Marxism, after drawing us to it as the moon draws the tides, after transforming all out ideas, after liquidating the categories of our bourgeois thought, abruptly left us stranded... it no longer had anything new to teach us, because it had come to a stop. Marxism stopped.... Marxism possesses theoretical bases, it embraces all human activities; but it no longer knows anything. 1
Jean-Paul Sartre
We have thus far critically discussed Classical Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, and Maoism. We've developed awarenesses of a number of general requirements for a workable powerful new ideology; it must 1- incorporate a strong psychological awareness for use in both theoretical and also strategic and tactical analysis, 2- broaden and enhance methodology for better day-to-day applicability, 3- understand race, sex, and authority in accord with their importance to modern revolutionary struggle, 4- understand general institutional relations and specifically revolutionary and factory institutional relations well enough to guide related practice, 5- posit understandable, relatively comprehensive goals, and 6- generate workable strategies and programs suitable to actual, concrete day-to-day conditions and accurately aimed toward desired ends. We've also noted that Marx's own work can valuably aid us in meeting these requirements since it's often vastly superior to the nevertheless more dominant Classical adaptations we've critiqued.
But even further, since Marx's day, and in parallel to the Classical interpreters, there have been other activists who have come considerably closer than the Classicists to fulfilling Marx's works' own original potentials. Frequently these humanist- and neo-Marxists clearly opposed their Classical contemporaries. They often criticized Classical views due to lessons learned from Second International vulgar determinism, Stalinist barbarism, fascist reaction, and modern capitalist powers of self-alteration. They were thus motivated by their historical settings and experiences much as we in the new left were pushed to critical views by the international student upsurge, the Vietnam revolution, the Cuban revolution, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
This chapter thus considers the contributions of Antonio Gramsci, Anton Pannekoek, Wilhelm Reich, Adam Schaff, Mihailo Markovic, Svetozar Stojanovic, Paul Sweezy, Charles Bettelheim, Andre Gorz, Jeremy Brecher, and Stanley Aronowitz. It shows how each responded (or is responding) to various historical trends by improving old ideology to meet partially one or more of our above listed six ideological requirements. The chapter can't approach a total or even fully representative view of each of these writers, but by foregoing discussion of their actual practice and of the various historical forces affecting them, it is possible to emphasize their theoretical contributions, especially insofar as those are relevant to present-day concerns. This succinct presentation of considerable information will give readers a feeling for each activist's overall orientation, and 'contemporize' What Is To Be Undone's arguments for a new ideology.
We thus show both how each activist we discuss contributes to present-day ideological efforts and also how each falls considerably short of actually succeeding in creating a finished new ideology.
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Communist, born on the isle of Sardinia, but primarily active in Turin, eventually as head of the Italian Communist Party. His life practice represents a magnificent synthesis of theoretical and practical work. In this chapter, however, we abstract from his historical setting and consider his major ideas only in regard to their modern relevance: we consider Gramsci's belief in the necessity for broadness of revolution, in the importance of workers' councils, and in the centrality of the ideological contest that Gramsci called the "struggle for hegemony."
Gramsci reacted against the Second International's "wait for the inevitable revolution" policies by trying to understand capitalism's active abilities to preserve itself, and by trying to uncover the ways revolutionary activism could overcome such defenses. He became aware that revolutionary activity primarily had to bring the masses from passive acceptance of capitalism to a revolutionary consciousness of its injustices and of the need for rebellion. Revolutionary activity would thus have to be premised in understandings of the roots of acquiescent consciousness, of how the state, production, and culture enforce such passive consciousness, and of how alternative views could best be spread. Gramsci understood that waiting for inevitable economically forced revolution was hopeless. Activists must prepare revolutionary potentials both outside and inside the masses, both organizationally and in consciousness. A precondition of total social revolution was a prior or at least simultaneous subjective revolution in the ways people think and live, how they perceive their worlds and act upon their needs.
Thus for Gramsci revolution required development of revolutionary consciousness among the masses of workers. Revolutionaries could aid such development by spreading their awarenesses and skills, but it was crucial that such acts actually foster real worker initiative. Gramsci knew the critical importance of mass communication of ideas and of non-elitist organizing methods:
To create a new culture does not only mean to make original discoveries on an individual basis. It also and especially means to critically popularize already discovered truths, make them, so to speak, social, therefore give them the consistency of basis for vital actions, make them coordinating elements of intellectual and social relevance. That masses of men be led to evaluate in a coordinated way the present reality is, philosophically speaking, a much more important and original fact than the isolated philosophical genius's discovery of a certain truth, which is then left in heritage to small intellectual groups. 2Gramsci also realized the necessity for creating a new type of intellectual who could really communicate well with workers by sinking roots among them:
The mode of existence of the new intellectual can no longer consist of eloquence, the external and momentary arousing of sentiments and passions, but must consist of being actively involved in practical life, as a builder, an organizer, "permanently persuasive" because he is not purely an orator -- and nevertheless superior to the abstract mathematical spirit; from labor-technique he reaches technique-science and the humanist historical conception, without which he remains a "specialist" and does not become a "leader" ... 3Gramsci felt education critically important because he saw that revolution had to be total -- political, economical, social, and cultural -- or it would not succeed at all. Weaknesses due to ignored concerns could subvert all other effective efforts. For Gramsci, therefore, "communists must ensure the development of spiritual premises of a new order." 4
Further Gramsci saw that the process of developing a full worker's revolutionary awareness was one that could only occur in context of worker self-organization, self-activity, and revolutionary activism:
The real process of the proletarian revolution cannot be identified with the development and action of revolutionary organizations of a voluntary and contractual type such as the political party and the trade unions. These organizations are born on the terrain of bourgeois democracy and political liberty, as developments of political freedom. These organizations, insofar as they implement a doctrine that interprets and predicts the revolutionary process, are the direct and responsible agents of the successive acts of liberation that the entire working class will launch in the course of the revolutionary process. And yet they are not this process, they do not go beyond the bourgeois State, they do not and cannot encompass all of the revolutionary forces that capitalism provokes in its implacable path as a machine of exploitation and oppression. During the economic and political predominance of the bourgeois class, the real unfolding of the revolutionary process happens underground, in the darkness of the factory, in the obscurity of the consciousness of the countless multitudes that capitalism subjugates to its laws. This will be done in the future when the elements that constitute it (sentiments, habits, seeds of initiative and mores) will be developed and purified by the evolution of society and of the new place that the working class will occupy in the field of production. 5Gramsci recognized that workers would become revolutionaries by developing revolutionary consciousness through analysis of their own activities in context of advice afforded by the more advanced new type of intellectual activists. He saw that the real organizations of revolution were the workers' own self-constituted councils, where the workers not only gathered the strength necessary to taking over the means of production, but also gained the skills and solidarity to then administer them.
He saw the councils as organic centers of factory life that were simultaneously weapons of revolutionary struggle and prefigurations of the coming revolutionized society. The council structure could above all else, make the working-class see itself as an active subject of history. Gramsci saw that councils could give workers a direct productive responsibility, improve their work, create voluntary self-conscious discipline, create a psychology of the producer and of the "creator of history," and thus that they could prepare workers to win, create, and live in a new type of self-managed society. Gramsci saw that rather than abstract ownership rights, the really central issue was day-to-day management of production and surplus, and the beliefs that such various types of local management could "engender." 6
Thus where the Bolsheviks, for example, destroyed indigenous workers' councils, Gramsci always struggled to defend and support them. They could initiate revolution in the workplace itself, where it was most critical. Where the Bolsheviks saw the councils as a contrary power which had to be eliminated lest it interfere with the state's implacable will, Gramsci saw the councils as themselves the correct vehicles of decision-making, the correct vehicles of workers' control of production:
The factory council is the model of the proletariat state. All the problems inherent in the organization of the proletarian state are inherent in the organization of the council. In the one and in the other, the concept of the citizen declines and is replaced by the concept of the comrade; collaboration to produce wealth... multiplies the bonds of affection and brotherhood. Everyone is indispensable; everyone is at his post; and everyone has a function and a post. Even the most ignorant and backward of the workers, even the most vain and 'civil' of engineers eventually convinces himself of this truth in the experience of factory organization. Everyone eventually acquires a communist viewpoint through understanding the great step forward that the communist economy represents over the capitalist economy. The council is the most fitting organ of reciprocal education and development of the new social spirit that the proletariat has succeeded in creating.... Working-class solidarity... in the council is positive, permanent, and present in even the most negligible moment of industrial production. It is contained in the joyous awareness of being an organic whole, a homogenous and compact system that, by useful labor and disinterested production of social wealth, asserts its sovereignty, and recognizes its power and its freedom as a creator of history. 7Finally Gramsci also formulated the concept of hegemony and hegemonic struggle: every society has an order "in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotations." 8 The hegemonic struggle thus itself determines which "concept of reality" will infuse all social relations and thoughts. It is a cultural, ideological, and institutional struggle to establish the dominance of a new revolutionary world view over and above the previous dominance of the old bourgeois world view. It is a struggle which Gramsci considers crucial because holding hegemony over a society's world view implies holding support of the masses and is thus essential to revolutionary success. Further, Gramsci recognizes how shared ideology is a prerequisite to collective action for both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. In this context, Gramsci's workers' council is a vehicle for the proletariat to understand its own views, needs, and visions, one by which they can propel that awareness to the central position of "infusing all social relations and thoughts," so that revolution can gain mass allegiance and thus the ideological and material power to collectively win full victory.
Gramsci's thought is a powerful counter to both Second International economist determinism and Leninist over-concerns with state power. It offers insights into cultural and workplace dynamics insofar as they affect human consciousness and it recognizes the central importance of creating and spreading revolutionary ideology. It puts consciousness in a central position and it emphasizes total revolution, the struggle for hegemony, and the power of workers' councils. To learn more from Gramscian thought a modern activist would extend its dimensions in both the workers'-council and the psychological-awareness directions. Thus these are precisely the types of contributions made by the next two activists whose works we consider.
Anton Pannekoek was perhaps the most famous of the European Council Communists and was the principle target of Lenin's derogatory polemic, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Pannekoek was one of many libertarian Marxists who shared Gramsci's general concerns, but where the others (Lukacs, Bloch, etc.) put most of their time into studying culture, Pannekoek emphasized issues of state power, workers' management, and workers' councils. His work thus continued the Gramscian corrective to old ideology by specifically furthering the understanding of authority, hierarchy, and workers' institutions.
Pannekoek's vision of a revolutionary society thus rested first and foremost on desires for workers' self-management without any accompanying party coercive apparatuses. He felt that workers' powers could only reach maturity in context of a parallel decline in traditional state power.
Governments were necessary, during the entire period of civilization up to now, as instruments of the ruling class to keep down the exploited masses. They also assumed administrative functions in increasing measure; but their chief character as power structures was determined by the necessity of upholding class domination. Now that that necessity has vanished, the instrument, too, has disappeared. What remains is administration, one of the many kinds of work, the task of special kinds of workers; what comes in its stead, the life spirit of organization, is the constant deliberation of the workers, in common thinking attending to their common cause. What enforces the accomplishment of the decisions of the councils is their moral authority. But moral authority in such a society has a more stringent power than any command or constraint from a government. 9Thus Pannekoek's goal is an active working-class administering its own collective life through self-organized councils. Collaboration is to replace command, solidarity is to replace fear:
Thus council organization weaves a variegated net of collaborating bodies through society, regulating its life and progress according to their own free initiative. And all that in the councils is discussed and decided draws its actual power from the understanding, the will, the action of working mankind itself. 10Obviously this is in sharp contrast with Bolshevik desires for discipline and the subordination of workers to managers and the state. For the Bolsheviks the economy must be set right by imposition of authority. For Pannekoek the economy can only thrive if workers take the initiative, thereby contributing incomparably to the powers of production. For Pannekoek the Bolshevik mistake was in subjugating workers rather than propelling them, and in destroying their organs of power rather than fostering them, not only for reasons of freedom and prevention of bureaucracy, as important as those are, but also for reasons of economic efficiency.
State socialism is a design for constructing society on the basis of a working class such as the middle class sees it and knows it under capitalism. In what is called a socialistic system of production the basic fabric of capitalism is preserved, the workers running the machines at the command of the leaders; but it is provided with a new improved upper story, a ruling class of humane reformers instead of profit-hungry capitalists. 11History has of course demonstrated the plight of these well-motivated new ruling reformers under the pressures of maintaining their own powers and self-conceptions.
Pannekoek understood revolution as a process wherein workers continually develop ever-widening revolutionary awarenesses. Struggle after struggle would perpetually enhance awareness of capitalist injustices and revolutionary alternatives until such time as the councils could command power themselves. He felt that the key to revolutionary victory was to avoid taking reactionary roads within capitalist-based institutions:
The old forms of organization, the trade unions and political party, and the new forms of councils (soviets) belong to different phases in the development of society and have different functions. The first was to secure the position of the working class among other classes within capitalism and belongs to the period of expanding capitalism. The latter has to conquer complete dominance for the workers, to destroy capitalism and its class divisions, and belongs the period of declining capitalism. 12The sin of hierarchical parties should be avoided: "The belief in parties is the main reason for the impotence of the working class.... we avoid forming a new party not because we are too few, but because a party is an organization that aims to lead and control the working class..." 13 The education of the masses should take place in context with their continual ever growing spontaneous rebelliousness, and in ways that depend upon and foster self-activity. "The insight needed cannot be obtained as instruction of an arrogant mass by learned teachers, possessors of science.... It can only be acquired by self-education, strenuous self-activity. [There should not be] the one sided teaching of doctrines that can only serve to breed obedient followers." 14
Pannekoek believed mass action carried on through workers' councils was the best way for workers to develop their own awarenesses. He felt that during unstable times self-preservation instincts dictate worker acquiescence to societal rules and lead to general worker passivity, but that in troubled, disrupted times, especially when well-posed alternatives seem better than old ways, the reverse phenomenon becomes true and preservation instincts push workers toward rebellion. Thus the miracle of the revolutionary energy of aroused masses, and thus also the importance of capitalist "breakdown" to Pannekoek's view.
Finally, like Gramsci and in opposition to determinist views, Pannekoek saw that the key to a full victory over all capitalist institutions was a prior conquest of capitalist ideology. Like Gramsci's hegemonic perspective, Pannekoek felt that workers must defeat old ideas and hold new ones if they are to have the initiative, morale, knowledge, and solidarity to practice effectively. Workers must overcome capitalism's spiritual sway over their minds before they can gain the insight and spirit necessary to also throw off its institutional yoke. Thus "capitalism must be beaten theoretically before it can be beaten materially." 15
But the fight will be long and difficult. For the power of the capitalist class is enormous...firmly entrenched in the fabric of state and government. It disposes of all the treasures of the earth, and can spend unlimited amounts of money...to carry away public opinion. Its ideas and opinions pervade the entire society...and dominate the minds of even the workers.... Against it the working class, certainly, has its numbers.... It has its momentous economic function, its direct hold over the machines, its power to run or stop them.... Number and economic importance alone are as the powers of a sleeping giant; they must first be awakened and activated by practical fight. Knowledge and unity must make them active power. Through the fight for existence... through the fight for mastery over the means of production, the workers must acquire the consciousness of their position, the independence of thought, the knowledge of society, the solidarity and devotion to their community, the strong unity of class that will enable them to defeat capitalist power. 16Council Communism is important for its emphasis on revolutionary institutions, for its awareness of the negative effects of capitalist and of all hierarchical institutions, for its insights into the importance of mass revolutionary consciousness, and for beginning the necessary effort of describing socialism and particularly the day-to-day nature of its alternative working relationships. On the negative side, however, Council Communism loses track of Gramscian cultural-consciousness lessons: it overemphasizes the likelihood of capitalist collapse, and underemphasizes the need to understand how capitalism's psycho-social dynamics and social divisions impede possibilities for worker activism. Council Communism relies too much on spontaneous revolution. It doesn't pay sufficient attention to what forms impediments to revolution take, and to discussing tactical means for overcoming those impediments. To extend Council Communist awarenesses it's necessary to add a strong psychological aspect to its already well-developed political one. Perhaps the finest work in such directions comes from the revolutionary psychologists themselves, and most principally from Wilhelm Reich.
Despite the unbalanced nature of some of his later work, Wilhelm Reich was in the main one of the most creative of all "modern" Marxist activists. His books are finally receiving attention in the United States and the results are likely to be both far-reaching and positive. Reich's main contribution was to extend revolutionary awarenesses into recognition of the vital importance of interaction between and among authoritarian character structure, revolutionary and reactionary consciousness, sexual needs, and sexual repression. His weakness was his fixation on sexual needs alone (while largely not understanding sexism itself) and his inability to gain a fair hearing from his contemporary revolutionaries, a fair hearing which could have led finally to a dialectical growth and improvement of his ideas.
Reich understood that history is at least as much determined by what's in people's heads as by "more material" matters. In their daily lives from birth onward people develop character structures or personalities which then mediate between their actual needs and their social contexts. Therefore to understand how economic and political events manifest themselves in real people's behaviors and consciousnesses, one has first to understand the nature of psychic character structure and the ways its mechanisms can react to societal occurrences.
Further for Reich one of the key problems in making a revolution is overcoming ruling-class ideology. Thus it is necessary for activists to understand not only how ruling-class ideology is pushed upon the oppressed, but also why they frequently tend to hold onto it despite its reactionary affects.
...every social order creates those character forms which it needs for its preservation. In class society, the ruling class secures its position with the aid of education and the institution of the family, by making its ideology the ruling ideology of all members of society. But it is not merely a matter of imposing ideologies, attitudes, and concepts on the members of society. Rather it is a matter of a deep-reaching process in each new generation, of the formation of a psychic structure that corresponds to the existing social order in all strata of the population. 17Reich wants knowledge that can help revolutionaries create day-to-day programs. He wants to understand how people develop character traits which generally respect private property, respect established authorities, and often fail even to recognize or admit the injustice of many quite obvious oppressions. He wants to know how acquiescent personalities are rooted in the forces of daily life and thus how they might be positively affected by revolutionary activity centered around explaining or altering daily life. He wants to know at the need/consciousness level why people generally support the status-quo instead of actively rebelling against it or at least hoping for opportunities to do so. He believes that only this type of knowledge can help revolutionaries orient programs toward affecting the real obstacles to mass revolutionary activism. Reich finds most of his answers at the micro- and psychological rather than macro- and sociological or economic levels of social life:
The revolutionary movement also failed to appreciate the importance of the seemingly irrelevant everyday habits, indeed, very often turned them to bad account. The lower-middle-class bedroom suite, which the "rabble" buys as soon as he has the means, even if he is otherwise revolutionary minded; the consequent suppression of the wife, even if he is a communist; the "decent" suit of clothes for Sunday; "proper" dance steps and a thousand other "banalities," have an incomparably greater reactionary influence when repeated day after day than thousands of revolutionary rallies and leaflets can ever hope to counterbalance. Narrow conservative life exercises a continuous influence, penetrates every facet of everyday life; whereas factory work and revolutionary leaflets have only a brief effect. Thus it was a grave mistake to cater to the conservative tendencies of workers by giving banquets as a means of getting to the masses. 18Here Reich recognizes the importance of analyzing tactics to determine how they affect worker consciousnesses in light of an understanding of worker character types, and also points out the importance of confronting not just in-the-factory abuses but also the totality of every day life under capitalism. Reich continues by finding that the key element in inculcating false ideas and reactionary lifestyles into the bulk of any oppressed citizenry is sexual repression. Sexual repression is seen as contributing to the development of authoritarian domineering and passive personalities, and as enforcing continuation of such personalities once they take root.
For Reich class-consciousness means having: 1- the knowledge of one's fundamental needs, 2- the knowledge of the possible ways of satisfying those needs, and 3- an understanding of how capitalism and capitalistic ways of thinking and acting are the chief obstacles to satisfying those needs while worker solidarity is the chief prerequisite of all means of satisfying them. Reich sees that class-consciousness is impeded among other ways by all authoritarian and sex-repressive interrelations. 19
Thus for Reich the revolutionary problem becomes how to choose tactics and organization so as to overcome passive and authoritarian tendencies, while simultaneously fostering real revolutionary working class consciousness. Like the Council Communists Reich believed in the crucial role of direct worker activity, self-education, and self-organization, but he was also aware of the many psychological impediments to effective worker activism. He thus favored a totalist organizing focus aimed at all facets of daily life, including work, but also including sex life, home life, culture, sports, and soon, through the whole gamut of activities that make up the bulk of any individual's daily concerns. For example, he severely criticized the pre-Nazi German left for its unwillingness to address the question of revolution in human relations until after a revolution in power relations. Further, with regard to the issues of sex life he developed a Sex Pol program, stressing youth centers, health clinics, and the distribution of sex information, to try to counter Classical party inadequacies. His extensive studies of the psychologies of youth, women, workers, and other strata attempt to provide a bedrock of useful information for strategic and tactical thinking. For example, using his psychological insights in tactical evaluation, he suggests setting up sex hygiene clinics, youth centers, and radical theatres, not overemphasizing ruling class strength in ways feeding working class insecurities, and acting carefully toward the police so that they might be won over or at least neutralized rather than thoroughly polarized. 20
Although Reich's contributions centered too exclusively on sexual need, they do offer many lessons about how to add a psychological dimension to revolutionary political and economic awarenesses. Readers who are convinced of the importance of such a task should read Reich and also a number of more recent authors who, while not quite sharing his perspectives, do share his overall psychological concern and do offer up a number of interesting psychological perspectives on modern problems. The bibliography in this book (see pp. 322-332) provides a considerable number of annotated references both to Reich's own work and to the work of some other more recent radically-oriented psychologists.
The East European Marxist Humanists address their efforts primarily to overcoming Stalinist residues in their own countries by charting humane alternatives to state, bureaucratic, or in some cases, mixed market socialism. Their advances centrally focus on issues of human nature, human consciousness, and human psychology, both in the abstract and as they affect and are affected by actual social institutions, particularly bureaucracy.
More concretely, in arguing the need for more emphasis on people and their natures, Mihailo Markovic says that "the idea of making a world more humane presupposes a well-developed idea of the nature of man, and what it means to exist in an authentic way as a true human person" 21 and "that there is no Marxist economy, there is no revolutionary theory without a theory of man and human nature. " 22 And Markovic adds that the Classicists haven't nearly accomplished these ends and explains why East European efforts to do so are not more prevalent:
Apart from some very general phrases about the greatness of man, alienation in capitalism, freedom as knowledge of necessity, and practice as a "criterion" of truth, philosophers of dialectical materialism have not developed any conception of human nature based upon an in-depth understanding of praxis, involving true, human needs and basic capacities, positive freedom, alienation, and human emancipation. Yet all of these are major themes in Marx's philosophical works. "Dialectical materialism" became a rigid ideological system in a time when some of the most important Marxist philosophical works were not yet known. But there is also method in this neglect: it involves deliberate rejection of these problems for obvious ideological reasons. Only in the light of Marx's humanism can one have an overall critical view of the whole history of socialist society, and only comparing the present-day reality with Marx's humanist project can one fully grasp how much the former is still far from the latter and how little resemblance there is between present-day bureaucratism and Marx's idea of self-government. Knowing what alienated labor and political alienation are, it should not be difficult to find them in a society which claims to have built socialism a quarter of a century ago. That is why Marx's early philosophical writings had to be classified as Hegelian and not Marxist. 23Similarly Adam Schaff says that "it is common knowledge that psychology is the Achilles' heel of Marxist research into social problems." And goes on to say that
One reason for this is surely to be sought in the simplified approach to the base superstructure relationship that seemed to eliminate the operation of the psychological factor. The Marxist lexicon includes, it is true, such categories as "national character," "national mentality," "cultural tradition," etc., but these can hardly be said to have been seriously considered in analyzing questions concerning the ideological superstructure of society. 24Schaff notes that obviously in different social environments "similar changes in the base cause different transformations in the consciousness of a given society." He asks how this could be and recognizes that the answers have a psycho-social core and "are not purely academic. They also concern such issues as the reason why similar changes in bases of socialist societies lead, in some of them to a relatively smooth and rapid collectivization, while in others they fail to transform the obstinacy of social consciousness." 25
Schaff knows that people create their environs, both base and superstructure, and therefore realizes that a fuller understanding of base and superstructure and indeed of any social dynamic depends upon a fuller understanding of human activity and thus of human motivation, consciousness, and psychology. In his formulation people are the "go-between" "mediators" who translate base-superstructure influences back and forth. Schaff thus says:
Whether we speak of the psychology of a given society, or of the historically formed character of men -- in fact whatever we call this issue -- we shall still remain within a sphere of rather vague definitions each of which requires further clarification. What matters in all these cases is certainly the entire range of mental attitudes, the emotional dispositions of men, their readiness to accept certain systems of values, and even the irrational component of the human mind which may be rationally explicable from the viewpoint of its genesis. If all this, and perhaps something else as well, makes up what we call the human "character," it is something that varies in the course of history and has been shaped by society. It consists of two factors: the psychosomatic, which is a social product in phylogenesis, and the effects of social stimuli in the life of the individual, which are the product of ontogenesis. Their sum total constitutes the filters that sift and direct the stimuli of the base. Knowledge of these filters is essential for our ability to predict the influence of the stimuli and thus for conscious planning of our behavior. It is also important as far as changes of the "filters" themselves are concerned, since, however reluctantly and slowly, they too are susceptible to such changes. 26In this passage Schaff gives a substantial part of the argument for expansion of radical awareness in psychological directions and thus makes a very significant contribution. Markovic even goes so far as trying to posit human nature as a series of innate capacities upon which, social interaction constructs personalities. He says that all people have capacities for unlimited sensory development, reason, imagination communication, creative activity, harmonization of interests in groups, discrimination among alternative possibilities, and development of clear self-consciousness. Regrettably, however, Markovic does not explain anything significant about how people form beliefs and personalities and choose their actions based on their capacities, and so he in fact gives us no reason to believe that his choice of a model of human nature is a particularly powerful or valid one; but he does at least admit the need for such knowledge in order to solve many critical problems, not the least of which is that of "irrational" behavior:
If we want to understand why many ordinary Russians admired and many adored Stalin in spite of all his monstrous crimes, if we want to understand how it is possible that even persons who suffered unjustly in concentration camps for years were later again ready to die with Stalin's name on their lips, a behaviorist will not help much. As has sometimes been said, "We must understand the Russian Soul." 27Marxist Humanism is concerned to put people and their capacities in priority at the concrete political revolutionary level. The entire East European Marxist Humanists orientation thus centers on the need to free human beings to be themselves by freeing them from alienation, ignorance, and institutional oppressions. As Schaff says, Marxist Humanists are interested in understanding how to "transform this inhuman world, in which things rule men, into a human world, a world of free human beings who are architects of their destiny and for whom man is the supreme good. A humanism of this kind is a theory of happiness. The prime objective is to make people happy, to make them capable of happiness." 28
And as Markovic says:
The essential characteristic of revolution is a radical transcendence of the essential internal limit of a certain social formation. Consequently the basic theoretical question of revolution is the establishment of this essential internal limit. Only when we establish which basic social institutions make a society nonrational and inhuman, only when we establish the historical possibility and the paths for abolishing these institutions and replacing them by others which ensure more rational and more humane social relations, can our idea of revolution become sufficiently clear and concrete.... 29Thus for the Marxist Humanists:
The task of a critical scientific analysis is then, a) to show what institutions and structures make social relationships irrational and inhumane, b) to show what real historical forces could possibly abolish them, and c) to clarify how these forces could be strengthened by appropriate practical collective engagement. This is the only way to make it clear under what historical conditions, with what concrete objectives and by what actions a radical change is possible, and what course must be taken from the initial transformations towards the realizations of the ultimate goal. 30But East European Marxist Humanism does not tell us what the central "critical scientific theory" that will aid us in accomplishing these tasks on a day-to-day, institution-to-institution, struggle-to-struggle level looks like. It does, however, recognize the crucial import of self-management and in Stojanovic's words posits that
A political movement which does not strive to create real possibilities for the introduction of workers' self-management is not a workers' movement in the full sense of the term. The criterion for this should be the extent to which the movement takes advantage of all opportunities to achieve this goal, not only after it has come to power, but while in opposition as well. 31Schaff, because of both his opposition to Stalinism and his awareness of the keen, critical importance of people, recognizes further that ideologies and institutions can also gain lives of their own which extend beyond the economic factors and influence social reality well beyond Classical expectations:
But once an ideology has been created, it begins to have a life of its own, and to acquire a relative autonomy, as shown by its repercussion on the base of a society. Ideology may shape human behavior, the further evolution of ideology itself through a filiation of ideas, and by a conservative perseverance that enables it to resist transformations of the base. 32And Stojanovic adds a further awareness concerning the characteristics of "life-taking" bureaucratic parties:In their social life, men enter various relationships which arrange themselves in permanent structures, most often in the form of institutions: the state and its bureaucratic apparatus, political parties, nations, social classes, professional groups, family, and so on. I have deliberately listed different types of human relations, with their different structures and institutions. All of them, however, have something in common. Once they are constituted as an institution (state, party, family, etc.) or as a permanent form of social organization (people, class, professional group, etc.) they begin to live an autonomous life independent of the will and choice of the individuals who are born into these institutions and forms of social organization and absorbed by them.... In some cases, particularly when the state is involved, the [resulting] estrangement of the human product is exceptionally harsh, painful, or even destructive of the individual. 33
In those communist parties in which the monolithic conception prevails it is characteristic that the ideological-theoretical monopoly of the leadership is constantly being renewed. This ideological centralism, a consequence of political, organizational, and staff centralism, has devastating consequences in the realm of ideas. All the most important theoretical initiatives are awaited from the party summit, so that it remains for the lower levels to merely accept them and work them out. Thus the theorists are divided into "party" and "non-party" elements, even within the party. 34But at this point the growing incisiveness of the Marxist Humanists begins faltering. They, for example, urge workers' control but in the fight against bureaucracy only seem to offer minimal correctives, rather than real alternative ways of organizing a revolutionary society's institutions:
A developed society which already possesses the possibility of creating all these institutions of self-management should make resolute efforts to prevent all those processes which lead to bureaucratization such as: a) fusion of the victorious party and state; b) professionalization of the leading political functionaries; c) privileges for performing political functions; d) monopoly of the mass media of communication; e) public property being used for the private benefit of permanent leaders; f) allowing the cult of certain personalities. Analogously to the norms of ancient democracy it should be a matter of revolutionary ethics to remove potential charismatic leaders from the positions of power and influence and to transfer to them other important social functions. 35In conclusion, Marxist Humanists see the need for psychology, recognize the imbalance of Classical base-superstructure ideas, and partially understand the dynamics of ideologies, institutions, and especially parties gaining extreme powers and "lives" of their own, but do not go deeply enough in any of these directions, do not provide sufficiently useable understandings of how people's consciousnesses form and are formed by revolutionary practice, do not adequately consider issues of class and other social groups, and do not even really venture to discuss alternative institutional relationships. Their whole East European thrust seems quite positive as a philosophical counter to Stalinist anti-humanism and bureaucracy, but their usefulness here in the United States is primarily in the questions they generate, rather than in any specific answers they finally give. Stojanovic is not merely rhetorical when he asks:In an early phase of the struggle against bureaucracy, while the critical social self-consciousness is still in statu nascendi, the most important means are truth, bold demystification of existing social relationships, dethronement of deified persons and institutions, and above all a great moral strength. It should be borne in mind that bureaucracy sometimes survives long after it has lost any historical justification because it succeeds in breaking psychologically the most active progressive elements in society. 36
Can dictatorship lead to democracy? Coercion and violence -- to freedom? Class struggle to classless society? Can uniformity yield diversity? Should we expect absolute state power to usher in a society without a state, a self-governing community? How can socialist revolution, itself a part of prehistory, lead to the beginning of mankind's true history? Can the revolutionary, himself belonging to the old world, create a new life and educate the new man? Who is to educate the educators? 37And for attempts to furnish answers we must turn our attentions some more western theorists.
Paul Sweezy and Charles Bettelheim are the deans of modern revolutionary economics. Their recent Monthly Review debate about "socialist transition" is a very interesting Western response to essentially the same issues and events which created Eastern European Neo-Marxist Humanism.
The debate centers around the problem of how a society can be transformed from capitalist to socialist dynamics once a successful transfer of power from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat and its representative party has occurred. The key agreement is that after this power transfer and before the actual success of the revolution there's a transition period during which old and new factors (market and plan; material and moral incentives; competitive and cooperative ideology; etc.) exist simultaneously. The problem then is determining which transitional features will foster socialism, which will impede it, and what programs might combat the latter while propelling the former?
Sweezy begins the debate by asserting: 1- enterprises run by small groups for profit embody the essential social relations of capitalism, so 2- control of an enterprise residing internally plus market distribution plus material incentives creates capitalist divisions and mentality and thus pushes toward capitalist restoration, no matter what property and governmental control regulations prevail, so that 3- market socialism is a contradiction in terms because during transition helping rather than fighting market relations equals helping rather than fighting tendencies toward return to capitalist dynamics.
Bettelheim replies by urging that the factors Sweezy emphasizes (market, incentives, and profit-seeking local management) are really only economic reflections of more fundamental political phenomena: principally the succession of a revolutionary bourgeois class to power. Bettelheim asserts that market relations per se don't propel either socialist or capitalist dynamics but rather that market relations only in the context of who is in power have such effects. For Bettelheim markets used by truly socialist authorities are socialist; markets used by capitalist authorities are capitalist.
Thus Bettelheim asserts that the key transitional problem is power, and that in the event of the successful solution of that problem, temporary economic retreats (like Lenin's use of capitalistic forms) are okay.
Sweezy replies that he doesn't mean that market, incentive, and profit seeking dynamics preclude socialism, but just that, though such features must temporarily exist, they are dangerous and must be carefully controlled.
Sweezy believes markets, individual material incentives, and profit-seeking create competition, advertising, inequality, misdirected production and consumption priorities, and general productive-place and consumption-place alienation.
Sweezy outlines his vision of potential negative transitional possibilities: power seizure leads to bureaucratic control, which, diminishing mass participation in politics, increases authoritarianism, which generates worker depoliticization, governmental rigidity, and general alienation, which finally causes economic problems due to worker hostility, passivity, and frustration/laziness, all causing worker disobedience and production decline. According to Sweezy the revolutionary party (the supposition of the whole presentation is that revolution is accomplished with a party at the helm and that transition is administered by that same party) then combats the economic problems by choosing either cultural revolution, as in China, to bring the masses back to lively participatory awareness, or capitalist incentive and management organizing techniques, as in Russia, to more directly reinforce productivity. In the former event reaction is hopefully warded off by a reassertion of revolutionary dynamics and values. In the latter case, however, there develops a managerial elite who subsequently struggle with and eventually overcome the programless bureaucrats and then institute the essentials of state capitalist organization.
Bettelheim responds at length, saying that an advance toward socialism equals a growth of self-control of producers, so that central plans -- the assumed alternative to Sweezy's disliked markets -- can mean an advance toward socialism if their content and implementation increase producers' control over economic life, but can also mean a return to capitalism if their processes of creation, content, and implementation throw up obstacles to producers' control over economic life.
He says that, contrary to Sweezy's implicit urge to focus on plan/market contradictions, analysts should instead look first and foremost to the condition of the class struggle for power. Who is in power gives reality and content to the plan-market choice and determines the direction of social evolution, and Bettelheim says that focusing attention on plan-market dynamics can obscure these more critical relations. Bettelheim thus rightly points out that plans need not equal a force for socialism and that markets need not equal a force for capitalism, and that it's important to examine power relationships as well as technical and tactical ones. He realizes that plans and markets have some aspects that reflect or depend upon "more essential" class power dynamics, but he doesn't realize that they also have intrinsic features of their own which tend to affect people in capitalistic or socialistic ways no matter who is in power. Thus Bettelheim rightly recognizes that transitional conditions can degenerate due to bourgeois elements taking positions of power, but he fails to recognize that another threat is that those in power (workers or otherwise) can be made bourgeois by their very efforts to employ capitalist or authoritarian methods.
In the next round Sweezy accepts Bettelheim's definition of the direction of socialist progress as power to the producers but then asks, what if the proletariat is in power and uses market relations? Won't such practice lead to competition, inequality, and so on, and won't all such trends tend to create reactionary forces and even to promote capitalistic type revisions? How do we know whether any chosen tactic is fostering socialism; what determines if socialism is going toward or backward; how do we know if the proletariat is actually in power; and why will it necessarily be the proletariat and not some other sector or alliance of sectors?
Bettelheim replies first giving his criteria for progress towards socialism, the continued enhancement of proletariat control over production, and then quoting Lenin favorably to the effect that State power is absolutely central to all revolutionary activity.
He continues, however, by arguing that for success, the state must be separated from the masses, and that policy must promote workers' control over their own situations and over the economy rather than state or party control over the workers. For him, the state must seek without coercion to push the proletariat to act in its own best interests. During the transition continued class struggle is necessary to eliminate old societal dynamics and must be led by the party and state. Precisely how they will accomplish such ends, however, or why they alone are suited to accomplish such ends, is never made explicit.
Thus Bettelheim recognizes the need to overcome bourgeois divisions of labor, old ideologies, separations between manual and mental labor, between leadership and performance roles, between theoretical knowledge and practical skills, but regrettably posits no concrete way to accomplish these tasks, save the enlightened application of proletarian policies by a proletarian government.
So the essence of the debate is that Sweezy asks what is the criterion for judging whether transition to socialism is proceeding well and for judging whether any particular tactic is having capitalist or socialist effects. Bettelheim replies that the criterion is the increase of proletarian control, and tactical evaluations, then, are to be based on their effects on proletarian control.
Well enough, but then Sweezy tries to make a fundamental advance: market relations, individual material incentives, and profit-seeking, all used by a proletarian party/state might be differently motivated than when similarly employed by a bourgeois state, but still a number of their capitalistic oppressive characteristics survive, and so a good part of their practical effect is to induce capitalist ideology, institutional relations, and even class divisions irrespective of who is in power; i.e., a whip in proletarian hands is perhaps a little gentler than a whip in bourgeois hands but it is a whip nonetheless.
Regrettably Bettelheim 'solves' Sweezy's problem much as Lenin did similar earlier problems, by putting more or less enlightened demands (anti-sectarianism, bring power to the proletariat) on the same old party and state institutions which are so ill-suited to meet these demands instead of describing new institutions more suited to the task of bringing power to all people and then helping them collectively hold that power.
The debate makes some headway over Classical views by emphasizing: 1- issues of producers' control and 2- the potentially capitalistic effects of markets and other traditional methods; but fails to make really significant advances because it never questions the necessity and worth of hierarchical parties as vehicles to producers' power.
In a discussion of Soviet and Polish experiences that closes the published debate, Sweezy makes some additional interesting points. In transition, policies should satisfy private needs only to the extent that such satisfactions can be produced in enough abundance to go around. Policies should be aimed at social improvement and social justice and inhibit development of divisions based on inequities of power or wealth. Short of being able to meet individual needs by producing enough for all, policies should aim only at solving problems by affecting collective well-being: thus, for example, public-transit investment rather than automotive investment. Similarly, since solidarity is the key to the development of revolutionary consciousness and behavior, while competition conversely fosters capitalist relations, all private incentive procedures should be replaced by collectively-oriented ones. Sweezy shows how in Poland "representatives of the proletariat in power" became essentially bourgeois due to their use of counter-productive techniques in society and in their own party relations. He argues that the transition from capitalism to socialism has potentials for reversion because residues of capitalist relations at both the human and institutional levels provide a basis for backward-looking elements to exert authoritarian and capitalistic policies. Thus, according to Sweezy's view, its always necessary to examine transitional methods to insure that they foster socialist rather than capitalist tendencies, and its never sufficient to rely solely on the enlightenment of the party in power.
Nonetheless both Sweezy and Bettelheim are, with reference to the United States, far too narrow in examining the problems of the ideological and institutional effects of racism and sexism, and far too cautious with the problem of creating new day-to-day useable methods for social investigation, new understandings of the relations between revolutionary consciousness and daily revolutionary activities, and new models of revolutionary political organization, leadership, and discipline more suited to the problems of both gaining and then effectively employing power in the United States.
Further, both Sweezy and Bettelheim unquestioningly accept the idea that gaining revolutionary power is a bureaucratic affair inevitably involving party and then government control. Although the thrust of many of their ideas is the necessity to counter bureaucratic deformations after power take-over, neither entertains the idea that the methods and institutions of power transfer could in themselves mitigate or solve the problems of bureaucratic control before and during rather than only after power transfer. Obviously also neither addresses the likelihood that hierarchical organizations in the United States wouldn't in fact be able to garner enough worker allegiance to manage a takeover in the first place, let alone deal with deformation after a takeover. These weaknesses seem to stem from a Sweezy and Bettelheim misunderstanding, or rather too literal understanding, of Maoist lessons: for Maoism primarily struggles against Classical difficulties in a reformist way without totally overcoming the use of Classical rhetoric, Classical ideas, and especially some forms of Classical organization, both on the road to taking and then also in the process of holding power. How much the Chinese in their particular situation will suffer for this is unclear; that Sweezy and Bettelheim are in error to assume they won't suffer at all, and moreover to assume that a similar understanding is also applicable in the United States is even more problematic. For Sweezy and Bettelheim to really push their debate forward they must recognize that it's necessary to struggle against the old society's "baggage" after reaching the new society, but also that, especially in the United States, it's necessary to do so even while fighting to reach the new society, and further, that this struggle must apply to all methods of investigation, conflict, and pre- as well as post-revolutionary organizational forms. Then Sweezy and Bettelheim would be better able to recognize and address the presently central question of how a United States revolutionary movement could best organize itself to insure its chances of gaining societal self-management and decentralized libertarian socialism without simultaneously creating any significant bureaucratic or authoritarian deformations to be countered, if such countering is really possible, later. Moreover Sweezy and Bettelheim don't seem to yet realize that as our earlier discussions of Leninism emphasized, a creative approach to revolutionary organizational forms is critical not only to perfecting but also even to generating United States revolutionary activity -- precisely because such activity will inevitably address societal anti-authoritarian and self-management needs, as well as material needs.
The importance of the Sweezy-Bettelheim debate is thus primarily not in any answers it develops but rather in the questions it raises for others to address. Like the East European Marxist Humanists Sweezy and Bettelheim only manage to find possibly fruitful directions of further inquiry, teaching us as much by what they leave out of view as by what they actually do discuss. Some other more strategy-oriented modern activists come still further along the road of demystifying past ideological conceptions and fulfilling the kinds of new revolutionary needs we outlined at the beginning of this chapter.
Andre Gorz is perhaps West Europe's best-known, practically-oriented, neo-Marxist. His works are aimed at concretely suggesting and analyzing programmatic ideas suitable for affecting real world conditions. The core advances of his work are extensions beyond Classical awarenesses of intra-class dynamics, of the importance of revolutionary goals, of the nature of revolutionary organizations, especially parties, and of the possibility of "non-reformist reform" strategies that lead to progressive development of mass revolutionary consciousness. His modern impact is deservedly great, but what is lacking from a United States orientation is enough analysis of the impact of racism and sexism, enough day-to-day useable methodology, enough discussion of the concrete ways revolutionary programs could affect worker consciousness, and a willingness to advance to the stage of actually describing what revolutionary organizations should look like.
For Gorz capitalism is a total system whose overthrow demands total opposition:
The dictatorship of capital is exercised not only on the production and distribution of wealth, but with equal force on the manner of producing, on the model of consumption, and on the manner of consuming, the manner of working, thinking, living... over the society's vision of the future, its ideology, its priorities and goals; over the way in which people experience and learn about themselves, their potentials, their relations with other people and with the rest of the world. This dictatorship is economic, political, cultural, and psychological at the same time: it is total. That is why it is right to fight it as a whole, on all levels, in the name of an overall alternative.... The cultural battle for a new conception of man, of life, education, work, and civilization, is the precondition for the success of all the other battles for socialism because it establishes their meaning. 38For any revolutionary movement to succeed against advanced capitalism it must recognize that people are not going to move on the basis of oppression alone, but instead also because envisioned liberated conditions make revolution too desirable to pass up:
What has changed, however, is that in the advanced countries the revolt against society has lost its natural base. As long as misery, the lack of basic necessities, was the condition of the majority, the need for a revolution could be regarded as obvious. Destitute proletarians and peasants did not need to have a model of future society in mind in order to rise up against the existing order: the worst was here and now; they had nothing to lose. But conditions have changed since then. Nowadays, in the richer societies, it is not so clear that the status-quo represents the greatest possible evil. 39Further Gorz therefore knows that for a revolutionary process and strategy to gain adherents it must not only point out present oppressions but also describe and even prefigure future liberations.
[The revolutionary project] can only constitute...a total stake justifying a total risk if the action of struggle has already been an experiment for them in self-organization, in initiative and collective decision-making, in short, an experiment in the possibility of their own emancipation. 40Gorz knows that "the working class will not unite politically or man the barricades for the sake of a ten percent wage increase or an extra fifty thousand dwellings. It is unlikely that in the foreseeable future there will be a crisis in capitalism so acute that, in order to protect their vital interests, workers will resort to a revolutionary general strike or armed insurrection." 42 Therefore "the main problem confronting socialist strategy is consequently that of creating the conditions, both objective and subjective, in which mass revolutionary action becomes possible and in which the bourgeoisie may be engaged and defeated in a trial of strength. " 43A revolutionary movement always feeds itself on the radical and total rejection of the existing order and all its possible improvements. But it can move forward, assert itself and bite into the existing order only if, in its progress, it evolves the outlines of a new kind of society, the instruments of its future development. 41
But Gorz also recognizes the depth of capitalism's abilities to administer itself, deceive and mystify its potential opponents, and even convince those it oppresses that their condition is in fact not so negative: "Domination produces an ideology that justifies domination as natural and necessary and makes non-acceptance of it a crime. The deeper the oppression, the greater the inability of the oppressed to think of themselves as possible subjects and agents of their own liberation and to create a consciousness of their own." 44
Gorz knows that capitalism oppresses, that it creates many needs it cannot meet, but also that such inadequacies are not always easy for the oppressed to identify fully and act upon. He knows that the "theory of immiseration" can only lead to sterile inactivity:
This theory becomes a crutch: like the theory of the inevitability of catastrophic crises which was current in the Stalinist era, it bases itself on the growing discontent of the masses as if that were an absolute impasse toward which capitalism were headed. Convinced that capitalism can only lead from bad to worse, the theory foresees its absolute intolerability. This allows it to dispense with the elaboration of a strategy of progressive conquest of power and of active intervention into capitalist contradictions. 45For Gorz the revolution is a process during which masses of workers and others become progressively more aware and begin to act both against the ills of present society and for the positive aspects of an envisioned future society. Therefore the problem is how can present revolutionaries best propel such a process -- to insure that it occurs at all, since it's not inevitable, and to cause it to happen as rapidly and with as little social friction as possible. Most importantly, in the context of this same problem, Gorz realizes that capitalism's police and military capacity demands revolutionaries rely on more than spontaneity; while capitalism's abilities to co-opt or thwart misconceived opposition necessitates that revolutionaries also not rely on demagogy, hierarchy, and or a blind discipline of the Leninist variety. Thus "one of the intrinsic difficulties of revolutionary leadership and education is that they can be entrusted to neither an 'enlightened' and self-appointed vanguard, nor the spontaneity of the masses...." 46
Further, and in parallel to the awareness that the "education problem" must be solved in ways prefiguring new societal potentials, Gorz recognizes that the "power problem" also requires a creative libertarian rather than the traditional centrist solution:
The key issue, therefore, is not getting working class parties into power; it is the building up of a genuine power of popular self-determination and self-government in opposition to centralized state power, which is the supreme instrument of bourgeois domination by which the social division of labor is perpetuated. Indeed, the question of winning power is practically meaningless unless a certain number of things have been done or have happened to liberate repressed needs and aspirations, promote the capacity of popular self-rule and effectively raise the issue of alternative power. 47Given all his concerns for revolutionary process, and for the importance of practice prefiguring goals, Gorz readily understands the centrality of the problem of revolutionary organization, seeing first that revolutionary organization must have a real basis in worker activities, and second that it must take a non-Classical form fulfilling a number of requirements which Lenin wrongly discounted. Thus "the first prerequisite for building a revolutionary movement is not the creation of a new party organization -- however 'pure' and 'genuinely revolutionary' its program and ideology -- but rousing the workers to fight for things that are within their reach and can be realized by their own direct actions: namely, working conditions in the factories. Self-determination of the purposes and methods of struggle; self-management of strikes and/or production through permanent debate in open assemblies; the setting up of strike committees at the factory and shop level, whose elected members are answerable to the general assembly of workers and may be recalled at any time -- all are liberating experiences that reveal to the working class its capacity for self-rule and for mastering and modifying the work process, and prepare it to refuse domination by management and by the state as well as by party and union bureaucracies." 48 But once there's a real basis for revolutionary organization it must be remembered that its organizational goals must be to strengthen but not dominate the movement, creating the means for workers to take societal powers unto themselves. For Gorz, such a revolutionary organization, which he still calls a party, must grow up from below in accord with developing worker consciousnesses and in tune with their needs for anti-authoritarian self-management and for the development of the skills necessary to effectively administer society and their own lives. Thinking in terms of the ills of traditional Leninist parties, Gorz sees the need for a party as a necessary evil, and tries to describe criteria for structuring one that would have a minimum of weaknesses:
Insofar as the party is a central organization it is to be regarded as a necessary evil: necessary because there has to be a center where local experience can be compared and coordinated, where it can achieve a unified outlook and be transformed into a political strategy to confront the bourgeois state. But nevertheless an evil because, facing a centralized power, it reflects the necessity to centralize a revolutionary undertaking of which the final aim is to do away with all state centralization. As a central organization, the party must be understood to be a temporary structure necessary for getting rid of the bourgeois state but which must thereafter get rid of itself. 49Regrettably, however, Gorz never moves on to consider if there could be an organization which might serve the positive functions he outlines above, without, on the other hand, having any of the traditional negative aspects of the central parties. Could there be a people's organization which could accomplish coordinating, communicative, and even planning and strategic functions, without at the same time garnering for itself any undue authority or power, without stifling initiative, and without becoming an eternal obstacle to the final appearance of a revolutionary and decentralist society? Could there be a people's organization which prefigures, propels, and then melts into a decentralized decision-making mechanism for a new society?
Gorz does however set stringent libertarian criteria for his revolutionary "party":
It is natural, therefore, that all those political parties that aim at controlling the state apparatus and modern capitalist society but not at changing them, should model their own structure on that of the state as it exists. A revolutionary party, on the other hand, is distinguished by its assault, both theoretical and practical, on the authoritarian centralist nature of the state as an expression of bourgeois monopolist rule; and by an ability to destroy the illusion that this degree of centralization is unavoidable in a modern industrial state, whether capitalist or socialist. The destruction of this myth entails in the first place that the party should not behave as -- and should not be considered as -- a machine for winning power for itself and for its leaders. It must be viewed not as the holder of future power but as the instrument whereby all the power will be transferred to the people and exercised by themselves. Not the winning of state power but the destruction of the state as a separate center of power ruling the people, is the revolutionary goal. 50Gorz knows that with a creative new "party," the revolutionary process has a good chance of success: he sees growing numbers of activists, growing revolutionary consciousness, and a growing scope for revolutionary programs, causing a strategic flow leading to eventual revolutionary victory. Therefore in Gorz's view the working hypothesis on which the revolutionary party must base its activity is no longer a sudden seizure of power, made possible by the breakdown of capitalist mechanisms or a military defeat of the bourgeois state, but that of a patient and conscious strategy aimed at provoking a crisis in the system by the masses' refusal to bend to its logic, and then resolving this crisis in the direction of their demands.
Revolution is to be an on-going flow of conflict during which continually more people become politically conscious and active -- the crisis precipitating an actual transfer of power comes then, not as a result of internal economic dynamics alone, but rather as a result of revolutionary opposition itself rupturing society's orderly capabilities. The conditions of revolutionary transfer of power from central institutions to people's institutions is accomplished by the long hard work of conscious revolutionary activists.
Further, Gorz feels that though capitalism is a total system, the locus of anti-capitalist activity must begin with the work situation and develop from there:
It is from the place of production that the struggle must necessarily begin. For: 1- it is at the place of production that the workers undergo most directly the despotism of capital, and have the direct experience of their social subordination; 2- it is there that capital, by methods of the division of labor which, often without technical necessity, constitute methods of domination, puts itself to work producing decomposed, molecularized, humiliated men which it can then dominate in society; 3- finally, and especially, it is only there that the workers exist as a group, as a real collective force capable of a collective action which is direct and daily, and which can just as well modify their condition in its most immediately intolerable aspects as it can force the enemy to confront them as he really is. 51Gorz also recognizes that within any factory there are not just two opposing classes but many sectors, each of which must be treated differently in revolutionary thought, propaganda, and tactics. He sees differences not only between boss and worker, but also between skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled workers, black and white workers, male and female workers, white- and blue-collar workers, totally oppressed workers and workers who partly carry out orders that oppress others, and so on. Gorz believes people's consciousnesses develop primarily through analysis of personal experience. He feels that for real successes the critical awarenesses that can thusly develop must be combined with positive aspirations as well -- for it is the positive aspirations that create the possibility of revolutionary praxis:
The politicization of the masses doesn't start from politics, nor action or struggle alone. Political commitment and choice, are in fact, the final position of a development of consciousness...which never starts with politics, i.e., with the problem of the organization of society and social relations, but from the direct and fragmentary experience of a change which is necessary because it is possible. The demand for change, in other words, does not arise from the impossibility of accepting what is, but from the possibility of no longer accepting what is. 52Gorz's ultimate solution to the revolutionary problem of creating the objective and subjective preconditions of revolution is to work in such ways as to continually augment worker consciousnesses of present injustices and future alternatives, and create a long march of non-reformist reform struggles. The workers organize to win concrete demands but when they accomplish those immediate ends, rather than merely recreating stability, their victory instead creates more favorable conditions for the next round of conflict. Thus the reform struggle is a successful part of real revolutionary process when it "sets up objectives beyond the realm of wages, when it carries on despite management concessions of wages, when it provokes a heightening of consciousness, and when it does not end before having raised additional demands, which, being unsatisfied, will resurge and reappear on a higher level in further actions," and when in victory it creates a better balance of forces for the next worker-management conflict.
Thus in clarifying his revolutionary reformist approach Gorz says:
What in practice distinguishes a genuinely socialist policy of reforms from reformism of the neo-capitalist or "social-democratic" type is less each of the reforms and goals than, first, the presence or absence of organic links between the various reforms, second, the tempo and method of their implementation, and third, the resolve, or absence of resolve, to take advantage of the imbalance created by the initial reforms to promote further disruptive action. 53Gorz's work is important to the left because he begins to challenge dogmas about revolutionary goals, revolutionary organization, and the existence of differing problems for each different sector of the working class. But he doesn't progress to the point of positing clear goals or describing concretely how tactics can prefigure new possibilities; he doesn't go beyond pushing stringent demands on a new revolutionary party to the task of explaining how a new revolutionary organization might actually be structured to meet those demands. The problems of revolutionizing different working-class sectors and different social groups with different consciousness and therefore different taking-off points is not adequately developed. Finally though Gorz does recognize the totalist nature of capitalist oppression, he focuses too single-mindedly on the workplace as the scene of revolutionary struggle. He doesn't give enough consideration to the possibility for consumer, neighborhood, caste, sex, service-institution, ecological, and state-sector political struggle in themselves and as they interrelate with workplace struggle. He does however recognize the need for separate struggles and movements to be tied together in ways going beyond the limitations of traditional alliances:Therein lies the profound difference between reformism and socialism. It is the difference between conceded reforms which perpetuate the subordinate position of the working class in the factories and in society and reforms dictated, effected, and controlled by the masses themselves, based on their capacity for self-management and their own initiative. 54
The weakness of the traditional type of alliance is that it consists of separate group interests and sectional grievances that are merely added together and turned into a list of demands that never amount, in their sum total, to a comprehensive critique of the existing order and to a unifying vision of the struggles to be waged for its supersession. 55But since he doesn't investigate the full variety of such sectional struggles, he gives no real ways for accomplishing this unifying task at either the ideological or the programmatic level. All in all he provides a powerful basis for further progress but does not show the precise ways to accomplish such further gains.
Stanley Aronowitz and Jeremy Brecher in a sense combine Pannekoek's political awarenesses and Reich's psychological awarenesses into a new and more powerful Council Communist position. Like Pannekoek they emphasize worker self-activity, worker self-organization, and the need to avoid and overcome the negative effects of hierarchical parties and trade unions. But they also go beyond Pannekoek's belief in the ease-of-worker-arousal to a more Reichian awareness of the kinds of socio-cultural forces impeding the realization of revolutionary consciousness.
Thus Brecher's major work, Strike, essentially charts a history of mass strikes in the United States, showing that they were mostly rank-and-file, often opposed rather than supported by organized trade unions, and that they sometimes offered up alternative direct factory-council organizational forms that had significant revolutionary potentials.
He shows how mass strikes generating worker self-organization are especially important for challenging authority, promoting solidarity, and giving workers new skills for controlling their own lives. The implication is that if workers were also guided by their own revolutionary ideals, goals, and programs, mass strikes could be truly effective revolutionary tactics.
Thus in a summary of his position published in "Radical America," Brecher first describes what he understands to be revolutionary consciousness:
The "consciousness" necessary for socialist revolution consists in workers' shared understanding that they can collectively initiate and control their own action to meet their own needs. Such an understanding does not flow directly and automatically from the position of workers in production, although that position is what makes workers potentially powerful. Nor does it arise primarily from the speeches, manifestos, and other "consciousness raising" activities of the Left, though they may make some contribution to it. The working class can come to understand its power to act only by acting. 56He then alludes to some adverse factors he finds prevalent in present United States working class consciousness: "On the contrary, it was because it [Strike] took the actual activity of the working class as its basis for evaluation that it found individualism, conservatism, racism, sexism, nationalism, and passivity to be real factors shaping working-class practice." 57 Brecher draws the rather straightforward conclusion that revolution in the United States will require a developmental process in which conscious revolutionaries must play significant organizational and educational roles:
The working class is potentially revolutionary, and socialism would be the natural result if one tendency of its development were carried to its logical conclusion. But if this were the only tendency in effect, the workers would all be revolutionaries and socialism would have been achieved long ago. To ignore the factors which currently lead workers to adapt to existing society instead of trying to abolish it is to give up the ability to understand "the real, existing American working class with all its limitations." To ignore those limitations is to lose the power to grasp the process that will be necessary to overcome them. 58Because he feels that hierarchy and authoritarianism breed passivity in workers and elitism in revolutionary cadres, in contrast to worker self-activity which leads to worker self-management, Brecher has a straight-forward criterion for judging revolutionary organization: "If socialism means the organized direction of society by the producers themselves, then socialist organization is that by which people develop their ability to initiate and control their common activity to meet their own needs." 60...it is hardly the function of radicals to say "amen" to whatever the working class may do. Those who accept rather than challenge the institutions and attitudes through which workers' subordinations to capital is mediated are the true "spontaneists".... For those of us who aim for the replacement -- and not merely the "humanizing" -- of capitalism, the least we can learn from the past is how to avoid contributing to the perpetuation of the system we want to abolish. That requires a willingness to criticize the Left of the past, not just for one or another "incorrect line," but for its most basic principles and premises. The purpose of such a critique, however, is by no means to discourage action; it is to see that our own action actually contributes to our liberation, rather than to our firmer enslavement. 59
In this same context Brecher revealingly defends Strike and implicitly Council Communism against a particular form of prevalent criticism:
Why then is Strike sometimes interpreted as advocating "spontaneous," as opposed to organized, activity? This criticism grows out of a different conception of organization, one which has been more common in the history of the socialist movement than the one I have proposed. According to this view, the working class is seen as organized to the extent that it is enrolled in formal organizations, particularly trade unions and radical parties. The possibility that such organizations might represent the disorganization of their members -- their inability to initiate and control their actions themselves -- is not apparent from this point of view. And activity not originating with such organizations is by definition "spontaneous." 61Finally Brecher makes explicit his reasons for believing in the revolutionary viability of workers' councils:
Workers' councils do not possess any secret quality which makes them, by virtue of their form, revolutionary. They do, however, have several characteristics which make them different from unions. First, they are based on the power of workers who are together every day and exercise continuous power over production. Second, they are already controlled by the workers themselves, who can recall their delegates at any time. Third, they follow the actually existing organization of the working class in production, rather than dividing it along lines that quickly become obsolete, as has happened over and over again in the history of unionism. 62Brecher's ideas are a fundamental return to Council Communism with an increased awareness of race, sex, authority, and psychology related concerns, and as such represent significant contributions to the task of creating a new United States revolutionary ideology.
Aronowitz has a similar orientation but greater experience and thus an even more effective and broad formulation. His recent book, False Promises, includes a general theoretical presentation of his viewpoints in the context of a discussion of modern worker activism, the history of the development of various sectors of the American working class and of American working class struggle, and of the culture of the American working class. The work is a major contribution to an understanding of United States history, of present United States conditions, and of Council Communist ideas adapted to a modern setting.
Aronowitz starts off with a strategic aim: "The fundamental question to be explored in this book is why the working class in America remains a dependent force in society and what the conditions are that may reverse this situation." 63 To answer why workers acquiesce to their oppressive conditions, Aronowitz recognizes that he "must examine daily life, for it is in the structures of everyday existence that the social structure is reproduced in the minds of its participants." 64 He finds that the confusion of American worker consciousness arises in the first place from the mystifying dynamics of their involvement in production:
Commodities appear to assume value in exchange rather than in production and the relations between men are perceived as relations between things. The worker values himself as one values all commodities -- by his selling price. Thus all relations appear as object relations. The very existence of the worker is bound up with the sale of his labor power. Individual worth is measured by how much labor can bring in the market place. People become identical with their occupations, consumption styles and social prestige and the self has no autonomy apart from its exchange value. The subordination of the self to the labor process takes on the appearance of blind economic law, so that the domination of man by man no longer appears an injustice but a biological or legal necessity. The power of the employer over the worker has the force of economic necessity and its human substance is entirely suppressed. 65And in the second, from the effects of society's various socializing institutions:
The main institutions within and against which the individual confronts society prior to entering the work-world are family, schools, religion, and more recently mass culture These institutions mediate between the social relations of production and individual consciousness by communicating to the individual his place in the social division of labor while providing contrary symbols that hold out the possibility of transcending the fate of previous generations. 66Aronowitz thus sees socialization as primarily a process of acclimating people to their niches in society, such that they will accept those niches and even feel them deserved, no matter how oppressive and unjust they might actually be. Like Pannekoek, he sees that authority relations play a central role in all such socialization and control, especially in the case of workers. But unlike Pannekoek, Aronowitz has no naive belief in the consciousness-raising effects of immiseration -- he neither expects worsening conditions, nor believes that if adverse changes did somehow occur, workers would thus be radicalized:The importance of the socializing institutions is that they make unnecessary the open use of force, because workers in their earliest experiences find themselves at the bottom of a pyramidal structure within these institutions and come to expect that all social institutions will assign them the same position. Theories of human nature are constructed that elevate this experience to a level of belief. The superiority and inferiority ratings of human beings based on the criteria of adaptive intelligence justify the hierarchical organization of labor, the domination of political institutions over individual lives, the tracking system in the schools, and the differential treatment accorded members of a person's family by parents. 67
Indeed, the child learns in school. But the content of the curriculum is far less important than the structure of the school itself. The child learns that the teacher is the authoritative person in the classroom.... 68
What has developed in the twentieth century is the partial utilization of knowledge, sufficient to maintain a level of economic growth adequate to the criterion of the profitability of production and to the maintenance of relatively high living standards...it seems clear that if the proletarian revolution awaits the economic crisis it may remain little more than a fantasy. 69Further Aronowitz discusses Reich's analysis of Germany favorably, agreeing on the importance of distorted sexual and authority relations to all that transpired there:The theory of revolution as the outcome of manifest economic crisis of capitalism encounters a second difficulty. There is absolutely no evidence that depressions in themselves lead to a rise of revolutionary activity, much less revolutionary consciousness among the workers. On the contrary, workers tend to become profoundly conservative under conditions of increasing material deprivation. They organize themselves only to fight against wage cuts or to force the government to undertake programs that increase relief payments and job-creating projects such as public works. The economic crisis of the 1930's resulted in the strengthening of the capitalist state rather than the development of a large revolutionary workers' movement.... 70
...the question of politics of the working class and its movement cannot be decided by reference to political and economic leadership alone. Reich argues that it was the authoritarian character structure of the German working class that provides the causal explanation for the revolutionary failure of the 1930's German society, he asserts, as mediated through the authoritarian family, repressed the instinctual need for freedom....the working class was predisposed to seek the solution to the world crisis of capitalism in authoritarian institutions because it failed to wage a struggle against authoritarianism within its own organizations.... Workers were subjected to a consistent pattern of repressed social relations in the entire compass of everyday life... 71Aronowitz thus realizes the complex nature of political motion and recognizes the absolute requirement that left organization not merely mimic traditional hierarchical modes. He says of the left's organizations in Germany, "the left-wing parties and the trade unions reflected the hierarchical relations of capitalist society no less than the corporations and the family," and points out that for so long as the left offers no real structural alternatives vis-a-vis issues of authority, it will be powerless in competition with even far more authoritarian, tightly knit organized right wing elements. He realizes thus that "the existence of radical organizations enjoying the support of the masses could constitute a brake on revolutionary activity if they reinforced the system of domination, especially sexual repression, already existing within the culture." 72 And he agrees with Reich that the fundamental question is "the transformation of workers' consciousness, not only at the point of production and within political struggle, but also in their daily lives, in the fulfillment or denial of their needs -- especially their sexual needs." 73
Further Aronowitz says that, "Daily life provides clues for both the liberatory and the authoritarian tendencies with the working class as well as all social groups. It is the critical institutions of family, peer groups, school, church, and the voluntary associations, and the workplace itself that structure the way people respond to events as well as create them." He then spends much time doing fine, relatively detailed analyses of how those institutions actually operate in the present United States setting. 74
Predictably Aronowitz is opposed to trade unions and all other hierarchically organized or capitalistically entangled institutions: "The trade unions have become an appendage of the corporations because they have taken their place as a vital institution in the corporate capitalist complex." 75
Further Aronowitz feels that organizing solely around wage problems is at best a partial and at worst a counter-productive approach. It is the totality of oppression that must be confronted most particularly by focusing on issues of management and alienation:
The most important issue to be addressed in defining the tasks ahead is not the question of inflation, wages, or general economic conditions. No matter how inequitable the distribution of income, no matter how deep the crisis, these conditions will never, by themselves, be the soil for revolutionary consciousness.For Aronowitz the revolutionary task is for activists and workers together to understand both the personal and the political obstacles to fulfillment and to then organize struggles designed to raise the type of revolutionary consciousness that could overcome those obstacles. Thus for Aronowitz "the first step in the reeducation of workers is to help them become aware of their own biographies, that is, the ways in which they have been educated so that their character structure is harmonious with the structure of domination." For Aronowitz the new left's great success was to realize the necessity of merging the political and personal, but its great failure was in not extending the awareness of this need from women and students to the workers themselves. Activists must not make the mistake of thinking that workers live only an "economic" existence lest they become "co-conspirators with the corporations in the cultural impoverishment of the working class." 77Revolutionary consciousness arises out of the conditions of alienated labor, which include economic conditions but are not limited to them. Its starting point is in the production process. It is at the point of mental and manual production, where the world of commodities is produced, that the worker experiences his exploitation. Consumption of waste production, trade union objectives in the direction of enlarging wages and social benefits, and the division of labor into industries and sections are all mediations which stand between the workers' existential exploitation at the workplace and their ability to comprehend alienated labor as class exploitation. 76
Culture is central as one aspect of the consciousness-life of all workers. Aronowitz thus sees that '"the struggle of workers' self-management at the shop level cannot be waged successfully as long as corporations and the government have cultural hegemony over the workers," 78 and feels that:
...the central mechanism of this hegemony is the control over unbounded time and its consequent rationalization analogous to the rationalization of industrial production. Consumerism, mass media, spectator sports, and educational institutions prepare workers to view themselves as objects of manipulation, to view their lives as outside of themselves, to surrender their subjectivity to the spectacle and to destroy their imagination. 79Aronowitz thus sees that "the central task of a New Left among the working class is to create the conditions for the separation of popular culture from mass culture," 80 because he feels the crucial need for workers to exert creative initiative over control of their own leisure lives, both to break down capitalist control and to begin exercising worker alternatives.
Aronowitz understands at least some of the implications of his anti-authoritarianism for questions of revolutionary organization. He sees that the task of a new radical left is to create a self-organized working class actor in history. He feels correlatively that radicals must avoid "vanguard politics" for three reasons:
First, the working class in America does not need such a vanguard because it has the objective possibility of comprehending its own experience and leading itself. Second, the left has no credentials for assuming the role even if it were needed; its contributions to working class struggle, however considerable, have never transcended the level of consciousness of the workers themselves, and have often seriously impeded that consciousness. Third, it is not the job of the left to reproduce authoritarian social relations in the workers' movement. Instead, its first responsibility is to help create a movement that prefigures a non-authoritarian society -- a movement that is aware of the dialectic of domination and subordination within the structure of society as well as the character structure of the workers themselves and tries to transcend these syndromes, even as it simultaneously struggles every day in the workplace against the assault of capital on work conditions. 81In line with his Council Communist heritage, Aronowitz feels that the ultimate vehicle for accomplishing the necessary revolutionary tasks can only be the workers' own self-organized councils:
Workers' councils or committees can only become serious expression of working class interests when they challenge authority relations in the enterprise, are based on some understanding that the prevailing division of labor reinforces these relations, and when they possess the power and the desire to transform the workplace in accordance with a new conception of the relations between work and play and between freedom and authority. Workers' control demands that are instruments of trade union and bureaucratic institutions merely reinforce the powerlessness of workers because they sow the seeds of cynicism concerning the possibility of actually achieving the vision of a self-managed society. 82In a real sense Aronowitz's politics synthesize the advances of humanist and neo-Marxism. The gain beyond previous sectarian conceptions is certainly obvious enough, but the remaining gaps are also quite pronounced. Still to be incorporated is a good understanding of the roles of Black and women's struggles, consumer struggles, and the importance of the state sector and of directly anti-state struggles. There is still no well-delineated discussion of revolutionary goals, still no really workable ideas on how revolutionary structures should look, and perhaps most important of all, there is still very little activist orientation. For even though Aronowitz does focus strategically on the question, "What are the impediments to revolution?" and even though he tries to give broad answers on how to counter those impediments, he does not develop a methodology activists can learn and employ in their own efforts. There is no set of tools that can be used to analyze tactics or programs that can overcome impediments of specific local work institutions, neighborhoods, or schools. Creating such tools is the crucial next step that could rekindle United States left motion. Developing a complete, popularly readable theoretical perspective, including goal orientation, theoretical tools, and an overall strategic awareness is the next major task for the left. Whether it can be accomplished within the rough outlines of Aronowitz's modern Council Communism, or whether it will require several new theoretical (feminist, racial, psychological?) categories remains an open question. What this book has however hoped to demonstrate is the variety of ways in which a new ideology must transcend Classical Marxism Leninism, Anarchism, and Maoism; and the nature of the "success criteria" it must fulfill in order really to provide viable tools for guiding a new United States revolutionary praxis.
FOOTNOTES
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, Alfred A. Knopf, New York. 21, 28.
2. Antonio Gramsci quoted in the article, "Antonio Gramsci: The Subjective Revolution" by Romano Giachetti, in The Unknown Dimension, edited by Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare, Basic Books Inc, New York. 151.
3. Ibid. 158.
4. Ibid. 162
5. Ibid. 157-158.
6. This is a crucial point in the sense it goes beyond Classical preoccupation with forces of production to a fairly clear perception that really far more important are the relations of production and of life in general.
7. Antonio Gramsci in Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, John M. Cammett, Stanford University Press. 82.
8. Ibid. 204.
9. Anton Pannekoek, Workers ' Councils, A Root and Branch Pamphlet, 275 River Street, Cambridge Mass. 52.
10. Ibid. 54.
11. Ibid. 33.
12. Anton Pannekoek quoted in the article "Left-Wing Communism: The Reply to Lenin," in The Unknown Dimension, op. cit. 181.
13. Ibid. 182.
14. Ibid. 177.
15. Anton Pannekoek, Workers' Councils, op. cit. 29.
16. Ibid. 34.
17. Wilhelm Reich quoted in the article "The Marxism of Wilhelm Reich," by Bertell Oilman, in The Unknown Dimension, op. cit. 205.
18. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, New York. 22-23.
19. See the essay "What Is Class Consciousness" in Wilhelm Reich, Sex-Pol, Vintage Books.
20. Ibid.
21. Mihailo Markovic, From Affluence to Praxis, University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor, Michigan. 139.
22. Ibid. 73.
23. Ibid. 56.
24. Adam Schaff, Marxism and the Individual, McGraw Hill Paperbacks, New York. 40.
25. Ibid. 40.
26. Ibid. 41.
27. Markovic, op. cit. 19.
28. Schaff, op. cit. 8.
29. Markovic, op. cit. 191-192.
30. Ibid. 214.
31. Svetozar Stojanovic, Between Ideals and Reality, Oxford University Press. New York. 115.
32. Schaff, op. cit. 115.
33. Ibid. 119.
34. Stojanovic, op. cit. 85.
35. Markovic, op. cit. 204.
36. Ibid. 206.
37. Stojanovic, op. cit. 178.
38. Andre Gorz, Karl Klare's introduction to The Unknown Dimension, op. cit. 10-11.
39. Gorz, Strategy for Labor, Beacon Press, Boston Mass. 3.
40. Gorz in The Unknown Dimension, op. cit. 18.
41. Gorz, Socialism and Revolution, Doubleday Anchor, New York. 36.
42. Ibid. 136.
43. Ibid. 135.
44. Ibid. 15.
45. Gorz, Strategy for Labor, op. cit. 23.
46. Gorz, Socialism and Revolution, 31.
47. Ibid. 32.
48. Ibid. 33.
49. Gorz, Socialism and Revolution, op. cit. 176.
50. Ibid. 63.
51. Gorz in Howard, in The Unknown Dimension, op. cit. 406.
52. Ibid 405.
53. Gorz, Socialism and Revolution, op. cit. 141.
54. Ibid. 158.
55. Ibid. 57.
56. Jeremy Brecher, Radical America, "Who Advocates Spontaneity?" 91-92.
57. Ibid. 93.
58. Ibid. 94.
59. Ibid. 110.
60. Ibid. 98.
61. Ibid. 99.
62. Ibid. 106.
63. Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises, McGraw Hill, New York. xi.
64. Ibid. 6.
65. Ibid. 7.
66. Ibid. 10.
67. Ibid. 60.
68. Ibid. 75.
69. Ibid. 53.
70. Ibid. 53-54.
71. Ibid. 54-55.
72. Ibid. 55.
73. Ibid. 55.
74. Ibid. 55.
75. Ibid. 219.
76. Ibid. 255.
77. Ibid. 435.
78. Ibid. 435.
79. Ibid. 436-437.
80. Ibid. 437.
81. Ibid. 441.
82. Ibid. 426-427.
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