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Everything you wanted to know
about sects
but were afraid to ask
By Jimmie Higgins
..Let me warn any of you with dirty minds that this discussion is
about organizations--not orgasms. I have borrowed freely from the
following: Murray Bookchin's classic essay, "Listen Marxist!",
Paul Cardan's writing for Solidarity (London), Greg Calvert
and Carol Neiman, "A Disrupted History: The New Left And The
New Capitalism", Michael Schneider, "Vanguard, Vanguard,
Who's Got The Vanguard?" Liberation May and August 1972,
and Michael Velli Manual
for Revolutionary Leaders (A superb satire compiled
and edited by Lorraine and Fred Perlman of Black and Red 1972).
I wish to thank Andrea Walsh, Simon Rosenblum, Ray Larken, and Barbara
MacAdam for their suggestions and criticism. All responsibility
for errors, misconceptions, etc. in this article belong to them.
..All the old crap of the thirties is back again — the shit
about the "class line", the "role of the working
class", the "trained cadres", the "vanguard
party", and the 'proletarian dictatorship". We are witnessing
a Lenin revival. What makes matters worse is that some of our friends
are participating in this new Lenin renaissance — they claim
to be making an uneasy peace with Lenin but history reminds us that
the workers at Kronstadt also made an "uneasy peace" with
Lenin. Most of us have experienced the difficulty of carrying on
productive discussion in public meetings without being afflicted
by a plague of Trotskyists, Maoists, etc., all happily "intervening",
all of them convinced that all questions are closed, that they have
all the answers, and that their task is to share their wisdom with
the less fortunate. Of course, all the sects are not equally bad
and for some strange reason, the best and the worst are usually
versions of Trotskyism.
Before getting on with this article, I would like to share my favorite
sect story. I arrived in New York City to do graduate work and,
as I approached the main entrance to the university, I heard a fellow
yell, "Eighty per cent unemployment in Seattle. Form a Labor
Party. Read the Bulletin." The Bulletin, I soon found
out, was the organ of the Workers' League and the soothsayer was
named Harvey. A large aircraft company had recently shut down a
plant in Seattle and the unemployment rate had reached approximately
fifteen per cent — how Harvey blew it up to eighty per cent,
I never found out. Needless to say, I was somewhat taken back and
amused by Harvey's sloganeering and decided to have a little fun
with him. I approached and denounced him as a revisionist. The unemployment
rate in Seattle was ninety-two not eighty per cent, I claimed, and
he should know better than to spread capitalist lies! An hour later,
I had registered and as I left the building, I heard Harvery screaming
"Ninety-two per cent unemployment in Seattle. For a Labor Party.
Read the Bulletin." Then there was the incident in the Guardian
where one group denounced another for opportunism. It seems the
accused had quoted Stalin simply in order to take advantage of his
popularity with the Anmerican working class!! Someday, a collection
of sect funnies will be published. Let me suggest a title: "Communist
Infantilism, A Left-Wing Disorder". The cover would have a
picture of Lenin naked in order to show that the emporer has no
clothes but possesses sharp teeth.
....The greatest tragedy of the present impasse is that the reversion
to Leninist forms and Maoist rhetoric has stifled much of the life-affirming
content of the New Left and has warped its sense of personal and
public values. The return to dogmatic rigidity and life-denying
values which colours the present (hopefully transitory) period is
indeed unfortunate when one realizes that ever greater numbers of
Americans are searching for a meaningful political alternative to
both the sterility of their private personal existence and the impotent
quadrennial spectacle of the humpty-dumpty politics of the ballot
box.
However tinged with utopianism (strategic romanticism and tactical
adventurism), the twin conceptions of "participatory democracy"
and "parallel institutions" formed the key notions of
the New Left before the late 1960's. The New Left had accurately
intuited that an organization is likely to make a revolution in
its own image. If we cannot transcend the vales of repressive civilization
in our living and thinking, in our loving and acting, if we cannot
develop a revolutionary life-style or mode of behavior which transcends
the social norms of bourgeois society, then we cannot make a revolution.
A good society can only be measured by the quality of individual
lives and the quality of human relationships, and the revolutionary
process must establish these values as primary. Leninism is incompatable
with the life-affirming and libertarian values which a socialist
movement must represent, and with a movement in which individuals
develop the self-consciousness and self-reliance which makes them
act as part of a determined and clear headed force which develops
socialism out of the womb of capitalism.
During the 1960's, the bankruptcy of Leninist practice clearly revealed
inself in the inability of the Leninists to deal creatively with
the life-affirming, libertarian, and creative elements of the youth
cultural revolt. Either the search for new life forms and new modes
of self-expression were treated as "petit-bourgeois self-indulgence"
or was channelled into "hatred of the ruling class". Nothing
separated sectarian left organizations, in the eyes of young people,
from the moth-eaten and rotten instituions they met on coming into
the social world. And now a word from Leon Trotsky: "There
are people who only succeed in remaining revolutionists by keeping
their eyes shut. ("Introduction to "the First Five Years
of The Communist International"). After years of positive development,
the 1960's ended in what Marx called "all the old shit."
Indeed, as he remarked, "the first time is tragedy, the second
time farce."
The recent growth of the "new communist parties'' brings with
it the new party discipline which bears no trace of subjective liberation;
it brings us, not a "new man" but a new left-authoritarian
personality. Efforts to oppose the Bolshevik type of party with
a different conception of political structure are branded as "anarchism,
spontaneism, or ultra-leftism."
The social relations behind class consciousness are social relations
between leaders and followers, social relations of subordination
and control. They are dependence relations. What is meant by class
conscious masses is people who submit to the will of a revolutionary
leader, people who cannot dispense with subordination, control,
and managers. Class consciousness is a euphemism for the mass psychology
of dependence.
- Michael Velli
The Leninist "industrial cadre" never gets around to learning
about any of the particular needs, desires and problems of their
fellow workers. As a result of their perspective, their objective
stance in relation to the working class is one of moralism —
an attitude of "nagging the workers." The debate continues:
to bore from within the unions or to bore from the outside. Meanwhile
the effect on working people is the same — boring! Their slogans
such as "smash the state apparatus" and "distroy
the machinery of capitalist domination" may be politically
correct in a formal way. But since, in those slogans, the act of
"destruction" determines the form of the political agitation
and propaganda, their immediate effect, from the subjective and
mass-psychological point of view, is only to arouse anxiety and
defensiveness within the working class. One wonder how anyone could
believe them when they say socialism develops not only the material
productive forces but also the creative imagination of the masses
when they themselves articulate their political beliefs as if they
were reciting a liturgy. For instance, the dazzling esthetic appeal
of the dictatorship of the proletariat! Marx (who was hardly a "cultural
Marxist") was able to capture this development in the Eighteenth
Brumaire of Lois Bonaparte:
The tradition of all the dead generation weighs like a nightmare
on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing
themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet
existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they
anxiously conjure up the spirits of a past to their service and
borrow from their names, battle cries and costumes in order to present
the new scene of world. hiatory in this time-honoured disguise and
this borrowed language.
..Why does Marxism-Leninism "thrive"? Part of the reason
lies in the fact that modern society is geared towards crushing
any attempt at self activity and at autonomous thinking. We are
always encouraged to rely on others to choose and decided for us,
and to provide the answers to all our problems. Many people, especially
among the youth, are deeply disillusioned with the values of this
society. Yet a number of them join Leninist organizations or become
Jesus freaks or followers of some guru. This is not so surprising,
considering the fact that in all of these outfits all the answers
are provided. The disciples are relieved of the need to decide or
choose for themselves. The Party line — or the word of the
Master — does it for them. They are no longer burdened by the
resposibilities of decisions to be made. A deep feeling of insecurity
attracts people like a magnet towards any closed system of ideas
which will relieve them from anxiety in the face of the unknown.
..Other Leninist recruits have such a bad conscience about their
bourgeois or petty-bourgeois origins that they make a fetish of
self-denial and cultivate a martyred look as though they were bearing
the cross for the entire working class. Revolutionary politics must
not become the last refuge of neurotic rigidity and of the need
for security. For as Wilhelm Reich pointed out many years ago: "In
our thinking we must learn to go through changes. This is to be
distinguished from lacking convictions. Our adherence to organization
and transmitted ideas can get in the way of seeing the living reality
and we must learn to recognize that.'' Socialists should begin to
understand their role as an active, self-conscious, intentional
minority, as radical catalysts rather than as a vanguard leadership.
Mistakes will be made but as Rosa Luxemburg declared: "Historically,
the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely
more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.
"
. The Leninist sects are essentially part of the problem, not part
of the solution. Fortunately, as Todd Gitlin has been quoted as
saying American society continues to make radicals more rapidly
than the radical movement turns them off. No matter what the number
of left sect, we would rather fight for what we want (even if we
don't get it in our lifetime) than fight for what we don't want
... and get it.
Published in Volume 2, Number 2 of The
Red Menace, Spring 1978.
(CX5150)
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