Rob Schaap wrote:
>
> >We have to organise, and the highest form of working class
> self-organisation is the mass revolutionary party and the >highest working
> class law is the law of the Party.
>
> Lotsa good stuff up to this bit, natch, but never do I see that bit of
> argument which convinces that the highest party law might be the law of the
> working class!
If you laid all the books end-to-end which discuss this question it would be enough
to build Heathrow's 5th runway. Much of this discussion is mischievous however,
because its only purpose is to disarm the working class and its social allies, to
spread confusion and undermine the revolution. For instance it is surely mischievous
to deny the need for political organisation. How can we achieve anything without
organisation? And you need MORE organisation, not less, if you are planning to make
a revolution.
A political party is a voluntary organisation like any other. People who join it
must follow its rules, but they are always free to leave, so the existence of rules
is not yet dictatorship. In bourgeois civil society any legal organisation is
subject to the laws of the land, and if the organisation (whatever it is) chooses to
break the laws then it and its members risk arrest as conspirators, members of
organised crime, political subversives etc.
However, these obvious facts from civics 101 do not apply when the civil society
itself collapses and when the rule of law itself is called into question. When the
authorities themselves become lawless, and when civil war replaces civil society,
then it is obvious that every single organised endeavour is put in a new position,
from a large corporation to a wine-appreciation club to a revolutionary party. When
the universality of right and law, embodied in civil instutitions which enjoy social
assent and which are legitimised by elections, is upheld, then the line between
lawful associations like tomato-growers clubs and unlawful conspiracies like armed
revolutionary secret societies, is clear enough. But when civil society fails, then
every organisation whatsoever is now in some sense extralegal, and even tomato
grower clubs can and do look suspicious to the authorities (who have themselves
become just one more criminalised conspiracy, albeit larger and better armed than
the others).
Those who argue that Bush stealing the election is nothing new, nothing to worry
about, that it is just the same-old same-old of governmental lawlessless and social
hypocrisy, and that in any case the whole sorry episode will be buried under the
landslide vicory of a Democrat in 4 years, also believe in their hearts that nothing
will ever change anyway. Funnily enough, these same people who mock at the
absurdities of the US Constitution do believe in their cowardly hearts that it is
eternal, and can never be changed.
They are real pessimists and underneath their clever cynicism is capitulation, and a
cowardly inability to think the unthinkable and to accept that, actually, things do
change, and that when presidential elections are stolen, this is serious stuff.
It is good that the Bush regime already shows signs of its real nature and that the
crooks are falling out among themselves before they even get their snouts in the
trough, but those who are hysterically gleeful about the fate of Linda Chavez while
also being strangely silent about the fate of democracy and about the real evil, the
really monstrous enormity, that is this Bush regime, the really monstrous usurpation
of popular right and sovereignty that it embodies, are making a mistake, are missing
the point in a big way. If you read the media or look at some elists like Doug
Henwood's LBO-talk for instance, you wouldn't know that anything unusual had
happened at all. This is breathtaking cynicism. This is also political cowardice,
because Bush has already got people running scared. People are tiptoeing around
what's happened, as if they woke up one morning and found a gorilla squatting in the
corner of the room and decided to go on as normal and pretend it isn't there. But it
is there. It *did* happen. Bush really *did* steal the election. So now everything
has changed, because the rules have been changed, and without anyone's say-so.
When the state ceases to represent the general interest and to embody the general
will but instead becomes the private playground of a sectional interest, then it is
not just the people who carry out the coup d'etat who put themselves above the law,
because then everyone else, too, is above the law -- because the law has been thrown
into the gutter. This has big implications for the question of political
organisation. When there is no longer any law in general, then there is only the
particular rules of any particular organisation. It makes a lot of common-sense, in
this situation, to say that the 'only law is the Party law'.
Of course we know that the concept of the General Will is just a polite fiction, an
enlightenment canard, the creation of French _philosophes_ in wigs and satin tights,
and that "in reality" the capitalist state has always been "a committee of the
bourgeoisie" running the show to suit themselves. But this "committee" has always
had to get itself elected, and that is the other side of the Social Contract. Take
elections away, and where then are your "checks and balances"? There are none, there
is just every man and women for themselves and sauve qui peut. OR ELSE there may be
private initiatives, self-help organisations, voluntary associations with rules for
their members, organisations which try to provide for their interests or protect
them in some way. What is the status of the rules of membership of these clubs etc?
Perhaps Rob Schaap is right, and Lenin should have respected the results of the
Constituent Assembly elections, which the Bolsheviks lost, in 1917. I have read a
good deal about this and I have even met both Old Bolsheviks and Old Mensheviks from
that era (as a matter of private interest, I went to college with the grandson of
Kerensky, and even publicly debated him about the fate of the Provisional
Government; and my settled conclusion is that Lenin was right not to respect the
results of the Constituent election; I'm prepared to argue chapter and verse about
this, but it's irrelevant to my point here. Incidentally, even Mensheviks who were
elected members of the Constituent and were bitterly anti-Lenin for the remainder of
their often very long lives, spent in exile, mostly did not think the Constituent
was viable and mostly acknowledged that it would have collapsed anyway). The point
however is very clear and simple: when electoral democracy fails, as it just has in
the US presidential elections, to speak any longer of 'constitutionalism', 'checks
and balances', etc, is just idle chatter, ie a waste of time unless your purpose is
precisely to restore democracy. And to do this it may indeed be necessary to place
"the Party's law" above everything else, even the preservation of your own life.
when Rob says:
>>Leninist theory might, for better or worse, have a chance in those
> parts of the world with weak governments, little international significance
> and large proportions of struggling peasants, but none at all in the core
> political economies of 2001. <<
he is standing the truth (both the historical truth and the theoretical truth) on
its head. I like Rob very much, and I am very glad he is here. So this isn't
personal. But "the truth" is surely that the one place where "Leninism" never stood
a chance, was precisely Soviet Russia, and Lenin himself said as much, in 1921 or
even before. That is, if by Leninism you mean what Lenin meant, ie, the construction
of an advanced, powerful socialist productive system, on the basis of a real
socialist democracy. 'Fools, fools, fools, all around us,' he once said in despair.
It was not just difficult, it was downright quixotic and utopian, even to begin to
think about building socialism in a country as backward as Russia was, where, as
Maxim Gorky put it, not just the Bolshevik Party but the entire Russian working
class (a mere 3 million strong!) would disappear 'like a pinch of salt thrown on the
vast bog of the Russian peasantry'. So let's not waste too much time discussing
Lenin or Russia in 1917.
It's simple to see that if there is never a crisis in the bourgeois state, a crisis
of democracy, a big political crisis, coupled with a big economic and social crisis,
and probably a war and/or massive ecological breakdown, then nothing will happen -
by definition, things will go on forever, boom will follow slump, repubs follow
dems, etc till the end of time. But by the same token, if democracy goes into
crisis, if the civil society fails, if the authorities become lawless and
criminalised, then the old questions of state and society, of private association
and public authority, and the relations between them, will reassert themselves *with
a vengeance*. It is no use blaming the Leninists for obeying only their own law when
there is *NO* other law and when everyone else is doing the same thing anyway. Is
it?
Bush stealing the presidential election is both symptom and catalyst of an
underlying malaise. Maybe the forces of renewal are so strong that capitalism will
be erstored, democracy will be redeemed and everything will be OK. But in any case
this is NOT just a minor blip and putting it right, as it were, will require immense
organisational effort and energy, will entail huge mass mobilisations. The whole
thrust and purpose of these inevitable (and already occurring) mobilisations will be
to *restore democracy and the rule of law*, will be to retrieve the status quo ante,
and to prevent the usurpation of state power by an unelected minority whose
political programme is evil, stupendously and even banally so. This huge effort of
popular mobilisation will only work is there is great popular ehtusiasm and great
personal commitment and sacrifice of time and effort. Above all, overthrowing the
Bush regime (because that is what we are talking about) will require great
organisation, and any organisation which succeeds does so because it primarily
depends upon the trust and commitment of its members, and on a real political bond
between the leadership and the rank and file. If that does not happen, nothing else
will.
It is self-evident that overthrowing the Bush regime will not require a social
revolution, altho it may feel like one at times. But failure may change the
situation for the worse. If the Bush regime become entrenched, then the enornous
latent instabilities, economic, enicornmental and social, of 21st century world
capitalism, are sure to be intensifies. The terrible crises of environmental and
social devastation and the gross and humilating inequality and lack of social
justice which so disfigures our epoch, will only be aggravated. The chances of
evolutionary 'puncture points', of qualitative shifts or step-changes in the the
historical process (of which the Bush coup d'etat is istelf one!) will only
increase. Therefore it is BY NO MEANS ABSURD to connect the Bush usurpation of power
with the emergence of profound crises of a revolutionary character.
If you create a "revolutionary party" what you are doing is prefiguring the
possibility of the complete collapse of civil society. Nevertheless, you may be a
perfectly lawful body and no threat to anybody (the FBI has just announced that
communists are no longer any kind of public menace). You are still just like any
other voluntary association or club with its own rules going about its lawful
occasions. If what you expect to happen does not, however, then you will have
completely wasted your time. Better to join a tomato growers' club.
But if what you epxect to happen, does, then unlike any other voluntary body, you
will have a chance to recreate history in your own image. You will try to take
power, and you will do so in the name of the constituency you represent, and what's
more you will aim to stand in locum tenens for the old, smashed state and civil
society while you replace it with something else. If you call yourself a
revolutionary and don't try to do that, then you really HAVE been wasting your time.
And it is ab initio absurd to pretend that a *revolutionary* organisation which
seeks to *overthrow the state* in circumstances of civil war and the collapse of
authority, civil society etc, is not going to *take power in its own name and on
behalf of a particular class* which it proposes thereby to *make into the RULING
class*. In the process of creating a new (socialist) state no opposition can be
tolerated, obviously: because we are not talking here about alternating governing
parties, about pluralism WITHIN a state, but about forging a brand NEW state and if
anyone attacks that brand-new state, in which the working class has the leading
role, they are going to be called counter-revolutionaries and can expect to be dealt
with summarily however much they dress up their attack on the workers' state in fine
words about democracy, decency, opposing one-party tyranny, preserving the rights of
property and other foundation-stones of bourgeois civil society, etc. Actually, you
will have a situation of complete social breakdown, of utter lawlessness,
brigandage, warlordism, of civil society levelled to the dust, of courts which are
the playthings of private warring fiefdoms, etc. Just like modern capitalist Russia,
in fact. In this situation *EVERYONE* will be busy proclaiming their own law, their
own enclave, their own state power etc. Everyone did just this in Russia after 1917,
right down to the very anarchists who were supposed to be opposed *in principle* to
state-building, Nestor Makhno q.v.
The ones who succeed, in this situation, will be precisely the ones who DO most
clearly embody "the general interest", who DO most clearly serve the people and
articulate their aspirations, and whose "Party law" DOES most clearly embody popular
sovereignty and right. In 1917 the party which most clearly did this, among the
hundreds of competing parties, was Lenin's Bolshevik Party. That is why they won:
because the "Party law" was the nearest thing there was in the whole of Russia, to
real law, to impartial justice, and which best expressed popular passions
(particularly inflamed and ardent just then). This is why people fought and died for
it, and why it's law became absolute.
What Rob perhaps has to explain, is how the US government and how western
democracies in general, checks and balances and all, are going to cope with:
> irreversible environmental species
> murder/suicide).
Most people who are active on the CrashList are here because altho they disagree
about almost everything else, they do agree that irreversible ecological breakdown
combined with economic collapse are quite likely, more likely than huge new
upswings, new golden era of unrivalled prosperity etc. From this point of view,
capitalism and the bourgeois state are not part of the solution, they ARE the
problem.
Mark
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