Text coloring decodes as
follows:
Black: | Ken Ellis |
Red: | Marx, Engels, Lenin |
Green: | Uncontested info, etc. |
Blue: | Correspondent, adversary, SLP-related |
Purple: | Unreliable Info |
Brown: | Inaccurate quote, but true to intent |
To embark upon
this more militant venture, I needed to find another work that
contained lots of theory and had many quotes from the founders
of socialism. I had also become curious about the Socialist Labor Party's
position on 'state power', which is also relevant to their rejection
of the dictatorship
of the proletariat. I found
just what I was looking for in Arnold Petersen's 1947 Preface to a SLP reprint of Engels' pamphlet: "The Development of Socialism
From Utopia to Science"
(which pamphlet, in his correspondence, Engels often referred
to as his 'Entwicklung' - the German word for 'development').
What follows is the analysis I worked on during
the last few months of '76, toward the end of my "career"
with the Socialist
Labor Party. The present
version of the analysis is a rather extensive expansion of the
original, but the general format is similar: A.P.'s text was split
into seventeen parts, and each part is analyzed separately. The
pages of A.P.'s Preface were numbered in Roman Numerals, and are included for reference. The cover page
of my original analysis included quotes that bore directly on
A.P.'s theses, so my cover page is reproduced here, slightly augmented
from the original:
1 - "[E]ach political party sets out to establish its rule in the state" ...
2 - "As soon as our Party is in possession of political power it has simply to expropriate the big landed proprietors just like the manufacturers in industry. Whether this expropriation is to be compensated for or not will to a great extent depend not upon us but the circumstances under which we obtain power, and particularly upon the attitude adopted by these gentry, the big landowners themselves. We by no means consider compensation as impermissible in any event; Marx told me (and how many times!) that in his opinion we would get off cheapest if we could buy out the whole lot of them."
3 - "If one thing is certain it is that our Party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown."
_____
4 - "Anarchy, then, is the great war-horse of their master Bakunin, who has taken nothing from the socialist systems except a set of slogans. What all socialists understand by anarchy is this: once the aim of the proletarian movement, the abolition of classes, has been obtained, the power of the State, which serves to keep the great majority of producers under the yoke of a numerically small exploiting minority, disappears, and the functions of government are transformed into simple administrative functions. The Alliance puts matters the other way round. It proclaims anarchy in the proletarian ranks as the surest means of breaking the powerful concentration of social and political forces in the hands of the exploiters. Under this pretext it demands of the International, at the very moment when the old world is seeking to crush it, that it should replace its organisation by anarchy ..."
5 - "Although the anarchist caricature of the working class movement has long since passed its zenith, the European and American governments are still so interested in its continued existence and are spending such large sums of money in its support, that we cannot entirely disregard the anarchists' heroic exploits ..."
1 Engels, "The Housing Question", 1872, MESW II,
p. 356
2 Engels, Nov. 1894, "The Peasant Question in France and Germany", MESW III,
p. 474
3 Engels, Jun. 1891,"Critique of Draft Social Democratic Program", MESW III,
p.435
4 Marx and Engels, Jun. 19, 1873, "Fictitious Splits in
International", NW 153, p. 74
5 Engels, Jan. 3, 1894, Note
from "The
Bakuninists at Work"
NW 153, p.125
MESW = Marx and Engels, Selected Works in 3 volumes, Progress Publishers,
1973
NW 153 = Anarchism+Anarcho-Syndicalism, New World Paperback,
1972
by: Ken Ellis
October 24, 1976
SLP 'translations' have a history of being terrible. In an October 24, 1891 letter to Sorge, Engels criticized the SLP for pirating his "The Development of Socialism From Utopia to Science" pamphlet, and then butchering its translation (MESC, p. 411):
... "[Socialism: Utopian and Scientific] will be published here in a translation prepared by Aveling and edited by me ... In face of this authorised translation the American pirate edition with its miserable English will be rather innocuous. It is moreover not even complete, whatever they found too difficult they have left out" ...
Some members
have made excuses for some of the "flaws"
or "discrepancies" within Party literature, including: 1) "There were differences in translations
between the literature that the SLP relied upon and what others
relied upon", and 2)
"The
early Party authors didn't have access to all the works that modern
scholars do." Those
were some of the excuses I heard from experienced members during
my early Party involvement. Aside from the very poor
translations, there is also the matter of faking 'translations' to aid and abet the process of confusing
and falsifying socialist ideas and principles.
The Marxist theory of the state was well illuminated
by Engels throughout his pamphlet. In his Preface
thereto, however, A.P. felt it necessary to criticize that theory
as outdated
and deficient so that he
could posit the SLP's
Socialist Industrial Union program
as a solution to the 'problems' that he found within Marxism,
but A.P.'s 'solutions' created even more problems.
On page XI of his Preface,
A.P. began 'correcting' his very own distortions of the Marxist theory of the state (p. XI):
1 "Engels's work speaks for itself. However, a certain section of the work requires brief comment and explanation. Reference is here made to the famous passages in which Engels outlines the passing of capitalism to Socialism. Engels wrote: "While it ["the capitalist mode of production"] forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialized [i.e., social production, albeit under private ownership], into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property." (Italics in original.)"
This passage outlined the prelude to, and the culmination of, the revolutionary act. A.P.'s very next words followed thus (p. XI):
"And again: 'When at last it [the State] becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection .... a repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary .... the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. [Italics ours.] The State is not 'abolished.' It dies out." (Italics in original.)"
This collection of rather disconnected snippets described the final stages of the transition to classless, stateless society. Conspicuous by its absence between A.P.'s excerpts was any passage descriptive of the state or classes during the proletarian dictatorship. Such a passage, omitted by A.P. right after the part about 'the proletariat seizing political power and turning the means of production into state property', went as follows (MESW III, p. 146):
"But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state."
These were to be some important tasks for the proletariat during its dictatorship. The paragraphs entitled "III. Proletarian Revolution" on page 67 of the SLP edition of Engels' pamphlet are also consistent with the tasks of the proletariat during its dictatorship (MESW III, p. 151):
"III. Proletarian Revolution
- Solution of the contradictions. The proletariat seizes the public
power, and by means of this transforms the socialised means of
production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public
property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production
from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives
their socialised character complete freedom to work itself out.
Socialised production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth
possible. The development of production makes the existence of
different classes of society thenceforth an anachronism. In proportion
as anarchy in social production vanishes, the political authority
of the state dies out. Man, at last the master of his own form
of social organisation, becomes at the same time the lord over
Nature, his own master - free.
"To accomplish this act of universal emancipation
is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly
comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature
of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class
a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous
act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical
expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism." {End of Engels' pamphlet.}
The reason why A.P. jumped from capitalism to classless, stateless society, and omitted the dictatorship of the proletariat, was to set the stage for his next major theoretical thrust (p. XI):
2 "Engels here admirably outlines the process toward what we now call "State Capitalism.""
Engels would have been the last to confuse socialism with state capitalism, a concept that was quite well understood, and had already been criticized quite thoroughly. As an example, the Prussian state of the time supposedly was an example of state capitalism at work. Engels explained in his pamphlet that private capitalism would evolve into state capitalism, as production on a broadly social basis previewed a future state-ownership mode of production, one in which all of the decisions would be made by salaried employees, and in which the capitalists would no longer be in direct control. Even in the text of the same pamphlet that A.P. prefaced, in a footnote on page 55 of the SLP's edition of "Socialism: From Utopia to Science", Engels attacked the "spurious socialism" of those who declared all state ownership to be socialistic (MESW III, p. 144):
... "For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the state has become economically inevitable, only then - even if it is the state of today that effects this - is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself. But of late, since Bismarck went in for state ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkeyism that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the state the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes - this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor shops of the Army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III's reign, the taking over by the state of the brothels."
A.P.'s absurd allegation that Engels did not know the difference between socialism and state capitalism was amply disproved by the very text of the pamphlet for which A.P. wrote his Preface. Since A.P. also quoted its text, he also had to have read it, so what excuse could he have had for his absurd charge that 'The socialism of Engels equals state capitalism', unless his misrepresentation was only setting the stage for what followed (p. XI):
3 "He assumed, however, that, once the proletariat had "seized political power," the transformation into Socialism would follow as a matter of course. We know better today."
This 'matter of course transformation
into socialism' theory just
happens to adequately assess Engels' assumption.
Marx himself stated that "One day the worker will have to seize political
supremacy to establish the new organisation of labour". One would not ordinarily expect
a socialist theoretician to criticize Engels' assumption
as incorrect, but such faulty critiques occur often
in A.P.'s writings. The problems created by his faulty critiques
then justified the creation of new solutions,
such as the Party's
SIU program.
When the most essential aspects of Marxism became fair targets for A.P.'s attacks, the results
often contradicted themselves. For example, the 'matter of course transformation
into socialism' theory ascribed
to Engels just happens to contradict a certain 'three-fold obstacle' theory that A.P. also ascribed to Marx and Engels
in "Proletarian
Democracy vs. Dictatorships and Despotism" (pp. 25-6):
"For he {Lenin}, as well as Engels and his contemporaries, proceeded on the assumption that the victorious proletariat would have three main factors to deal with before instituting Socialism proper. First, a powerful and potent, though temporarily beaten, capitalist class; second, a numerically strong petty bourgeois and peasant element, with the actual proletariat everywhere in the minority; and third, an insufficient industrial development. Throughout all the writings of Marx and Engels on this subject (and the same holds true of the writings of Lenin, who in industrially backward Russia largely faced the same situation generally prevailing at the time of the Paris Commune), Marx and Engels reverted to that three-fold obstacle to immediate and complete proletarian success."
In "PD vs. D+D", the 'three-fold obstacle to socialism' theory was ascribed to Marx and Engels;
but, in A.P.'s Preface to "Socialism: From Utopia to Science", we find instead ascribed to Engels
the theory that - '.. once
the proletariat had "seized political power," the
transformation into Socialism would follow as a matter of course.' If only A.P. were still alive, he would
no doubt tell us which theory he wanted us to use. Or, did the
founders of socialism describe the achievement of socialism both
ways, and, if so, where's the documentation for 'the three-fold obstacle
theory'? In his Preface, A.P. did not at all seem to mind labeling the
result of the
political victory of the working class
as 'state
capitalism'; but, why didn't
this alleged state
capitalism find a three-fold obstacle in its path?
In one pamphlet, 'proletarian victory would confront a three-fold obstacle', while in A.P.'s other pamphlet, 'proletarian victory would yield only state
capitalism'; but the consistency
between the two scenarios was that, in both cases, 'proletarian victory was spoiled as the result
of having been obtained politically'.
No matter which of the two scenarios was fated to happen, the
proletariat allegedly would
meet only with danger or defeat if they were to use political solutions.
A.P. continued (p. XI):
4 "It was the genius of De Leon which perceived that to transform private capitalist property into "State property" amounted to consolidating all economic power into the hands of a few capitalists, leaving the workers empty-handed, their political victory rendered null and void by reason of this capitalist State-consolidated economic power."
One could ask
just how stupid a working class would have to be in order to convert all of the means
of production into capitalist state property in the belief that this was the program of socialism. This has all of the appearance of a straw
man theory that it doesn't take a genius to demolish, for it is
clear from Engels' text that the state property into which the means of production
was to be converted was the state property of the armed workers, rather than the capitalist state. And, look at where the straw man theory takes
us: look at the horror reflected in the loss of all of that economic
power, that economic loss supposedly rendering the political victory null and void, as if the whole revolution revolved around capturing
economic power, or the means of production. This pattern shows up over and over.
Sometimes one can cover up a falsification of
theory by describing it as a stroke of genius.
One could do well to remember WW2, when
it was theorized that 'if a big lie was repeated often enough, the masses
would soon take it for gospel.'
This 'politics-negating' aspect of De Leonism
is a key to understanding how it differs from Marxism,
for De Leonism holds that 'All state power is capitalist state power',
and 'Workers'
state power
is illogical and inconceivable for the USA.'
Also, let us look more closely at our premises.
If one were to interpret the 'political victory' of the workers as a simple electoral victory at the ballot box, then A.P.'s scenario of 'consolidating all economic
power into the hands of a few capitalists' is not implausible; for, even after the political victory
of the workers' party at the ballot box, the elements of force in the state remain in
the hands of the capitalist class, and if the program of the workers' party included
'transforming private capitalist property into "State property"', then private capitalist property would become
the property of the capitalist state.
But, what, precisely, is this particular scenario?
De Leon certainly was not criticizing the Marxist
theory of the state, what with its smashing up of the old state apparatus,
and its replacement with a workers' state. What De Leon criticized here was merely the Social-Democratic, or reform-socialist,
or state-socialist, or state-ownership
theory of the state that A.P. accused Engels of not being able to move beyond. That theory equates socialism with state ownership of the
means of production, and
implies that, in
a democratic republic, 'socialism can be peacefully achieved by
concentrating the means of production into the hands of the state'. Regardless of whether that's a good idea or not, the fraud element materialized
when the state
ownership theory was labeled
by A.P. and De Leon as the Marxist theory.
To the hard-line, Marxist,
smash-the-state type of theorist, what's missing in
the state
socialist theory is the element
of revolution, i.e., the
smashing of the bourgeois state, and its replacement by the proletarian
state. According to Marxist theory, the proletariat transforms both capitalist state
property and capitalist private property into proletarian
state property. The machinery of state that preserved capitalist
relations of production and private property would be replaced
by the state of the armed workers. State power in the hands of
the poor and oppressed would allow workers' cooperatives to compete
as viable entities, while capitalists who refrained from hostility
and cooperated with the new state could still count on making
profits, albeit curtailed by a progressive profit or income tax.
A.P. continued (p. XII):
5 "The present writer has dealt in some detail with this question in an address published under the title, "Daniel De Leon: Social Architect." The following relevant passages are quoted from that address:
"De Leon's concept of the Industrial Union Government in operation precluded, of course, the existence of the political State. But that the political State would cease to be under Socialism was not a conclusion born of De Leon's discovery. Both Marx and Engels had demonstrated that the State as such would die out."
A.P.'s statement
led his readers into a fine mass of confusion. First of all, using
Lenin's definition, socialism
is a form of political state, i.e., a proletarian dictatorship in evolution to classless,
stateless society. On the
other hand, if A.P.'s "Socialism"
described classless, stateless society, then Marx and Engels never
expected the
proletarian revolution to yield A.P.'s "Socialism" right
away. Marx and Engels knew
that workers
would have to possess their own state machinery in order to carry
out the social revolution, i.e., abolish capital, class distinctions,
and the antitheses between mental and manual labor and between
town and country. It was not the capitalist state or "the
State as
such"
that was to die out, but rather the proletarian state, during the era of proletarian dictatorship. A.P.'s concept of "the State as such" does not distinguish between capitalist
and proletarian
state power, so "the State as such" came in handy for those who saw the state in general
as the main evil in the world,
and who therefore (unlike Marx, Engels and Lenin) could not conceive
of a state
that could represent the interests of the poor, oppressed and
working classes.
If 'De
Leon's government precluded the existence of the political state', then, no matter how A.P. defined it,
precluding
the state meant nothing less
than substituting
the program of anarchy for the program of socialism. Which class of people does the philosophy
of anarchism represent? In 1850, Engels wrote a revealing article
entitled "The
Catchword: "Abolition of the State" and the German "Friends
of Anarchy"" (NW 153, p. 27):
"For Communists abolition
of the state makes sense only as the necessary result of the abolition
of classes, with whose disappearance the need for the organised
power of one class for the purpose of holding down the other classes
will automatically disappear. The abolition of the state in bourgeois
countries means the reduction of state power to the North American
level. Class contradictions there are not fully developed, and
class conflicts are always palliated by the outflow of the proletarian
surplus population to the West; state interference is reduced
to a minimum in the East and entirely absent in the West. Abolition
of the state in feudal countries means the abolition of
feudalism and the establishment of a conventional bourgeois state.
In Germany the slogan conceals either a cowardly flight
from actual concrete struggles, the extravagant bogus transformation
of bourgeois liberty into absolute freedom and independence
of the individual, or finally the indifference of the bourgeois
towards any form of state so long as it does not hamper the development
of bourgeois interests. ...
"All these factions agree in their desire to maintain
the existing bourgeois society. Since they uphold bourgeois
society they are bound to uphold the rule of the bourgeoisie and
in Germany even the winning of this rule by the bourgeoisie; they
differ from the real members of the bourgeoisie only in the matter
of unusual form, which gives them the semblance of "going
further", of "going further than anyone else".
This semblance vanishes on all real conflicts; in every case these
exponents of anarchy did their utmost to stem anarchy when faced
with the real anarchy of revolutionary crises, when the
masses fought with "brute force". In the final analysis
this much praised "anarchy" amounts in substance to
what in more advanced countries is termed "order". The
"friends of anarchy" in Germany find themselves in complete
and friendly agreement with the "friends of order" in
France."
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In a letter to Paul Lafargue in April of 1870, Marx criticized the three points of Bakunin's program (NW 153, pp. 45-6):
" ...
But Bakounine's
programme was "the theory". It consisted, in
fact of 3 points.
"1) That the first requirement
of the social Revolution was - the abolition of inheritance,
Saint-Simoniste nonsense, of which the charlatan and ignoramus
Bakunin became a responsible publisher. It is evident: If you
have had the power to make the social Revolution in one day, par
decret plebiscitaire, you would abolish at once landed property
and capital, and would therefore have no occasion at all to occupy
yourself with the right of inheritance. On the other hand,
if you have not that power (and it is of course foolish to suppose
such a power), the proclamation of the abolition of inheritance
would be not a serious act, but a foolish menace, rallying the
whole peasantry and the whole small middle-class round the reaction.
Suppose for instance that the Yankees had not had the power to
abolish slavery by the sword. What an imbecility it would have
been to proclaim the abolition of inheritance in slaves!
The whole thing rests on a superannuated idealism, which considers
the actual jurisprudence as the basis of our economical state,
instead of seeing that our economical state is the basis and source
of our jurisprudence! As to Bakounine, all he wanted was to improvise
a programme of his own making. That's all. It was a haphazard
programme.
"2) "Equality of different classes". To
suppose on the one hand the continued existence of classes,
and on the other hand the equality of the members belonging
to them, this blunder shows you at once the shameless ignorance
and superficiality of that fellow who made it his "special
mission" to enlighten us on "theory".
"3) The working class must not occupy itself with
politics. They must only organise themselves by trades-unions.
One fine day, by means of the Internationale they will
supplant the place of all existing states. You see what a caricature
he has made of my doctrines! As the transformation of the existing
States into Associations is our last end, we must allow the governments,
these great Trade-Unions of the ruling classes, to do as they
like, because to occupy ourselves with them is to acknowledge
them. Why! In the same way the old socialists said: You must not
occupy yourselves with the wages question, because you want to
abolish wages labour, and to struggle with the capitalist about
the rate of wages is to acknowledge the wages system! The ass
has not even seen that every class movement as a class
movement, is necessarily and was always a political movement."
In a January, 1872 letter to Cuno, Engels contrasted socialism with some Bakuninist theories (MESW II, pp. 424-30):
... "Bakunin, who up to 1868
had intrigued against the International, joined it after he had
suffered a fiasco at the Berne Peace Congress {where he lost his bid to get his program endorsed} and at once began to
conspire within it against the General Council. Bakunin
has a peculiar theory of his own, a medley of Proudhonism and
communism. The chief point concerning the former is that he does
not regard capital, i.e., the class antagonism between capitalists
and wage-workers which has arisen through social development,
but the state as the main evil to be abolished. While the
great mass of the Social-Democratic workers hold our view that
state power is nothing more than the organisation which the ruling
classes - landowners and capitalists - have provided for themselves
in order to protect their social privileges, Bakunin maintains
that it is the state which has created capital, that the
capitalist has his capital only by the grace of the state.
As, therefore, the state is the chief evil, it is above all the
state which must be done away with and then capitalism will go
to blazes of itself. We, on the contrary, say: Do away with capital,
the concentration of all means of production in the hands of the
few, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is an essential
one: Without a previous social revolution the abolition of the
state is nonsense; the abolition of capital is precisely the social
revolution and involves a change in the whole mode of production.
Now then, inasmuch as to Bakunin the state is the main evil, nothing
must be done which can keep the state - that is, any state, whether
it be a republic, a monarchy or anything else - alive. Hence complete
abstention from all politics. To commit a political act, especially
to take part in an election, would be a betrayal of principle.
The thing to do is to carry on propaganda, heap abuse upon the
state, organise, and when all the workers, hence the majority,
are won over, depose all the authorities, abolish the state and
replace it with the organisation of the International. This great
act, with which the millennium begins, is called social liquidation.
"All this sounds extremely radical and is so simple
that it can be learned by heart in five minutes; that is why the
Bakuninist theory has speedily found favour also in Italy and
Spain among young lawyers, doctors, and other doctrinaires. But
the mass of the workers will never allow itself to be persuaded
that the public affairs of their countries are not also their
own affairs; they are naturally politically-minded and
whoever tries to make them believe that they should leave politics
alone will in the end be left in the lurch. To preach to the workers
that they should in all circumstances abstain from politics is
to drive them into the arms of the priests or the bourgeois republicans.
"Now, as the International, according to Bakunin,
was not formed for political struggle but to replace the old state
organisation as soon as social liquidation takes place, it follows
that it must come as near as possible to the Bakuninist ideal
of future society. In this society there will above all be no
authority, for authority = state = absolute evil. (How
these people propose to run a factory, operate a railway or steer
a ship without a will that decides in the last resort, without
single management, they of course do not tell us.) The authority
of the majority over the minority also ceases. Every individual
and every community is autonomous; but as to how a society of
even only two people is possible unless each gives up some of
his autonomy, Bakunin again maintains silence.
"And so the International too must be arranged according
to this pattern. Every section, and in every section every individual,
is to be autonomous. To hell with the Basle resolutions,
which confer upon the General Council a pernicious authority demoralising
even to itself! Even if this authority is conferred voluntarily
it must cease just because it is authority!
"Here you have in brief the main points of this
swindle. But who are the originators of the Basle resolutions?
Well, Mr. Bakunin himself and Company! ...
... "So long as these gentlemen keep within legal bounds
the General Council will gladly let them have their way. This
coalition of the most diverse elements will soon fall apart; but
as soon as they start anything against the Rules or the Congress
resolutions the General Council will do its duty.
"If you reflect upon the fact that these people
have launched their conspiracy precisely at the moment when a
general hue and cry is being raised against the International,
you cannot help thinking that the international sleuths must have
a hand in the game. And so it is. In Beziers the Geneva Bakuninists
have picked the central police commissioner [Bousquet] as their correspondent! Two prominent
Bakuninists, Albert Richard from Lyons and Leblanc, were here
and told a worker named Scholl, also from Lyons, to whom they
had addressed themselves, that the only way to overthrow Thiers
was to restore Bonaparte to the throne; and they were traveling
about on Bonaparte money to conduct propaganda among
the refugees in favour of a Bonapartist restoration! That
is what these gentlemen call abstaining from politics!
In "Marx and the Trade Unions", Lozovsky revealed some early anarchist vacillations (M+TU, p. 134):
"The Proudhonists and Bakuninists, as is known, had originally been against the trade unions and against strikes, but afterwards they turned through 180 degrees and became energetic defenders of the trade unions, considering them the only form for workers' associations, and strikes as the only form of struggle."
A.P. continued (p. XII):
6 "Engels observed that 'the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of the processes of production.' ("Socialism From Utopia to Science.") That is a happily phrased designation of the Industrial Union Government, but unhappily it is only a phrase, for Engels never worked out the actual form or details of the social organism which necessarily must take over 'the conduct of the processes of production' when the State dies out, though he does say that 'anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization.' (Ibid.) Again we ask: How, and what kind?"
The two phrases from Engels juxtaposed by A.P. were from opposite ends of the era of proletarian dictatorship. The first phrase described activity at the end of the dictatorship, in its transition to classless, stateless society (MESW III, p. 147):
"State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished." It dies out."
The second phrase's 'replacement of anarchy by planning' was to happen right after the proletariat's conquest of political power, and continue indefinitely after. Even on page 64 of the SLP edition of "Socialism: From Utopia to Science", it can easily be seen that the sentence containing 'systematic, definite organization' directly follows a sentence which is clearly post-revolutionary and embraces both the dictatorship of the proletariat and classless, stateless society (MESW III, pp. 149-50):
"With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom."
When A.P. inserted
the phrase 'anarchy in social production
is replaced by systematic, definite organization'
right after repeating the thought 'when
the State
dies out', an inattentive reader could easily
be led to believe that: 'Anarchy
in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization only after society becomes classless and stateless.' But, the era of proletarian state power
was not to preclude the systematic organization of production. On the contrary, that was to be the
only time it
could begin in earnest, according
to Engels, who labeled production under capitalism as
anarchical many times in
his pamphlet, as well as in many other writings. The fact that
anarchy in
production was to be replaced by
'systematic,
definite organisation' during the era of proletarian political
power is a fact that no honest
commentator could have avoided becoming aware of.
With regard to 'the actual form or details' of a future society, the actual experience
of the proletariat in the Commune was
that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie was replaced - not by
a classless, stateless administration of things - but rather by a workers' state using the political form of a democratic republic.
Engels wrote about the form of proletarian dictatorship in several places. Especially illuminating was
his March 6, 1894 letter to Lafargue (MESC,
p. 447):
"With respect to the proletariat the republic differs from the monarchy only in that it is the ready-for-use political form for the future rule of the proletariat. You are at an advantage compared with us in already having it; we {Germans} for our part shall have to spend twenty-four hours to make it. But a republic, like every other form of government, is determined by its content; so long as it is a form of bourgeois rule it is as hostile to us as any monarchy (except that the forms of this hostility are different). It is therefore a wholly baseless illusion to regard it as essentially socialist in form or to entrust socialist tasks to it while it is dominated by the bourgeoisie. We shall be able to wrest concessions from it but never to put in its charge the execution of what is our own concern, even if we should be able to control it by a minority strong enough to change into the majority overnight" ...
Notice the implication, in the last sentence especially, of the insufficiency of an electoral victory of a workers' party in a republic to create socialism. Engels was critical of those who worshiped democracies, believing that socialism could be achieved by victories at ballot boxes, while ignoring the consequences of capitalist domination, and the corruption of politicians after taking office. In a January 1894 letter to Turati, Engels wrote about some pitfalls around electing socialists to government (MESC, p. 446):
"After the common victory {with other democratic parties} we might be offered some seats in the new government, but so that we always remain a minority. That is the greatest danger. After February 1848 the French socialist democrats (of the Réforme, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Flocon, etc.) made the mistake of accepting such posts. Constituting a minority in the government they voluntarily shared the responsibility for all the infamies and treachery which the majority, composed of pure {bourgeois} Republicans, committed against the working class, while their presence in the government completely paralysed the revolutionary action of the working class which they claimed they represented."
Valuable lessons
are contained in these words, especially when considering the
promises of those who claim to represent the interests of the poor and oppressed and then sell out those classes after
getting elected.
Where A.P. wrote that ... 'Engels never worked out the actual form
or details of the social organism which necessarily must take
over 'the
conduct of the processes of production' when the State dies out' ... , A.P. created confusion on a variety of
levels. After attaining
political supremacy, few
problems were anticipated with regard to the processes of production. The Communist
Manifesto made it clear that
capitalist
production was to co-exist with proletarian dictatorship. Workers'
parties were to be dominant in several democratic republics, so the future form of government was
already well-known, the republic already having been used in various
western European countries for centuries.
Secondly, A.P.'s timing was all off, for the
workers' government was certainly not going to wait for their state to die out before taking control over
the conduct of processes of production.
Thirdly, the state that dies out was
implied by A.P. to be the
capitalist state, whereas,
of course, Engels always intended that the workers' state would
be moribund.
A.P. continued (p. XII):
7 "Marx speaks similarly, and although his conception of the non-political, classless future society seems to be projected with greater precision, he still fails to answer the 'How?' and 'What kind?' In an otherwise remarkable passage, contrasting the two elements of the Proletarian Revolution, political action as the destructive, economic action as the constructive, element, he said: 'Where its organizing activity begins, where its proper aim, its soul, emerges, there Socialism casts away the political hull.' ("On the King of Prussia and Social Reform.")"
First of all,
2 other published translations of Marx's article give 'political mask' and 'political cloak'
instead of A.P.'s "political hull". A hull
can be regarded as 1) the outer layer of a seed, such as a 'shell' or 'casing', or it can be regarded as 2) the essence
of an object, like the hull of a ship; so, A.P.'s use of the word
'hull' creates confusion. A.P.'s misuse of
'hull' is also investigated again at the end
of Part D of this book.
Are we to believe, from A.P.'s little quote,
or from anything else he wrote, that 'Marx projected his conception of the
non-political, classless future society with greater precision than Engels'? It's too bad that A.P. didn't quote
something more convincing, but the reason he didn't was that neither
Marx nor Engels had ever tried to define the structure of the
future classless and stateless society, and that was a conscious
decision on their part, not an oversight, as A.P. implied, since
no one can predict what that structure will look like. I trust
people will safely make that transition
at the proper time, and without any help from Marx, De Leon, or
anyone else from now or the past. The form that WAS continually
discovered and rediscovered in the days of Marx and Engels was
the democratic republic, the Paris Commune
being the example that held great promise.
A.P. implied all along that a classless, stateless
administration
of things
would be the natural and immediate successor to capitalism, a conclusion that could have been reached
only by ignoring the entire body of the mature political writings
of Marx and Engels. If the political hull is
to be cast away when socialism's organizing activity begins, does that mean that the state is to be abolished in a revolution? That theory would not correlate with
the meaning of an earlier passage from the very same "Critical Notes on the
Article 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian'" (Marx, Early Writings, Vintage
Press, 1975, p. 419):
... "the political soul of revolution consists in the tendency of the classes with no political power to put an end to their isolation from the state and from power." ...
How 'the classes with no political power' could 'put an end to their isolation from the state and from power' by 'casting away the political hull' is a puzzle that A.P. probably did not wish to discuss. This was a perfect example of A.P. taking a quote out of historical context, this time from one of Marx's earliest efforts. Was the Marxist theory of the state incomplete in July of 1844 when the 'King of Prussia' article was written? In April of 1883, in a letter to Van Patten of the SLP in New York, Engels wrote (MESC, pp. 340-341):
"Marx and I, ever since
1845, have held the view that one of the final results
of the future proletarian revolution will be the gradual dissolution
and ultimate disappearance of that political organization called
the state; an organization the main object of which has
ever been to secure, by armed force, the economical subjection
of the working majority to the wealthy minority. With the disappearance
of a wealthy minority the necessity for an armed repressive state-force
disappears also. At the same time we have always held that in
order to arrive at this and the other, far more important ends
of the social revolution of the future, the proletarian class
will first have to possess itself of the organised political force
of the state and with this aid stamp out the resistance of the
capitalist class and re-organise society. This is stated already
in the Communist Manifesto of 1847, end of Chapter II.
"The Anarchists reverse the matter. They say, that
the proletarian revolution has to begin by abolishing the
political organization of the state. But after the victory of
the proletariat, the only organization the victorious working
class finds ready-made for use is that of the state. It may require
adaptation to the new functions. But to destroy that at such a
moment, would be to destroy the only organism by means of which
the victorious working class can exert its newly conquered power,
keep down its capitalist enemies and carry out that economic revolution
of society without which the whole victory must end in a defeat
and in a massacre of the working class like that after the Paris
Commune.
"Does it require my express assertion that Marx
opposed these anarchist absurdities from the very first day that
they were started in their present form by Bakunin? The whole
internal history of the International Working Men's Association
is there to prove it. The Anarchists tried to obtain the lead
of the International, by the foulest means, ever since 1867 and
the chief obstacle in their way was Marx. The result of the five
years' struggle was the expulsion, at the Hague Congress, Sept.
1872, of the Anarchists from the International, and the man who
did most to procure that expulsion was Marx. Our old friend F.
A. Sorge of Hoboken, who was present as a delegate, can give you
further particulars if you desire.
"Now as to Johann Most. If any man asserts that
Most, since he turned anarchist, has had any relations with, or
support from Marx, he is either a dupe or a deliberate liar. ...
We had for his anarchism and anarchist tactics the same contempt
as for those people from whom he had learnt it."
The first sentence
of that excerpt shows that Marx and Engels agreed on their theory of the dissolution
of the state only after 1845, which information could not have been avoided
by A.P. during the preparation of his Preface,
because, on the bottom of page XIII thereof,
that very same letter to Van Patten was again quoted. The
1844 'King
of Prussia' article was also
misused by A.P. to lead the reader to believe that 'there is a sharp division
between proletarian political and economic activities', but with no explanation of the historical
context from which Marx's phrases were taken. The case that A.P.
was trying to build was that: 'Political power is destructive only, and is useful
to abolish the capitalist state, but economic reconstruction begins
only when political action ceases.'
By themselves, the early phrases of Marx and
Engels were incapable of leading the reader to a full understanding
of their theories, but the same early phrases were abused by A.P.
to facilitate justification of his anarchist theories. This was
highly unethical, and was also thoroughly contradicted by the
more elaborate writings of Marx and Engels in their refutations
of the anarchists, especially around the final years of the First International.
A.P. continued (p. XIII):
8 "In other words, although both Marx and Engels knew, and said so in general terms, that the political form of society would yield to the industrial form, they did not develop the vital point beyond the general, and, for all practical purposes, left the problem unsolved."
Though it's entirely possible that political forms may someday yield to a classless, stateless administration of things in the future, Marx and Engels believed that an entire historical epoch known as the dictatorship of the proletariat would have to rise and fall between the end of capitalism and the start of classless, stateless society. One of the many places where A.P. went wrong was in stating that 'Marx and Engels failed to solve the problem of specifying an industrial form for future society.' The development of such an industrial form must have been such a "vital point" for Engels that he wrote in "The Housing Question" (MESW II, pp. 368-369):
"To be utopian does not mean to maintain that the emancipation of humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will be complete only when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished; the utopia begins only when one ventures, "from existing conditions," to prescribe the form in which this or any other antithesis of present-day society is to be resolved."
The SLP's Socialist Industrial Union program fits Engels' definition of utopia perfectly, because it prescribes the form into which the working class must organize in order to resolve the contradiction between social production and private appropriation of the product of labor. Another criticism leveled against utopian forms in "The Housing Question" was that they failed completely to help the proletariat become the ruling class. The stated intent of Engels' German party, on the other hand, was to take full state power and pursue working class policies in the new state against the interests of the bourgeoisie (MESW II, p. 356):
"But the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party, just because it is a workers' party, necessarily pursues a "class policy," the policy of the working class. Since each political party sets out to establish its rule in the state, so the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party is necessarily striving to establish its rule, the rule of the working class, hence "class domination." Moreover, every real proletarian party, from the English Chartists onward, has put forward a class policy, the organization of the proletariat as an independent political party, as the primary condition of its struggle, and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the immediate aim of the struggle."
The SIU program rejects political forms for future society
altogether by calling for the dismantling of the state as soon as SLP political
candidates get elected to office. The SIU recognizes no post-electoral political
or state organization of the proletariat, which is completely ahistorical, and unscientific.
A.P. continued (p. XIII):
9 "But, being anything but anarchists, they were compelled to fall back on the doomed and dying political State as the instrument, not merely of destruction, but of construction as well - a conclusion which, in the Marxian premises, and particularly in the light of Morgan's important discoveries and summary (accepted in the main by Marx and Engels), amounted to a contradiction in terms."
After pulling
every trick in the book to put anarchist philosophy in the mouths
of Marx and Engels, A.P. then reminded us that 'Marx and Engels were anything but anarchists.' According to A.P., 'The anarchists would abolish the state, and replace it with
nothing at all', but the
anarchists that Marx and Engels fought against wanted to replace the state with
organizations of trade unions,
or with the
First International, or with a non-political administration of things, practically the same as the SIU program.
A.P. stated that Marx and Engels were
... 'compelled to fall back on the doomed and dying political State as the
instrument, not merely of destruction, but of construction as
well' ... A.P. also theorized
that 'the
political state can only be a capitalist state'. Those two statements enjoy a certain consistency
of logic, for it is difficult to imagine the CAPITALIST state
being very interested in either socialist construction or the repression of the
capitalist class. But, Engels
was not so primitive or confused as to expect a state that was designed to protect
capitalist interests to carry out tasks that contravene those
same interests. It is difficult
as well to imagine the alleged contradiction between Morgan's discoveries and
Marx's theories. In "Ancient Society", Morgan wrote (New York Labor News, N.Y., 1971, p. 552):
"The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man's existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes."
Exactly how
this statement about human
intelligence mastering property,
or how any other of Morgan's
statements contradicted Marx's theories was not explained by A.P. Perhaps the lapse was
related to the continuation
of the state after the victory of the workers, a state that A.P. always interpreted as a capitalist state, but which Marx and Engels intended
to be a workers'
state. Since A.P.'s misinterpretation
meant that he thought that Marx's scenario would perpetuate capitalist property
forever, that may be why
he stated that
the perspectives
of Marx and Morgan were
at odds.
A little off point, and in no attempt to discredit
Morgan, but of interest to those concerned with racial issues,
Lewis Henry Morgan also stated on the next page (Ibid., p. 553):
"It must be regarded as a marvelous fact that a portion of mankind five thousand years ago, less or more, attained to civilization. In strictness but two families, the Semitic and the Aryan, accomplished the work through unassisted self-development. The Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress, because it produced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming control of the earth. And yet, civilization must be regarded as an accident of circumstances" ...
Out of Morgan's whole book, that was the only paragraph of its type that I could find. A.P. continued (p. XIII):
10 "The reason for the failure of Marx and Engels to project the indicated synthesis lies beyond the subject in hand. But that Engels sensed the deficiency in the analysis of the State, and the necessity for an organ to administer things, is, I believe, subject to demonstration."
A.P.'s statement
appears to be a cop-out. A.P. could not give a reason for an alleged
'failure ... to project the indicated synthesis', because they did not fail in that
particular manner. If Marx and Engels completely, consciously
and publicly refused to describe the form of classless, stateless society, then there can be no failure
on their part in that area. But, what A.P. avoided discussing
was the lesson Marx and Engels took from the Paris Commune
experience: M+E expected the political era beyond capitalist rule
to be a proletarian
dictatorship, and the specific form of
that dictatorship would be a democratic republic.
With regard to A.P.'s second sentence, and in
light of all that has been uncovered about A.P.'s methods employed
so far, his statement rather seems like a complaint that Engels did not leave
a few handy phrases around that could have been taken out of context
and manipulated into a sense of deficiency in what he had written.
A.P. continued (p. XIII):
11 "The Marxian premise was sound as far as it went, but the premise was incomplete. And, as Buckle reminds us: 'Whenever something is kept back in the premises, something must be wanting in the conclusion.'"
Wasn't it just a little ironic for A.P. to have complained about 'Marxian' premises being incomplete? What about all of the premises that are missing from A.P.'s theories? Why didn't his theories include 1) the worker-peasant alliance, and 2) the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie? With those premises missing, how accurate could his conclusions be? Engels wrote in "The Housing Question" (MESW II, p. 314):
"If one has so arranged one's premises that they already contain the conclusion, then of course it requires no greater skill than any charlatan possesses to produce the result, prepared beforehand, from the bag and proudly point to unshakeable logic whose result it is."
With regard to a conclusion that is severely wanting in logic and suitability to American conditions, was the SIU the marvelous gift from De Leon that the SLP claims it is, or had it already been criticized by Marx as essentially a crazy Bakuninist scheme? In his letter to Lafargue of April 19, 1870, Marx began point #3 with a sarcastic critique of Bakunin's anarchist theories (NW 153, p. 46):
"3) The working class must not occupy itself with politics. They must only organize themselves by trades-unions. One fine day, by means of the Internationale they will supplant the place of all existing states. You see what a caricature he {Bakunin} has made of my doctrines! As the transformation of the existing States into Associations is our last end, we must allow the governments, these great Trade-Unions of the ruling classes, to do as they like, because to occupy ourselves with them is to acknowledge them. Why! In the same way the old socialists said: You must not occupy yourselves with the wages question, because you want to abolish wages labour, and to struggle with the capitalist about the rate of wages is to acknowledge the wages system! The ass has not even seen that every class movement, as a class movement, is necessarily and was always a political movement."
It appears
as though the idea of unions
taking the place of the existing states had been proposed by Bakunin as early as the days
of the First
International Working Men's Association (1864-1872), and Marx had criticized it some 35
years before De Leon gave his alleged stroke of genius to the American anarchists. According to Lozovsky,
Bakunin invented
anarcho-syndicalism, of which
the Socialist
Industrial Union idea is
but a variation that took into account the vertical monopoly ownership
of industries by positing a corresponding industrial union organization of the
working class. If Bakunin's
idea was a 'mistake', then De Leon's SIU
was a monument to that 'mistake', and the SLP
is a church in which that 'mistake' has been worshiped for a long
time.
Because of the European and Russian roots of
anarchy, the old idea that had been fed to me in my old study class about the totally American character of the Party program proved to be just another lie. If Bakunin really was the
author of the essence of the SIU, then
it turns out to be far more European in origin than what the SLP said it was, and, what's worse for Party notions of prestige, the SIU
turns out to be Russian. Thus we find, much to the contrary of
all of A.P.'s wind about 'conditions',
it may have been the backward conditions of Bakunin's Russia that
gave birth to anarcho-syndicalism, and to the basic idea behind
the Party
program. With all of the
repressive absolute monarchies of that era, especially around
Eastern Europe, an Eastern European origin for anarcho-syndicalism
is not surprising. On the other hand, anarcho-syndicalism spontaneously
arising in a republic like the USA, or in England of that era,
WOULD be surprising, because workers in republics have democratic
and peaceful mechanisms to help them, while workers in absolute
tyrannies have nothing but their own devices with which to defend
themselves against state institutions that rightfully appear useless
and hostile. There, workers could easily be attracted to notions
of replacing absolute tyrannies with a classless and stateless
administration of things. Compare the state of open class warfare
associated with feudal monarchies to the rather easy-going life
in republics, which enjoy tremendous amounts of mass invovement
and participation in government.
In a way, it's too bad that the Party took such a low road by alleging a Marxian basis for the
SIU. If they had instead
simply offered it without trying to justify it in Marxian science, it might have had a better chance of
being accepted, for their idea of bypassing political solutions to the
social question simply because of advances in the means of production
may have had a certain appeal
that might never have required a poorly engineered justification in Marxism.
A.P. continued (p. XIII):
12 "Criticizing the anarchists for wishing to destroy the State out of hand, with nothing to take its place, Engels (in a letter written in 1883) said:
"'The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organization of the State. But after its victory the sole organization which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the State.' ("Marx-Engels Correspondence.")
"Precisely. Without the concept of Industrial Unions, and the Industrial Union form of government, the State appeared to be the only social organization capable of holding society together and to carry on, somehow, social production, until that undefined, nebulous 'administration of things' could be organized.
By attributing
that quote to as vast a body of work as the 'Marx-Engels Correspondence', A.P. thereby refused to admit that
it came from the same 1883 letter to Van Patten that he
had already extensively quoted. A.P. falsely portrayed it as indicating
that 'Engels
thought that the capitalist state would survive the political victory of
the workers' party.'
Political
victory, yes, but what kind
of political
victory? Let's consider three
different kinds, from the most ordinary to the most empowering:
At the low end, consider winning reforms in democracies, such as reducing the length of the working day, or winning the right to unionize, or the right to free and universal health care, etc. Second, consider a workers' party winning
an electoral victory at the ballot box,
such as what occurred in the past century of European politics.
Third, consider the
proletariat taking full state power,
as in the Paris
Commune, the early Soviets,
Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, etc.
During working class electoral victories, the
state that survives the election is indeed the capitalist state, as proven by European politics, which
didn't provide enough force to enable property ownership to be socialized
without compensation. But,
electorally
victorious Europeans were
able to win
reforms that put them ahead
of the USA, at least in terms of health care and vacation time.
Without a very careful examination of Engels'
letter to Van Patten, the intent of his second paragraph could
be subjected to a variety of interpretations, especially if one
were to take every sentence as Marxist gospel,
as A.P. chose to do. A.P. opportunistically allowed one sentence:
'But after
its victory the sole organization which the proletariat finds
already in existence is precisely the State' to convey the anarchist theory that: 'The state that survives
the political victory of the proletariat {in the electoral sense} is the capitalist state, or the state
as such,
an entity of no value to the proletariat, and which is to be abolished.' However, the absurdity of this misinterpretation
was made evident by another passage in the very same letter (MESC,
p. 341):
"At the same time we have always held that in order to arrive at this and the other, far more important ends of the social revolution of the future, the proletarian class will first have to possess itself of the organized political force of the state and with this aid stamp out the resistance of the capitalist class and reorganize society."
How the proletariat
would "stamp
out the resistance of the capitalist class" with
capitalist state machinery
is beyond my ability to comprehend, and yet A.P. attributed the
formulation of that very absurdity to Engels,
in spite of the writings of Marx and Engels on the palpable experience
of the Paris
Commune, with its replacement of the old
state machinery with a workers' state,
proving that the anarchists either learned nothing from history
(this is too charitable a conclusion), or else they willfully
studied history in order to teach other than what really happened.
In other words, they studied history in order to be better able
to butcher it. What with the myriad connections of anarchists
to the police, the uncharitable conclusion is probably the more
accurate.
Electoral
victories were the only type
of political
victories A.P. allowed us
to consider, and he prevented his readers from contemplating the
possibility of the ultimate type of political victory, i.e.,
taking full state power.
In A.P.'s pamphlet analyzed in Part 4 of this book, two of the
three types of political
victories were eliminated
as options for an 'anarchist political party'.
Limited viewpoints run throughout anarchist philosophy, i.e.,
they limit the options for militant action to an insufficient
few, or they set up straw-man options that the lower classes would
never consider adopting en masse.
For the third time already, A.P. falsely charged
that the
anarchists would destroy the state out of hand, with nothing to
take its place, as though
no one would ever again read about the perfect willingness of
anarchists to replace
the state with an administration
of things, much the same
way Bakunin and his brainchild SIU program
would like to do. But, what if there was something that
the anarchists wanted
to destroy out of hand, but nothing to take its place existed, and the name of that 'irreplaceable
something' was 'capitalism'? There often was a glimmer of plausibility
lurking somewhere in what A.P. wrote.
A.P. continued (p. XIV):
13 "Had Engels lived another ten or twenty years, and particularly if he had lived to witness the logical development of the State administration idea (however expectantly temporary) into the ultra-reactionary fascist State machinery, he would undoubtedly have realized the deficiency in his analysis and projection of the post-revolutionary requirements and possibilities."
Though falling an inch or two short of directly attributing fascism's paternity rights to Engels, A.P. once again accused Engels of not knowing the difference between socialism and state capitalism, but, in a long footnote in the plain text of "Socialism: From Utopia to Science", i.e., even on pages 56-7 of the SLP edition of the pamphlet, Engels differentiated between socialism and state capitalism in greater than sufficient detail (MESW III, p. 145):
"But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies or trusts, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution."
In order to
believe that Engels
did not know the difference between state capitalism and socialism, one would have to shut one's eyes completely
to passages like that, and to many others elsewhere as well. A
careful reader of even the SLP version
of Engels' pamphlet would not have to go to the library to figure
out that A.P. had misrepresented Engels.
Germany would be a logical choice for an example
of a state
capitalism which evolved into an ultra-reactionary state machine. From the context of A.P.'s criticisms
of Engels' alleged state
capitalism, A.P. was not
above suggesting that 'Engels was the unwitting father of fascism.' What with the alleged dictatorship of the proletariat over the peasantry
that Marx and Engels allegedly promoted, and that Stalin carried
out to an extreme, it isn't very difficult to imagine that A.P.
would blame both fascism and Stalinism
on Marx and Engels for their 'crime' of
advocating
political solutions, as if
politics
could be avoided during the present era of class divisions, if
enough minds are put to the task.
With regard to the 'however expectantly temporary' nature of Engels' state administration idea, A.P. here conceded that the use of the state by the workers was
to be a temporary measure
in Marxist theory, so, it shouldn't be a total
surprise if the
temporary use of the state by the workers had been honored by the founders of socialism
with an official name, but A.P. dismissed it as 'a period of little consequence', instead of admitting that the name
of this temporary period was to be nothing less than the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
As for the quality of the translation, the text
of the SLP pamphlet and that of the Progress Publishers version agree practically exactly, with the
major exception that the SLP editions quite
consistently capitalized the term 'State'
most of the time, undoubtedly to lend an exclusive and capitalist
coloring to 'the state', thereby building mass hostility to it.
In the above passage, the Progress Publishers edition also printed "capitalistic nature of the productive
forces" instead of "capitalist nature". But, in this pamphlet, these
differences in translations were not so gross as to cause concern,
unlike the way in which 'differences in translations' in other pamphlets grossly affected the intent
of what Marx, Engels and Lenin had written.
A.P. continued (p. XIV):
14 "Lenin did realize the deficiency, for in October, 1917, discussing the problem confronting the workers of Russia when political power fell into their hands, he wrote that "there is no doubt that with the old State machine the proletariat could not have retained power, and to create a new power all of a sudden is impossible!' (Lenin: "Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?")"
While A.P.
gave the title of Lenin's booklet as "Will the Bolsheviks Maintain Power?", the title in the Collected Works just happens to read "Can the Bolsheviks Retain
State Power?". Though
some apologists for A.P. might explain that 'the difference between titles was just
another difference in translations',
omitting the word 'State' is really too large a difference to
be anything but another example of a deliberate anarchist retreat
from Lenin's 'State
Power', a retreat caused
by A.P.'s dread of the notion of 'political power' being scrutinized or considered by the lower
classes, driving A.P. wherever possible to omit material that
hinted at that option.
Doesn't the phrase 'when political power fell into their
hands' sound just a little
too passive to be based in reality? Did A.P. have in mind a European
election, or a plain old election in the USA, where power alternately
'falls into
the hands' of Republicans and Democrats?
In a country like Russia, one that has not had a long tradition
of regular democratic elections, political power has often been gained or maintained by nothing
less than force, and the change in power from the hands of one
class to another hardly ever meant anything less than a fight.
To suggest that 'power
fell into the hands of the Russian proletariat' could indicate that A.P. was portraying Lenin's
Bolshevik
Party as just another party competing with other
parties for power in a democracy, and as though political conditions
under the Russian monarchy were not much different from American
democratic conditions.
The contrast between the allegedly similar political conditions of America and Russia, and their allegedly
diametrically
opposed economic conditions,
was an interesting turnabout. Too bad for A.P. that the opposite
was far closer to the truth. From a political perspective, the American
republic was diametrically opposed to the old Russian monarchy,
democracy
being the negation of monarchy,
while, at the same time in history, the economic systems of both
America and Russia were similar in that they were both capitalist.
A.P.'s reversal persuaded readers to think that 'political solutions were
appropriate for the primitive economic conditions of Russia, while
economic solutions are appropriate to the super-advanced economic
conditions of America.' Notice
the compatibility of that lie with the alleged necessity of a proletarian dictatorship over the peasantry
in backward
countries with relatively large peasant populations.
True to form, A.P. lifted that quote from Lenin
entirely out of context. In "Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?", written a few weeks before the
Bolshevik revolution, Lenin explained that the
soviets were
organizations that would help the proletariat take full state
power (LCW 26,
p. 104):
"In 1905, our Soviets
existed only in embryo, so to speak, as they lived altogether
only a few weeks. Clearly, under the conditions of that time,
their comprehensive development was out of the question. It is
still out of the question in the 1917 Revolution, for a few months
is an extremely short period and - this is most important - the
Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik leaders have prostituted
the Soviets, have reduced their role to that of a talking-shop,
of an accomplice in the compromising policy of the leaders. The
Soviets have been rotting and decaying alive under the leadership
of the Liebers, Dans, Tseretelis and Chernovs. The Soviets will
be able to develop properly, to display their potentialities and
capabilities to the full only by taking full state power;
for otherwise they have nothing to do, otherwise they are
either simply embryos (and to remain an embryo too long is fatal),
or playthings. "Dual power" means paralysis for the
Soviets.
"If the creative enthusiasm of the revolutionary
classes had not given rise to the Soviets, the proletarian revolution
in Russia would have been a hopeless cause, for the proletariat
could certainly not retain power with the old state apparatus,
and it is impossible to create a new apparatus immediately. The
sad history of the prostitution of the Soviets by the Tseretelis
and Chernovs, the history of the "coalition", is also
the history of the liberation of the Soviets from petty-bourgeois
illusions, of their passage through the "purgatory"
of the practical experience of the utter abomination and filth
of all and sundry bourgeois coalitions. Let us hope
that this "purgatory" has steeled rather than weakened
the Soviets."
Obviously,
Lenin was not at all discussing, or even alluding to, 'a deficiency in the Marxist
theory of the state', nor
was it 'Lenin's
lament over power having fallen into the hands of the workers'. Rather, it was a celebration of the
fact that the
soviets had already been organized, and needed only to be turned
to a revolutionary purpose under the leadership of the Bolsheviks,
rather than over to the allegedly petty-bourgeois leadership
of the Mensheviks and other parties that might never have been
able to lead the workers to completely defeat the old regime.
The exposure of A.P. having
so brazenly taken Lenin's phrase completely out of context has
again left us with no concrete evidence of a sense of deficiency in the Marxist analysis
of the state by Marx, Engels or Lenin, but comprises additional
clear evidence with which to convict A.P. of gross fraud.
A.P. continued (p. XIV):
15 "This is the point De Leon incessantly hammered home - the workers must organize the agency needed to administer production, a new government machine is needed to supplant the old State machine. We cannot doubt that Frederick Engels would have seen this as clearly as Lenin did, and probably more so."
After bombarding
his readers with little better than lies, and as though SLP members would lap them all up like obedient servants,
A.P. proceeded to suggest that he had such a familiarity with their inner thoughts that 'Engels probably would have seen the need for an
organization to administer production' 'as clearly as Lenin did'! From all of the nonsense that he fabricated
out of quotes out of context, A.P. concluded that 'workers must replace
the capitalist state with an administration of things', as though 'administering production was to be the most important post-revolutionary
function'. A.P. entirely
ignored the possibility that the capitalist class would fight to retain
its ownership of industry and its political advantages.
A.P. continued (p. XIV):
16 "Indeed, he does anticipate that the State, in the role he assigns to it (illogical and impossible as we now clearly see), 'might require very considerable alterations before it can fulfill its new functions.' ("Socialism From Utopia to Science")"
Though this
phrase was attributed to "Socialism: From Utopia to Science", it can only be found in Engels'
letter to Van Patten. Under the circumstances of an honest scholar
attempting an exploration of a deficiency in the Marxist analysis of the state, a failure to credit excerpts correctly
might be forgiven like typographical errors; but, in the present
circumstances, where practically every sentence of A.P.'s contains
one or more lies, it's easy to think of a reason why he wouldn't
want too much material attributed to the Van Patten letter. Having
used it so often, it would have been logical for a scholar to
have included the whole letter in an appendix, had it not contained
so much contradictory evidence to so many of A.P.'s arguments
and assertions.
Did Engels really suggest that the capitalist state,
or 'the state as such', 'may require adaptation
to the new functions', i.e.,
the administration of production and the repression of the capitalists?
In his introduction to "The Civil War in France",
written for the twentieth
anniversary of the Paris Commune,
Engels got quite specific about altering the state machine (MESW
II, pp. 187-189):
"From the very outset
the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class,
once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state
machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered
supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with
all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself,
and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and
officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to
recall at any moment. What had been the characteristic attribute
of the former state? Society had created its own organs to look
after its common interests, originally through simple division
of labor. But these organs, at whose head was the state power,
had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests,
transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters
of society. This can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary
monarchy, but equally so in the democratic republic. Nowhere do
"politicians" form a more separate and powerful section
of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of
the two major parties which alternately succeed each other in
power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business
of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies
of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a
living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory
are rewarded with positions. It is well known how the Americans
have been trying for thirty years to shake off this yoke, which
has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they continue
to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely
in America that we see best how there takes place this process
of the state power making itself independent in relation to society,
whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there
exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few
men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent
posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here
two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take
possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt
means and for the most corrupt ends - and the nation is powerless
against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly
its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.
"Against this transformation of the state and the
organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society
- an inevitable transformation in all previous states - the Commune
made use of two infallible means. In the first place, it filled
all posts - administrative, judicial and educational - by election
on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to
the right of recall at any time by the same electors and, in the
second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages
received by the workers. The highest salary paid by the Commune
to anyone was 6,000 francs. In this way an effective barrier to
place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding
mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added
besides.
"This shattering [Sprengung] of the former state power and its replacement
by a new and truly democratic one is described in detail in the
third section of The Civil War. But it was
necessary to dwell briefly here once more on some of its features,
because in Germany particularly the superstitious belief in the
state has been carried over from philosophy into the general consciousness
of the bourgeoisie and even of many workers. According to the
philosophical conception, the state is the "realisation of
the idea," or the Kingdom of God on earth, translated into
philosophical terms, the sphere in which eternal truth and justice
is or should be realised. And from this follows a superstitious
reverence for the state and everything connected with it, which
takes root the more readily since people are accustomed from childhood
to imagine that the affairs and interests common to the whole
of society could not be looked after otherwise than as they have
been looked after in the past, that is, through the state and
its lucratively positioned officials. And people think they have
taken quite an extraordinarily bold step forward when they have
rid themselves of belief in hereditary monarchy and swear by the
democratic republic. In reality, however, the state is nothing
but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and
indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy;
and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious
struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious
proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop
off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation
reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire
lumber of the state on the scrap heap.
"Of late, the Social-Democratic Philistine has once
more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship
of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know
what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune.
That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
Engels well answered the question of 'altering' or 'adapting' the state in his reference to the state as:
... "an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible" ...
The lack of
substantive change after the transition from Republican
to Democratic administrations in American elections
can be contrasted to the depth of change that the administration
of Paris experienced at the time of the Commune.
Some aspects of Engels' critique of the American
two-party
system are still relevant
now. He also made it clear that the pre-revolutionary and the post-revolutionary
states are two entirely different animals. While the role of the post-revolutionary state
was alleged by A.P. to be that of merely administering production, its primary role in Marxist
theory is to keep
down the workers' class enemies.
If the
capitalist state could administer production, then why couldn't the proletarian state? By now, we have seen how badly the existing communist
states have failed in that function so far, and by labeling the post-revolutionary
administration of production by the state as 'illogical
and impossible', this may
be yet another place where the Party concluded
correctly for all of the wrong reasons.
A.P. continued (pp. XIV-XV):
17 "But that a new organ of social administration and production is essential, he leaves open to no doubt. For he goes on to say that to destroy the State at the moment of proletarian political victory 'would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society WITHOUT WHICH THE WHOLE VICTORY MUST END IN A NEW DEFEAT AND IN A MASS SLAUGHTER OF THE WORKERS SIMILAR TO THOSE AFTER THE PARIS COMMUNE.' (Ibid.)"
A.P.'s two
sentences contradicted one another. A.P. first wrote that Engels left 'open to no doubt' that 'a
new organ of social administration and production is essential.' If so, then the very next sentence
might want to confirm the 'new
organ' thesis in A.P.'s first
sentence, but A.P. merely went on to quote the Van Patten letter
to the effect that 'the
working class agenda was going to be accomplished with the old
state machine'! Nothing in
A.P.'s second sentence implied or indicated that 'Engels saw the need for
a new organ' at all!
This was all we got from A.P., in spite of the fact that Engels
praised the Commune as an example of a new state machine, in fact a proletarian dictatorship.
Though A.P.'s "Ibid."
implied that the
quote was taken from "Socialism: From Utopia
to Science", it could
only be found in the Van Patten letter. This was the last
of three times that A.P. quoted that letter, but he barely credited
it once. By fragmenting the letter and attributing the fragments
to different sources, the internal logic of the letter was broken
up, and it could not readily testify against the points made by
A.P. in his Preface to the effect that: 1) 'the anarchists wanted
to abolish the capitalist state with nothing to replace it', 2) 'the capitalist state shouldn't be abolished unless
something exists to replace it',
3) 'the capitalist state is needed by the
victorious proletariat to assert its newly conquered power', 4) 'the capitalist state is needed by the
victorious proletariat to hold down its capitalist adversaries', and 5) 'the capitalist state is needed by the victorious proletariat
to carry out an economic revolution WITHOUT WHICH THE WHOLE VICTORY
MUST END IN A NEW DEFEAT AND IN A MASS SLAUGHTER OF THE WORKERS
SIMILAR TO THOSE AFTER THE PARIS COMMUNE.' ...
If the founders of socialism had actually formulated
and believed in the five absurdities enumerated above, one could
quite easily get the impression that: 'People in the last century had quite
primitive brains and intellects, but we have come so much further
today.' And, if we could
guess why we have come so far along, 'it was entirely due to the advances in
the means of production.'
I wonder how many members understood and agreed with A.P.'s 'analysis', and how many might have speculated
that it would
have explained a lot to Marx and Engels if only it had been available
to them while they were alive. How
many members wished that they could have stepped into a time machine
to go back to the last century to deliver that analysis to Marx
and Engels themselves?
The one sentence from the excerpt of A.P.'s
text that was not a miserable lie was the first sentence, for
Marx and Engels certainly did believe that a new organization of the poor
and oppressed was essential, though not entirely for the purpose
of administering production.
It is difficult to imagine how Engels, on the one hand, could
have intended that (MESC, p. 341):
... 'after the victory of the proletariat, the only organization the victorious working class finds ready-made for use is that of the capitalist state.'
... while, on the other hand, in his 'Twentieth Anniversary Introduction to The Civil War in France', Engels had written that (MESW II, p. 187):
... "the working class, once come to power, could not go on managing with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself" ...
There Engels stated in his own words what Marx had observed in "The Civil War in France", namely that (MESW II, p. 217):
... 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.'
Does this not contradict the anarchist absurdity that 'the proletariat finds the capitalist state ready-made for use after its victory'? But, if the victory in question happens to be an electoral victory in a democratic republic, then that form of state is ready-made for the proletariat to use. The state and the form of the state are two different things. In a January 1884 letter to Bernstein, Engels elaborated further on the idea of adapting the old state to new functions (MESC, p. 345):
"It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administratively centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes; whereas all bourgeois republicans since 1848 inveighed against this machinery so long as they were in the opposition, but once they were in the government they took it over without altering it and used it partly against the reaction but still more against the proletariat."
These last
statements can only mean that the bourgeoisie used the state machine that it
inherited from the feudal regimes unmodified for its own purposes,
whereas the lower classes cannot directly use or wield
the unmodified old ruling class state machine for socialist purposes.
One fact that seems not to have been freely
advertised was the connection between Engels and various SLP personalities. Philip Van Patten was a National Secretary of the SLP
from 1877-83, a period of time when the SLP
stood on a Marxist platform, as Engels claimed in his letter
to Sorge of 3-10-1887 (LTA, p. 178):
... "it is the sole workers' organization in America wholly standing on our platform."
The SLP might have had a Marxist platform in 1887, but it certainly changed after 1889. Some of the history of the SLP's conversion to anarchist ideology is presented in Appendix 2.
From the above analysis of A.P.'s Preface to Engels' "Socialism: From Utopia to Science", the following synopsis of inaccuracies has been compiled:
Point #:
1 Quotes from Engels were selected so as to exclude any material describing the era of proletarian dictatorship.
2 Engels was accused of advocating state capitalism because of allegedly not knowing the difference between socialism and state capitalism, in spite of evidence to the contrary in the very text of his pamphlet.
3 A.P.'s 'matter of course transformation into
Socialism' theory contradicted
his 1931 'three-fold
obstacle to immediate and complete proletarian success' theory, as advanced in "PD vs. D+D".
It was implied that more modern theories held that 'socialism' would not result from the 'matter of
course transformation.'
4 The Marxist concept
of the working
class political victory was
limited to an electoral
victory at the ballot box.
'The
concentration of property into the hands of the workers' state' was misstated by De Leon as 'the concentration of
property into the hands of the capitalist state', and De Leon's 'genius'
was credited for that lie.
5 By precluding the existence of the
political
state, De Leon's Industrial Union program fitted the program of anarchy, but it
was not labeled as such.
The political
state, or dictatorship of the proletariat, was incorrectly declared to cease to exist under
'socialism'.
Marx and Engels were alleged to have shown that
'the state
as such (the capitalist state) will die out', instead of 'the dictatorship of the proletariat will wither
away'.
6 Engels was faulted for not specifying the form
to be taken by the classless, stateless administration
of things.
The democratic republic form of state was ignored
as the form that Marx and Engels saw the workers use in the Paris Commune.
By carefully juxtaposing Engels' phrases, the
"systematic,
definite organization of production"
was implied to be consistent only with classless, stateless
society, instead of consistent with both
lower and upper stages of post-revolutionary society.
7 Marx was faulted for failing
to specify
the form of the future structure of society.
A more precise conception of classless, stateless society than
that of Engels was allegedly projected by Marx,
but with little documentation other than a sentence from 1844
given to back up the assertion.
That single sentence quoted from an early work
of Marx was taken out of historical - as well as actual - context
to buttress the theory that 'political action is destructive only, while economic action
is constructive,
but will not begin until political action is finished.'
That early quote from Marx was used to imply
that 'classless,
stateless society will emerge from capitalism right after the
revolution.'
Evidence that the Marxist
theory of the state might have been incomplete in 1844 was totally
ignored, even though the evidence of that possibility could not
have been avoided.
8 Marx and Engels were faulted for 'not developing the vital point of the
yielding of the political form to the industrial form', even though they had repeatedly criticized
speculation
about forms of classless, stateless society as
utopian.
The ample number of examples in the writings
of Marx and Engels to the effect that 'the democratic republic was to be the
form of the dictatorship
of the proletariat' were
entirely ignored.
9 The anarchists were again accused of
wishing to
destroy the state,
while offering nothing with which to replace it.
The 'doomed and dying political state' was implied to be either the capitalist state or an entity that
stood above classes.
A 'constructive
and destructive capitalist state' theory was improperly substituted for Marx's
'constructive
and destructive proletarian state', and it was then shown that the falsified 'Marxist' theory
of the state contradicted itself.
How Morgan
illuminated 'the contradictory nature
of Marx's theory of a constructive and destructive political state' was left for the reader only to imagine.
10 Marx and Engels were improperly criticized
for an alleged 'failure
to project the indicated synthesis',
or otherwise resolve contradictions arising from their alleged
advocacy
of proletarian use of the 'capitalist' political state.
A reason for the alleged failure of Marx and Engels to 'project the indicated synthesis' was implied to exist, but was not specified.
A.P. hinted that Engels might have sensed a deficiency
in the Marxist analysis of the state, and 'the necessity for an
organ to administer things',
but did not document it. A.P. failed to show that Engels believed
that production
could be administered by a workers' state.
11 An anarchist premise was incorrectly labeled as a 'Marxian' premise, and, with a little help from a quote by Buckle, the premise was declared to be 'incomplete'.
12 Engels was alleged to have 'criticized the anarchists
for wishing to destroy the State out of hand, with nothing to
take its place', but no example
of that type of criticism was ever offered as proof.
The Van Patten letter was not credited, in spite
of its having been quoted elsewhere.
A portion of the Van Patten letter was quoted
out of context to enable the post-revolutionary state appear to
be capitalist
in content, in spite of the
many writings by Marx and Engels that showed the post-revolutionary state
was to be proletarian in content.
The capitalist state was alleged to survive the proletarian
revolution, and was falsely
given a role
in the management of post-revolutionary society.
The Industrial
Union form of government
was presented as the
form of administration of things that would solve the problems associated with the
Marxist scenario of administering production with a post-revolutionary
capitalist state.
The democratic
republic form of proletarian
dictatorship was never mentioned.
13 Engels was accused of not knowing the difference between socialism
and state capitalism, and of not having lived to see the realization
of the state capitalism idea,
in spite of documentation to the contrary in the very same pamphlet
for which A.P. wrote his Preface.
On faulty grounds, the Marxist
theory of the state was alleged to be deficient.
The post-revolutionary state was alleged to
be a capitalist
state.
The democratic republic was omitted from Engels'
alleged projection of 'post-revolutionary requirements and possibilities'.
14 On the basis of a quote out of context, Lenin
was alleged to have been aware of a 'deficiency' in the Marxist analysis
of the state.
Political
power was misrepresented
as having merely
fallen into the hands of the workers,
rather than having been fought for.
15 The building of an economic agency to administer production was falsely put at the top of the list
of priorities for the working class, as though economic administration was to be the
only function of the post-revolutionary state.
Lenin was misrepresented as having seen the need for an agency of
economic administration to assume the post-revolutionary functions
of the workers' state, but
with no documentation.
On the basis of lies and quotes out of context,
it was falsely claimed that 'Engels would have seen the need for such a post-revolutionary
economic administrative agency as clearly as Lenin did, and probably
more so.'
16 Engels' quote from the Van Patten letter
was falsely attributed to "Socialism: From Utopia to Science".
The capitalist state, or 'the state as such' was substituted for the proletarian state in A.P.'s analysis of post-revolutionary roles
for the state.
Contempt for the post-revolutionary role of administering
production was expressed
for the state, such as 'illogical and impossible'.
17 In his first sentence, A.P. stated that Engels advocated a new
organ for social and productive administration, though, in his next sentence, this advocacy was
contradicted by misusing quotes from the Van Patten letter to
imply that 'all
of the social changes under socialism would take place using the
old state machine.'
A.P. failed to make any distinction between
the state and the form of state, enabling him to assert that 'Marx and Engels taught
that the proletariat would carry out the revolution with the old
state machine', rather than
stating that 'the
democratic republic would be as much the form of state for the
proletariat as it is for the bourgeoisie.'
The old capitalist state, or 'the state as such' was designated as the vehicle by which the proletariat
would 1) 'assert its newly conquered power', 2) 'hold down its
capitalist adversaries', 3) 'carry out that economic revolution
of society 'WITHOUT WHICH ..' etc.'
Engels' quote from the Van Patten letter was
again falsely attributed to "Socialism: From Utopia to Science".
In a little over four pages of his Preface, from page XI to XV, Arnold Petersen told 48 lies, and maybe more.
According to A.P.'s butchery of Marxist theory, the theories of the state would have been explained by the indicated authors in the following ways:
'The proletariat does
not create its own State power, but uses the capitalist State
in order to administer production after the revolution. Private
property is gradually converted into capitalist State property.
When the capitalist State represents the whole of society, it
dies out.
'The Anarchists wanted
to abolish the State out of hand with nothing to take its place,
but that would have been foolish, since the capitalist state is
the only post-political victory organization still in existence
that the proletariat can use to administer production.
'After the victory of
the proletariat, it may be necessary to alter the capitalist State
to get it to conform to its new task of socialist reconstruction.'
'Because the continued
use of the capitalist State beyond the political victory means
certain failure for the proletarian revolution, the workers must
organize into Industrial Unions so that the capitalist State can
be immediately disposed of.
'Though
they knew that the
workers cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery,
and wield it for their own purposes, Marx and Engels were forced to rely
on the capitalist State to perform the tasks of socialist reconstruction
and to administer production, because conditions had not yet evolved
sufficiently to show them the form of the new administration of
things.'
'De Leon did the proletarian movement a great service by discovering at last the new form of the administration of things. Socialist Industrial Unionism is what we are building in the Soviet Union. By correcting the deficiency in the Marxist analysis of the State, De Leon was the only one to add anything to Marxian Science.'
The preceding theories of the state were distilled from SLP falsifications and anarchist absurdities, which were supported by quotes out of context and lies cut from whole cloth. Anyone with a little curiosity could quite easily verify for themselves that when the proletariat seized state power in the Paris Commune, they created their own state power. Engels declared that the Paris Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it was a dictatorship over the old ruling classes, and not over the peasantry; and the form of that proletarian government was a democratic republic.
The following theories of the state were distilled from the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin:
The working class builds
a party of its own, independent of bourgeois influence. The working
class party allies itself with other progressive forces, and comes
to power in the form of a democratic republic. The proletarian
dictatorship is the state that dies out as class contradictions
are abolished, and after the antitheses between town and country
and between mental and manual labor have been abolished.
In the American republic of the 1800's, a proletarian
victory would have been as simple as getting a majority of workers'
party representatives elected to office. But, prosperous economic
conditions and opportunities to expand to the West prevented wide-spread
working class militancy, and prevented organization of an effective
workers' party to vie for state power.
The First International Workingmen's Association
urged European workers to ally with democratic forces to replace
monarchies with democracies by any means necessary. In either
type of change, electoral or revolutionary, only by first of all
organizing into a distinct and independent political party and
by conquering political power could labor be organized along new
lines. This scenario had little appeal to anarchists, who wanted
workers to spurn political activity and organize themselves into
unions which would displace existing states.
Lenin was generally in agreement with Marx and Engels on theories of the state. One exception is covered later. In his April 1917 "Letters on Tactics", Lenin wrote, (LCW 24, p. 49):
..."[A]narchism denies the need for a state and state power in the period of transition from the rule of the bourgeoisie to the rule of the proletariat, whereas I, with a precision that precludes any possibility of misinterpretation, advocate the need for a state in this period, although, in accordance with Marx and the lessons of the Paris Commune, I advocate not the usual parliamentary bourgeois state, but a state without a standing army, without a police opposed to the people, without an officialdom placed above the people."
From Lenin's 1918 "The Immediate tasks of the Soviet Government" (NW153, p. 289, or LCW 27, p. 263):
... "it would be extremely stupid and absurdly utopian to assume that the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without coercion and without dictatorship. Marx's theory very definitely opposed this petty-bourgeois-democratic and anarchist absurdity long ago."
In his Preface to "Socialism: From Utopia to Science", A.P. 'confused and confounded' his readers
by quoting Marx, Engels and Lenin out of context to try to prove
that 'every
kind of state power can only be capitalist state power.' This grand fraud, were it actually
a true appraisal, very much limits revolutionary possibilities.
'If State
power always and exclusively is bourgeois state power, it is worthless to
try to wield that which
will always be used against the proletariat. If Marx said that the proletariat cannot simply lay hold
of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purposes, and if anarchists want to abolish
the state and replace it with nothing at all, then there arises
the problem of finding a form of organization with which to administer
production after the revolution.'
'Hence
Marx's reliance on the capitalist state on a temporary basis,
but if the contradiction was too difficult for Marx to solve,
how can any mere mortal be expected to come up with a valid solution?
Here was an obvious deficiency in the Marxist analysis of the
state. Even Engels may have suspected a deficiency in the Marxist
analysis of the state, although Arnold Petersen did not have the
time to find perfectly convincing documentation for that sentiment.
But, Lenin certainly realized that this deficiency did exist.'
'To
save the present generation from becoming too depressed over the
lack of options for revolution, it was the genius of Daniel De
Leon that came up with the form into which the workers should
organize to implement the administration of things so that the
capitalist state can be immediately disposed of. Thanks to De
Leon and the advances in the means of production which made such
ideas possible, the state can be abolished and the socialist administration
of things that Marx and Engels could only dream about in their
day can become an immediate reality.'
The previous paragraphs echo the ideology of
the Socialist
Labor Party in a condensed
form, much of which is taught by members and sympathizers as socialist
gospel. Those for whom the caricature serves essential purposes
will want to continue to perpetrate it. Opportunists who join
with the objective of climbing high in the Party
will thoroughly learn the nuances of the caricature, and participate
in the task of getting members and sympathizers to part with their
dollars to support the hierarchy. They might become familiar with
the documentation of lies, dirty tricks and self-serving actions
of previous administrations, and continue to hide the evidence
of shameful crimes against the members and the workers. In their
haughtiness, they could say that 'the emancipation of the membership is
the class-conscious act of the membership itself!'
Purposely kept in a state of ignorance, members
hate to be reminded of their alleged laziness,
and though they sometimes complain, they send in ever more money
to the National
Office, hoping never to hear
words of chastisement again, but the prodding gets repeated over
and over again, lest members forget their duties to the god-like
intellectuals without
whom the Party would cease to exist.
The SLP's application of the term "Stalinist bureaucracies" or "bureaucratic state despotisms" to revolutionary governments or aspiring
revolutionary movements all over the world emanated from the SLP's denial of the theoretical existence of proletarian state power. Previously oppressed classes that became
politically
dominant, overturned colonial rule, and came to power in new states of their own, with working-class ideology, were automatically
perceived, simply because they were states,
as 'exploiting' or 'capitalist'
states, and could therefore not be supported in any way.
The conflict in Vietnam was not seen as a struggle for self-determination, but rather as the struggle of one group of exploiters
against other exploiters seeking domination over poor people with
little say in their own fate.
The Party subscribed to a three-way imperialist struggle theory in which 'American imperialists, if defeated, would
only be traded off for Soviet or Chinese imperialists, and the
Vietnamese would go on being exploited as if nothing had happened.
If the Vietnamese Communists were to take state power, then they
intended to wield their capitalist state for their own
purposes, undoubtedly to the detriment of Vietnamese workers.
So why should the struggle of Vietnamese communists against Americans
be supported in any way whatsoever? Any communist victory over
Americans along with their Vietnamese puppets would be null and
void due to their intent to wield their capitalist state against
the proletariat.' Furthermore,
as far as the SLP could determine, the communists were not building Socialist
Industrial Unions, and showed no intention of abolishing their
state after victory.
The SLP regarded all of the other parties on
the left as revisionist
and opportunist because they saw the need for
a party to rule in a state.
As a consequence of the SLP's perspective
on the state, the great majority of other parties were treated
as though they were as
much an enemy of workers as any capitalist state, so the SLP could
not cooperate to demonstrate or to otherwise help put an end to
America's savage war
in Vietnam. Though members
were never allowed to participate directly in demonstrations against
the war that were organized by other groups, the existence of
sizable demonstrations convinced the SLP
to allow its members to leaflet on the fringes,
but never to allow their leafletting and agitational activities
to be interpreted as being in support of the protest or the protesters.
To maintain its purity, the SLP could
do and say little about the unjust war in Vietnam. Members could not join with other progressive
forces in the USA to protest the gross injustice, slaughter and
destruction of the planet and its peoples without feeling dirty,
compromised and aligned with alleged Stalinists.
But, amazingly enough, the decree from A.P.'s
successors in 1975 was that the three-way imperialist conflict theory was a
mistake! The intellectuals
wished to attract new blood to the Party,
and because so many new prospects probably also shared the gut
feeling that the
Vietnamese victory was to be celebrated, the intellectuals did not want the Party to maintain such a ridiculous line that new blood
would be so alienated by the old position as to refuse to have
anything to do with the Party. So,
the new verdict was that the final outcome of the Vietnamese conflict was
the national liberation of Vietnam, and the liberation was progressive.
But, because the ongoing financial support of
the NO by the longtime members was definitely
a matter of interest to the intellectuals (a bird in the hand
is worth two in the bush), they did not want to overly antagonize
those who were comfortable with the old position, so they found
a way to prevent the total alienation of the old blood by claiming
that: 'There
were other dimensions to the Vietnamese conflict, including the
opposing interests of the superpowers, a not insignificant factor.' Even though the new position was officially
adopted by the Party, many long-time members could not understand
why the old
line was incorrect, which
they ended up repeating out of habit, much to the consternation
of the intellectuals. But, for being afraid to get to the root
of the misunderstanding in the first place, much of the fault
for the misunderstandings of the long-time members lay with the
intellectuals themselves. They could have initiated the process
of throwing out the rubbish entirely if they had dared.
Because SLP ideology
relies heavily on the notion that the existence of the state (which state?) can only mean the existence of slavery* (of which class?), the newly adopted
position on the Vietnamese situation had to accommodate itself
to that 'state
= slavery' equation. The
only type of scenario which the SLP could
understand, and into which the Vietnamese victory could plausibly
fit, was a bourgeois-democratic type of revolutionary state, where
a capitalist class overthrows a feudal monarchy and establishes
a bourgeois-democratic republic, much like the bourgeois democracies
that were established in Europe over the past few hundred years.
But, if what
happened in Vietnam was a bourgeois-democratic revolution, then why didn't the victorious Vietnamese bourgeoisie stay in Vietnam? If there hadn't been
so many pictures of boat people emigrating with their cargoes
of gold, the bourgeois-democratic
thesis might have had some
credibility, but the image of the capitalist class leaving Vietnam
in 1975 could only indicate that something other than a traditional
bourgeois-democratic revolution had occurred.
*In his 1844 article entitled "Critical Notes on the
Article 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Russian'", Marx wrote (Marx, Early Writings, Vintage Press,
1975, p. 419): "The
existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery." The Party
failed to credit this phrase from one of Marx's earliest works,
a few of whose theoretical constructions before 1845 could be
considered to be immature.
Another indication that it was not a bourgeois-democratic
revolution was that the Vietnamese immigrants were accepted into
the USA with open arms, just as many of the immigrants from Cuba,
the Soviet Union and every other communist country were welcomed.
The welcoming of immigrants from communist countries was in direct
opposition to the policy of exclusion and expulsion which greeted
refugees from the oppressed classes of El Salvador, Haiti, and
other dictatorships supported by the American government.
The SLP
world outlook is based upon
the denial of proletarian
state power, as well as the
denial of alliances
between fractions of the lower classes,
and these denials have been shown to be based upon falsifications
of Marx's theories of the state, and upon ignorance of Marx's
policies of workers'
support of national liberation struggles.
As anarchist
as the SLP has been, but having called itself socialist all along, its leadership long ago discerned
the necessity to 'prove' that 'it is indeed socialist' in order to satisfy the needs of the membership
to feel as though they
were supporting a genuine Marxist program. One way to put on a socialist
front was to reproduce the writings of the founders of socialism,
and then proudly portray them as the Party's
own ideas. When pressed to explain exactly how the Party program was based upon Marxism,
they cited as much corroborating material as they could possibly
squeeze out of context, and then used the phony quotes to support
the Party's theories.
If a party would like to prove that the proletariat cannot exercise a working class policy in its
own state, then proof must be found in the works of Marx, Engels and
Lenin. But, the number of passages one can draw upon to 'prove' this are very few in number, so a falsifier must
be very imaginative. Assuming that their readers would never bother to check the
'proof', appropriate passages could be appropriated, and
an impression created in the minds of the members that: 1) 'In the old days, the
only tool the proletariat had to keep down its capitalist enemies
after the revolution was the capitalist state', 2) 'if
all property is transformed into state property, it is transformed
into capitalist state property',
3) 'the consequence
of the proletariat's failure to organize the new administration of things after its political victory will be to face the
wrath of the capitalist state.'
Working with theories like that, reluctance to take state power is the natural result. It would have been one
thing for Party theoreticians to give a fair representation
of the Marxist theory of the state before criticizing
its deficiencies, but instead, they first falsified Marxist theories, and then found deficiencies in the falsified
theories. Then they proposed the SIU solution
to 'correct' the artificially phonied deficiencies.
Until the SLP casts
off its anarchist program and the lies that support it, and learns
what it can from the actual experience of the working classes
of the world to build a valid program, its program will be of
no value to the lower classes. Only the present members can correct
the course of the Party from within. As Engels wrote to Eduard
Bernstein on October 20, 1882, in the context of criticizing old
Bakuninist tactics of lies, calumniation and secret
cliquishness (MESC, p. 332):
... "It seems that every worker's party of a big country can develop only through internal struggle, which accords with the laws of dialectical development in general." ...
In an October 1882 letter to Bebel, Engels reiterated that idea, and added (MESC, p. 334):
... "The development of the proletariat proceeds everywhere through internal struggles, and France, which is now setting up a workers' party for the first time, is no exception. We in Germany have left behind the first phase of the internal struggles (with the Lassalleans); other phases still lie before us. Unity is quite a good thing so long as it is possible, but there are things which stand above unity. And when, like Marx and myself, one has all one's life fought harder against self-styled Socialists than against anyone else (for we regarded the bourgeoisie only as a class and hardly ever involved ourselves in conflicts with individual bourgeois), one cannot be greatly grieved that the inevitable struggle has broken out." ...
After the SLP eliminated peaceful means of internal struggle, writing about it on the outside of it became the only alternative. Such is the fruit of the Party's censorious, bureaucratic, secretive and sectarian ways.
At some point
in my Section's agenda, it had been decided to unite business meetings
with the study class, take care of business first, and study afterwards.
After distributing my critique
of A.P.'s Preface to Engels' "Socialism: From Utopia to Science" to Section
Santa Clara County, and after giving them a couple of weeks to
digest it, I moved for a discussion of my critique. However, they
were in the middle of discussing Lenin's "The State and Revolution", and didn't want to interrupt
it. After a brief discussion, they tabled my motion, and the consensus
was that discussing my critique would be reconsidered after the
Section completed studying "The State and Revolution", though, at that point, I began
to suspect that they would never get around to it. But, I went
along with their plan because the reading of Lenin would help
expose some of the more poorly educated members to a different
concept of the state, and anything they could learn about Leninism's closer approximation to Marxism would come in handy during a discussion of my
critique. It also gave me a little more time in which I could
save more money for a time when I might be unemployed for a while.
The following is part of a draft of a letter
written to a member right about that time:
"You might ask how I can possibly survive
working at the NO, knowing what I know. I must admit that
relations have been strained, but I am tolerated because 1) I
learned a long while back how to do my work well even under great
emotional stress if I thought there was a goal worth working for,
and 2) my Comrades have not even attempted to refute my
theories and have even expressed partial agreement when I forced
them to say something, and 3) I feel that there is so much
force behind the principle of exposing deceptions that it is only
a matter of time before my views .... {Manuscript broke off.}
'But the fact is that my position at the nerve
center is both advantageous and disadvantageous. It is advantageous
because I can keep a good eye on the general mood of the Party as a whole {this statement contradicts the alienation
I always felt as a shipping clerk, but I was much closer to the
scene of the crime than were the members of the outlying Sections} and I can keep the kind of perspective
on the Party that would be unobtainable in a Section ... It is disadvantageous in that I have found
it impossible to get the "leadership"
of the Party interested enough in my ideas to do
anything with them. They have been very non-committal so far and
this fact has been a source of bitterness in the past between
us, but I realize that they cannot do everything. They pour in
so much energy into just maintaining the organization and doing
positive things, that any effort to come up with a new coherent
line must come from an entity different from an overworked leadership.
The problem we face is a universal problem throughout the Party and the source is no longer a conspiracy against
the revolution by any group or unit within the Party.
This is why we can now cure ourselves and even stay together in
the process, painful though it will be.'
Parts of this paragraph were very conciliatory
toward those I also accused of blocking my process. It is one
of the few written reminders of the great internal conflict between
alternately blaming the Party and
myself for my inability to accomplish the changes that needed
to occur.
Though I wrote many a personal letter to some
members back East, I never got much encouragement from them to
keep doing my research, nor (with the exception of one) was I
made aware that they agreed
or disagreed with what I wrote.
Their general failure to respond to the ideas in my letters was
always disappointing. At first I did little more than point out
quotes that A.P. had taken out of context, but I got no response
at all. That was scary, as I could not figure out if the member
in question was simply numb or was waiting for me to crack altogether,
or what. Silence on my major points!
In my first batch of letters, I never attacked
my potential allies in the NO, and always
limited my attacks to Petersen or SLP
ideology, but after my quitting became inevitable, my letters
started attacking my co-workers in the NO
as well. During the course of my last few months with the Party, my previous jovial and amiable conversations
with the Party intellectuals declined to the point
of breaking off. Toward the end, the only discourse that I had
that was halfway pleasant was with a few of the older members,
even if it wasn't very intellectually stimulating.
During the
study classes of that time period, I usually said
very little, and waited patiently to someday bring up my critique
of A.P.'s pamphlet. An exception to my usual reticence occurred
one day while we were discussing possible forms of proletarian rule. I felt a certain level of excitement
and desire to share what I had discovered about this aspect of
Marxism, for I had already incorporated some
of that relevant research into my critique. Being very careful
not to phrase my argument in a way that would cause them to be
put down violently, I somewhat apprehensively informed the class
of what Engels had written in 1891 about 'the specific form of proletarian rule
being a democratic republic'.
To my amazement, one of the intellectuals piped up and exclaimed
in a veritable shout, "Engels was wrong!!"
'Wrong', thought I, as the words reverberated
in my ears for a while. If Engels was wrong,
then I had
to have been wrong as well,
but, because Engels had made his statement so emphatically and
so positively, I had all along thought that Engels was right.
But I had not yet read everything he and Marx had written
about the democratic republic, so I didn't have much of a solid
platform from which to argue. All I could do was to clam up, do
some more homework, and hope to bring it up again in the future
if the evidence I found seemed overwhelming.
After it was over, I sulked over the incident
for awhile, and I could not recall it without feeling as though
I had been swindled one more time. But, thought I, there might
still be a little hope that my critique would be picked up off
the table, and we would see who was right and who was wrong. But,
ignorant was I of the plans that the intellectuals wanted to impose
on the members.
After the Section finished
studying Lenin's "The State and Revolution", we picked up my old motion about whether
or not to discuss my critique of Petersen's Preface,
and they decided not to discuss it, a decision that I had
pretty much expected by that time. Still, the drama had to be
played out, and, at that point, I threatened to quit the Party if it wasn't discussed, but my threat to quit
brought no reaction at all. The Section didn't
even want to discuss what the Party had
upheld for decades as the
correct theory of the state.
Instead, they moved to a discussion of the possible necessity
of the workers to take state power within the framework of Socialist
Industrial Unionism! For
the second time in the meeting, I felt betrayed and invalidated.
I was overwhelmed by the audacity of the intellectuals. I had
never been one for thinking on my feet too well, and I'll admit
that I was in a double state of shock at the additional news of
making the
SIUs into state organizations.
I sat back and thought about two things: 1) how I was going to
depart the Party and the NO,
and 2) the absolute treachery of my fellow Comrades,
who were probably going to ram home the idea of "fighting SIUs" through the Section,
the National
Executive Committee, and
then the whole rest of the Party, without
increasing the understanding of the members by one iota.
Later on, I remembered what I had been taught
so many times about the
SIU being the specific form into which workers must organize in
order to avoid having to take (capitalist) state power
for the tasks of socialist reconstruction, but the intellectual cream of the National Office was now telling us that the SIU might be used
in a manner that would
have had A.P. and De Leon turning over in their graves. All
that was regarded as essential from "The State and Revolution" was the fact that 'workers' state power
would be arrived at with new forms of workers' organizations', and that, 'since the SIU could be described as a
new form of workers' organization, it could logically be expected to play
a role as an organization of state power', a logic that completely ignored the more official
logic of 'the SIU rendering state power unnecessary.'
At the end of ramrodding such an important theoretical
matter through Party
bureaucracy without discussion,
the members would remain in complete ignorance about how the Party could have arrived at such a new conflicting position
on the SIU, but the intellectuals could probably
have cared less, just as long as they could fulfill their goals,
which included: 1) presenting
to the American workers a Party program that was not so ridiculously
pacifist as to totally exclude the possibility of either a violent revolution or a dictatorship of the proletariat over
the bourgeoisie; 2) doing the above in a
manner that appeared logical and grounded in Marxism and the philosophy
of the Party, thereby eliminating criticism on those grounds; and 3) doing the above in a manner that didn't
alienate the older members by directly attacking the falsifications of Marxism
that gave birth to the Party's fraudulent
anarchist program in the first place.
The bad times
I endured during my last ten months with the Party
were probably the most disagreeable ones I ever lived through.
I had to live with the conflict of knowing that my labor was being
used to confuse the working class, but the goal of enlightening
my fellow members coupled with my poor financial circumstances
had been enough to warrant my staying on for awhile. Though I
failed in my immediate goal of enlightening anyone to my satisfaction
at the time, the idea grew that at least someday I would write
a book about it, but it took 15 years for the right circumstances
to arrive.
I really hoped at one time to see unity between
myself and the intellectuals by cooperating with them on a mutual
attack on the fraudulent premises of the Party program.
I thought at one time that one plausible reason why that unity
had never happened was that the others were probably afraid that that particular
kind of digging into Party history might have resulted in their
getting fired.
It's difficult for me to
assess the sentiment of the NEC very well,
since I didn't get to know but one of them to any extent, but
I do suppose that they
could have had a bunch of us fired for attacking the Party program. But then, who would have been left
to write the Weekly
People and keep the Party together? The NEC would
surely have had to take those dire straits into account, so getting
fired can be dismissed as having been the problem that the intellectuals
might have been worried about.
A more plausible reason why that unity never
happened was that the NO
staff had already invested
so much of their lives perpetuating the fraud, or simply allowing
it to be perpetuated, and could not easily be expected one day
to proceed in the opposite direction just because one individual
came around and pointed out a not particularly comfortable path
for them to follow. They probably thought that it was far better for the SLP to die
a predictable and slow death mired in fraud, bureaucracy, censorship,
secrecy, and a cult of De Leonist personality, than to take a
chance on a whole lot of truth getting out, upsetting the old
dogma and making life just a little too unpredictable than the
one that could be obtained by working forty hours with a reliable
pay-check at the end of each week.
About the potential for such unity, I wrote
to a member:
"At one time, when I had just begun to
uncover the mountain of lies, I had thought that my colleagues
at the NO would help me to explain the lies and
their significance to the rest of the members so that the members
would decide for themselves what to do ...
"What was uncovered in the following nine
months, however, was not so much the lies in Party literature, but the depth of the rottenness of the 'Comrades' who determined that this information should never reach the
membership. Some of my Comrades had been critical of Party literature long before I had even heard of the SLP, but were far more willing to prostitute themselves
to the fleshpots of Petersenism than I had ever suspected any 'socialist'
to be capable."
'But no group is as dedicated to certain truths than some of my Comrades,
however. One truth that they must certainly recognize is
the decline
of the Party. In their efforts
to gain more members, they have decided to inject a little Leninism into SLP ideology.
They will try to reconcile the irreconcilable - Anarchy and state
power! And the way it will be done will be by proposing that the Socialist Industrial
Unions become organs of state power,
in spite of my having been taught that the SIU is the specific form into which
the proletariat should organize so as to avoid the use
of the state or state power. Maybe the
new talent of the NO will be no less adept at burying the
history of the SIU than the old talent was at burying the
history of the proletariat.
'The Party has
been doing as much harm with its lies as good, so any diminution
of its effectiveness by its disappearance would be as much a blessing
for the workers as a pain for the NO.
Some of the staff might be basically honest, but they
are so scared of doing anything to lose their income that they
have accepted the plan of slowly reforming the Party, and under no circumstances
revealing the truth about the Party or Petersen. They will not do anything that will jeopardize the flow
of money from the pockets of the Petersenites, of whom the party
is mostly composed.
"Thus, my thesis that the Party members were basically honest and would be able
to understand how Petersen lied and would want to do something
about it took a back seat to the NO
clique's theory that the
Party consisted of stupid babies who would abandon the NO if disparaging
comments about Petersen's theories were allowed to be freely circulated
within the Party. But this
was only a cover for their greed. If the Party
really cared about truth, they would throw out the NO if they thought the NO was withholding something.
'The NO knew that
Petersen
was dishonest intellectually,
and that what
I had to say was nothing new to them.
But rather than allowing the information to come out as quickly
... by allowing freedom
of speech, they instead put
a clamp on it so that they could continue to live their suburban
lives. One of them even said that their plan was to 'someday come down hard
on Petersen' and that the half-million bucks
that the party had saved was going to 'pay our salaries for the
next twenty years'.
"Rather than be part of their plan, I opted
out. It was objectionable to me because I saw myself as merely
being used by them to help
spread Petersen's lies so that the NO could stay alive. But having fought so very hard for ten
years to seek and spread understanding, I knew that I could not
prostitute myself to their plan. I thought of all of the people
who might be in a position of truth-searching
that I was once in, and I could betray them by spreading lies
at the rate of $3.50 per hour? Perhaps for $4.50 or $5.00 per
hour, I could be so rotten. But I was beginning to despise the
filth of the whole situation, so I was not about to ask for a
raise, even though there might have been a chance that I could
command it. I was a damned good shipping clerk. I kept busy all
of the time and gave the Party its
full money's worth.
"That the NO
clique was merely using me and the other four {who quit at nearly
the same time} was evidenced by the statement of one of the clique
at our very last session when I was threatening to quit, to the
effect: "Why
are you being so unreasonable? We treat you well." Later on I interpreted the statement
to mean 'Why
can't you keep your mouth shut like we do and enjoy your life?'"
Never having had the money to enjoy life like
a bourgeois, that may have been why I was more interested in correcting
social injustice wherever I found it, even in the midst of a Party that was ostensibly dedicated to doing just that.
My failure
to lead the Party out of its difficulties was a big problem
for me. I had for a long time been bothered with the feeling that
someone else in my shoes, in better control of their lives, just
a little more street wise, or somehow able to cope with similar
opportunities, or what-have-you, could have done what I only dreamed
of doing. The discovery of something rotten that others were making
a living from, and sought to perpetuate, if not in original form,
then at least intact in general intent - perhaps the interests
of the other players in the game were sufficient to doom the efforts
of anyone like myself who would have rid the Party
of its rotten roots.
Rules against discussing inner Party business with Party
sympathizers, against talking
about the business of one Section with
members of other Sections, the near total lack of meaningful response
from other members, the paranoia that led me to feel that even to talk about what
was on my mind would only lead to my ostracism or even to my death, my own history of limited achievement
in expressing myself - all of those factors combined to leave
me quite isolated, and may have been sufficient in themselves
to condemn my efforts to failure.
Of these conflicts, I wrote:
'I found it easy at times to blame my failures
entirely on the existing machinery. In letters to Comrades back east, I ranted and raved at 'the
lack of democracy within the Party.' I
fulminated endlessly that 'there was more freedom of speech in the very state machine that the SLP had sworn to abolish.' I have not been alone in
this charge against the Party, for
many others have made the same accusation. In my case, however,
I could not decisively blame the Party
as much as I would have wanted, due to my failure to fully exhaust
my administrative remedies. Though I was running out of remedies, I still feel that I could have done
more, but when I was denied the right to speak
to my Section, I decided to end what could have turned
out to be an endless pattern of denial of my right to speak. Maybe I was right, I may never know for sure.
The fact that someone said to someone else that "Ken really got f----d
over", and that sentence
found its way back to me, indicates that I might never have been
allowed to speak. But, as mentioned already, I will never know,
as I simply gave up, threw in the towel, and walked out.'
'The biggest mistake I made (so that others
may learn) was my reluctance to vigorously pursue my goal. By
pursuing my arguments through my Section,
where they were easily prevented from reaching the rest of the
Party, I instead could have used my strategic
position as a NO
employee to write a letter
to the NEC simply stating that I would refuse to
ship out any more copies of "Socialism: From Utopia to Science", "Proletarian Democracy vs. Dictatorships
and Despotism", and
"Karl
Marx and Marxian Science",
listing some of the major lies from each work. It might have been
my fear of being dismissed that kept me from consciously considering
that option.'
"The most detrimental factor to the unfortunate
outcome of my case was my fear of being immediately dismissed
for a too forceful pursuit of my goal as Party reformer. Thus I didn't conceptualize more forceful modes
of struggle that might have realized my goal of ..." {Manuscript
broke off here.}
'Amazingly enough, I was never attacked for
my conflict with the program. I thought for sure that some rabid
Industrial
Unionist was going to someday
bring me up on the charge of being in conflict with the program, but it never happened. If it had happened
early in the game, I never would have had much of a chance to
prove my points. Later on, when things got boring, I might have
welcomed being challenged. I think that the reason that I was
never brought up on charges was the fact that I continued to do
my work conscientiously and, except for my paper challenges, vocally
I remained relatively subdued.'
I felt guilty for not continuing to torture
myself by tying the Party around my neck like the albatross in
the poem. The self-torture went on and on, and here is a sample:
"I would have been willing to stay on had
the Party been willing to be liberal enough to
allow my new-found discoveries of dishonesty and the substantive
issues of what the Party should do about them to be discussed
within the whole Party. But nothing becomes so simply because
one wishes it so, and the desire for freedom of speech was not going to be won by me, because I was not
willing to work for it. And here I must take issue with something
I said in my last letter to the effect that the Party was too bourgeois to want to
do anything about the deceptions it unwittingly perpetrates on
the working class. I was
merely rationalizing my own unwillingness to struggle for what
I believed to be correct ... And by refusing to struggle and by
giving up, I naturally have discredited my whole argument and
all of the work that I did and wished to go on doing because I
was too weak to really fight it out within the Party.
"I therefore abandoned the honest people
of the Party, i.e., the people who would not be repeating
the mistakes that have been repeated so many decades
simply because the mistakes seemed so plausible to people who were
never interested in Marxism enough to find out what it really is.
"So these were my motivations for staying
and leaving. Would it have helped the movement if I had stayed
in the Party and fought it out to the end? I wasn't
motivated to do it, in this Party, at
least, so it's impossible to say. I was just killing time, and
consider my Party involvement to be just so much water
over the dam, like so much else of my life, a waste of time, a
mass of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
My associates
must have understood that I was not afraid to upset the applecart, and they must have decided that, in
this particular war, it
was far better for one radical to be sacrificed than for half
of the NO to be sacrificed. They
must have sensed that I was on the verge of quitting anyway, for one can only stand to be disappointed
in one's Comrades just so long before reaching the breaking
point. I had already planned that, if the Section
failed to discuss my critique, I would definitely quit.
And so I did. But it took a couple of weeks.
I informed the National
Secretary of my intentions,
and at first planned to stay long enough to train someone to do
my job, but that would have taken too long, and I really couldn't
stand being around much longer. So after waffling in my intentions
to train someone else, or appeal to the NEC,
and after lasting two weeks beyond the fatal Section
meeting, I went back to the NO late on
a Friday night, cleaned out my locker, and put my key in an envelope
along with a note as to my intentions to desert the Party, and tossed it in the door slot.
What a relief it was to be finally rid of them!
I didn't care how much, if any, the Party
might have suffered as a result of my sudden departure. I would
have been much happier to see the Party
dissolve into nothing than to have it go on spreading the lies
that had deceived me and perhaps so many others.
Right around the same time, and entirely unrelated
to my own departure, the four new people who had come to work
at the NO had become so dissatisfied with their
jobs that they quit the NO as well.
I can remember one of them complaining that the articles he and another had spent
long hours preparing were not being printed, or were severely
butchered. The five of us
hung around with each other for a little while afterwards, but
since they didn't have much conflict with the Party program and philosophy, I didn't have that much in common with
them. I was disappointed that they didn't join in with my criticisms
of the Party
program, but no one seemed
very interested.
Some time after we had left the Party, one of them mentioned to me that one of the intellectuals
had told him that "Ken really got f----d over." This told me right away that the intellectuals
knew very well what they were doing by denying me the right to
try to sway the opinion of the Section. They
were well aware that they were rationing the scarce resource of
freedom of
speech to only those who
already had it, namely, themselves.
Of this freedom of speech
issue, I wrote to a member:
"My very own Section
has admitted in its own Minutes of
October, 1976, that examples
of misinformation exist in SLP literature. But when I tried, just this past study class
of March 28, 1977, to convince the Section
to take the first step to getting these important matters discussed
before the Party, they turned me down cold, and in full
knowledge that I would quit if they turned me down. I had waited
months for the Section to finish reading "The State and Revolution" so that we could discuss evidence
of distortion on the very question of the state, a subject which
I had written about and submitted to the Section
for discussion in November of 1976.
"But, to them, what I wished to discuss further was
not important enough to go before the Party, though they did admit that the question of the use of the state
by the workers was important enough to advocate that the SIUs
could and should be state organizations, in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the program has
been generally considered ... to have been designed
specifically to render such use of the state by the workers unnecessary.
"To the Section, however,
this advocacy
of the SIUs as state organizations is not contradictory at all, no insult
to anyone's intelligence, not at all. It
is probably no
more contradictory than were
the claims of A.P. that Engels did not know the difference between state
capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
"Perhaps it is felt by the ruling clique
that if enough
little changes are made to the Party program, Party history will
look muddled enough in theoretical content to allow increasingly
larger changes to occur in the future with only manageable disruption.
The older portion of the
Party, which is often blamed for "holding back Party progress
because of their dogmatic methods"
does not take kindly to changes in Party positions because of their instinctive knowledge that the explanations for
the changes advanced so far have been inadequate, to say the least."
In one letter, I came down real hard on my fellow
workers at the National
Office:
'There are only two possible explanations for
their present activities. One: that they are truly conscious of
the value of anarchist theories in splitting the working class
movement and are agents of the state, or Two: that they are merely
prostitutes, and maintain a semblance of interest in Petersen's
theories only to maintain a level of income from Petersen's idolizers,
while at the same time trying to convert to a more Leninist position on state power in an effort
to attract
those workers who know or suspect that the SIU is nothing more
than anarcho - syndicalist nonsense.
In this manner they will be able to discard the Petersen faction
that they often make fun of when they think they are in safe circle
of friends. At any rate, the hostility of the NO
staff to Petersen's writings became less and less of a secret
the more I got involved.'
Because I was so green for so long, and blamed
all of my failures on my own inadequacies, a vicious circle evolved
in which I blamed myself for everything and lost self-confidence.
I didn't realize then how much the cards were stacked against
anyone who would have wanted to do for their Party
what I wanted to do for mine, and I might have dismissed as ridiculous
any possibility that my own problems were not caused exactly by
myself alone. The nice part about struggling for clarity is that
eventually I found a sense of balance and peace within myself,
even if my first attempts to defeat oppression resulted in ridiculous
mistakes, and temporarily worsened various situations.
The subjects
of freedom
of information and censorship
were not treated as objects of interest while I was a member,
thoughts thereof seemingly absent in the minds of the membership.
The Party's work of promoting the SIU was
self-explanatory, issues within the Party
apparently non-existent. And yet, there was a subterranean roar,
members and Sections continued to be expelled, but no one
who wasn't in the fray had any idea of what the issues could have
been about. Such matters were 'handled' by the National Secretary and his alleged 'rubber-stamp'
NEC. If the Party administrators were not infallible and perfect, but instead had
their own axes to grind and didn't want their own foibles too
closely examined, they protected themselves from criticism from
the rank-and-file by promoting strict control over intra-Party information, labeling any attempt of the Party to inform itself as a "lampoon".
I once drafted the following to a member:
"The refusal of the NO staff
to cooperate with me to expose the fraud in SLP literature created the tensions that caused me to walk out.
I could no longer pretend that I didn't despise them thoroughly,
but neither could I openly express my anger. In their stubbornness
to maintain control of the Party by seeing
that only their "carefully
selected" viewpoints were allowed
to be disseminated "legally" within the Party, they trampled on the first principle
of democracy - equal
freedom of expression - and
this caused myself and finally four others to walk out.
"The significance of this lack of freedom
is that there is a lot of dirt to be hidden, dirt which can be
uncovered only by a concerted effort of a strong enough portion
of the membership who are conscientious enough to demand the truth and demand putting an end to the lies and falsifications
that presently make the SLP program and literature objects of scorn and derision among the proletariat.
"Their defense to their upperhandedness
is that the 'The
Party is not ready for certain topics',
which translates into 'We will not be able to retain power if certain
things are allowed to be discussed.'
'Certain
things', such as the truth."
'Party
organizational procedures
make it possible for the central group
to dominate because freedom
of information dissemination
is not guaranteed but has
to be funneled and digested by that body before it can be allowed
to spread to the rest of the Party.
Instead of serving the Party, the
NO dominates the Party.
Where is this a principle
of democracy?
'If everyone in the Party
had heard all of the lies about socialism before, and were properly
immunized, what would be the harm of any individual spreading
'lies'? And if this individual were really
sincere and was making honest mistakes, then what is the harm
of at least hearing this person out and correcting the mistakes instead of suppressing the viewpoints so that
they can not even be heard? Would not the correcting of the mistakes be good training for all of the members
involved? Let it not be forgotten that I also had a track record
of some of my major points being agreed on by my Section.' A Section that contained the bulk of the professional
intellectuals of the Party, besides.
'If the Party cannot
allow for the voice of one faction to be heard on an equal level
with that of another, then the faction that wins all of the time
will keep on winning until it finds itself quite alone, and then
it may continue to split up further within itself. This process
is what is happening now and will continue to happen until the
right of a minority viewpoint to be heard is guaranteed.'
"The {internal Party}
newsletter is a sham because the NS
is the one who determines the content thereof, and I know there
was no way I could get my stuff printed without the backing of
my Section, and they wouldn't even let me present
it to them."
The ways in which internal communications are
handled in the SLP make it possible for the faction in
power to tyrannize other viewpoints. If one's views match those
of one's Section and later the internal Party bulletin editors, then there's no problem, and everything
that everybody already agrees with gets rehashed one more time.
If one's views don't agree with those of one's Section,
then they have little hope of making their views known legally.
The frustrating experience of many members,
past or present, lends credibility to the theory that, with respect
to freedom
of expression, Party democracy is more limited than that of the state
that the Party is sworn to abolish. Why should one's
Party be more oppressive than one's government
in any respect? Any group that seeks to publish propaganda of
its own for internal and external distribution is subject to censure
by the Party
executive, as in the case
of the 'New
Unionists' of a few years
back. On the other hand, any group within the confines of the
state is considerably more free to publish most anything they
wish, and even have it delivered by the U.S. Post Office.
A.P. may have learned his own undemocratic ways
from his predecessors in a Danish Party that Engels criticized
in a December 1889 letter to Gerson Trier in Copenhagen, in which
Engels philosophized about the relation of freedom of speech to the workers' party (MEW 37,
pp. 327-8):
"With regard, now, to the procedure of the Hovedbestyrelsen {Supervising Committee} toward you and your friends, such a summary expulsion from the party has happened in the secret societies from 1840-51; the secret organization made it unavoidable. It has furthermore happened, and often enough, with the English physical force Chartists under the dictatorship of O'Connors. But the Chartists were a party directly organized to strike out, as the name says, therefore they were under a dictatorship, and expulsion was a military measure. On the other hand, in times of peace, I know of a similar arbitrary procedure only of the Lassalleans of J. B. von Schweitzer's "strict organization"; von Schweitzer needed it because of his suspicious dealings with the Berlin Police, and thereby only hastened the dissolution of the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiterverein. Among the socialist workers' parties existing today it would hardly occur to a single one - after Mr. Rosenberg in America {SLP} eliminated himself - to treat an opposition, which grew out of it, after the Danish model. It belongs to the life and well-being of any party that out of it more moderate and more extreme directions develop and fight each other, and those who simply exclude the more extreme ones only encourage their growth. The workers' movement is based on the sharpest critique of existing society, critique is its vital element; how can it remove itself from criticism, forbid debate? Are we demanding from others free speech for us, only to abolish it again in our own ranks?"
It's too bad
that Rosenberg did not take his censorious techniques with him
when he left the SLP, but this type of censorship is exactly
what the Party
bureaucracy has practiced
for a long time. I found it also indicative of the immaturity
of the American movement as a whole that this portion of Engels'
letter to Trier was not readily available in the English language
until just recently. Did parties and groups lobby publishers to
omit this
portion of the letter so as to be better able to blame their totalitarian
practices on ignorance? Food
for thought.
Lenin struggled for many years against the censorship
of the Tsarist regime of Russia, and he also recognized
the destructive effects of the lack of freedom to freely discuss
theoretical material within his own party. More than once he campaigned
for theoretical journals for the RSDLP
members to discuss their views. In his June, 1914 "Report of the Central
Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party to the
Brussels Conference",
Lenin struggled with a faction of "liquidators",
and proposed dealing with their propaganda in the following way
(LCW 20, p. 519):
"7. The existence of two
rival newspapers in the same town or locality shall be absolutely
forbidden. The minority shall have the right to discuss before
the whole Party, disagreements on programme, tactics and organisation
in a discussion journal specially published for the purpose, but
shall not have the right to publish, in a rival newspaper, pronouncements
disruptive of the actions and decisions of the majority.
"Inasmuch as the liquidators' newspaper in St. Petersburg,
which is supported chiefly by bourgeois, not proletarian funds,
is published contrary to the will of the acknowledged and indisputable
majority of the class-conscious Social-Democratic workers in St.
Petersburg, and causes extreme disorganisation by advocating disregard
for the will of the majority, it shall be deemed necessary to
close this newspaper immediately and to issue a discussion journal
in its place."
In 1921, an
alleged 'anarcho-syndicalist
deviation' known as the "Workers' Opposition", led by Alexandra Kollontai, campaigned
for industrial unions and workers' control in the Soviet Union.
Even though Lenin disagreed with them, much of their propaganda
was ordered printed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and Kollontai herself was granted a
seat on the Central
Committee. Compare that treatment
to how my critiques of A.P.'s theories were treated. In a certain
inner-Party
communication, the NS complained about my 'pre-occupation with distortions in Party
literature', but I never
learned if the NEC
Subcommittee or the NEC itself had been allowed to gather any idea of
the specifics of my charges of 'distortions'.
On page 16 of the SLP's
edition of Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme", a line of Marx's prefatory letter to W.
Bracke of May, 1875 that was critical of the Lassallean
faction of his German party was replaced by a series of dots.
In the interests of the education of interested parties, here
is the sentence that the SLP found
too dangerous to print (MESW III,
p.12):
"One had obviously a desire to stifle all criticism and to give one's own party no opportunity for reflection."
Now, would
the Party have been hurt very much by printing
that sentence? Probably not. But, a Party
leadership that was so guilty of manipulating its own members
became paranoid enough about their learning that the same kind of manipulation
could have happened within other parties at other times, that it resorted to the additional
crime of omitting pertinent passages from the historical writings
of the founders of socialism. The extreme horror of the Party's perpetration of fraud against the working class
required the studied exercise of the weapon of censorship to maintain
it.
The acceptance of secrecy and censorship by
the members also prepared them to accommodate themselves to the
growing climate of authoritarian oppression in the country, even
though, in the same country in which the Party
program met with comparatively little interference from government,
there was no rational need for the Party
to operate within its shroud of secrecy, unless its secrecy was
designed to prevent its fraud from becoming known to its members,
in the same way that the secrecy of government keeps its own fraud
and crime from being detected by the public. As above, so below.
The following
is from the bulk of a draft of a letter about how various Party positions were achieved:
'The position change on the Vietnamese War came about as the result of a criticism of an
April 1975 Weekly
People article on the Vietnamese victory over the Americans. The matter went
to the NEC, and, almost without discussion, they
changed the Party
position on the nature of
the conflict. Then it was recapped once again at the '76 Convention, and I will bet that not one per cent
will remember or understand how the original position (three-way superpower
conflict) was arrived at
or why the new position was not that much better.'
"Then on the union
question came the reprinting of the "Mines to the Miners" pamphlet which advocated members working within the unions. Again the question was handled by the
NEC, but they complained that they didn't have the time
to consider all of the implications of a position change and they
were surprised that it should have to be decided upon without
more discussion.
"Though a swallow doth not a summer make,
I could see a real precedent growing that the "new" NO, which claims to have "done more to bring democracy
to the Party than any other group in history", was going to use the same methods of "getting things done" as did the previous administration.
"This is all leading up to a plan by the
NO to make
state organizations out of the SIUs,
perhaps at the next Convention, and perhaps without giving the membership
the opportunity to reflect and discuss these important questions.
In other words, instead of proclaiming that the SIUs are deficient and giving the members a year or so to carry on
a free discussion (uncensored), most of the members do
not know what plans the NO has for
them, and what a surprise this one will be!
'Is it not your experience that the SIUs are the specific
form into which the workers should organize so as to avoid having
to take state power? Wouldn't
it seem a little contradictory if these SIUs, just because they are organizations
of working people, should become state organizations? And isn't the idea so wonderful
that a paper that I wrote that attacked the problem of state power
on a much more fundamental level five months ago, should be deemed
not fit to
discuss on the Section floor
and instead be repressed? Democracy in action
- business as usual. The new NO has shown
itself to be as interested in bona-fide criticism as the old one.'
So far in this book, only a relatively small number of theoretical issues in SLP literature have been examined, but now that a few preliminary theories have been explored, the pamphlet that had originally so outraged me with its falsifications will be investigated further in order to see what else therein can also be proven to be false. Almost all of the analyses from here on were written after 1992.