I was a council communist in my youth, long, long ago (influenced by Castoriadis), so I've experienced the enthrallment and the disillusionment both. Looking back, the telltale lacuna for me is political parties. Without them, there can't be real, meaningful democracy, since they organize differing ideological perspectives over time. Instead of fragmented, ephemeral opinion formation, you get commitment and sustained opposition during periods when you're out of power. In the end, I believe the reason such classical socialists/communists as Lenin and Gransci thought parties were poison is that that they harbored an implicit, unspoken belief in the homogeneity of the class whose cause they championed, a homogeneity of interest if not (yet) of outlook. (A class in itself on the road to being a class for itself.) Just why they assumed this, where this assumption came from and why it has continued to exert influence over the left, is something I'll be exploring in a book I'm writing. For now, I'll just say that it goes a long way back in European history.
Other parties implies other opinions. The true believer has no doubt and is sure his policies and opinion are correct. Therefore by definition, opposition is wrong. The true believer may try to convince the opposition of the error of their ways, but if they decline to see the light, well then force is the only alternative. Of course deadly force is regrettable, but it’s the opposition’s own fault since they refuse to be convinced and therefore must be evil.
It goes further back, to the millenarian tradition with roots in the later middle ages. The familiar notions of revolution and the utopian post-revolutionary society evolved over several centuries. Outside them, there is no radical socialist vision. (My book hopes to change this.) This tradition is specific to Europe, which is why non-European socialism is an adaptation. How Rousseau relates to this is an interesting question. My sense is that he stands outside it, but I'm no Rousseau scholar, and it would be interesting to get a well-informed take on this.
Well, thinking about this overnight: Rousseau has been claimed by game theorists for his stag hunt analogy, and you could certainly give the general will a collective action interpretation. He was a rationalist, after all -- so much so he was in some sense a moral monster. But whether this reading is anachronistic or not is something I'm totally unqualified to evaluate. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a literature out there on this very question.
First I disagree with you about Lenin. His attitude toward worker control over production wasn't ideological but a function of the level of economic development of the Soviet Union in 1921. There simply wasn't enough of a domestic surplus of capital to enable worker's control over production. The civil war and the reduction of the market to barter left him no choice. He had to reinstitute capitalism. This meant taking ownership of the factory away from workers which meant returning them to the status of non owners and opening up ownership to those who had assets and would risk productive investment on their own capitalist terms.
To put it bluntly, Lenin recognized that so long as a scarcity of capital exists there cannot be socialism. This is the whole economic basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the formation of the centralized non democratic state. Hold power until economic conditions enable new forms of social relations.
After WW2 the Soviet Union could have taken the Chinese road which Lenin would have welcomed during the NEP had he lived but Stalin wouldn't accept the Breton Woods terms he was offered and took the path of "central planning", primitive accumulation through worker exploitation and peasant confiscation.
The attempts to reinstitute workers control post WW2 in Eastern Europe also hit the rock of insufficient capital.
However just giving workers control over the enterprise without giving them personal responsibility for risk in allocating capital to production also isn't socialism. It is liberalism. It leads to a focus on consumption. Alternatively it creates divisions within the working class between haves and have nots---well paid union workers and scrounging gig workers, depending upon how well the company fares.
The focus of worker control in order for it to work has to be on production not consumption. The state not the enterprise has to be the focus if consumption. Democracy will come out of the social relations thus produced!
I agree with you. You explain the reasons why Lenin was against workers' role in production. This is all true. But it simply confirms the fact that I state, namely that Lenin was against workers' councils, i.e., he never discussed them seriously and barely mentioned them.
Actually there was a tremendous debate over workers councils initiated by the metal workers union and Shylapnikov(bad spelling) in which Trotsky took the anti union position of miltarized labor, direct state worker employment and Lenin took the position of the NEP and made quite a few speeches about the necessity of capital limiting the options of worker control. There had been workers control both endorsed as Party Policy from 1918 to 1921 and in practice at the factory level. The debate at the time was hiw to restore a devastated economy. There haven't been many papers coming from western socialists that address what could have been done during this period given the lack of investment capital. I think the answer is obvious---not much. During the Prague Spring period there was such a debate but in much better economic circunstances.
Lenin was a pragmatist. When workers are eating their shoelaces and burning their furniture to stay warm it was absolutely necessary to get that hoarded bourgesois capital back into investment. Giving the capitalists the power to invest and control production he thought would be balanced by Party control over the unions and the State. Lenin was a Marxist. He wasn't wedded to any absolute position. He wasn't opposed to worker control over production he just found it impractical. Then there were the Mensheviks who were taking advantage of worker conditions to aggitate for less Communist Party control over the State at the same time when the Brits were trying to isolate and strangle the Soviet state first militarily then economically. You can't pull Lenin out of the time in which he lived.
But the short answer is yes there was voluminous debate at the time (see Barbara Allen)and no Lenin didn't ignore the concept of workers councils(there was a CC split). But Lenin always changed his strategy, based upon Marxist analytic methodology, drawing the options from what was happening and changing in the material world. As a historical figure he will be remembered for this. Marx was very much into the logic of NOT. How does something transform into its opposite. Example: a law passed to prevent development of environmentally important property by eliminating road access becomes a law denying the public access altogether. Lenin would have loved prob ability.
I wonder how the tendency for worker managed enterprises in the former Yugoslavia to underinvest in capital requirements matches Perotin’s findings that worker cooperatives tend to be more capital intensive than traditional enterprises. Maybe it’s about the context of the model or specific features in how each is implemented rather than something intrinsic to worker self-management or maybe a tension that can be counted balanced within the sovereignty of labour?
I don't think the Eastern European expiraments in worker control over production that were eventually crushed in 1968 by Brezhnev were compatible with the centralized planning command model that Stalin and most western intellectuals called socialism. Paranoid dictators do not like risk. Advances in production always involve risk. This is also why Lenin emphasized culture(education) for workers, to minimize losses in worker directed investment decisions. As capitalism accumulated more and more capital it could afford to back riskier investments. The whole venture capital movement is based upon this. If you look at the worker movements in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s the experience of pre assembly line skilled workers allowed them to to self organize production. They knew what methods were most advanced and should be invested in. The state didn't have the capital always to move in that direction (think make do). Then there was the control freak in the bureacracy, Stalin. The Soviet Union went full top down hierarchical vertically and horizontally integrated monopoly (scientific sic) production. Socialism in this context, as an advance on capitalism wasn't possible. Steve Jobs would have been shot and Wozniak sent to Siberia. In China today you see the possibility of the next advance in production. They have state capitalism. They understand entrepreneurs but haven't yet figured out how to move to efficient worker control of investment. They need to solidify the role of the state in providing for the needs of the population so that workers don't eat up profits. In the US Trump is forcing a fascist form of state capitalism on the monopolies. It is actually an interesting period. But our economy is wasteful. Instead of efficiently minimizing the cost of worker reproduction it maximizes conspicuous consumption while squeezing healthcare, housing, and education. Unfortunately this leads to collapse not reform. Brains need not apply.
I find Gramsci’s work very far reaching. I don’t think we’ll ever see any society live up to what he was demanding.
I loved reading Role of Intellectuals where he wrote from the prison cell he ultimately died in how disappointed he was in the intellectual class who refused to tell the public the truth and instead pleasured themselves.
Two foundational elements of China's political system – national goal-setting and consensus voting – appear to obviate partisanship and divisiveness.
China was lucky that Confucius set national goals for it 2500 years ago and, once the PRC adopted them, consensus came easily. (They involve creating advanced forms of society, with Norway's QOL and Gini as the first step).
How to agree on the policies and projects needed is done by consensus-building and early stage trials. Once two-thirds of the country, Party and legislators support it and it's legislated, public criticisms and arguments about it cease and everyone cooperates to reach the goal.
If two-thirds support seems high, consider this: 95% of Chinese say their country is headed in the right direction.
Gramsci is very highly regarded in the West because he's the only one so far who tried, in the post-war I period, to theorize why communist revolutions in the West failed where in the East (Russia) they succeeded, and how a communist revolution in the West should pan out.
He's taken very seriously by some anti-communist elites, like, e.g. the Brazilian Armed Forces, whose intellectuals study him precisely to predict and crush a communist revolution in Brazil before it takes shape.
However, it is a product of its times. It does not - and never had the intention of - being an eternally valid “theory”. For example, his “broad front” theory is sketchy at best, and was used by Western Marxists during the Cold War to justify a communist revolution without violence (i.e. without seizing any type of military power) and thus to, at the same time, demonize Eastern Marxism (Leninism; Marxism-Leninism aka Stalinism; Maoism) as “oppressive”, “totalitarian” and “authoritarian”. It also gave the intellectual legitimacy to a lot of Western Marxist leaders to bureaucratize from the Hard Left (i.e. the non-Social-Democratic Left; Keynesianism) by promising a communist revolution at a snail's pace -- some kind of Western Marxist version of Bukharinism that quickly converged with Post-Keynesianism after the late 70s.
So far, a revolution of the type Gramsci predicted has never materialized -- the only two communist revolutions that happened in the West, Cuba and Venezuela -- happened by seizing, almost immediately, military power (in Venezuela's case, institutionally, because Chávez was already from the Venezuelan military itself).
I'm really enjoying Branko Milanovic's notes on in his readings of communist intellectuals, and in particular the fresh perspective he brings by doing what vanishingly few non-marxists are willing to do—he takes them seriously as thinkers—but without taking the scientific truth of marxism as his starting point. He reads them not for solutions, but for how their search for solutions can aid us in ours.
That said, I'd be interested to know whether he is familiar with the work of Bernard Manin, and in particular his Principles of Representative Government. which is to my mind among the most penetrating critical analyses of "representative government," which is the term Manin uses in place of "representative democracy," because, as he shows, election has historically been associated with aristrocratic forms of rule rather than democratic ones. He also shows that election in practice always and necessarily leads to non-representative "representatives" in the sense that they are distinguished from others by their superior wealth and social connections.
Maybe I'm a bit late to the party, but your suggestion that direct democracy may be achieved with the help of the internet is quite interesting and something that I have, too, considered previously, as I am not a big fan of representative democracy and political parties. Even if I am not looking at the issue from the communist/marxist perspective.
In fact, there is currently a political project (party) in Bulgaria, which aims to achieve exactly the above and they claim to have the technology already in place and to have been contacted about it from foreign organizations as well. I cannot confirm this personally, of course, as I am not part of this organization myself (because I find some other aspects of it a bit too "quirky").
I think we in the environmental justice movement have always known what Gramsci says. What counts is the power you can organize on the ground. Then there will be negotiations. If the power you can organize is big enough the other party will feel existentially threatened and it's your turn to come up with a solution.
I was a council communist in my youth, long, long ago (influenced by Castoriadis), so I've experienced the enthrallment and the disillusionment both. Looking back, the telltale lacuna for me is political parties. Without them, there can't be real, meaningful democracy, since they organize differing ideological perspectives over time. Instead of fragmented, ephemeral opinion formation, you get commitment and sustained opposition during periods when you're out of power. In the end, I believe the reason such classical socialists/communists as Lenin and Gransci thought parties were poison is that that they harbored an implicit, unspoken belief in the homogeneity of the class whose cause they championed, a homogeneity of interest if not (yet) of outlook. (A class in itself on the road to being a class for itself.) Just why they assumed this, where this assumption came from and why it has continued to exert influence over the left, is something I'll be exploring in a book I'm writing. For now, I'll just say that it goes a long way back in European history.
America is the OG euro trash!
Other parties implies other opinions. The true believer has no doubt and is sure his policies and opinion are correct. Therefore by definition, opposition is wrong. The true believer may try to convince the opposition of the error of their ways, but if they decline to see the light, well then force is the only alternative. Of course deadly force is regrettable, but it’s the opposition’s own fault since they refuse to be convinced and therefore must be evil.
Could the origin be in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of general will?
Could the origin be in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's concept of general will?
It goes further back, to the millenarian tradition with roots in the later middle ages. The familiar notions of revolution and the utopian post-revolutionary society evolved over several centuries. Outside them, there is no radical socialist vision. (My book hopes to change this.) This tradition is specific to Europe, which is why non-European socialism is an adaptation. How Rousseau relates to this is an interesting question. My sense is that he stands outside it, but I'm no Rousseau scholar, and it would be interesting to get a well-informed take on this.
Well, thinking about this overnight: Rousseau has been claimed by game theorists for his stag hunt analogy, and you could certainly give the general will a collective action interpretation. He was a rationalist, after all -- so much so he was in some sense a moral monster. But whether this reading is anachronistic or not is something I'm totally unqualified to evaluate. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a literature out there on this very question.
First I disagree with you about Lenin. His attitude toward worker control over production wasn't ideological but a function of the level of economic development of the Soviet Union in 1921. There simply wasn't enough of a domestic surplus of capital to enable worker's control over production. The civil war and the reduction of the market to barter left him no choice. He had to reinstitute capitalism. This meant taking ownership of the factory away from workers which meant returning them to the status of non owners and opening up ownership to those who had assets and would risk productive investment on their own capitalist terms.
To put it bluntly, Lenin recognized that so long as a scarcity of capital exists there cannot be socialism. This is the whole economic basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the formation of the centralized non democratic state. Hold power until economic conditions enable new forms of social relations.
After WW2 the Soviet Union could have taken the Chinese road which Lenin would have welcomed during the NEP had he lived but Stalin wouldn't accept the Breton Woods terms he was offered and took the path of "central planning", primitive accumulation through worker exploitation and peasant confiscation.
The attempts to reinstitute workers control post WW2 in Eastern Europe also hit the rock of insufficient capital.
However just giving workers control over the enterprise without giving them personal responsibility for risk in allocating capital to production also isn't socialism. It is liberalism. It leads to a focus on consumption. Alternatively it creates divisions within the working class between haves and have nots---well paid union workers and scrounging gig workers, depending upon how well the company fares.
The focus of worker control in order for it to work has to be on production not consumption. The state not the enterprise has to be the focus if consumption. Democracy will come out of the social relations thus produced!
I agree with you. You explain the reasons why Lenin was against workers' role in production. This is all true. But it simply confirms the fact that I state, namely that Lenin was against workers' councils, i.e., he never discussed them seriously and barely mentioned them.
Actually there was a tremendous debate over workers councils initiated by the metal workers union and Shylapnikov(bad spelling) in which Trotsky took the anti union position of miltarized labor, direct state worker employment and Lenin took the position of the NEP and made quite a few speeches about the necessity of capital limiting the options of worker control. There had been workers control both endorsed as Party Policy from 1918 to 1921 and in practice at the factory level. The debate at the time was hiw to restore a devastated economy. There haven't been many papers coming from western socialists that address what could have been done during this period given the lack of investment capital. I think the answer is obvious---not much. During the Prague Spring period there was such a debate but in much better economic circunstances.
Lenin was a pragmatist. When workers are eating their shoelaces and burning their furniture to stay warm it was absolutely necessary to get that hoarded bourgesois capital back into investment. Giving the capitalists the power to invest and control production he thought would be balanced by Party control over the unions and the State. Lenin was a Marxist. He wasn't wedded to any absolute position. He wasn't opposed to worker control over production he just found it impractical. Then there were the Mensheviks who were taking advantage of worker conditions to aggitate for less Communist Party control over the State at the same time when the Brits were trying to isolate and strangle the Soviet state first militarily then economically. You can't pull Lenin out of the time in which he lived.
But the short answer is yes there was voluminous debate at the time (see Barbara Allen)and no Lenin didn't ignore the concept of workers councils(there was a CC split). But Lenin always changed his strategy, based upon Marxist analytic methodology, drawing the options from what was happening and changing in the material world. As a historical figure he will be remembered for this. Marx was very much into the logic of NOT. How does something transform into its opposite. Example: a law passed to prevent development of environmentally important property by eliminating road access becomes a law denying the public access altogether. Lenin would have loved prob ability.
I wonder how the tendency for worker managed enterprises in the former Yugoslavia to underinvest in capital requirements matches Perotin’s findings that worker cooperatives tend to be more capital intensive than traditional enterprises. Maybe it’s about the context of the model or specific features in how each is implemented rather than something intrinsic to worker self-management or maybe a tension that can be counted balanced within the sovereignty of labour?
I don't think the Eastern European expiraments in worker control over production that were eventually crushed in 1968 by Brezhnev were compatible with the centralized planning command model that Stalin and most western intellectuals called socialism. Paranoid dictators do not like risk. Advances in production always involve risk. This is also why Lenin emphasized culture(education) for workers, to minimize losses in worker directed investment decisions. As capitalism accumulated more and more capital it could afford to back riskier investments. The whole venture capital movement is based upon this. If you look at the worker movements in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s the experience of pre assembly line skilled workers allowed them to to self organize production. They knew what methods were most advanced and should be invested in. The state didn't have the capital always to move in that direction (think make do). Then there was the control freak in the bureacracy, Stalin. The Soviet Union went full top down hierarchical vertically and horizontally integrated monopoly (scientific sic) production. Socialism in this context, as an advance on capitalism wasn't possible. Steve Jobs would have been shot and Wozniak sent to Siberia. In China today you see the possibility of the next advance in production. They have state capitalism. They understand entrepreneurs but haven't yet figured out how to move to efficient worker control of investment. They need to solidify the role of the state in providing for the needs of the population so that workers don't eat up profits. In the US Trump is forcing a fascist form of state capitalism on the monopolies. It is actually an interesting period. But our economy is wasteful. Instead of efficiently minimizing the cost of worker reproduction it maximizes conspicuous consumption while squeezing healthcare, housing, and education. Unfortunately this leads to collapse not reform. Brains need not apply.
I find Gramsci’s work very far reaching. I don’t think we’ll ever see any society live up to what he was demanding.
I loved reading Role of Intellectuals where he wrote from the prison cell he ultimately died in how disappointed he was in the intellectual class who refused to tell the public the truth and instead pleasured themselves.
Sounds like America today.
Two foundational elements of China's political system – national goal-setting and consensus voting – appear to obviate partisanship and divisiveness.
China was lucky that Confucius set national goals for it 2500 years ago and, once the PRC adopted them, consensus came easily. (They involve creating advanced forms of society, with Norway's QOL and Gini as the first step).
How to agree on the policies and projects needed is done by consensus-building and early stage trials. Once two-thirds of the country, Party and legislators support it and it's legislated, public criticisms and arguments about it cease and everyone cooperates to reach the goal.
If two-thirds support seems high, consider this: 95% of Chinese say their country is headed in the right direction.
Completely agree. China is very developed. It would be really nice to be that developed for the U.S.
And you’re even more right in stating we need community built systems instead of greed built systems that we have.
Gramsci is very highly regarded in the West because he's the only one so far who tried, in the post-war I period, to theorize why communist revolutions in the West failed where in the East (Russia) they succeeded, and how a communist revolution in the West should pan out.
He's taken very seriously by some anti-communist elites, like, e.g. the Brazilian Armed Forces, whose intellectuals study him precisely to predict and crush a communist revolution in Brazil before it takes shape.
However, it is a product of its times. It does not - and never had the intention of - being an eternally valid “theory”. For example, his “broad front” theory is sketchy at best, and was used by Western Marxists during the Cold War to justify a communist revolution without violence (i.e. without seizing any type of military power) and thus to, at the same time, demonize Eastern Marxism (Leninism; Marxism-Leninism aka Stalinism; Maoism) as “oppressive”, “totalitarian” and “authoritarian”. It also gave the intellectual legitimacy to a lot of Western Marxist leaders to bureaucratize from the Hard Left (i.e. the non-Social-Democratic Left; Keynesianism) by promising a communist revolution at a snail's pace -- some kind of Western Marxist version of Bukharinism that quickly converged with Post-Keynesianism after the late 70s.
So far, a revolution of the type Gramsci predicted has never materialized -- the only two communist revolutions that happened in the West, Cuba and Venezuela -- happened by seizing, almost immediately, military power (in Venezuela's case, institutionally, because Chávez was already from the Venezuelan military itself).
Gwyn A(lf) Williams' "Proletarian Order" is a great intro to Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo.
Thank you.
The 'internet' direct democracy mentioned here was basically instituted by the Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy in order to circumvent some of the parliamentary issues identified in this excellent post; cf. 1) https://www.wired.com/story/italy-five-star-rousseau-online/; 2) https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-5starts-online-platform-rousseau-crisis/; and 3) https://www.ft.com/content/546be098-989f-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b. It did not end well, however.
Efforts are already under way. See more about the True Representation Movement. https://truerepmovement.com/
I think that Citizens' Assemblies hold the most promise.
Obviously they need to be structured very carefully.
https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/citizens_assembly
I'm really enjoying Branko Milanovic's notes on in his readings of communist intellectuals, and in particular the fresh perspective he brings by doing what vanishingly few non-marxists are willing to do—he takes them seriously as thinkers—but without taking the scientific truth of marxism as his starting point. He reads them not for solutions, but for how their search for solutions can aid us in ours.
That said, I'd be interested to know whether he is familiar with the work of Bernard Manin, and in particular his Principles of Representative Government. which is to my mind among the most penetrating critical analyses of "representative government," which is the term Manin uses in place of "representative democracy," because, as he shows, election has historically been associated with aristrocratic forms of rule rather than democratic ones. He also shows that election in practice always and necessarily leads to non-representative "representatives" in the sense that they are distinguished from others by their superior wealth and social connections.
Maybe I'm a bit late to the party, but your suggestion that direct democracy may be achieved with the help of the internet is quite interesting and something that I have, too, considered previously, as I am not a big fan of representative democracy and political parties. Even if I am not looking at the issue from the communist/marxist perspective.
In fact, there is currently a political project (party) in Bulgaria, which aims to achieve exactly the above and they claim to have the technology already in place and to have been contacted about it from foreign organizations as well. I cannot confirm this personally, of course, as I am not part of this organization myself (because I find some other aspects of it a bit too "quirky").
I think we in the environmental justice movement have always known what Gramsci says. What counts is the power you can organize on the ground. Then there will be negotiations. If the power you can organize is big enough the other party will feel existentially threatened and it's your turn to come up with a solution.
The tech bros, of course, have a solution: The Network State. It's close to a single party state, not sure yet how it will resist dictatorship.
I have read your work as well, and greatly appreciate it.