[A praxis discussion document presented on 14th November 2007 .
Note here that 'working class' is used in its wider economic (=proletariat) sense.
Also note that while the risks of co-option from becoming involved in popular struggles are not dealt with here, the idea is that the Praxis organisation will not itself directly engage in reformist struggles, and will rather leave that for non-revolutionary popular organisations, which albeit may include Praxis members in an individual capacity.]
As socialists we propose the revolutionary transformation of society. We propose to run our communities, our industry and our planet directly through a system of assemblies and councils. We hold that it is not enough simply to institute democracy, but that a fundamental overhaul of the ecomony is necessary. We believe in the abolition of class society.
As workers then we form a minority position within the working class as a whole, most of whom (if they consider these positions) currently reject them. Even those workers who agree with socialism do not necessarily have the confidence or the capacity to act on those beliefs, or they consider such ideas impractical in the realworld. We are therefore faced with a very complex problem. We could convince workers in the abstract that socialism is a good idea. That the abolition of class society is necessary. We could win the hearts and minds of millions to our ideas, and yet we would find that we had still very little power to implement our ideas and programmes.
This problem is twofold. First there are few extant examples of workers in the UK who have changed their conditions through being powerful. There are also no current examples of socialism in practice.
Many workers too have little or no experience of collective power. They have no concept that collectively we have power, or they have no faith that if they do something others will to (and rightly so because at the moment, those others won’t). So we have some false consciousness and a prisoners dilema that keeps our class from taking action.
More than this we also face an ever present problem of clientellism. The numbers of people queing up to do things ‘for us’ are endless. While someone else is being paid to sort things out for us why should we take action? This kind of thinking reinforces passivity and helplessness, and amongst those of our class with the lowest social capital it becomes a negative cycle of reification of powerlessness.
If we really want to build socialism this is the major battle we have to fight – not armies, tanks, guns or thermonuclear warheads (although we will need to fight those too at some stage) but in the here and now we have to fill our fellow workers with the confidence, skills, capacity and determination to take action collectively on our shared interests. It is only in doing so that we transcend our otherwise hegemonic special interests, and meet as proletarians.
What this means in practice is fighting for shared objectives and goals collectively in a way in which we can develop a positive feedback loop for the participants. We must turn “If I fight I will lose,” into “We won the last time when we stood together, we can win again.”
If this is done systemically and programmatically throughout mass worker organisations in our workplaces and communities then we can raise the ambitions of the class, and move beyond the struggles of defence to an offensive programme, collectively determined.
As participants in these struggles and in the movements of the class we can add our input to create a systemic drive towards victories which are most likely to increase the confidence and capacity of our fellow workers.
If through programmatic involvement in struggles we can pick the campaigns and battles which are most likely to enhance the collective power and confidence of our fellow workers and provide a platform for further struggles we can begin to move towards a strategy of attack.
No one fight is going to emerge which will lead the charge to revolution. Even very radical movements which are successful will not collapse capitalism. Capitalism has proven itself a very adaptable system. The only way we are going to crush it is through developing the kind of powerful mass organisations which are capable of strategically seizing industry and civil society on a vast enough scale to be able to withstand the repression that will follow. Revolution is on such a scale that all we can hope for in the current period is to work towards it by building ever more powerful movements. A more powerful movement of workers could be on the cards which could force the repeal of anti-trade union legislation through a programme of direct action. A community movement could force the state to build X thousand new council houses, and an economic programme with enough backing could force the rescinding of the TINA (There Is No Alternative) mantra over privatisation and the hegemony of neoliberal economics, but in the here and now our involvement in mass organisations should be in giving the capacity for those organisations to really fight and win which will programmatically advance our class towards greater and greater power as we try and convince through the evidence of the victories in the struggles of our own making, that we really are capable of seizing the means of production and advancing towards socialism.
Too often the politics of despair dominates the discourse on the left. It was remarked earlier in the year by many participants on the libcom forum that the wobblies claims that the IWW in the UK will have 1000 members by late 2008 were ridiculous and impossible. This is despite somewhat silly ideological organisations on the continent being capable of boasting memberships much higher than this, and despite the fact that the IWW now stands at around 350 members (an advance on the 100, the organisation had this time last year). We can be very defeatist and self-limiting. This can lead to flights of fancy, where the decades of agitation required to build the movements necessary to challenge capitalism in this country are reduced to ’sparks’ which will throw the workers headlong into workers councils circumscribing all that work. That’s a convenient fantasy, but it is fantastic.
The work that went into building the Spanish CNT before the revolution in 1936 started in the 19th century. It was built up not through calls towards uprisings or spontaneity, nor by calling for revolution, but by systematically working on single issues, building up power, showing workers that they collectively had strength and linking the struggles in the here and now with a vision of a better future, in a down-to-earth practical way. Those who favoured skipping this necessary work of building confidence and capacity and winning struggles and reforms in favour of advancing from one victory then to the revolution were inevitably destructive towards the organisation of this task.
In the UK context that means fighting on a reform ticket in the here and now and at the same time being open that our vision is not just for new council houses, or the odd community land trust, but that we want social control of housing. It means saying we must smash social partnership and begin building union militants while we organise a parallel synicalist union and at the same time calling out to the new rank and file that we must build worker controlled industry unions that will hand us more power, but that we think are capable of and eventually will seize industry.
Now just as we believe it is necessary to be strategic about which struggles to involve ourselves in, it also becomes important to be strategic about how we believe struggles should be leveraged. Victory Y may be impossible at the moment, because it might rely on the procurement structures for public sector contractors to be changed (or whatever). It is not reformist to acknowledge this, and to say that to achieve victory Y we must first achieve victory Y, because for us nothing short of world revolution is the endgame. It becomes reformist, in the sense of counterposed to revolution, when the political organisation decides it no longer aspires to revolution. There is no sense in lying to people, or saying that we do not need to consider these things because they are ‘bourgeois’. In terms of strategic planning they are necessary to enable us to make advances, otherwise we risk alienating people by not explaining what it would mean if a given struggle or path were chosen.
The early socialists had minimum and maximum programmes to deal with this issue. The craven failure of the second international was that it liquidated itself by abandoning the maximum programmes in favour of reformism. The concept however is not a failure even if the early advocates of this methodology later abandonned socialism in favour of social democracy; there were structural reasons for this failure, and we are not out to ape these structural faiilures, but the concept that a socialist organisation can hold a position for a reform demand which will enable more radical future reforms is not a new one, and is more honest than Trotsky’s transitional demands, or the anarchist movement’s failure to engage with reality by not assessing how we can build real power for our class and always holding out the ultimate goal as immediately realisable.
The concept however that there is a (one, singular) minimum programme is dogmatic and undialectical. The reality is rather that a list of reform demands articulated by mass organisations will give way to more and more radical demands as these organisations grow in power and confidence, provided victories and struggles are fought and won by workers directly and not in a clientellist manner, and that revolutionaries are active in these preceding struggles putting forward a vision of a better society.
That is why popular victories should give way to more and more popular victories and why reform demands must be agitated for in a programmatic manner.
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