Introduction to the Publication of CICA

The following document is of a polemical nature. It does not aim to provide an exhaustive or definitive exposition of all the issues addressed. This is particularly important to bear in mind regarding references to the conception of historical materialism and the party form, but it also applies to some extent to all other matters discussed.

At the time, this text was an attempt to bring to light a series of theoretical-programmatic developments made by the author over the preceding years, between their definitive break with Trotskyism (having been a member of two organizations for a time) and their progression toward council communism through a deepening engagement with original Marxism.

It is regrettable that the Grupo de Propaganda Marxista (GPM) has not given the necessary attention to this text or responded to the criticisms raised, as these issues are of utmost importance for revolutionary praxis today. Surely, such a response, which would have sparked a debate, could have helped contextualize the text within a broader framework.

In summary, the text is structured and presented as a series of critical theses against the key positions upheld and developed by the GPM in its critical analysis of the program and conceptions of the Socialist Left Current. Certainly, some elements of the text have universal scope, but the bulk of the argumentation is specifically directed at the GPM’s positions. For this reason, we emphasize that the "Seven Critical Anti-Bolshevik Theses" cannot be considered an independent document or a universal critique of Leninism. Rather, they are a critique of the "leftist" interpretations of Leninism that attempt to separate Leninist theory from its actual historical practice, thereby shielding it from the judgment of history.

We encourage a careful reading of the text and suggest combining it with the document prepared by the GPM, which can be found on their website: www.nodo50.org/gpm.

Introductory Letter: For a Contribution to the Critique of Trotskyism and the Development of the Revolutionary Program

Greetings first and foremost, comrades.

I have read with interest most of your critical work on the positions of the Argentine Socialist Left Current, and I would like to point out several issues in this regard.

I have been following your work more or less since the time of your writings on crisis theory, though mainly those on economic, philosophical, and critical analyses of the ICC or the BIPR. While I differ with you politically, as I align myself with council communism, I must first say that I find your work to be of high theoretical quality, playing a significant role in dissemination and dynamism, as well as making original contributions and highlighting key issues.

I completely agree with your emphasis on economic theory and the need for a scientific understanding of society, and especially with the effort to bring it—or at least make it relevant, given the current difficulties—to class practice.

Moreover, I believe your work contributes decisively, at least in the Spanish state, to pulling the remnants of revolutionary currents and scattered militants out of theoretical stagnation, as well as sparking theoretical interest among new generations of militants who may be emerging. I personally place myself in this latter group, and your work has greatly encouraged me to delve into the study of Capital and to apply its conclusions to the—localized—attempts at independent militant organizing in which I have participated recently.

As your latest critical work on the Argentine CIS addresses typical Trotskyist issues, particularly the Transitional Program, and engages with controversies surrounding left communism, I saw the need to share a critique with you, in a constructive spirit but without theoretical concessions, to present some observations and viewpoints.

Introduction

The political issue currently facing the revolutionary struggle is, to a significant extent, the validity of Marxian revolutionary theory itself.

Based on my experience and my own theoretical and practical developments in an effort to update communism as a real movement, the crisis of the workers’ movement, which has persisted for decades, is fundamentally a crisis of the development of the conscious revolutionary movement, a crisis in the process of updating revolutionary practical consciousness. The efficient cause of this crisis lies, at the level of the proletarian mass movement, in the growing material and spiritual power of capitalism. However, its determining root lies at the level of the communist vanguard, in the unresolved congenital weaknesses that persist within the revolutionary movement.

The resolution of these (theoretical-practical) weaknesses falls to the conscious vanguard, and this task is essential for developing its capacity to elevate, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the self-activity of the proletariat as a whole. This self-activity is awakened by the tendential sharpening of objective class antagonisms in declining capitalism, but its self-development to the level of radicality and scope necessary for revolution depends on the scope and effects of conscious revolutionary self-activity on the masses.

This assessment forms the basis for the subsequent critical theses, aimed at clarifying essentially two issues, one theoretical and one practical:

a) The first, theoretical issue is that all "errors" and undialectical or idealist distortions introduced or perpetuated in revolutionary theory can only be seriously analyzed in the realm of effective praxis, the living unity of thought and action in proletarian activity, as capitalist alienations of proletarian praxis and not merely as a matter of thought. Rather, considering that the effective material basis of theoretical consciousness lies in practical consciousness, thought is responsive to and inseparably linked to praxis: that is, on one hand, to a specific type of practical activity with its determined content, and on the other, to a specific mode of relation between practical activity and itself as reflective activity. Thus, any alienation of thought implies both a capitalist deviation of practice and a bourgeois distortion of the theoretical method, which is essentially a conception of praxis. This forms the basis for the critique of Bolshevism that follows and, in particular, of its Trotskyist interpretation.

b) The second, practical issue is that the essence of revolutionary praxis is practical-critical activity, not theoretical critique, such that its function is grounded in the development of the proletariat’s self-activity as a revolutionary class, not in the development of its consciousness to align with revolutionary goals, which is, in any case, only a moment of mediation within the contradictory dynamic of the revolutionary subject’s development.

This lies at the heart of the idea expressed by Marx and Engels that communism is not an ideal to which reality should conform but a real movement of overcoming the existing state of affairs1 . This, I believe, is an error you fall into, necessarily as a result of the separation of practice from your theoretical development—a common issue among most revolutionary groups today. However, the value of revolutionary theory in vanguard organizations must precisely lie in their ability to maintain a practical vision despite the isolation and historical climate of defeat for the proletariat as a revolutionary class.

Let us now turn to the specific issues:

First Thesis - [Bolshevism and the Class Struggle of the 20th Century]

In general, the positions of the CIS are part of the leftist derivatives of Trotskyism. Trotskyism, in general, has, until now, pointed out relevant issues for the class struggle and has attempted to address them in a difficult era for revolutionary organizations. However, Trotskyism also demonstrates the inability of Bolshevism itself to position itself in a context entirely different from that of Russia in the first half of the 20th century.

Revolutionary Bolshevism, of which Trotskyism has undoubtedly been, at least ideologically, a continuation, has fallen into theoretical eclecticism between spontaneism and dirigisme, as a result of increasingly alienating social conditions weighing on the workers’ movement. The product of these alienating class conditions, reflected in this internal contradiction of Trotskyism, became visible through the increasingly deep integration of the workers’ movement into capitalism during the last century: it was, objectively, a contradiction between the need for spontaneity to promote the revolutionary self-development of the proletariat as a class and the predominance of submission to reformist bureaucratic leaderships.

Trotskyism was unable to rise above this contradiction, not only, nor primarily, because of its economic analysis of capitalism, but because it failed to see a direct relationship between the decline of capitalism and the development of workers’ spontaneity in a revolutionary sense. Of course, it can be said that it is possible to preserve revolutionary theory despite unfavorable social circumstances and dynamics, but in practice, this becomes unsustainable within proletarian currents, where practical class interests take precedence and determine theory—that is, where revolutionary materialism is applied regardless of the conscious or unconscious will of individuals. The eclecticism of Trotskyism is thus a reflection of the contradiction between Bolshevik dirigisme and the spontaneous tendency of the class struggle, a contradiction that, by the way, has not been resolved in a revolutionary sense even when circumstances have been more favorable (e.g., in the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s).2

The entire history of revolutionary Bolshevism in Western countries, following the Russian Revolution, has been a history of practical impotence, demonstrating that it was a political conception incapable of acting revolutionarily in a specifically capitalist context. This necessary impotence materialized as opportunism with its definitive decline as a political force, and all Western Trotskyist organizations have either been reduced to nothing or have become reformist groups within existing “workers’” organizations. Certainly, like Stalinism, Trotskyism can also lend itself to representing revolutionary movements, such as those in Latin America, marked by economic underdevelopment and backwardness, but at the cost of sclerotizing those movements, leading them to defeat, or, less likely, to a supposed bureaucratic “workers’ state.”

The core issue is that the Bolshevik conception of the practical function of the revolutionary vanguard—the political leadership of the proletariat, since so-called “education” translates, in practice, to political leadership—does not serve to foster the development of proletarian self-activity. Instead, this self-activity has always developed independently of Bolshevik practices, which in reality have always tended to lag behind the practical movement of the class struggle, rather than acting as a vanguard in practice. This objective dissociation between the claims of the self-proclaimed, non-effective vanguard and the spontaneous mass dynamic can only have two opposing solutions without falling into eclecticism:

1) The subordination of spontaneity to intellectual leadership, of immediate struggles to the revolutionary program, of the masses to the party, which is the Bolshevik theory and is essentially undialectical and non-materialist in the subject-object relations of consciousness (and which, in practice, leads to the formation of totalitarian state capitalism, not communism, opposing proletarian emancipation);

2) The theory of council communism, which understands spontaneity as determined by the conditions of capitalism and sees it as the non-intellectual form of proletarian consciousness that develops through class struggles, such that the intellectual consciousness of the vanguard is merely the most advanced edge of the class struggle itself, and the vanguard’s function lies in clarifying and elevating the consciousness of the masses to the intellectual level. Council communism is the theory of the proletariat’s effective self-liberation.

You hold an uncritical view of Leninism, and therefore you fail to grasp the essence of the problem. The reformist tendencies, or, if you prefer, euphemistically, “errors,” that you criticize in the CIS program stem from the bourgeois nature of the foundations of the Bolshevik conception of the class struggle, which manifests in the form of eclecticism under the pressure of the need to promote the development of workers’ spontaneity—a spontaneity that escapes its theoretical understanding. By not recognizing the class nature of Bolshevism (which, in Lenin’s own words, is the theoretical conception that the intelligentsia brings from outside to the proletarian masses), you demand from the CIS a clarification of principles as the key to revolutionary organization in light of historical materialism. However, you yourselves do not start from a critique of the practical consequences of these “errors” in the real proletarian struggle to arrive at a class analysis of those “errors.” Thus, the “errors” appear as mere “theoretical” mistakes, contrasted with your defense of “orthodox” Leninist praxis. And it is based on the principles of this praxis, of the “construction of socialism,” and not on the principles of the effective emancipation of concrete workers, that you apply historical materialism. Consequently, in the “concrete thought,” you grasp real universality but fail to also reach the particularity and individuality of the proletariat in your concept of socialism. For this real universality (general existence) is the abolition of classes in general, but the particularity (class) of the proletariat is wage labor, and its individuality is the alienated generic life that results from the former (alienation as a dominated class and as a productive class in the entire life of the human species).

Thus, you fall into a practical scientism, turning the dialectical method into the source of truth instead of considering it as dependent on the consciousness of the interests of the subject applying it. In other words, you disregard the role of the practical consciousness of the subject in theoretical practice itself, so that, for you, the truth “is out there,” independent of consciousness. The material conditions, with their determination over practical consciousness, disappear, or their relationship is considered static, viewing consciousness as a static reflection of existing conditions or falling into some other bourgeois deviation by starting from Lenin’s eclecticism between his bourgeois dirigiste conception of material practice and the dialectical theoretical conception, which reflects the practical nature of the class struggle and the development of society, of social dialectics.

Thus, your conception of communism may be true on the plane of generality, but it remains abstract (and in this sense, utopian) on the plane of concrete practice. It is also abstract in its materiality with respect to the specific social condition of the revolutionary class, for universality only exists in effective reality as a living synthesis that encompasses the individual and the particular. The universal abolition of existing classes (i.e., classes in their current form) does not necessarily lead to the abolition of wage labor or the alienated life of humanity as a collective of individuals. It must be recalled here that it is alienated labor, rooted in the alienated life of the human species produced in its historical development (partly due to the ignorance, and partly despite and against the knowledge of the exploited), that produces the class division of society. Only on the basis of this alienated way of life, grounded in the exploitation of the labor of others, with its technical, institutional, and cultural foundations, is it possible for the political division of society into classes to constitute itself as a social power (in the state and economic power structures) and to present itself (in a dialectical twist) as the cause, and not the effect, of alienated labor.

Second Thesis - [Experience, Spontaneity, and Proletarian Consciousness]

As a consequence of your undialectical conception of the process of knowledge, you underestimate experience, whose sole value would be to provide materials for the “historical-materialist” analytical intellect (an intellect that, at that precise moment, places itself outside of social practice and, therefore, its praxis is not that of the proletariat but exclusively that of the presumed leader of the proletariat). Hence your insistence on the political education of the working class to be carried out by a revolutionary party: this carries the danger of confusing the objective demands of the subjective development of the proletariat as a revolutionary class, for which the vanguard must work (thereby transforming and developing itself as an effective vanguard), with the demands of the particular subjective logic of the individual, group, or organization that seeks to assume the role of vanguard.

Through this approach, revolutionary theory is not constructed, developed, or updated based on the social dynamic in which proletarian self-activity is inscribed, with its struggles, will, and consciousness, but rather based on the particular relationships of the “revolutionary” individual, group, or organization with this social dynamic—that is, according to a struggle, a will, and a consciousness that develop independently, as particular realities, and that do not submit to the development of the class as a whole but, in reality, seek to direct this development according to their own desires. This is not only ultimately impossible but also deeply pernicious. The attempt to force events, to push forward steps, even solely in the realm of the evolution of the proletariat’s intellectual consciousness, necessarily implies the non-integration of theoretical consciousness with practical consciousness, which remains bourgeois and reformist.

Like any theory with an idealist foundation, Leninist materialism does not seek to ground its rational assertions in the dialectical relationships that form the fabric of social praxis but instead takes as its starting point supposedly proven logical postulates. It does not proceed from experience to thought but only from thought to experience. The fact that thought is supposedly a scientific result of praxis does not prevent this methodology from being unscientific and idealist, for theoretical scientific verification in dialectical materialism requires moving first from the concrete to the abstract and only then—only then—returning from the abstract to the concrete, in a single process that is both analytical and synthetic at once. This process affects all premises, including the very laws and guidelines of the dialectical method and the conception of matter, so that we can progressively access increasingly complex levels of reality, which involve not only an increase in knowledge but also the adaptation or qualitative modification of previous premises based on a deeper understanding of the dynamic of the concrete totality.

The laws of dialectics in revolutionary materialism are merely a guide for reflective action and are subject to the critical-practical development of knowledge, not an unassailable dogma to cling to in order to weather the storm. You do not substantiate your stance on the educative role of the party with an in-depth historical and holistic analysis of the development of class consciousness in relation to the material determinations arising from the objective development of capitalist production and the capital-labor class struggle. Instead, consistent with your logical system, you start from the assertion that experience does not produce consciousness. In this regard, it seems what you really mean is that experience does not produce thought, since experience, in itself, is nothing other than a form of consciousness situated at the individual-particular level. Thought is nothing other than the establishment of relationships between elements or data of accumulated experience, driven by practical necessity. Thus, dialectically, the process of experimentation-intellectualization is a unity in which the only mediation is the self-activity of the conscious subject who, through their attention and will, perceives and reflects.

The difficulty in understanding the development of proletarian class consciousness lies in the fact that the alienated state of wage labor entails the repression of the self-determined will of wage workers, and this submission is only shaken off through class struggles.

Thus, struggle produces consciousness, though, of course, this consciousness can take on various levels of quantity and quality. Outside of struggle, experience tends to be assimilated with little or no consciousness, and it is only during moments or periods of intensified class antagonism that this accumulated experience begins to be rationally synthesized at levels corresponding to the previously achieved evolutionary degree and the attained intellectual capacity. Hegel has described quite well the various levels that consciousness can reach between immediacy and the concrete totality. Therefore, to claim that struggle does not produce consciousness is to repeat the old Leninist mechanism that does not dialectically conceive the relationship between subject and object and, consequently, can only understand revolutionary praxis as something essentially dead in the masses, leading, in another well-known phrase of Lenin, to “combating spontaneity.”

Third Thesis - [Leninist Materialism and Its Practical Consequences]

The dialectical logic of capital itself is thus separated from the development of class consciousness. However, the class struggle is not merely the action of a few individuals determined by the totality of economic and social factors (a particular action) but also (as a universal action) the subjective form of the objective antagonism on which the capitalist mode of production is based (the universal relation of capital). Consequently, the development of the consciousness of the exploited class will spontaneously orient itself based on the development of the objective internal antagonism of capital’s production and accumulation.

Only in this way can human action and thought be understood as part of real materiality, in contrast to the metaphysical concept of matter postulated by Lenin.

“Before Marx the word "materialism" had long been used in opposition to idealism, for whereas idealistic philosophical systems assumed some spiritual principle, some "Absolute Idea" as the primary basis of the world, the materialistic philosophies proceeded from the real material world. In the middle of the nineteenth century, another kind of materialism was current which considered physical matter as the primary basis from which all spiritual and mental phenomena must be derived. Most of the objections that have been raised against Marxism are due to the fact that it has not been sufficiently distinguished from this mechanical materialism.

Philosophy is condensed in the well-known quotation "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness." Marxism is not concerned with the antithesis matter-mind; it deals with the real world and the ideas derived therefrom. This real world comprises everything observable -- that is, all that by observation may be declared an objective fact. The wage-relations between workman and employer, the constitution of the United States, the science of mathematics, although not consisting of physical matter, are quite as real and objective as the factory machine, the Capitol or the Ohio River. Even ideas themselves in their turn act as real, observable facts. Mechanical materialism assumes that our thoughts are determined by the motions of atoms in the cells of our brains. Marxism considers our thoughts to be determined by our social experience observed through the senses or felt as direct bodily needs.

...

The relations which the productive system establishes between men have the same stringency as biological facts; but this does not mean that men think only of their food. It means that the manner in which man earns his living -- that is, the economic organization of production -- places every individual in determinate relations with his fellow-men thus determining his thinking and feeling. It is true, of course, that even up to the present nearly all the thoughts of men have been orientated around the getting of food, because a livelihood has never been assured for everybody. The fear of want and hunger has weighed like a nightmare on the minds of men. But, in a socialist system, when this fear will have been removed, when mankind will be master of the means of subsistence, and thinking will be free and creative, the system of production will also continue to determine ideas and institutions.

...

The Marxian conception of history puts living man in the center of its scheme of development, with all his needs and all his powers, both physical and mental. His needs are not only the needs of his stomach (though these are the most imperative), but also the needs of head and heart. In human labor, the material, physical side and the mental side are inseparable; even the most primitive work of the savage is brain work as much as muscle work. Only because under capitalism the division of labor separated these two parts into functions of different classes, thereby maiming the capacities of both, did intellectuals come to overlook their organic and social unity. In this way, we may understand their erroneous view of Marxism as a theory dealing exclusively with the material side of life.”

(Anton Pannekoek, Society and Mind in Marxian Philosophy, 1937)3

In Marx, matter is a fabric of sensible relations; in Lenin, it is “that which is independent of consciousness.” Thus, it is impossible to arrive at a revolutionary understanding of the class struggle by following his distorting interpretation of historical materialism. The utility of Lenin’s method exists only in the context (which Lenin himself describes accurately, though likely misjudging its value) of a workers’ movement incapable of rising above trade unionism on its own—that is, a movement still in its initial historical phase of development, where workers’ parties still have to struggle against the trade unionist conception of the class struggle (which, by the way, has nothing “spontaneous” about it beyond its elemental core as a form of proletariat-capital struggle, as the trade unionist conception, with its organizational form, methods, ideas, etc., is a result of precapitalist—guild—and capitalist—parliamentary—influences on the consciousness of the form of struggle).

In the current context, where the old workers’ movement is in decline in Western countries, where reformism is becoming increasingly unviable in immediate practice as well as historically because capitalism is irreversibly advancing in its decline as a mode of production, the Leninist method serves only to mystify Bolshevism’s inability to promote the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, framing its own “errors” as a problem confined to the power of reformism, bourgeois democracy, and ideology, etc. In reality, Bolshevism cannot promote or guide the development of the class struggle in a revolutionary direction because it is a theory of leading the proletariat to take power through a party, not a theory of developing the proletariat’s self-activity to foster its capacities for self-direction.

Bolshevism is incapable of recognizing the radical difference between the initial phase of the workers’ movement (during ascendant capitalism) and subsequent phases, from the First World War to the 1970s, and from the 1970s onward (declining capitalism). Its view of the development of the workers’ movement, as determined by the development of capitalism itself and its tendency toward decline as a mode of production, is static. It fails to grasp the unity between the later phases of capitalist development and the end of the reformist phase of the workers’ movement, nor the internal unity of that reformist phase between the goals of reforms and the adoption of specific organizational forms: trade unions, political parties, etc.

Thus, Bolshevism remains blind to the new phase of class struggle development in decadent capitalism, its conditions and developmental needs, and the process of proletarian consciousness. It ends up interpreting the current situation as a revolutionary current would in the general historical phase of ascendant capitalism: attempting to reorient and revive the dying old workers’ movement, which the class struggle itself had nearly destroyed as the historical representative of the conscious proletariat’s interests—through the most advanced proletarian struggles of the 1920s and 1970s, fighting and/or breaking away from it, thereby exposing and denouncing its purely capitalist character—instead of fighting to deliver the final blow and build a new movement based on revolutionary principles and forms of activity and organization.

Bolshevism remains, in its political and philosophical conceptions, nothing more than a radical heir of classical social democracy. Its danger for the vanguard itself lies in justifying the inability to effectively stimulate and guide proletarian self-activity, mystifying it as its opposite, as factors independent of the will of revolutionaries: the masses’ attachment to their reformist organizations, the influence of bourgeois ideology on the proletariat, and even the “errors” (though merely “tactical”) of the vanguard itself. Ultimately, Bolshevism’s final argument to justify its failure is always that circumstances are not sufficiently favorable to its own expansion. But it should be said, rather, that Bolshevism is incapable of expanding favorable conditions, which the bourgeoisie’s dominance always seeks to reduce to a minimum as far as possible. At a deeper level, the problem is not that circumstances prevent Bolshevism’s expansion, but that Bolshevism prevents the expansion of favorable conditions.

Fourth Thesis - [The Transition from Capitalism to Socialism]

We thus arrive at the question of “state capitalism.” From your economic foundation of the problem of the transition to socialism, it can be inferred that you understand the categories of value, surplus value, commodity exchange, wage labor, etc., solely as historical categories and not also, simultaneously, as categories of class domination. Modes of production are also, in class society, modes of domination (and in the future classless society, the mode of production will consequently be a mode of self-liberation). Thus, economic categories, which are materially nothing more than the expression, in their abstract, conceptual form, of concrete economic relations, are not only historically tied to a specific mode of production, in this case capitalism, but also politically (and economically as forces of class domination).

The perpetuation of wage labor, surplus value, and even the market implies the survival of capital’s domination over labor. This leads to the point that you label as petty-bourgeois the critique of state capitalism by the Russian left communists, which was centrally focused not on the issue of control or domination of the “proletarian” state over not fully nationalized economic sectors, but on the issue of the suppression of real workers’ self-management in factories at the hands of Lenin’s clique. In this way, you sidestep the critique of the Soviet regime under Lenin, to the point of turning his theoretical falsifications—which Lenin himself likely sincerely believed to be true—into the reference point for the universal transition to socialism. Instead of analyzing the necessary process for the abolition of capitalist categories based on their existence as concrete relations, you conceive the revolutionary transition in the economic sphere as a gradualist process by stages. Once again, the idea precedes practice and asserts itself as constitutive of praxis in place of materiality.

4

As a corollary of this logic, which may be highly dialectical but scarcely materialist in its effective premises, you repeatedly refer to the Kronstadt rebellion as an example of counterrevolutionary action stemming from a misunderstanding of revolutionary theory. At its core, what you seem to argue is that the demand for Soviet democracy against Bolshevik power was mistaken because it was not theoretically “scientific,” so that, following idealist formal-logical reasoning, starting from Leninist theory, you inevitably return to validating Leninism.

For you, democracy is subordinate to consciousness, and with this same undialectical logic, to the party. Certainly, democracy does not produce consciousness, but the most important aspect of the communist revolution is not consciousness but the liberation from wage slavery. You completely lose sight of the ultimate goal to focus on matters of strategy, and this is precisely because Bolshevism, along with its theoretical method, is in itself merely a strategy for seizing power, whose principles-goals are presupposed by its self-proclamation as “socialist” or “communist.” From a dialectical perspective, when faced with two necessary factors of a single process—proletarian self-emancipation—one cannot view one as a means to the other without reciprocally doing so, arriving at an understanding of the dynamic truth of the totality.

Proletarian self-consciousness cannot develop without proletarian democracy, and thus, there is no room for confusion regarding the supposed intrinsic importance of defending formal democratic rights or the alleged positive role of “revolutionary” participation in bourgeois parliamentarism.

As can be inferred, there is no place here for a conception of the party as an “educator,” nor even for political parties in the strict sense. Communist revolutionary currents do not aim to “educate” the masses in the party’s theory. The “party’s theory” can only be either a more advanced and complete development of the masses’ consciousness, a universal and international intellectual worldview (which also, though not exclusively, stems from the local historical experience of the class movement in each country or territory, and in this sense, is inherently limited nationally and historically), or a theory external to the masses’ experience, which must therefore originate in reality from a historical experience alien to the movement (alien due to its bourgeois or petty-bourgeois class character, alien due to coming from the movement of another country, etc.).

The function of the “party” must therefore be to clarify and provide the elements of consciousness necessary to accelerate and catalyze the development of the masses’ self-consciousness, counteracting the effects and influences of alienating forces and powers that block and hinder it. This can only be achieved in an emancipatory way as a process of simultaneous individual and collective self-education. The model of the educating party is based on the division between intellectual and manual labor and, consequently, on a capitalist social relation, not its overcoming. As with many other conceptions, Leninism transforms a necessity of capitalist society into a virtue here, being incapable of conceiving the development of proletarian autonomy through the struggle against capital or, worse still, conceiving socialism as identical to state capitalism + the rule of the revolutionary workers’ party, or, in the well-known Trotskyist formula, nationalizations + planning under a workers’ government.

Sixth Thesis - [Communist Economy vs. State Capitalism]

In relation to the conception of the socialist regime and the transitional program, I believe it is necessary to provide a clearer definition of the issue in light of historical experience.

For my part, firstly, I maintain that no sharp or abstract distinctions should be made within the economic process of building communism. Socialism must be understood simply as the limited phase of the communist mode of production, in which distribution is governed by the same principle (from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs), but adapted to the material constraints that persist in the productive forces.

Thus, distribution according to labor time is not a correct definition of socialist distribution; rather, to be truly socialist, it must be complemented by redistribution measures to fulfill the principle of “to each according to their needs” as faithfully as possible within the existing limits. Hence, I consider your citation of Marx in the critique of the Gotha Program to be partial: Marx insists on the need for unequal rather than equal rights, but only after clarifying that the starting point will be equal distribution based on labor time. What Marx proposes is a dialectical unity between equal rights applied to distribution based on production and unequal rights applied to consumption according to the specific conditions of individuals, collectives, etc. (disabilities, family burdens, worse starting social positions, etc.).

In this way, all the inequalities that developed under the Bolshevik regime from the early years of the revolution, between the emerging bureaucracy (including the Bolshevik Party itself) and the masses, are not justifiable on the basis of Marxian theory but are, rather, an example of the capitalist character and corruption of Bolshevism upon coming to power, including Lenin and his associates.

Evidently, the political phases of building communism must be distinguished. The communist economy must start with the abolition of the class division specific to bourgeois society (even if non-specifically capitalist forms, such as the petty bourgeoisie, persist), as otherwise it reproduces wage slavery and, consequently, the proletariat’s position as a dominated class. However, communist politics is, in addition to its emancipatory content, directly determined by the class struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, so the self-organizing and emancipatory nature of the new political forms, the workers’ councils, is still combined with the repressive character of their state function as an instrument of oppression against the bourgeoisie.

While the initial communist economy, once established, overcomes the capitalist mode of production, the political course of the revolution must pass through the transitory form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which develops during the transformation of the capitalist economy into a fundamentally communist one. Even so, it must be emphasized that the foundation of proletarian power itself must, from the outset, be direct and self-organizing democracy, even if it excludes the bourgeoisie by organizing it based on the structure of production.The dictatorship of the proletariat can only develop on the basis of abolishing wage labor and alienated labor, establishing new relations of production from the start. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, by suppressing attempts at self-management and perpetuating wage labor in nationalized enterprises, were, in fact, implementing a state capitalist regime, distinguished from its comparable Western forms (fascism and the welfare state, which came later and were partly influenced by the Russian system) only by the extreme and totalitarian degree to which they pursued (or rather, attempted to pursue) state ownership, control, and planning, which would reach their peak under Stalin.5

When studying books on the Soviet economy, one does not really wonder whether it was socialism or not, but rather what was essentially different from capitalism, as all the effective categories of capital remained, except, perhaps, for competition and anarchic exchange, which were reduced to a minimum (or rather replaced by state arbitrariness). This does not mean, however, that the market—commodity exchange—did not exist, even if it did so in a non-free form. Nor is it true that the market is absolutely opposed to planning, as commodity production in conventional capitalism is not antagonistic to planning based on demand.

Following the equation of capital: wage labor + commodity production + surplus value = capital production, i.e., capitalism.

The application of the law of distribution according to needs implies the abolition of value, which is the relation or alienated form of labor time under the regime of private appropriation (whether formally individual or collective—cooperative or state, since the state is historically nothing other than the representative of private property). It also involves the expression of exchange in terms of concrete labor time, so that materialized labor is commonly identifiable as the sole measure of the economic relations of social exchange.

Seventh Thesis - [Transitional Demands]

Regarding the transitional program, beyond the accurate critique you make of its political pretensions as a substitute for the work of building a vanguard and clarifying the consciousness of the masses, it must be said that the very notion of “transition” falls into a profound error. It conceives the beginning of the struggle in terms of its revolutionary development (and thus the objective process that would enable the development of an organized revolutionary movement) as separate from immediate struggles.

For Trotskyists, the revolutionary struggle would develop from a quantitative leap in demands.6 However, in reality, it can be seen that all their demands are technically achievable within capitalism. Thus, on one hand, they fail to understand how to progressively foster self-activity in immediate struggles toward revolutionary transitional forms, instead merely upholding a program of demands that would allow them to lead these struggles despite the masses’ self-consciousness. On the other hand, the dissemination of these demands does not elevate the masses’ consciousness in a revolutionary sense but rather reinforces their reformist illusions and leads to the integration of Trotskyist parties into reformist organizations embedded in the capitalist state (in the Spanish state, there are plenty of examples, many relatively recent, of integration into the PSOE or IU, such as the cases of the POR, PRT, etc.).

Moreover, Trotskyists define the transitional objectives they propose as if they were a prelude to socialism, when in fact, nationalizations, workers’ control, sliding wage scales, or even political demands like the workers’ and peasants’ government, factory committees, etc.—the latter two in a distorted or partial manner, though no less within the ambiguities of Bolshevism’s own theoretical and practical formulation regarding workers’ democracy and self-management—are objectives perfectly achievable within capitalism from a technical perspective. Consequently, they also fail to clarify for the masses the measures necessary to establish socialism.

Instead of openly orienting toward measures that, according to the criteria of the Communist Manifesto, aim to create a dual power situation, partially advance revolutionary transformation, etc., the transitional program, 90 years later, incorporates the worst aspects of the Manifesto (its bourgeois statism, which would be questionable in light of Marx’s shift in position on the capitalist state after the Paris Commune) and discards the best.

The Bolshevik experience, as well as that of Western social democracy, clearly demonstrates the harmfulness of transitional demands that pretend to pass as socialist achievements when, in reality, they are mere capitalist reforms. Therefore, in light of historical experiences, neither nationalizations, nor workers’ control, nor even a “workers’ government” are steps forward in the revolutionary transition, but rather steps toward stabilizing capitalism, even if they may need to be established violently due to opposition from certain bourgeois or petty-bourgeois factions (just as can occur in power struggles between opposing bourgeois factions, as in a civil war).

Thus, “transitional demands” must be precisely defined. Council communists have made a significant contribution by seeing in the autonomous and wild forms of working-class struggle the initial practical and organizational link of the revolutionary struggle. The only valid aspect remaining of the Trotskyist transitional program, in my view, is that it identifies the targets of proletarian attack. However, to avoid leading to the defeat of the revolution, demands must acquire a practical non-capitalist foundation: for example, forms of social property under workers’ self-management, reducing the role of state or bureaucratic bodies to mere supervision (the same role to which workers are relegated under the Bolshevik and capitalist methods of “workers’ control” in enterprises) and applying revolutionary legal forms in the realm of common social ownership of the means of production, wealth distribution, and the development of productive forces; building embryonic forms of workers’ councils in the most radical struggles, etc.Demands that are economically progressive but lack a specifically revolutionary character, such as the sliding wage scale—i.e., adjusting wages to market prices (which has nothing to do with socialism, where, in immediate production, the material value or purchasing power of labor time increases as wealth in goods for enjoyment grows and free time also increases)—do not truly constitute transitional revolutionary objectives but rather mere reforms stabilizing capitalism that do not alter the nature of exploitation in any way—and, in this sense, are not “progressive” from a political-revolutionary perspective. In contrast, for example, a wage increase directly proportional to the increase in surplus value effectively constitutes a limited application of a communist principle that openly violates the law of the rate of profit but is essential to combat the current degradation of wage labor through precarization, wage reductions, and the extension of working hours.

Demands that are economically progressive but lack a specifically revolutionary character, such as the sliding wage scale—i.e., adjusting wages to market prices (which has nothing to do with socialism, where, in immediate production, the material value or purchasing power of labor time increases as wealth in goods for enjoyment grows and free time also increases)—do not truly constitute transitional revolutionary objectives but rather mere reforms stabilizing capitalism that do not alter the nature of exploitation in any way—and, in this sense, are not “progressive” from a political-revolutionary perspective. In contrast, for example, a wage increase directly proportional to the increase in surplus value effectively constitutes a limited application of a communist principle that openly violates the law of the rate of profit but is essential to combat the current degradation of wage labor through precarization, wage reductions, and the extension of working hours.

The conception I uphold, in short, is that the very notion of permanent revolution excludes the concept of a “transitional program” and instead requires a permanent and unified program that spans from immediate to ultimate objectives, merging the minimum and maximum programs based on the criterion of their content—i.e., progress without retreat toward communism, scaling various forms of advancement, from the most limited, such as struggles for wage increases and reduced hours, to capitalist expropriation, and from strike committees to workers’ councils and the destruction of the state.

This means, in practice, that transitional demands or objectives are meaningless outside an integrated vision of the overall development of the class struggle in a revolutionary direction, and that the revolutionary program is not, therefore, a “transitional program,” even though it includes measures that can be defined as transitional in light of the dialectics of the revolutionary struggle. It is a program of permanent confrontation and struggle against the power and existence of the capital relation, a program of permanent, antagonistic revolutionary struggle, whose core is the self-constitution of the proletariat as a revolutionary political power and, consequently, its self-construction as a political subject.

The effective revolutionary program must also encompass the necessary organizational forms for the development of the real revolutionary movement, conducting an analysis based on their content and not merely their external forms (social composition characteristics or scope of action) or their abstract leadership (i.e., their ideological composition at the bureaucratic level), something that all Leninist programs tend to overlook, thereby verifying their own bourgeois character, incapable of going beyond capitalist society with its ideas and relations.7

Conclusion

“The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.” (Marx/Engels, Communist Manifesto)

The traditional ideas of the workers’ movement are the ideas of reformism, that is, the ideas of bourgeois society and of the proletariat as a particular set of bourgeois individuals. Any continuity with these ideas will condemn the movement and the communist revolution to failure or, even worse, to turning the abstract revolutionary movement into the extreme left wing of capital, leading to its recuperation and the liquidation of the efforts of revolutionary militants.

PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION OR SINKING INTO BARBARISM!!!

Roi Ferreiro,
Galiza, April 6, 2004.

• 1By the way, the Spanish Leninist translation of the quote from The German Ideology to which I refer here unilaterally interprets the term “state” at the end of the mentioned phrase, which in German etymologically carries the sense of “material state,” as “state of affairs.” This translation surreptitiously introduces a falsification of historical materialism.
• 2Only when the decline of capitalism progresses to the point of causing the absolute and sustained degradation of the proletariat’s conditions of existence does it become possible for significant revolutionary currents to form and grow consistently over time. Neither living revolutionary organizations nor revolutionary theory as a living form of thought can exist outside these conditions, except in isolated groups incapable of influencing the course of history.

  For intellectuals, however, and also for those who consider theory abstractly, independent of practice and practical consciousness (which is continuously formed socially), this problem is not even recognized as such: everything is reduced to the “lack of consciousness” of the proletariat, which does not heed the specialists of “revolutionary theory” who would understand their “true interests.” This is the backdrop of any conception, like Leninism, that considers thought as independent of social practice or, more concretely, socialist theory as independent of the practical self-activity of the proletariat. This conception can only result in a distortion of the class nature of the theory itself, with the consequent outcomes: this is the case of the relationship between Leninism and original Marxism.For the proletariat, on the other hand, revolutionary consciousness can only exist when it is linked to the practical consciousness that capitalism is an intolerable social system. As long as capitalism remains tolerable—that is, as long as it still maintains relative societal progress—the proletariat has no immediate practical interest in revolution, and it is set aside. But, conversely, in a situation of absolute and persistent degradation of its living conditions, the proletariat has no immediate interest in reforms and only fights for reforms to the extent that it is not yet capable of confronting revolution. This is what I mean when I say that “revolutionary materialism is applied regardless of the conscious or unconscious will of individuals.”By attempting to build a “revolutionary party” during the phase of capitalist stagnation (or, one could say, latent decline), that is, between the First World War and the crisis of the 1970s, Trotskyism was thereby condemned to degenerate, as a real movement, into a merely reformist tendency. Given this state of affairs, when the historical tendency of class antagonism changed, Trotskyism was neither able to recognize the change nor to assess its possibilities and thus could only behave as yet another bourgeois tendency, forever framed within the old workers’ movement, instead of helping to push forward the waves of struggle during the proletariat’s ascendant periods and fostering the development of its consciousness as a class. Trotskyism’s adherence to the trade union and party bureaucracy of the majority “workers’” organizations, and thus to labor and political parliamentarism, is merely the corollary of an entire historical degeneration. (Roi Ferreiro, 07/25/2005)

• 3“The thoughts and aims of an active man are considered by him as the cause of his deeds; he does not ask where these thoughts come from. This is especially true because thoughts, ideas and aims are not as a rule derived from the impressions by conscious reasoning, but are the product of subconscious spontaneous processes in our minds. For the members of a social class, life's daily experiences condition, and the needs of the class mold, the mind into a definite line of feeling and thinking, to produce definite ideas about what is useful and what is good or bad. The conditions of a class are life necessities to its members, and they consider what is good or bad for them to be good or bad in general. When conditions are ripe men go into action and shape society according to their ideas.

  ...

  The materialistic conception of history explains these ideas as caused by the social needs arising from the conditions of the existing system of production. ... The historical materialist's interpretation of the French Revolution in terms of a rising capitalism which required a modern state with legislation adapted to its needs does not contradict the conception that the Revolution was brought about by the desire of the citizen for freedom from restraint; it merely goes further to the root of the problem. For historical materialism contends that rising capitalism produced in the bourgeoisie the conviction that economic and political freedom was necessary, and thus awakened the passion and enthusiasm that enabled the bourgeoisie to conquer political power and to transform the state.

  In this way Marx established causality in the development of human society. It is not a causality outside of man, for history is at the same time the product of human action. Man is a link in the chain of cause and effect; necessity in social development is a necessity achieved by means of human action. The material world acts upon man, determines his consciousness, his ideas, his will, his actions, and so he reacts upon the world and changes it. To the traditional middle-class mode of thinking this is a contradiction -- the source of endless misrepresentations of Marxism. Either the actions of man determine history, they say, and then there is no necessary causality because man is free; or if, as Marxism contends, there is causal necessity it can only work as a fatality to which man has to submit without being able to change. For the materialistic mode of thinking, on the contrary, the human mind is bound by a strict causal dependence to the whole of the surrounding world.

  The thoughts, the theories, the ideas, that former systems of society have thus wrought in the human mind, have been preserved for posterity, first in material form in subsequent historical activity. But they have also been preserved in a spiritual form. The ideas, sentiments, passions and ideals that incited former generations to action were laid down in literature, in science, in art, in religion and in philosophy. We come into direct contact with them in the study of the humanities. These sciences belong to the most important fields of research for Marxian scholars; the differences between the philosophies, the literatures, the religions of different peoples in the course of centuries can only be understood in terms of the molding of men's minds through their societies, that is, through their systems of production.

  ...

  The human mind is entirely determined by the surrounding real world. We have already said that this world is not restricted to physical matter only, but comprises everything that is objectively observable. The thoughts and ideas of our fellow men, which we observe by means of their conversation or by our reading are included in this real world. Although fanciful objects of these thoughts such as angels, spirits or an Absolute Idea do not belong to it, the belief in such ideas is a real phenomenon, and may have a notable influence on historical events.

  The impressions of the world penetrate the human mind as a continuous stream. All our observations of the surrounding world, all experiences of our lives are continually enriching the contents of our memories and our subconscious minds.

  The recurrence of nearly the same situation and the same experience leads to definite habits of action; these are accompanied by definite habits of thought. ... The world of experience, however, is continually expanding and changing; our habits are disturbed and must be modified, and new concepts substituted for old ones. Meanings, definitions, scopes of concepts all shift and vary.

  ...

  ... Marx's thesis that the real world determines consciousness does not mean that contemporary ideas are determined solely by contemporary society. Our ideas and concepts are the crystallization, the comprehensive essence of the whole of our experience, present and past. What was already fixed in the past in abstract mental forms must be included with such adaptations of the present as are necessary. New ideas thus appear to arise from two sources: present reality and the system of ideas transmitted from the past. Out of this distinction arises one of the most common objections against Marxism. The objection, namely, that not only the real material world, but in no less degree, the ideological elements -- ideas, beliefs and ideals -- determine man's mind and thus his deeds, and therefore the future of the world. This would be a correct criticism if ideas originated by themselves, without cause, or from the innate nature of man, or from some supernatural spiritual source. Marxism, however, says that these ideas also must have their origin in the real world under social conditions.

  As forces in modern social development, these traditional ideas hamper the spread of new ideas that express new necessities. In taking these traditions into account we need not leave the realm of Marxism. For every tradition is a piece of reality, just as every idea is itself a part of the real world, living in the mind of men; it is often a very powerful reality as a determinant of men's actions. It is a reality of an ideological nature that has lost its material roots because the former conditions of life which produced them have since disappeared. That these traditions could persist after their material roots have disappeared is not simply a consequence of the nature of the human mind, which is capable of preserving in memory or subconsciously the impressions of the past. Much more important is what may be termed the social memory, the perpetuation of collective ideas, systematized in the form of prevailing beliefs and ideologies, and transferred to future generations in oral communications, in books, in literature, in art and in education. The surrounding world which determines the mind consists not only of the contemporary economic world, but also of all the ideological influences derived from continuous intercourse with our fellow men. Hence comes the power of tradition, which in a rapidly developing society causes the development of the ideas to lag behind the development of society. In the end tradition must yield to the power of the incessant battering of new realities. Its effect upon social development is that instead of permitting a regular gradual adjustment of ideas and institutions in line with the changing necessities, these necessities when too strongly in contradiction with the old institutions, lead to explosions, to revolutionary transformations, by which lagging minds are drawn along and are themselves revolutionized.”

  (Anton Pannekoek, Society and Mind in Marxian Philosophy, 1937)

• 4Fifth Thesis - [Bolshevism vs. Proletarian Self-Emancipation]
• 5 In reality, the phase of Lenin’s leadership in the Bolshevik state corresponds to the economic phases of war communism and the New Economic Policy, the latter leaning toward competitive capitalism combined in various ways with state capitalism. The phase of consolidation and completion of state capitalism as the total form of the Russian republic’s economy would rather be attributed to Stalin. For an analysis of Lenin’s policy, see Herman Gorter’s text The World Revolution (English version of the text The Communist Workers’ International (KAI), published in 1924 by Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Dreadnought).
• 6It should be noted that Engels heavily promoted the interpretation that the law of the transformation of quantity into quality was based on a simple increase in quantity, using the example of increasing heat causing water to boil. However, this is a half-truth, as a change in a material’s state may have a quantitative change, an accumulation, as its immediate cause, but this is not the internal, sufficient cause of the process. A confluence of environmental conditions and a specific internal composition and structure of the material is necessary for a specific reaction to a quantitative change to occur. In chaos theory, the transformation of quantity into quality is interpreted in light of its internal process, as a transition from an old order to a new one through the self-organizing chaos of matter.

  For Trotskyists, the qualitative determination would actually be added by the Party (or rather, THEIR party) once the revolutionary process is initiated.

• 7This is manifested, in the leftist deviations of Bolshevism, in the cult of the external forms of the proletarian movement, such as assemblyism, revolutionary syndicalism, etc., disregarding their content (not only their outward economic or political content but also the degree of internal self-organization and the level of autonomous workers’ cooperation they actually enable, as we know that top-down assemblyism is very common, and workers’ cooperation in unions is restricted, due to their recruitment and organizational commitment characteristics, to the cooperation of militant elites).

  In rightist deviations, the inability to overcome old organizational conceptions manifests in the cult of abstract leadership, leading to typical entryist practices in pseudo-proletarian reformist unions and parties, with the aim of replacing reformist leaders with supposedly revolutionary ones (the fact that this aim is justified by the opportunism of the former does not negate that entryism, as thus understood, is also essentially opportunist, as it typically seeks to appropriate the existing organization without openly declaring its “revolutionary” objectives).