. Accessed 24 October 2017. Schmidt, Werner. 2014. From Fordism to High-Tech Capitalism: A Political Economy of the Labour Movement in the Baltic Sea Region. In The Sea of Identities. A Century of Baltic and East European Experiences with Nationality, Class, and Gender, vol. 60, ed. Norbert Göt, 173–191. Stockholm: Södertörn Academic Studies. Streeck, Wolfgang. 2014. Buying Time. The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso. Traverso, Enzo. 2016. Malinconia di sinistra. Una tradizione nascosta. Milano: Feltrinelli. English edition: Traverso, Enzo. 2017. Left-Wing Melancholia. Marxism, History, and Memory. Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 9

(Tentative) Conclusions

1

A Compact Current?

From 1917 to the end of the 1970s, an alternative tradition took shape on the margins of the consolidated ideological currents of the workers’ movement, an alternative that resisted neat classification among the classical canons of socialism, communism or anarchism. Indeed, the thinkers we have presented reformulate the classic conceptual pairings (reform/revolution, state/society, party/movement, politics/economics, utopia/realism…) in ways that go beyond the usual schemes that have characterized those traditions. The journey we have charted featuring some important figures of twentieth-century socialist and anarchist debate does not purport to land on the doorstep of some imaginary museum of the great anti-capitalist works and protagonists of the past, perhaps replacing Antonio Gramsci’s portrait with that of Panzieri, Rosa Luxemburg’s works with those of Kollontai’s and so on. More modestly, instead, we sought to present a set of thinkers, homogeneous yet not directly connected, to demonstrate that the roots of a socialist thought for the twenty-first century are to be found in the long twentieth century. Such thought must cope with a three-part crisis. First, the crisis of the social subject, the working class, which in the past was invested with a privileged role on the road to revolutionary

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8_9

173

174

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

change; second, the crisis of the idea of progress, that is, the conviction, held by Kautsky, Lenin or Gramsci himself, that the working class and socialist movement embodied a future destined to be radiant in part thanks to enormous technological advancements and the development of social productive power; and finally, the crisis of the statist option characterizing many twentieth-century revolutionary perspectives, persuaded as they were that anti-capitalist strategy should involve merely conquering power, i.e. framing the state as an object to be seized in order to change the structure of society. It is therefore a matter of reformulating the notion of the revolutionary class. Today, it comprises factory workers, tertiary workers and knowledge workers as well as the unemployed and working-poor, not to mention those (mostly women) who—in the heart of capitalism and peripheral countries alike—devote themselves to forms of reproductive work, thereby prefiguring a world free from the totalitarian logic of capitalist valorization. In short, it is a question of understanding how to connect up subaltern subjects in the awareness that a deadly mix of globalization, deregulation and automation (processes exacerbated by the current pandemic) is swelling their ranks to the bursting point. A sociology of subalterns has yet to be formulated, but it cannot be forged without considering the encounter of the workers’ movement with other social movements: Landauer intuited this point, and it seems to us that our Interludes focus on two epochal phases of twentieth-century revolutionary history, 1936 Spain and Italy’s long 1968, which illustrate that revolutionary potential developed in terrain in which the borders of the revolutionary class and its internal hierarchies were already being redefined. Therefore, the idea that the only time a free and egalitarian society can emerge is when capitalism has reached its highest level of development, still today identified with technical and scientific “progress”, needs to be questioned. As Panzieri anticipated, the world of today’s capital coincides with pure barbarity. No one knows this better than all the people in the heart of “advanced” capitalism excluded from the labour market—with no possibility of re-entry—and thus from society tout court. The same is true of the victims of ecological disasters, desertification and wars over access to water in the peripheries of the world. Finally, it is a matter of discarding an idea that has united the Social Democratic tradition (with the SPD, the German Social Democratic Party in the front lines), the Leninist tradition (with the communist parties

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

175

loyal to Bolshevism) and even the anarchist tradition. Indeed, anarchist thinkers were often equally responsible for expressing their aversion to the state as a form of hostility towards an object that needed to be destroyed sic et simpliciter, while other lines of thought framed it as something to be conquered and subjugated for higher purposes of emancipation. However, as many of “our” thinkers perceived, the state is a complex social relationship that cannot simply be destroyed or conquered without also changing the bonds among the human beings that fundamentally constitute it. We are well aware that there are marked differences between the work of Mattick, an attentive analyst of capitalism as a mode of production, and the work of Landauer, for example, who was convinced that the moment of circulation was crucial for understanding modern society and capitalism as a way of life; likewise, we do not deny that the role Kollontai attributed to unions is different from the equally important role Meidner saw them as playing. In the same way, it is easy to see that Panzieri, educated in the cultural climate of Italian Marxism traditionally imbued by a certain degree of historicism, might have seemed eccentric in focusing on the question of worker’s autonomy in the eyes of a Marxist thinker such as Poulantzas, whose philosophical development took place in Althusserianinfluenced French structuralist Marxism. More than the differences distinguishing Landauer, Kollontai, Mattick, Panzieri, Meidner and Poulantzas, however, it is the elements uniting their thought that we see as important. Even today, they continue to represent the decisive elements for at least imagining an egalitarian social way of life, free and at the same time capable of ensuring a decent life to the vast majority of human beings, respecting the environment that surrounds them along with all other living beings: the principle of self -organization, and critique of the political party as an external avantgarde; anti-capitalism, and the critique of its inherent militarism and war-mongering tendencies; the critique of the Soviet experience, and in particular the prospect of “socialism in a single country” in favour of an internationalism coherently lived and practised. Let us try to explain more fully. All of these thinkers are united by the principle of self-organization: the active and conscious participation of the working class not only in the productive process, but also in political, cultural and social life as a whole. This emphasis on subaltern subjects playing the leading role binds all the authors to the spirit of the First International, convinced, like Marx

176

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

was, that “the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves”. There is no trace, in the work of the thinkers presented here, of any philosophy of history, and this constitutes a significant point: in the course of the twentieth century, the habit of identifying socialism (especially in its Marxian and Marxist articulations) with determinism brought the very idea of abolishing exploitation to be associated with authoritarianism, despotism or even totalitarianism, and thus discredited. The militant intellectuals gathered here believed, in some cases based on a careful reading of Marx, that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx 1852). Of course, the interaction among social subjects produces an objectivity to which individuals can be subjugated. However, the intellectual and moral significance of socialism, from Marx to Poulantzas and Bihr, lies precisely in the conviction that people can free themselves thanks to knowledge, critical analysis and goal-oriented action; such activity is always human, never imposed by higher entities. The contradiction between productive forces and relations of production, which in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx identified as the driving force behind the social and political transformation of societies, therefore does not dissolve by itself or automatically, and certainly not in a predetermined direction. Rather, it is shaped by social and political conflicts, the outcomes of which depend directly on the action of both classes and individuals. It follows that these thinkers did not treat the discourse on reform or revolution in a rigid or identity-based manner, that is, the way it was framed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during the great crisis of Marxism featuring the major figures of socialism from Kautsky to Bernstein, from Luxemburg to Lenin. After all, if we do not already know how history will end or if socialism will truly prevail over “barbarism”, we cannot even place restrictions on the choice of means. For example, Meidner’s proposed reform involving wage-earners’ funds escapes this trap of rigidity because it represents one of the later twentieth century’s most powerful attempts to peacefully and gradually break away from capitalism, that is, a real attempt to launch a phase of transition in the West. Not particularly interested in doctrinal disputes, the exponents of this group coherently linked theoretical reflection and critical understanding of the present moment to direct engagement in the movements of their

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

177

times. They considered it impossible to separate thought and action, let alone establish lines of hierarchical demarcation between intellectual and manual work. Only two of the thinkers presented here held leading roles for some time in the political organizations to which they belonged: the anarchist Landauer and socialist Panzieri. On the whole, an implicit rejection of political professionalism does not translate into abject forms of anti-politics, but it does at least inspire a rigorous critique of politics and the peculiar characteristics of power in capitalism. And this is precisely the direction Bihr took when he proposed to draw a clear distinction in militant engagement and struggles between the role of stimulus, clarification and direction played by the “avant-garde” (a body which is always provisional) and the stable and omniscient role that the “major states” of parties, trade unions and even many movements would like to claim for themselves. Naturally, the trait of anti-capitalism distinctly characterizes the physiognomy of these figures. Mattick represented this aspect in an emblematic way, reconstructing and continuing as he did the Marxian criticism of political economy. The conviction in his thought was that it is impossible to hypothesize a humane version of capitalism; the very logic of a capitalist system—based on the ever-increasing exploitation of labour— invalidates such a hypothesis a priori. The critique of capitalism thus immediately entails a critique of both the market1 and, at the same time, social-democratic reformism. Such reformism is seen as insufficient whether it be timid or—as was clearly the case after the Congress of Bad Godesberg (1959), when the German SPD accepted the logic of enterprise—complicit in the anti-grassroots policies of capitalism itself. The condemnation of Soviet socialism constituted an equally radical if much more bitter position, even though these thinkers’ diagnoses of its 1 “Non-market socialism” is the focus of the 1987 book by Crump, John and Rubel, Maximilien: Non-market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York: St. Martin’s Press; the editors warn that it might seem like a pleonastic statement: “If we use words carefully, it is superfluous to define ‘socialism’ with the adjective ‘non-market’, because socialism is by definition a society without a market. The market cannot coexist with socialism because socialism means that society owns and controls both the means of production and the goods that result from productive activity” (p. 1; translated from Italian). A society in which the production of goods is destined for exchange, the authors ironically suggest, has another name: capitalism. However, just as the absence of a market is not sufficient to identify socialist social forms, so the presence of marginal forms of mercantile exchange may—in pure theory—not affect the essence of a society headed towards socialism, i.e. a society in which production is not a market-oriented end in itself.

178

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

pathologies covered a wide range: while on one end Kollontai saw the Soviet system as the degeneration of an originally healthy entity, on the other Mattick repudiated the alleged proletarian character of the October Revolution itself, interpreting it instead as a petty-bourgeois revolution and, as such, destined to disappoint the hopes of the working class. Such critical positions took issue with every aspect, from the medium (the party) to the process (the transformation of the state of exception into normality) and the arrival point (the nature of the regime that took hold in the Soviet Union). None of these thinkers believed that the political party, structured in top-down or militarist forms, represented the vehicle best suited to bringing about socialist change in the world. They saw such a party, acting as the depository of unquestionable truth (the correct interpretation of the historical trajectory), as condemning the revolution to a nefarious, two-fold loss of direction: on the one hand, implementing socialism as a plan preordained (from above) rather than a process unfolding on the basis of trial and error, the latter overcome through constant dialogue between grass-roots and central bodies; and on the other hand, the tendency to dispense with democracy since, in the light of the party’s infallibility, it comes to be seen as simply superfluous. It was this process that Kollontai took issue with as early as 1921: an endless state of emergency, lasting well beyond the chronological span of the civil war, became the Bolshevik leadership’s justification for militarizing the economy and criminalizing dissent. This thesis that authoritarian involution is a genetic mutation of the Leninist party, that is, a possibility found in its very constitutive code, seems to be more historically and politically fruitful than Mattick’s stance, although his thinking on the theme of “state capitalism” was pioneering. While Mattick focused on asserting the absolute alterity between the October Revolution and the proletarian revolution, the idea of an inherent authoritarian bent invites us to question the risks underlying a centralized and state-centred revolutionary process. What left these authors astonished was, above all, the anthropological metamorphosis of so many honest Bolsheviks (as Poulantzas warns us, the proletariat must also defend itself from itself—and above all from its leaders) as they transformed from supporters of democracy to persecutors of their own comrades, if the latter diverged from the party line. In reacting to the Bolshevik dogma of infallibility, the authors addressed in this book express an ethics the substance of which consists in the means of working for socialism corresponding to the ends of such

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

179

action. They completely dismiss the hypothesis that luminous ends justify even shadowy means. After all, it is unworkable to envisage a future society based on the self-management of direct producers even while stripping unions—the expression of direct class self-organization—of any authority over economic planning; likewise, it is inconsistent to hypothesize a socialist society based on self-government with the state destined to become extinct and at the same time develop an all-encompassing, even totalitarian, apparatus to achieve this goal. In the same way, it is unacceptable to sermonize about exploited and oppressed social subjects playing a leading role but then demand they be enrolled into the ranks of a political party built in the form of an army or, worse, a church. Among the militant thinkers presented so far, there are frequent tributes to the work of Rosa Luxemburg. Indeed, her “prophetic” reading of the fate of democracy in the new socialist state warned that failing to recognize the intrinsic value of “formal” freedoms would lead the state to transform even substantial freedoms into mere window dressing and eventually discard them altogether; even decades later, these warnings resonated in all their painful lucidity. In their writings, these authors insist on democracy from the bottom up, and in Poulantzas’ work, this focus is bolstered by the explicit call for institutional guarantees to protect political freedoms. This insistence stems from the awareness that a society lacking in pluralism hands over itself to the hypertrophy of political police forces, bureaucratic inefficiency, waste and the maintenance, or reproduction from a certain point onwards, of the same exploitation of human beings, the abolition of which constitutes the main tenet of socialism. To some extent, however, these authors’ understandable libertarian concerns take priority over the question of socializing the economy in its materiality and concreteness: how can this process be launched, and safeguarded, if not by imposing a limit on pluralism itself, at least wherever such pluralism allows for the possibility of restoring capitalism? Internationalism is a necessary yet not sufficient condition for the construction of a socialist society, with antimilitarism as a logical corollary. Even when they acknowledge the effectiveness and importance of national belonging (which always transcends the state) as an element of individual and collective identity generated by language, traditions, folklore, all these socialists see themselves as part of a yet-to-be-constructed ideal nation in which local specificities are not grounds for excluding foreigners, but

180

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

sources of cultural and material enrichment. What is more, although politically socialism can be developed along specific and original lines, it must necessarily be able to count on an international movement for support. Generally, therefore, this group of thinkers accepted and welcomed forms of transnational organization. Most of them, it is worth noting, experienced the consequences of different but comparable configurations of nationalism on their own skin: Stalinist nationalism, in the case of Kollontai and the German imperial one for the Jewish anarchist Landauer; Mattick and Meidner, also Germans, spent much of their lives in the United States and Sweden, respectively; the Greek native Poulantzas experienced and studied authoritarian and pro-fascist phenomena in Europe after moving to France. None of them believed that socialist experiments can survive for long in a hostile geopolitical context: ultimately, the spirit that resurfaces in their lives and perspectives is the original one of the First International, before the initial break between political socialism and libertarian socialism. For example, Bihr demonstrates this stance when claiming the contemporary relevance of “communism as a project” but in a sense based on democracy and self-government rather than a hasty “statistic solution”, and capable of harmoniously interweaving the needs of the individual and the needs of the community. It was this direction that the so-called movement of movements began to pursue a few years later.

2

The Movement of Movements

Contradicting the authoritative scholars who had prophesied an epic shift in the dynamics of social movements in which postmaterialist values (embodied by the middle classes) supplanted struggles for economic equality, at the turn of the twenty-first century the increasingly disastrous consequences of the end of the compromise between capital and labour brought social rights-based conflicts back to centre-stage, although this time integrated with a focus on the issues (such as environmental sustainability or gender differences) that had emerged on the horizon of the previous phase of struggles. At the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, in fact, a movement appeared demanding the attention of public opinion and was hastily designated by the media as “no global”. In reality, participating activists rejected this name, preferring “new global”, “alter-globalization”

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

181

or “movement for global justice”, to name just a few self-chosen definitions. The terminological dispute points to a different reading of globalization: it was not rejected in and of itself but rather in its neoliberal formulation, and the movement called for making the most of the communicative, technological and cognitive potential of global processes. While the movement made its media debut with the “battle of Seattle” in which approximately 75,000 people protested against the WTO and with it the principles driving the international financial and economic institutions, its turning point took place in 2001. In January, the first World Social Forum (WSF) was held in Porto Alegre with the aim of bringing together, discussing and coordinating both local and national movements, thanks in part to the stimulus it gave to the launching of regional forums. Since then, it has been organized regularly almost every year, several times in Porto Alegre, but also in other continents; after the boom of those first years, however, it has gradually been losing visibility. In conjunction with the Brazilian WSF in Davos, Switzerland, activists demonstrated against the World Economic Forum (January 27); a few weeks later, a protest erupted in Naples where the Global Forum, an economic body sponsored by the UN (15–17 March), was being convened. “Incidents” had been already reported in demonstrations outside of Italy (such as the one in Gothenburg, against the European Summit, on 15 June 2001), but in Naples the situation deteriorated: the police charged violently into the crowd trying to enter the red zone and later the injured protesters who had been taken to the hospital were subjected to violence, both verbal and physical. No officers were ever convicted. On 20 July, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Genoa to contest the G8 meeting amid intense police surveillance—and yet the groups defined by the media as “Black Bloc” or actors who had infiltrated it were allowed to roam the city for hours like the hordes of Genghis Khan, an occurrence that was never fully explained. On that day of protest, Italy earned a shameful first place: the first member of the alter-globalization movement killed by the forces of law and order in the Western world (there had certainly been no shortage of deaths in the countries of the Global South). In the course of violent clashes, twentythree-year-old Carlo Giuliani was killed by a carabiniere: “another death in the streets” (Grispigni 2014). It was coherent with the all-Italian “tradition” of treating social struggles as a problem of public order to be addressed using force.

182

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

On the evening of 21 July, the police raided two schools that were being used by the demonstrators as meeting and resting places in order to search them; the action ended with 93 arrests and 82 injured. Of these, 63 were taken to the hospital while the remaining 19 were taken to the police barracks in Bolzaneto. What happened before and after the arrests has been summarized in the judgements of the European Court of Human Rights, and in fact, the court has repeatedly condemned Italy for acts of torture (a crime not included in the Italian criminal code, and therefore not punishable) perpetrated by the police against Italian and foreign citizens, both men and women, ranging from very young to over 60 (Davies 2008): “In July 2001 there was a violation of human rights in Italy on a scale unprecedented in Europe in recent history”, stated Neris Lee, international secretary of Amnesty International (Ginori 2002). The movement reacted vigorously, intensifying its meetings and protests. In the course of the numerous meetings held as part of these struggles and the world, continental and national social forums, anti-neoliberalists (not necessarily anti-capitalists), ecologists, degrowth advocates, religious activists, parties of the so-called radical left, localists and indigenous movements coexisted and engaged in dialogue. These currents, often characterized by internal tensions between reformist platforms and revolutionary positions, came together in this movement with specifically anti-capitalist groups as well as the magmatic world of social antagonism. This plurality also gave rise to heterogeneous forms of struggle unfolding side by side, from lobbying and cooperation agreements (familiar to actors such as environmentalists and trade unions) to direct action. Indeed, the latter was a point of intense friction. The majority of the movement opted for non-violent forms of struggle in the belief that such methods were consistent with their ethical principles while ensuring visibility: roadblocks, street parties, breaking into red areas, occupying spaces, civil disobedience and the auto-reduction of prices. More radical groups, beginning with the Black Bloc, interpreted direct action as also encompassing physical confrontation. Despite the variety of guiding principles and forms of struggle, the different threads of the movement were all driven by the same pressing need for a form of political participation not satisfied by political parties. With representative democracy dispossessed by the dictatorship of transnational economic-financial institutions and the progressive disempowerment of elected assemblies in favour of executive ones, the

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

183

movement argued, the old structures must be replaced by a new form of democracy, a participatory democracy aimed at enhancing popular control over political decisions and the management of resources. The debate around and experiments in participatory budgeting were particularly lively (although in many cases, in Italy at least, such initiatives were turned into mere window dressing by centre-left administrations in search of relegitimation). Other issues around which the various components of the movement converged were anti-racism, environmentalism (and thus the search for an alternative mode of production), global social justice and the autonomy of peoples, all consistently addressed through a gender perspective. This emphasis on renewed forms of democracy was reflected in the movement’s attempt to rethink organizational structures, rejecting hierarchy and centralism in favour of participation from below, a cooperative approach to decision-making and horizontalism. In the arena of organization just like that of ideas, the focus was not on bringing everyone together in a single hegemonic model but rather treating diversity as a resource. The movement’s web-like form of self-representation is effectively captured in the Zapatista slogan WE WANT A WORLD WHERE MANY WORLDS FIT and it also embraced the strategic choice modelled by Marcos‘ army to pursue not the seizure of state power, but rather the creation of spaces of self-government. As might be expected, this experimentation also displayed the weaknesses characterizing the movement of movements. Given the absence of official representatives, the proliferation of documents which were inevitably only partial in terms of both content and consensus, and the rejection of higher-level coordinating structures meant that many issues, both analytical and strategic, remained undefined. Some of more significant of these unresolved issues are the movement’s relationship with political power (which later assumed a particular meaning in those Latin American countries where progressive forces took on governmental positions) and its verdict on capitalism (insurmountable horizon or corpse to bury once and for all?).

3

At the Intersection of Class, Gender and Ethnicity---And Environment

The characteristics of the alter-globalization movement are unprecedented with respect to twentieth-century history; it is not surprising, therefore, that it revisited the history of the First International. It was

184

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Lidia Cirillo in particular who clarified the form of this rediscovery. Indeed, it has not been a simple matter of “returning” to an earlier moment, for two reasons: the first, elementary one, is that history does not travel backwards; the second is that it would be self-defeating to expunge an entire century, the twentieth, which also involved liberating events and processes of emancipation. Nevertheless, retracing the history of the First International means raising questions about the problems it had to face, how it overcame them (or, rather, was overwhelmed by them) and what tangled knots remain to be unravelled by those taking part in a revolutionary tradition: the organizational forms of class struggle, the question of alliances and the ideological battle for an interpretation of everyday life that is alternative to the dominant one. Founded in London in 1864, the International Working Men Association sought a new road compared to previous forms of workers’ mobilization characterized by corporatism and a local focus. This new road was also envisaged as safeguarding pluralism, both political and organizational. In fact, it brought together divergent currents (English trade-unionism, French Proudhon-inspired mutual aid, Italian, French and Polish democratism, Blanquism, anarchism and communism) in a multitude of “parties”, unions and circles of various kinds. Marx, the inspirer and creator of the International, imbued this amalgam with his class-oriented approach even while respecting the federative structure of the association, open to heterogeneous contributions. By virtue of this last aspect and its ability to begin from the local level (the experiences of national workers’ movements) to forge a unitary global vision through debates, multi-lingual publications and international conferences, this initiative was decidedly more in tune with today’s anti-capitalist movements than the rigid a-democratic centralism of the third-internationalist tradition. The challenges the First International faced were likewise contemporary: its trajectory was marked by the rise of ideas and organizational forms that culminated in the brief parable of the Paris Commune; when the Commune was dismantled, the organization began to decline. It had also been undermined for some time by growing rifts between moderates and revolutionaries and, within the latter circle, between Bakuninian anarchists and Marxist-oriented communists. Then, as now, anti-capitalist movements found themselves caught between repression, on the one hand, and internal fragmentation, on the other.

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

185

The class composition of the International seems to have been quite contemporary as well. Its elite was made up of skilled craftsmen who demonstrated their capacity for self-organization by implementing forms of struggle that were highly radical in terms of form, but also uncoordinated and often paradoxically moderate in terms of substance. Its rank-and-file, on the other hand, included temporary workers, young intellectuals and artists, and women lacking social positions: figures whose uncertain existence can be seen reflected in many individuals today as well. The theories of intersectionality developed between the twentieth and the twenty-first century are based precisely on the rejection of any project of “class” emancipation that overlooks gender and ethnic specificities in the name of Eurocentric universalism. The starting point for such theories is the recognition that the worlds subjugated by capital are highly heterogenous, beginning from the fault line dividing rich countries from poor ones and continuing with the internal hierarchies within each country among regular and undocumented workers, workers with permanent positions and precarious ones, the unemployed and employed, reproductive and productive workers, and migrants and natives. On paper, all of these figures belong to the same class by virtue of their shared condition of exploitation; in reality, however, they are separated by gender rules, processes of socialization, claims-making, lifestyles and subjectivities which are often radically different and which make the task of coordinating the struggles of these various categories—and they are engaged in struggles!—highly problematic. While the term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the cornerstones of this approach were identified by Patricia Hill Collins in her landmark work Black Feminist Thought (1990): intersectionality is an “analysis claiming that systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of a social organisation” (Collins 2000, 299). Intersectionality urges the left to recognize the complexity of social conflict without framing the interests of white male workers as universal interests. There is a risk, however, that “class” interpreted through this lens will be deprived of its transformative power and, moreover, that the same fate might befall the categories of gender and ethnicity if they are interpreted exclusively as identity, albeit socially constructed identity, rather than as social relationships stemming from the dominant mode of production. Since this has in fact been the prevailing interpretation, it is not surprising that intersectionality has risen to the status of

186

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

mainstream theory in the European Union (yet another example of incorporating potentially radical thinking within a conceptual and institutional framework that dismantles it). Nevertheless, intersectionality raises an enduring problem that twentyfirst-century socialism cannot avoid addressing: in bottom-up struggles, how can identities be brought into synergy when they are not only distinct, and sometimes distant, but also changing over time in that different stages of capitalism entail different constellations of class, gender and ethnicity? According to Judith Butler, the lowest common denominator is to be found in precariousness; hence, her interest in the way precariousness might constitute a “site of alliance” (Butler 2015, 27) among social groups that have little in common beyond precariousness, or who sometimes even view each other with distrust and antagonism: indeed, precariousness characterizes both sexual minorities and the unemployed—as well as Palestinians or Kurds. Cinzia Arruzza sums up the matter as follows: The point is not whether class comes before gender or gender before class, the point is rather how gender and class intertwine in capitalist production and power relations to give rise to a complex reality, and it makes little sense and is not very useful to attempt to reduce these to a simple formula. The point is, therefore how class and gender can be combined together in a political project able to take action avoiding two specular dangers: the temptation of mashing the two realities together, making gender a class or class a gender, and the temptation to pulverize power relations and exploitative relations to see nothing but a series of single oppressions lined up beside each other and reluctant to be included within a comprehensive liberation project. (Arruzza 2013, 128)

Although the encounter between feminism and Marxism is fraught with mutual misunderstandings (Arruzza speaks of a “dangerous liaison”), Ashley Bohrer’s reconstruction aids us in identifying a non-dominant yet highly fruitful historical thread in which intersectionality and historical materialism converge as part of an analysis that views class-based divisions as inextricably intertwined with a regime of ethnic, sexual and gender oppression perpetrated by colonialist capitalism. It is important to recall that Marx’s thought had already expressed an awareness of this intertwining. Ecofeminism, which identifies capitalist patriarchy as the cause of the planetary crisis, contributes to enriching the debate on intersectionality;

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

187

under this patriarchal reign, it argues, “the enclosure and commodification of nature echoes the enclosure and commodification of women’s laboring bodies” (Salleh 2019). Reproductive work, that is, the ability to perpetuate biological cycles (what women do through care activities, but also peasants and gatherers), is at the centre of this analysis. Although it constitutes the foundation of every society, the fact that such labour is not monetized means that is not recognized by the social sciences or Marxism. The anthropocentric dualism humanity vs. nature that permeates even the left (including feminists) has prevented these subjects—marginal in relation to the centres of the capitalist economy—from being considered full-fledged political actors, an eco-centric labour class. As Silvia Federici has written, the left has not posed the question of how to bring together the many proliferating commons that are being defended, developed and fought for, so that they can form a cohesive whole and provide a foundation for a new mode of production. (Federici 2018, 106)

The centrality of reproductive work—so evident in the “suburbs” of the world—can also be seen in the urban areas of the West when living conditions are endangered by austerity policies: this scenario appeared in Greece and Spain following the 2008 financial crisis and could recur in many countries in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Given this fact, a feminist gaze on the commons is essential: historically, women have been much more dependent on natural assets than men and consequently more heavily penalized by their privatization, and indeed women have often been the first to mobilize in opposition to such privatization. What the history of these struggles teaches us is that sharing the material means of reproduction creates a link between the human beings who participate in it, a link so powerful that it constitutes a bulwark against the capitalist colonization of their lives. In industrialized countries, the move to re-appropriate natural goods and share reproductive work has yet to be pursued; through trial and error, such a move would overthrow the division among production, reproduction and consumption that capitalism has imposed. Despite its indeterminacy, this is an unavoidable passage, Federici argues, if we want to train ourselves in self-government and pursue the interpretation of history as a collective project.

188

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Elsewhere, in one of those “peripheries” alternately forgotten and manipulated by global capitalism, such experimentation has been carried much further, albeit in a dramatic context.

4

Between Disaster and Hope

Beyond the admirable yet fragmentary initiatives such as the selfmanagement of individual production units or small geographical areas that have been developed, especially in Latin America, frequently involving cross-pollination between socialism and populism, one of the most systematic experiments in “intersectional” self-government carried out in recent years was born in a theatre of war. Is it possible, in such a context, to imagine “encountering violence without reproducing its terms” (Butler 2015, 187)? The Movement for a Democratic Society (Tev-Dem) in the Rojava region of Northern Syria (since 2016 included under the banner of the Democratic Federation of North Rojava-Syria) has risen to this challenge, repeatedly resisting, opposing and defeating fundamentalism and laying the foundations for a vision of society based on equality, freedom and the recognition of diversity. Although the war in Syria has been under the spotlight of the international press for many years, it took quite a while for public opinion to become aware of the heroic Kurdish resistance to ISIS encroachment. Many months after Kobane was liberated in February 2015, the New York Times finally dedicated an article to Rojava, reporting that “the Kurds are there not only to fight against the Islamic State, but also to defend a precious experiment in direct democracy” (Ross 2015). Historically, Kurdistan has been a stateless nation, divided between Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), founded in 1978 on ideological bases similar to Marxism-Leninism, has always struggled for an independent Kurdish nation-state. After the 1991 war, the regional government of Kurdistan in Iraq was granted special, autonomous status. In 2005, the PKK made official a highly important shift in its strategy based on the approach developed by Abdullah Öcalan during his imprisonment in Turkish prisons, ongoing since 1999: instead of trying to construct a traditional state, the Kurds turned to democratizing the territories in which they live, aiming at autonomy and self-defence. Based in part on his readings of the famous American anarchist Murray Bookchin, Öcalan proposes to build a new society here and now, one in which power flows from the bottom up that is founded on

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

189

city-level assemblies (councils) and increasingly larger structures run by elected delegates with imperative mandate. Öcalan “began to advocate for a kind of stateless democracy, built on the three pillars of women’s equality, ecology, and peace” (Levi Strauss 2016, 10). This is a form of Democratic Confederalism enacted through direct democracy, as summarized in the brochure the Kurdish diaspora disseminated internationally in 2011 (Öcalan 2011). This new vision was welcomed by the Democratic Society Congress, a set of associations and movements linked to the PKK in North Kurdistan (Turkey), then taken up by the Democratic Union Party (PYD, founded in 2003) in Rojava, which has tried to implement its principles in concrete terms. On 19 July 2012, a true revolution was launched against the Baathist regime and then, when ISIS besieged the city of Kobane for months between the end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, against ISIS as well. Several parties are working together in the three cantons comprising the Rojava region (Afrîn, Cîzire and Kobane) as part of a coalition called the Movement for a Democratic Society. Although the PYD plays a decisive leadership role, the prevailing climate is a pluralism that reflects the complex composition of a society made up of Kurds, Turkmens, Arabs and Christians. The role of women lies at the heart of the democratic vision of Confederalism. It is not simply a matter of pursuing gender equality or other claims of historical feminism, but of a profound cultural revolution in the name of “Jineology”, the science (and knowledge) of women, an unprecedented paradigm aimed at abolishing the patriarchy and violent masculinity seen as underlying the principle of the state. The word derives from the Kurdish “Jin”, woman, but also has ties with the term “Jiyan”, meaning life. “Jineology” is not only a women’s science but also an overall rethinking of social relations and collective life. Harnessing the insights of feminist sociologist Maria Mies, the traditional relationship between men and women is seen as stemming from a colonial form of relationship, and as such, the urgent task of redefining gender relations represents a prerequisite of the revolution, because “no non-state and non-power solutions can be achieved while each and every individual is regenerating such relations in their seemingly harmless ways of life” (Güne¸ser 2016, 50). In fact, various and convergent accounts suggest that the centuriesold subordination of women to men has been effectively questioned in Rojava. This shift is evident in many areas of community life, but

190

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

particularly in the military sphere. In Rojava, the fundamental principle of self-defence is embodied by the YPG (Popular Protection Unit) militias, which are mixed-gender, and by the YPJ-Star (Union of Free Women, linked to the PKK), an exclusively female component of the army. As Evren Kocabiçak has stated, “In order for those women, who are dispossessed of their volitions and their very selves under societies where oppressive forces are dominant, to reshape their own personalities, to become Life’s transformative force and to liberate their gender, is only possible through becoming a power themselves. In such context, the women’s militarization had organized itself rather as an instrument of equality in social, political and cultural spheres instead of a simple military organization with only combat-related purposes” (Kocabiçak 2016, 63). On the institutional level, the People’s Council of West Kurdistan is divided into different levels, with administrative positions held in rotation by women and men: the municipality is the foundational unit, the neighbourhood, district and canton are additional levels of organization. In this system, self-government is based on the administration of justice through special peace commissions set up at the municipal and neighbourhood level, accompanied by women-only commissions for specific cases of violence. At the district level, the People’s Court handles the most difficult situations (such as homicide) and, finally, there is a Court of Appeals. Adverse to the death penalty, the system is focused on restorative justice and rehabilitating offenders as opposed to mere punishment or imprisonment. Policing is carried out by a non-professionalized force, trained to not resort to repression or the use of violence: torture, inhuman or degrading treatment is explicitly banned. In short, self-government is practised first and foremost as a form of self-jurisdiction, and it is interesting to note how one of the historical fathers of anarchism, Pëtr Kropotkin, held up medieval communes as paradigmatic examples of “mutual support” based precisely on this trait: the faculty of administering justice directly without the mediation of the Empire or Church, or the Turkish or Syrian state. Since 2014, there has been a more traditional level of government alongside the council system that brings the cantons of Rojava together under the democratic Autonomous Administration, in compliance with the principles of the Charter of the Social Contract for democratic selfrule, a pact drawn up in the name of the freedom, equality and justice. The inclusive perspective of this charter aims to facilitate coexistence

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

191

among the different groups in the region and is sanctioned by the principles of peaceful conflict resolution and decentralization. In particular, it guarantees a separation of powers and the rule of law and recognizes the “Covenants and international conventions for human rights”, affirming that they “are an essential part and complements this contract” (art. 20). The secular nature of institutions is protected. Fundamental rights include that of living in a healthy environment, based on ecological balance (art. 21), and of leading a dignified life. Citizens enjoy full freedom of assembly, organization, demonstration, strike and expression… Everyone is equal before the law and enjoys equal opportunities in public and professional life. All gender discrimination is abolished and actively combatted. The charter deals in particular with young people, fostering and protecting the “effective participation of youth in political and administrative life”, as well as, in article 29, the rights of the child: “This contract ensures the right of children, prevents child labour, exploiting and torturing them psychologically and physically, and marrying them at a young age”. Economically, the perspective is prudent: the charter establishes public ownership of basic resources, but does not call into question individual private property. The anti-capitalist character of Rojava’s social experiment is not explicitly stated in the Charter, but it can be seen in the cooperative character of production. Currently, cooperative production is being practised in a context characterized by a subsistence economy (essentially agricultural) and war; we have yet to see what might happen if the longed-for peace is achieved, especially taking into account the fact that the region hosts oil fields that have attracted the interest of large multinationals and the surrounding powers. Anti-capitalist intentions can also be seen in the fundamental critique of money, framed not as a neutral instrument for mediating exchanges but as a fundamental means of reifying social relations of exploitation and domination. These are the elements that have made this project of building a solid economy based on needs and respect for basic ecological principles, in a community-based context founded on direct democracy, an example long admired and supported, internationally, by groupings and individuals who see it as the possible rebirth of radical thought and a practice of emancipation. There is no doubt that many things changed between 2018 and 2019, and the Democratic Federation of Rojava-Northern Syria is entering into an even more difficult phase. In terms of so-called geopolitics, the United States, after having agreed to collaborate with the Democratic Forces in

192

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

the fight against ISIS, has withdrawn and abandoned Rojava to its fate; Russia and Turkey are left free to crush and asphyxiate a social and political experiment that represents nothing but a useless nuisance for their own national policies. As a result, this area has been subject to full-blown ethnic and political cleansing, hidden behind Turkish military operations with names such as “Olive Branch” and “Source of Peace”. The canton of Afrin was the first to fall, and then the assault continued with the support of Islamist forces: the Democratic Federation has been dismantled and re-defined as the Democratic Administration of the Northeast. For Rojava, constructing an inclusive model of life that is egalitarian, in harmony with the environment, and founded on self-government must begin by resisting oppression. In many ways, this difficult challenge also accompanied other revolutionary experiments in the past, such as the Spanish one back in the 1930s. This case involves a recurring problem, the same one faced by revolutionaries of yesterday and today: successfully articulating resistance to oppression and processes of emancipation in a context of war. Now more than ever before, the courageous but insufficient direct engagement of internationalist militants should be accompanied by growing mobilization in various national contexts to put pressure on governments who have directly or indirectly contributed to an international operation characterized by clearly regressive traits. Without such mobilization, any move to rethink a project of anti-capitalist emancipation appears little more than an intellectualistic exercise. Today’s world seems to fulfil even the darkest predictions about the destructive and regressive character of capitalism which, combining the ecological and environmental crisis with a pandemic disrupting the social order of most societies, carried the very real danger of a generalized, radical crisis of civilization. The challenge facing every emancipatory movement and every individual is to find a way to unite a critique of the world with practices for transforming it, and vice versa. In pursuing this path, our path, frontier socialists will be precious companions.

References Arruzza, Cinzia. 2013. Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism. Pontypool: Merlin Press. Bohrer, Ashley. 2020. Marxism and Intersectionality. Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality Under Contemporary Capitalism. Bielefeld: Transcript.

9

(TENTATIVE) CONCLUSIONS

193

Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cirillo, Lidia. 2017. Prima Internazionale e genealogia rivoluzionaria. http:// ilmegafonoquotidiano.it/news/prima-internazionale-e-genealogia-rivoluzio naria. Accessed 23 November 2017. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Psychology Press. Davies, Nick. 2008. The Bloody Battle of Genoa. The Guardian, July 16. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/17/italy.g8. Accessed 24 May 2020. Dieterich, Hans. 2006. Der Sozialismus des 21. Jahrhunderts. Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Demokratie nach dem globalen Kapitalismus. Berlin: Kai Homilius Verlag. Douzinas, Costas, and Slavoi Zizek (eds.). 2010. The Idea of Communism. London and New York: Verso. Federici, Silvia. 2018. Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons. Oakland: PM Press/Kairos. Ginori, Anais. 2002. Amnesty, Atto d’accusa all’Italia. Abusi eccezionali per l’Europa. la Repubblica, July 15. Grispigni, Marco. 2014. Figli della stessa rabbia. Lo scontro di piazza nell’Italia repubblicana. https://storieinmovimento.org/2014/08/16/figli-dellastessa-rabbia/. Accessed 24 May 2020. Güne¸ser, Havin. 2016. No Miracles at Work. In To Dare Imagining. Rojava Revolution, ed. Dilar Dirik et al., 47–52. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Honneth, Axel. 2017. The Idea of Socialism. Towards a Renewal. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press. The Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). The Invisible Committee. 2015. To Our Friends. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). The Invisible Committee. 2017. Now. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Kocabiçak, Evren. 2016. The World’s First Army of Women. In To Dare Imagining. Rojava Revolution, ed. Dilar Dirik et al., 63–70. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Levi Strauss, David. 2016. Hope in Rojava. In To Dare Imagining. Rojava Revolution, ed. Dilar Dirik et al., 9–12. Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Marx, Karl. 1852. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ ch01.htm. Öcalan, Abdullah. 2011. Democratic Confederalism. London and Duisburg: Transmedia. Ross, Carne. 2015. The Kurd’s Democratic Experiment. New York Times, September 30. https://nyti.ms/1O1i6Le. Last accessed 19 November 2017.

194

M. QUIRICO AND G. RAGONA

Salleh, Ariel. 2019. Ecofeminist Sociology as a New Class Analysis. Global Dialogue. Australia. http://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/ecofeminist-soc iology-as-a-new-class-analysis/. Accessed 24 May 2020. Sunkara, Bhaskar. 2019. The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. London and New York: Verso. Wright, Eric Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopia. London and New York: Verso. Wright, Eric Olin. 2019. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist for the 21st Century. London and New York: Verso. Wu Ming. 2020. Verso il 25 Aprile. Riflessioni urgenti sulla necessità di rompere il vetro e tornare in strada. https://www.wumingfoundation.com/ giap/2020/04/verso-il-25-aprile/. Accessed 24 May 2020.

Index

A Abensour, M., 14 Adamo, P., 23 Albanis, Y., 2 Alfonso XIII, 57 Allende, S., 155–157 Alquati, R., 100 Althusser, L., 136, 139, 149 Armand, I., 43 Arruzza, C., 54, 186 B Bakunin, M., 26 Balibar, É., 136 Bambery, C., 107 Barrow, C.W., 142 Beauvoir de, S., 135 Bebel, A., 45 Berneri, C., 62 Bernstein, E., 22 Berti, G., 63 Bihr, A., 18, 158–160, 166–170, 176, 177, 180 Bismarck, O. von, 21, 28

Bobbio, L., 112, 115, 116 Bobbio, N., 151 Bodin, J., 10 Boétie, É. de la, 28 Bohrer, A., 186 Bologna, S., 165 Bookchin, M., 188 Breaugh, M., 14 Bruno, P., 118 Buber, M., 30 Bukharin, N.I., 47, 52 Butler, J., 7, 18, 186, 188 C Castoriadis, C., 149 Chattopadhyay, S., 8 Cirillo, L., 160, 184 Cole, G.D.H., 9 Collins, P., 185 Cornu, A., 90 Corpet, O., 16 Cox, L., 8 Crenshaw, K., 185 Crouch, C., 164

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Quirico and G. Ragona, Frontier Socialism, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52371-8

195

196

INDEX

Crump, J., 177

D Davies, N., 182 Deleuze, G., 136 de l’Hospital, M., 10 De Luca, E., 118 Deutscher, I., 45 Dieterich, H., 7 Douzinas, C., 4

E Eisner, K., 35 Elysard, J. See Bakunin, M. Engels, F., 9, 21, 45, 72, 74, 86, 94

F Federici, S., 187 Floyd, G., 8 Fofi, G., 88 Foot, J., 108 Foucault, M., 136, 146 Franco, F., 59 Fraser, N., 159, 160 Fumagalli, A., 3, 165

G Galbraith, J., 3 Genghis Khan, 181 Gesell, S., 31 Ginori, A., 182 Giuliani, C., 181 Gorter, H., 70 Gramsci, A., 12, 15, 29, 93, 94, 139–141, 173, 174 Grandjonc, J., 9 Grispigni, M., 181 Grossmann, H., 76 Guattari, F., 149

Gullo, F., 86 Güne¸ser, H., 189

H Hahnel, R, 8 Hayek, F.A. von, 162 Hitler, A., 122 Hobsbawm, E.J., 121 Holt, A., 44 Honneth, A., 7

I Ingrao, P., 150

K Kamenev (pseudonym of Lev Borisovic Rosenfeld), 49, 50 Kapp, W., 68 Kautsky, K., 70–72, 74, 78, 124, 174, 176 Keynes, J.M., 31, 76, 94 Kocabiçak, E., 190 Kolko, G., 87 Kollontai, A., 41–52, 54, 175, 178, 180 Kollontai, V.L., 41 Korsch, K., 70 Kropotkin, P.A., 10, 23, 190 Krupskaya, Nadezhda, 43

L Laclau, E., 14 Landauer, G., 13, 17, 21–37, 85, 99, 166, 174, 175, 177, 180 Largo Caballero, F., 62 Laski, H., 12 Lassalle, F., 25 Latouche, S., 12 Leclerc, A., 135

INDEX

197

Lee, N., 182 Levi Strauss, D., 189 Libertini, L., 86, 93–95 Liebknecht, K., 77 Lombardi, R., 157 Lorusso, P.F., 118 Löwy, M., 12, 157 Lukács, G., 136 Lupo, M., 118 Luxemburg, R., 42, 46, 70, 73, 77, 87, 141, 173, 179 Lyotard, J.-F., 136

P Pannekoek, A., 74 Panzieri, R., 17, 85–103, 175, 177 Papandreou, G., 1 Peirò, J., 62 Philips Price, M., 48 Plechanov, G.V., 74 Poggio, P.P., 14 Poulantzas, N., 4, 17, 135–152, 157, 160, 166, 175, 176, 178–180 Proudhon, P.-J., 31, 32, 34 Pucciarelli, M., 2

M Machiavelli, N., 28, 29 Machno, N., 9 Malatesta, E., 23 Mandel, E., 17 Mao Zedong, 86 Marcos, 183 Marx, K., 27, 28, 125, 136, 137, 141, 176 Mattick, P., 17, 67, 71–82 Mehring, F., 77 Meidner, R., 17, 53, 121, 122 Micciché, T., 118 Mies, M., 189 Miliband, R., 141 Montseny, F., 62 Morandi, R., 85, 91 Mouffe, C., 14 Myrdal, G., 122

R Rancière, J., 14, 136 Reagan, R., 145 Rehn, G., 121, 123 Rivera, P. de, 57 Roosevelt, F.D., 69 Ross, C., 188 Rossi, W., 118 Roth, G., 28 Rubel, M., 17, 70, 72 Rühle, O., 70, 77, 78 Russo Spena, G., 2

N Negri, T. (Antonio), 88 Neuville, R., 60

O Öcalan, A., 188, 189 Osinskij, N., 51

S Sacco, N., 121 Salleh, A., 187 Sapronov, T., 51 Sartre, J.P., 135, 136 Schmidt, W., 165 Šljapnikov, A., 43, 47, 49, 50 Smirnov, V., 51 Sofri, A., 110, 111, 113, 115 Souvarine, B., 10 Spencer, P., 150 Stalin (pseudonym of Iosif Vissarionoviˇc Džugašvili), 50 Streeck, W., 160, 162–165

198

INDEX

Sunkara, B., 7

T Traverso, E., 6, 160, 165 Tronti, M., 88, 96, 101, 102 Trotsky (pseudonym of Lev Davidoviˇc Bronštejn), 49, 50, 52 Tsipras, A., 2–4

V Vanzetti, B., 121 Varoufakis, Y., 3 Venza, C., 62 Viale, G., 116

W Walzer, M., 14 Webb, B., 42 Webb, S., 42 Wigforss, E., 122, 125 Wilhelm II (German Emperor), 21 Wright, E.O., 7, 8 Wright Mill, C., 87 Z Zetkin, C., 42, 45 Zinovyev, pseudonym of Hirsch Apfelbaum, 50 Žižek, S., 7 Zörgiebel, K., 121