“The largely unorganized social rejection of liberal politics has led us to this moment when the reactionary forces of Trumpism have recaptured the state.” To change course, we can “begin with a leap of faith, a fidelity in the primacy of class action in defense of all workers, no matter their legal status, race, or gender.”
November 30, 2024
Source: Convergence
Image from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist comedy
Image from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist comedy
The Exterminating Angel, via Convergence Magazine.
In the wake of the election, I’ve been thinking of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist comedy The Exterminating Angel. It stars a group of socialites dining together at the mansion of an upper- class couple hosting them after a night at the opera. As wealthy guests begin to arrive for the soiree to feast on a bear and two sheep, the couple’s cook and servants desert their masters and strange happenings begin to occur, leaving the tuxedoed guests flummoxed and trapped inside. They fill the night with backbiting gossip and rituals of superstition, from masonic handshake signs to chicken’s feet in a purse. Soon enough bourgeois morality gives way to barbarism when, casting off their respectable manners, they plot to murder one of their hosts to break whatever spell prevents them from leaving.
“They’re trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac,” wrote the late film critic Roger Ebert, interpreting the dinner guests as representing “the ruling class in Franco’s Spain. Increasingly resentful at being shut off from the world outside, they grow mean and restless; their worst tendencies are revealed.”
No false equivalence: The Democrats aren’t fascists. But they are revealing their worst bourgeois tendencies as workers exit their glittery oligarchic party controlled by bosses and a coterie of highly paid consultants and donors. As the veritable fascist Donald Trump steps back into the White House, Democratic Party loyalists and hangers-on in the media circuit are apoplectic about the working-class dolts who deserted Kamala Harris in her “a $1 billion disaster” of a campaign and hitched their wagon to the MAGA movement. They would sooner employ the same divide-and-conquer tactics of their MAGA opponents in a liberal scapegoating frenzy than engage with the exhaustion of their vaunted liberalism.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” said Senator Bernie Sanders in a statement after the election. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Democrats deflect disaster
Union households voted 54% for Kamala Harris vs. 43% for Donald Trump, with non-union households at 51% Trump, 47% Harris. Latinos went from 63% for Biden to 56% for Harris. White voters, the majority of the electorate at 75%, supported Trump by 56%. Trump won the popular vote albeit with a smaller share than Biden and Obama.
A working class that is fragmented and unorganized doesn’t speak in one voice, much less press its demands with unity of purpose. Exit polls indicate workers across racial and ethnic lines are frustrated with the economic status quo. About 60% of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, especially low-wage workers earning less than $50,000 a year. Meanwhile, the working class saw grocery bills skyrocket; a dozen eggs went from $2.01 to $4.21 in 2023. While CEOs made massive profits, workers saw their weekly take-home pay sink, and struggled to cover housing and food. On the eve of the election, according to CBS News, 60% of Americans rated the economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.”
Even among workers ineligible to vote, the sentiment is the same. “Those with power haven’t noticed the difficulties of those without power,” an undocumented Latino day laborer who supports Trump told the Austin American-Statesman. Since the election, I’ve heard similar sentiments among older generations of immigrant workers who resent housing accommodations for asylum seekers, given their own struggles to evade the police on street corners.
One worker who helped organize anti-raid defense committees more than a decade ago told me the culture of solidarity on New York City streets has disappeared; newer workers don’t believe Trump’s threats to deport millions of undocumented workers will affect them. They believe t he’s going after the bad immigrants, the so-called criminals. The criminalization of immigrants has been a bipartisan project, from Clinton through Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. They’ve all advanced the ideological and political work of linking federal deportation to the criminal justice system.
But Trump is the culmination of that work, without the liberal paternalism of sectioning off families from an array of criminals roaming the nation. The liberal establishment didn’t only acquiesce to anti-immigrant economic nationalism, but it helped fuel it by tying immigration to rising crime and housing costs. They refused to believe Latino or Black immigrants would want to assimilate into the nation’s traditional social hierarchies. What’s more American than joining in the national pastime of rugged individualism, the ethos of “I got mine, Jack, screw you!” combined with nativist revanchism of a settler-colonial power in decline?
The liberal establishment didn’t only acquiesce to anti-immigrant economic nationalism, but it helped fuel it by tying immigration to rising crime and housing costs.Luis Feliz Leon
Class politics vs. polarization
To overcome polarization in the working class between undocumented workers with decades of years in the country and recently arrived asylum-seekers, we need to build a broad class politics. As the historian Joel Suarez argues in N+1 magazine, “the left must not be cowed into a narrow politics of income inequality and redistribution; it must look further, toward democratic control of capital itself. But doing so means forging a broad and deep culture of solidarity, something that in turn cannot be done by waving away the problems of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and transphobia in favor of simple economic populism.”
The essence of an exhausted liberalism is to invoke racism and sexism to explain the debacle, but make them weightless ideas, obscuring the material weight of these heavy social foundations, brushing aside their historical contingency and geographical locations. Vulgar liberals view racism and sexism as merely wrong ideas and policies held by bad people, so they wield them as a cudgel not as political frameworks with far-reaching implications. They reduce systems of oppression to mere sanctimony and paternalism, offering little more than noblesse oblige (black tie gala philanthropists) and deference (the well-meaning venture activists).
Yes, racism and sexism are big social forces in US life, and people in the electorate espouse these views. There’s a hard core of Trump voters who won’t be persuaded away from nationalism underpinned by racism and misogyny—their calling cards replacement theory and bans on abortion. There’s also another soft core of millions of people who were peeled away from the Democratic coalition and found in MAGA an answer to their frustrations. As Stuart Hall reminds us, “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” Racism and sexism are real social forces with material effects, and they are imbricated in the production of economic anxiety. The disaffected workers who have flocked to Republicans should be understood as subjects whose worldviews are shaped by these forces, but they aren’t solely defined by them either.
Workers see through centrism
Workers have rejected Barack Obama’s multicultural Third Way centrism. That was foretold by lonely voices on the left from the moment Obama rose to prominence. In 2008, speaking before Harlem’s Tenants Association, Robert Fitch elucidated the ideological thrust of Third Way communitarians:
“The Left and the Right argue that different interests matter. The Third Way says they don’t. When the Third Way advocates insist that we share a common good; when they refuse to recognize that the interests of the oppressed and the interests of the oppressors don’t exist on the same moral plane; when they counsel us to stop being partisans of those interests—they’re not being non or post-partisan; they’re siding with the powers that be.”
Class is about a worker’s structural relationship to production, white collar, blue collar, or no collar. On that basis, the historian Tim Barker writes in New Left Review: “Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.”
But class is also about something lived in and messy, like culture, and the Democratic Party has largely appealed to college-educated liberals who party elites consider their true base, offering them warmed over multiculturalism and New Agey platitudes. In 2008, the late Christopher Hitchens acidly opined in Slate about Obama’s campaign: “Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps ten keywords: Dreams, Fear, Home, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together.”
Trump has captured Obama’s multiracial coalition, curdling Obama’s phony optimism into a Make America Great Again movement, a slogan borrowed from Ronald Reagan who should be credited for Obama. If Tony Blair and New Labour were Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievements, then Bill Clinton and Obama count as Reagan’s across the pond. The rightward realignment of economic and political power started with President Jimmy Carter, was consolidated in Reagan’s two terms as president and became bipartisan consensus politics in the Clinton administration. But Obama’s presidency paved the way for the Democratic Party to “unite all of big business behind it.”
Democrats had nothing to counter MAGA with politically and nothing to offer disaffected voters economically drawn to its dark nihilism of societal collapse–nothing, that is, beyond more vacuous pablum in the less rhetorically gifted hands of Kamala Harris. There is widespread dissatisfaction in the American people and more generally across the globe with the cascading calamities of rising inequality, climate-induced disasters, and migration, largely due to climate and social dislocations because of the US’s punitive sanctions and wars, but the liberals along with the Left failed to mobilize these expressions of social anger into working-class power and solidarity.
The right-wing media was effective not only because we lead increasingly atomized lives online but also because it tapped into a deep-seated libidinal rage against the economic status quo. The Right is adroit at plumbing the depths of despair. With these dark wells of anger combined with class disorganization, there’s no need for a perfectly crafted message to galvanize people into throwing down with reaction.
On the leadership front, Trump can be best understood as a Bonapartist figure through whom various social classes have coalesced in an uneasy multiracial coalition, including big financialized firms, a small “m” millionaire business-owner gentry, working-class people in union and nonunion households alike, and lonely young men living in echo chambers of algorithmically mediated hyperreality. They are for Trump in various uneven and contradictory ways. But they are definitionally against the Democratic Party and the status quo it props up. That largely unorganized social rejection of liberal politics has now led us to the present moment when the reactionary forces of Trumpism have recaptured the state.
With these dark wells of anger combined with class disorganization, there’s no need for a perfectly crafted message to galvanize people into throwing down with reaction.Luis Feliz Leon
How people experience the state matters
Contradictions are the stuff of politics. The average worker takes pride in pulling their boot straps. “People want financial independence,” said Henry East, a UNITE HERE worker I interviewed in 2020, explaining why the same people who voted for Trump backed the minimum wage hike. “They don’t want to have to depend on food stamps and all these other programs. They would prefer to grind and make their own money and be able to pay their own bills. And by forcing employers to pay them a livable wage, they won’t be so dependent on the government. And they see Trump as someone who shows people to not be so dependent on the government. That’s why they can support both.”
At one level, it is clear that employers that pay poverty wages offload the social costs of their workforce onto the state. But at another level, why shouldn’t the government take care of its people? East’s insight may reveal the hidden logic that reconciles the seemingly contradictory support for Trump and pro-worker proposals like the minimum wage increase, a dynamic that also played out on paid leave and minimum wage ballot questions across the country this time around.
It raises the question of how people experience the state. “In the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic initiatives,” Stuart Hall wrote, “the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful, bureaucratic imposition.”
In The New Republic, Alex Pareene turned to Hall in the wake of the 2020 election to understand the possibility that “voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.”
The same question has returned in 2024 with a vengeance. But the signal Pareene sounded then should be filtered out from the noise:
“It would take making the state work for people to convince the masses that the state can work for people… The mission to build power for the left—or, much more modestly, to help an improved Democratic Party consolidate power—will not come down to simply announcing support for the right policies, while decrying or downplaying the wrong ones. It will, unfortunately, be much longer and harder work.”
Labor and the Democrats
To borrow a phrase from Mike Davis, the marriage between labor and the Democrats is barren, but no one is ready to file for divorce just yet. For the foreseeable future, all indications suggest that unions will be part of the unity of contradictory forces in the Democratic Party. If there is a schism, it’s most likely going to tack to the right. Under the right inducements from Trump, it’s easy to imagine a conservative wing of labor made up of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, President of the International Association of Fire Fighters Edward Kelly, International Longshoremen’s Association President Harold Daggett, and President of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Douglas McCarron, alongside assorted police, corrections, and border patrol unions.
But can rifts grow into large political fractures even within the dense web of corporate alliances that juice the Democratic Party’s coffers and impede even the mildest redistribution efforts? No one knows. The corporate dominance of the party is indisputable, and bosses grip on it hasn’t loosened because the Left has organized within the party. But the party also contains environmentalists, unions, and progressives of various stripes. Can they, organizing within and/or outside of it, exert meaningful influence? Addressing that question would lead outside the scope of this article. But independent candidacies, like Dan Osborn’s senatorial run in Nebraska, and municipal reform projects like the Richmond Progressive Alliance in California, offer models to attempt. We have to sow seeds of class solidarity across the nation, so many seedlings of independent political action may bloom.
“The Democrats did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Trump,” wrote Jimmy Williams, Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, after the election. “That’s not good enough anymore! Rather than offer a positive agenda on what immigrant workers bring to our country, they bought into the punitive, ‘tough,’ anti-worker messaging that is championed by Trump, even though we know it’s the bosses’ fault.”
Still, 2,000 UNITE HERE members and volunteers canvassed in battleground states, knocking on over four millions doors and had over 500,000 conversations with voters–deploying to doors as they’ve done in previous election cycles.
Members of the United Auto Workers participated in an intensive door-knocking campaign, reaching 200,000 members. Now we need a similar deployment but to organize and save the labor movement and along with it the dignity of working-class life.
UAW President Shawn Fain didn’t mince words: “UAW members around the country clocked in today under the same threat they faced yesterday: unchecked corporate greed destroying our lives, our families, and our communities…We’ve said all along that no matter who is in the White House, our fight remains the same.”
“Corporations and ultra-wealthy people are setting the agenda,” UNITE HERE President Gwen Mills. “Our mission is to put that power back in the hands of workers.”
Right now ranks of organized workers are far too few to exercise power–not to elect Democrats but to make any politician, regardless of party listen, to workers’ demands. To change the balance of power, we need more union members and unions that give a damn about fighting back. The answer to organized money is organized workers, but fewer workers are members of unions today than at any time in the country’s recent history. Union membership rates stand at 10% in the public sector and an abysmal 6% in the private sector.
Union researcher Chris Boehner has found that current organizing is one-tenth of what the labor movement had accomplished in the 1970s. “But imagine if labor put on its seventies bell-bottom jeans and started organizing one percent of eligible workers as unions did in the 1970s, not the current one-tenth of one-percent rate,” wrote Boehner. “Instead of 107,000 workers voting for a union in 2024, the number would be more like 1.1 million workers.”
At the end of Buñuel’s film, the guests attend a religious service, and yet again they are for some inexplicable reason struck with a paralyzing inertia, unable to leave. So too are Democrats, whether at the MSNBC studio or the White House, hermetically sealed in the insularity of their self-exculpating ideological delusions, ever loyal to their corporate paymasters. Let them be.
As Trump steps into office for a second term, the labor movement will have to stand up– not retreat into a defensive crouch. If the bosses don’t listen to our demands, we can walk off—just like Buñuel’s cooks and servants, with union power at our backs.
2028
Save the Date: May 2028, the date of our rendezvous with a potential to exercise our collective power, as the labor movement aligns our contracts and prepares for mass strikes. On that day, we aren’t just leaving. We are marching as one movement united behind the working class.
In Prisoners of the American Dream, Mike Davis wrote that the Knights of Labor had “tapped the wellsprings of diverse laboring traditions…to nourish a network of solidarity association that bound together workplace and community.” One year before the May Day eight-hour-day demonstrations of 1886, Davis shared an inventory of “Knight-related organizations in Detroit in 1885, showing how their movement building went beyond bread-and-butter economics but provided an all-encompassing vision of democracy from below: ‘Unions, Knights of Labor assemblies, Working Men’s Club Rooms, cooperative stores and factories, labor newspapers, singing societies, social clubs, political organizations, and a worker’s militia.’”
These mass institutions involving hundreds of thousands achieved the “landmark reconciliation of Irish, German, and native workers.” Ultimately, Davis argued racism and nativism prevented the working class from seizing crucial turning points in class struggles of nineteen century into independent political action and realignment.
“The refusal of Irish miners in an anthracite hellhole of eastern Pennsylvania not only to sympathize with the slaves but to accept the implication… that they were in America anything less than CITIZENS’, speaks volumes about the ideological impact of American exceptionalism and the difficulties of building a class-conscious labor movement,” wrote Davis about failed efforts to build a united front linking abolition and ethno-religious Catholic discrimination.
Yes, it’s been a long-haul struggle. But that’s the trouble with a simpleminded populism, especially in a country where who is a person or who constitutes the people is heavily contested, from the Dred Scott case in 1858, guaranteeing enslavers the right to take their human property anywhere in the United States and strip African Americans of citizenship, to the present, targeting the undocumented workers for mass deportation and persecuting anyone involved in abortion or gender-affirming care.
“Give the people what they want,” say the liberals and culturally conservative leftists, inciting us to sacrifice trans people and migrants in response to social reaction. But as Stuart Hall cogently put it, “Politicians always think they know what people feel. It’s a fallacy, because there is no such thing as ‘the people.’ It is a discursive device for summoning the people that you want. You’re constructing the people, you’re not reflecting the people.”
Today, we are faced with yet another turning point, a moment to remake the common sense in the working class. We can overcome divisions that feed racism, nativism, and misogyny. But in order to do so, we must organize institutions of our own making. As we organize for May 2028, we have a rare opportunity to fortify class institutions and create a new web of associations to contain the necessary solidarities to act as one mighty working class.
To believe deeply that the working class can self-consciously act collectively is, in the words of W.E.B. Dubois, “a hope that is not hopeful, but not hopeless.”
Let’s begin with a leap of faith, a fidelity in the primacy of class action in defense of all workers, no matter their legal status, race, or gender, so that in the years ahead, we can “fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely” to be society.
In the wake of the election, I’ve been thinking of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist comedy The Exterminating Angel. It stars a group of socialites dining together at the mansion of an upper- class couple hosting them after a night at the opera. As wealthy guests begin to arrive for the soiree to feast on a bear and two sheep, the couple’s cook and servants desert their masters and strange happenings begin to occur, leaving the tuxedoed guests flummoxed and trapped inside. They fill the night with backbiting gossip and rituals of superstition, from masonic handshake signs to chicken’s feet in a purse. Soon enough bourgeois morality gives way to barbarism when, casting off their respectable manners, they plot to murder one of their hosts to break whatever spell prevents them from leaving.
“They’re trapped in their own bourgeois cul-de-sac,” wrote the late film critic Roger Ebert, interpreting the dinner guests as representing “the ruling class in Franco’s Spain. Increasingly resentful at being shut off from the world outside, they grow mean and restless; their worst tendencies are revealed.”
No false equivalence: The Democrats aren’t fascists. But they are revealing their worst bourgeois tendencies as workers exit their glittery oligarchic party controlled by bosses and a coterie of highly paid consultants and donors. As the veritable fascist Donald Trump steps back into the White House, Democratic Party loyalists and hangers-on in the media circuit are apoplectic about the working-class dolts who deserted Kamala Harris in her “a $1 billion disaster” of a campaign and hitched their wagon to the MAGA movement. They would sooner employ the same divide-and-conquer tactics of their MAGA opponents in a liberal scapegoating frenzy than engage with the exhaustion of their vaunted liberalism.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” said Senator Bernie Sanders in a statement after the election. “First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Democrats deflect disaster
Union households voted 54% for Kamala Harris vs. 43% for Donald Trump, with non-union households at 51% Trump, 47% Harris. Latinos went from 63% for Biden to 56% for Harris. White voters, the majority of the electorate at 75%, supported Trump by 56%. Trump won the popular vote albeit with a smaller share than Biden and Obama.
A working class that is fragmented and unorganized doesn’t speak in one voice, much less press its demands with unity of purpose. Exit polls indicate workers across racial and ethnic lines are frustrated with the economic status quo. About 60% of workers are living paycheck to paycheck, especially low-wage workers earning less than $50,000 a year. Meanwhile, the working class saw grocery bills skyrocket; a dozen eggs went from $2.01 to $4.21 in 2023. While CEOs made massive profits, workers saw their weekly take-home pay sink, and struggled to cover housing and food. On the eve of the election, according to CBS News, 60% of Americans rated the economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.”
Even among workers ineligible to vote, the sentiment is the same. “Those with power haven’t noticed the difficulties of those without power,” an undocumented Latino day laborer who supports Trump told the Austin American-Statesman. Since the election, I’ve heard similar sentiments among older generations of immigrant workers who resent housing accommodations for asylum seekers, given their own struggles to evade the police on street corners.
One worker who helped organize anti-raid defense committees more than a decade ago told me the culture of solidarity on New York City streets has disappeared; newer workers don’t believe Trump’s threats to deport millions of undocumented workers will affect them. They believe t he’s going after the bad immigrants, the so-called criminals. The criminalization of immigrants has been a bipartisan project, from Clinton through Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. They’ve all advanced the ideological and political work of linking federal deportation to the criminal justice system.
But Trump is the culmination of that work, without the liberal paternalism of sectioning off families from an array of criminals roaming the nation. The liberal establishment didn’t only acquiesce to anti-immigrant economic nationalism, but it helped fuel it by tying immigration to rising crime and housing costs. They refused to believe Latino or Black immigrants would want to assimilate into the nation’s traditional social hierarchies. What’s more American than joining in the national pastime of rugged individualism, the ethos of “I got mine, Jack, screw you!” combined with nativist revanchism of a settler-colonial power in decline?
The liberal establishment didn’t only acquiesce to anti-immigrant economic nationalism, but it helped fuel it by tying immigration to rising crime and housing costs.Luis Feliz Leon
Class politics vs. polarization
To overcome polarization in the working class between undocumented workers with decades of years in the country and recently arrived asylum-seekers, we need to build a broad class politics. As the historian Joel Suarez argues in N+1 magazine, “the left must not be cowed into a narrow politics of income inequality and redistribution; it must look further, toward democratic control of capital itself. But doing so means forging a broad and deep culture of solidarity, something that in turn cannot be done by waving away the problems of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and transphobia in favor of simple economic populism.”
The essence of an exhausted liberalism is to invoke racism and sexism to explain the debacle, but make them weightless ideas, obscuring the material weight of these heavy social foundations, brushing aside their historical contingency and geographical locations. Vulgar liberals view racism and sexism as merely wrong ideas and policies held by bad people, so they wield them as a cudgel not as political frameworks with far-reaching implications. They reduce systems of oppression to mere sanctimony and paternalism, offering little more than noblesse oblige (black tie gala philanthropists) and deference (the well-meaning venture activists).
Yes, racism and sexism are big social forces in US life, and people in the electorate espouse these views. There’s a hard core of Trump voters who won’t be persuaded away from nationalism underpinned by racism and misogyny—their calling cards replacement theory and bans on abortion. There’s also another soft core of millions of people who were peeled away from the Democratic coalition and found in MAGA an answer to their frustrations. As Stuart Hall reminds us, “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” Racism and sexism are real social forces with material effects, and they are imbricated in the production of economic anxiety. The disaffected workers who have flocked to Republicans should be understood as subjects whose worldviews are shaped by these forces, but they aren’t solely defined by them either.
Workers see through centrism
Workers have rejected Barack Obama’s multicultural Third Way centrism. That was foretold by lonely voices on the left from the moment Obama rose to prominence. In 2008, speaking before Harlem’s Tenants Association, Robert Fitch elucidated the ideological thrust of Third Way communitarians:
“The Left and the Right argue that different interests matter. The Third Way says they don’t. When the Third Way advocates insist that we share a common good; when they refuse to recognize that the interests of the oppressed and the interests of the oppressors don’t exist on the same moral plane; when they counsel us to stop being partisans of those interests—they’re not being non or post-partisan; they’re siding with the powers that be.”
Class is about a worker’s structural relationship to production, white collar, blue collar, or no collar. On that basis, the historian Tim Barker writes in New Left Review: “Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything. The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.”
But class is also about something lived in and messy, like culture, and the Democratic Party has largely appealed to college-educated liberals who party elites consider their true base, offering them warmed over multiculturalism and New Agey platitudes. In 2008, the late Christopher Hitchens acidly opined in Slate about Obama’s campaign: “Pretty soon, we should be able to get electoral politics down to a basic newspeak that contains perhaps ten keywords: Dreams, Fear, Home, New, People, We, Change, America, Future, Together.”
Trump has captured Obama’s multiracial coalition, curdling Obama’s phony optimism into a Make America Great Again movement, a slogan borrowed from Ronald Reagan who should be credited for Obama. If Tony Blair and New Labour were Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievements, then Bill Clinton and Obama count as Reagan’s across the pond. The rightward realignment of economic and political power started with President Jimmy Carter, was consolidated in Reagan’s two terms as president and became bipartisan consensus politics in the Clinton administration. But Obama’s presidency paved the way for the Democratic Party to “unite all of big business behind it.”
Democrats had nothing to counter MAGA with politically and nothing to offer disaffected voters economically drawn to its dark nihilism of societal collapse–nothing, that is, beyond more vacuous pablum in the less rhetorically gifted hands of Kamala Harris. There is widespread dissatisfaction in the American people and more generally across the globe with the cascading calamities of rising inequality, climate-induced disasters, and migration, largely due to climate and social dislocations because of the US’s punitive sanctions and wars, but the liberals along with the Left failed to mobilize these expressions of social anger into working-class power and solidarity.
The right-wing media was effective not only because we lead increasingly atomized lives online but also because it tapped into a deep-seated libidinal rage against the economic status quo. The Right is adroit at plumbing the depths of despair. With these dark wells of anger combined with class disorganization, there’s no need for a perfectly crafted message to galvanize people into throwing down with reaction.
On the leadership front, Trump can be best understood as a Bonapartist figure through whom various social classes have coalesced in an uneasy multiracial coalition, including big financialized firms, a small “m” millionaire business-owner gentry, working-class people in union and nonunion households alike, and lonely young men living in echo chambers of algorithmically mediated hyperreality. They are for Trump in various uneven and contradictory ways. But they are definitionally against the Democratic Party and the status quo it props up. That largely unorganized social rejection of liberal politics has now led us to the present moment when the reactionary forces of Trumpism have recaptured the state.
With these dark wells of anger combined with class disorganization, there’s no need for a perfectly crafted message to galvanize people into throwing down with reaction.Luis Feliz Leon
How people experience the state matters
Contradictions are the stuff of politics. The average worker takes pride in pulling their boot straps. “People want financial independence,” said Henry East, a UNITE HERE worker I interviewed in 2020, explaining why the same people who voted for Trump backed the minimum wage hike. “They don’t want to have to depend on food stamps and all these other programs. They would prefer to grind and make their own money and be able to pay their own bills. And by forcing employers to pay them a livable wage, they won’t be so dependent on the government. And they see Trump as someone who shows people to not be so dependent on the government. That’s why they can support both.”
At one level, it is clear that employers that pay poverty wages offload the social costs of their workforce onto the state. But at another level, why shouldn’t the government take care of its people? East’s insight may reveal the hidden logic that reconciles the seemingly contradictory support for Trump and pro-worker proposals like the minimum wage increase, a dynamic that also played out on paid leave and minimum wage ballot questions across the country this time around.
It raises the question of how people experience the state. “In the absence of any fuller mobilization of democratic initiatives,” Stuart Hall wrote, “the state is increasingly encountered and experienced by ordinary working people as, indeed, not a beneficiary but a powerful, bureaucratic imposition.”
In The New Republic, Alex Pareene turned to Hall in the wake of the 2020 election to understand the possibility that “voters no longer believe that the Democratic Party represents a coalition that includes the working class, and that even if the party puts forward Democratic candidates who support pro-worker policy, it simply will not suffice to reach or convince voters.”
The same question has returned in 2024 with a vengeance. But the signal Pareene sounded then should be filtered out from the noise:
“It would take making the state work for people to convince the masses that the state can work for people… The mission to build power for the left—or, much more modestly, to help an improved Democratic Party consolidate power—will not come down to simply announcing support for the right policies, while decrying or downplaying the wrong ones. It will, unfortunately, be much longer and harder work.”
Labor and the Democrats
To borrow a phrase from Mike Davis, the marriage between labor and the Democrats is barren, but no one is ready to file for divorce just yet. For the foreseeable future, all indications suggest that unions will be part of the unity of contradictory forces in the Democratic Party. If there is a schism, it’s most likely going to tack to the right. Under the right inducements from Trump, it’s easy to imagine a conservative wing of labor made up of Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, President of the International Association of Fire Fighters Edward Kelly, International Longshoremen’s Association President Harold Daggett, and President of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Douglas McCarron, alongside assorted police, corrections, and border patrol unions.
But can rifts grow into large political fractures even within the dense web of corporate alliances that juice the Democratic Party’s coffers and impede even the mildest redistribution efforts? No one knows. The corporate dominance of the party is indisputable, and bosses grip on it hasn’t loosened because the Left has organized within the party. But the party also contains environmentalists, unions, and progressives of various stripes. Can they, organizing within and/or outside of it, exert meaningful influence? Addressing that question would lead outside the scope of this article. But independent candidacies, like Dan Osborn’s senatorial run in Nebraska, and municipal reform projects like the Richmond Progressive Alliance in California, offer models to attempt. We have to sow seeds of class solidarity across the nation, so many seedlings of independent political action may bloom.
“The Democrats did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Trump,” wrote Jimmy Williams, Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, after the election. “That’s not good enough anymore! Rather than offer a positive agenda on what immigrant workers bring to our country, they bought into the punitive, ‘tough,’ anti-worker messaging that is championed by Trump, even though we know it’s the bosses’ fault.”
Still, 2,000 UNITE HERE members and volunteers canvassed in battleground states, knocking on over four millions doors and had over 500,000 conversations with voters–deploying to doors as they’ve done in previous election cycles.
Members of the United Auto Workers participated in an intensive door-knocking campaign, reaching 200,000 members. Now we need a similar deployment but to organize and save the labor movement and along with it the dignity of working-class life.
UAW President Shawn Fain didn’t mince words: “UAW members around the country clocked in today under the same threat they faced yesterday: unchecked corporate greed destroying our lives, our families, and our communities…We’ve said all along that no matter who is in the White House, our fight remains the same.”
“Corporations and ultra-wealthy people are setting the agenda,” UNITE HERE President Gwen Mills. “Our mission is to put that power back in the hands of workers.”
Right now ranks of organized workers are far too few to exercise power–not to elect Democrats but to make any politician, regardless of party listen, to workers’ demands. To change the balance of power, we need more union members and unions that give a damn about fighting back. The answer to organized money is organized workers, but fewer workers are members of unions today than at any time in the country’s recent history. Union membership rates stand at 10% in the public sector and an abysmal 6% in the private sector.
Union researcher Chris Boehner has found that current organizing is one-tenth of what the labor movement had accomplished in the 1970s. “But imagine if labor put on its seventies bell-bottom jeans and started organizing one percent of eligible workers as unions did in the 1970s, not the current one-tenth of one-percent rate,” wrote Boehner. “Instead of 107,000 workers voting for a union in 2024, the number would be more like 1.1 million workers.”
At the end of Buñuel’s film, the guests attend a religious service, and yet again they are for some inexplicable reason struck with a paralyzing inertia, unable to leave. So too are Democrats, whether at the MSNBC studio or the White House, hermetically sealed in the insularity of their self-exculpating ideological delusions, ever loyal to their corporate paymasters. Let them be.
As Trump steps into office for a second term, the labor movement will have to stand up– not retreat into a defensive crouch. If the bosses don’t listen to our demands, we can walk off—just like Buñuel’s cooks and servants, with union power at our backs.
2028
Save the Date: May 2028, the date of our rendezvous with a potential to exercise our collective power, as the labor movement aligns our contracts and prepares for mass strikes. On that day, we aren’t just leaving. We are marching as one movement united behind the working class.
In Prisoners of the American Dream, Mike Davis wrote that the Knights of Labor had “tapped the wellsprings of diverse laboring traditions…to nourish a network of solidarity association that bound together workplace and community.” One year before the May Day eight-hour-day demonstrations of 1886, Davis shared an inventory of “Knight-related organizations in Detroit in 1885, showing how their movement building went beyond bread-and-butter economics but provided an all-encompassing vision of democracy from below: ‘Unions, Knights of Labor assemblies, Working Men’s Club Rooms, cooperative stores and factories, labor newspapers, singing societies, social clubs, political organizations, and a worker’s militia.’”
These mass institutions involving hundreds of thousands achieved the “landmark reconciliation of Irish, German, and native workers.” Ultimately, Davis argued racism and nativism prevented the working class from seizing crucial turning points in class struggles of nineteen century into independent political action and realignment.
“The refusal of Irish miners in an anthracite hellhole of eastern Pennsylvania not only to sympathize with the slaves but to accept the implication… that they were in America anything less than CITIZENS’, speaks volumes about the ideological impact of American exceptionalism and the difficulties of building a class-conscious labor movement,” wrote Davis about failed efforts to build a united front linking abolition and ethno-religious Catholic discrimination.
Yes, it’s been a long-haul struggle. But that’s the trouble with a simpleminded populism, especially in a country where who is a person or who constitutes the people is heavily contested, from the Dred Scott case in 1858, guaranteeing enslavers the right to take their human property anywhere in the United States and strip African Americans of citizenship, to the present, targeting the undocumented workers for mass deportation and persecuting anyone involved in abortion or gender-affirming care.
“Give the people what they want,” say the liberals and culturally conservative leftists, inciting us to sacrifice trans people and migrants in response to social reaction. But as Stuart Hall cogently put it, “Politicians always think they know what people feel. It’s a fallacy, because there is no such thing as ‘the people.’ It is a discursive device for summoning the people that you want. You’re constructing the people, you’re not reflecting the people.”
Today, we are faced with yet another turning point, a moment to remake the common sense in the working class. We can overcome divisions that feed racism, nativism, and misogyny. But in order to do so, we must organize institutions of our own making. As we organize for May 2028, we have a rare opportunity to fortify class institutions and create a new web of associations to contain the necessary solidarities to act as one mighty working class.
To believe deeply that the working class can self-consciously act collectively is, in the words of W.E.B. Dubois, “a hope that is not hopeful, but not hopeless.”
Let’s begin with a leap of faith, a fidelity in the primacy of class action in defense of all workers, no matter their legal status, race, or gender, so that in the years ahead, we can “fight with hope, fight without hope, but fight absolutely” to be society.
The Party and Class
Anton Pannekoek
Published: Modern Socialism, no. 2, pages 7-10. Winter 1941.
Transcribed: by David Walters/Greg Adargo, December, 2001.
Proofed: and corrected by Megen Devine, July 2011; Micah Muer, 2017.
Source: Antonie Pannekoek Archives
The old labor movement is organized in parties. The belief in parties is the main reason for the impotence of the working class; therefore we avoid forming a new party—not because we are too few, but because a party is an organization that aims to lead and control the working class. In opposition to this, we maintain that the working class can rise to victory only when it independently attacks its problems and decides its own fate. The workers should not blindly accept the slogans of others, nor of our own groups but must think, act, and decide for themselves. This conception is on sharp contradiction to the tradition of the party as the most important means of educating the proletariat. Therefore many, though repudiating the Socialist and Communist parties, resist and oppose us. This is partly due to their traditional concepts; after viewing the class struggle as a struggle of parties, it becomes difficult to consider it as purely the struggle of the working class, as a class struggle. But partly this concept is based on the idea that the party nevertheless plays an essential and important part in the struggle of the proletariat. Let us investigate this latter idea more closely.
Essentially the party is a grouping according to views, conceptions; the classes are groupings according to economic interests. Class membership is determined by one's part in the process of production; party membership is the joining of persons who agree in their conceptions of the social problems. Formerly it was thought that this contradiction would disappear in the class party, the "workers" party. During the rise of Social Democracy it seemed that it would gradually embrace the whole working class, partly as members, partly as supporters. Because Marxian theory declared that similar interests beget similar viewpoints and aims, the contradiction between party and class was expected gradually to disappear. History proved otherwise. Social Democracy remained a minority, other working class groups organized against it, sections split away from it, and its own character changed. Its own program was revised or reinterpreted. The evolution of society does not proceed along a smooth, even line, but in conflicts and contradictions.
With the intensification of the workers' struggle, the might of the enemy also increases and besets the workers with renewed doubts and fears as to which road is best. And every doubt brings on splits, contradictions, and fractional battles within the labor movement. It is futile to bewail these conflicts and splits as harmful in dividing and weakening the working class. The working class is not weak because it is split up—it is split up because it is weak. Because the enemy is powerful and the old methods of warfare prove unavailing, the working class must seek new methods. Its task will not become clear as the result of enlightenment from above; it must discover its tasks through hard work, through thought and conflict of opinions. It must find its own way; therefore, the internal struggle. It must relinquish old ideas and illusions and adopt new ones, and because this is difficult, therefore the magnitude and severity of the splits.
Nor can we delude ourselves into believing that this period of party and ideological strife is only temporary and will make way to renewed harmony. True, in the course of the class struggle there are occasions when all forces unite in a great achievable objective and the revolution is carried on with the might of a united working class. But after that, as after every victory, come differences on the question: what next? And even if the working class is victorious, it is always confronted by the most difficult task of subduing the enemy further, of reorganizing production, creating new order. It is impossible that all workers, all strata and groups, with their often still diverse interests should, at this stage, agree on all matters and be ready for united and decisive further action. They will find the true course only after the sharpest controversies and conflicts and only thus achieve clarity.
If, in this situation, persons with the same fundamental conceptions unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussions and propagandize their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of today. Action, the actual class struggle, is the task of the working masses themselves, in their entirety, in their real groupings as factory and millhands, or other productive groups, because history and economy have placed them in the position where they must and can fight the working class struggle. It would be insane if the supporters of one party were to go on strike while those of another continue to work. But both tendencies will defend their positions on strike or no strike in the factory meetings, thus affording an opportunity to arrive at a well founded decision. The struggle is so great, the enemy so powerful that only the masses as a whole can achieve a victory—the result of the material and moral power of action, unity and enthusiasm, but also the result of the mental force of thought, of clarity. In this lies the great importance of such parties or groups based on opinions: that they bring clarity in their conflicts, discussions and propaganda. They are the organs of the self-enlightenment of the working class by means of which the workers find their way to freedom.
Of course such parties are not static and unchangeable. Every new situation, every new problem will find minds diverging and uniting in new groups with new programs. They have a fluctuating character and constantly readjust themselves to new situations.
Compared to such groups, the present workers' parties have an entirely different character, for they have a different objective: they want to seize power for themselves. They aim not at being an aid to the working class in its struggle for emancipation but to rule it themselves and proclaim that this constitutes the emancipation of the proletariat. The Social-Democracy which arose in the era of parliamentarism conceived of this rule as a parliamentary government. The Communist Party carried the idea of party rule through to its fullest extreme in the party dictatorship.
Such parties, in distinction to the groups described above, must be rigid structures with clear lines of demarcation through membership cards, statues, party discipline and admission and expulsion procedures. For they are instruments of power—they fight for power, bridle their members by force and constantly seek to extend the scope of their power. It is not their task to develop the initiative of the workers; rather do they aim at training loyal and unquestioning members of their faith. While the working class in its struggle for power and victory needs unlimited intellectual freedom, the party rule must suppress all opinions except its own. In "democratic" parties, the suppression is veiled; in the dictatorship parties, it is open, brutal suppression.
Many workers already realize that the rule of the Socialist or Communist party will be only the concealed form of the rule of the bourgeois class in which the exploitation and suppression of the working class remains. Instead of these parties, they urge the formation of a "revolutionary party" that will really aim at the rule of the workers and the realization of communism. Not a party in the new sense as described above, but a party like those of today, that fight for power as the "vanguard" of the class, as the organization of conscious, revolutionary minorities, that seize power in order to use it for the emancipation of the class.
We claim that there is an internal contradiction in the term: "revolutionary party." Such a party cannot be revolutionary. It is no more revolutionary than were the creators of the Third Reich. When we speak of revolution, we speak of the proletarian revolution, the seizure of power by the working class itself.
The "revolutionary party" is based on the idea that the working class needs a new group of leaders who vanquish the bourgeoisie for the workers and construct a new government—(note that the working class is not yet considered fit to reorganize and regulate production.) But is not this as it should be? As the working class does not seem capable of revolution, is it not necessary that the revolutionary vanguard, the party, make the revolution for it? And is this not true as long as the masses willingly endure capitalism?
Against this, we raise the question: what force can such a party raise for the revolution? How is it able to defeat the capitalist class? Only if the masses stand behind it. Only if the masses rise and through mass attacks, mass struggle, and mass strikes, overthrow the old regime. Without the action of the masses, there can be no revolution.
Two things can follow. The masses remain in action: they do not go home and leave the government to the new party. They organize their power in factory and workshop and prepare for further conflict in order to defeat capital; through the workers' councils they establish a form union to take over the complete direction of all society—in other words, they prove, they are not as incapable of revolution as it seemed. Of necessity then, conflict will arise with the party which itself wants to take control and which sees only disorder and anarchy in the self-action of the working class. Possibly the workers will develop their movement and sweep out the party. Or, the party, with the help of bourgeois elements defeats the workers. In either case, the party is an obstacle to the revolution because it wants to be more than a means of propaganda and enlightenment; because it feels itself called upon to lead and rule as a party.
On the other hand the masses may follow the party faith and leave it to the full direction of affairs. They follow the slogans from above, have confidence in the new government (as in Germany and Russia) that is to realize communism—and go back home and to work. Immediately the bourgeoisie exerts its whole class power the roots of which are unbroken; its financial forces, its great intellectual resources, and its economic power in factories and great enterprises. Against this the government party is too weak. Only through moderation, concessions and yielding can it maintain that it is insanity for the workers to try to force impossible demands. Thus the party deprived of class power becomes the instrument for maintaining bourgeois power.
We said before that the term "revolutionary party" was contradictory from a proletarian point of view. We can state it otherwise: in the term "revolutionary party," "revolutionary" always means a bourgeois revolution. Always, when the masses overthrow a government and then allow a new party to take power, we have a bourgeois revolution—the substitution of a ruling caste by a new ruling caste. It was so in Paris in 1830 when the finance bourgeoisie supplanted the landed proprietors, in 1848 when the industrial bourgeoisie took over the reins.
In the Russian revolution the party bureaucracy came to power as the ruling caste. But in Western Europe and America the bourgeoisie is much more powerfully entrenched in plants and banks, so that a party bureaucracy cannot push them aside as easily. The bourgeoisie in these countries can be vanquished only by repeated and united action of the masses in which they seize the mills and factories and build up their council organizations.
Those who speak of "revolutionary parties" draw incomplete, limited conclusions from history. When the Socialist and Communist parties became organs of bourgeois rule for the perpetuation of exploitation, these well-meaning people merely concluded that they would have to do better. They cannot realize that the failure of these parties is due to the fundamental conflict between the self-emancipation of the working class through its own power and the pacifying of the revolution through a new sympathetic ruling clique. They think they are the revolutionary vanguard because they see the masses indifferent and inactive. But the masses are inactive only because they cannot yet comprehend the course of the struggle and the unity of class interests, although they instinctively sense the great power of the enemy and the immenseness of their task. Once conditions force them into action they will attack the task of self-organization and the conquest of the economic power of capital.
The old labor movement is organized in parties. The belief in parties is the main reason for the impotence of the working class; therefore we avoid forming a new party—not because we are too few, but because a party is an organization that aims to lead and control the working class. In opposition to this, we maintain that the working class can rise to victory only when it independently attacks its problems and decides its own fate. The workers should not blindly accept the slogans of others, nor of our own groups but must think, act, and decide for themselves. This conception is on sharp contradiction to the tradition of the party as the most important means of educating the proletariat. Therefore many, though repudiating the Socialist and Communist parties, resist and oppose us. This is partly due to their traditional concepts; after viewing the class struggle as a struggle of parties, it becomes difficult to consider it as purely the struggle of the working class, as a class struggle. But partly this concept is based on the idea that the party nevertheless plays an essential and important part in the struggle of the proletariat. Let us investigate this latter idea more closely.
Essentially the party is a grouping according to views, conceptions; the classes are groupings according to economic interests. Class membership is determined by one's part in the process of production; party membership is the joining of persons who agree in their conceptions of the social problems. Formerly it was thought that this contradiction would disappear in the class party, the "workers" party. During the rise of Social Democracy it seemed that it would gradually embrace the whole working class, partly as members, partly as supporters. Because Marxian theory declared that similar interests beget similar viewpoints and aims, the contradiction between party and class was expected gradually to disappear. History proved otherwise. Social Democracy remained a minority, other working class groups organized against it, sections split away from it, and its own character changed. Its own program was revised or reinterpreted. The evolution of society does not proceed along a smooth, even line, but in conflicts and contradictions.
With the intensification of the workers' struggle, the might of the enemy also increases and besets the workers with renewed doubts and fears as to which road is best. And every doubt brings on splits, contradictions, and fractional battles within the labor movement. It is futile to bewail these conflicts and splits as harmful in dividing and weakening the working class. The working class is not weak because it is split up—it is split up because it is weak. Because the enemy is powerful and the old methods of warfare prove unavailing, the working class must seek new methods. Its task will not become clear as the result of enlightenment from above; it must discover its tasks through hard work, through thought and conflict of opinions. It must find its own way; therefore, the internal struggle. It must relinquish old ideas and illusions and adopt new ones, and because this is difficult, therefore the magnitude and severity of the splits.
Nor can we delude ourselves into believing that this period of party and ideological strife is only temporary and will make way to renewed harmony. True, in the course of the class struggle there are occasions when all forces unite in a great achievable objective and the revolution is carried on with the might of a united working class. But after that, as after every victory, come differences on the question: what next? And even if the working class is victorious, it is always confronted by the most difficult task of subduing the enemy further, of reorganizing production, creating new order. It is impossible that all workers, all strata and groups, with their often still diverse interests should, at this stage, agree on all matters and be ready for united and decisive further action. They will find the true course only after the sharpest controversies and conflicts and only thus achieve clarity.
If, in this situation, persons with the same fundamental conceptions unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussions and propagandize their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of today. Action, the actual class struggle, is the task of the working masses themselves, in their entirety, in their real groupings as factory and millhands, or other productive groups, because history and economy have placed them in the position where they must and can fight the working class struggle. It would be insane if the supporters of one party were to go on strike while those of another continue to work. But both tendencies will defend their positions on strike or no strike in the factory meetings, thus affording an opportunity to arrive at a well founded decision. The struggle is so great, the enemy so powerful that only the masses as a whole can achieve a victory—the result of the material and moral power of action, unity and enthusiasm, but also the result of the mental force of thought, of clarity. In this lies the great importance of such parties or groups based on opinions: that they bring clarity in their conflicts, discussions and propaganda. They are the organs of the self-enlightenment of the working class by means of which the workers find their way to freedom.
Of course such parties are not static and unchangeable. Every new situation, every new problem will find minds diverging and uniting in new groups with new programs. They have a fluctuating character and constantly readjust themselves to new situations.
Compared to such groups, the present workers' parties have an entirely different character, for they have a different objective: they want to seize power for themselves. They aim not at being an aid to the working class in its struggle for emancipation but to rule it themselves and proclaim that this constitutes the emancipation of the proletariat. The Social-Democracy which arose in the era of parliamentarism conceived of this rule as a parliamentary government. The Communist Party carried the idea of party rule through to its fullest extreme in the party dictatorship.
Such parties, in distinction to the groups described above, must be rigid structures with clear lines of demarcation through membership cards, statues, party discipline and admission and expulsion procedures. For they are instruments of power—they fight for power, bridle their members by force and constantly seek to extend the scope of their power. It is not their task to develop the initiative of the workers; rather do they aim at training loyal and unquestioning members of their faith. While the working class in its struggle for power and victory needs unlimited intellectual freedom, the party rule must suppress all opinions except its own. In "democratic" parties, the suppression is veiled; in the dictatorship parties, it is open, brutal suppression.
Many workers already realize that the rule of the Socialist or Communist party will be only the concealed form of the rule of the bourgeois class in which the exploitation and suppression of the working class remains. Instead of these parties, they urge the formation of a "revolutionary party" that will really aim at the rule of the workers and the realization of communism. Not a party in the new sense as described above, but a party like those of today, that fight for power as the "vanguard" of the class, as the organization of conscious, revolutionary minorities, that seize power in order to use it for the emancipation of the class.
We claim that there is an internal contradiction in the term: "revolutionary party." Such a party cannot be revolutionary. It is no more revolutionary than were the creators of the Third Reich. When we speak of revolution, we speak of the proletarian revolution, the seizure of power by the working class itself.
The "revolutionary party" is based on the idea that the working class needs a new group of leaders who vanquish the bourgeoisie for the workers and construct a new government—(note that the working class is not yet considered fit to reorganize and regulate production.) But is not this as it should be? As the working class does not seem capable of revolution, is it not necessary that the revolutionary vanguard, the party, make the revolution for it? And is this not true as long as the masses willingly endure capitalism?
Against this, we raise the question: what force can such a party raise for the revolution? How is it able to defeat the capitalist class? Only if the masses stand behind it. Only if the masses rise and through mass attacks, mass struggle, and mass strikes, overthrow the old regime. Without the action of the masses, there can be no revolution.
Two things can follow. The masses remain in action: they do not go home and leave the government to the new party. They organize their power in factory and workshop and prepare for further conflict in order to defeat capital; through the workers' councils they establish a form union to take over the complete direction of all society—in other words, they prove, they are not as incapable of revolution as it seemed. Of necessity then, conflict will arise with the party which itself wants to take control and which sees only disorder and anarchy in the self-action of the working class. Possibly the workers will develop their movement and sweep out the party. Or, the party, with the help of bourgeois elements defeats the workers. In either case, the party is an obstacle to the revolution because it wants to be more than a means of propaganda and enlightenment; because it feels itself called upon to lead and rule as a party.
On the other hand the masses may follow the party faith and leave it to the full direction of affairs. They follow the slogans from above, have confidence in the new government (as in Germany and Russia) that is to realize communism—and go back home and to work. Immediately the bourgeoisie exerts its whole class power the roots of which are unbroken; its financial forces, its great intellectual resources, and its economic power in factories and great enterprises. Against this the government party is too weak. Only through moderation, concessions and yielding can it maintain that it is insanity for the workers to try to force impossible demands. Thus the party deprived of class power becomes the instrument for maintaining bourgeois power.
We said before that the term "revolutionary party" was contradictory from a proletarian point of view. We can state it otherwise: in the term "revolutionary party," "revolutionary" always means a bourgeois revolution. Always, when the masses overthrow a government and then allow a new party to take power, we have a bourgeois revolution—the substitution of a ruling caste by a new ruling caste. It was so in Paris in 1830 when the finance bourgeoisie supplanted the landed proprietors, in 1848 when the industrial bourgeoisie took over the reins.
In the Russian revolution the party bureaucracy came to power as the ruling caste. But in Western Europe and America the bourgeoisie is much more powerfully entrenched in plants and banks, so that a party bureaucracy cannot push them aside as easily. The bourgeoisie in these countries can be vanquished only by repeated and united action of the masses in which they seize the mills and factories and build up their council organizations.
Those who speak of "revolutionary parties" draw incomplete, limited conclusions from history. When the Socialist and Communist parties became organs of bourgeois rule for the perpetuation of exploitation, these well-meaning people merely concluded that they would have to do better. They cannot realize that the failure of these parties is due to the fundamental conflict between the self-emancipation of the working class through its own power and the pacifying of the revolution through a new sympathetic ruling clique. They think they are the revolutionary vanguard because they see the masses indifferent and inactive. But the masses are inactive only because they cannot yet comprehend the course of the struggle and the unity of class interests, although they instinctively sense the great power of the enemy and the immenseness of their task. Once conditions force them into action they will attack the task of self-organization and the conquest of the economic power of capital.
On the New Program of the American Workers Party
1935
Published: in International Council Correspondence Vol. 1, no.4, January 1935, pp 15-25.
Source: Antonie Pannekoek Archives
Transcribed: by Graham Dyer
The first question to be put with reference to the statement of principles of a revolutionary labor party has to do with whether and how far that program really breaks with the existing capitalist order of society. The A.W.P. is not lacking in the subjective will to make that break. It rejects not only the hitherto existing form of the bourgeois social order and its economic foundation, but also the previous and future forms of the Rooseveltian New Deal inclusive of inflation, “social credit”, and “state socialism”; it recognizes Fascism as merely an attempt to save the capitalist State and property, and lays bare within the Roosevelt administration the clearly arising tendencies to fascism. It rejects the traditional American concept of “politics” and the replacement of the real political movement by the parliamentary electoral movement. It proclaims a new type of State in the form of the workers' state based on workers' councils as a democratic instrument for solving the contradictions of the capitalist system and for accomplishing the transition to the communist society. It takes the standpoint of an unconditional revolutionary internationalism of the labor movement; and it separates itself from the Communist International because primarily this organization is “completely and mechanically” controlled by the Russian party and serviceable to the changing official interests of the Soviet Union so that the identity of its tasks with the immediate tasks of the international struggle of the working class is no longer unconditionally and at every moment guaranteed. In its economic analysis it decisively takes the position that even though the present world crisis may be temporarily “overcome”, the decline of the capitalist system is no longer reversible, and it regards the present crisis as the “beginning of the end of the present form of society”. It makes the claim of having recognized the nature of the impending revolutionary change and of having the capacity for the correct carrying through of the revolutionary proletarian class struggle and for the setting up of a free workers' democracy.
Nevertheless, the present draft program does not contain the break with the capitalist social order and all present and future further developments of that order. Even in the economic part of the program there is a striking gap, in that nowhere is there any attempt to come to grips with the concept of planned economy, and much less is the fundamentally capitalist-fascist character of all present day talk and pretense of so-called planned economy decisively pointed out. The draft speaks of “planned economy” only in two places. In the one it is taken for granted that a “planned socialist economy” exists and is making headway in the Soviet Union; and although in the next paragraph there is express mention of the “compromises” forced upon Russia even in the economic sphere and a statement of the impossibility of building a socialist economy in the Soviet Union alone, there is not a word of explanation as to why and to what extent the unlimitedly socialist character of the Russian planned economy accords with these compromises and impossibilities and in what that character consists. In the other passage which reveals a lack of clarity almost reminiscent of the Rooseveltian and Hitlerian “economic planning”, we read that the future workers' State issuing from the victorious revolution is destined “to undertake great projects of social reconstruction by the planned economy of the new society”. To this unsatisfactory treatment of the concept of planned economy may be added the ambiguous manner in which, immediately thereafter, in the section on “Socialization”, there is demanded only the expropriation of all “monopolies in industry and land”. In view of the monopolistic character of all capitalist property, that may, on the one hand, mean complete socialization. On the other hand, many doors remain open for limiting the “socialization” to the so-called monopolies after the manner of the “socialization program” of the German and Austrian Social Democracy from 1918 to 1933, or even according to the still further watered proposals of the new-socialist post-war “socialism” (de Man's “Plan d’action”).
Thus in the very incompleteness and ambiguity of the economic demands it becomes manifest that the carrying out of this program might require, instead of the revolutionary attack upon the whole of capital, possibly only one or another partial attack. Likewise the lack of theoretical clarity at the basis of these demands is proved by the form in which (in the last paragraph of the first chapter) “the central contradiction” of the capitalist system and its “solution” are defined:
“The central contradiction is unmistakably clear; it is the contradiction between a productive plant (!) now physically capable of supplying amply all the basic needs of men, of freeing men forever from hunger, want and insecurity, of assuring mankind as a whole thereby full and creative life - between this and a system of social relations that prevents this productive plant from operating effectively, that directs its operations not to the fulfillment of human needs but to the making of profits for private individuals and corporations. Out of this contradiction and the irreconcilable class divisions it creates, flow the many other contradictions that devastate modern society.”
What is here proclaimed is not the Marxist and revolutionary basic contradiction between the productive forces and productive relations and (what is strictly identical with this economic contradiction) the historical, social and practical contradiction and struggle between the possessing class (interested in maintaining the present relations of production) and the non-possessing proletarian class (interested in overthrowing the present relations of production), a class which, according to Marx, is “itself the strongest productive force”. Rather it is here asserted, after the fashion of Stuart Chase and other modern apostles of capitalist planned economy, that, even today, under capitalism itself, a new epoch has set in, in which “scarcity production” could be replaced by “plenty production” if only the present productive apparatus were no longer capitalistically misused but humanly used. As if the capitalist mode of production had not ever been at the same time the production of ‘plenty’ and the production of ‘scarcity’ and ever the one only through the medium of the other! As if the root of the capitalistic evil lay, not in production itself and in the capitalistic fettering of the productive forces (i.e. in the capitalistic suppression of the productive forces which could be released through the socialist mode of production and which even now, in the proletarian class struggle, are rebelling against the capitalistic relations of production) but only in an avoidable misdirection of this production, in the misuse of the available productive apparatus and in an improper distribution! The basic contradiction of capitalist society is not between the available productive apparatus and the productive relations. Rather is this whole material productive apparatus (the technical equipment of the industries), this whole enormous apparatus with its capacity which in times of peace, even in boom periods, is no longer completely used and which lies idle during the crisis - this apparatus is nevertheless, if one will only take into consideration also the “normal condition” of war, still today completely adapted to the capitalistic property relations. This adaptedness exists even for the wage workers and for the now rapidly increasing mass of those who are temporarily and chronically unoccupied.
Just as in the capitalistic division of labor the productive workers are assimilated in the most exact manner to their means of production, the “part-worker” to his ‘tool’ and the laboring man has become a mere appendage of the machine, so the growing army of unemployed, even in its long-known quality of the “industrial reserve army” of capital in peace and the more so in its new quality (now grown important) of the “military reserve army” of capital in war, forms in its functions an exactly determinate component of the equipment of the present-day capitalist mode of production. Anyone who takes as his starting point the means of production which are actually at hand must logically not only renounce the proletarian revolution in favor of a capitalistic reform, but in the end capitulate before fascism. The present capacity of production in its capitalistic form, computed by such theoreticians as the Technocrats and Stuart Chase is given by the existence of the means of production, by the enormous capitalistic productive apparatus at hand. When confronted with the storms to which the world market is subjected as a result of the crisis with the ravages of an “unregulated” competition on and, last not least, with the unavoidable rebellions on the part of the suppressed and exploited workers and of the growing mass of under-workers who are “planfully” left jobless in time of peace, that productive capacity can be protected only by means of the strong State, by which this technical foundation of capitalism is protected under all circumstances in war and in peace and defended with all ordinary and extraordinary means against all attacks of the workers as well as of the individual capitalists and special capitalist groups. That is the feeling today of the bourgeoisie, even where it itself suffers under fascism, and that is the feeling of a large and growing part of the people and of the peoples, even deep into the ranks of the workers and of the unemployed under-workers. The sophism at the bottom of all this, the deceptiveness of the illusion that the strong state of a Hitler or Mussolini or Roosevelt could really solve this problem, and the insufficiency of this static and evolutionary goal itself can be illuminated only when the basic contradiction is seen not from the material side in the relation between productive means (apparatus) and the productive relations, but from the human side in the relation between the productive forces which are potentially present in the working population and the present capitalistic relations of production (which are in full accord with the productive apparatus). The modern working class, which has developed upward, not without the capitalistic means of production, but with them and thru them to the present level of its economic and historico-social-practical productive power, but which in increasing clarity of consciousness is already separable from those means of production and can already be joined to them ideologically in new socialist forms - the modern working class represents that “strongest force of production” which in its advancing development comes in ever increasing revolutionary contradictions with the fixed capitalistic productive relations, property relations, distribution relations, their State, law and all their ideologies. Its own State, the proletarian workers' State, is the strong State of which today fascists and half-fascists technocrats and Stuart Chasists dream only in a confused manner, but which becomes actual through the unfettering of that strongest revolutionary productive force which even today is the proletarian class itself, through the bursting of those fetters which even today is capital itself, and through the violent solution in the international proletarian revolution, of the sharpening basic contradiction existing between the two.
It is not my intention to say that this, the real meaning of the Marxist doctrine on the basic contradiction of capitalist economy was misunderstood by the authors of the program. There are Marxian “materialists” who look upon the Marxist doctrine of the “productive character of the proletariat itself” as an “idealistic” deviation of the master from his own materialism. This draft program is in general far remote from such dogmatic narrowness. Still less is it my design to base this whole criticism, say, on the single phrase “productive plant.” But the whole passage above quoted, which occupies a decisive position in the program, is saturated even in its style with those only apparently revolutionary, in reality superficial ideas which today are disseminated by the voluntary and involuntary pacemakers of the fascist counter-revolution regarding the possibility of a New Deal through a mere transformation of distribution and a few “planned-economic” invasions into the present system of production. Even where the program brings out, with a decisiveness not hitherto attained in any socialist program, the special significance of the industrial workers and particularly of the “basic industry workers”, for whom the revolutionary solution is pointed to as the only way out because their very situation in life, it defines as the goal of this action the creation of a condition in which “the shops run to serve the needs of society and not to make a profit for private individuals and corporations. This, and this only, will release the machinery now braked by the overload of capital debt and the impossibility of finding solvent purchasers for commodities”. This ostensibly revolutionary goal of the basic industry workers can today, in the exigencies of the crisis, be taken over even by the capitalist who is threatened with bankruptcy, and in Germany we find Hitler shouting: “The general welfare comes before private welfare”!
The “Revolutionary Parliamentarism” of the A.W.P.
In the criticism of the political part of the draft program, I take as my starting point the view (won through study of the program and press of the A.W.P.) that the A.W.P. at its present stage of development is not yet a directly revolutionary party but is merely on the way “toward an American Revolutionary Labor Movement”. This becomes evident even from the external division of the program, where the aims of the party are treated quite separately from the means and methods which in the present and immediate future it thinks of employing in its “struggle for power”. The second chapter which treats of “the aim of the A.W.P.” is immediately followed by an intercalated third chapter which gives a criticism of the other labor parties and should really stand as an annex at the end of the program; and it is only in the fourth and last chapter that we get the answer to the question, “How the AWP will fight for Power”. The significance of this sharp separation between the so-called “final goal” (questions of the maximal program, questions of the program of principles) and the so-called “present tasks” or “transitional slogans” (questions of the minimal program, questions of the program of action) is sufficiently well known to anyone familiar with the Marxist movement from the history of the European labor parties of pre-war times. Such a party is (at the best) revolutionary in its theory and in the meaning which it theoretically assigns to its present actions and to the connection between them; it is also revolutionary in its practical tendency - more or less directed to the “final goal” - and it may in a certain measure, even in its present practice, fulfill that role which the Communist Manifesto of 1847-48 had once proclaimed for the Communists: namely, that they “represent in the present-day movement at the same time the future of the movement" or (what merely concretizes the same thing from two directions and in another form) that they represent in the national at the same time the international movement and in the political at the same time the economic and social movement on which it is based. It is not yet able, however, whether from objective causes, based on the outer development, or from subjective causes, based on its own development, to combine its different activities, distributed over different spheres and time intervals, among each other and with all the other actions of the proletarian class into the cohesive whole of one revolutionary action.
Where such a situation is given - and that this applies to the A.W.P. to its own character and its position within the present-day American labor movement is clearly proved, in my opinion, by the present draft program - it would be improper to take this standpoint of a “pure” and total revolutionary ideology and to regard the difference between the final slogans and the present demand of the program offhand, as so many “contradictions” and “inconsistencies”, or to deny to the party question any sort of “revolutionary” character because of the limitedness of its immediate practical tasks. The critic of such a program, and particularly the outside critic, must rather set out from the disconnectedness and transitional character of such a program as from a given fact. He must confine himself to pointing out the cases in which as a result of this (within certain limits unavoidable) division between future aims and present means and methods of the struggle, the revolutionary development of the party, oriented in its actions on this program, is hindered and endangered. He can protest when the revolutionary theory degenerates to a mere ideology, to the ideological cloak for an actually opportunistic practice, and he can prove that in certain cases, as a result of the peculiarly “revolutionary” position of the party on a certain form of proletarian activity, the present force of this proletarian activity is in reality weakened and its future revolutionary development fettered, while with an apparently less revolutionary attitude together with maximum intensification of the present activity the way for a really revolutionary further development is much better kept open.
The given starting points for such a criticism, one which is not ideologically doctrinaire but realistically revolutionary, is offered by the position taken in the program, on the one hand, to the question of parliamentarism, and on the other to the question of trade unions.
All the mistakes committed in the earlier development of the Marxist parties in Europe and there already shown up by reality are brought together with encyclopedic completeness in the program's attitude to participation in elections. It is not a matter of criticizing the decision adopted by the party in this field of tactics. A sober exposition of mere grounds of expediency, which make participation in elections a transitorily unavoidable necessity in present-day America, even for a proletarian and in its tendency revolutionary party, would suffice if not to refute all the fundamental objections which might arise against the tactical decision, at least to make them practically of no account. Instead of that, the present draft program has, in the first place, taken a position on this question which is thoroly contradictory - and this is by no means a dialectical contradiction, brought about thru the relation between final goal and present tasks, but a simple and direct contradiction arising thru unclear and inconsistent thinking and speaking. It has, furthermore, at the place where after long beating about the bush in the very last section of the program the practical decision is now really taken, it has forthwith added on to this opportunistic decision an ideological and apologetic illusionary and “revolutionary” justification by which itself and in addition to other or others are deceived. In doing so, it has decided not simply for parliamentary activity of the party, but has rather taken up with that thoroly unreal monster of a so-called “revolutionary parliamentarism” the nothingness of which has been proved by the previous experience of all Marxist parties in Germany and in all other European countries before and since the war, a something which, after the close of that historical period in which the Parliament constituted for the bourgeois revolution itself a means of struggle and not yet a mere means for coordinating the different competing class interests within the bourgeoisie, hence in the entire epoch of the beginning proletarian revolution has actually never and nowhere existed and which likewise will by no means exist for the present and future America now entering upon the era of the final struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, democracy and fascism, socialism and capitalism.
Because of the importance of the matter, I shall sketch in some detail the different stages by which in this program a revolutionary principle, which from the very beginning is formulated ambiguously becomes converted into a mere revolutionary phrase.
As early as the second chapter (which in itself is not concerned with present practice, but only with the “goal” of the party) we get some remarkable phraseology concerning the allegedly “common aims of all political parties” – as if (and particularly from the viewpoint of the revolutionary final goal) there could be such a common character of proletarian and capitalist parties even for a moment. The program itself describes in detail, in two special sections, “The Nature of the Capitalist Dictatorship” as the rule of a minority and the technique by which the capitalist class imposes this rule upon the great majority of the people and of the working class with all forceful means, direct and indirect.
This exposition is counterbalanced in the next section by "The Specific Aims of a Revolutionary Party", and on this occasion, if words have any meaning, parliamentary action as a possible means for the attainment of even the smallest part of these specific aims is radically rejected. This rejection begins - still somewhat weakly - with the observation that the A.W.P., to be sure, like the capitalist parties aims at the conquest and consolidation of state power, but that, unlike the capitalist parties, it regards this measure “merely as an essential (!) step to fundamentally changing the whole order of society”. It wants to bring this about “not by stepping into state power, the Presidency or Congress, but by doing away with the present basis of state power entirely”. The whole exposition immediately following reaches its climax in the result that in the given conditions of the political dictatorship of capital, resting upon the economic and social class character of the capitalist order, it would be utopian for the workers to believe that they could take over the state power along parliamentary paths. To this end, the working class would rather require other, newly forged weapons. The united action of the working class organizations must provide the basis for the construction of truly united revolutionary working-class organizations; the workers' councils which carry through the struggle for power “with all means”.
But all the theoretical clarity which with these formulations seems at first to be won, not only for an action lying in the remote future, but in tendency also for the present notion of the revolutionary labor party - that becomes illusory through the statements of the fourth chapter by which they are irreconcilably opposed. Here we find, in the next to the last section, devoted to the “United Front”, the remarkable inversion of the real relation between a genuine workers' united front and the revolutionary seizure and exercise of power through the workers' councils; namely, that the united front is not denoted as a breeding ground for the workers' councils but inversely “the so-called (why only so-called?) workers' councils” as merely “the most highly developed form of the united front”. But this little discrepancy between the fourth and the second chapter completely disappears before the magnitude of the catastrophic downfall which now comes about in the last section of this chapter, on the last page of this whole program. Once more in this section, which is headed “Participation in Elections”, but this time in a much more circumspect and reserved fashion, the “movement to the ballot box” is denoted as “in the last instance (!) not (!) the (!) most important (!) form (!)” of the political mass-movement. This reservation now serves merely as a transition to the pompous observation: “This does not mean that the AWP will neglect the traditional methods of American politics”. It will rather - the dam is now broken, and the floods so long held up rush back boisterously into their old accustomed course – “wherever and whenever possible, participate in local, state and national elections, and will fight to win elections”.
Now to the justification of this tactic there march up, one behind the other, all those well-known ideological pseudo-reasons which in Germany and elsewhere have over and over again been thoroly deprived of force. Beginning with the “revolutionary” possibilities of the election struggle as a tribune for propagating the aims and program of the party and for uncovering the misleading and concealing manoeuvers of the opponents, and ending with those “strategic positions” into which the various elected party members will be placed through this election allegedly for the support of the organization and of the workers' struggles and for breaking down the capitalistic control over the State and for the public pillorying of the fraudulent government politics. One sees that the revolutionary “theory” of the basic part of the party program and especially the solemn promise “not to step into state office, the Presidency or Congress” is here actually reduced to a pure ideology of concealment, which enables the party also on its own account to faithfully carry on “the traditional methods of American politics”.
The Trade-Union Policy of the A.W.P.
In the trade-union question also there is a contradiction between the theoretical position of the A.W.P. as consciously proclaimed in the program, and its actual practice as shown by the previous and continuing development of the party and as it receives at least an indirect expression in the concrete positions taken in the program on the questions of the present-day American trade-union organization and tactic. In its actual practice and in all concrete questions, the A.W.P., which in its past “has functioned primarily in the economic conflicts of the American labor scene”, recognizes even yet today the peculiar and independent significance of the economic and social struggles of the working class and renounces expressly not only a “mechanical” but actually also any other form of rule over the trade-union organizations and the subordination of their special aims to the “higher” aims of the “politics” carried on by the “Party”. In its theoretical position on the trade-union question, however, it takes its stand on that theory which in the best case (Lenin) is jacobinical-revolutionary and in the worse case (the German Social Democracy and other marxist parties of pre-war time) is simply bourgeois; namely, the primacy of politics over economics and of the political over the trade-union struggle. While it rightly reproaches the American Social Democracy with drawing too sharp and arbitrary a line of separation between the political and economic labor struggle, with leaving the leadership of the latter completely in the hands of the ultra-reformist bureaucracy of the A.F. of L. and with supporting in the trade-unions in all cases the reactionary measures of the right -wing bureaucracy against the progressive tendencies within the trade unions, still in the formulations of principle of its draft program the A.W.P. itself falls into the opposite one-sidedness. One may say that in the American labor movement of the present time the Socialist Party repeats the actual development, while the A.W.P. repeats the ideology of the German Social Democracy of pre- and post-war time, where the true relation between Party and trade unions was even then mirrored inversely.
In a sharp break with the actual character which it has previously revealed, the A.W.P. today wants to be above all a “political” party. For this reason it wishes to give a strictly political orientation not only to all its own activities, but in an extraordinarily abstract fashion to subordinate all other activities of the working class to this political activity of the Party. All other class organization of the fighting proletariat appear accordingly, even in this new program, under the bad and unspecific general name of “mass organizations” (to be won by the party). Even the trade unions, which in reality represent a peculiar and independent basic form of the proletarian class organization not replaceable by the party, come under this theoretical viewpoint. In the present draft program they are treated as, to be sure, most important but yet only of equal rank with the other “mass organizations” (by the side of farmers, negroes, professional workers and unemployed), thru which the Party, mainly bent upon its own narrower political party tasks, strives to extend and strengthen its influence in a secondary way. Though in this connection the overwhelming importance of the industrial workers and especially of the “workers in the large shops, mills, factories and mines of the basic industries” is correctly emphasized, yet immediately following, with a somewhat striking “idealism”, the actual winning of precisely these most important workers is practically set equal to the purely ideological task of their merely theoretical attraction into the inner orientation of the Party. The program says that the A.W.P. wants to support itself “in a two-fold sense” on these industrial workers. It wants to win their membership, their confidence and influential positions in their organizations; but even though the actual progress aimed at in this way among the industrial workers were to be slight, the A.W.P. wants to “make the needs and the historical position of these workers the viewpoint of its theoretical orientation”. This “idealistic” turn of speech is not only suspiciously reminiscent of the manner of a merely parliamentary and electoral party, which also ever takes care to put the needs and the situation of broad masses of voters “in the mid-point of its orientation”. It also shows very clearly the insufficiency of such a merely formal attitude of the political party of the proletariat to all activities of the proletarian class struggle which are not or “not yet” politically formed.
Now of course the A.W.P. in this very profession of allegiance to the primacy of politics over economics and to the superiority of the conscious political struggle of the Party over all other less developed forms of the proletarian fight for emancipation, has wished to profess allegiance to that revolutionary conception of the relation between economics and politics, party and trade unions, which since Lenin and Trotsky is regarded as the true Marxist position on the trade-union question. The A.W.P. wants in its turn to repeat that great struggle which Lenin, around the turn of the century, carried through in Russia and on an international scale against the “Economists” and to restore to honor that famous phrase of the Communist Manifesto which states that in the last instance “every class struggle is a political struggle”. It quite correctly recognizes behind the apparent bowing of the “Socialist Party” to the “trade unions” the real alliance of all backward instead of forward looking elements in party and trade unions, and wants to set over against this alliance of all reactionary elements under the “hegemony” of the trade-union bureaucracy the alliance of all progressive elements of the whole labor movement under the leadership of the revolutionary party. Such a genuine combination of the economic and political struggle and of all other forms of activity of the working class into the single whole of a directly revolutionary struggle is the necessary goal of all proletarian revolutionists, regardless of whether they conceive this alliance in the “Leninist-Communist” manner as a bringing together of all isolated forms of struggle into the revolutionary political struggle or in the “syndicalist” manner as an extension and intensification of the direct economic action into the single whole of a directly revolutionary and social struggle. On this point there scarcely remains in the revolutionary end-result a single difference between the two tendencies which today are competing with and warring upon each other. The very same Marx who called every class struggle a “political struggle” has also in exactly the same sense called politics a “concentrated economics”. The coincidence of the two conceptions regarding the relation of the economic to the political class struggle first practically comes about, however, in the moment or in the period when, in the direct revolutionary action of the workers' councils, economics and politics actually coalesce. Until that time the claim to hegemony put forth by both of the tendencies, the “political” one of the Marxists and Leninists no less than the “economic” one of the syndicalists, contains a one-sidedness which restricts and weakens the practical class struggle of the proletariat. The identity which is present in the beginning of the economic and political class struggle of the workers can first be completely actualized in the full development of the directly revolutionary struggle. It can no more be brought about in advance through a merely formal “subordination” of the “trade union mass organizations” to the viewpoint of a revolutionary party than through the no less formal rejection of all “politics” in the other camp; and the damage unavoidably resulting from such an empty formalism strikes, as is especially clearly shown by the fate of the German Social Democracy, in the end not only and not even most severely the trade unions and the possible forms of organization to be “politicized” and “led” by the party in accordance with its “revolutionary” ideology, but also the party itself, just as in an earlier period with the German Social Democracy, so with the AWP even today there is concealed behind the ideologically raised claim to the primacy of the party over the trade unions, in reality the opposite practical tendency of subjecting its revolutionary political theory to the preponderance of the trade-union mass organizations and their practice, oriented to their own and by no means revolutionary interests. Such a germ of future capitulation is concealed, for example, behind the extraordinarily general declaration of the party against “any general policy of dual unionism” and the equally general assertion, added to this declaration as the only reason for it, that any “divided trade union movement opens the way for fascism”. This passage may be applicable to the policy of the Communist Party - a policy which is described immediately thereafter in considerably more concrete form - with its paper red unions bound to the line set by the party leadership, though even for this trade union policy of the C.P. the most fatal mistake - a point which the program completely overlooks – consisted in the fact that it has been an unprincipled tactic different for different countries and continually vacillating in the course of time and has accordingly been no more a consistent policy of splitting the trade unions than a consistent policy of conquering them; but how can a revolutionary proletarian party in the USA - a party which is up in arms against the ineradicable reformism of the A.F. of L. bureaucracy, and at the same time has to ward off the new half-fascist tendency of the Roosevelt administration to turning the trade union movement into an instrument of state policy, and which furthermore propagates as the next stage of development to be aimed at with reference to workers' united front actions the forming of revolutionary workers' councils - how can such a party, in such a pompous manner resign itself to recognizing the now existing trade union organizations for all future time? In reality there is here revealed, in this first practical drawing back of the American Workers Party before the enormous difficulties of its theoretically proclaimed revolutionary tasks, the unavoidable developmental tendency of a political party which, instead of injecting itself as a definite part, fulfilling important part functions, into the existing working-class movement, comes forth with a “theoretical” claim to totality, in the name of a “revolutionary” theory which, under the given relations, is unavoidably converted into an ideological glorification of a much more limited practice, and behind which the process of reducing the revolutionary proletarian party to a bourgeois opposition party and its final destruction through the American Mussolini or Hitler can be accomplished the more readily.
Karl Korsch
Published: in International Council Correspondence Vol. 1, no.4, January 1935, pp 15-25.
Source: Antonie Pannekoek Archives
Transcribed: by Graham Dyer
The first question to be put with reference to the statement of principles of a revolutionary labor party has to do with whether and how far that program really breaks with the existing capitalist order of society. The A.W.P. is not lacking in the subjective will to make that break. It rejects not only the hitherto existing form of the bourgeois social order and its economic foundation, but also the previous and future forms of the Rooseveltian New Deal inclusive of inflation, “social credit”, and “state socialism”; it recognizes Fascism as merely an attempt to save the capitalist State and property, and lays bare within the Roosevelt administration the clearly arising tendencies to fascism. It rejects the traditional American concept of “politics” and the replacement of the real political movement by the parliamentary electoral movement. It proclaims a new type of State in the form of the workers' state based on workers' councils as a democratic instrument for solving the contradictions of the capitalist system and for accomplishing the transition to the communist society. It takes the standpoint of an unconditional revolutionary internationalism of the labor movement; and it separates itself from the Communist International because primarily this organization is “completely and mechanically” controlled by the Russian party and serviceable to the changing official interests of the Soviet Union so that the identity of its tasks with the immediate tasks of the international struggle of the working class is no longer unconditionally and at every moment guaranteed. In its economic analysis it decisively takes the position that even though the present world crisis may be temporarily “overcome”, the decline of the capitalist system is no longer reversible, and it regards the present crisis as the “beginning of the end of the present form of society”. It makes the claim of having recognized the nature of the impending revolutionary change and of having the capacity for the correct carrying through of the revolutionary proletarian class struggle and for the setting up of a free workers' democracy.
Nevertheless, the present draft program does not contain the break with the capitalist social order and all present and future further developments of that order. Even in the economic part of the program there is a striking gap, in that nowhere is there any attempt to come to grips with the concept of planned economy, and much less is the fundamentally capitalist-fascist character of all present day talk and pretense of so-called planned economy decisively pointed out. The draft speaks of “planned economy” only in two places. In the one it is taken for granted that a “planned socialist economy” exists and is making headway in the Soviet Union; and although in the next paragraph there is express mention of the “compromises” forced upon Russia even in the economic sphere and a statement of the impossibility of building a socialist economy in the Soviet Union alone, there is not a word of explanation as to why and to what extent the unlimitedly socialist character of the Russian planned economy accords with these compromises and impossibilities and in what that character consists. In the other passage which reveals a lack of clarity almost reminiscent of the Rooseveltian and Hitlerian “economic planning”, we read that the future workers' State issuing from the victorious revolution is destined “to undertake great projects of social reconstruction by the planned economy of the new society”. To this unsatisfactory treatment of the concept of planned economy may be added the ambiguous manner in which, immediately thereafter, in the section on “Socialization”, there is demanded only the expropriation of all “monopolies in industry and land”. In view of the monopolistic character of all capitalist property, that may, on the one hand, mean complete socialization. On the other hand, many doors remain open for limiting the “socialization” to the so-called monopolies after the manner of the “socialization program” of the German and Austrian Social Democracy from 1918 to 1933, or even according to the still further watered proposals of the new-socialist post-war “socialism” (de Man's “Plan d’action”).
Thus in the very incompleteness and ambiguity of the economic demands it becomes manifest that the carrying out of this program might require, instead of the revolutionary attack upon the whole of capital, possibly only one or another partial attack. Likewise the lack of theoretical clarity at the basis of these demands is proved by the form in which (in the last paragraph of the first chapter) “the central contradiction” of the capitalist system and its “solution” are defined:
“The central contradiction is unmistakably clear; it is the contradiction between a productive plant (!) now physically capable of supplying amply all the basic needs of men, of freeing men forever from hunger, want and insecurity, of assuring mankind as a whole thereby full and creative life - between this and a system of social relations that prevents this productive plant from operating effectively, that directs its operations not to the fulfillment of human needs but to the making of profits for private individuals and corporations. Out of this contradiction and the irreconcilable class divisions it creates, flow the many other contradictions that devastate modern society.”
What is here proclaimed is not the Marxist and revolutionary basic contradiction between the productive forces and productive relations and (what is strictly identical with this economic contradiction) the historical, social and practical contradiction and struggle between the possessing class (interested in maintaining the present relations of production) and the non-possessing proletarian class (interested in overthrowing the present relations of production), a class which, according to Marx, is “itself the strongest productive force”. Rather it is here asserted, after the fashion of Stuart Chase and other modern apostles of capitalist planned economy, that, even today, under capitalism itself, a new epoch has set in, in which “scarcity production” could be replaced by “plenty production” if only the present productive apparatus were no longer capitalistically misused but humanly used. As if the capitalist mode of production had not ever been at the same time the production of ‘plenty’ and the production of ‘scarcity’ and ever the one only through the medium of the other! As if the root of the capitalistic evil lay, not in production itself and in the capitalistic fettering of the productive forces (i.e. in the capitalistic suppression of the productive forces which could be released through the socialist mode of production and which even now, in the proletarian class struggle, are rebelling against the capitalistic relations of production) but only in an avoidable misdirection of this production, in the misuse of the available productive apparatus and in an improper distribution! The basic contradiction of capitalist society is not between the available productive apparatus and the productive relations. Rather is this whole material productive apparatus (the technical equipment of the industries), this whole enormous apparatus with its capacity which in times of peace, even in boom periods, is no longer completely used and which lies idle during the crisis - this apparatus is nevertheless, if one will only take into consideration also the “normal condition” of war, still today completely adapted to the capitalistic property relations. This adaptedness exists even for the wage workers and for the now rapidly increasing mass of those who are temporarily and chronically unoccupied.
Just as in the capitalistic division of labor the productive workers are assimilated in the most exact manner to their means of production, the “part-worker” to his ‘tool’ and the laboring man has become a mere appendage of the machine, so the growing army of unemployed, even in its long-known quality of the “industrial reserve army” of capital in peace and the more so in its new quality (now grown important) of the “military reserve army” of capital in war, forms in its functions an exactly determinate component of the equipment of the present-day capitalist mode of production. Anyone who takes as his starting point the means of production which are actually at hand must logically not only renounce the proletarian revolution in favor of a capitalistic reform, but in the end capitulate before fascism. The present capacity of production in its capitalistic form, computed by such theoreticians as the Technocrats and Stuart Chase is given by the existence of the means of production, by the enormous capitalistic productive apparatus at hand. When confronted with the storms to which the world market is subjected as a result of the crisis with the ravages of an “unregulated” competition on and, last not least, with the unavoidable rebellions on the part of the suppressed and exploited workers and of the growing mass of under-workers who are “planfully” left jobless in time of peace, that productive capacity can be protected only by means of the strong State, by which this technical foundation of capitalism is protected under all circumstances in war and in peace and defended with all ordinary and extraordinary means against all attacks of the workers as well as of the individual capitalists and special capitalist groups. That is the feeling today of the bourgeoisie, even where it itself suffers under fascism, and that is the feeling of a large and growing part of the people and of the peoples, even deep into the ranks of the workers and of the unemployed under-workers. The sophism at the bottom of all this, the deceptiveness of the illusion that the strong state of a Hitler or Mussolini or Roosevelt could really solve this problem, and the insufficiency of this static and evolutionary goal itself can be illuminated only when the basic contradiction is seen not from the material side in the relation between productive means (apparatus) and the productive relations, but from the human side in the relation between the productive forces which are potentially present in the working population and the present capitalistic relations of production (which are in full accord with the productive apparatus). The modern working class, which has developed upward, not without the capitalistic means of production, but with them and thru them to the present level of its economic and historico-social-practical productive power, but which in increasing clarity of consciousness is already separable from those means of production and can already be joined to them ideologically in new socialist forms - the modern working class represents that “strongest force of production” which in its advancing development comes in ever increasing revolutionary contradictions with the fixed capitalistic productive relations, property relations, distribution relations, their State, law and all their ideologies. Its own State, the proletarian workers' State, is the strong State of which today fascists and half-fascists technocrats and Stuart Chasists dream only in a confused manner, but which becomes actual through the unfettering of that strongest revolutionary productive force which even today is the proletarian class itself, through the bursting of those fetters which even today is capital itself, and through the violent solution in the international proletarian revolution, of the sharpening basic contradiction existing between the two.
It is not my intention to say that this, the real meaning of the Marxist doctrine on the basic contradiction of capitalist economy was misunderstood by the authors of the program. There are Marxian “materialists” who look upon the Marxist doctrine of the “productive character of the proletariat itself” as an “idealistic” deviation of the master from his own materialism. This draft program is in general far remote from such dogmatic narrowness. Still less is it my design to base this whole criticism, say, on the single phrase “productive plant.” But the whole passage above quoted, which occupies a decisive position in the program, is saturated even in its style with those only apparently revolutionary, in reality superficial ideas which today are disseminated by the voluntary and involuntary pacemakers of the fascist counter-revolution regarding the possibility of a New Deal through a mere transformation of distribution and a few “planned-economic” invasions into the present system of production. Even where the program brings out, with a decisiveness not hitherto attained in any socialist program, the special significance of the industrial workers and particularly of the “basic industry workers”, for whom the revolutionary solution is pointed to as the only way out because their very situation in life, it defines as the goal of this action the creation of a condition in which “the shops run to serve the needs of society and not to make a profit for private individuals and corporations. This, and this only, will release the machinery now braked by the overload of capital debt and the impossibility of finding solvent purchasers for commodities”. This ostensibly revolutionary goal of the basic industry workers can today, in the exigencies of the crisis, be taken over even by the capitalist who is threatened with bankruptcy, and in Germany we find Hitler shouting: “The general welfare comes before private welfare”!
The “Revolutionary Parliamentarism” of the A.W.P.
In the criticism of the political part of the draft program, I take as my starting point the view (won through study of the program and press of the A.W.P.) that the A.W.P. at its present stage of development is not yet a directly revolutionary party but is merely on the way “toward an American Revolutionary Labor Movement”. This becomes evident even from the external division of the program, where the aims of the party are treated quite separately from the means and methods which in the present and immediate future it thinks of employing in its “struggle for power”. The second chapter which treats of “the aim of the A.W.P.” is immediately followed by an intercalated third chapter which gives a criticism of the other labor parties and should really stand as an annex at the end of the program; and it is only in the fourth and last chapter that we get the answer to the question, “How the AWP will fight for Power”. The significance of this sharp separation between the so-called “final goal” (questions of the maximal program, questions of the program of principles) and the so-called “present tasks” or “transitional slogans” (questions of the minimal program, questions of the program of action) is sufficiently well known to anyone familiar with the Marxist movement from the history of the European labor parties of pre-war times. Such a party is (at the best) revolutionary in its theory and in the meaning which it theoretically assigns to its present actions and to the connection between them; it is also revolutionary in its practical tendency - more or less directed to the “final goal” - and it may in a certain measure, even in its present practice, fulfill that role which the Communist Manifesto of 1847-48 had once proclaimed for the Communists: namely, that they “represent in the present-day movement at the same time the future of the movement" or (what merely concretizes the same thing from two directions and in another form) that they represent in the national at the same time the international movement and in the political at the same time the economic and social movement on which it is based. It is not yet able, however, whether from objective causes, based on the outer development, or from subjective causes, based on its own development, to combine its different activities, distributed over different spheres and time intervals, among each other and with all the other actions of the proletarian class into the cohesive whole of one revolutionary action.
Where such a situation is given - and that this applies to the A.W.P. to its own character and its position within the present-day American labor movement is clearly proved, in my opinion, by the present draft program - it would be improper to take this standpoint of a “pure” and total revolutionary ideology and to regard the difference between the final slogans and the present demand of the program offhand, as so many “contradictions” and “inconsistencies”, or to deny to the party question any sort of “revolutionary” character because of the limitedness of its immediate practical tasks. The critic of such a program, and particularly the outside critic, must rather set out from the disconnectedness and transitional character of such a program as from a given fact. He must confine himself to pointing out the cases in which as a result of this (within certain limits unavoidable) division between future aims and present means and methods of the struggle, the revolutionary development of the party, oriented in its actions on this program, is hindered and endangered. He can protest when the revolutionary theory degenerates to a mere ideology, to the ideological cloak for an actually opportunistic practice, and he can prove that in certain cases, as a result of the peculiarly “revolutionary” position of the party on a certain form of proletarian activity, the present force of this proletarian activity is in reality weakened and its future revolutionary development fettered, while with an apparently less revolutionary attitude together with maximum intensification of the present activity the way for a really revolutionary further development is much better kept open.
The given starting points for such a criticism, one which is not ideologically doctrinaire but realistically revolutionary, is offered by the position taken in the program, on the one hand, to the question of parliamentarism, and on the other to the question of trade unions.
All the mistakes committed in the earlier development of the Marxist parties in Europe and there already shown up by reality are brought together with encyclopedic completeness in the program's attitude to participation in elections. It is not a matter of criticizing the decision adopted by the party in this field of tactics. A sober exposition of mere grounds of expediency, which make participation in elections a transitorily unavoidable necessity in present-day America, even for a proletarian and in its tendency revolutionary party, would suffice if not to refute all the fundamental objections which might arise against the tactical decision, at least to make them practically of no account. Instead of that, the present draft program has, in the first place, taken a position on this question which is thoroly contradictory - and this is by no means a dialectical contradiction, brought about thru the relation between final goal and present tasks, but a simple and direct contradiction arising thru unclear and inconsistent thinking and speaking. It has, furthermore, at the place where after long beating about the bush in the very last section of the program the practical decision is now really taken, it has forthwith added on to this opportunistic decision an ideological and apologetic illusionary and “revolutionary” justification by which itself and in addition to other or others are deceived. In doing so, it has decided not simply for parliamentary activity of the party, but has rather taken up with that thoroly unreal monster of a so-called “revolutionary parliamentarism” the nothingness of which has been proved by the previous experience of all Marxist parties in Germany and in all other European countries before and since the war, a something which, after the close of that historical period in which the Parliament constituted for the bourgeois revolution itself a means of struggle and not yet a mere means for coordinating the different competing class interests within the bourgeoisie, hence in the entire epoch of the beginning proletarian revolution has actually never and nowhere existed and which likewise will by no means exist for the present and future America now entering upon the era of the final struggle between revolution and counter-revolution, democracy and fascism, socialism and capitalism.
Because of the importance of the matter, I shall sketch in some detail the different stages by which in this program a revolutionary principle, which from the very beginning is formulated ambiguously becomes converted into a mere revolutionary phrase.
As early as the second chapter (which in itself is not concerned with present practice, but only with the “goal” of the party) we get some remarkable phraseology concerning the allegedly “common aims of all political parties” – as if (and particularly from the viewpoint of the revolutionary final goal) there could be such a common character of proletarian and capitalist parties even for a moment. The program itself describes in detail, in two special sections, “The Nature of the Capitalist Dictatorship” as the rule of a minority and the technique by which the capitalist class imposes this rule upon the great majority of the people and of the working class with all forceful means, direct and indirect.
This exposition is counterbalanced in the next section by "The Specific Aims of a Revolutionary Party", and on this occasion, if words have any meaning, parliamentary action as a possible means for the attainment of even the smallest part of these specific aims is radically rejected. This rejection begins - still somewhat weakly - with the observation that the A.W.P., to be sure, like the capitalist parties aims at the conquest and consolidation of state power, but that, unlike the capitalist parties, it regards this measure “merely as an essential (!) step to fundamentally changing the whole order of society”. It wants to bring this about “not by stepping into state power, the Presidency or Congress, but by doing away with the present basis of state power entirely”. The whole exposition immediately following reaches its climax in the result that in the given conditions of the political dictatorship of capital, resting upon the economic and social class character of the capitalist order, it would be utopian for the workers to believe that they could take over the state power along parliamentary paths. To this end, the working class would rather require other, newly forged weapons. The united action of the working class organizations must provide the basis for the construction of truly united revolutionary working-class organizations; the workers' councils which carry through the struggle for power “with all means”.
But all the theoretical clarity which with these formulations seems at first to be won, not only for an action lying in the remote future, but in tendency also for the present notion of the revolutionary labor party - that becomes illusory through the statements of the fourth chapter by which they are irreconcilably opposed. Here we find, in the next to the last section, devoted to the “United Front”, the remarkable inversion of the real relation between a genuine workers' united front and the revolutionary seizure and exercise of power through the workers' councils; namely, that the united front is not denoted as a breeding ground for the workers' councils but inversely “the so-called (why only so-called?) workers' councils” as merely “the most highly developed form of the united front”. But this little discrepancy between the fourth and the second chapter completely disappears before the magnitude of the catastrophic downfall which now comes about in the last section of this chapter, on the last page of this whole program. Once more in this section, which is headed “Participation in Elections”, but this time in a much more circumspect and reserved fashion, the “movement to the ballot box” is denoted as “in the last instance (!) not (!) the (!) most important (!) form (!)” of the political mass-movement. This reservation now serves merely as a transition to the pompous observation: “This does not mean that the AWP will neglect the traditional methods of American politics”. It will rather - the dam is now broken, and the floods so long held up rush back boisterously into their old accustomed course – “wherever and whenever possible, participate in local, state and national elections, and will fight to win elections”.
Now to the justification of this tactic there march up, one behind the other, all those well-known ideological pseudo-reasons which in Germany and elsewhere have over and over again been thoroly deprived of force. Beginning with the “revolutionary” possibilities of the election struggle as a tribune for propagating the aims and program of the party and for uncovering the misleading and concealing manoeuvers of the opponents, and ending with those “strategic positions” into which the various elected party members will be placed through this election allegedly for the support of the organization and of the workers' struggles and for breaking down the capitalistic control over the State and for the public pillorying of the fraudulent government politics. One sees that the revolutionary “theory” of the basic part of the party program and especially the solemn promise “not to step into state office, the Presidency or Congress” is here actually reduced to a pure ideology of concealment, which enables the party also on its own account to faithfully carry on “the traditional methods of American politics”.
The Trade-Union Policy of the A.W.P.
In the trade-union question also there is a contradiction between the theoretical position of the A.W.P. as consciously proclaimed in the program, and its actual practice as shown by the previous and continuing development of the party and as it receives at least an indirect expression in the concrete positions taken in the program on the questions of the present-day American trade-union organization and tactic. In its actual practice and in all concrete questions, the A.W.P., which in its past “has functioned primarily in the economic conflicts of the American labor scene”, recognizes even yet today the peculiar and independent significance of the economic and social struggles of the working class and renounces expressly not only a “mechanical” but actually also any other form of rule over the trade-union organizations and the subordination of their special aims to the “higher” aims of the “politics” carried on by the “Party”. In its theoretical position on the trade-union question, however, it takes its stand on that theory which in the best case (Lenin) is jacobinical-revolutionary and in the worse case (the German Social Democracy and other marxist parties of pre-war time) is simply bourgeois; namely, the primacy of politics over economics and of the political over the trade-union struggle. While it rightly reproaches the American Social Democracy with drawing too sharp and arbitrary a line of separation between the political and economic labor struggle, with leaving the leadership of the latter completely in the hands of the ultra-reformist bureaucracy of the A.F. of L. and with supporting in the trade-unions in all cases the reactionary measures of the right -wing bureaucracy against the progressive tendencies within the trade unions, still in the formulations of principle of its draft program the A.W.P. itself falls into the opposite one-sidedness. One may say that in the American labor movement of the present time the Socialist Party repeats the actual development, while the A.W.P. repeats the ideology of the German Social Democracy of pre- and post-war time, where the true relation between Party and trade unions was even then mirrored inversely.
In a sharp break with the actual character which it has previously revealed, the A.W.P. today wants to be above all a “political” party. For this reason it wishes to give a strictly political orientation not only to all its own activities, but in an extraordinarily abstract fashion to subordinate all other activities of the working class to this political activity of the Party. All other class organization of the fighting proletariat appear accordingly, even in this new program, under the bad and unspecific general name of “mass organizations” (to be won by the party). Even the trade unions, which in reality represent a peculiar and independent basic form of the proletarian class organization not replaceable by the party, come under this theoretical viewpoint. In the present draft program they are treated as, to be sure, most important but yet only of equal rank with the other “mass organizations” (by the side of farmers, negroes, professional workers and unemployed), thru which the Party, mainly bent upon its own narrower political party tasks, strives to extend and strengthen its influence in a secondary way. Though in this connection the overwhelming importance of the industrial workers and especially of the “workers in the large shops, mills, factories and mines of the basic industries” is correctly emphasized, yet immediately following, with a somewhat striking “idealism”, the actual winning of precisely these most important workers is practically set equal to the purely ideological task of their merely theoretical attraction into the inner orientation of the Party. The program says that the A.W.P. wants to support itself “in a two-fold sense” on these industrial workers. It wants to win their membership, their confidence and influential positions in their organizations; but even though the actual progress aimed at in this way among the industrial workers were to be slight, the A.W.P. wants to “make the needs and the historical position of these workers the viewpoint of its theoretical orientation”. This “idealistic” turn of speech is not only suspiciously reminiscent of the manner of a merely parliamentary and electoral party, which also ever takes care to put the needs and the situation of broad masses of voters “in the mid-point of its orientation”. It also shows very clearly the insufficiency of such a merely formal attitude of the political party of the proletariat to all activities of the proletarian class struggle which are not or “not yet” politically formed.
Now of course the A.W.P. in this very profession of allegiance to the primacy of politics over economics and to the superiority of the conscious political struggle of the Party over all other less developed forms of the proletarian fight for emancipation, has wished to profess allegiance to that revolutionary conception of the relation between economics and politics, party and trade unions, which since Lenin and Trotsky is regarded as the true Marxist position on the trade-union question. The A.W.P. wants in its turn to repeat that great struggle which Lenin, around the turn of the century, carried through in Russia and on an international scale against the “Economists” and to restore to honor that famous phrase of the Communist Manifesto which states that in the last instance “every class struggle is a political struggle”. It quite correctly recognizes behind the apparent bowing of the “Socialist Party” to the “trade unions” the real alliance of all backward instead of forward looking elements in party and trade unions, and wants to set over against this alliance of all reactionary elements under the “hegemony” of the trade-union bureaucracy the alliance of all progressive elements of the whole labor movement under the leadership of the revolutionary party. Such a genuine combination of the economic and political struggle and of all other forms of activity of the working class into the single whole of a directly revolutionary struggle is the necessary goal of all proletarian revolutionists, regardless of whether they conceive this alliance in the “Leninist-Communist” manner as a bringing together of all isolated forms of struggle into the revolutionary political struggle or in the “syndicalist” manner as an extension and intensification of the direct economic action into the single whole of a directly revolutionary and social struggle. On this point there scarcely remains in the revolutionary end-result a single difference between the two tendencies which today are competing with and warring upon each other. The very same Marx who called every class struggle a “political struggle” has also in exactly the same sense called politics a “concentrated economics”. The coincidence of the two conceptions regarding the relation of the economic to the political class struggle first practically comes about, however, in the moment or in the period when, in the direct revolutionary action of the workers' councils, economics and politics actually coalesce. Until that time the claim to hegemony put forth by both of the tendencies, the “political” one of the Marxists and Leninists no less than the “economic” one of the syndicalists, contains a one-sidedness which restricts and weakens the practical class struggle of the proletariat. The identity which is present in the beginning of the economic and political class struggle of the workers can first be completely actualized in the full development of the directly revolutionary struggle. It can no more be brought about in advance through a merely formal “subordination” of the “trade union mass organizations” to the viewpoint of a revolutionary party than through the no less formal rejection of all “politics” in the other camp; and the damage unavoidably resulting from such an empty formalism strikes, as is especially clearly shown by the fate of the German Social Democracy, in the end not only and not even most severely the trade unions and the possible forms of organization to be “politicized” and “led” by the party in accordance with its “revolutionary” ideology, but also the party itself, just as in an earlier period with the German Social Democracy, so with the AWP even today there is concealed behind the ideologically raised claim to the primacy of the party over the trade unions, in reality the opposite practical tendency of subjecting its revolutionary political theory to the preponderance of the trade-union mass organizations and their practice, oriented to their own and by no means revolutionary interests. Such a germ of future capitulation is concealed, for example, behind the extraordinarily general declaration of the party against “any general policy of dual unionism” and the equally general assertion, added to this declaration as the only reason for it, that any “divided trade union movement opens the way for fascism”. This passage may be applicable to the policy of the Communist Party - a policy which is described immediately thereafter in considerably more concrete form - with its paper red unions bound to the line set by the party leadership, though even for this trade union policy of the C.P. the most fatal mistake - a point which the program completely overlooks – consisted in the fact that it has been an unprincipled tactic different for different countries and continually vacillating in the course of time and has accordingly been no more a consistent policy of splitting the trade unions than a consistent policy of conquering them; but how can a revolutionary proletarian party in the USA - a party which is up in arms against the ineradicable reformism of the A.F. of L. bureaucracy, and at the same time has to ward off the new half-fascist tendency of the Roosevelt administration to turning the trade union movement into an instrument of state policy, and which furthermore propagates as the next stage of development to be aimed at with reference to workers' united front actions the forming of revolutionary workers' councils - how can such a party, in such a pompous manner resign itself to recognizing the now existing trade union organizations for all future time? In reality there is here revealed, in this first practical drawing back of the American Workers Party before the enormous difficulties of its theoretically proclaimed revolutionary tasks, the unavoidable developmental tendency of a political party which, instead of injecting itself as a definite part, fulfilling important part functions, into the existing working-class movement, comes forth with a “theoretical” claim to totality, in the name of a “revolutionary” theory which, under the given relations, is unavoidably converted into an ideological glorification of a much more limited practice, and behind which the process of reducing the revolutionary proletarian party to a bourgeois opposition party and its final destruction through the American Mussolini or Hitler can be accomplished the more readily.
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