Theory as Psychoanalysis, Theorist as Psychoanalyst

 What is the Relation of the Marxian Theory to Struggles?  What is the Point of Intellectual Effort?

The problem of what the Marxian intellectual is doing with theory, what we think theory is supposed to do, remains.

Especially if one begins from the idea that theorists and intellectuals do not 1) raise consciousness, 2) develop a political program, 3) develop a political line, and are not 4) ersatz activists, aka popularizers who are self-conceived of as organizers or the brain of the organizers (of a movement or an organization or even a journal), and that a "revolutionary consciousness" (if such a term is even meaningful) therefore comes out of struggles and how they fall in relation to capital as such and at its specific moment.  If the coming to self-consciousness isn't strictly speaking theoretical or the activity of some group of people conscious before the fact, then why even "do theory"?  Against the idea that intellectual intervention is useless because the struggle (conceived in a completely objectivist fashion) teaches all of the lessons and a consciousness adequate to the struggle merely arises magically without dialogue, discussion, critique and self-critique, I do consider the development of a new self-consciousness, a self-awareness of the implications of what one is doing, essential to people being able to actually control their own lives and constitute a different world.  If consciousness is not necessary, then are we not still in fact dealing with the automatic subject, Capital?  Isn't the irrelevance of self-consciousness as much a fetish as that of the educator (party, intellectual, organizer, etc) as Messiah-awakener?

There is a dualism of consciousness that is shared by both those who accept the theoretician-party as bearer of a class consciousness that must be adopted, and therefore raiser of consciousness, and those for whom the theorist, as spontaneist, rejects the importance of consciousness to the overcoming of capital and the production of a new society.  Each fall prey to a fetishization of externality.  The former where the theory-party is magically external to the society as a whole, and thus the bearers of Truth that will awaken the Messiah; the latter as the bearers of the Truth that the proletarian overthrow is itself also machine-like, external to and independent of consciousness, a certain kind of theoretical nihilism that is not nihilistic about its own activity.

I'm thinking there is another way to think about this, one that allows for theory to be meaningful and contributory, but which does not rely on theory as bearer of revolutionary consciousness and consciousness raising as the key to revolutionary success or consciousness, and struggles over ideas, as irrelevant to revolution.  The former wants to lead the masses, the latter reduces theory to an activity "theorists" pursue because that is what they do, which is to say, consciousness is meaningless and theory only exists to to convince other theorists of its meaninglessness, hence a kind of nihilism.  Obviously, I am posing extremes, suggesting that the truth of the matter is not in the murky middle, but in the excessive statement of the extremes.

On this one, I would definitely start from these points:

1. The obligation of the intellectual is not to offer answers, but to pose problems and bring forth dilemmas and shortcomings, to attempt to provide a ground on which we might clarify the inner contradictions of everything, from our ideas to our actions to our social being.

2.  The intellectual has to say what only they can say, understanding that their work will not necessarily find an audience initially.  Ideas do not create the ground of a radical practice, however radical practices will look for ideas in order to clarify and comprehend its own activities and limits.

3.  Marxian theory understood as critical theory is negative.  It is not a political programme nor does it lead to recipes of the future.  It has a vision of the future, but in a rather broad way that is always shifting as the world out which it draws its visions changes, and yet there is an element that is invariant.  The invariant element is a wager that if we think this is still capitalist society, then we still think that certain concepts apply because certain real abstractions remain determinate.

4.  The language can vary.  It should not be academic, but it is not obligated to be popular.  The intellectual must trust that if their ideas do catch people's attention, they will find ways to express them in popular turns of phrase.  Rarely is it the intellectual who can be popular because inevitably they write for the future.  They are not activists or politicians, they do not have to adjust to people's consciousness and they do not have to raise people's consciousness.

5.  The intellectual's work is not educative or consciousness raising; it is clarifying through troubling, probing, and de-naturalizing.  It is a dialogue and a provocation.  It is closer to the positon of the Freudian analyst, who first of all cannot tell you what your problem is, cannot tell you how to resolve it, is NOT the one who knows even as they appear to be "the one supposed to know".  The intellectual, like the analyst, tries to trouble the excuses we make, the bad things we settle for, and the attendant forms of evasion of ourselves through denial, projection, and so on.  And like the analyst, the theorist has to accept that they too are a neurotic, that they too need analysis and are an analysand, and are not at all external to this world.  The possibility of insight comes from the inner contradictions of this world, not from their intelligence or effort or mystical access to a Truth from theory as a Truth Generating machine.  The intellectual, especially the would-be revolutionary, often falls into the trap of self-consciousness Hegel illuminates in the Phenomenology of Spirit as "The law of the heart, and the insanity of self-conceit".

6.  Does this require an organization?  In one sense, a political party is inimical to this kind of work.  It has a line to tow, a platform, and for most organizations, their theory is a justification of their practices and the self-analysis of the organization is always the prerogative of the leadership, so that it cannot happen.  Simultaneously, it is essential for people to share, to comment, to develop each other and this in no way requires a hierarchy or a programme.  In the end, there is no such thing as an autodidact and intellectual engagement and production is not restricted to the official institutions of this society, the universities and think tanks and professional societies.  It is undoubtedly something that would always be a hot mess.  Does not mean it isn't potentially valuable.  I think it would have to be about certain kinds of relations and ways of relating.

7.  The next greatest limitation the intellectual finds is finding a public, being able to have an audience that goes outside their milieu.  The less precise, the less threatening to this society, the more an accomodation to the current consciousness, the more likely one is to get published, assuming one is not an academic, and the rule applies there too.  The "popularizer" of radical ideas ends up also being an academic and they are popular in their broad, more middle class circles, which gives an illusion of "speaking to the masses".

8.  What the radical intellectual hopes for is that moment where they are surpassed by and lag behind the actions of masses of people in struggle, and that their ideas, having provided self-clarification, are surpassed by the realization of whatever the overcoming of this society may be.  After all, the problems of this society, this world, cannot be solved in ideas or because we suddenly became conscious or got educated.  We transform the world collectively, in practice, a practice which is neither mechanical nor ideal.  Following Hegel we might speak of Substance which is Subject, Subject which is Substance, but no longer a totalizing Subject or Substance.  Rather, subjects whose substance is themselves and each other, in which substance is neither a Master or Other to be mastered, but an extension of the self whose independence is also acknowledged.

9. Coming back to language, should there be one language?  If we take up the idea of the theorist as analyst, does the analyst talk to the analysand as they talk to other analysts?  Is there a scientific (Hegelian notion of scientific here, Wissenschaft) language?  Or does the analyst have to find a new way of speaking that is both psychoanalytic and self-engaged, self-reflective? Can there be a thoroughgoing conceptual discussion in the same language as the  public, "session" language?

This is not a trivial issue.  If we take the psychoanalytic idea seriously, it is not productive or necessary or even appropriate clinically in the therapeutic session to discuss psychoanalytic concepts.  What is important is to trouble, provoke, and call out all evasion, self-deception, resistance, projection, etc.  Can it also investigate its own conceptuality?  Do Marx and Hegel do this?  I am not convinced it is possible, and maybe this dilemma, this linguistic diremption, must be registered and we must remain uncomfortable with it, a kind of "register but refuse to normalize".  The diremption in language is just another a moment of the contradictions of this society and it also won't be overcome by the intellectuals.  But we can register and struggle with it and make it explicit and be open to being challenged as such.

Addendum

This occured to me quite some time after I originally wrote this up in draft: the activist/recruitment/programmatic organization (hereafter sect or racket) is to theoretical work as self-help gurus are to psychoanalysis.  The sect or racket uses theory (truncated, simplified, and codified, stripped of ambiguity and complexity and the need for development and pruning, and of course moderated by the original Leader-Followers who run the racket) to tell the people looking for answers that only their program aka their theory and their practice, are the right one, and the sect will supply you with a schemata.  Much of this involves something very much akin to a Tupperware or Cutco pyramid scheme, where each person is expected to not merely sell the goods, but more importantly to get two new people to now buy in and sell the goods, and they each get two people to buy in and sell the goods, and so on.

The self-help gurus have a product to sell you and they want to recruit you to sell their snake oil.  Most importantly, they need you to add more people to the pyramid scheme.  Unlike the psychoanalyst, they desperately need your familiaity with the product, with its marketing and brand, with its schemes, with its language.  They need you to also become self-help gurus.  They need you to work and evangelize.  They need you to be accept that you are permanently an addict so that you permanently need the sect.

Of course, such self-help gurus are in competition with other self-help gurus, even if they have the same parent approach.  There is no greater enemey of a self-help guru than the most closely competing one who looks the least different, and so it is among the sectarian rackets.

The Infinite and Finite in the Storming of the US Capitol

 The folks at Cured Quail were originally kind enough to publish this little analysis of the January 6th uprising.

I have subsequently re-worked it significantly and was lucky enough to have it published as a part of a very important work on antisemitism, edited by Marcel Stoetzler:

Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism

I owe an update, though I provided a small one.

Anti-Imperialism Is Unable To Grasp the Israel-Hamas Conflict

 This was my contribution to this eBook, Left Responds, after the Hamas attack on Israel.  Although not everyone agreed on all points, what we did agree on is that the standard Leftist response that demonizes Israel is fundamentally antisemitic.

I believe the analysis still stands, especially as in the treatment of Israel like any other state, it is impossible at this point to fail to recognize that the Likud government and the elements aligned with it are looking for nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank.

The attack in October on Israeli citizens by Hamas and Israel’s response to the attack have once again revealed that a large part of the Left fails to grasp the relation of the nation-state, nationalism and so-called “national liberation” to capital, and simultaneously that antisemitism remains alive as “the socialism of fools.” The failure takes two forms. We see outright support for Hamas as “objectively anti-imperialist” and as an “authentic” Palestinian political force. But we also see a denial to Jewish peoples of the same rights as any other oppressed people.

Hamas launched the attack on October 7, 2023 fully well knowing that this was not a winnable military campaign. Who thinks that Hamas plans to defeat Israel militarily? Not Hamas. Hamas may be a murderously antisemitic, anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-socialist, anti-democratic political organization, but they have not shown themselves to be that stupid. Instead, based on the timing, on the clearly provocative and cruel atrocities, and on the absence of any chance of military success, Hamas likely acted because it fears Israel’s significant efforts to normalize diplomatic and political relations with the Arab states. Hamas’s attack was a performance designed to bait the Likud regime into a response of collective punishment, which is a war crime in international law, ending for the foreseeable future any possible normalization, keeping Palestine as a wedge issue in the Middle East, and keeping Hamas at the political table. By this measure, Hamas won, at the expense of the majority of Palestinians.

Why did Netanyahu’s government take the bait and launch a counter-campaign that would obviously involve war crimes from the perspective of international law and diplomacy, destroy normalization with the Arab regimes, and heap opprobrium on Israel? It should be clear, as it is to many Israeli citizens, that Likud and its far right allied parties have a reactionary agenda designed to use liberal democracy to destroy liberal democracy, just as Netanyahu’s allies, Trump and Putin, do. Therefore, despite the diplomatic inconveniences, October 7 presented an opportunity to justify using the military to both reinforce a policy of apartheid and a policy of collective punishment of Gaza, killing an estimated 14,000+ Palestinians, while trying to silence the increasingly militant internal Israeli opposition to the regime.

If this did not involve Israel, the politics would be clear to leftists. Hamas stands against everything the Left stands for, pursues its agenda by violence against Israelis and Palestinians, worries first and foremost about its position of power at the table, and promotes international antisemitism. Netanyahu’s Likud sees this as an opportunity to pursue the most radical parts of its ultra-conservative agenda and has already killed many times more Palestinians, over half of them women and children, than on October 7. If this did not involve Israel, we would start by condemning Hamas as an enemy of the oppressed and exploited in Gaza and everywhere. Then we would condemn the Likud regime for using Hamas’s pogrom as an excuse for collective punishment of Gazans, calls for ethnic cleansing by its right-wing partners, and as another means to destroy Israeli liberal democracy. Both sides (Hamas and Likud, not Palestinians and Israelis) represent moments of the long rightward shift globally that marks the secular crisis of capital.

But it does involve Israel, so many “anti-imperialists” defend Hamas and argue that the Jews, despite being nearly extinguished as a people in Europe through the Holocaust, are the one oppressed group with no right to a nation-state. Not that “national liberation” solves problems constituted by capital, as the last 70 years have shown, but the issue is the antisemitic hypocrisy of the anti-imperialists, not the effectiveness of a nation-state solution. Leftists cheering Hamas support a fascistic, antisemitic organization that any and all of them would condemn in their own countries. 

However, justifying the Likud regime’s actions, as if antisemitism means that the Israeli state is magically outside the laws of capital, and does not behave just like any other capitalist nation-state, is to become apologists for Likud and the ethnic cleansing policies of their Knesset allies, policies that mirror those of their allies like Trump, Putin, et al, in the growing fascist international, who support Netanyahu with one hand and their own native antisemites with the other.

To defend the oppressed and exploited in Palestine and Israel, we must refuse defending Hamas or Likud or anyone who would tell us that murdering children, raping women, blowing up hospitals, murdering homosexuals, stealing people’s land and all the rest of the atrocities will lead to a more free and dignified humanity.

Political Murder is a Dead End

The assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare has brought a not-always-evident rage about the state of US healthcare, and corporate power as a whole, to the surface in a stunning way. The person who committed the murder clearly had an intent to their act etched into the bullet casings and as we may now be seeing through their manifesto. This was an intentional, politically motivated act, but what should we actually make of it?

On the surface, there is the fact that this was an act of murder. An individual, outraged at the US healthcare system targeted someone who symbolically represents not merely that system, but the worst, most egregious company at the very head of that system, a system that intentionally sanctions the suffering of millions and the death of thousands every year in the name of profit, stock prices, "shareholder value" and infinite accumulation of wealth.

The insurance system is indeed a mob protection scheme that tells people, "If you want protection [from sickness, disease, injury], you have to pay us in order to get access to the services that would help you." Insurance companies are, even in the context of capitalism, a scam fee structure that adds enormous expense to medical care without adding a single mote of value. So much so that in all other developed countries, some manner of single-payer or nationalized healthcare system exists that at least minimizes the ability of this protection-peddling racket to cause excessive direct harm. But not so in the United States.

Drawing on popular culture, consider the CEO series done by College Humor (now Dropout TV), specifically the "GoFundMe CEO: We Could Use A Few Fun Ones" skit which details in painful detail the horror show that is the US healthcare system. This skit on Youtube has 5.4 million views. It addresses how GoFund me became a major supplemental source for US citizens healthcare needs. I will draw on another, even more popular, example below, but suffice to say that such pop culture moments clearly strike a chord with our everyday experience. The breadth and depth of the anger isn't really all that surprising then.

- People who otherwise accept as justified the anger of those who support this act thus find themselves against what this person did. But there are a variety of different angles from which this rejection of the act comes.

- For some, nothing the elites do justifies such an act. One might simply respond by asking why such elites, such corporate leaders, should not be considered criminals subject to prosecution for mass murder? If your problem is that a person acted outside the law, what do you do when the law sanctions murder? No movement that has made the world better has not broken the law and even killing defenders and beneficiaries of that "order". This view relies on a moralism in which only the victims, in struggling to no longer be victims, must behave like angels, while the oppressors are allowed to behave however they wish.

- Some want to know why this young person, clearly from privilege, would do this, since they nominally are a beneficiary of the system and have no real skin in the game. This notion that the privileged have no skin in the game of antagonism to capitalism as individuals precisely eliminates the idea that a human being as an individual may be ethically appalled by and opposed to oppression without themselves being directly a victim of this or that particular oppression. In the name of a very moralistic view of the world in which authenticity can only extend from one's identity, it negates the possibility of any individual to become a truly ethical being. It is a weird kind of determinism that denies precisely that any individual may become an enemy of oppression, that is, be an ethically decent human being, and that only identity grants authenticity. No Marxian thinker, no one familiar with psychoanalysis, should accept this fundamentally Heideggarian love affair with identity and authenticity because it is precisely non-identity, a desire to no longer be true to something that can only be socially imposed. All desire to be free is a rejection of any identification with the existing order and its categories, the rejection of the unfreedom of all existing identity.

However, from what is now coming out, it is becoming clear that this young man and his mother were both victims of our monstrous healthcare system. Being relatively privileged according to some list of identity antinomies (white vs black, male vs female, worker vs capitalist, etc.) doesn't determine an individual as good or bad, oppressor or oppressed, and it does not make that individual incapable of rejecting precisely what is supposed to define them. To restate my earlier point, if no one rejected what defined them, positive radical change, much less revolution, would be utterly impossible. This kind of thinking further misses that capital could not care less what your identity is and that at any moment any individual may become a victim of some element of its indirect, impersonal, radically indifferent necessity of infinite accumulation. The logic of accumulation, not a cabal of horrible capitalists with top hats and twirling mustaches, runs the show.

Let's also consider that what this person did is not without precedent. The Russian Narodniks carried out assassinations of Russian aristocrats and even a Czar. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated on 28 June 1914 by Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip. On 27 February 1933, frantic days, the young Dutch communist Marinus Van der Lubbe set the Reichstag, the German Parliament building, on fire and burnt it down. All of them considered themselves some form of liberation fighters, acting against autocracy, oppression, and even a rising fascism in Van der Lubbe's case.

In the U.S. context, there are also precedents. Some of them are quite celebrated. John Brown engaged in the murder of pro-slavery families in Missouri and eventually organized an attempt to capture an armory in Harper's Ferry and engage in a para-military attack on the Southern slavocracy. The group Black October in Baltimore in the early 1970's killed multiple drug dealers and a Maryland House of Delegates member James “Turk” Scott, bringing the drug trade in Baltimore to a virtual halt. The Weather Underground carried out bombings against symbolic targets, government buildings and banks, in the 1970's, in the name of the propaganda of the act.

All of the above are not fundamentally different from this execution. They were acts of violence, often murderous, outside the law, done with an intent to punish and terrorize those in power or their representatives, those responsible for atrocious, continuous, and largely ignored violence against the exploited and oppressed. Most importantly, they accepted the idea of the propganda of the deed, the idea that if only the powerful were shown to be vulnerable, if only we show our commitment to the oppressed and exploited, the oppressed and exploited will be ignited. In fact, groups like this already lay the groundwork for or adopt the ideas of anti-imperialism and identity politics, that the problem isn't actually capitalism, the domination of the mass of humanity through generalized wage-labor, but imperialism, [white skin] privilege, and so on.

- Some are shocked that people are condoning assassination in the name of justice, something these days largely associated with right-wing terrorist organizations.

But isn't it in fact slightly disingenuous to be horrified when for a long time now, this kind of action is lauded as long as it remains fictionalized in popular culture? I'll just address one specifically relevant example, in the form of an excedingly popular cartoon film meant to bridge an appeal to children and adults.

I have in mind the cartoon movie The Incredibles, which premiered 30 years ago. Early on in the movie, the lead character, Mr. Incredible, is living in hiding after the "Golden Age" of super heroes has passed. He is working as an insurance company call center worker. He gets a call from an elderly woman who is being denied access to her claim and he tells her all of the ways necessary to get around the arcane bureaucracy designed to deny her care in order to get approved to get the help she clearly needs. He is immediately called into his manager's office and run down for actually helping this elderly woman, as his manager explains how the insurance company makes money by following the method of "deny, defend, depose". Mr. Incredible, horrified by being expected to do the opposite of everything he believes he is supposed to do, which comes down to "help, serve, protect", punches the manager through multiple walls, hospitalizing him [in reality it would have killed him], and loses his job because his violent response was against the law and against "only following orders", the Nazi justification on display at Nuremberg.

No one was shocked by what Mr. Incredible did. In fact, it establishes the ethical credibility of Mr. Incredible as a hero. It is the single most important moment of the film that establishes Mr. Incredible ethically as a decent human being with an unshakeable moral compass. There is no fundamental difference between supporting Mr. Incredible and supporting this execution, except that it is apparently acceptable to symbolically support it as long as no actual human being in real life pays the price. And in reality, a CEO is the master and commander of the little monster in the cartoon, the symbolic head of the health insurance company hydra, the Fuhrer who the little manager is "only obeying orders" from. Though in fact the even deeper truth of that moment is that the department supervisor character actually enjoys what they do, they truly believe.

- But let's return to those who not only support the anger motivating such an act, but the act itself. Was this not a direct action against horrible elites, corporate power or the capitalist class? Was this not both a justified act and, for some, a first spark that might light a fire?

The popularity of individual or small group acts of violence against systematic oppression is widespread. The moral horror at what this person did is, frankly, dubious. Why is what this person did unethical when what the C-Suite individuals sanction day in and day out is the systematic terrorizing and murder of a large mass of humanity?

However, there is a profoundly negative aspect of this as a supposedly political act. This kind of act betrays a profound sense of powerlessness underneath the anger. It does not offer a perspective of fundamental transformation. It misunderstands that the problems with the healthcare system, and every other negative, inhuman feature of capitalist society, is a problem of bad individuals (this or that politician or capitalist) or bad groups (the privileged, the capitalist class, the elites, etc.) It is an action that is mired in helplessness and desperation and which, as with other, earlier historical actions of this type, a profoundly individualistic and moralistic acting out.

Most importantly theoretically, the problem with capital is not individual bad actors and it isn't even the capitalist class. Capital is not an outcome of the capitalist class, their choices, their decisions. The Soviet Union and the entire post-WWII "socialist bloc" proved that capital doesn't require a capitalist class. The state can step in and guarantee that the separation of the laborer from the labor process, the continuation of wage-labor, that the access to the means of life is mediated by the wage-form, by money.

The elimination of the capitalist class, the statification of control, does not eliminate the separation of the producers from the means of production. It does not undermine capital at its core, but reflects a concrete situation in which the accumulation of capital on a national scale can only proceded effectively if a huge amouont of the capital is organized singularly under the state into one large pool, where individual capitals lack the ability to resist the global market. The end of capital only happens if we end the fundamental separations at the root of capital.

Critically, this kind of act does not lead to any kind of collective political formation that challenges, and could generate an alternative to, capital and its indirect form of domination. Instead of uniting the split between the political and the economic, instead of addressing the aporia of the ethical and the political, it bypasses both and presents direct violence as the mediation, the path of individual violence aligns with instead of undermining this society.

Like The Incredibles, it supports the idea of the need for superheroes, for exceptional individuals, as opposed to collective, democratic, social reorganization of society. Elevating what this person did leads us into the trap that salvation comes from exceptional individuals.

A central error is the idea that to abolish capitalist society, you have to abolish the capitalist class. This is aiming at the wrong target. The capitalist is a nothing, no more important to the game than chits on the green of a golf course. Only when we abolish the working class do we abolish capitalist society. Only when we abolish labor and pass from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom (free time), do we abolish capital. Once labor ceases to be the mediation between what I neede and what I can have, the capitalist class ceases to exist as well. As someone recently expressed it, what we need is not class homicide (“killing/expropriating the capitalists”) but class suicide (eliminating our subordination to labor as that which sustains the non-labour of the few.)

(MAGA = Communism) = Red-Brown Fascism

 I don't post often, obviously, but here I am.

The obvious moment is, from the U.S., FUCK TRUMP.

And on an abstract communist level, fuck Harris.

BUT...

FUCK every piece of pseudo-communist piece of shit who thinks that TRUMP = Communism (because Trumpism = collapse of capitalism)

You pieces of shit have no idea that communism does not merely = not capitalism.  You are apologists for fascism.  You are Red-Brown turds.

If Communism is "automatic", then communism is not autonomy, it is another form of heteronomy, of domination.

Either revolution is freedom, is human autonomy, or it is necessarily counter-revolution.

Oppose Trump because his success in the U.S. is a profound setback on a global level.  Even if "Trumpism" leads to the collapse of global capital, there is no sense in which it leads to human autonomy.  Quite the contrary, it leads humanity into a filthy abyss from which universal communist autonomy is even more difficult.

Theses on the Unions and Trade Unionism (originally written May 2001)

In light of the General Motors strike, and a host of other union-building struggles at Amazon, Starbucks, et al over the last period, it seemed worthwhile to put forward something I wrote 22 years ago, with some amended notes.  I know this blog is frequently dedicated to rejuvenating critical theory at a hopefully high level, but in the end it only matters if we contribute, in whatever manner, to both the abolition of capital and the achievement of communism.

On Trade Union Work (A Schematic Outline of Political Points) [Originally posted, I believe, on Libcom.org, May 2001)

1. Trade unions are a basic form of workers’ organization.  Unions negotiate the level of exploitation and the general conditions of that exploitation, such as wages, working conditions, safety, pensions and so on, for a section of the working class against the individual capitalists or corporations.  In so far as the workers will necessarily fight to improve their lot under capital’s rule, unions will perform a necessary, albeit limited, function.  It would be a completely mistaken notion to condemn workers for organizing in unions.  Many ultra-Lefts, old and new, take the attitude that the unions are completely reactionary and that the workers should abstain from organizing in unions.  This idea neglects the actual struggle of the workers. It would be ridiculous to tell the workers that they should not participate in unions because all they are doing is negotiating the rate and conditions of exploitation.  We should just as well tell them to fold their arms and accept whatever level of exploitation is handed to them until “the glorious day of the revolution”.  Rather, we must try to understand the possibilities and limitations of the unions and the union struggle.

2. The heterogeneous nature of the unions, their representation of sections of the class, and their role as mediators over the value of labor power keeps them from confronting the capitalist class as a whole, against said class’ right to rule.  What is the basis for what we have said?

3. The union apparatus may mobilize workers for fights against particular capitalists or corporations for goals attainable within the boundaries of capitalist society or in the interests of the union machinery.  However, there is no reason to believe that the union apparatus will always or even generally act in the workers’ interests even in individual cases.  Often, the union apparatus will approve the firing of “troublemakers” and even try to drive them out.  The idea that the union necessarily improves workers’ ability to defend themselves is radically false.  Nor do we have any reason to believe that a change in the leadership of a local will necessarily change that situation, though it can.  In reference to the union bureaucracy, we can liken them to cops: a cop may protect someone from being robbed, but if a community burns down the local crack houses, the cops will arrest the community people.  Working class people can be protected, but they are not allowed to protect themselves, to self-determine their lives.

4. The unions are fatally compromised in relation to capital, whether a fraction of capital or capital as a whole.  The acceptance of the possibility, nay, inevitability, of the collaboration of labor and capital forms the sine qua non of trade unionism.  In practice, the trade union bureaucracy has to make constant deals and bargains with capital and they come to see capital’s side of the struggle as valid and necessary.  Class collaboration is not a policy of union bureaucrats but the natural extension of trade unions as limited institutions.  We do not oppose the workers fighting for limited improvements in their situation; rather, we oppose limiting the workers’ struggle to the boundaries of collaboration established by the trade union framework.  The established trade unions tend to be not only counter-revolutionary, but also reactionary in daily struggles.  Trade unions act as lawyers in relation to negotiating the daily exploitation of labor, without being able to call into question the fact of exploitation itself.  They accept capital’s exploitation of labor as capital’s prerogative.

5. The unions are generally made up of the more privileged sections of the working class, who have the degree of concentration and power to organize.  The unions tend to be based on skilled labor, larger scale industries and firms, or partial ability to regulate the industry to the benefit of a stratum of capitalists in a given industry.  It is rare for the unions to constitute more than 30-40% of the working class, except for periods of upsurge in the class struggle.  This is true in the U.S, France, Germany, and Japan, to be sure.  The trade unions help establish and maintain one of the central intra-class hierarchies of the working class and work in such a way as to sacrifice non-union workers’ (or workers in other unions) interests in the name of defending the sectoral privileges of their members.  This leads them to in fact betray their own members’ interests.

6. Many people claim that the trade unions are a school of struggle for the working class.  The unions may indeed find themselves opposed (usually despite their wishes) to the capitalists, as working class institutions, while being limited by the need to accept partial victories and represent even the most backwards sections of the working class.  However, the unions are not opposed to capital as such.  Every union in the history of the United States (and everywhere else, as far as I have seen), from the NMU, to the Knights of Labor, to the FOTLU, to the AFL, to the CIO, has eventually struggled to limit workers to demands that could be met under capital’s aegis.  Only the IWW has been a different kind of organization, but only in so far as the IWW was not a union.  The IWW refused to make contracts, did not establish systems of stewards, and saw itself largely as an organizing center, rather than as a union.  In fact, one could view the IWW as a partial recreation of the International Workingmen’s Association, in terms of its structure and composition.

7. The inability to oppose capital and the capital-labor relation partially rests on the recognition of the unions by either particular capitalists or corporations or even industries as legitimate partners in the control of labor and the production of a consistent, manageable pool of labor power.  This is obvious in the case of the craft unions, but also in hiring halls and industrial unions in different periods and different ways.  It also partially rests on the increasing integration of the state and the trade unions.  The official recognition of the trade unions also means deeper collusion between capital and the unions.  Their legalism increases and things like the dues check-off system gives the bureaucrats a vested interest in staying within the law.  The integration with the state further increases the distance between the membership and the officialdom.  Finally, the unions would cease to exist without the capital-labor relation, so the union machinery and officials have a vested interest in the continuation of the capital-labor relation.

8. Some people claim that the unions can be schools for the democratic self-organization of the class and its struggles.  A careful differentiation needs to be made here between what is sometimes possible, generally only at the local level, and what has historically been true, especially, but not only, at the regional, national and international levels.  Leninists and Social Democrats have often confused temporary tolerance by the leading union bureaucrats (such as with Lewis in the CIO) with actual democratic control of the union by the workers.  At those levels, the unions have always been bureaucratic and most successful workers’ struggles find themselves in direct conflict with the unions, except when certain union officials support massive upsurges in working class activity in order to rein them in and re-institutionalize that struggle.  This history is obvious in reference to the AFL, the Knights of Labor in their last years, as well as the independent craft unions.  However, from the very beginning, even the CIO represented a section of the trade union bureaucrats from the AFL recognizing the need to rein in the mass insurgency of 1934.  At every step, as the workers became less militant or more connected to the leadership of Lewis, Hillman, Reuther, the CPUSA, etc., that same leadership came to dominate and de-rail the workers’ struggles.  The idea that the unions can provide a place for workers to begin to judge the policies of different tendencies within the class, to test their power against the capitalist class, and to democratically control themselves and their would-be leaders is absurd.  Unless one means that the workers can learn about the limitations of class collaboration by watching themselves be repeatedly sold down the river.  Rather, workers need to take control of each struggle from the unions.  Democratic control can only be asserted over struggles from outside the union machinery.

9. The response to this argument is as follows: “It is incorrect to argue that because the trade unions are limited organizations that they must always submit to the rules and laws of capitalism.  This confuses the limits of a reformist, class collaboration leadership with the limits of trade unions.  This attitude also serves as a left cover for such a policy.”  On the contrary, the idea that unions can be anything other than class collaborationist serves as an apology for trade union reformism.  Certainly, local leaderships can take a different approach, and sometimes have, but they generally face the hostility of the regional, national and international leaderships.  The power of a revolutionary local leadership has to come from the base and from workers’ struggles, not from Realpolitik within the union by this or that “party” seeking to form a “revolutionary opposition” within the apparatus.

What is the attitude of revolutionaries towards trade union activity?

1. The most basic answer is to say that revolutionaries will find themselves in the unions and in the trade union struggle.  This is not simply a struggle for daily demands against the ruling class, but a struggle for the autonomy of workers in struggle, in relation to capital and to the unions.  It is not a principled struggle to spread the influence of the unions over an ever-increasing section of the working class.  It is a struggle to foster self-reliance and the creation of independent workers’ organs to control each and every struggle and to challenge the capital-labor relation.  To abstain from unions would clear the path for the trade union bureaucrats, but neither should we seek positions in the union, except under conditions of mass rank and file action.  We can only become “better” bureaucrats by seeking positions in the unions [EDIT 11/2023: under any other conditions], a tendency with a long history.

2. The essential form that revolutionary trade union work takes is the formation of a revolutionary opposition, which does not seek leadership, but which promotes the idea that workers win struggles only through self-organization and self-determination.  The revolutionary opposition expresses the conscious idea of working class self-determination within and against the trade unions.  This opposition may not always be public (for a variety of reasons: security, repression, expulsions, etc.), but it must cohere around a complete rejection of all external limitations on struggles and for the creation of independent organs of control and information in each struggle.  At the same time, we can participate in the struggle for union democracy, union independence from state control, etc. in order to clear a greater space for struggle for those workers in the unions.  The revolutionary opposition fights against the union officialdom and ideological adherence to unionism as one of the greatest impediments within the working class to the workers’ interests and as the agents of capital in the working class.

3. The labor bureaucracy is the agent of the capitalist class within the working class.  The labor bureaucracy supports capital’s domination of labor.  This labor bureaucracy has always been, at its core, defined by a policy of class collaboration because the unions are class collaborationist.  Unlike Leninists, we see unions as inherently class collaborationist, regardless of leadership.  This has not changed.  The struggle against the labor bureaucracy is essential to the struggle against the capitalist class.  The labor bureaucracy will always choose its ties to capital over any ties it has to the workers.

4. What has been increasingly true since the 1920’s, however, is the degree to which the trade unions have become tied to the state.  The trade union officials have always been ‘the labor lieutenants of capital’, but the unions themselves are increasingly also the guardians of state authority and bourgeois legalism, sanctified by state regulation of the trade unions (see the Taft-Hartley Act, the National Labor Relations Board, the McCarran Act, and so on).  This finds its purest expression in the fascist regimes and military dictatorships, but is true of the ‘democratic’ states also.

5. This does not mean that the labor bureaucracy is the same as the bourgeois parties.  There is no choice between the Democrats and Republican (or the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Parties, or the Conservatives and Labor or the Liberal Democratic Parts and the Socialist Party, etc.), but there is a difference, at times, between the left, center and right in the trade unions.  This is possible to say because the union bureaucracy leads mass working class organizations directly representing labor against a particular employer or industry.  The control exerted over the workers determines the labor bureaucrats’ usefulness to the capitalist class, but also requires that the unions partially attend to the need of the workers.  The key, here, is that the bureaucracy must maintain control, and this may require actions a la John L. Lewis supporting the formation of the CIO and supporting mass organizing drives. [EDIT Nov. 2023: This sections requires at least rethinking and is especially open to question.  In the present where there are the normal parties of bourgeois domination, and "electoral parties" become effectively fascist parties, while the "normal" bourgeois parties behave as they did in the 1920's and 30's, failing to properly oppose even on bourgeois grounds the fascist parties, it also feels simplistic to not understand the difference for the struggles of the oppressed to oppose open regression and to simply equate bourgeois democratic conditions with fascist conditions.  In the end, based on my theses, is voting for a liberal genuinely in some sense worse or more meaningless than siding with a nominally progressive union bureaucrat?]

6. Another distinction must be made between the upper and lower layers of the bureaucracy.  Conflicts arise because lower layers of the bureaucracy are more likely to break with (or at least temporarily violate) a class collaborationist policy.  This is the case for a variety of reasons: closeness to the living conditions of the rank and file; greater pressure from the rank and file due to a more direct dependence on the members in a local; less benefits from association with the union; conflicts over being in an employee-employer-like relationship with the upper layers of the bureaucracy, etc. 

7. What does this mean?  It means that a revolutionary opposition in the unions must exploit the divisions in the union apparatus between different officials.  It is possible to win individual officials from the apparatus to the workers’ side during individual fights.  It is also possible, in a mass upsurge, pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation, for a portion of the apparatus to break with the bureaucracy and join the revolutionary opposition.  

8. There are no recipes regarding strategy and tactics to be drawn from the above points.  There can be no concession to temporary allies in the apparatus (who we will probably have to fight tomorrow) on this.  We cannot be silent for one moment on the weaknesses and failings of our ‘allies’ because silence provides a left cover for the left-reformists and centrists.  There is ample proof of the deadliness of this policy in the British General Strike of 1926, the French General Strike of 1935, Spain in 1936-9, the CIO, and other crucial moments closer to home. 

9. A revolutionary opposition must always address the interests of the workers in the union in relation to the interests of the working class as a whole, internationally.  Many workers in the unions support the trade unions and get material benefits from the union.  Even in the face of mass struggle, many workers will have illusions in the role of the unions.  This includes a section of the revolutionary rank and file whose size and weight varies in any period.  Cooperation with particular officials is possible when we have the same goal, but must be conducted in such a way that we fight for workers’ independent organs of struggle to which everyone is subordinated. 

10. It is in the nature of what we have to propose as revolutionaries that we make the left-reformists and centrists (and trade unionists of all sorts) uncomfortable and even hostile.  We will have few allies among the union-oriented Left and trade unionists.

11. Revolutionaries also reject the notion that the unions are politically neutral.  They are not and never will be.  This is obvious in all the major imperialist powers, especially Britain, France and the United States.  The unions can never really have independence from the state and from capital, even when they have independence from all capitalist parties.      

12. Finally, I want to address one last argument which in my opinion sums up the Leninist attitude towards the unions.  It might be reasonably worded as follows:  “We also reject the notion that the unions are necessarily consigned by fate or by their non-revolutionary function to be lead by reformist or reactionary tendencies in the working class.  This is a complete falsehood.  It is possible for unions to be lead by a revolutionary party of the working class, in a way that is consistent with revolutionary politics.  The difference between revolutionary leadership and non-revolutionary leadership is this: that communist trade union leaders always fight for the full victory of the workers in every struggle, seek to push each struggle to its fullest development, and never stop a struggle from achieving the maximum victory.  Communists also do not accept agreements that constrain the right of the workers to fight (such as no strike clauses, cooling off periods, notice of strike, etc.)  The reformists hold back the struggle at every point where it comes up against their personal interests, their relations with the bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties, where it threatens bourgeois property or where it threatens to go beyond their control.  In other words, the reformists are always pulled back by the policies of class collaboration, which rest on the right of the capitalist class to exploit the working class, while the working class’ only right is to bargain for a better arrangement within the existing order.”  The problem of the first sentence is that leadership appears as the problem and the solution, rather than the class nature of the unions as mass working class reformist bodies which can be nothing but class collaborationist.  The question of who leads the unions does not change their character, but the nature of trade unions certainly changes the character of the revolutionaries who lead them.  The approach quoted above does not start from the self-activity of the working class as the central component of struggle.  It fails to take into account that any structure which the struggles of the working class give rise inevitably become integrated into capital in some form or another if they survive beyond the movement which gave rise to them.  Nor does it take into account the current conjuncture and the fate of unions in a post-Keynesian world of (choose your term of choice: neo-liberalism, globalization, new enclosures, etc.)  Those unions and relations codified the partial victory of the working class in the United States in the 1930’s, working class militancy during WWII and the new period of global expansion of capital after WWII.  They in turn became the means of managing and controlling working class struggle.  

Written May 2001

Addendum November 2023:

Need to add more clarity that in the name of the defense of a particular industry, unions can be quite reactionary.  e.g. Prison guard unions, unions in the military industry, and in general against global warming.

More than ever, Marx's comment on the relationship of communists to the struggles of the proletariat as a class in The Communist Manifesto are more a propos than ever, and yet more challenging than ever.

“The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”

"The Right and the Righteous": Required Reading in a Time of (Toxic) Righteousness

Shannon Hoff's essay "The Right and the Righteous: Hegel on Confession, Forgiveness, and the Necessary Imperfection of Political Action", published in Phenomenology and Forgiveness, ed. Marguerite La Caze, is a necessary read, as profound in what kind of human beings, what kind of ethical and political being to enact in the world, as J. M. Bernstein's Dignity and Torture.

In the essay, Hoff works through the contemporary practical, moral and political importance of Hegel's final chapter of the section Spirit, "Conscience. The beautiful soul, evil and its forgiveness".  She takes up the notions of moral action, judgment, forgiveness and their implications for moral and political action, without which political and moral ideas are mere abstractions, but which are always, inevitably, one-sided, invested, imperfect.

In a contemporary moment in which righteousness predominates, Hoff encourages us to see both the necessity and imperfection of action and the necessity and imperfection of criticism.  In this context, we require both action and criticism, but action and criticism which are themselves open to being criticized in turn, that is, to communication and forgiveness.

I will not work through the entire essay, as it is not only important to work through Hoff's arguments for oneself, but I cannot in a brief note do justice to her engaging and elegant exposition of the ideas developed herein.  It is enough to quote a paragraph that epitomizes the intellectual and ethical depth of the essay:

"The criticism that supplements and completes action, then, is not a matter of condemnation that distances the critic from the actor, but a matter of establishing solidarity through communication—it is precisely forgiveness.  As we saw earlier, our actions, as necessarily one-sided and specific, do not unambiguously manifest the principle to which they aim to answer, and so they do not “speak for themselves” but require instead communication as a supplement. And communication, insofar as it is oriented toward revealing the principle that motivates action, can precisely lead to unexpected forms of identification. The “act” of an action can never, on its own, reveal the motivation of the agent, of which it is an expression. It is through struggling to understand the action on the agent’s own terms—struggling to appreciate the action and recognize the agent—that we get into a position in which meaningful criticism—criticism that would actually be meaningful to the agent and to what the agent was doing—becomes possible. Such an understanding, however, in as much as it is precisely a matter of “sympathizing” with the agent, simultaneously fosters an identification with the agent: it involves a recognition, in other words, that the agent’s actions make sense to us. Forgiveness is precisely this intertwining of criticism and identification." (p. 15)