“The original organizations of the proletariat were modeled after those of the medieval apprentices. In like manner the first weapons of the modern labor movement were those inherited from a previous age, the strike and the boycott. But these methods are insufficient for the modern proletariat. The more completely the various divisions of which it is made up unite into a single working-class movement, the more must its struggles take on a political character. Every class-struggle is a political struggle. Even the bare requirements of the industrial struggle force the workers to make political demands. We have seen that the modern state regards it as its principal function to make the effective organization of labor impossible. Secret organizations are inefficient substitutes for open ones. The more the proletariat develops, the more it needs freedom to organize.” (Karl Kautsky)
In the first chapter, a modern approach to programming class struggle and social revolution was outlined, based broadly on the game theory concepts of maximax and maximin, with the latter entailing immediate, intermediate, and threshold demands. Explained earlier in this chapter was the historical and long-term necessity of ensuring that the immediate and intermediate demands being raised “make further progress more likely and facilitate other progressive changes” (Robin Hahnel) as well as enable the basic principles to be, through the emphasis on transnational “ pressure” (class struggle) for legislative implementation, “kept consciously in view” (Karl Kautsky) – thus being consistent with the maximin concept. Nevertheless, in between the maximax and the maximin are demands of a “directional” (as opposed to pseudo-“transitional”) nature which, either individually or combined, would necessitate a revolutionary departure from bourgeois-capitalist social relations specifically (as opposed to coordinator-capitalist, petty-capitalist, and even perceived “socialist” social relations) or from all forms of capitalist social relations altogether. In the case of the latter, at least one demand that is seemingly peripheral but is crucial for the departure was examined in Chapter 2.
One more detail completes this modern approach to programming class struggle and social revolution: some demands are, in the broad sense, “self-directional.” With this particular type of demand, some aspects of it pose immediate concerns, other aspects intermediate ones, still other aspects threshold ones, leaving the remainder to pose directional concerns. The freedom of specifically class-strugglist assembly and association, free from anti-employment reprisals, police interference such as from agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement – as opposed to the liberal hollowness of “freedom of assembly and association” – is one such “self-directional” demand, as pointed out by an enraged Lenin in his primary counter-polemic with the senile renegade who was his most influential theoretical mentor:
Under bourgeois democracy the capitalists, by thousands of tricks – which are the more artful and effective the more “pure” democracy is developed – drive the people away from administrative work, from freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc.
[…]
You, exploiters and hypocrites, talk about democracy, while at every step you erect thousands of barriers to prevent the oppressed people from taking part in politics. We take you at your word and, in the interests of these people, demand the extension of your bourgeois democracy in order to prepare the people for revolution for the purpose of overthrowing you, the exploiters.
Indeed, consider even the most narrowly economistic take on class-strugglist assembly and association, otherwise known as unionization rights (mere collective bargaining “rights,” to be more precise). Right after featuring Lars Lih’s critique of broad economism, the very next issue of the Weekly Worker published these insightful remarks by Mike Macnair (if only limited by a binary, offensive-defensive approach to minimum demands) on the peculiarly British take on anti-union laws:
The use of democratic demands in connection with defensive struggles against the effects of crisis is the use of selected elements of the minimum programme which are particularly relevant to the crisis.
The first and most fundamental of these is (partially) shared by all the left ‘action programmes’: abolition of the anti-union laws. The slogan should be expressed as “abolition”, not “repeal”: trade unions are illegal at common law (the first anti-union Act of Parliament was the Confederacies of Masons Act 1424; picketing has been unlawful since around the 1240s) and even repeal of everything passed since 1970 would still allow judges to invent new means of penalising unions or reinvent ancient ones.
“Partially shared” because there is a more general democratic principle involved: freedom of association.
[…]
The struggle for freedom of association is a struggle for a general democratic demand. But it is also the struggle for the most elementary need of the working class as a class: to organise itself freely and independently of the capitalist state. Conditions of economic crisis and recession make this need more, not less, urgent.
However, mere abolition is insufficient. In the United States, the current push by unionized labour to have the card-check Employee Free Choice Act passed is driven by frustration over anti-employment reprisals sanctioned under current labour law, the National Labour Relations Act of 1935. These reprisals occur in between the required two elections to have union representation (the latter occurring via secret ballot, hence the right-wing hysteria to preserve secret-ballot “rights” in this area), ranging from threats to disciplinary action to unlawful terminations that see their lawsuit resolutions too late (not that the issue of pro-unionization intimidation during the card check process should be ignored, but that has always been playing second fiddle by far).
Next, consider the historical role of “the pigs” – police officers (not even the bourgeoisie are called “the pigs” by the class-strugglist left) – as obstacles to class-based assembly and association, including but not limited to the usage of agents provocateurs to incite violence, the suppression of mass strikes and wildcat strikes in general, the forced enforcement of lockouts or outright unemployment in response to sit-down strikes or even “recovered” factories, and so on. For the purposes of this lengthy chapter, this more direct consideration of the bourgeois-capitalist state’s “principal function [of making] the effective organization of labor impossible” will indeed be limited to the usage of agents provocateurs, especially in recent years. That even paleoconservative reactionaries like Alex Jones and liberals like Steve Watson can mutually identify this expression of bourgeois-capitalist authoritarianism and (at least inadvertently) link it to class struggle is something to note:
[In 2007] peaceful protestors at the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit in Montebello captured sensational video of hired agent provocateurs attempting to incite rioting and turn the protest violent, only to encounter brave resistance from real protest leaders.
Quebec provincial police later admitted that their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protest at the North American leaders summit in Montebello, Que.
In Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organisation meeting, the authorities declared a state of emergency, imposed curfews and resorted to nothing short of police state tactics in response to a small minority of hostile black bloc hooligans. In his film Police State 2, Alex Jones covered the fact that the police allowed the black bloc to run riot in downtown Seattle while they concentrated on preventing the movement of peaceful protestors. The film presents evidence that the left-wing anarchist groups are actually controlled by the state and used to demonize peaceful protesters.
At WTO protests in Genoa 2001 a protestor was killed after being shot in the head and run over twice by a police vehicle. The Italian Carabinere also later beat on peaceful protestors as they slept, and even tortured some, at the Diaz School. It later emerged that the police fabricated evidence against the protesters, claiming they were anarchist rioters, to justify their actions. Some Carabiniere officials have since come forward to say they knew of infiltration of the black bloc anarchists, that fellow officers acted as agent provocateurs.
At the Free Trade Area of Americas protests in Miami in late November 2003, more provocateuring was evident. The United Steelworkers of America, calling for a congressional investigation, stated that the police intentionally caused violence and arrested and charged hundreds of peaceful protestors. The USWA suggested that billions of dollars supposedly slated for Iraq reconstruction funds are actually being used to subsidize ‘homeland repression’ in America.
Now, consider the formal political disenfranchisement (including, among other things, the right to vote) of criminals, many of whom upon release become law-abiding taxpapers, yet are not formally enfranchised. “How would it feel to work and pay taxes, and be excluded from the democratic process?” asks the American Civil Liberties Union on this status applying to 5.3 million Americans (evoking the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois slogan “No taxation without representation!”):
The recently reauthorized Voting Rights Act went a long way towards redressing imbalances. But it left one group of citizens behind. Says US Congressman John Lewis: "I just think the American people got to rise up. And not be quiet. Find a way to get in the way. And I think here today, we must see this as an extension of the civil rights movement. It is time for the American citizens to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble."
[…]
Today, we face increasing disengagement and disenchantment with the political process. High incarceration rates and felony disfranchisement exacerbate that, creating a culture of indifference […]
Not that the ACLU has nothing to say internationally. On the contrary:
Prisoners vote in a large number of countries, and some countries have more tailored bans on prisoner voting. For example, disfranchisement is rare in Norway, where courts are only allowed to disfranchise those convicted of treason, electoral fraud and national security breaches, and Poland permits courts to disfranchise those convicted of extremely serious offenses and sentenced to over three years in prison.
Some lawyers argue that American disfranchisement policies are likely to be in contravention of international human rights instruments that guarantee the right to vote, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which has been ratified by the United States. The racially disproportionate impact of the law may also contravene the non-discrimination policies in the Covenant and in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the US has also ratified.
Particularly worrisome is the potential application of this formal political disenfranchisement to class-conscious workers convicted of some extra-legal class-strugglist activity that falls far short of “treason” (hence the emphasis above on the Polish situation)!
Special emphasis must be given to the immediate (not “intermediate”) application of this demand within the armed forces. For example, until a few years ago, trade-union rights (at least the “right” to collective bargaining, if not the right to strike) existed in the German armed forces. With all the jingoistic appeals to “patriotism” in the United States, what has been relatively ignored is the sad treatment of many military veterans by the bourgeois-capitalist government itself! Consider this Associated Press article from late 2007:
Military veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.
And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.
[…]
Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future. It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless. Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.
"We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous," said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
[…]
The Iraq vets seeking help with homelessness are more likely to be women, less likely to have substance abuse problems, but more likely to have mental illness – mostly related to post-traumatic stress, said Pete Dougherty, director of homeless veterans programs at the VA.
Overall, 45 percent of participants in the VA's homeless programs have a diagnosable mental illness and more than three out of four have a substance abuse problem, while 35 percent have both, Dougherty said.
In his pathbreaking The Road to Power, Kautsky emphasized the need to actively break the loyalty of rank-and-file military personnel to their respective bourgeois-capitalist governments:
To in the age of railroads and telegraphs, of newspapers and public assemblages, of countless industrial centers, of magazine rifles and machine guns it is absolutely impossible for a minority to cripple the military: forces of the capital [city], unless they are already completely disorganized. It is also impossible to confine a political struggle to the capital [city]. Political life has become national. Where these conditions exist a great transfer of political power that shall destroy a tyrannical regime is only to be expected where all of the following conditions exist […] Confidence in the ruling regime, both in its power and in its stability, must have been destroyed by its own tools, by the bureaucracy and the army.
If the reader here thinks that this emphasis is too “Caesarian,” it is only due to a relative lack of knowledge on the socioeconomic causes of this original “March on Rome” (farcically repeated by the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini in 1922) and on the politically incorrect cause of Julius Caesar’s assassination, as asserted by Michael Parenti in his The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome: his “tyrannical” land reform proposal to redistribute common land seized by patricians either in the Senate or with Senate connections, naturally to demobilized soldiers and proletarianized peasants. History eventually repeated itself with Oliver Cromwell’s short-lived assault on the British aristocracy, but moreover with the Soviet legacy posed by the ascendancy of the “Caesarist” praktiki (practical full-timers) around Joseph Stalin at the expense of the uniformed “Bonapartists” around Leon Trotsky and of the intellectually “aristocratic” Bolshevik Old Guard.
Once more, this real yet class-based freedom of assembly and association – free from anti-employment reprisals, police interference such as from agents provocateurs, and formal political disenfranchisement – is the basis of politico-ideological independence for the working class, of winning “the battle of democracy” mentioned in the Communist Manifesto, and of class-strugglist democracy itself, with the working class ultimately capturing the full political power of a ruling class in accordance with the slogan “WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!”
REFERENCES:
The Class Struggle (Erfurt Programme) by Karl Kautsky [ http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ch05.htm ]
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin [ http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/index.htm ]
Crisis and defensive demands by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/751/crisisand.html]
Learn more about the Employee Free Choice Act by the American Rights at Work Education Fund [ http://freechoiceact.org/index.php/petition/pages/araw_learn_more ]
Police Used "Agents Provocateurs" At UK Bush Protests by Steve Watson [ http://www.infowars.net/articles/june2008/260608Provocateurs.htm ]
Democracy's Ghosts: How 5.3 million Americans have lost the right to vote by the American Civil Liberties Union
[ http://www.democracysghosts.com/ ]
[ http://www.democracysghosts.org/democracy/democracy.html ]
[ http://www.democracysghosts.org/intsituation/intsituation.html ]
Out of uniform and on the street by Kathy Matheson, The Associated Press [ http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/08/america/NA-GEN-US-Homeless-Veterans.php ]
The Road to Power by Karl Kautsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch06.htm ]
The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti [ http://www.michaelparenti.org/Caesar.html ]
