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#title The Origins of Modern Leftism

#author Richard Gombin

#date x

#source x

#pubdate 2025-03-02T00:15:04

#topics x

Text on the origins of the contemporary political left wing.

Submitted by libcom on July 30, 2005

- 1.The vital question: The régime of the USSR and the phenomenon of bureaucracy

- 3. A Critique of Everyday Life

- 4b. The theory of council communism: The Inheritors

- 5. Leftism and Active Dissent

* Book traversal links for The Origins of Modern Leftism - Richard Gombin

Leftism as described and defined in the following pages is first and foremost a theory : a theory of present-day society, of the society of the future and of the transition from one to the other. very little consideration will be devoted to 'practical leftism', although its haunting presence will be felt behind the text. The reason is that it seemed to me worth while to give an account of leftist theory before embarking upon a description of the practice of confrontation, which at the moment would be fragmentary at best. The theory itself is far from complete, and therefore my principal concern will be with its genesis.

Systematic leftism takes the form of an alternative ( to use a neologism ) to Marxism-Leninism. The interest in analysing it therefore resides in the fact that it presents itself as a successor to a theoretical construction which has practically monopolized radical thought over the last half-century, and which was already the predominant revolutionary doctrine for half a century before that.

The curiosity which modern leftism may excite does not arise simply from the fact that it aims to replace orthodox Marxism as the guiding theory of the revolutionary movement. Other systems of thought have already attempted to supplant it. But most of these alternatives have been on the right : social democracy, labourism, cooperation, pro-planning liberalism, etc. Criticisms from the left, that is to say critiques presenting a revolutionary alternative, grow out of the same tradition and claimed the same parentage; for the sake of convenience, we shall refer to these as the extremists.

Of course there has been anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, and revolutionary syndicalism. But these movements were the very ones to be ousted from their old entrenched positions by the October Revolution. They were to survive only as minor sects, expending the best part of their energies in pursuing a fanatical critique of the Soviet Union and its supporters. There is no getting away from the fact that for fifty-odd years Marxism-Leninism has reigned supreme, monopolizing the ideological leadership of the organized revolutionary movement.

Opposition was made even more difficult by the intolerance of the communist system's 'guardians of conscience' : you were

* revolutionary only if you came out in favour of Bolshevism, * counter-revolutionary if you permitted yourself the slightest criticism of Moscow.

Modern leftism has broken this vicious circle, broken cheerfully with Marxism-Leninism, and has assumed the role of inquisitor in its turn. To enhance further the novelty of its new departure, its propagation has coincided with the coming of age of a whole generation of militants who have not had to suffer the traumas of Stalinism, with its absolutist pretensions that elevated it to the status of an eternal truth. Consequently, the theoretical initiative has found a sociological base in a living movement.

Finally, having consigned Marxism-Leninism to the ideological dustbin of history, the modern leftism theory claims to be the expression of current struggle. In this sense, it no longer represents one radical utopia among others, but the theory of a revolutionary movement in full flood.

This, then, is the extent of the leftist ambition. It seemed to me essential to present the various aspects of the new current of thought in a succinct form. It must be emphasized that it is new only by virtue of its newsworthiness and by the gradual merging of disparate elements. The reader will recognize some familiar themes, which may remind him of other periods of history. For novelty does not in fact consist in erasing the past and starting from scratch. It is the result of a sudden convergence of a number of currents, previously dispersed or forgotten, with a social reality which appears to justify them. What is new, unprecedented, is the fact that these currents have sprung forth unlooked-for on the scene of confrontation, the fact that they are fed by a common inspiration and, above all, by what I shall call an identical vision of the world, which makes it possible to contain several disparate fragments within the same logical framework.

Leftism, therefore, is a way of thinking, of reacting in the face of the same phenomena, of revolting against all attempts at regimentation. The cohesion of leftism is a theoretico-practical cohesion : theory does not find its justification within itself, but in the action it claims to express.

If the leftists are right, if their theory is really the theory of the real, the actual, it cannot fail to acquire over the years all the attributes of a finished theory. Marxism itself is a synthesis of disparate elements; leftism has not yet found its own synthesis. Will it ever do so ? For the moment, we can only trace these elements in outline, while suggesting the Ariadne's thread by which we may pass from one to the other. At the same time, we may sketch the broad features of the recent historical developments that have enabled these elements to emerge.

- The Origins of Modern Leftism - Richard Gombin

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In its awareness of this emergence from the realm of scarcity, mankind is impatient to satisfy its needs -- all its needs. It is clear that the struggle against the obstacles barring man from enjoying the fruits of his own labour has taken new forms. Seen on the social scale, this means that social struggles have changed both in appearance and objectives.

If we look at the French labour movement from the time of its initial organization in the 1880s (both on a trade-union and a party level) up to the end of the 1950s, it will be seen that it follows a historical line of development starting from a situation of intensive capitalist accumulation and ending up in the age of consumption. Throughout these seventy years. the worker's primary concern was to defend himself against unemployment, poverty, the oppression of the employers, in short against all the hazards inherent in a capitalist economy based on scarcity. The liberal State claimed to maintain a position of neutrality, implying that it was up to the organizations created by the proletariat to fight for the everyday welfare of the worker, and at the same time against a system which by its very nature perpetuated injustice and poverty. Accordingly, the trade unions, however staunchly they may have supported a revolutionary syndicalism in theory, and despite their ambitious programmes and apocalyptic vocabulary, in fact practised a some what milk-and-water reformism. The political parties, which by the end of the century were influenced by Marxism, followed a similar pattern : they offered the masses a revolutionary ideology coupled with a reformist practice (this was as true of the pre-1914 SFIO as it was of the post-1930 CP). The strength of their hold on the masses was in direct proportion to the rigour of their organizational structure. So far as the PCF was concerned, it was still bathed in the glory of a successful revolution, and the extreme subversiveness of its vocabulary was an additional recommendation.

In short, the hold these trade-union and party machines exercised over the mass of the working class was primarily due to the nature of their objectives. Obliged to struggle for immediate economic aims in a situation of scarcity, the proletariat cedes its autonomy and delegates its power, all the more so for the fact that the realities of the capitalist market necessitate the organization and concentration of decision-making. To put it in a nutshell, since it was obliged to transform itself into a pressure-group, the working class equipped itself with all the attributes of a pressure-group : leadership, bureaucracy, hierarchy and authoritarianism.

The results achieved (increases in wages, security of employment, social insurance, other legislation beneficial to the proletariat, democratization of the electoral system) corresponded exactly to the needs of a class seeking to win itself a place within the capitalist system. The true extent of these achievements is open to debate, but it is undeniable that the leadership of the working class, charged with managing the immediate interests of that class, carried out its task by managerial methods.

The reason why this hold has lasted for almost a century, and still survives to a degree. is that the problems of economic and job security were an ever-present reality to two thirds of the population -- and this is a fact that should not be forgotten.

A course of development that began in 1936 was interrupted by the last war, until the flow of militants to the C P was revived by the Resistance. Subsequently, the liberation of France recreated a situation of economic scarcity, job insecurity and, by way of corollary, a resurgence in the power of the Communist Party and of the unions controlled by it. But as France began to emerge from the economic morass, at the beginning of the fifties or thereabouts, the traditional leadership of the working class, despite their unprecedented power, were quite clearly out of touch with the new aspirations of the workers, directed towards the new opportunities offered by the industrial society. A political structure (the CP) and a trade-union structure (the CGT) based on democratic centralism, that is to say total centralization to the benefit of the party and trade-union machines. a strategy which vacillated between reformism and harassment of the State establishment, these were the norms of working-class organization as seen by the majority of the French labour movement in the years following the liberation.

The gap between the specific needs peculiar to the machines in question and the general needs of the working population rapidly became apparent. Stalinism in its broadest sense was, in the West, a brutal effort to preserve, to freeze for ever a politico-social structure which. was after all ephemeral and dated. Organized communism in the capitalist countries had nothing to offer the new needs and aspirations of the workers except intransigence in theory coupled with total compromise in practice. In a world of relative abundance, of unprecedented technological, scientific and economic change, of completely new sociological groupings, the labour movement suddenly and spontaneously rediscovered its most natural, and also most ancient, preoccupations, which the years of 'quantitative' struggle had helped to disguise. The workers, tentatively and uncertainly at first, are beginning to express their will to determine the objectives of this struggle themselves, from the grass roots, and above all to fashion in the society of the future an authentic socialism founded on autonomy of decision, that is to say a decentralized and self-governing socialism.

The new type of social conflict, which for the sake of convenience we shall term 'contestation' [1] and which has become fairly world-wide over the past few years, emerged in a particularly violent, concentrated and massive form in France with the general strike of May-June 1968.

The contestation in these conflicts was aimed at once at the employers, the State authority and the traditional leadership of the workers. By resisting both the repressive structure of society, in whatever part of the world, and the stranglehold of the working-class leadership, the workers were returning to more basic responses that would have been better understood by a Proudhon or a Bakunin than by a Marx or a Lenin. But whereas the Bakuninite critique could only lead to a step backward in the socio-economic context of the time, postulating as it did a collective aspiration towards a more or less mythical past (a society of free and independent craftsmen), the situation today is quite different. For after years of reformism in practice and of dogmatism in visions of the future, many workers now seem ready to assume responsibility for their own destiny and to take the management of their affairs into their own hands. Revolutionary theory is moving in a similar direction : it no longer precedes social action but follows it, or at best runs parallel to it.

The leftist objective, as it may currently be observed, seems to be to provide contestation and its protagonists with a theory to embrace their own practice. But 'leftism' is a term both overused and over-abused, so that it is necessary to clarify certain points before proceeding further.

To the political scientist, leftism may be either a portmanteau word (the generally accepted, journalists' meaning) or a technical term, with a meaning sufficiently precise to be immediately accomodated in the framework of an analysis which transcends it. Either way, the value of such a heuristic, and is in no way essential; hence our definition of leftism is not intended to be exhaustive -- quite the contrary; it is restrictive and selective, deliberately isolating a certain number of characteristics. [2]

Only the second category seems to require any comment. It is very wide-ranging and includes a number of groups that are commonly lumped in with leftism. It covers all those movements (most of which are quite old) which accuse the CP of having betrayed Marxism-Leninism, either recently (1956) or since 1925 or even 1923. As the reader will have recognized, these groups are the ones consisting of the various internal 'communist oppositions' (represented in France by Unir-Débats and Le Communiste), the Bordiguists, the Maoists, [3] the Trotskyists, whether Posadist, Frankist, Lambertist or Pablist in tendency. The one feature common to all these groups, beyond their very major theoretical differences, is their reference to Marxism-Leninism and their position in relation to the Communist Party.

By attacking the Party for its betrayal of Marxist-Leninist theory or practice, or both, these groups present themselves as the faithful guardians of orthodoxy. In this sense, they offer an alternative. but an alternative to the leadership of the Party and riot to Marxism-Leninism. In this sense, therefore, one may speak of leftism, but it is a leftism in relation to the Party and not in relation to communist doctrine. It thus seems preferable, in the framework of the definition we have given to the leftist concept. to speak of extremism, for the objective of these groups is to move to the extreme of communist doctrine and not to replace it.

A borderline case is that of the spontaneist Maoists (Mao-Spontex, ex-Gauche prolétarienne, Vive la révolution, etc.) which retained, after May 1968, the tactical spontaneity and the notion of 'propaganda of the deed' derived from the leftists. The presence of Alain Geismar at the head of the ex-Gauche prolétarienne is a good illustration of this marriage of Maoist dogmatism with the spontaneity inherited from the Movement of 22 March. However, to the extent that these groups are only spontaneist at the tactical level, while remaining Marxist-Leninist on the doctrinal level, they will not be included in this study.

Having drawn the distinction between leftism and communist extremism, and having defined it as a practical and ideological alternative to Marxism-Leninism, it only remains to give an account of its aims and its origins, and to ask where it fits into the tradition of the revolutionary movement.

To the extent that it is a movement of ideas, leftism is at once a critique, a praxis and a theory. A critique, firstly, which extends from the revision of Marxism to the point of negating it as a revolutionary theory. In the last analysis, Marx emerges as the theoretician of the bourgeois revolution pushed to the limits of its potentialities. The whole of the Leninist theory of organization, its very conception of revolution as the seizure of political power at the summit, bears all the marks of bourgeois thought. To a leftist, it is therefore not surprising that the Russian Revolution should have resulted in a State-capitalist regime reproducing a more refined and more concentrated version of the system of class domination.

The leftist critique therefore repudiates all the revolutions of the twentieth century, or rather denies them the label 'socialist'; it sees in them the last of the bourgeois revolutions.

This analysis leads to a view of organized communism and social democracy not as deviations from an ideal model, but rather as capitalist institutions, that is to say institutions tending to manipulate capitalist society in the direction of greater efficiency and a greater concentration of power.

Seen in this light, leftism appears as a revolutionary praxis wherever the class struggle breaks the mould previously established by traditional organizations -- everywhere, that is, where it is directed both against the system and against the working-class leadership. This praxis is manifested in wildcat strikes, the occupation of factories, takeovers of cadres and organization at shop-floor, factory or company level outside the existing trade-union or political frameworks. A praxis of this type would unmask the oppressive, restrictive nature of the 'historic' instruments of leadership, which faithfully reflect their bourgeois originals. In this perspective, the general strike appears as the first or at least the most extensive demonstration by the workers against their own organizations.

Leftist theory, on the basis of this type of praxis, adopts and puts forward an entirely new historical analysis and projection. According to this view, socialism is no longer to be regarded as a manipulation of an existing model of society, but a higher stage characterized by the autonomy of human groups. The prefiguration of the emancipated society is more or less detailed according to the group and its particular theoretical bent (for leftism is still far from homogeneous), but all leftists are agreed on the principle of autonomy, which consequently excludes all authoritarian, centralist, interventionist, planned and ideological models. 'Ideology' here means the phenomenon of repression in the realm of the mind and of collective attitudes. Just as bourgeois civilization introduced the structure of authority (paternal, managerial, pedagogical, political, etc.), one of its more heinous misdeeds was to sanctify ideological domination. And the revolutionary leaders, with Lenin at their head, conformed slavishly to this pattern by imposing on the proletariat from outside an ideology -- the ideology of their own liberation.

The object therefore is not to put forward a new ideology, but to abolish and demystify all ideologies. The ideal activity of revolutionaries will be to systematize, to give some coherence to, the fundamental praxis of contestation as it exists here and now. The revolutionaries are therefore concerned to draft a theory for their own practice, without the analysis ever becoming congealed, fixed at it specific historical point, in which case it would become an ideology.

Here again, all kinds of variations are to be found : from the groups which reject all theorizing and rely on the pure spontaneity of the workers, down to those which postulate the organizational forms which the workers will establish (workers' councils, action committees, etc.). However, there is general agreement on the central revolutionary reality, which is the independent activity of the workers in their day-to-day struggle.

As for the means of establishing the socialist society, they are not to be fixed immutably either : far from conforming to a pre-established organizational pattern, revolutionary activity will create its own forms of struggle in the course of the movement to a higher historical stage. In other words, just as socialist society will be characterized by self-government at every level, the revolutionary process will include the totality of individual autonomous struggles. Starting from the hypothesis that a society can only be free if it is freely established, the leftists see in contemporary revolutionary practice a tendency towards autonomy of struggle, towards an instinctive rejection of all leadership and all hierarchies, however revolutionary.

Having projected the principle of autonomy on to its vision of the future, having made this the very essence of the revolutionary process, having aimed at renewing revolutionary thought in its historical dimension by this means, leftism has also found a new conception of the content of this process.

Orthodox analysis on this subject -- drawn principally from the writings of the 'older' Marx, from the analysis in Capital and in the critique of the Gotha Programme -- fixed the revolutionary timetable in advance. The revolution was supposed to come at the climax of the period of capitalist development, when the socio-economic system had matured sufficiently to allow certain factors to come to fruition which the old system already contained within itself in embryonic form. [4] The revolutionary struggle, and the political organization of the masses, appear in this light as both a preparation (notably by education) for the advent of socialism and as a 'hefty shove' to shake the old world on its foundations.

The favoured battle-grounds of revolutionary action are the centres of production. Since all alienation springs from economic alienation, this has to be suppressed first by abolishing wage slavery and collectivizing the means of production. It is therefore no accident that the communist parties have chosen the factory as the base of their organization.

The revolutionary time-scale of leftism emerges as both less determinate and longer than this. An economic evolutionism contradicted by events has been repudiated. On the other hand, a greater place has been reserved for revolutionary voluntarism, and hence for the socialist conscience, although this latter may. of course not be imposed from outside. While it is admitted that a capitalist economy is not without internal contradictions, it has become apparent that the system has found a way of taming its crises and learned to prolong its own existence, The end of capitalism is not yet in sight, and can only be foreseen as the result of a constant and conscious struggle, both against the system and against the traditional revolutionary opposition.

But this conception of the revolution, while it may appear more atemporal than Marxism-Leninism, is also much looser spatially, extending far beyond the simple notion of battle for the abolition of the wage bond. For revolutionary action means to the leftists a permanent struggle on all fronts. All alienations - psychological, sexual, cultural, ideological and, of course, economic -- must be done away with, The front of the revolutionary struggle has thus become greatly extended : the revolutionary process itself has been drawn out both in space and in time. Its ultimate objective is the conquest of all powers, the end of all alienation; something which cannot be achieved within the scope of an insurrection but demands a whole historical period.

Obviously since leftism categorizes itself in historical terms, only history will provide a definitive answer. The contemporary observer of a phenomenon can only go by the indicators, and the one which seems to us decisive, and legitimizing by the same token this type of study, is that the totality of analyses, reflexes, ideas and practices which I have termed 'modern leftism' do not constitute a phenomenon specific to a given country, nor did they appear suddenly out of thin air. Since the present work is restricted to a study of leftism in France, it will attempt to consider its genesis in this particular instance. Mere superficial observation will show that it represents the point of convergence of a number of currents differing in form, content and aims -- currents which, for the most part, often sprang from origins which go back well before the last world war, but all of which became crystallized after 1945. Likewise all, or almost all, of them fused after May-June 1969 in the wider movement of world-wide contestation, which thus emerged as the synthesis Of these separate individual currents.

If we have not stopped to detail the content of French leftism, this is because the analysis of its various components in the chapters to follow will be concerned with that very question. Before embarking on the study of individual trends, it would be as well to emphasize that the national framework accorded to this book is entirely arbitrary and was chosen for reasons of practical convenience. Not only is leftism not a specifically French phenomenon, but in its role as a revolutionary alternative it has made its appearance in France a quarter of a century late, compared with Central Europe. This is due to various factors, and primarily to the relatively tardy introduction of Marxism into France and to the richness of a specifically national revolutionary tradition. Similarly, at the time when Marxism was beginning to be seriously questioned in the German-speaking countries, it had only just been properly assimilated by French thinkers and was only just finding its first 'high priests' among them. It was indeed in the interwar period that a number of highly regarded intellectuals and philosophers went over to Marxism : whereas before 1914 it had only provided the inspiration for a part of the socialist movement, from then on it was to be a subject for commentary as well. But no sooner had the Marxian exegesis begun to be introduced (and nourished by the translation, in 1933, of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) than the final 'Bolshevization' of the French CP and the Stalinization of its leaders was to petrify Marxist-Leninist theory right up to the 1950s. There was talk of a period of Stalinist 'glaciation' (Edgar Morin), and it is true that only a few intellectual circles outside the Party continued to keep up the interpretative and analytical tradition of the twenties. [5]

In contrast, a tradition of high-level theoretical Marxian critique has existed in Central Europe since before the First World War. Austro-Marxism and the critique of Lukács gave rise, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, to a veritable Marxist revisionism and even to attempts to transcend Marxism, after thinkers such as Karl Korsch, Pannekoek, Ernst Bloch, Th. Adorno and Horkheimer had drawn up a critique of Leninism as a non-Marxist political praxis, or of Marxism as an analysis unable to give an account of modern industrial society.

It should be added that several abortive revolutions (Hungary and Bavaria, notably) provided examples of a different kind of praxis, of organizational models differing from Leninism (independent workers' councils, for example).

Besides these neo-Marxist explorations, the occupation of factories in Italy in 1919-20 and the Spanish revolution (1936-7) added more fuel to the non-Leninist and even non-Marxist revolutionary tradition.

It is certainly true that in such circumstances the birth of French leftism can only be viewed in the context of these international precedents. But whereas certain analyses involving a break with orthodox Marxism and a search for new departures could be lifted whole from illustrious predecessors like Lukács and Korsch, other aspects of French leftism stemmed more directly from the French tradition, whether literary (Rimbaud, the surrealists) or political (Fourier, Proudhon, revolutionary syndicalism).

In reality, a multitude of trends go to make up the tissue of an intellectual movement that is challenging for the succession to a revolutionary theory identified with the labour movement for more than fifty years. A survey of the various aspects of the phenomenon of leftism, their genesis and their content, will permit a better appreciation of this many-sided phenomenon, which owes it coherence to an apparently fortuitous convergence of various different factors, united nevertheless by a common aim : to change the world and transform the human condition.

[1] For an initial semantic and political approach, cf. G. Lavau, report to the Congress of the AISP, Munich, 1970 (duplicated text).

[2] A. Kriegel has attempted to draw a distinction between leftism and extremism which is very different from this : it does not seem to me to clarity matters to define leftism as a 'safety-valve'; has not communism too been a safety-valve in most countries ? Les Communistes français (Paris, 1968), pp. 234-5.

[3] Originally, these were against de-Stalinization, against the Russian 'revisionists' and for Mao, the only 'correct' interpreter of doctrine. Since June 1968, the pattern has become complicated by the addition of other elements. The common factor is still that beyond Stalin, Mao or Enver Hoxha, Lenin remains the paragon of the Marxist militant and thinker,

[4] In his critique of the draft Erfurt programme, Engels had already abandoned all the 'revolutionary voluntarism' of the 1840s and 50s , and went so far as to predict a quasi-automatic change-over to socialism, notably in England.

[5] The question is dealt with by G. Lichtheim, Marxism in Modern France (Columbia University Press, 1966). Jean Touchard writes that until 1930 Marx was only known to the French communists through the medium of the October Revolution. It was the 'Philosophies' group that was to discover Marx by way of a philosophical approach and which might have been able to develop a Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, had it not been for the intellectual 'glaciation' of the thirties to which I have referred. See Le Mouvement des idées politiques dans la France contemporaine (Paris, Cours IEP, 1968), pp. 22 and 170.

* Book traversal links for Introduction

- 1.The vital question: The régime of the USSR and the phenomenon of bureaucracy

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In order for the revolutionary movement to be able to attack the Marxist-Leninist 'system', to revise and replace it, a formidable obstacle had to be overcome : the critique of the Soviet revolution. While it is not inconceivable that the CP might have been 'by-passed' to the left in 1938-40, in view of the signs of its more sober approach since the time of the Popular Front and the 'wildcat' methods first introduced in the strike of 1936, the last war and the experience of the French Resistance helped somewhat to refurbish its image. For the generation which came to the Party in 1930, and for that which rejoined it in the Resistance, communism was the incarnation of the doctrines of Marx, Engels and Lenin, as Stalin's Soviet Russia was the logical and legitimate continuation of the Russia of 1917-23. For a wide range of Communist Party supporters, whether manual workers or intellectuals, progressive Party workers or 'fellow-travellers' from the prosperous middle class, the Communist Party was not merely the 'party of the 75,000 martyrs of the Resistance', the party which had contrived to reconcile patriotism with internationalism, revolutionary struggle with governmental responsibility, but also and above all the party connected with the USSR, that country whose enormous sacrifices had made possible the defeat of Nazi barbarism. To the whole world, whether sympathetic or hostile, the Party was the undisputed incarnation of the revolution : its leadership of the working class appeared wholly legitimate, as by divine right.

To contest the Party's 'revolutionary representativity' meant instant ostracization from the movement, and in practice this often meant joining the ranks of the enemy. To thousands of militants, 'to be outside the Party meant giving up the struggle to change the world, it meant a renunciation of all that was best in oneself. It meant sinking back into the petty-bourgeois slime. [1] Besides, most Party members did not ask themselves too many questions : those who were not members but regarded themselves as revolutionaries or even just 'of the left' were invariably hamstrung, by the Sartrean philosophy of commitment : but to be committed between 1944 and the beginning of the fifties could mean nothing other than commitment to the 'Great Cause'. Outside the Party, there was no salvation.

Similarly, the part played by those who attempted to maintain a balance between the rejection of Stalinism and the rejection of pro-American social democracy was extremely difficult to keep up. Yet some mention must be made of the experiment made by Sartre and his friends, for it illustrates at once an attempt at a leftist critique of Stalinism and its dismal failure. The experiment goes back to the tiny movement called 'Socialisme et Liberté' which Sartre had created during the war : it was continued in the creation of Les Temps modernes and various attempts at establishing a political footing, among which the Rassemblement démocratique de la Résistance (RDR) had some ephemeral success.

Whereas the RDR was doomed from the start, because of the very fact of its heterogeneous composition, Les Temps modernes survived, but the experiment it represented (the attempt to keep at an equal distance from communism and the 'bourgeoisifed' socialism of the SFIO) was a failure : of its four founders, three (R. Aron, A. Camus and M. Merleau-Ponty) veered towards liberalism, while the fourth (Sartre) became, according to some, the 'Enlightened Companion' of the CP [2] or according to others an uncompromising Stalinist who had been of greater service to the Party from the outside than he ever was from within. [3]

However that may be, Les Temps modernes, by its readiness to inform its readers on the reality of the Stalin régime (camps, trials, dictatorship) and by its penetrating analyses, was able for a time to play the role of left-wing critic and tarnish the idyllic image of the Soviet Union entertained in left-wing circles in France. The theoretical debate introduced by the review from 1945 was aimed at a readjustment of Marxist theory to the current facts : it started out with a rejection of the Communist Party's yesmanship, its blind allegiance to the policies of Stalin. [4]

During the first period, which lasted until 1952, various voices could be heard, often discordant, sometimes going so far as to question Bolshevism itself. Those who moved the furthest along this road, and who were to make a reappearance in Socialisme ou Barbarie, were attempting to consider Stalinism in a new light : not as an accident attributable to Stalin's personality, but as an inevitable development of a bureaucracy inherent to the Bolshevik Party. Since the 'committee-men' first took over the controls of the Russian Social-Democratic Party in 1901, the Party cut itself off from the will of the masses, and the leaders even found themselves in opposition to the masses during the decisive periods of struggle in 1905-7 and in April 1917. [5] This kind of analysis gives a relativist view of the Bolshevik revolution, in fact the reflection of a backward capitalism, almost an accident of a history temporarily twisted out of shape by the will of Lenin.

The whole process which led to Stalinism was therefore fully in keeping with the image of a party completely removed from the masses, a party which had been forced to make itself authoritarian, centralist and bureaucratic in order to 'short-circuit' the gradual processes of the masses. By the same token, no Bolshevik could exempt himself from, the accusation of bureaucracy, least of all Trotsky. The so-called degeneration of the Russian Revolution had been the product of the Party itself, and Stalin was cast in the image of that Party. [6]

This critique of Bolshevism led on to an analysis of the Soviet Union to which few of the collaborators of Les Temps modernes were able to subscribe, since it called in question the socialist nature of Russian society and presented Stalinism as a system of exploitation even more highly developed and refined than the classic form of capitalist system. [7]

Nevertheless, this 'centrist' trend, [9] of which Jean-Paul Sartre, from the height of his enormous prestige as a libertarian writer and philosopher, was the very incarnation, hesitated to draw all the conclusions which these revelations, among others, might be thought to entail. This Sartrean group, obliged to recognize the reality of oppression in the Soviet Union, the gap between the ideal and everyday practice, nevertheless opted for the latter, since it aligned itself with the progressive forces of this world and to take a stand against the USSR would mean alliance with her enemies.

But Merleau-Ponty's critique, drawn up in the form of a series of questions, became bogged down in an apparently unending chain of further questions, to the point at which their author broke with the revolution. By contrast, the Trotskyist critique, although part of a much more specious viewpoint, was at the same time far more fruitful, since it made it possible to attack Bolshevism without abandoning its revolutionary premises.

So while the attempted critique by Les Temps modernes seems ambiguous, holding a very precarious balance between Stalinist orthodoxy and liberal thought, Trotskyism was the only movement in the immediate postwar period to sustain a serious left-wing critique of Stalinism. [13] Organized Trotskyism, and notably the PCI (International Communist Party), was also to provide the sounding-board for the political opposition to Stalinism : the reasoned negation of Leninism was constructed on the basis of Trotsky's ideas, but was also to be directed against them.

To reach this conclusion, Trotsky had started from a highly literal interpretation of Marxism, according to which it is the ownership of the means of production which characterizes régimes. Since Marxism knows no other form of ownership than individual or collective, Trotsky defined the USSR as a degenerate workers' State, the base of which was socialist, but with a mode of distribution which was bourgeois and operated to the benefit of a tiny minority. This situation, according to him, could only be unstable and transitory; the régime would sooner or later have to move in the direction of complete socialism or tip backwards to capitalism. In the former case, it would probably need a political revolution; in the latter case a complete social counter-revolution would be necessary, since the relationships of production would have to be altered.

After the war, this analysis came to appear both to go beyond the theses of the CP, in that it called Stalinism in question and aspired to a return to the pure and healthy springs of Leninist Bolshevism, but also as less far-reaching than some views which detected in Stalinism something other, and more, than a mere political structure.

Within the Fourth International, after 1944, and in its French section, the PCI, it was assumed without question that the Soviet State was both proletarian and degenerate, half-way on the road between capitalism and socialism. But Trotsky, as we have seen, considered this state of affairs to be abnormal : the régime of the USSR seemed to him to be in unstable equilibrium; it was fated inevitably either to develop towards socialism or to '' into capitalism. The war, he was convinced, would precipitate this development : the USSR could only emerge from it as a fully fledged proletarian State, or slide back into the barbaric state of capitalism.

However, come the Liberation, not only was this 'unstable' régime in better health than ever. but the leaders of the Fourth International 'froze' any new interpretation of this phenomenon by attributing to Trotsky's analyses the qualities of an unassailable dogma. This situation drove a number of young Trotskyists to form a splinter group, which claimed that the analysis of the Russian régime and its bureaucracy should be carried further in the light of the new facts. Going back to the reasoning of the founder of the Fourth International, they came to the conclusion that the Stalinist bureaucracy had become a true ruling class.

The revolt and the subsequent breakaway by the young Trotskyist dissenters in 1948 was apparently based on a point of secondary importance : the designation of the Soviet ruling group. In fact, the real issue was the whole Trotskyist doctrine, which the expellees, grouped around the review Socialisme ou Barbarie, were subsequently to condemn as 'ideological conservatism'. [16]

Taking issue with Trotskyist dogma, which saw in Stalinism a phenomenon that was purely political and nothing else, Socialisme ou Barbarie asserted that the Russian bureaucracy was a veritable ruling class, oppressive and exploitative, the social expression of new economic forms and new models of exploitation. [17]

This was now a real innovation in the framework of Marxist theory, since a third socio-economic category had been created, besides free-enterprise capitalism and socialism. [18] This new category was State capitalism, resulting in a form of development common to all the industrialized countries and all modern societies, and which had its origins in the world of before the Great War. This development is characterized by an increasing concentration of property in the hands of those who also control the management of commercial enterprises and hold the reins of State. The bureaucracy is the new class which benefits from this development : it achieves the ambition of every capitalist, for it is the sole and undisputed wielder of economic and political power; it has no trade-union opposition to cope with, let alone political opposition.

By comparison with the bourgeoisie of the Western countries, the Stalinist bureaucracy possesses one peculiarity which might at first sight seem to deny its class nature : its members are not individually owners of the means of production. To the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, this is not a decisive argument, however. For a start, the Russian bureaucracy possesses all the attributes of a property-owning class -- it decides upon and directs investment, fixes prices and wages, appoints and dismisses local functionaries and enjoys a standard of living and a way of life which in the West would be the apanage of the bourgeoisie. At all events, and this is the second point, it controls the means of production and enjoys the attendant privileges collectively : but this is merely a question of legal status which in no way alters the bureaucracy's real situation as a class. Besides, in the capitalist countries it is no longer true today that the property-owning middle classes are the major beneficiaries of class exploitation, it is the executives and managers of industry and commerce and the higher civil servants who corner the benefits of the system, and this not by virtue of a formal title to property, but from the fact of their situation in the productive set-up.

The bureaucracy of the Eastern countries thus possesses all the characteristics of a dominant class : from its existence, the analysts of Socialisme ou Barbarie deduce that the Soviet Union is a society of exploitation and that the Soviet State is a capitalist State. [19]

Certainly this analysis of bureaucracy is not entirely novel : quantities of ink have flowed on the subject, from Hegel's Principles of the Philosophy of Right down to Djilas's The New Class. But Lenin and Bukharin, Max Weber and Trotsky all considered the problem from the political angle. Only Roberto Michels had gone one step further, by asserting that the management of an enormous volume of capital gave the managers a power comparable with that enjoyed by the actual owner. [20] But the first man to speak of 'bureaucratic collectivism' and explicitly to designate the Russian ruling group as a class was Bruno Rizzi, who expressed these ideas within the framework of a critique of Trotskyism when he left the movement just before the war.

In his dispute with Trotsky, Bruno Rizzi maintained [21] that the Soviet State is not a workers' State because the capitalist class has not been replaced by the working class but by the bureaucratic class, which includes State and Party officials, technicians and experts of every kind. He estimated this new ruling class as comprising fifteen million people, and the share of production monopolized by them on the eve of war at 40 per cent. [22] This class corresponds to a new form of social organization and results from a considerable growth in the forces of production, which excludes, according to Rizzi, any likelihood of a return to capitalism in the USSR.

The divergences with Trotsky are therefore apparent; but it was on the basis of the latter's analyses that Bruno Rizzi (who had already evinced an intuitive perception of the new Russian ruling class in 1936, in his Oû va l'URSS ?) was to give a closely reasoned development of his thesis, and indeed he himself readily acknowledged the debt.

While it may thus be affirmed that the analysis of the Russian bureaucracy as a class springs from a common source (Trotskyism), from which both Rizzi and the founders of Socialisme ou Barbarie had drawn in abundance, and while we may even assume that the former had some influence on the latter, the differences of detail and, above all, the clearly contradictory conclusions drawn by the two parties from these common premises should not be overlooked . [23]

Whereas Rizzi lumped together the Nazi and fascist régimes with that of the USSR, applying to all three the term 'bureaucratic collectivism', the collaborators of Socialisme ou Barbarie regarded the fascist bureaucracy as a purely political phenomenon, since private property and its individual beneficiaries still existed; this was not the case in the Soviet Union, where the very form of property had been modified. The chief point of difference, however, is that Rizzi, convinced of the convergence of all types of régime towards bureaucratic collectivism, remained highly sceptical of socialism's chances of ever winning the day. Consequently he even went so far as to propose an alliance between the proletariat and fascism to oppose capitalism. [24] The collaborators of Socialisme ou Barbarie, on the other hand, considered socialism inevitable, and looked on their task as a preliminary demystification necessary to any reconstruction of revolutionary theory. [25]

For this reason, their analysis did not confine itself to an examination of economic and social relationships in the USSR : since it was supposed to provide the fundamentals of a revolutionary theory readjusted to fit contemporary reality, it went further than this. It endeavoured to answer the question 'Why was the class hatched by the October Revolution a new class ? Why was there no Thermidor, as Trotsky had maintained, i.e. a simple about-face ?' In order to answer this fundamental question, it was necessary to take a closer look at the bureaucratic phenomenon, to ask oneself if it represented an accidental, specifically Russian social form, or whether it represented a new, universal category which made it possible to understand the development of modern capitalism. Detailed study of the Russian economy, the social and economic relationships characterizing Soviet society, shows that it is going through the last phase of capitalist development -- that in which the development of technology has reached a peak, in which the concentration of capital and of power is at its most intense. P. Chaulieu has deduced from this that the bureaucracy is that precise class that corresponds to this stage in the development of capitalism, and that it has its roots in the absolute concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the Party. Now the concentration of political and economic power is a phenomenon which also characterizes the capitalist countries of the West -- the only difference is that in these countries it is not yet absolute. In this sense, the countries of the East present a picture of a concentration that is complete -perfect, one might say, from the point of view of a French, English or American industrialist. There is nothing to stand in the way of the march of the economy and the reality of exploitation : neither opposition parties, nor trade unions, nor even quarrelling capitalists. Just as it wants an entirely controlled economy (a process already begun by monopolistic mergers, nationalization and State controls), the bourgeoisie aspires to become a bureaucracy. In this sense, it may be said that the bureaucratization which is a reality in the Eastern countries is an irresistible tendency in the countries of the West. [26]

At this point, it may well be asked whether modern bureaucratic societies or societies in the process of bureaucratization have preserved all the classical features of exploitation : individual appropriation of surplus value by the owner of the means of production. By virtue of the fact that the bureaucracy operates as a collective entity, and because of the separation, in the West, of the functions of management and of ownership. the decisive boundary is no longer that between the propertyowner and the propertyless but that between management and operatives. [27]

Whereas the contradictions postulated by classical Marxism (between the individual nature of property and the social nature of labour) have been muted in the new situation which applies in all the developed countries, new contradictions have been introduced which the system cannot and never will resolve : the contradictions which result from the total cleavage between managers and workers, and which present-day capitalism must preserve in order to survive. The worker reduced to the condition of a mere robot. with no power of decision or control over his own actions, also loses his spirit of creativity and will tend to abandon all initiative in his work. But since the system of production is becoming technically and intellectually more and more complex. it can only continue to function with the active and willing assistance of those very people whose personalities are being eradicated. Consequently, the system needs a spirit of initiative in its workers in order to function; but if it were to acquire such a spirit, the ruling class would lose its permanent basis of domination -- the separation of management and work-force.

What interests us here is not to verify the accuracy of this analysis or to compare it with the facts, but to see in what way it has made inroads on orthodox Marxist analysis and, above all. to see how it has inspired and given consistency to a new revolutionary theory. The renewal (or revision, depending on the standpoint of the observer) of Marxist theory with regard both to capitalist society and to the society calling itself socialist is too obvious to need further emphasis; the lumping together of the régimes of East and West, their integration in a system of bureaucratization founded on new social relationships is of the very greatest interest for the development of leftist ideas. True or false, Socialisme ou Barbarie's analysis of bureaucracy is the only one that exists, if we exclude liberal thought on the one hand and Marxist-Leninist thought on the other. But the most striking and interesting feature of the approach consists in the potential development it allows. Such developments relate to three essential aspects of the leftist movement :

(1) the application of the bureaucratic pattern to modern society and the contemporary labour movement;

(2) the content of socialism as it appears in the (perhaps negative) light of the experience of Bolshevism triumphant;

(3) the conclusions which may be drawn from it with regard to the forms of organization of the revolutionary movement.

These are all questions which lie at the very heart of leftist theory; we shall return to them after considering the philosophical critique of Marxism.

[1] E. Morin, A Autocritique (Paris. 1959), p. 159. The best analysis of this state of mind among intellectuals is that by D. Caute, Communism and the French Intellectuals (André Deutsch. 1964).

[2] S. de Beauvoir, La Force des choses 1 Paris, 1963).

[3] J. Ardagh, The New French Revolution (Seeker & Warburg, 1968), Chapter 11.

[4] M. Merleau-Ponty : Tour la vérité, Les Temps modernes, 4 (1946).

[5] Benno Sarel : 'Lénine, Trotsky, Staline et le problème du parti révolutionnaire', Les Temps modernes, 73 (November 1951).

[6] Cl. Lefort : 'La Contradiction de Trotsky et le problème révolutionnaire', Les Temps modernes, 39 (January 1949).

[7] cf. in particular, besides the articles of Benno Sarel and Cl. Lefort already quoted, the latter's 'Sociologie du communisme', Les Temps modernes, 50 (December 1949).

[8] J.-P. Sartre and M. Merleau-Ponty : 'Les Jours de notre vie', Les Temps modernes, 51 (January 1951).

[9] From which Raymond Aron cut himself off from the start, attracted as he was by British Labourism, which he considered to have effected the takeover from the ruling class 'without any rupture or upheaval'. 'Chance du socialisme', Les Temps modernes, 2 (1 November 1945).

[10] cf. his article 'Les Communistes et la paix', Les Temps modernes, 84 (November 1952).

[11] cf. his article 'Pour la vérité' quoted above, and his book Humanisme et terreur (Paris, 1948), where the subject is dealt with in greaterdepth.

[12] This was not the only obstacle : the Trotskyists reproduced in their very organization a Leninist, even a Stalinist, model, so precluding any development in this respect.

[13] E. Morin, Autocritique, p. 77.

[14] L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Pathfinder Press, 1972); see in particular Section IX : 'What is the USSR ?'

[15] It has some glaring weaknesses : how could Trotsky, good Marxist that he was, so readily accept that an economy with a socialist base could produce a superstructure (i.e. the bureaucracy) so utterly nonsocialist ?

[16] Cl. Lefort : 'Organisation et Parti'. Socialisme ou Barbarie, 26 (November-December 1958).

[17] cf., for example, Socialisme ou Barbarie, 1 (March-April 1949), Editorial; and 9 (April-May 1952).

[18] In the early days, the review and the group hoped to remain within the limits of Marxist thought : indeed. the traces of Trotskyism were never entirely to disappear. Thus in the nineteen -fifties P. Chaulieu reiterated the analysis of the Russian bureaucracy as the result of a degeneration of the October Revolution, 'Réponse au camarade Pannekoek', Socialisme ou Barbarie, 14 (April-May 1954).

[19] Besides the articles already quoted. see P. Chaulieu, 'Sur le contenu du socialisme', Socialisme ou Barbarie. 17 (July-September 1955).

[20] For a historical analysis of the various concepts of bureaucracy, see P. Naville, 'La Bureaucratic et la révolution', Arguments, 17 (first quarter, 1960).

[21] Bruno Rizzi, La Bureaucratisation du monde (published privately, 1939).

[22] ibid., pp. 21-4 and 83. This estimate is the same as Trotsky's, who backed it with detailed statistics : op. cit., pp. 138-41.

[23] La Bureaucratisation du monde was published by the author in 500 copies. The war and Trotsky's death prevented discussion of the ideas contained therein during the 1940s. Chaulieu may possibly have known of it (a fact which seems to be suggested by the author of the article 'Les classes sociales et M. Touraine', Socialisme ou Barbarie. 27 (April-May 1959), note 13).

[24] Rizzi, op. M Chapter 7. One might also mention Rizzi's violent anti-semitism ('The struggle of National Socialism[against the Jews] ... is practically just' -- p. 295), which was not shared by Socialisme ou Barbarie.

[25] The all-embracing nature of the analysis undertaken by Socialisme ou Barbarie and the political conclusions which that group drew from it mark it off straight away from this review of theories otherwise close to it. It should not be forgotten that the discussion of the nature of the Russian ruling group had not ceased to preoccupy Trotskyist circles the world over since the beginning of the nineteen-thirties. Their origins may be traced to the platform of the Workers' Opposition in 1921 (reproduced in Socialisme ou Barbarie, 35[January-March 19641). The Trotskyist Rakovsky wrote in 1929 that the bureaucratically deformed State of the USSR had turned into a bureaucratic State. Trotsky took up this analysis on his own account (in The Revolution Betrayed) but drew no conclusions from it. Thus B. Rizzi was simply continuing in the same tradition, only he carried the discussion on to a higher plane (Trotsky was to acknowledge as much in The USSR in War, published in September 1939). By contrast, James Burnham, Max Schachtman and others merely copied Rizzi's arguments ; cf. P. Naville's article in Arguments quoted above and I. Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 463.

In fact James Burnham's theory of the 'managerial revolution' falls well short of Rizzi's analysis in the poverty of the concepts it employs and in the series of hypotheses it postulated which subsequently proved false. Incidentally Burnham abandoned not only Marxism but the revolutionary movement : he came to deny any possibility of socialist revolution, on the grounds that the proletariat does not have ownership of the means of production in bourgeois society, and consequently has no opportunity of reinforcing its position as a class, in contrast to the bourgeoisie under the feudal system. J. Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Penguin, 1962), pp. 69-70.

The difference between Socialisme ou Barbarie and a man like Burnham is that the latter regards bureaucracy as a necessary parasitic phenomenon arising out of the technical requirements of a modern economy. The analysis given by Socialisme ou Barbarie, by contrast, concludes that it is a social phenomenon comprehensible only in the context of the development of the class struggle in modern society. As Lefort has written, Socialisme ou Barbarie begins its analysis where Burnham left off; see 'Sur l'article de Morin'. Arguments, 4 (June-September 1957).

As for Milovan Djilas's book The New Class it provides an illustration of these considerations, but at a very crude conceptual level. Its chief value is as a personal testament, but even from this angle it is disappointing.

[26] See, in particular, Chaulieu, 'Sur le contenu du socialisme', Socialisme ou Barbarie, 17 (July-September 1955), and A. Garros, 'L'Union de la gauche socialiste', 26 (November-December 1958).

[27] J. Burnham was well aware that property and management no longer coincide, but his analysis is impaired both by a number of false predictions (such as. for example. that of general unemployment in the capitalist countries) and by the purely circumstantial conclusions he draws from them, notably those relating to the existence of managers, the social basis for which he completely fails to demonstrate. Socialisme ou Barbarie's analyses of modern capitalist society may be found in the collected articles of P. Chaulieu : 'Le Mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne', Nos. 31, 32 and 33 (December 1960, April-June 1961 and December-February 1961-2).

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Modern leftism, in that it is an attempt to renew the theory and practice of revolution, can only be a success if it engages in a ruthless critique of the Marxist-Leninist system, that system which has monopolized revolutionary thinking since 1917. More than this, leftism is first and foremost the absolute negation of any revolutionary ideology (ideology being understood in the sense of 'false consciousness'). The first obstacle is encountered at the level of the Soviet social system; this presented itself to the world as the epitome of socialism. The picture was marred somewhat by the analysis of the bureaucratic class. It was further spoilt by contrasting Marxist thought with the model pretending to incarnate it. This confrontation with the facts led to a philosophical revisionism of Marxism itself, an attempt to return to the original springs of Marxism. In the past, any work which aimed at re-launching revolutionary thought came up against the totalitarian pretensions (in the etymological sense) of 'orthodox' Marxism, which presented itself as a closed, scientific and final system. Not only all social life but all the sciences were contained by this veritable cosmogony, with its own holy writ, its official priesthood, its deviations and its heresies. The important thing was to break the vicious circle, to crack the monopoly of theory held by the high priests of communism. Revision, then, consists of Marxist self-questioning; an application of Marxist methods to the very content of the doctrine. In France this work is associated with the name of the journal Arguments, founded at the beginning of 1957. In fact, of course, the Arguments team had no monopoly of doubt on the subject of theoretical Marxism, and moreover the solid content of its revisionism is very poor. On the other hand, this journal put the problem very clearly and its chief merit lay in having enabled the French public to become familiar with the experiments in revisionism carried out in Central Europe in the twenties and thirties. So it was not so much a matter of revising as of evoking a revision already carried out thirty years earlier, of presenting and translating texts hitherto unpublished in France.

This time-lag is an interesting phenomenon. Why did it take such an unconscionable time to tackle the basic philosophical problem, which consisted in surpassing Marx's economic analysis, the strategic and tactical thinking of Lenin, the totalitarian dictatorship of Stalin in order to arrive at the philosophical level reached by Marx and Engels in the period from 1843 to 1848 ? The delay was primarily due to Marxism's late introduction into France, and to the simplified and schematic form in which this took place. [1] It is also due to the existence of an authentically French socialist tradition which was very deep-rooted in the urban proletariat. The great majority of militants only knew of Marxism through the October Revolution. Subsequently, in the course of the nineteen-twenties, a whole constellation of left-wing intellectuals discovered Marx via Hegel and deepened the philosophical dimensions of his teaching. [2]

However, their membership of the Communist Party marks the cessation of all philosophical thought throughout the thirties, forties and fifties, the years of 'glaciation' as E. Morin calls them. [3]

The chief reason for the time-lag was thus the Party's absolute authority in matters of ideology. Not until the liberation of France was there any attempt at philosophical revisionism.

Merleau-Ponty was by that time asking questions of Marxism which were truly philosophical, examining the finality of Stalinist violence and, on the eve of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, writing that in order to understand the famous Stalinist 'degeneration' it was necessary to go back, not to the origins of Bolshevism, but to the well-springs of Marxism itself. [4] This he was himself to do, basing his attitude on the writings of G. Lukács and K. Korsch and ending up by denying dialectical materialism. But Merleau-Ponty's analysis was that of a disappointed man, who was ultimately to seek a 'reconciliation' with bourgeois liberalism. Les Aventures de la dialectique contains the seed of all future debates, but it was not until the Twentieth Congress. Poznan, the workers' councils of Hungary and the intervention of Soviet tanks that a mass of communist intellectuals were to give in to a kind of collective catharsis which enabled them to denounce the gods they had previously adored.

What led them to re-examine hitherto unquestioned standpoints was the 'exploding' of Stalinism. as it was called by the editorial to the first issue of Arguments. [5] The editorial team's first intention had been to seek, under the innumerable layers of the Marxist-Leninist palimpsest, the first, original script. This meant going back to first principles, denouncing scholasticism, 'de-dogmatizing' knowledge, questioning Marx's thought by applying his own method to it. [6] But the effects of the grand revisionist design entertained by Arguments did not entirely measure up to expectations; notably the philosophical discussions never reached a level comparable with that of the pre-war German school; the revisionism of Arguments was entirely one of form and not of content, for which one had to consult Lukács, Adorno and Marcuse. The old vigour was missing, Marxism was too compromised, associated as it was with totalitarian forms of government, and it seemed as though no philosophical renewal could imbue it with new life. [7]

In order to understand the meaning of the philosophical revision of Marxism, and remembering that the stakes were the emergence of a new theory of the proletarian movement, it should not be forgotten that orthodox Marxism had set itself up as a 'scientific' system well before the advent of Stalinism.

It was therefore not enough to demonstrate the extreme poverty of Stalinist philosophy, it was still necessary to go back to its roots. This meant the necessity of applying to Marxism its own analytical concepts, in fact to undertake the same operation as Marx : did when he examined the meaning of the German philosophy of his day. Now Marx's critical method is that of his philosophical writings, where he used the dialectic as a category of logic. It was therefore vitally necessary to re-examine the philosophical writings of the young Marx, his Hegelian origins and, of course, his development.

But in the years which followed the Russian Revolution, this kind of undertaking was by no means an obvious necessity, since the 'official' Marxism that had come to be accepted was that of Capital and Engels's Anti-Düring. The heritage which had been assimilated was that of the critique of political economy, the enunciation of laws governing trends (fall in the rate of profitability, concentration of capital, proletarization of the masses, inevitability of economic crisis). Marxism had been turned into an economic determinism of universal validity; a science of society and social development; a set of laws which need only be consulted in order to determine whether or not a revolution has any chance of success, or whether a party is opportunist, adventurist or simply counter-revolutionary. This system, as has been said, was something of a cosmogony, since it even applied to the natural sciences : the dialectic, which had become the supreme science, governed the development of things (dialectical materialism) as well as of beings. Consequently it was possible to have anti-Marxist sciences, or, on the other side of the fence, Marxist interpretations of genetics (Lysenko).

The 'scientistic' and economic interpretation of Marxism goes back, without doubt, to the last period of the writings of Marx and Engels. It is not necessary to consider here the validity of 'Marxian' theories according to which Marx is supposed to have been betrayed by his epigones, starting with Engels, and again according to which the economist Marx had never renounced the philosophical work of his youth, etc. [8] What is of chief interest here, by contrast, is to establish the origin of the 'scientistic' trend.

There is certainly no doubt that Engels had been attracted by the natural sciences all his life, and had shown marked positivist tendencies. It was he, therefore, who gave the most complete account of dialectical materialism, and although Marx declared himself to be in entire agreement with it, it was in fact Engels's text which provided the work of reference for the German Marxists of the end of the nineteenth century. Engels regarded the dialectic as the science of the general laws of movement and development of nature, of human society and of thought. Its central principle he saw as negation, and he gives concrete examples, even extending into mathematics (the multiplication of two negative values gives a positive value :[-X] X [-X] = +X2). [9]

Besides this, Engels predicted the consequences of the economic development of advanced capitalist régimes (the United States, France, Great Britain) and came to the conclusion that socialism would come about of itself, by the natural and necessary process of evolution. [10]

By virtue of this approach, he broke very explicitly with the voluntarist period of Marxism, that of the Communist Manifesto, but also broke off relations with Blanqui, and put forward a determinist and evolutionist theory which applied as much to things as to thinking beings. On the philosophical level, this expressed itself in the form of a rather sketchy materialism, in which matter becomes a category apart, an absolute of which consciousness is only the reflection. The dialectic, having become the science of nature, was removed from the dimension of philosophy and gave way to the concept of the 'reflection'.

After Marx's death, Engels set about propagating the whole of this bundle of concepts, transmitting them notably to his spiritual heir, Karl Kautsky. Lenin in turn took Kautsky as his model, 'guided' in this by the philosophical conceptions of Gyorgy Plekhanov. In his great philosophical work of 1908, Materialism and Empiriocriticism, he was to prove much more of a materialist than a dialectician, and his ideas reflected, as we shall see, the scientistic positivism of the nineteenth century. [11]

The symmetry between the Kautskyist and the Leninist interpretations of Marxism stops, however, at the philosophical level. Both were convinced that dialectical and historical materialism represented the realization of philosophy which Marx had prophesied. But on the political scale, or if one prefers on the level of revolutionary praxis, Kautsky (and German social democracy with him) remained the circumspect evolutionist, waiting for the time when German society would of its own emerge into the Democratic Republic, [12] while Lenin, by contrast, proved to be an ultra-voluntarist, the natural successor to traditional Blanquism. In other words, Lenin broke all ties between doctrine and political action, whereas his 'orthodoxy' in matters of philosophy enabled him systematically to underestimate the independent role of the proletariat, since the strict determinism to which he attached himself gave the right to interpret the laws of the historical dialectic to the 'guardians of bourgeois science'. [13]

The mechanistic materialism of Lenin. who saw the origin of all phenomena in matter (understood in the physical sense), had the further consequence of entirely separating being and consciousness, of making one the reflection of the other, and hence of denying all class consciousness that was independent of and did not flow from those who knew how to interpret the laws of scientific socialism -- the professional revolutionaries. [14]

It will be seen that such a conception, which freezes the dialectical processes (and which, it should be noted, represents a return to the Kantian thing-in-itself) resolves itself, in the last analysis, into a simple causal determinism, the precise image of the positivist conceptions of the last half of the nineteenth century. It makes it possible to enunciate eternal laws (dogmas), specifying at the same time that they may only be accepted or rejected en bloc (the latter alternative being necessarily counter-revolutionary). Here, then, is the seed of ideological totalitarianism, and it only remained for Lenin's successors to pursue the propositions contained in this 'orthodox Marxism' to their logical conclusion.

When, in 1923, Georg Lukács published a volume of studies on Marxian dialectics, it was not his intention to contradict the extollers of 'scientific' Marxism, but to apply the dialectic to social phenomena, and first and foremost to class consciousness. [15] Nor was Karl Korsch, in his Marxism and Philosophy published the same year, any more concerned to criticize the Authorized Version directly : he simply put the question of the link between the philosophy of the proletariat and the social revolution. [16]

In the last analysis, these two books have the same object : to apply Marxist (dialectical) method to the development of Marxism : consequently, and to simplify this account, we shall give a schematic analysis of this, for the features which are of concern in the present work are the conclusions that were subsequently to be drawn by the leftists with regard to the problem of revolutionary theory.

Both attack the materialist notions of contemporary Marxists, which separate matter from spirit, making one a simple reflection of the other. This philosophical assertion, which provides the basis for the primacy of the substructure over the superstructure, is not dialectic, for the conscious activity of an individual is on the objective side of the process, a datum which Lukács contrasts with both being and consciousness. [17] Only the process is an objective reality, for in it subject and object, being and consciousness are united. 'We find the subject and object of the social process coexisting in a state of dialectical interaction. [18] So much so that even the simple fact of the knowledge produces an objective change in its object. To stop at the reality of the mere object would be to grasp only the appearance of things, and this would mean staking everything on their immediacy.

The only valid philosophical category is totality, and only by dialectical method can totality be appreciated, whereas the method which Lukács calls 'reflective' only apprehends a false objectivity. The latter is the logical method of the bourgeoisie, which cannot transcend immediacy because it is the prisoner of its position, whereas the proletariat, by the specific dialectic of its class situation, is moved to find a way out of it, since it alone possesses the understanding of the process, hence of the totality. In this conception, consciousness is not a simple reflection of the process of history, but is truly the agent by which history may be transformed : at the moment of revolution the separation between subject and object disappears completely; a fraction of humanity perceives the totality and thus raises itself to the level of self-consciousness.

This represents a positive return to the younger Marx, still impregnated with the philosophy of Hegel, who rejected the Kantian distinction between 'is' and 'ought'. The question for him, and for Marx, is resolved in the notion of historical 'presence' (Dasein). [19]

The identity of subject and object in the process is categorically opposed to the materialism of a Kautsky, a PIekhanov or a Lenin. It is true that Lukács does not make a frontal attack on Lenin, aiming rather at the German reformists, whose theory of evolution without revolution is a direct consequence of the separation of the dialectic from historical materialism. But by accusing Engels of 'ambiguity' in his notion of the thing-in-itself, of having considered concepts the reflections of 'real' objects, he called in question the whole basis of 'scientific socialism'. He does not hesitate to write that the dialectic of nature leads on to a pre-Hegelian materialism which becomes a form of 'inverted Platonism'. [20] on this point, Korsch is more explicit in accusing Lenin of returning purely and simply to Kant. By separating being and consciousness, not only does Lenin deny any dialectical relationship between theory and practice, but he also makes being, the 'is', into an absolute -- and ideal -- category. [21]

It is evident that the philosophical argument boiled down to an assessment of the revolutionary movement, and of whether it is or is not an independent agent of the historical dialectic; it is the very primacy of the Party which is here in question, since it is the proletariat as a class which is able to grasp and overcome historical realities, starting with its own alienation. [22] In other words, the essential element in historical evolution does not consist in the contradictions between the forces of production and the relationships of production, but in the proletariat's consciousness of this. The proletariat's awareness of the contradictions is not direct; it appreciates them only through its own alienation. The decisive factor in social change is therefore alienation (or, as Lukács calls it, 'reification'). It is no longer a question of objective, observable factors which may be deduced from the laws of the dialectic, as the orthodoxies (whether Leninist or Kautskyist) maintain, but of a factor of consciousness, a superstructure. This is very important, and not just in order to understand the vigour of communist attacks on Lukács but to the very comprehension of leftism itself, which, as will be seen, places very great importance on alienation in its vision of capitalist society and its overthrow, both as a universal, omnipresent phenomenon and as one which is directly communicated to the consciousness of the workers, without benefit of any privileged intermediary. [23]

In rediscovering the philosophical dimension of Marxism, revisionism also questions the very meaning of revolutionary theory. Korsch is far more explicit than Lukács, but his reasoning follows on from their common conception of philosophy as the spiritual expression of the world. Theory, says Korsch, is nothing other than the general expression of the real movement of history. [24] Ideology, on the other hand, is thought congealed into a fixed pattern, which no longer expresses a living reality. This definition, drawn directly from Hegel's definition of philosophy ('an epoch captured in a thought') and which Marx : was to apply to the movement of thought in his own time, enables Korsch to apply himself to a dialectical examination of Marxism. Is it still a theory of the development of the proletariat, or is it, by contrast, an ideology in the Marxian sense (false consciousness) in that it disguises true social relationships and the true course of historical development ?

The importance of this distinction must be emphasized at once; it makes it possible to unmask a supposedly immutable system, and hand down to leftism the Korschian concept of revolutionary theory, defined as the current praxis of the proletariat. At the time when he was writing his Marxism and Philosophy in 1923, Korsch limited himself to applying this concept to the history of Marxism, in which he distinguished three phases. The period from 1843 to 1848 was that in which Marxism expressed the revolutionary tendencies of the European proletariat; 1848 up to the end of the century corresponded to the rise of reaction and the weakening of the class struggle. Marxism then became critical of political economy and enunciated the theses relating to peaceful evolutionism. From the end of the nineteenth century an attempt was made to return to revolutionary Marxism (Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg).

Whereas in the first period the Marxist critique was a totality (philosophical, economic, political and ideological), in the second period it gave special weight to the economic element, becoming a scientific critique of the economy of a bourgeois State but not necessarily leading to a revolutionary praxis. To convince oneself of this, says Korsch, one need only compare the Communist Manifesto with the programmes of the European socialist parties, both East and West. [25]

Subsequently, Korsch, having broken with the KPD (German CP), pushed his analysis even further, showing that Marxism was tainted with Jacobinism from the start, because it stemmed from the philosophy of the bourgeois revolution. [26] Because it remained faithful to the political forms of the bourgeois revolution, because it overestimated the ability of the State to act as the decisive instrument of social revolution and because it identified the development of the capitalist economy with the social revolution of the working class, Marxism became a brake on the revolution; from being a revolutionary theory, it became a pure ideology. [27]

While the transformation of Marxism into a scientific system based on economic evolution still expressed a degree of reality in the course of the second phase, the 'congealing' of this line of thought from the end of the nineteenth century onwards was to establish a final divorce between Marxism and reality. According to Korsch, Bernstein's reformism better expressed the reality of the German labour movement before the First World War than did Kautsky's intransigent and 'orthodox' scientism. Similarly, in the interwar period, Marxism became estranged from social struggle : it had built itself up into a State philosophy, while 'proletarian communism', as a theory of the real labour movement, only seemed to survive thanks to isolated thinkers or groups like the council communists. [28]

The full importance of Lukács's and Korsch's revisionism is evident : most significant is the return to philosophical analysis which resulted from it, i.e. to reflection on Marxism using its own concepts (the dialectic). The outcome of this was a relativization of revolutionary ideologies which produced the exact opposite of Marxism-Leninism : whereas the latter presented itself as the revolutionary theory, incontrovertible because scientific, Korsch saw all revolutionary thought in a dialectical relationship with the real class movement, so defining it as necessarily changeable as that movement changed. [29]

While Korsch and Lukács were making a philosophical critique of Lenin's materialism, it is interesting to compare it with the epistemological theories of the times (the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth). This analysis is all the more valuable for the fact that it was carried out by Anton Pannekoek, whose political notions of working-class praxis are central to the current theoretical renewal, and whose scientific credentials have never been questioned. [30]

Pannekoek, an astronomer with a world reputation, shows in a very concise study of Dietzgen, Mach and Avenarius carried out in the light of modern epistemological notions (the theory of relativity) that the matter which provides the key concept of Lenin's work is a mere abstraction. Consequently Lenin, who criticizes Mach and Avenarius for their subjectivism (according to which reality is composed of purely mental sensations or elements), has failed to reach the level of their systems. Avenarius considers the dualism between the central nervous system and the sensations, which, according to him, are only variations of it; Lenin regresses in time, by comparison with this notion, by identifying nature with physical matter and by creating an absolute opposition between matter and ideal, energy and consciousness. [31] But the whole development of modern physics, says Pannekoek, rejects the material notion of matter (which refers to ether, atoms and molecules), imposing an abstract concept instead, one of energy, waves and light. In short, the thing-in-itself is nothing without the representation of it we ourselves make : matter is everything which actually exists, whether in nature or in our own minds.