The Proletarian Public - The Practice of Proletarian Self-Emancipation

557 Pages·1996·1.413 MB·English

by  Peter Critchley

The Proletarian Public Dr Peter Critchley
THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC

The Practice of Proletarian Self-Emancipation

1996

Dr Peter Critchley

Critchley, P. 1996., The Proletarian Public : The Practice of Proletarian Self-Emancipation [e-book]

Available through: Academia website <http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Books

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Peter Critchley is a philosopher, writer and tutor with a first degree in the field of the
Social Sciences (History, Economics, Politics and Sociology) and a PhD in the field of
Philosophy, Ethics and Politics. The Proletarian Public was written during the first year of
Peter’s period of PhD research. Peter works in the tradition of Rational Freedom, a tradition
which sees freedom as a common endeavour in which the freedom of each individual is
conceived to be co-existent with the freedom of all. In elaborating this concept, Peter has
written extensively on a number of the key thinkers in this ‘rational’ tradition (Plato, Aristotle,
Aquinas, Dante, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Habermas). Peter is currently
engaged in an ambitious interdisciplinary research project entitled Being and Place. The
central theme of this research concerns the connection of place and identity through the
creation of forms of life which enable human and planetary flourishing in unison. Peter tutors
across the humanities and social sciences, from A level to postgraduate research. Peter
particularly welcomes interest from those not engaged in formal education, but who wish to
pursue a course of studies out of intellectual curiosity. Peter is committed to bringing
philosophy back to its Socratic roots in ethos, in the way of life of people. In this conception,
philosophy as self-knowledge is something that human beings do as a condition of living the
examined life. As we think, so shall we live. Living up to this philosophical commitment, Peter
offers tutoring services both to those in and out of formal education.

The subject range that Peter offers in his tutoring activities, as well as contact details, can be
seen at http://petercritchley-e-akademeia.yolasite.com
The range of Peter’s research activity can be seen at
http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley

Peter sees his e-akademeia project as part of a global grassroots learning experience and
encourages students and learners to get in touch, whatever their learning need and level.

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The Proletarian Public Dr Peter Critchley
THE PROLETARIAN PUBLIC

1 INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................... 2
2 INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM AND SYNDICALISM ............................................ 41
The History of British Syndicalism ...................................................................... 66
3 TOM MANN.......................................................................................................... 102
4 JAMES CONNOLLY ........................................................................................... 143
5 FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY SYNDICALISM ............................................. 173
Fernand Pelloutier ............................................................................................... 189
L’Organisation et l’anarchie ........................................................................... 204
L’Art et la revolte ............................................................................................. 205
Georges Sorel ........................................................................................................ 206
Hubert Lagardelle ................................................................................................ 228
Revolutionary Syndicalism – conclusions .......................................................... 247
6 ROSA LUXEMBURG .......................................................................................... 267
Reform Or Revolution ......................................................................................... 268
Consciousness And Activity ................................................................................ 278
Mass Strike ........................................................................................................... 293
Luxemburg And Lenin ........................................................................................ 304
The Split In The SPD ........................................................................................... 316
7 COUNCIL COMMUNISM .................................................................................. 324
8 ANTON PANNEKOEK ....................................................................................... 344
9 THE COUNCIL COMMUNISM OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI ......................... 401
Gramsci Conclusion ............................................................................................. 522
10 CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................. 530

1 INTRODUCTION

In the view of Marx, the emancipation of the working class is an act of the
working class itself. This book is the result of gathering materials with a view
to demonstrating that the working class in support of the thesis that the
working class is indeed capable of emancipating itself, capable of developing
its own organs of social power and control. Further, the attempt is made to
discern in such self-activity and self-organisation not only proletarian self-
emancipation but also the contours of a future socialist public life which is at
both collectivist and libertarian at the same time.

The argument affirms the continued relevance of ideas about socialist
democracy and self-management in the aftermath of the collapse of party-
state socialism.

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The aim of the argument developed in this book is to demonstrate not
merely that a lost or subterranean tradition of radical socialist theory and
practice exists but that this tradition is a living tradition, with plenty to offer in
an era of capitalist crisis and contradiction. The collapse of party-state
socialism is not the collapse of socialism as such. On the contrary, the space
is cleared for a genuine socialism, one which defines socialisation as the
social control of producer-citizens, in contradistinction to the centrally planned
economy and the subordination of social life to central political control.

Throughout this book, I will argue that achieving socialism requires a
prefigurative strategy in which the means are the socialist end in the process
of becoming. Proletarian self-emancipation, in other words, proceeds through
organs of self-activity and self-organisation which are capable of constituting
the socialist future. Proletarian self-emancipation proceeds hand in hand with
the construction of a socialist public order. This chapter introduces the
concept of a democratised Civil Society invested with governmental power
and political significance, explore via Marx the possibilities of a radical
transformation which goes beyond the state- civil society dualism.

The key figures in this story of proletarian order insist on democracy as an
active principle, holding that any power exercised in society ought to be
shared, public and democratically accountable. This is particularly the case
with respect to the material processes of everyday life, the resources around
which the lives of individuals are organised – industry, education, health,
culture and so on. As will be shown, the key actors in this tradition insist on
the social nature of power, arguing that power must be diffused in the social
body and kept as close to the people as possible. To this end, both politics
and production must be decentralised and brought under the conscious
control of participatory institutions. Such an approach is incompatible with the
elitism of state politics and capitalist economics.

The approach affirms a workers’ socialism from below as against the top
down socialism of the professional middle class. Whereas a workers’
socialism is powered from below in accordance with the principle of
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proletarian self-emancipation, connecting that self-emancipation with the
emancipation of society as a whole, party-state socialism sees the problem as
one of efficiency and control. It is a view which values and enhances the
capacities of working men and women as against the ‘experts’.

Book education and not skill is now the road to status and, with
diminishing exceptions, even skill has moved into the world of diplomas.
And, of course, the road into that world has been broadened. There was
a time when miners might want their sons out of the pit at all costs, but
engineers were content to offer their sons a presumably improving version
of their own prospects. How many of the sons of toolmakers today are
content to become toolmakers? . . .
When the last men who have driven and cared for steam
locomotives retire - it will not be long now - and when engine-drivers
will be little different from tram-drivers, and sometimes quite superfluous,
what will happen? What will our society be like without that large body of
men who, in one way or another, had a sense of the dignity and self-
respect of difficult, good, and socially useful manual work, which is also a
sense of a society not governed by market-pricing and money: a society
other than ours and potentially better? What will a country be like
without the road to self-respect which skill with hand, eye and brain
provide for men - and, one might add, women - who happen not to be
good at passing examinations?

E. J. Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1984, pp. 271-2

The world is a product of human praxis and it is the working class who are
the productive, creative, reality constituting power. Yet the working class
occupies the most subordinate position as the most exploited class. It was for
this reason that Marx made the proletariat the most radical class, the class in
radical chains. Marx asks where is the positive possibility of emancipation.

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This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of
civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class [Stand] which is the
dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because
of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because
the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general, a sphere of
society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a
human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the
consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German
political system; and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without
emancipating itself from - and thereby emancipating - all the other spheres
of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can
therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This
dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat.

Marx EW CHPR:I 1975

The emancipation of the working class is the emancipation of society in
general. Capital is the power of labour in alien form. Labour can autonomise
itself from capital but capital cannot autonomise itself from labour. Marx valued
the proletariat on account of its material futurity and structural capacity to act, to
free itself from capitalist exploitation and alienation and in the process refashion
society in the image of the producers. Those figures and movements who have
sought to further the ends of a workers’ socialism have pursued an ideal
society fashioned in the image of that large body of men and women who, in
their particular productive capacities, had the sense of the dignity and self-
respect of difficult, good, and socially useful manual work within them.
Industrial unionists, revolutionary syndicalists, the councilists pursued a vision
of a society ruled by use value rather than exchange value, a society beyond
money and market-pricing: a society other than ours and potentially better.

This society is an actively democratic society of producer-citizens, a
society that overcomes the dualism of elite and mass, leaders and led. The
relocation of socialism from the social terrain to the abstracted political terrain
proceeded through the agency of the professional, educated middle class and
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upper middle class, transforming the conception of socialism, severing its link
to emancipation and redefining it in terms of instrumental rationality, efficiency
and order. This entailed a reproduction of elitism. The workers remained
workers, subject to authority, discipline and exploitation.

In our own time the division between high-born and base-born has
become a fiction, transparent to every eye. But the distinction between the
lowly manual world and the lofty intellectual one continues — no longer
as lord and serf, but as officer and subaltern, party cadre and party
member, expert and everyone else. Even after the rights of property
have been unmasked, those of intellectual labour remain.

R. L. Heilbroner, New York Review of Books, 5 November 1981, p. 52

The men and women who we will meet in these pages rejected such
distinctions and affirmed the powers of labour to constitute the world in a
democratic, just and egalitarian fashion. The point is that throughout the
twentieth century there have been two socialism’s in opposition to each other,
a democratic socialism of the working class and a party-state socialism fitted
to the dualistic contours of the capital system. The result was that the working
class were fighting for their emancipation not only against the agencies of
capitalism as such but within their own field, against people and parties calling
themselves socialist but actually acting to reinforce and entrench and extend
capitalism.

One can see here why, having condemned the Russian Revolution of
1917 as the biggest disaster to befall the socialist movement, the Webbs
came to hail Soviet Communism as a new civilisation. G. D. H. Cole always
believed that the Webbs would be 'converted' to Communism as a result
of their research into Soviet Russia. The fact that the Fabian Sydney Webb
had been a member of an impeccably respectable and constitutional British
government would not prevent him from becoming pro-Communist. For
the Webbs, Soviet Communism proved the truth of Fabianism, not its
error.
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G. D. H. Cole always believed that the Webbs would be 'converted' to
Communism as a result of their research into Soviet Russia. The fact that
the Fabian Sydney Webb had been a member of an impeccably
respectable and constitutional British government would not prevent him
from becoming pro-Communist. For the Webbs, Soviet Communism
proved the truth of Fabianism, not its error.

Soviet Communism embodies Fabian policy: Fabian consumers'
economics and Fabian emphasis upon the application of science to
social institutions, and Fabian dislike for emotional and libertarian
Utopias. Indeed, the followers of Lenin have outplanned the Webbs:
and it was our belief in a planned social order that was caricatured in the
Webbville and damned and derided by the anarchist revolutionary
movement of 1910-1914.

B Webb, Diary (unpublished) 3 May 1934

None of this would have surprised radical socialists like Belfort Bax, who
had understood the character of Fabianism from the first. In 1901, Bax
wrote:

Fabianism is the special movement of the government official, just as
militarism is the special movement of the soldier and clericalism of the
priest.

Belfort Bax Justice, 9 March 1901.

All of which goes to prove that estimations of right and wrong cannot be
conditional upon temporal success and failure. The Fabians and the
Communists were united in their condemnation of the ‘anarchist
revolutionary movement’ and in their rejection of the ‘infantile disorder’ of left
wing communism. But with the collapse of party-state socialism under the
weight of its bureaucratic inertia, waste, flabbiness and inefficiency, the
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‘infantile’ ‘anarchists’ have been proven right, even if they lost the political
battle.

Both the revisionist Eduard Bernstein and the revolutionary Lenin
praised the Webbs’ Industrial Democracy (1897) for its expert knowledge of
labour history, trade-union practice and the possible future of the working
class. Lenin translated the book while in exile in Siberia, and
incorporated key elements from it in What Is to Be Done (1902). The
Webbs gave Lenin the research materials he needed to fight against
'primitivism' and ‘economism’ in organisational questions, since they gave
clear evidence that ultra-democracy had already been found wanting in the
British labour movement. The Webbs’ views also buttressed Lenin's
conviction that the working class would spontaneously generate only a
trade union consciousness, not socialism. For the working class to go
beyond a trade-union consciousness and develop a socialist
consciousness, they needed the help of a contingent from the
intelligentsia outside of the working class. This was a frank denial of
Marx’s argument that it was the exploited position of the working class
within the class system that gave it the structural and epistemological
power to see through and break through capitalist relations. Marx may or
may not have been wrong in this reasoning – it is still too soon to say –
but it needs to be emphasised that Lenin’s views owed more to the
Webbs and Fabianism than they did to Marx. In flat denial of the principle
of proletarian self-emancipation, the Webbs argued for a new,
professional labour leader who would shape the opinions of his
constituents while abiding by them in the last resort. This was the old
‘Workers’ Dictator’ for an age of rational, bureaucratic capitalism. Whilst it
would be wrong to claim that the Webbs' professional labour leader and
Lenin's professional revolutionary are one and the same, there are
nevertheless substantial areas of agreement. Reform and revolution via
the abstracted agency of the party are two sides of same rational,
bureaucratic coin. (S. and B. Webb, Industrial Democracy, London,
Longmans, Green & Co., 1897, p. 70. For the similarities between the
Webbs, Lenin and Bernstein, see R. Harrison, 'The Webbs as
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historians of trade unions', in R. Samuel (ed.), People's History and
Socialist Theory, London, Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 322-6.)

Sidney Webb never felt the need to conceal the fact that his socialism
was about the rule of the working class by the professional-managerial
class. He simply equated such a socialism with efficiency, reason and
progress. As he wrote to H.G. Wells in 1901:

Along with your engineers and chemists in the dominant class of the
future will be the trained administrator, the expert in organising men
- equipped with an Economics or a Sociology which will be as scientific
and as respected by his colleagues of other professions as Chemistry or
Mechanics. You seem to ignore this class.

N. Mackenzie (ed.), The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Vol. II,
Partnership 1891-1912, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 144.

What could possibly go wrong? William Morris was never persuaded
by the facile conflation of reason, state power and progress. ‘The world is
going your way at present, Webb, but it is not the right way in the end.’
(William Morris, talking to Sidney Webb in 1895, quoted in R. Page
Arnot, William Morris: The Man and the Myth, London, Lawrence &
Wishart, 1964). The rational, bureaucratic state regulation which
characterised Fabian socialism has few friends these days. Party-state
socialism has been and gone, unable to restrain the contradictory
dynamics and crisis tendencies of the capital system. William Morris’
socialism, however, is ripe for rediscovery.

Morris well understood the threat which the professional, educated
middle class posed to socialism. He understood the appeal of a
bureaucratic, efficient state capitalism as an alternative to socialist
revolution. He understood its appeal to the emerging professional-
managerial class. As he wrote to a correspondent in Commonweal in
1885:
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I should like our friend to understand whither the whole system of
palliation tends - namely, towards the creation of a new middle class to
act as a buffer between the proletariat and their direct and obvious
masters; the only hope of the bourgeois for retarding the advance of
socialism lies in this device.

Morris Commonweal, July 1885.

The purpose of socialism, Morris made clear, was to overcome the
dualism of masters and servants. 'Take this for the last word of my
dream of what is to be - the test of our being fools no longer will be that
we shall no longer have masters.' (Morris, 'The Society of the Future',
Commonweal, 13 April 1885.) Morris argued that 'while the national
systems cannot . . . be directly attacked with success as to their more
fundamental elements' in the immediate period, in the long run, a process
of 'starving out' or 'sapping' could go on. As part of this revolution as
process, working-class unions, local associations etc could serve as
constructive instruments, assuming more and more responsibility and
thus constituting the essential components of the future socialist
commonwealth. As the old political systems were 'weakening into
dissolution', such organs of popular control could, through federation,
already be dealing with the 'details of change'.

The form which the decentralisation or Federation will take is bound to
be a matter of experiment and growth; what the unit of administration
is to be, what the groups of Federation are to be, whether or not there
will be cross-Federation, as e.g. Craftsguilds and Co-operative
Societies going side by side with the geographical division of wards,
communes and the like, all this is a matter for speculation and I don't
pretend to prophesy about it.

W. Morris and B. Bax, Socialism, its Growth and Outcome, London,
Sonnenschein, 1896, p. 282. 'How Shall We Live Then', quoted in P.
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