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Listen,Marxist!

All the old crap of the thirties is coming back again—theshit about the "class line," the "role of the working class,"the "trained cadres," the "vanguard party," and the "pro-letarian dictatorship." It's all back again, and in a morevulgarized form than ever. The Progressive Labor Party isnot the only example, it is merely the worst. One smellsthe same shit in various offshoots of SDS, and in the Marx-ist and Socialist clubs on campuses, not to speak of theTrotskyist groups, the International Socialist Clubs, andYouth Against War and Fascism.

In the thirties, at least it was understandable. TheUnited States was paralyzed by a chronic economic crisis,the deepest and longest in its history. The only livingforces that seemed to be battering at the walls of capital-ism were the great organizing drives of the CIO, with theirdramatic sitdown strikes, their radical militancy, and theirbloody clashes with the police. The political atmospherethroughout the entire world was charged by the electricityof the Spanish Civil War, the last of the classical workers'revolutions, when every radical sect in the American leftcould identify with its own militia columns in Madrid andBarcelona. That was thirty years ago. It was a time whenanyone who cried out "Make love, not war" would havebeen regarded as a freak; the cry then was "Make jobs, notwar"—the cry of an age burdened by scarcity, when theachievement of socialism entailed "sacrifices" and a"transition period" to an economy of material abundance.To an eighteen-year-old kid in 1937 the very concept ofcybernation would have seemed like the wildest sciencefiction, a fantasy comparable to visions of space travel.

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196 / Post-Scarcity Anarchism

That eighteen-year-old kid has now reached fifty years ofage, and his roots are planted in an era so remote as todiffer qualitatively from the realities of the present periodin the United States. Capitalism itself has changed sincethen, taking on increasingly statified forms that could beanticipated only dimly thirty years ago. And now we arebeing asked to go back to the "class line," the "strategies,"the "cadres" and the organizational forms of that distantperiod in almost blatant disregard of the new issues andpossibilities that have emerged.

When the hell are we finally going to create a movementthat looks to the future instead of to the past? When willwe begin to learn from what is being born instead of whatis dying? Marx, to his lasting credit, tried to do that in hisown day; he tried to evoke a futuristic spirit in the revolu-tionary movement of the 1840s and 1850s. "The traditionof all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on thebrain of the living," he wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaireof Louis Bonaparte. "And just when they seem to be en-gaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creatingsomething entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolu-tionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of thepast to their service and borrow from them names, battleslogans and costumes in order to present the new scene ofworld history in this time-honored disguise and borrowedlanguage. Thus Luther donned the mask of the ApostlePaul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alter-nately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, andthe revolution of 1848 knew nothing better than toparody, in turn, 1789 and the tradition of 1793 to1795. . . . The social revolution of the nineteenth centurycannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from thefuture. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped offall superstition in regard to the past. . . . In order to arriveat its content, the revolution of the nineteenth centurymust let the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went

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beyond the content; here the content goes beyond thephrase."28

Is the problem any different today, as we approach thetwenty-first century? Once again the dead are walking inour midst—ironically, draped in the name of Marx, theman who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century.So the revolution of our own day can do nothing betterthan parody, in turn, the October Revolution of 1917 andthe civil war of 1918-1920, with its "class line," its Bol-shevik Party, its "proletarian dictatorship," its puritanicalmorality, and even its slogan, "soviet power." The com-plete, all-sided revolution of our own day that can finallyresolve the historic "social question," born of scarcity,domination and hierarchy, follows the tradition of thepartial, the incomplete, the one-sided revolutions of thepast, which merely changed the form of the "social ques-tion," replacing one system of domination and hierarchyby another. At a time when bourgeois society itself is inthe process of disintegrating all the social classes that oncegave it stability, we hear the hollow demands for a "classline." At a time when all the political institutions of hier-archical society are entering a period of profound decay,we hear the hollow demands for a "political party" and a"workers' state." At a time when hierarchy as such is beingbrought into question, we hear the hollow demands for"cadres," "vanguards" and "leaders." At a time when cen-tralization and the state have been brought to the mostexplosive point of historical negativity, we hear the hollowdemands for a "centralized movement" and a "proletariandictatorship."

This pursuit of security in the past, this attempt to finda haven in a fixed dogma and an organizational hierarchyas substitutes for creative thought and praxis is bitterevidence of how little many revolutionaries are capableof "revolutionizing themselves and things," much lessof revolutionizing society as a whole. The deep-rooted


conservatism of the PLP* "revolutionaries" is almostpainfully evident; the authoritarian leader and hierarchyreplace the patriarch and the school bureaucracy; thediscipline of the Movement replaces the discipline ofbourgeois society; the authoritarian code of politicalobedience replaces the state; the credo of "proletarianmorality" replaces the mores of puritanism and the workethic. The old substance of exploitative society reappearsin new forms, draped in a red flag, decorated by portraitsof Mao (or Castro or Che) and adorned with the little"Red Book" and other sacred litanies.

The majority of the people who remain in the PLP to-day deserve it. If they can live with a movement that cyni-cally dubs its own slogans into photographs of DRUMpickets; t if they can read a magazine that asks whetherMarcuse is a "copout or cop"; if they can accept a "disci-pline" that reduces them to poker-faced, programmedautomata; if they can use the most disgusting techniques(techniques borrowed from the cesspool of bourgeois busi-ness operations and parliamentarianism) to manipulateother organizations; if they can parasitize virtually everyaction and situation merely to promote the growth of theirparty—even if this means defeat for the action itself—thenthey are beneath contempt. For these people to call them-selves reds and describe attacks upon them as redbaiting isa form of McCarthyism in reverse. To rephrase Trotsky'sjuicy description of Stalinism, they are the syphilis of the

* These lines were written when the Progressive Labor Party (PLP)exercised a great deal of influence in SDS. Although the PLP hasnow lost most of its influence in the student movement, the organi-zation still provides a good example of the mentality and valuesprevalent in the Old Left. The above characterization is equally validfor most Marxist-Leninist groups, hence this passage and other ref-erences to the PLP have not been substantially altered.

t The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, part of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers.

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radical youth movement today. And for syphilis there isonly one treatment—an antibiotic, not an argument.

Our concern here is with those honest revolutionarieswho have turned to Marxism, Leninism or Trotskyismbecause they earnestly seek a coherent social outlook andan effective strategy of revolution. We are also concernedwith those who are awed by the theoretical repertory ofMarxist ideology and are disposed to flirt with it in theabsence of more systematic alternatives. To these peoplewe address ourselves as brothers and sisters and ask for aserious discussion and a comprehensive re-evaluation. Webelieve that Marxism has ceased to be applicable to ourtime not because it is too visionary or revolutionary, butbecause it is not visionary or revolutionary enough. Webelieve it was born of an era of scarcity and presented abrilliant critique of that era, specifically of industrial capi-talism, and that a new era is in birth which Marxism doesnot adequately encompass and whose outlines it only par-tially and onesidedly anticipated. We argue that the prob-lem is not to "abandon" Marxism or to "annul" it, but totranscend it dialectically, just as Marx transcended Hegel-ian philosophy, Ricardian economics, and Blanquist tacticsand modes of organization. We shall argue that in a moreadvanced stage of capitalism than Marx dealt with a cen-tury ago, and in a more advanced stage of technologicaldevelopment than Marx could have clearly anticipated, anew critique is necessary, which in turn yields new modesof struggle, of organization, of propaganda and of lifestyle.Call these new modes whatever you will, even "Marxism"if you wish. We have chosen to call this new approachpost-scarcity anarchism, for a number of compelling rea-sons which will become evident in the pages that follow.

THE HISTORICAL LIMITS OF MARXISM

The idea that a man whose greatest theoretical contribu-tions were made between 1840 and 1880 could "foresee"


the entire dialectic of capitalism is, on the face of it, ut-terly preposterous. If we can still learn much from Marx'sinsights, we can learn even more from the unavoidableerrors of a man who was limited by an era of materialscarcity and a technology that barely involved the use ofelectric power. We can learn how different our own era isfrom that of all past history, how qualitatively new are thepotentialities that confront us, how unique are the issues,analyses and praxis that stand before us if we are to makea revolution and not another historical abortion.

The problem is not that Marxism is a "method" whichmust be reapplied to "new situations" or that "neo-Marx-ism" has to be developed to overcome the limitations of"classical Marxism." The attempt to rescue the Marxianpedigree by emphasizing the method over the system or byadding "neo" to a sacred word is sheer mystification if allthe practical conclusions of the system flatly contradictthese efforts.* Yet this is precisely the state of affairs inMarxian exegesis today. Marxists lean on the fact that thesystem provides a brilliant interpretation of the past whilewillfully ignoring its utterly misleading features in dealingwith the present and future. They cite the coherence thathistorical materialism and the class analysis give to theinterpretation of history, the economic insights of Capitalprovides into the development of industrial capitalism, and

* Marxism is above all a theory of praxis, or to place this relation-ship in its correct perspective, a praxis of theory. This is the verymeaning of Marx's transformation of dialectics, which took it fromthe subjective dimension (to which the Young Hegelians still tried toconfine Hegel's outlook) into the objective, from philosophical cri-tique into social action. If theory and praxis become divorced, Marx-ism is not killed, it commits suicide. This is its most admirable andnoble feature. The attempts of the cretins who follow in Marx'swake to keep the system alive with a patchwork of emendations,exegesis, and half-assed "scholarship" a la Maurice Dobb and GeorgeNovack are degrading insults to Marx's name and a disgusting pollu-tion of everything he stood for.


the brilliance of Marx's analysis of earlier revolutions andthe tactical conclusions he established, without once recog-nizing that qualitatively new problems have arisen whichnever existed in his day. Is it conceivable that historicalproblems and methods of class analysis based entirely onunavoidable scarcity can be transplanted into a new era ofpotential abundance? Is it conceivable that an economicanalysis focused primarily on a "freely competitive" sys-tem of industrial capitalism can be transferred to a man-aged system of capitalism, where state and monopoliescombine to manipulate economic life? Is it conceivablethat a strategic and tactical repertory formulated in a per-iod when coal and steel constituted the basis of industrialtechnology can be transferred to an age based on radicallynew sources of energy, on electronics, on cybernation?

As a result of this transfer, a theoretical corpus whichwas liberating a century ago is turned into a straitjackettoday. We are asked to focus on the working class as the"agent" of revolutionary change at a time when capitalismvisibly antagonizes and produces revolutionaries among vir-tually all strata of society, particularly the young. We areasked to guide our tactical methods by the vision of a"chronic economic crisis" despite the fact that no suchcrisis has been in the offing for thirty years.* We are askedto accept a "proletarian dictatorship"—a long "transitionalperiod" whose function is not merely the suppression ofcounterrevolutionaries but above all the development of atechnology of abundance—at a time when a technology ofabundance is at hand. We are asked to orient our "strate-gies" and "tactics" around poverty and material immisera-tion at a time when revolutionary sentiment is beinggenerated by the banality of life under conditions of mate-rial abundance. We are asked to establish political parties,

* In fact Marxists do very little talking about the "chronic [eco-nomic] crisis of capitalism" these days—despite the fact that thisconcept forms the focal point of Marx's economic theories.


centralized organizations, "revolutionary" hierarchies andelites, and a new state at a time when political institutionsas such are decaying and when centralization, elitism andthe state are being brought into question on a scale thathas never occurred before in the history of hierarchicalsociety.

We are asked, in short, to return to the past, to diminishinstead of grow, to force the throbbing reality of ourtimes, with its hopes and promises, into the deadeningpreconceptions of an outlived age. We are asked to operatewith principles that have been transcended not only theo-retically but by the very development of society itself.History has not stood still since Marx, Engels, Lenin andTrotsky died, nor has it followed the simplistic directionwhich was charted out by thinkers—however brilliant—whose minds were still rooted in the nineteenth century orin the opening years of the twentieth. We have seen capi-talism itself perform many of the tasks (including thedevelopment of a technology of abundance) which wereregarded as socialist; we have seen it "nationalize" prop-erty, merging the economy with the state wherever neces-sary. We have seen the working class neutralized as the"agent of revolutionary change," albeit still strugglingwithin a bourgeois framework for more wages, shorterhours and "fringe" benefits. The class struggle in the clas-sical sense has not disappeared; it has suffered a moredeadening fate by being co-opted into capitalism. Therevolutionary struggle within the advanced capitalistcountries has shifted to a historically new terrain: it hasbecome a struggle between a generation of youth that hasknown no chronic economic crisis and the culture, valuesand institutions of an older, conservative generation whoseperspective on life has been shaped by scarcity, guilt, re-nunciation, the work ethic and the pursuit of materialsecurity. Our enemies are not only the visibly entrenchedbourgeoisie and the state apparatus but also an outlookwhich finds its support among liberals, social democrats,


the minions of a corrupt mass media, the "revolutionary"parties of the past, and, painful as it may be to the aco-lytes of Marxism, the worker dominated by the factoryhierarchy, by the industrial routine, and by the work ethic.The point is that the divisions now cut across virtually allthe traditional class lines and they raise a spectrum ofproblems that none of the Marxists, leaning on analogieswith scarcity societies, could foresee.

THE MYTH OF THE PROLETARIA TLet us cast aside all the ideological debris of the past andcut to the theoretical roots of the problem. For our age,Marx's greatest contribution to revolutionary thought ishis dialectic of social development. Marx laid bare thegreat movement from primitive communism through pri-vate property to communism in its higher form—a commu-nal society resting on a liberatory technology. In thismovement, according to Marx, man passes on from thedomination of man by nature, to the domination of manby man, and finally to the domination of nature by man*and from social domination as such. Within this largerdialectic, Marx examines the dialectic of capitalism itself—a social system which constitutes the last historical "stage"in the domination of man by man. Here, Marx makes notonly profound contributions to contemporary revolution-ary thought (particularly in his brilliant analysis of thecommodity relationship) but also exhibits those limita-tions of time and place that play so confining a role in ourown time.

The most serious of these limitations emerges fromMarx's attempt to explain the transition from capitalism tosocialism, from a class society to a classless society. It isvitally important to emphasize that this explanation wasreasoned out almost entirely by analogy with the transi-* For ecological reasons, we do not accept the notion of the "domi-nation of nature by man" in the simplistic sense that was passed onby Marx a century ago. For a discussion of this problem, see "Ecol-ogy and Revolutionary Thought."


tion of feudalism to capitalism—that is, from one classsociety to another class society, from one systemof property to another. Accordingly, Marx points out thatjust as the bourgeoisie developed within feudalism as aresult of the split between town and country (more pre-cisely, between crafts and agriculture), so the modern pro-letariat developed within capitalism as a result of the ad-vance of industrial technology. Both classes, we are told,develop social interests of their own—indeed, revolutionarysocial interests that throw them against the old society inwhich they were spawned. If the bourgeoisie gained con-trol over economic life long before it overthrew feudalsociety, the proletariat, in turn, gains its own revolutionarypower by the fact that it is "disciplined, united, organ-ized" by the factory system.* In both cases, the develop-ment of the productive forces becomes incompatible withthe traditional system of social relations. "The integumentis burst asunder." The old society is replaced by the new.

The critical question we face is this: can we explain thetransition from a class society to a classless society by

* It is ironic that Marxists who talk about the "economic power" ofthe proletariat are actually echoing the position of the anarcho-syndicalists, a position that Marx bitterly opposed. Marx was notconcerned with the "economic power" of the proletariat but with itspolitical power; notably the fact that it would become the majorityof the population. He was convinced that the industrial workerswould be driven to revolution primarily by material destitutionwhich would follow from the tendency of capitalist accumulation;that, organized by the factory system and disciplined by industrialroutine, they would be able to constitute trade unions and, aboveall, political parties, which in some countries would be obliged to useinsurrectionary methods and in others (England, the United States,and in later years Engels added France) might well come to power inelections and legislate socialism into existence. Characteristically,many Marxists have been as dishonest with their Marx and Engels asthe Progressive Labor Party has been with the readers of Challenge,leaving important observations untranslated or grossly distortingMarx's meaning.


means of the same dialectic that accounts for the transi-tion of one class society to another? This is not a textbookproblem that involves the juggling of logical abstractionsbut a very real and concrete issue for our time. There areprofound differences between the development of thebourgeoisie under feudalism and the development of theproletariat under capitalism which Marx either failed toanticipate or never faced clearly. The bourgeoisie con-trolled economic life long before it took state power; ithad become the dominant class materially, culturally andideologically before it asserted its dominance politically.The proletariat does not control economic life. Despite itsindispensable role in the industrial process, the industrialworking class is not even a majority of the population, andits strategic economic position is being eroded by cyberna-tion and other technological advances.* Hence it requiresan act of high consciousness for the proletariat to use itspower to achieve a social revolution. Until now, theachievement of this consciousness has been blocked by thefact that the factory milieu is one of the most well-en-trenched arenas of the work ethic, of hierarchical systemsof management, of obedience to leaders, and in recenttimes of production committed to superfluous commodi-ties and armaments. The factory serves not only to "disci-pline," "unite," and "organize" the workers, but also todo so in a thoroughly bourgeois fashion. In the factory,

* This is as good a place as any to dispose of the notion that anyoneis a "proletarian" who has nothing to sell but his labor power. It istrue that Marx defined the proletariat in these terms, but he alsoworked out a historical dialectic in the development of the prole-tariat. The proletariat developed out of a propertyless exploitedclass, reaching its most advanced form in the industrial proletariat,which corresponded to the most advanced form of capital. In thelater years of his life, Marx came to despise the Parisian workers,who were engaged preponderantly in the production of luxurygoods, citing "our German workers"-the most robot-like inEurope-as the "model" proletariat of the world.


capitalistic production not only renews the social relationsof capitalism with each working day, as Marx observed, italso renews the psyche, values and ideology of capitalism.

Marx sensed this fact sufficiently to look for reasonsmore compelling than the mere fact of exploitation orconflicts over wages and hours to propel the proletariatinto revolutionary action. In his general theory of capital-ist accumulation he tried to delineate the harsh, objectivelaws that force the proletariat to assume a revolutionaryrole. Accordingly he developed his famous theory of im-miseration: competition between capitalists compels themto undercut each others' prices, which in turn leads to acontinual reduction of wages and the absolute impoverish-ment of the workers. The proletariat is compelled to revoltbecause with the process of competition and the centrali-zation of capital there "grows the mass of misery, oppres-sion, slavery, degradation."*

But capitalism has not stood still since Marx's day. Writ-ing in the middle years of the nineteenth century, Marxcould not be expected to grasp the full consequences of hisinsights into the centralization of capital and the develop-ment of technology. He could not be expected to foresee

* The attempt to describe Marx's immiseration theory ininternational terms instead of national (as Marx did) is sheer subter-fuge. In the first place, this theoretical legerdemain simply tries tosidestep the question of why immiseration has not occurred withinthe industrial strongholds of capitalism, the only areas which form atechnologically adequate point of departure for a classless society. Ifwe are to pin our hopes on the colonial world as "the proletariat,"this position conceals a very real danger: genocide. America and herrecent ally Russia have all the technical means to bomb the under-developed world into submission. A threat lurks on the historicalhorizon—the development of the United States into a truly fascistimperium of the nazi type. It is sheer rubbish to say that thiscountry is a "paper tiger." It is a thermonuclear tiger and theAmerican ruling class, lacking any cultural restraints, is capable ofbeing even more vicious than the German.


that capitalism would develop not only from mercantilisminto the dominant industrial form of his day—from state-aided trading monopolies into highly competitive indus-trial units—but further, that with the centralization ofcapital, capitalism returns to its mercantilist origins on ahigher level of development and reassumes the state-aidedmonopolistic form. The economy tends to merge with thestate and capitalism begins to "plan" its development in-stead of leaving it exclusively to the interplay of competi-tion and market forces. To be sure, the system does notabolish the traditional class struggle, but manages to con-tain it, using its immense technological resources to assimi-late the most strategic sections of the working class.

Thus the full thrust of the immiseration theory isblunted and in the United States the traditional classstruggle fails to develop into the class war. It remains en-tirely within bourgeois dimensions. Marxism, in fact,becomes ideology. It is assimilated by the most advancedforms of the state capitalist movement—notably Russia. Byan incredible irony of history, Marxian "socialism" turnsout to be in large part the very state capitalism that Marxfailed to anticipate in the dialectic of capitalism.* Theproletariat, instead of developing into a revolutionary classwithin the womb of capitalism, turns out to be an organwithin the body of bourgeois society.

The question we must ask at this late date in history iswhether a social revolution that seeks to achieve a classlesssociety can emerge from a conflict between traditionalclasses in a class society, or whether such a social revolu-tion can only emerge from the decomposition of the tradi-tional classes, indeed from the emergence of an entirelynew "class" whose very essence is that it is a non-class, a

* Lenin sensed this and described "socialism" as "nothing but statecapitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people. "29 This is anextraordinary statement if one thinks out its implications, and amouthful of contradictions.


growing stratum of revolutionaries. In trying to answer thisquestion, we can learn more by returning to the broaderdialectic which Marx developed for human society as awhole than from the model he borrowed from the passageof feudal into capitalist society. Just as primitive kinshipclans began to differentiate into classes, so in our own daythere is a tendency for classes to decompose into entirelynew subcultures which bear a resemblance to non-capitalistforms of relationships. These are not strictly economicgroups any more; in fact, they reflect the tendency of thesocial development to transcend the economic categoriesof scarcity society. They constitute, in effect, a crude,ambiguous cultural preformation of the movement of scar-city into post-scarcity society.

The process of class decomposition must be understoodin all its dimensions. The word "process" must be empha-sized here: the traditional classes do not disappear, nor forthat matter does the class struggle. Only a social revolutioncould remove the prevailing class structure and the con-flicts it engenders. The point is the traditional classstruggle ceases to have revolutionary implications; it re-veals itself as the physiology of the prevailing society, notas the labor pains of birth. In fact the traditional classstruggle stabilizes capitalist society by "correcting" itsabuses (in wages, hours, inflation, employment, etc.). Theunions in capitalist society constitute themselves into acounter-"monopoly" to the industrial monopolies and areincorporated into the neomercantile statified economy asan estate. Within this estate there are lesser or greaterconflicts, but taken as a whole the unions strengthen thesystem and serve to perpetuate it.

To reinforce this class structure by babbling about the"role of the working class," to reinforce the traditionalclass struggle by imputing a "revolutionary" content to it,to infect the new revolutionary movement of our timewith "workeritis" is reactionary to the core. How often dothe Marxian doctrinaires have to be reminded that the his-


tory of the class struggle is the history of a disease, of thewounds opened by the famous "social question," of man'sone-sided development in trying to gain control over na-ture by dominating his fellow man? If the byproduct ofthis disease has been technological advance, the main prod-ucts have been repression, a horrible shedding of humanblood, and a terrifying distortion of the human psyche.

As the disease approaches its end, as the wounds beginto heal in their deepest recesses, the process now unfoldstoward wholeness; the revolutionary implications of thetraditional class struggle lose their meaning as theoreticalconstructs and as social reality. The process of decomposi-tion embraces not only the traditional class structure butalso the patriarchal family, authoritarian modes of up-bringing, the influence of religion, the institutions of thestate, and the mores built around toil, renunciation, guiltand repressed sexuality. The process of disintegration, inshort, now becomes generalized and cuts across virtuallyall the traditional classes, values and institutions. It createsentirely new issues, modes of struggle and forms of organi-zation and calls for an entirely new approach to theoryand praxis.

What does this mean concretely? Let us contrast twoapproaches, the Marxian and the revolutionary. The Marx-ian doctrinaire would have us approach the worker—orbetter, "enter" the factory—and proselytize him in "pref-erence" to anyone else. The purpose?—to make the worker"class conscious." To cite the most neanderthal examplesfrom the old left, one cuts one's hair, grooms oneself inconventional sports clothing, abandons pot for cigarettesand beer, dances conventionally, affects "rough" manner-isms, and develops a humorless, deadpan and pompousmien.

* On this score, the Old Left projects its own neanderthal imageon the American worker. Actually this image more closely approxi-mates the character of the union bureaucrat or the Stalinistcommissar.


One becomes, in short, what the worker is at his mostcaricaturized worst: not a "petty bourgeois degenerate,"to be sure, but a bourgeois degenerate. One becomes animitation of the worker insofar as the worker is an imita-tion of his masters. Beneath this metamorphosis of thestudent into the "worker" lies a vicious cynicism. One triesto use the discipline inculcated by the factory milieu todiscipline the worker to the party milieu. One tries to usethe worker's respect for the industrial hierarchy to wed theworker to the party hierarchy. This disgusting process,which if successful could lead only to the substitution ofone hierarchy for another, is achieved by pretending to beconcerned with the worker's economic day-to-day de-mands. Even Marxian theory is degraded to accord withthis debased image of the worker. (See almost any copy ofChallenge—the National Enquirer of the left. Nothingbores the worker more than this kind of literature.) In theend, the worker is shrewd enough to know that he will getbetter results in the day-to-day class struggle through hisunion bureaucracy than through a Marxian party bureauc-racy. The forties revealed this so dramatically that within ayear or two, with hardly any protest from the rank-and-file, unions succeeded in kicking out by the thousands"Marxians" who had done spade-work in the labor move-ment for more than a decade, even rising to the top leader-ship of the old CIO internationals.

The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becomingmore of a worker but by undoing his "workerness." Andin this he is not alone; the same applies to the farmer, thestudent, the clerk, the soldier, the bureaucrat, the profes-sional—and the Marxist. The worker is no less a "bour-geois" than the farmer, student, clerk, soldier, bureaucrat,professional—and Marxist. His "workerness" is the diseasehe is suffering from, the social affliction telescoped to indi-vidual dimensions. Lenin understood this in What Is to BeDone? but he smuggled in the old hierarchy under a red


flag and some revolutionary verbiage. The worker begins tobecome a revolutionary when he undoes his "workerness,"when he comes to detest his class status here and now,when he begins to shed exactly those features which theMarxists most prize in him—his work ethic, his character-structure derived from industrial discipline, his respect forhierarchy, his obedience to leaders, his consumerism, hisvestiges of puritanism. In this sense, the worker becomes arevolutionary to the degree that he sheds his class statusand achieves an un-class consciousness. He degenerates—and he degenerates magnificently. What he is shedding areprecisely those class shackles that bind him to all systemsof domination. He abandons those class interests that en-slave him to consumerism, suburbia, and a bookkeepingconception of life.*

The most promising development in the factories todayis the emergence of young workers who smoke pot, fuckoff on their jobs, drift into and out of factories, grow longor longish hair, demand more leisure time rather than morepay, steal, harass all authority figures, go on wildcats, and

The worker, in this sense, begins to approximate the socially transi-tional human types who have provided history with its most revolu-tionary elements. Generally, the "proletariat" has been mostrevolutionary in transitional periods, when it was least "proletarian-ized" psychically by the industrial system. The great focuses of theclassical workers' revolutions were Petrograd and Barcelona, wherethe workers had been directly uprooted from a peasant background,and Paris, where they were still anchored in crafts or came directlyfrom a craft background. These workers had the greatest difficultyin acclimating themselves to industrial domination and became acontinual source of social and revolutionary unrest. By contrast, thestable hereditary working class tended to be surprisingly non-revolu-tionary. Even in the case of the German workers who were cited byMarx and Engels as models for the European proletariat, the major-ity did not support the Spartacists in 1919. They returned largemajorities of official Social Democrats to the Congress of Workers'Councils, and to the Reichstag in later years, and rallied consistentlybehind the Social Democratic Party right up to 1933.


turn on their fellow workers. Even more promising is theemergence of this human type in trade schools and highschools, the reservoir of the industrial working class tocome. To the degree that workers, vocational students andhigh school students link their lifestyles to various aspectsof the anarchic youth culture, to that degree will the prole-tariat be transformed from a force for the conservation ofthe established order into a force for revolution.

A qualitatively new situation emerges when man is facedwith a transformation from a repressive class society, basedon material scarcity, into a liberatory classless society,based on material abundance. From the decomposingtraditional class structure a new human type is created inever-increasing numbers: the revolutionary. This revolu-tionary begins to challenge not only the economic andpolitical premises of hierarchical society, but hierarchy assuch. He not only raises the need for social revolution butalso tries to live in a revolutionary manner to the degreethat this is possible in the existing society.* He not only

* This revolutionary lifestyle may develop in the factories as well ason the streets, in schools as well as in crashpads, in the suburbs aswell as on the Bay Area-East Side axis. Its essence is defiance, and apersonal "propaganda of the deed" that erodes all the mores, institu-tions and shibboleths of domination. As society begins to approachthe threshold of the revolutionary period, the factories, schools andneighborhoods become the actual arena of revolutionary "play"—a"play" that has a very serious core. Strikes become a chronic condi-tion and are called for their own sake to break the veneer of routine,to defy the society on an almost hourly basis, to shatter the mood ofbourgeois normality. This new mood of the workers, students andneighborhood people is a vital precursor to the actual moment ofrevolutionary transformation. Its most conscious expression is thedemand for "self-management"; the worker refuses to be a "man-aged" being, a class being. This process was most evident in Spain,on the eve of the 1936 revolution, when workers in almost everycity and town called strikes "for the hell of it"-to express theirindependence, their sense of awakening, their break with the socialorder and with bourgeois conditions of life. It was also an essentialfeature of the 1968 general strike in France.


attacks the forms created by the legacy of domination, butalso improvises new forms of liberation which take theirpoetry from the future.

This preparation for the future, this experimentationwith liberatory post-scarcity forms of social relations, maybe illusory if the future involves a substitution of one classsociety by another; it is indispensable, however, if the fu-ture involves a classless society built on the ruins of a classsociety. What, then, will be the "agent" of revolutionarychange? It will be literally the great majority of society,drawn from all the different traditional classes and fusedinto a common revolutionary force by the decompositionof the institutions, social forms, values and lifestyles of theprevailing class structure. Typically, its most advanced ele-ments are the youth—a generation that has known nochronic economic crisis and that is becoming less and lessoriented toward the myth of material security so wide-spread among the generation of the thirties.

If it is true that a social revolution cannot be achievedwithout the active or passive support of the workers, it isno less true that it cannot be achieved without the activeor passive support of the farmers, technicians and profes-sionals. Above all, a social revolution cannot be achievedwithout the support of the youth, from which the rulingclass recruits its armed forces. If the ruling class retains itsarmed might, the revolution is lost no matter how manyworkers rally to its support. This has been vividly demon-strated not only by Spain in the thirties but by Hungary inthe fifties and Czechoslovakia in the sixties. The revolutionof today—by its very nature, indeed, by its pursuit ofwholeness—wins not. only the soldier and the worker, butthe very generation from which soldiers, workers, techni-cians, farmers, scientists, professionals and even bureau-crats have been recruited. Discarding the tactical hand-books of the past, the revolution of the future follows thepath of least resistance, eating its way into the most sus-ceptible areas of the population irrespective of their "class


position." It is nourished by all the contradictions in bour-geois society, not simply by the contradictions of the1860s and 1917. Hence it attracts all those who feel theburdens of exploitation, poverty, racism, imperialism and,yes, those whose lives are frustrated by consumerism, sub-urbia, the mass media, the family, school, the supermarketand the prevailing system of repressed sexuality. Here theform of the revolution becomes as total as its content-classless, propertyless, hierarchyless, and wholly liberating.

To barge into this revolutionary development with theworn recipes of Marxism, to babble about a "class line"and the "role of the working class," amounts to a subver-sion of the present and the future by the past. To elabo-rate this deadening ideology by babbling about "cadres," a"vanguard party," "democratic centralism" and the "pro-letarian dictatorship" is sheer counterrevolution. It is tothis matter of the "organizational question"—this vitalcontribution of Leninism to Marxism—that we must nowdirect some attention.

THE MYTH OF THE PARTY

Social revolutions are not made by parties, groups orcadres, they occur as a result of deep-seated historic forcesand contradictions that activate large sections of the popu-lation. They occur not merely because the "masses" findthe existing society intolerable (as Trotsky argued) butalso because of the tension between the actual and thepossible, between what-is and what-could-be. Abjectmisery alone does not produce revolutions; more oftenthan not, it produces an aimless demoralization, or worse,a private, personalized struggle to survive.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 weighs on the brain ofthe living like a nightmare because it was largely the prod-uct of "intolerable conditions," of a devastating imperial-istic war. Whatever dreams it had were virtually destroyedby an even bloodier civil war, by famine, and by treachery.


What emerged from the revolution were the ruins not of anold society but of whatever hopes existed to achieve a newone. The Russian Revolution failed miserably; it replacedczarism by state capitalism.* The Bolsheviks were thetragic victims of their own ideology and paid with theirlives in great numbers during the purges of the thirties. Toattempt to acquire any unique wisdom from this scarcityrevolution is ridiculous. What we can learn from the revo-lutions of the past is what all revolutions have in commonand their profound limitations compared with the enor-mous possibilities that are now open to us.

The most striking feature of the past revolutions is that

* A fact which Trotsky never understood. He never followedthrough the consequences of his own concept of "combined de-velopment" to its logical conclusions. He saw (quite correctly) thatczarist Russia, the latecomer in the European bourgeois develop-ment, necessarily acquired the most advanced industrial and classforms instead of recapitulating the entire bourgeois developmentfrom its beginnings. He neglected to consider that Russia, torn bytremendous internal upheaval, might even run ahead of the capitalistdevelopment elsewhere in Europe. Hypnotized by the formula"nationalized property equals socialism," he failed to recognize thatmonopoly capitalism itself tends to amalgamate with the state by itsown inner dialectic. The Bolsheviks, having cleared away the tradi-tional forms of bourgeois social organization (which still act as arein on the state capitalist development in Europe and America),inadvertently prepared the ground for a "pure" state capitalist de-velopment in which the state finally becomes the ruling class. Lack-ing support from a technologically advanced Europe, the RussianRevolution became an internal counterrevolution; Soviet Russiabecame a form of state capitalism that does not "benefit the wholepeople." Lenin's analogy between "socialism" and state capitalismbecame a terrifying reality under Stalin. Despite its humanistic core,Marxism failed to comprehend how much its concept of "socialism"approximates a later stage of capitalism itself—the return to mercan-tile forms on a higher industrial level. The failure to understand thisdevelopment led to devastating theoretical confusion in the contem-porary revolutionary movement, as witness the splits among theTrotskyists over this question.


they began spontaneously. Whether one chooses to exa-mine the opening phases of the French Revolution of1789, the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, the1905 revolution in Russia, the overthrow of the czar in1917, the Hungarian revolution of 1956, or the Frenchgeneral strike of 1968, the opening stages are generally thesame: a period of ferment explodes spontaneously into amass upsurge. Whether the upsurge is successful or notdepends on its resoluteness and on whether the troops goover to the people.

The "glorious party," when there is one, almost in-variably lags behind the events. In February 1917 thePetrograd organization of the Bolsheviks opposed the call-ing of strikes precisely on the eve of the revolution whichwas destined to overthrow the czar. Fortunately, theworkers ignored the Bolshevik "directives" and went onstrike anyway. In the events which followed, no one wasmore surprised by the revolution than the "revolutionary"parties, including the Bolsheviks. As the Bolshevik leaderKayurov recalled: "Absolutely no guiding initiatives fromthe party were felt. . .the Petrograd committee had beenarrested and the representative from the Central Com-mittee, Comrade Shliapnikov, was unable to give any direc-tives for the coming day."30 Perhaps this was fortunate.Before the Petrograd committee was arrested, its evalu-ation of the situation and its own role had been so dismalthat, had the workers followed its guidance, it is doubtfulthat the revolution would have occurred when it did.

The same kind of story could be told of the upsurgeswhich preceded 1917 and those which followed—to citeonly the most recent, the student uprising and generalstrike in France during May-June 1968. There is a con-venient tendency to forget that close to a dozen "tightlycentralized" Bolshevik-type organizations existed in Parisat this time. It is rarely mentioned that virtually every oneof these "vanguard" groups disdained the student uprising


up to May 7, when the street fighting broke out in earnest.The Trotskyist Jeunesse Communiste Revolutionnaire wasa notable exception—and it merely coasted along, essen-tially following the initiatives of the March 22nd Move-ment.* Up to May 7 all the Maoist groups criticized thestudent uprising as peripheral and unimportant; the Trot-skyist Federation des Etudiants Revolutionnaires regardedit as "adventuristic" and tried to get the students to leavethe barricades on May 10; the Communist Party, of course,played a completely treacherous role. Far from leading thepopular movement, the Maoists and Trotskyists were itscaptives throughout. Ironically, most of these Bolshevikgroups used manipulative techniques shamelessly in theSorbonne student assembly in an effort to "control" it,introducing a disruptive atmosphere that demoralized theentire body. Finally, to complete the irony, all of theseBolshevik groups were to babble about the need for "cen-tralized leadership" when the popular movement col-lapsed—a movement that occurred despite their "direc-tives" and often in opposition to them.

Revolutions and uprisings worthy of any note not onlyhave an initial phase that is magnificently anarchic but alsotend spontaneously to create their own forms of revolu-tionary self-management. The Parisian sections of 1793-94were the most remarkable forms of self-management to becreated by any of the social revolutions in history. t Morefamiliar in form were the councils or "soviets" which the

* The March 22nd Movement functioned as a catalytic agent in theevents, not as a leadership. It did not command; it instigated, leavinga free play to the events. This free play, which allowed the studentsto push ahead on their own momentum, was indispensable to thedialectic of the uprising, for without it there would have been nobarricades on May 10, which in turn triggered off the general strikeof the workers.

t See "The Forms of Freedom."


Petrograd workers established in 1905. Although lessdemocratic than the sections, the councils were to re-appear in a number of later revolutions. Still another formof revolutionary self-management were the factory com-mittees which the anarchists established in the SpanishRevolution of 1936. Finally, the sections reappeared asstudent assemblies and action committees in the May-Juneuprising and general strike in Paris in 1968.*

At this point we must ask what role the "revolutionary"party plays in all these developments. In the beginning, aswe have seen, it tends to have an inhibitory function, not a"vanguard" role. Where it exercises influence, it tends toslow down the flow of events, not "coordinate" the revo-lutionary forces. This is not accidental. The party is struc-tured along hierarchical lines that reflect the very society itprofesses to oppose. Despite its theoretical pretensions, itis a bourgeois organism, a miniature state, with an appara-tus and a cadre whose function it is to seize power, notdissolve power. Rooted in the prerevolutionary period, itassimilates all the forms, techniques and mentality ofbureaucracy. Its membership is schooled in obedience andin the preconceptions of a rigid dogma and is taught torevere the leadership. The party's leadership, in turn, isschooled in habits born of command, authority,manipulation and egomania. This situation is worsened* With a sublime arrogance that is attributable partly to ignorance, anumber of Marxist groups were to dub virtually all of the aboveforms of self-management as "Soviets." The attempt to bring all ofthese different forms under a single rubric is not only misleading butwillfully obscurantist. The actual Soviets were the least democraticof the revolutionary forms and the Bolsheviks shrewdly used themto transfer the power to their own party. The Soviets were not basedon face-to-face democracy, like the Parisian sections or the stu-dent assemblies of 1968. Nor were they based on economic self-management, like the Spanish anarchist factory committees. TheSoviets actually formed a workers' parliament, hierarchically organ-ized, which drew its representation from factories and later frommilitary units and peasant villages.


when the party participates in parliamentary elections. Inelection campaigns, the vanguard party models itselfcompletely on existing bourgeois forms and even acquiresthe paraphernalia of the electoral party. The situationassumes truly critical proportions when the party acquireslarge presses, costly headquarters and a large inventory ofcentrally controlled periodicals, and develops a paid"apparatus"—in short, a bureacracy with vested materialinterests.

As the party expands, the distance between the leader-ship and the ranks invariably increases. Its leaders not onlybecome "personages," they lose contact with the livingsituation below. The local groups, which know their ownimmediate situation better than any remote leader, areobliged to subordinate their insights to directives fromabove. The leadership, lacking any direct knowledge oflocal problems, responds sluggishly and prudently. Al-though it stakes out a claim to the "larger view," to greater"theoretical competence," the competence of the leader-ship tends to diminish as one ascends the hierarchy ofcommand. The more one approaches the level where thereal decisions are made, the more conservative is the natureof the decision-making process, the more bureaucratic andextraneous are the factors which come into play, the moreconsiderations of prestige and retrenchment supplant crea-tivity, imagination, and a disinterested dedication to revo-lutionary goals.

The party becomes less efficient from a revolutionarypoint of view the more it seeks efficiency by means ofhierarchy, cadres and centralization. Although everyonemarches in step, the orders are usually wrong, especiallywhen events begin to move rapidly and take unexpectedturns—as they do in all revolutions. The party is efficientin only one respect—in molding society in its own hier-archical image if the revolution is successful. It recreatesbureaucracy, centralization and the state. It fosters the


bureaucracy, centralization and the state. It fosters thevery social conditions which justify this kind of society.Hence, instead of "withering away," the state controlledby the "glorious party" preserves the very conditionswhich "necessitate" the existence of a state—and a partyto "guard" it.

On the other hand, this kind of party is extremely vul-nerable in periods of repression. The bourgeoisie has onlyto grab its leadership to destroy virtually the entire move-ment. With its leaders in prison or in hiding, the partybecomes paralyzed; the obedient membership has no oneto obey and tends to flounder. Demoralization sets inrapidly. The party decomposes not only because of therepressive atmosphere but also because of its poverty ofinner resources.

The foregoing account is not a series of hypotheticalinferences, it is a composite sketch of all the mass Marxianparties of the past century—the Social Democrats, theCommunists, and the Trotskyist party of Ceylon (the onlymass party of its kind). To claim that these parties failedto take their Marxian principles seriously merely concealsanother question: why did this failure happen in the firstplace? The fact is, these parties were co-opted into bour-geois society because they were structured along bourgeoislines. The germ of treachery existed in them from birth.

The Bolshevik Party was spared this fate between 1904and 1917 for only one reason: it was an illegal organiza-tion during most of the years leading up to the revolution.The party was continually being shattered and reconsti-tuted, with the result that until it took power it neverreally hardened into a fully centralized, bureaucratic, hier-archical machine. Moreover, it was riddled by factions; theintensely factional atmosphere persisted throughout 1917into the civil war. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik leadershipwas ordinarily extremely conservative, a trait that Leninhad to fight throughout 1917—first in his efforts to re-


orient the Central Committee against the provisionalgovernment (the famous conflict over the "April Theses"),later in driving the Central Committee toward insurrectionin October. In both cases he threatened to resign from theCentral Committee and bring his views to "the lower ranksof the party."

In 1918, factional disputes over the issue of the Brest-Litovsk treaty became so serious that the Bolsheviks nearlysplit into two warring communist parties. OppositionalBolshevik groups like the Democratic Centralists and theWorkers' Opposition waged bitter struggles within theparty throughout 1919 and 1920, not to speak of opposi-tional movements that developed within the Red Armyover Trotsky's propensity for centralization. The completecentralization of the Bolshevik Party—the achievement of"Leninist unity," as it was to be called later—did not occuruntil 1921, when Lenin succeeded in persuading the TenthParty Congress to ban factions. By this time, most of theWhite Guards had been crushed and the foreign interven-tionists had withdrawn their troops from Russia.

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the Bolshevikstended to centralize their party to the degree that theybecame isolated from the working class. This relationshiphas rarely been investigated in latter-day Leninist circles,although Lenin was honest enough to admit it. The storyof the Russian Revolution is not merely the story of theBolshevik Party and its supporters. Beneath the veneer ofofficial events described by Soviet historians there wasanother, more basic, development—the spontaneous move-ment of the workers and revolutionary peasants, whichlater clashed sharply with the bureaucratic policies of theBolsheviks. With the overthrow of the czar in February1917, workers in virtually all the factories of Russia spon-taneously established factory committees, staking out anincreasing claim on industrial operations. In June 1917 anall-Russian conference of factory committees was held in


Petrograd which called for the "organization of thoroughcontrol by labor over production and distribution." Thedemands of this conference are rarely mentioned in Lenin-ist accounts of the Russian Revolution, despite the factthat the conference aligned itself with the Bolsheviks.Trotsky, who describes the factory committees as "themost direct and indubitable representation of the prole-tariat in the whole country," deals with them peripherallyin his massive three-volume history of the revolution. Yetso important were these spontaneous organisms of self-management that Lenin, despairing of winning the Sovietsin the summer of 1917, was prepared to jettison the slogan"All Power to the Soviets" for "All Power to the FactoryCommittees." This demand would have catapulted theBolsheviks into a completely anarcho-syndicalist position,although it is doubtful that they would have remainedthere very long.

With the October Revolution, all the factory commit-tees seized control of the plants, ousting the bourgeoisieand completely taking control of industry. In acceptingthe concept of workers' control, Lenin's famous decree ofNovember 14, 1917, merely acknowledged an accom-plished fact; the Bolsheviks dared not oppose the workersat this early date. But they began to whittle down thepower of the factory committees. In January 1918, a scanttwo months after "decreeing" workers' control, Leninbegan to advocate that the administration of the factoriesbe placed under trade union control. The story that theBolsheviks "patiently" experimented with workers' con-trol, only to find it "inefficient" and "chaotic," is a myth.Their "patience" did not last more than a few weeks. Notonly did Lenin oppose direct workers' control within amatter of weeks after the decree of November 14, evenunion control came to an end shortly after it had beenestablished. By the summer of 1918, almost all of Russianindustry had been placed under bourgeois forms of


management. As Lenin put it, the "revolution demands . . .precisely in the interests of socialism that the massesunquestionably obey the single will of the leaders of thelabor process."* Thereafter, workers' control wasdenounced not only as "inefficient," "chaotic" and"impractical," but also as "petty bourgeois"!

The Left Communist Osinsky bitterly attacked all ofthese spurious claims and warned the party: "Socialismand socialist organization must be set up by the proletariatitself, or they will not be set up at all; something else willbe set up—state capitalism."31 In the "interests of social-ism" the Bolshevik party elbowed the proletariat out ofevery domain it had conquered by its own efforts andinitiative. The party did not coordinate the revolution oreven lead it; it dominated it. First workers' control andlater union control were replaced by an elaborate hier-archy as monstrous as any structure that existed in pre-revolutionary times. As later years were to demonstrate,Osinsky's prophecy became reality.

The problem of "who is to prevail"—the Bolsheviks orthe Russian "masses"—was by no means limited to the fac-

* V. I. Lenin, "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government," inSelected Works, vol. 7 (International Publishers; New York, 1943),p. 342. In this harsh article, published in April 1918, Lenin com-pletely abandoned the liberatarian perspective he had advanced theyear before in State and Revolution. The main themes of the articleare the needs for "discipline," for authoritarian control over thefactories, and for the institution of the Taylor system (a systemLenin had denounced before the revolution as enslaving men to themachine). The article was written during a comparatively peacefulperiod of Bolshevik rule some two months after the signing of theBrest-Litovsk Treaty and a month before the revolt of the CzechLegion in the Urals-the revolt that started the civil war on a widescale and opened the period of direct Allied intervention in Russia.Finally, the article was written nearly a year before the defeat of theGerman revolution. It would be difficult to account for the "Im-mediate Tasks" merely in terms of the Russian civil war and thefailure of the European revolution.


tories. The issue reappeared in the countryside as well asthe cities. A sweeping peasant war had buoyed up themovement of the workers. Contrary to official Leninistaccounts, the agrarian upsurge was by no means limited toa redistribution of the land into private plots. In theUkraine, peasants influenced by the anarchist militias ofNestor Makhno and guided by the communist maxim"From each according to his ability; to each according tohis needs," established a multitude of rural communes.Elsewhere, in the north and in Soviet Asia, several thou-sand of these organisms were established, partly on theinitiative of the Left Social Revolutionaries and in largemeasure as a result of traditional collectivist impulseswhich stemmed from the Russian village, the mir. It mat-ters little whether these communes were numerous or em-braced large numbers of peasants; the point is that theywere authentic popular organisms, the nuclei of a moraland social spirit that ranged far above the dehumanizingvalues of bourgeois society.

The Bolsheviks frowned upon these organisms from thevery beginning and eventually condemned them. To Lenin,the preferred, the more "socialist," form of agriculturalenterprise was represented by the state farm—an agricul-tural factory in which the state owned the land and farm-ing equipment, appointing managers who hired peasants ona wage basis. One sees in these attitudes toward workers'control and agricultural communes the essentially bour-geois spirit and mentality that permeated the BolshevikParty—a spirit and mentality that emanated not only fromits theories, but also from its corporate mode of organiza-tion. In December 1918 Lenin launched an attack againstthe communes on the pretext that peasants were being"forced" to enter them. Actually, little if any coercion wasused to organize these communistic forms of self-manage-ment. As Robert G. Wesson, who studied the Soviet com-munes in detail, concludes: "Those who went into corn-


munes must have done so largely of their own volition."32

The communes were not suppressed but their growth wasdiscouraged until Stalin merged the entire developmentinto the forced collectivization drives of the late twentiesand early thirties.

By 1920 the Bolsheviks had isolated themselves fromthe Russian working class and peasantry. Taken together,the elimination of workers' control, the suppression of theMakhnovtsy, the restrictive political atmosphere in thecountry, the inflated bureaucracy and the crushing mate-rial poverty inherited from the civil war years generated adeep hostility toward Bolshevik rule. With the end of hos-tilities, a movement surged up from the depths of Russiansociety for a "third revolution"—not to restore the past, asthe Bolsheviks claimed, but to realize the very goals offreedom, economic as well as political, that had rallied themasses around the Bolshevik program of 1917. The newmovement found its most conscious form in the Petrogradproletariat and among the Kronstadt sailors. It also foundexpression in the party: the growth of anticentralist andanarcho-syndicalist tendencies among the Bolsheviksreached a point where a bloc of oppositional groups,oriented toward these issues, gained 124 seats at a Moscowprovincial conference as against 154 for supporters of theCentral Committee.

On March 2, 1921, the "red sailors" of Kronstadt rosein open rebellion, raising the banner of a "Third Revolu-tion of the Toilers." The Kronstadt program centeredaround demands for free elections to the Soviets, freedomof speech and press for the anarchists and the left socialistparties, free trade unions, and the liberation of all priso-ners who belonged to socialist parties. The most shamelessstories were fabricated by the Bolsheviks to account forthis uprising, acknowledged in later years as brazen lies.The revolt was characterized as a "White Guard plot" de-spite the fact that the great majority of Communist Party


members in Kronstadt joined the sailors—precisely as Com-munists—in denouncing the party leaders as betrayers ofthe October Revolution. As Robert Vincent Daniels ob-serves in his study of Bolshevik oppositional movements:"Ordinary Communists were indeed so unreliable. . . thatthe government did not depend upon them either in theassault on Kronstadt itself or in keeping order in Petro-grad, where Kronstadt's hopes for support chiefly rested.The main body of troops employed were Chekists andofficer cadets from Red Army training schools. The finalassault on Kronstadt was led by the top officialdom of theCommunist Party—a large group of delegates to the TenthParty Congress was rushed from Mosow for this pur-pose."33 So weak was the regime internally that the elitehad to do its own dirty work.

Even more significant than the Kronstadt revolt was thestrike movement that developed among the Petrogradworkers, a movement that sparked the uprising of thesailors. Leninist histories do not recount this critically im-portant development. The first strikes broke out in theTroubotchny factory on February 23, 1921. Within a mat-ter of days the movement swept one factory after another,until by February 28 the famous Putilov works—the "cru-cible of the Revolution"—went on strike. Not only wereeconomic demands raised, the workers raised distinctlypolitical ones, anticipating all the demands that were to beraised by the Kronstadt sailors a few days later. On Feb-ruary 24, the Bolsheviks declared a "state of siege" inPetrograd and arrested the strike leaders, suppressing theworkers' demonstrations with officer cadets. The fact is,the Bolsheviks did not merely suppress a "sailors' mutiny";they crushed the working class itself. It was at this pointthat Lenin demanded the banning of factions in the Rus-sian Communist Party. Centralization of the party wasnow complete—and the way was paved for Stalin.

We have discussed these events in detail because they


lead to a conclusion that the latest crop of Marxist-Lenin-ists tend to avoid: the Bolshevik Party reached its maxi-mum degree of centralization in Lenin's day not to achievea revolution or suppress a White Guard counterrevolution,but to effect a counterrevolution of its own against thevery social forces it professed to represent. Factions wereprohibited and a monolithic party created not to prevent a"capitalist restoration" but to contain a mass movement ofworkers for soviet democracy and social freedom. TheLenin of 1921 stood opposed to the Lenin of 1917.

Thereafter, Lenin simply floundered. This man whoabove all sought to anchor the problems of his party insocial contradictions found himself literally playing anorganizational "numbers game" in a last-ditch attempt toarrest the very bureaucratization he had himself created.There is nothing more pathetic and tragic than Lenin's lastyears. Paralyzed by a simplistic body of Marxist formulas,he can think of no better countermeasures than organiza-tional ones. He proposes the formation of the Workers'and Peasants' Inspection to correct bureaucratic deforma-tions in the party and state—and this body falls underStalin's control and becomes highly bureaucratic in its ownright. Lenin then suggests that the size of the Workers' andPeasants' Inspection be reduced and that it be merged withthe Control Commission. He advocates enlarging the Cen-tral Committee. Thus it rolls along: this body to be en-larged, that one to be merged with another, still a third tobe modified or abolished. The strange ballet of organiza-tional forms continues up to his very death, as though theproblem could be resolved by organizational means. AsMosche Lewin, an obvious admirer of Lenin, admits, theBolshevik leader "approached the problems of governmentmore like a chief executive of a strictly 'elitist' turn ofmind. He did not apply methods of social analysis to thegovernment and was content to consider it purely in termsof organizational methods."34


If it is true that in the bourgeois revolutions the "phrasewent beyond the content," in the Bolshevik revolution theforms replaced the content. The Soviets replaced theworkers and their factory committees, the party replacedthe Soviets, the Central Committee replaced the Party, andthe Political Bureau replaced the Central Committee. Inshort, means replaced ends. This incredible substitution ofform for content is one of the most characteristic traits ofMarxism-Leninism. In France during the May-June events,all the Bolshevik organizations were prepared to destroythe Sorbonne student assembly in order to increase theirinfluence and membership. Their principal concern wasnot the revolution or the authentic social forms created bythe students, but the growth of their own parties.

Only one force could have arrested the growth ofbureaucracy in Russia: a social force. Had the Russianproletariat and peasantry succeeded in increasing thedomain of self-management through the development ofviable factory committees, rural communes and freeSoviets, the history of the country might have taken adramatically different turn. There can be no question thatthe failure of socialist revolutions in Europe after the FirstWorld War led to the isolation of the revolution in Russia.The material poverty of Russia, coupled with the pressureof the surrounding capitalist world, clearly militatedagainst the development of a socialist or a consistentlylibertarian society. But by no means was it ordained thatRussia had to develop along state capitalist lines; contraryto Lenin's and Trotsky's initial expectations, the revolu-tion was defeated by internal forces, not by invasion ofarmies from abroad. Had the movement from below re-stored the initial achievements of the revolution in 1917, amultifaceted social structure might have developed, basedon workers' control of industry, on a freely developingpeasant economy in agriculture, and on a living interplayof ideas, programs and political movements. At the very


least, Russia would not have been imprisoned in totali-tarian chains and Stalinism would not have poisoned theworld revolutionary movement, paving the way for fascismand the Second World War.

The development of the Bolshevik Party, however, pre-cluded this development—Lenin's or Trotsky's "goodintentions" notwithstanding. By destroying the power ofthe factory committees in industry and by crushing theMakhnovtsy, the Petrograd workers and the Kronstadtsailors, the Bolsheviks virtually guaranteed the triumph ofthe Russian bureaucracy over Russian society. The central-ized party—a completely bourgeois institution—became therefuge of counterrevolution in its most sinister form. Thiswas covert counterrevolution that draped itself in the redflag and the terminology of Marx. Ultimately, what theBolsheviks suppressed in 1921 was not an "ideology" or a"White Guard conspiracy," but an elemental struggle ofthe Russian people to free themselves of their shackles andtake control of their own destiny.* For Russia, this meantthe nightmare of Stalinist dictatorship; for the generationof the thirties it meant the horror of fascism and the

* In interpreting this elemental movement of the Russian workersand peasants as a series of "White Guard conspiracies," "acts ofkulak resistance," and "plots of international capital," the Bol-sheviks reached an incredible theoretical low and deceived no onebut themselves. A spiritual erosion developed within the party thatpaved the way for the politics of the secret police, for characterassassination, and finally for the Moscow trials and the annihilationof the Old Bolshevik cadre. One sees the return of this odious men-tality in PL articles like "Marcuse: Cop-out or Cop?"-the theme ofwhich is to establish Marcuse as an agent of the CIA. (See ProgressiveLabor, February 1969.) The article has a caption under a photo-graph of demonstrating Parisians which reads: "Marcuse got to Paristoo late to stop the May action." Opponents of the PLP are in-variably described by this rag as "redbaiters" and as "anti-worker."If the American left does not repudiate this police approach andcharacter assassination it will pay bitterly in the years to come.


treachery of the Communist parties in Europe and theUnited States.

THE TWO TRADITIONSIt would be incredibly naive to suppose that Leninism wasthe product of a single man. The disease lies much deeper,not only in the limitations of Marxian theory but in thelimitations of the social era that produced Marxism. If thisis not clearly understood, we will remain as blind to thedialectic of events today as Marx, Engels, Lenin andTrotsky were in their own day. For us this blindness willbe all the more reprehensible because behind us lies awealth of experience that these men lacked in developingtheir theories.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were centralists—notonly politically, but socially and economically. They neverdenied this fact and their writings are studded with glow-ing encomiums to political, organizational and economiccentralization. As early as March 1850, in the famous"Address of the Central Council to the CommunistLeague," they call upon the workers to strive not only for"the single and indivisible German republic, but also strivein it for the most decisive centralization of power in thehands of the state authority." Lest the demand be takenlightly, it is repeated continually in the same paragraph,which concludes: "As in France in 1793, so today in Ger-many the carrying through of the strictest centralization isthe task of the really revolutionary party."

The same theme reappears continually in later years.With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, for ex-ample, Marx writes to Engels: "The French need a thrash-ing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state powerwill be useful for the centralization of the German workingclass."35

Marx and Engels, however, were not centralists because


they believed in the virtues of centralism per se. Quite thecontrary: both Marxism and anarchism have always agreedthat a liberated, communist society entails sweeping de-centralization, the dissolution of bureaucracy, the aboli-tion of the state, and the breakup of the large cities."Abolition of the antithesis between town and country isnot merely possible," notes Engels in Anti-Duhring. "It hasbecome a direct necessity . . . the present poisoning of theair, water and land can be put to an end only by the fusionof town and country. . . ." To Engels this involves a"uniform distribution of the population over the wholecountry"36 —in short, the physical decentralization of thecities.

The origins of Marxian centralism are in problems aris-ing from the formation of the national state. Until wellinto the latter half of the nineteenth century, Germanyand Italy were divided into a multitude of independentduchies, principalities and kingdoms. The consolidation ofthese geographic units into unified nations, Marx andEngels believed, was a sine qua non for the development ofmodern industry and capitalism. Their praise of centralismwas engendered not by any centralistic mystique but bythe events of the period in which they lived—the develop-ment of technology, trade, a unified working class, and thenational state. Their concern on this score, in short, is withthe emergence of capitalism, with the tasks of the bour-geois revolution in an era of unavoidable material scarcity.Marx's approach to a "proletarian revolution," on theother hand, is markedly different. He enthusiasticallypraises the Paris Commune as a "model to all the industrialcenters of France." "This regime," he writes, "once estab-lished in Paris and the secondary centers, the old central-ized government would in the provinces, too, have to giveway to the self-government of the producers." (Emphasisadded.) The unity of the nation, to be sure, would not


disappear, and a central government would exist during thetransition to communism, but its functions would belimited.

Our object is not to bandy about quotations from Marxand Engels but to emphasize how key tenets of Marxism—which are accepted so uncritically today—were in fact theproduct of an era that has long been transcended by thedevelopment of capitalism in the United States and West-ern Europe. In his day Marx was occupied not only withthe problems of the "proletarian revolution" but also withthe problems of the bourgeois revolution, particularly inGermany, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe. He dealt withthe problems of transition from capitalism to socialism incapitalist countries which had not advanced much beyondthe coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, andwith the problems of transition from feudalism to capital-ism in countries which had scarcely advanced much be-yond handicrafts and the guild system. To state theseconcerns broadly, Marx was occupied above all with thepreconditions of freedom (technological development,national unification, material abundance) rather than withthe conditions of freedom (decentralization, the formationof communities, the human scale, direct democracy). Histheories were still anchored in the realm of survival, notthe realm of life.

Once this is grasped it is possible to place Marx's theo-retical legacy in meaningful perspective—to separate itsrich contributions from its historically limited, indeedparalyzing, shackles on our own time. The Marxian dialec-tic, the many seminal insights provided by historicalmaterialism, the superb critique of the commodity rela-tionship, many elements of the economic theories, thetheory of alienation, and above all the notion that freedomhas material preconditions—these are lasting contributionsto revolutionary thought.

By the same token, Marx's emphasis on the industrial


proletariat as the "agent" of revolutionary change, his"class analysis" in explaining the transition from a class toa classless society, his concept of the proletarian dictator-ship, his emphasis on centralism, his theory of capitalistdevelopment (which tends to jumble state capitalism withsocialism), his advocacy of political action through elec-toral parties—these and many related concepts are false inthe context of our time and were misleading, as we shallsee, even in his own day. They emerge from the limitationsof his vision—more properly, from the limitations of histime. They make sense only if one remembers that Marxregarded capitalism as historically progressive, as an indis-pensable stage to the development of socialism, and theyhave practical applicability only to a time when Germanyin particular was confronted by bourgeois-democratic tasksand national unification. (We are not trying to say thatMarx was correct in holding this approach, merely that theapproach makes sense when viewed in its time and place.)

Just as the Russian Revolution included a subterraneanmovement of the "masses" which conflicted with Bol-shevism, so there is a subterranean movement in historywhich conflicts with all systems of authority. This move-ment has entered into our time under the name of "anar-chism," although it has never been encompassed by asingle ideology or body of sacred texts. Anarchism is alibidinal movement of humanity against coercion in anyform, reaching back in time to the very emergence ofpropertied society, class rule and the state. From thisperiod onward, the oppressed have resisted all forms thatseek to imprison the spontaneous development of socialorder. Anarchism has surged to the foreground of thesocial arena in periods of major transition from one histori-cal era to another. The decline of the ancient and feudalworld witnessed the upsurge of mass movements, in somecases wildly Dionysian in character, that demanded an endto all systems of authority, privilege and coercion.


The anarchic movements of the past failed largelybecause material scarcity, a function of the low level oftechnology, vitiated an organic harmonization of humaninterests. Any society that could promise little morematerially than equality of poverty invariably engendereddeep-seated tendencies to restore a new system of privi-lege. In the absence of a technology that could appreciablyreduce the working day, the need to work vitiated socialinstitutions based on self-management. The Girondins ofthe French Revolution shrewdly recognized that theycould use the working day against revolutionary Paris. Toexclude radical elements from the sections, they tried toenact legislation which would end all assembly meetingsbefore 10 p.m., the hour when Parisian workers returnedfrom their jobs. Indeed, it was not only the manipulativetechniques and the treachery of the "vanguard" organiza-tions that brought the anarchic phases of past revolutionsto an end, it was also the material limits of past eras. The"masses" were always compelled to return to a lifetime oftoil and rarely were they free to establish organs of self-management that could last beyond the revolution.

Anarchists such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, however,were by no means wrong in criticizing Marx for his em-phasis on centralism and his elitist notions of organization.Was centralism absolutely necessary for technological ad-vances in the past? Was the nation-state indispensable tothe expansion of commerce? Did the workers' movementbenefit by the emergence of highly centralized economicenterprises and the "indivisible" state? We tend to acceptthese tenets of Marxism too uncritically, krgely becausecapitalism developed within a centralized political arena.The anarchists of the last century warned that Marx'scentralistic approach, insofar as it affected the events ofthe time, would so strengthen the bourgeoisie and the stateapparatus that the overthrow of capitalism would be ex-tremely difficult. The revolutionary party, by duplicating

Listen, Marxist I 235

these centralistic, hierarchical features, would reproducehierarchy and centralism in the postrevolutionary society.

Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta were not so naive asto believe that anarchism could be established overnight.In imputing this notion to Bakunin, Marx and Engels will-fully distorted the Russian anarchist's views. Nor did theanarchists of the last century believe that the abolition ofthe state involved "laying down arms" immediately afterthe revolution, to use Marx's obscurantist choice of terms,thoughtlessly repeated by Lenin in State and Revolution.Indeed, much that passes for "Marxism" in State andRevolution is pure anarchism—for example, the substitu-tion of revolutionary militias for professional armed bodiesand the substitution of organs of self-management forparliamentary bodies. What is authentically Marxist inLenin's pamphlet is the demand for "strict centralism,"the acceptance of a "new" bureaucracy, and the identifica-tion of soviets with a state.

The anarchists of the last century were deeply pre-occupied with the question of achieving industrializationwithout crushing the revolutionary spirit of the "masses"and rearing new obstacles to emancipation. They fearedthat centralization would reinforce the ability of the bour-geoisie to resist the revolution and instill in the workers asense of obedience. They tried to rescue all those precapi-talist communal forms (such as the Russian mir and theSpanish pueblo) which might provide a springboard to afree society, not only in a structural sense but also a spiri-tual one. Hence they emphasized the need for decentraliza-tion even under capitalism. In contrast to the Marxianparties, their organizations gave considerable attention towhat they called "integral education"—the development ofthe whole man—to counteract the debasing and banalizinginfluence of bourgeois society. The anarchists tried to liveby the values of the future to the extent that this waspossible under capitalism. They believed in direct action to


foster the initiative of the "masses," to preserve the spiritof revolt, to encourage spontaneity. They tried to developorganizations based on mutual aid and brotherhood, inwhich control would be exercised from below upward, notdownward from above.

We must pause here to examine the nature of anarchistorganizational forms in some detail, if only because thesubject has been obscured by an appalling amount of rub-bish. Anarchists, or at least anarcho-communists, acceptthe need for organization.* It should be as absurd to haveto repeat this point as to argue over whether Marx ac-cepted the need for social revolution.

The real question at issue here is not organization versusnon-organization, but rather what kind of organization theanarcho-communists try to establish. What the differentkinds of anarcho-communist organizations have in com-mon is organic developments from below, not bodies engi-neered into existence from above. They are social move-ments, combining a creative revolutionary lifestyle with acreative revolutionary theory, not political parties whosemode of life is indistinguishable from the surroundingbourgeois environment and whose ideology is reduced torigid "tried and tested programs." As much as is humanlypossible, they try to reflect the liberated society they seekto achieve, not slavishly duplicate the prevailing system ofhierarchy, class and authority. They are built around inti-mate groups of brothers and sisters—affinity groups—whose ability to act in common is based on initiative, onconvictions freely arrived at, and on a deep personal

* The term "anarchist" is a generic word like the term "socialist,"and there are probably as many different kinds of anarchists as thereare socialists. In both cases, the spectrum ranges from individualswhose views derive from an extension of liberalism (the "individual-ist anarchists," the social-democrats) to revolutionary communists(the anarcho-communists, the revolutionary Marxists, Leninists andTrotskyists).


involvement, not around a bureaucratic apparatus fleshedout by a docile membership and manipulated from aboveby a handful of all-knowing leaders.

The anarcho-communists do not deny the need for coor-dination between groups, for discipline, for meticulousplanning, and for unity in action. But they believe thatcoordination, discipline, planning, and unity in actionmust be achieved voluntarily, by means of a self-disciplinenourished by conviction and understanding, not by coer-cion and a mindless, unquestioning obedience to ordersfrom above. They seek to achieve the effectiveness im-puted to centralism by means of voluntarism and insight,not by establishing a hierarchical, centralized structure.Depending upon needs or circumstances, affinity groupscan achieve this effectiveness through assemblies, actioncommittees, and local, regional or national conferences.But they vigorously oppose the establishment of an organi-zational structure that becomes an end in itself, of com-mittees that linger on after their practical tasks have beencompleted, of a "leadership" that reduces the "revolu-tionary" to a mindless robot.

These conclusions are not the result of flighty "indi-vidualist" impulses; quite to the contrary, they emergefrom an exacting study of past revolutions, of the impactcentralized parties have had on the revolutionary process,and of the nature of social change in an era of potentialmaterial abundance. Anarcho-communists seek to preserveand extend the anarchic phase that opens all the greatsocial revolutions. Even more than Marxists, they recog-nize that revolutions are produced by deep historicalprocesses. No central committee "makes" a social revolu-tion; at best it can stage a coup d'etat, replacing one hier-archy by another—or worse, arrest a revolutionary processif it exercises any widespread influence. A central commit-tee is an organ for acquiring power, for recreating power,for gathering to itself what the "masses" have achieved by


their own revolutionary efforts. One must be blind to allthat has happened over the past two centuries not to rec-ognize these essential facts.

In the past, Marxists could make an intelligible (al-though invalid) claim for the need for a centralized party,because the anarchic phase of the revolution was nullifiedby material scarcity. Economically, the "masses" were al-ways compelled to return to a daily life of toil. The revolu-tion closed at ten o'clock, quite aside from the reaction-ary intentions of the Girondins of 1793; it was arrested bythe low level of technology. Today even this excuse hasbeen removed by the development of a post-scarcity tech-nology, notably in the U.S. and Western Europe. A pointhas now been reached where the "masses" can begin, al-most overnight, to expand drastically the "realm of free-dom" in the Marxian sense—to acquire the leisure timeneeded to achieve the highest degree of self-management.

What the May-June events in France demonstrated wasnot the need for a Bolshevik-type party but the need forgreater consciousness among the "masses." Paris demon-strated that an organization is needed to propagate ideassystematically—and not ideas alone, but ideas which pro-mote the concept of self-management. What the French"masses" lacked was not a central committee or a Lenin to"organize" or "command" them, but the conviction thatthey could have operated the factories instead of merelyoccupying them. It is noteworthy that not a singleBolshevik-type party in France raised the demand of self-management. The demand was raised only by the anar-chists and the Situationists.

There is a need for a revolutionary organization—but itsfunction must always be kept clearly in mind. Its first taskis propaganda, to "patiently explain," as Lenin put it. In arevolutionary situation, the revolutionary organization pre-sents the most advanced demands: it is prepared at everyturn of events to formulate—in the most concrete

Listen, Marxist I 239

fashion—the immediate task that should be performed toadvance the revolutionary process. It provides the boldestelements in action and in the decision-making organs ofthe revolution.

In what way, then, do anarcho-communist groups differfrom the Bolshevik type of party? Certainly not on suchissues as the need for organization, planning, coordination,propaganda in all its forms or the need for a social pro-gram. Fundamentally, they differ from the Bolshevik typeof party in their belief that genuine revolutionaries mustfunction within the framework of the forms created by therevolution, not within the forms created by the party.What this means is that their commitment is to the revolu-tionary organs of self-management, not to the revolution-ary "organization"; to the social forms, not the politicalforms. Anarcho-communists seek to persuade the factorycommittees, assemblies or Soviets to make themselvesinto genuine organs of popular self-management, not todominate them, manipulate them, or hitch them to anall-knowing political party. Anarcho-communists do notseek to rear a state structure over these popular revolu-tionary organs but, on the contrary, to dissolve all theorganizational forms developed in the prerevolutionaryperiod (including their own) into these genuine revolu-tionary organs.

These differences are decisive. Despite their rhetoric andslogans, the Russian Bolsheviks never believed in the so-viets; they regarded them as instruments of the BolshevikParty, an attitude which the French Trotskyists faithfullyduplicated in their relations with the Sorbonne students'assembly, the French Maoists with the French laborunions, and the Old Left groups with SDS. By 1921, theSoviets were virtually dead, and all decisions were made bythe Bolshevik Central Committee and Political Bureau. Notonly do anarcho-communists seek to prevent Marxistparties from repeating this; they also wish to prevent their


own organization from playing a similar role. Accordingly,they try to prevent bureaucracy, hierarchy and elites fromemerging in their midst. No less important, they attemptto remake themselves; to root out from their own person-alities those authoritarian traits and elitist propensities thatare assimilated in hierarchical society almost from birth.The concern of the anarchist movement with lifestyle isnot merely a preoccupation with its own integrity, butwith the integrity of the revolution itself.*

In the midst of all the confusing ideological cross-currents of our time, one question must always remain inthe foreground: what the hell are we trying to make arevolution for? Are we trying to make a revolution torecreate hierarchy, dangling a shadowy dream of futurefreedom before the eyes of humanity? Is it to promotefurther technological advance, to create an even greaterabundance of goods than exists today? It is to "get even"with the bourgeoisie? Is it to bring PL to power? Or theCommunist Party? Or the Socialist Workers Party? Is it toemancipate abstractions such as "The Proletariat," "ThePeople," "History," "Society"?

Or is it finally to dissolve hierarchy, class rule and coer-cion—to make it possible for each individual to gain con-trol of his everyday life? Is it to make each moment asmarvelous as it could be and the life span of each indi-vidual an utterly fulfilling experience? If the true purposeof revolution is to bring the neanderthal men of PL topower, it is not worth making. We need hardly argue the* It is this goal, we may add, that motivates anarchist dadaism, theanarchist flipout that produces the creases of consternation on thewooden faces of PLP types. The anarchist flipout attempts to shatterthe internal values inherited from hierarchical society, to explodethe rigidities instilled by the bourgeois socialization process. Inshort, it is an attempt to break down the superego that exercisessuch a paralyzing effect upon spontaneity, imagination and sensi-bility and to restore a sense of desire, possibility and the marvelous—of revolution as a liberating, joyous festival.


inane questions of whether individual development can besevered from social and communal development; obviouslythe two go together. The basis for a whole human being isa rounded society; the basis for a free human being is afree society.

These issues aside, we are still faced with the questionthat Marx raised in 1850: when will we begin to take ourpoetry from the future instead of the past? The dead mustbe permitted to bury the dead. Marxism is dead because itwas rooted in an era of material scarcity, limited in itspossibilities by material want. The most important socialmessage of Marxism is that freedom has material precondi-tions—we must survive in order to live. With the develop-ment of a technology that could not have been conceivedby the wildest science fiction of Marx's day, the possibilityof a post-scarcity society now lies before us. All the insti-tutions of propertied society—class rule, hierarchy, thepatriarchal family, bureaucracy, the city, the state—havebeen exhausted. Today, decentralization is not only desi-rable as a means of restoring the human scale, it is neces-sary to recreate a viable ecology, to preserve life on thisplanet from destructive pollutants and soil erosion, to pre-serve a breathable atmosphere and the balance of nature.The promotion of spontaneity is necessary if the socialrevolution is to place each individual in control of hiseveryday life.

The old forms of struggle do not totally disappear withthe decomposition of class society, but they are beingtranscended by the issues of a classless society. There canbe no social revolution without winning the workers,hence they must have our active solidarity in every strugglethey wage against exploitation. We fight against socialcrimes wherever they appear—and industrial exploitation isa profound social crime. But so are racism, the denial ofthe right to self-determination, imperialism and povertyprofound social crimes—and for that matter so are pollu-


tion, rampant urbanization, the malignant socialization ofthe young, and sexual repression. As for the problem ofwinning the working class to the revolution, we must bearin mind that a precondition for the existence of the bour-geoisie is the development of the proletariat. Capitalism asa social system presupposes the existence of both classesand is perpetuated by the development of both classes. Webegin to undermine the premises of class rule to the degreethat we foster the declassifying of the non-bourgeoisclasses, at least institutionally, psychologically and cultu-rally.

For the first time in history, the anarchic phase thatopened all the great revolutions of the past can be pre-served as a permanent condition by the advanced tech-nology of our time. The anarchic institutions of thatphase—the assemblies, the factory committees, the actioncommittees—can be stabilized as the elements of a libe-rated society, as the elements of a new system of self-management. Will we build a movement that can defendthem? Can we create an organization of affinity groupsthat is capable of dissolving into these revolutionary insti-tutions? Or will we build a hierarchical, centralized,bureaucratic party that will try to dominate them, sup-plant them, and finally destroy them?

Listen, Marxist: The organization we try to build is thekind of society our revolution will create. Either we willshed the past—in ourselves as well as in our groups—orthere will simply be no future to win.

New YorkMay 1969

A Note on Affinity GroupsThe term "affinity group" is the English translation of theSpanish grupo de afinidad, which was the name of anorganizational form devised in pre-Franco days as the basisof the redoubtable Federation Anarquista Iberica, theIberian Anarchist Federation. (The FAI consisted of themost idealistic militants in the CNT, the immense anar-cho-syndicalist labor union.) A slavish imitation of theFAI's forms of organization and methods would be neitherpossible nor desirable. The Spanish anarchists of thethirties were faced with entirely different social problemsfrom those which confront American anarchists today.The affinity group form, however, has features that applyto any social situation, and these have often been intui-tively adopted by American radicals, who call the resultingorganizations "collectives," communes" or "families."

The affinity group could easily be regarded as a newtype of extended family, in which kinship ties are replacedby deeply empathetic human relationships—relationshipsnourished by common revolutionary ideas and practice.Long before the word "tribe" gained popularity in theAmerican counterculture, the Spanish anarchists calledtheir congresses asambleas de las tribus—assemblies of thetribes. Each affinity group is deliberately kept small toallow for the greatest degree of intimacy between thosewho compose it. Autonomous, communal and directlydemocratic, the group combines revolutionary theory withrevolutionary lifestyle in its everyday behavior. It creates afree space in which revolutionaries can remake themselvesindividually, and also as social beings.

Affinity groups are intended to function as catalystswithin the popular movement, not as "vanguards"; theyprovide initiative and consciousness, not a "general staff"

243


and a source of "command." The groups proliferate on amolecular level and they have their own "Brownian move-ment." Whether they link together or separate is deter-mined by living situations, not by bureaucratic fiat from adistant center. Under conditions of political repression,affinity groups are highly resistant to police infiltration.Owing to the intimacy of the relationships between theparticipants, the groups are often difficult to penetrateand, even if penetration occurs, there is no centralizedapparatus to provide the infiltrator with an overview of themovement as a whole. Even under such demanding condi-tions, affinity groups can still retain contact with eachother through their periodicals and literature.

During periods of heightened activity, on the otherhand, nothing prevents affinity groups from workingtogether closely on any scale required by a living situation.They can easily federate by means of local, regional ornational assemblies to formulate common policies andthey can create temporary action committees (like thoseof the French students and workers in 1968) to coordinatespecific tasks. Affinity groups, however, are always rootedin the popular movement. Their loyalties belong to thesocial forms created by the revolutionary people, not to animpersonal bureaucracy. As a result of their autonomy andlocalism, the groups can retain a sensitive appreciation ofnew possibilities. Intensely experimental and variegated inlifestyles, they act as a stimulus on each other as well as onthe popular movement. Each group tries to acquire theresources needed to function largely on its own. Eachgroup seeks a rounded body of knowledge and experiencein order to overcome the social and psychological limita-tions imposed by bourgeois society on individual develop-ment. Each group, as a nucleus of consciousness andexperience, tries to advance the spontaneous revolutionarymovement of the people to a point where the group canfinally disappear into the organic social forms created bythe revolution.

A Discussion on"Listen,

Marxist!"

D

Robert B. Carson, in an article published in the April 1970issue of Monthly Review, writes that the "major thrust" of'Listen, Marxist!' is to "destroy a class-based analysis ofsociety and revolutionary activity." This criticism has beenmade by many Marxists who read the article. *

Carson's accusation is quite absurd. I seriously doubt if hedid more than skim the article. Carson goes on to say thatmy approach is "ahistorical" and that I try to promote a"crude kind of individualistic anarchism"—this despite thefact that a large portion of the article attempts to drawimportant historical lessons from earlier revolutions anddespite the fact that the article is unequivocally committedto anarcho-comrnunism.

The most interesting thing about Carson's criticism iswhat it reveals about the theoretical level of many Marx-ists. Apparently Carson regards a futuristic approach as"ahistorical." He also seems to regard my belief that free-dom exists only when each individual controls his daily lifeas "a crude kind of individualistic anarchism." Here we getto the nub of the problem. Futurism and individual free-dom are indeed the "main thrust" of the pamphlet.Carson's reply confirms precisely what the pamphlet setout to prove about Marxism today, namely that Marxism(I do not speak of Marx here) is not futuristic and that itsperspectives are oriented not toward concrete, existential

* This is an edited summary of several discussions on "Listen, Marx-ist!," most of which occurred at my anarcho-communism class atAlternate U, New York's liberation school. I have selected the mostrepresentative and recurrent questions raised by readers of thepamphlet.

247


freedom, but toward an abstract freedom—freedom for"Society," for the "Proletariat," for categories rather thanfor people. Carson's first charge, I might emphasize, shouldbe leveled not only at me but at Marx—at his futurism inthe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

As to the charge that I am opposed to a "class-basedanalysis of society and revolutionary activity," need I saythat a "class analysis" permeates the pamphlet? Is it con-ceivable that I could have terms like "capitalist" and"bourgeois" without working with a "class-based analy-sis"? Originally I thought there could have been no doubtabout the matter. I have since changed the expression"class analysis" in the text to "class line," and perhaps Ihad better explain the difference this change is meant toconvey.

What Carson is really saying is that I do not have aMarxist "class analysis"—a "class analysis" in which theindustrial proletariat is driven to revolution by destitutionand immiseration. Carson apparently assumes that Marx'straditional "class line" exhausts all there is to say aboutthe class struggle. And in this respect, he assumes far toomuch. One need only turn to Bakunin, for example, tofind a class analysis that was quite different from Marx's—and more relevant today. Bakunin believed that the indus-trial proletariat by no means constitutes the most revolu-tionary class in society. He never received the credit duehim for predicting the embourgeoisement of the industrialworking class with the development of capitalist industry.In Bakunin's view, the most revolutionary class was notthe industrial proletariat—"a class always increasing innumbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the verymechanisms of capitalist production itself" (Marx)—butthe uprooted peasantry and urban declasses, the rural andurban lumpen elements Marx so heartily despised. We needgo no further than the urban centers of America—not to

Discussion on "Listen, Marxist!" / 249

speak of the rice paddies of Asia—to find how accurateBakunin was by comparison with Marx.

As it turned out, the development of capitalist industrynot only "disciplined," "united" and "organized" theworking class but, by these very measures, denatured theproletariat for generations. By contrast, the transitionaland lumpenized classes of society today (such as blacks,drop-out youth, people like students, intellectuals andartists who are not rooted in the factory system, andyoung workers whose allegiance to the work ethic has beenshaken by cultural factors) are the most radical elements inthe world today.

A "class analysis" does not necessarily begin and endwith Marx's nineteenth-century version, a version I regardas grossly inaccurate. The class struggle, moreover, doesnot begin and end at the point of production. It mayemerge from the poverty of the unemployed and unem-ployables, many of whom have never done a day's work inindustry; it may emerge from a new sense of possibilitythat slowly pervades society—the tension between "whatis" and "what could be"—which percolates through vir-tually all traditional classes; it may emerge from the cul-tural and physical decomposition of the traditional classstructure on which the social stability of capitalism wasbased. Finally, every class struggle is not necessarily revolu-tionary. The class struggle between the original Romanproletarius and patricius was decidedly reactionary andeventually ended, as Marx observed in the opening lines ofthe Communist Manifesto, "in the common ruin of thecontending classes."37

Today, not only poverty but also a relative degree ofaffluence is causing revolutionary unrest—a factor Marxnever anticipated. Capitalism, having started out by pro-letarianizing the urban declasses, is now ending its life-cycle by creating new urban declasses, including "shiftless"


young industrial workers who no longer take the jobs, thefactory discipline or the work ethic seriously. This stratumof declasses rests on a new economic base—a post-scarcitytechnology, automation, a relative degree of material abun-dance—and it prefigures culturally the classless society theMarxists so devoutly envision as humanity's future. Onewould have thought that this remarkable dialectic, this"negation of the negation," would have stirred a flicker ofunderstanding in the heavy thinkers of the Marxist move-ment.

It would be difficult to conceive of a revolution in anyindustrially advanced capitalist country without the sup-port of the industrial proletariat.

Of course. And "Listen, Marxist!" makes no claim that asocial revolution is possible without the participation ofthe industrial proletariat. The article, in fact, tries to showhow the proletariat can be won to the revolutionary move-ment by stressing issues that concern the quality of lifeand work. I agree, of course, with the libertarian Marxistsand anarcho-syndicalists, who raise the slogan "workers'management of production." I wonder, however, if thisslogan goes far enough now. My suspicion is that theworkers, when they get into revolutionary motion, willdemand even more than control of the factories. I thinkthey will demand the elimination of toil, or, what amountsto the same thing, freedom from work. Certainly a drop-out outlook is growing among kids from working-classfamilies—high school kids who are being influenced by theyouth culture.

Although many other factors may contribute to thesituation, it remains true that the workers will developrevolutionary views to the degree that they shed their tra-ditional working-class traits. Young workers, I think, willincreasingly demand leisure and the abolition of alienated


labor. The young Marx, I might add, was not indifferent tothe development of unconventional values in the proletar-iat. In The Holy Family, he cites with obvious favor aParisian working-class girl in Eugene Sue's The WanderingJew who gives of her love and loyalty spontaneously, dis-daining marriage and bourgeois conventions. He notes,"she constitutes a really human contrast to the hypo-critical, narrow-hearted, self-seeking wife of the bourgeois,to the whole circle of the bourgeosie, that is, to the officialcircle."38 The working class, in the young Marx's view, isthe negation of capitalism not only in that it suffers totalalienation, abasement and dehumanization, but also in thatit affirms life forces and human values. Unfortunately,observations of this kind tend to fade away as Marx'ssocialism becomes increasingly "objectivist" and "scien-tific" (the admirers of Marx's famous—but untranslatedand little-read—Grundrisse notwithstanding). The laterMarx begins to prize the bourgeois traits of the worker—the worker's "discipline," "practicality," and "realism"—asthe characteristics necessary for a revolutionary class.

The approach which Marx followed in The Holy Familywas, I think, the correct one. Trapped by the notion thatthe working class, qua class, implied the liquidation ofclass society, Marx failed to see that this class was the alterego of the bourgeoisie. Only a new cultural movementcould rework the outlook of the proletariat—and depro-letarianize it. Ironically, the Parisian working-class girls ofMarx's youth were not industrial workers, but ratherpeople of transitional classes who straddled small- andlarge-scale production. They were largely lumpenized ele-ments, like the sans-culottes of the French Revolution.

If the analysis in "Listen, Marxist!" is "class-based," whatis the nature of the class struggle?

The class struggle does not center around material ex-


ploitation alone but also around spiritual exploitation. Inaddition, entirely new issues emerge: coercive attitudes,the quality of work, ecology (or, stated in more generalterms, psychological and environmental oppression). More-over, the alienated and oppressed sectors of society arenow the majority of the people, not a single class definedby its relationship to the means of production; the moreradical as well as more liberatory sensibilities appear in theyounger, not in the more "mature," age groups. Terms like"classes" and "class struggle," conceived of almost entirelyas economic categories and relations, are too one-sided toexpress the universalization of the struggle. Use theselimited expressions if you like (the target is still a rulingclass and a class society), but this terminology, with itstraditional connotations, does not reflect the sweep andthe multi-dimensional nature of the struggle. Words like"class struggle" fail to encompass the cultural and spiritualrevolt that is taking place along with the economicstruggle.

"Listen, Marxist!" speaks a great deal about the poten-tialities of a post-scarcity society, but what of the actu-alities? There is still a great deal of poverty and hunger inthe U.S. Inflation is a growing problem, not to speak ofunemployment, bad housing, racial discrimination, workspeed-ups, trade union bureaucracy, and the danger offascism, imperialism and war.

"Listen, Marxist!" was written to deal with the simplifi-cations of social problems (the economic and Third World-oriented "either/or" notions) that were developing in the"New Left." The post-scarcity viewpoint advanced in thepamphlet was not designed to replace one simplification(class struggle) by another (utopia). Yes, these economic,racial and bureaucratic actualities exist for millions ofpeople in the U.S. and abroad. Any revolutionary move-

Discussion on "Listen, Marxist!" I 253

ment that fails to deal energetically and militantly withthem will be as distorted as a movement that deals withthem, singly or severally, to the exclusion of all others. Mywritings on post-scarcity possibilities, ecology, utopia, theyouth culture and alienation are intended to help fill amajor gap in radical theory and praxis, not to createanother gap.

The really important problem we face is how the actu-alities of the present scarcity society are related to—andconditioned by—the potentialities for a future post-scarcity society. So far as this really dialectical problem isconcerned, the heavy thinkers of the "left" show them-selves to be incredibly light-minded and narrowly empir-ical. In the industrialized Western world, scarcity has to beenforced, so great is the productive potential of tech-nology. Today economic planning has one basic purpose:to confine a highly advanced technology within a com-modity framework. Many of the social problems whichwere endured almost passively a generation ago are nowregarded as intolerable because the tension between "whatis" and "what could be" has reached a point where "whatis" seems utterly irrational. This tension adds an explosivecharacter to many actualities that evoked only a flicker ofprotest a quarter of a century ago. Moreover, the tensionbetween "what is" and "what could be" conditions all thetraditional economic and social issues that have occupiedradical movements for generations. We can no longer dealwith these issues adequately unless we view them in thelight of the economic, social and cultural possibilities ofpost-scarcity.

Let me present a concrete example. Assume there is astruggle by welfare mothers to increase their allotments. Inthe past, the mothers were organized by liberal groups orStalinists; petitions were drawn up, demonstrations wereorganized, and perhaps a welfare center or two was occu-pied. Almost invariably, one of the groups or parties


trotted out a "reform candidate" who promised that, ifelected, he would fight "unflinchingly" for higher welfareexpenditures. The entire struggle was contained within theorganizational forms and institutions of the system: formalmeetings of the mothers (with the patronizing "organ-izers" pulling the strings), formal modes of actions (peti-tions, demonstrations, elections for public office), andmaybe a modest amount of direct action. The issue prettymuch came to an end with a compromise on allotmentincreases and perhaps a lingering formal organization tooversee (and later sell out) future struggles around welfareissues.

Here actuality triumphed completely over potentiality.At best, a few mothers might be "radicalized," whichmeant that they joined (or were shamelessly used by)organizations such as the Communist Party to promotetheir political influence. For the rest, most of the welfaremothers returned to the shabbiness of their daily lives andto varying degrees of passivity as human beings. Nothingwas really changed for those who did not ego trip as"leaders," "politicals" and "organizers."

To revolutionaries with a "post-scarcity consciousness"(to use Todd Gitlin's phrase), this kind of situation wouldbe intolerable. Without losing sight of the concrete issuesthat initially motivated the struggle, revolutionaries wouldtry to catalyze an order of relationships between themothers entirely different from relationships the usualorganizational format imposes. They would try to foster adeep sense of community, a rounded human relationshipthat would transform the very subjectivity of the peopleinvolved. Groups would be small, in order to achieve thefull participation of everyone involved. Personal relation-ships would be intimate, not merely issue-oriented. Peoplewould get to know each other, to confront each other;they would explore each other with a view toward achiev-ing the most complete, unalienated relationships. Womenwould discuss sexism as well as their welfare allotments,


child-rearing as well as harassment by landlords, theirdreams and hopes as human beings as well as the cost ofliving.

From this intimacy there would grow, hopefully, asupportive system of kinship, mutual aid, sympathy andsolidarity in daily life. The women might collaborate toestablish a rotating system of baby sitters and child-careattendants, the cooperative buying of good food at greatlyreduced prices, the common cooking and partaking ofmeals, the mutual learning of survival skills and new socialideas, the fostering of creative talents, and many othershared experiences. Every aspect of life that could be ex-plored and changed would be one part of the new kinds ofrelationships. This "extended family"—based on exploredaffinities and collective activities—would replace relation-ships mediated by "organizers," "chairmen," an "execu-tive committee," Robert's Rules of Order, elites, andpolitical manipulators.

The struggle for increased allotments would expandbeyond the welfare system to the schools, the hospitals,the police, the physical, cultural, aesthetic and recreationalresources of the neighborhood, the stores, the houses, thedoctors and lawyers in the area, and so on—into the veryecology of the district.

What I have said on this issue could be applied to everyissue—unemployment, bad housing, racism, work con-ditions—in which an insidious assimilation of bourgeoismodes of functioning is masked as "realism" and "actual-ity." The new order of relationships that could be de-veloped from a welfare struggle is Utopian only in the sensethat actuality is informed and conditioned by post-scarcityconsciousness. The future penetrates the present; it recaststhe way people "organize" and the goals for which theystrive.

Perhaps a post-scarcity perspective is possible in the U.S.and Europe, but it is hard to see how a post-scarcity


approach has any relevance for the Third World, wheretechnological development is grossly inadequate to meetthe most elementary needs of the people. It would seemthat the libertarian revolution and the non-coercive, un-mediated social forms that are possible for the U.S. andEurope would have to be supplanted by the rigorousplanning of highly centralized, coercive institutions inAsia, Africa and Latin America. Carl Oglesby has evenargued that to help these continents catch up with theU.S., it will be necessary for Americans to work ten ortwelve hours daily to produce the goods needed.

I think we must dispel the confusion that exists about theThird World. This confusion, due partly to the super-ficiality of knowledge about the Third World, has doneenormous harm to radical movements in the First World."Third World" ideology in the U.S., by promoting a mind-less imitation of movements in Asia and Latin America,leads to a bypassing of the social tasks in the First World.The result is that American radicals have often eased thetasks of American imperialism by creating an alien move-ment that does not speak to issues at home. The "Move-ment" (whatever that is) is isolated and the Americanpeople are fair game for every tendency, reactionary aswell as liberal, that speaks to their problems.

I think we should begin with some essentials. The ThirdWorld is not engaged in a "socialist revolution." One mustbe grossly ignorant of Marxism—the favored ideology ofthe Third World fetishists—in order to overlook the realnature of the struggle in Asia, Africa and Latin America.These areas are still taking up the tasks that capitalismresolved for the U.S. and Europe more than a centuryago—national unification, national independence andindustrial development. The Third World takes up thesetasks in an era when state capitalism is becoming predomi-nant in the U.S. and Europe, with the result that its own


social forces have a highly statified character. Socialismand advanced forms of state capitalism are not easy todistinguish from each other, especially if one's conceptionof "socialism" is highly schematic. Drape hierarchy with ared flag, submerge the crudest system of primitive accumu-lation and forced collectivization in rhetoric about theinterests of "the People" or "the "Proletariat," cover uphierarchy, elitism and a police state with huge portraits ofMarx, Engels and Lenin, print little "Red Books" thatinvite the most authoritarian adulation and preach themost inane banalities in the name of "dialectics" and"socialism"—and any gullible liberal who is becoming dis-enchanted with his ideology, yet is totally unconscious ofthe bourgeois conditioning he has acquired from the patri-archal family and authoritarian school, can suddenly be-come a flaming "revolutionary" socialist.

The whole process is disgusting—all the more so becauseit stands at odds with every aspect of reality. One istempted to scream: "Look, motherfucker! Help the ThirdWorld by fighting capitalism at home! Don't cop out byhiding under Ho's and Mao's skirts when your real job is tooverthrow domestic capitalism by dealing with the realpossibilities of an American revolution! Develop a revo-lutionary project at home because every revolutionaryproject here is necessarily internationalist and anti-imperialist, no matter how much its goals and language arelimited to the American condition." Oglesby's hostility toa post-scarcity approach on the grounds that we will haveto work ten or twelve hours daily to meet the ThirdWorld's needs is simply preposterous. To assume that theworking day will be increased by an American revolution isto invite its defeat before the first blow is struck. If, insome miraculous way, Oglesby's "revolution" were to bevictorious, surely he doesn't think that the Americanpeople would accept an increased working day without astrong, centralized state apparatus cracking its whip over


the entire population. In which case, one wonders whatkind of "aid" such a regime would "offer" to the ThirdWorld?

Like many of the "Third World" zealots, Oglesby seemsto have an incomplete knowledge of America's industrialcapacity and the real needs of the Third World. Roughlyseventy percent of the American labor force does abso-lutely no productive work that could be translated intoterms of real output or the maintenance of a rationalsystem of distribution. Their work is largely limited toservicing the commodity economy—filing, billing, book-keeping for a profit and loss statement, sales promotion,advertising, retailing, finance, the stock market, govern-ment work, military work, police work, etc., ad nauseam.Roughly the same percentage of the goods produced issuch pure garbage that people would voluntarily stop con-suming it in a rational society. Working hours could bereduced enormously after a revolution without losing highproductive output, provided that the available labor supplyand raw materials were used rationally. The quality of theproductive output, moreover, could be so improved thatits durability and usefulness would more than cancel outany reduction in productive capacity.

On the other side, let us look more closely at the mate-rial needs of the Third World. As Westerners, "we" tend toassume out of hand that "they" want or need the samekind of technologies and commodities that capitalism pro-duced in America and Europe. This crude assumption isbolstered by the fear consciously generated by imperialistideology, that millions of black, brown, and yellow peopleare hungrily eyeing "our" vast resources and standard ofliving. This ideology reminds us how lucky "we" are to beAmericans or Europeans, enjoying the blessings of "freeenterprise," and how menacing "they" are, festering inpoverty, misery and the ills of overpopulation. Ironically,the "Third World" zealots share this ideology in the sense


that they, too, conceive of Asian, African and LatinAmerican needs in Western terms—an approach that mightbe called the Nkrumah mentality of technological gigan-tism. Whatever is living and vital in the precapitalist societyof the Third World is sacrificed to industrial machismo,oozing with the egomaniacal elitism of the newly con-verted male radical.

Perhaps no area of the world is more suitable for aneco-technology than the Third World.* Most of Asia,Africa and Latin America lie in the "solar belt," betweenlatitudes 40 degrees north and south, where solar energycan be used with the greatest effectiveness for industrialand domestic purposes. New, small-scale technologies aremore easily adapted for use in the underdeveloped areasthan elsewhere. The small-scale gardening technologies, infact, are indispensable for the productive use of the soiltypes that are prevalent in semi-tropical, tropical, and high-land biomes. The peasantry in these areas have a long tradi-tion of technological know-how in terracing and horti-culture, for which small machines are already available oreasily designable. Great strides have been made in devel-oping an irrigation technology to provide year-round waterresources for agriculture and industry. A unique combina-tion could be made of machine and handcrafts, crafts inwhich these areas still excel. With advances in the standardof living and in education, the population of these areascould be expected to stabilize sufficiently to remove pres-sure on the land. What the Third World needs above all is arational, sophisticated communications network to redis-tribute food and manufactures from areas of plentifulsupply to those in need.

A technology of this kind could be developed for the* The alternatives to a "Western"-type technology for the ThirdWorld and the resolution of the "population problem" in this areawill be discussed in some detail in my forthcoming book, The Ecol-ogy of Freedom, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf and as aVintage paperback.


Third World fairly rapidly by American and European in-dustry without placing undue strain on the resources ofthe West. The rational use of such a technology presup-poses a sweeping social revolution in the Third Worlditself—a revolution, I believe, that would almost im-mediately follow a social revolution in the U.S. With theremoval of imperialism's mailed fist, a new perspectivecould open for the Third World. The village would acquirea new sense of unity with the elimination of the localhierarchies appointed by the central governments whichhave so heavily parasitized the regions. An exchange econ-omy would continue to exist in the Third World, althoughits base would probably be collectivist. In any case, theexploitation of labor and the domination of women bymen would be eliminated, thus imposing severe restrictionson the use of income differentials for exploitative pur-poses.* The resources of the First World could be used topromote the most revolutionary social alternatives—apeople's movement as against an authoritarian one, decen-tralized, immediate relations as against centralized medi-ated institutions.

It would be difficult to say what kind of institutionalstructure would emerge from revolutionary changes in theThird World following a complete social revolution in theFirst World. Until now, the Third World has been obligedto fight imperialism largely on its own. Although there hasbeen a great deal of international solidarity from millionsof people in Europe and the U.S. for Third World struggles,there has been no real, disinterested material support* More can be learned, I think, from the impact the Spanish anar-chist movement had on the village economy than from Mao or Hoand the movements they spoke for. Unfortunately, very little infor-mation on this development is available in English. The spontaneoustakeover and collectivization of the land by Spanish pueblos duringthe early weeks of Franco's rebellion provides us with one of themost remarkable accounts of how the peasantry can respond tolibertarian influence.


from these key industrial areas. One wonders what willhappen when a revolutionary United States and Europebegin to aid the Third World fully and disinterestedly, withnothing but the well being of the African, Asian and LatinAmerican peoples at issue. I believe that the social develop-ment in the Third World will take a more benign and liber-tarian form than we suspect; and that surprisingly littlecoercion will be needed to deal with material scarcity inthese areas.

In any case, there is no reason to fear that a quasi-statistdevelopment in the Third World would be more than tem-porary or that it would affect the world development. Ifthe U.S. and Europe took a libertarian direction, theirstrategic industrial position in the world economy would, Ithink, favor a libertarian alternative for the world as awhole. Revolution is contagious, even when it occurs in arelatively small and economically insignificant country. Icannot imagine that Eastern Europe could withstand theeffects of a libertarian revolution in Western Europe andthe U.S. The revolution would almost certainly engulf theSoviet Union, where massive dissatisfaction exists, andfinally the entire Asian continent. If one doubts the ful-fillment of this possibility, let him consider the impact ofthe French Revolution on Europe at a time when theworld economy was far less interdependent than it istoday.

After the revolution the planet would be dealt with as awhole. The relocation of populations in areas of high den-sity, the development of rational, humanistic birth controlprograms oriented toward improving the quality of life,and the modification of technology along ecological lines—all of these programs would be on the agenda of history.Aside from suggesting some basic guidelines drawn fromecology, I can do no more than speculate about how theresources and land areas of the world could be used toimprove life in a postrevolutionary period. These programs


will be solved in practice and by human communities thatstand on a far higher level, culturally, psychologically andmaterially, than any community that exists today.

"Listen, Marxist!" seems to be quite relevant as a critiqueof the vulgar Marxists—Progressive Labor, the Trotskyists,and other "Old Left" movements. But what of the moresophisticated Marxists—people such as Marcuse, Gorz andthe admirers of Gramsci? Surely "Listen, Marxist!" im-putes too much to the "Old Left" in taking it as the pointof departure for a critique of Marxism.

Marcuse is the most original of the thinkers who still callthemselves Marxists, and I must confess that even on thosepoints where I may have disagreements with him, I amstimulated by what he has to say.

With this exception, I would differ with the claim that"Listen, Marxist!" is relevant only as a critique of the "OldLeft." The article is relevant to all types of Marxist ideo-logy. Two things trouble me about Marx's mature writings:their pseudo-objectivity and the obstacles they raise toUtopian thinking. The Marxian project, as it was formu-lated by Marx himself, deepened the early socialist tradi-tion but also narrowed it, and in the long run this hasproduced a net setback rather than a net gain.

By Marx's pseudo-objectivity I mean the astonishing ex-tent to which Marx identified "scientific socialism" withthe scientism of the nineteenth century. Although there isa tendency today for the more sophisticated "neo-Marxists" to cast the Marxian project in terms of alien-ation, the project (as it developed in Marx's hands) wasabove all an attempt to make socialism "scientific," toprovide it with the authority of a scientific critique. Thisled to an emphasis on "objectivity" that increasingly sub-verted the humanistic goals of socialism. Freedom and eros(where the latter was taken up at all) were anchored so


completely in the material preconditions for freedom thateven the loss of freedom, if it promoted the materialdevelopment, was viewed as an "advance" of freedom.Marx, for example, welcomed state centralization as a stepin the development of the productive forces without onceconsidering how this process enhanced the capacity of thebourgeoisie to resist revolution. He disclaimed any moralevaluation of society and in his later years became increas-ingly captive to scientism and to mathematical criteria oftruth.

The result of this development has been a major loss forthe humanistic and imaginative elements of socialism.Marxism has damaged the left enormously by anchoring itin a pseudo-objectivity that is almost indistinguishablefrom the juridical mentality. Whenever I hear "New Left"Marxists denounce a position as "objectively counter-revolutionary," "objectively racist," or "objectively sex-ist," my flesh crawls. The charge, flung randomly againstall opponents, circumvents the need for an analytic or adialectical critique. One simply traces "counterrevolution,""racism" or "sexism" to be the preconceived "objectiveeffects." Marx rarely exhibited the crudity of the "OldLeft" and "New Left" in his use of this approach, but heused the approach often enough—and often as a substitutefor a multi-dimensional analysis of phenomena.

You must see how consequential this is. Freedom isdivested of its autonomy, of its sovereignty over the hu-man condition. It is turned into a means instead of an end.Whether freedom is desirable or not depends upon whetherit furthers the "objective" development. Accordingly, anyauthoritarian organization, any system of repression, anymanipulatory tactic can become acceptable, indeed admir-able, if it favors the "building of socialism" or "resistanceto imperialism"—as though "socialism" or "anti-imperialism" is meaningful when it is poisoned by manipu-lation, repression, and authoritarian forms of organization.

i


Categories replace realities; abstract goals replace realgoals; "History" replaces everyday life. The universal,which requires a complex, many-sided analysis to begrasped, is replaced by the particular; the total, by theone-sided.

No less serious is the rejection of Utopian thought—theimaginative forays of Charles Fourier and William Morris.What Martin Buber called the "utopian element in social-ism" is rejected for a "hardheaded" and "objective" treat-ment of "reality." But, in fact, this approach shrivelsreality by limiting one's purview of social experience anddata. The hidden potential of a given reality is either sub-verted by an emphasis on the "objective" actualities or, atleast, diminished by a one-sided treatment. The revolution-ary becomes a captive to experience not as it exists dialec-tically, in all its actualities and potentialities, but as it isdefined in advance by "scientific socialism." Not surpris-ingly, the New Left, like the Old Left, has never graspedthe revolutionary potential of the ecology issue, nor has itused ecology as a basis for understanding the problems ofcommunist reconstruction and Utopia. At best the issue isgiven lip service, with some drivel about how "pollution isprofitable"; at worst it is denounced as spurious, diversion-ary and "objectively counterrevolutionary." Most of thesophisticated Marxists are as captive to these limiting fea-tures of Marxism as their New Left brethren. The dif-ference is that they are simply more sophisticated.

In contrast to most radical works, "Listen, Marxist!" con-tinually speaks of "hierarchical society" instead of "classsociety," of "domination" instead of "exploitation." Whatsignificance do these differences in language have?

A difference is definitely intended. Pre-Marxian socialismwas, in many ways, much broader than the Marxian vari-ety. Not only was it more utopian, it was also occupied


more with the general than the particular. Varlet, the lastof the great enrages, who survived the death of his com-rade Jacques Roux and Robespierre's purge of the left,concluded that government and revolution are utterly "in-compatible." What a splendid insight! In this one observa-tion revolutionary consciousness expanded from a critiqueof a specific class society to a critique of hierarchical soci-ety as such. The pre-Marxian socialist and radical theoristsbegan to occupy themselves with domination, not onlyexploitation; with hierarchy, not only class rule. With Fou-rier, consciousness advanced to the point where the goal ofsociety was viewed as pleasure, not simply happiness.

You must see what an enormous gain this was. Exploita-tion, class rule and happiness are the particular within themore generalized concepts of domination, hierarchy andpleasure. It is theoretically—and, in great part, actually-possible to eliminate exploitation and class rule or toachieve happiness, as these concepts are defined by Marx-ism, without achieving a life of pleasure or eliminatingdomination and hierarchy. Marx, by "scientifically"anchoring exploitation, classes, and happiness in the eco-nomic domain, actually provided the rationale for atheoretical regression from the original socialist values.Marxian economic solutions, such as nationalization ofproperty, may even create the illusion that hierarchy hasdisappeared. One has only to study the torment of theTrotskyist movement over the nature of the Russian stateto see how obfuscating Marxian theory can be.

This particularization of the general is precisely whatMarxism achieved. As I noted in reply to the previousquestion, socialism was given greater theoretical depth bythe acquisition of dialectical philosophy, but it was nar-rowed disastrously by Marx's economic emphasis. EvenMarx's writings shrivel in content as the man "matures."They increasingly center on the "objective" economic ele-ments of society, until Marx sinks into a grotesque fetishi-


zation of economic theory of the kind we find in volumetwo of Capital. With Marx's death, an immense exegeticalliterature emerges on capitalist circulation, accumulationand "realization theory." Even Rosa Luxemburg wascaught in this swamp, not to speak of the Keynesian Marx-ists who churn out their papers for the American Eco-nomic Review and Science and Society.

Marxism created a stupendous intellectual furniture thatone must clear away to make contact with reality. Thefield abounds with "experts" and heavies, with academicsand authorities whose bullshit makes original, indeeddialectical, thought virtually impossible. Once we rescuethe essentials, this theoretical garbage must be junked. It isvitally necessary that we return to the generalized terrainthat pre-Marxian socialism established, and then go for-ward again.

The youth culture has already posed the "social ques-tion" in its richest and most meaningful terms—"Life ver-sus death." I would say, with an eye towards the insightsof Marxism, "Life versus survival." In any case, we have toget away from the one-sided, repressive jargon of Marxism,which defines our perspective in a limiting manner. I amreminded of a fine passage from Paul Avrich's recent book,Kronstadt 1921, in which the language of the revolution-ary Kronstadt sailors is contrasted with that of the Bolshe-viks. "Rebel agitators," Avrich notes, speaking of the sail-ors, "wrote and spoke (as an interviewer later noted) in ahomespun language free of Marxist jargon and foreign-sounding expressions. Eschewing the word 'proletariat,'they called, in true populist fashion, for a society in whichall the 'toilers'—peasants, workers and the 'toiling intelli-gentsia'—would play a dominant role. They were inclinedto speak of a 'social' rather than a 'socialist' revolution,viewing class conflict not in the narrow sense of industrialworkers versus bourgeoisie, but in the traditional narodnik


sense of the laboring masses as a whole pitted against allwho throve on their misery and exploitation, includingpoliticians and bureaucrats as well as landlords and capital-ists. Western ideologies—Marxism and liberalism alike—hadlittle place in their mental outlook."39

The point, of course, is not Western ideologies versusRussian, or "homespun" versus "foreign-sounding" lan-guage. The real point is the broader concepts with whichthe "masses" worked almost intuitively—concepts drawnfrom the experience of their own oppression. Note howthe sailors had a broader view of the "laboring masses" andtheir "oppressors" than the Bolsheviks, a view that in-cluded the elitist Bolsheviks among the oppressors. Notewell, too, how Marxist jargon made it possible for theBolsheviks to exclude themselves as oppressors in flatdenial of the real situation. For my part, I am delightedthat the New Left in America has replaced the words"workers and "proletariat" by "people." Indeed, it issignificant that even professedly Marxian groups like thePanthers and Weathermen have been obliged to use a popu-list language, for this language reflects the changed realityand problems of our times.

To sum up: what I am talking about is a human condi-tion reflected by the word "power." We must finally re-solve the historic and everyday dichotomies: man's powerover woman, man's power over man, and man's power overnature. For inherent in the issue of power—ofdomination—are the contradictory, destructive effects ofpower: the corruption of life-giving sexuality, of a life-nourishing society, of a life-orienting ego, and of a life-sustaining ecology. The statement "power corrupts" is nota truism because it has never been fully understood. It mayyet become understood because power now destroys. Noamount of theoretical exegesis can place power in the serv-ice of history or of a revolutionary organization. The only


act of power that is excusable any longer is that one act—popular revolution—that will finally dissolve power as suchby giving each individual power over his or her everydaylife.

New YorkAugust 1970

TheMay-June

Eventsin France: 1

France: a Movementfor Life

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