By DANIEL BENSAID
It is not just the need to transform the world, but to find the answer to the question of how to transform it.
The question of and the word “strategy” now return. This may seem banal, but this was not the case in the 1980s and early 1990s: the talk was mainly about resistance and discussions on the strategic question had practically disappeared. It was about resisting, without necessarily knowing how to get out of that defensive situation. If today a discussion about strategic problems resumes – let's say what this is about – it is because the situation itself has evolved.
To put it simply, starting from the social forums the slogan “another world is possible” has become a mass slogan or at least a widespread one. The questions that arise today are: “what other world is possible?” or “What other world do we want?” and above all “how to reach this other possible and necessary world?”. The question of strategy is exactly this: not just the need to transform the world, but to find the answer to the question of how to transform it, how to succeed in transforming it.
Preliminary remarks
A first observation is that the vocabulary of strategy, tactics and even – in the tradition of Italian comrades who are familiar with Antonio Gramsci – the notions of war of position [war of attrition – literally, war of attrition], war of movement, etc., this entire lexicon, which became that of the workers' movement at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, was borrowed from the language of the military and especially from military history manuals. Having said that, we must not deceive ourselves: from the point of view of revolutionaries, talking about strategy is not just talking about violent confrontations or military confrontations with the State apparatus, etc., but it is a series of watchwords and forms of organization politics, it is a question of politics to transform the world.
Second observation: the strategic issue has two complementary dimensions in the history of the workers' movement. First is the question of how to seize power in a country. The idea that the revolution begins with the conquest of power in a country, or in several, but in any case at the level of nations, in which class relations and power relations are organized, based on a history, of conquests social and legal relationships. This issue – the conquest of power in a country such as Bolivia, Venezuela and hopefully tomorrow in a European country – remains an issue on the agenda and a fundamental issue.
Contrary to what certain currents intended – such as those inspired by Toni Negri in Latin America or Italy, who think that the issue of gaining power in a country is an outdated and even eventually reactionary issue, because it keeps struggles within national frameworks – , we think that the question of the struggle for power still begins on the terrain of national power relations, but that it is increasingly closely combined with the second dimension of the strategic question: that of a strategy on an international, continental scale and in the days of world today. This was already the case at the beginning of the XNUMXth century – and this was the meaning of the idea of permanent revolution: to start solving the question of revolution in one or several countries, but the question of socialism put the extension of the revolution to a continent as a starting point. and to everyone.
This idea was fundamental for the revolutionaries of the generation of Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg and it is even more so for us. We can verify this: in Venezuela, one can nationalize oil, have a certain independence in relation to imperialism, but this possibility has limits if there is no extension of the revolutionary process to Bolivia, Ecuador and a project for Latin America, which is the Bolivarian revolution. So we have this double problem: taking power in some countries, but with the aim of using it as a springboard for an international extension of the social revolution.
Finally, a last introductory remark: the problem of revolutionary strategy is that of responding to a real challenge, which was not resolved in Marx. If one considers that workers in general, the working class, are mutilated physically, but also morally and intellectually by exploitative conditions – and Marx describes this in pages and pages of The capital, the brutalization of work, the absence of leisure, the impossibility of having time to live, read and cultivate... -, how a class that suffers such total oppression could be capable, at the same time, of conceiving and building a new society ?
There was in Marx an idea that the problem would resolve itself in an almost natural way, that the industrialization of the end of the XNUMXth century would create a working class that was increasingly concentrated, therefore increasingly organized and therefore increasingly conscious, and that this contradiction between the living conditions in which she is exploited and massacred and the need to build a new world would be governed by a kind of almost spontaneous dynamics of history. However, the entire experience of the last century shows us that capital permanently reproduces divisions among the exploited, that the ideology – dominant – also dominates the dominated and that this does not happen only because there is manipulation of opinion by the media – which play an increasingly important role, this is true – but because the conditions of domination, including ideological ones, of the exploited find their roots in the work relationship itself, in the fact of not being the owner of their work tool, of not being the owner of the objectives of production, of being – as Marx said – more an instrument of the machine than the master of the machine.
This is what makes many phenomena in the modern world appear to us, the human beings that we are, as strange and mysterious forces. They tell us: you shouldn't do this because the markets will get angry, as if the markets were all-powerful characters, as if money were itself an all-powerful character, etc. I cannot elaborate on this, but it is important to say that capitalist social relations create a world of illusions, a fantastic world, which thus subordinates the dominated and from which they must free themselves.
This is why spontaneous struggles against exploitation, against oppression and against discrimination are necessary. If you like, it's the fuel of the revolution. But spontaneous struggles are not enough to break the vicious circle of relations between capital and labor. It takes a piece of conscience, a piece of will, a conscious element: it is the part of political action and political decision that are carried by a party. A party is not alien to the society we are in. Even the most revolutionary organization suffers from the effects of division of labor and alienation (from sports alienation, for example, because that is the order of the day this summer), but at least a revolutionary organization can equip itself with the means to resist collectively and break the enchantment, the spell, of bourgeois ideology.
“Seize” power?
From this it is necessary to say simple things. We are asked: “but what does it mean to be revolutionary in the XNUMXst century? Are you in favor of violence?” To begin with, as Chairman Mao would say, revolution is not a gala dinner. The opponent is fierce and powerful. Therefore, the class struggle is a struggle, and in many ways a merciless struggle. And we didn't decide that. So there is legitimate revolutionary violence. We shouldn't practice a cult of it, but that's not what for us mainly characterizes the revolution. We would even like to be pacifists and love each other. But for that to happen, it would be necessary to create, first of all, the conditions. On the other hand, what defines a revolution for us is precisely the transformation of an increasingly unfair and violent world. And transforming the world passes precisely through the conquest of power.
But what does it mean to seize power? It does not mean appropriating a tool, occupying positions, taking possession of state apparatuses. Taking power is transforming power relations and property relations. It is to make power less and less a power of some over others and more and more a collective and shared action. And for that, it is necessary to transform property relations – private ownership of the means of production, of the means of exchange and, nowadays, increasingly ownership of knowledge. Because, through patents or intellectual property, there is privatization of knowledge that is a collective product of humanity (one even goes so far as to patent genes, tomorrow mathematical formulas or languages).
There is privatization of space (there is less and less public space – the Mexican comrades will tell you that we find private streets in Mexico – and this is also starting to happen in Europe), privatization of the means of information, etc. Therefore, for us, taking power is transforming power. And to transform power, it is necessary to radically transform property relations and reverse the current trend towards privatization of the world.
How to overcome this domination of capital, which reproduces itself almost naturally through the organization of work, the division of labor, the commodification of leisure (etc.)? How to get out of this vicious circle that ends up making the oppressed adhere to the system that oppresses them? During the last electoral campaign, I heard a worker say on television in France: “How is it that the bourgeois know how to vote according to their interests and the workers, perhaps the majority of them, vote for interests that are contrary to them?” It is precisely because they are under the domination of the dominant ideology.
So how to get out of it? The reformers' response was in small bites: a little more union organization, a little more electoral votes, etc. So, obviously, all of this is important: the level of union organization and even electoral results are indexes of power relations. In developed capitalist countries that today have almost a century or more of a century of parliamentary life, we will not be more than a few hundred or thousands of militants in the assault on power if we do not build power relations in the trade union field, in the social field and also, even if it is very distorted, in the electoral field.
So indeed there is this change to be made. But the reformist illusion is that – to use a formula that has been used – the electoral majority will end up joining the social majority and that, as a result, the transformation of society can be the result of a simple electoral process. All the experiences of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries show the opposite. There are revolutionary possibilities only under certain relatively exceptional conditions. There are conditions of revolutionary crisis and revolutionary situation in which a true metamorphosis takes place, not simply a small progress, but a sudden transformation in the consciousness of hundreds of thousands and millions of people.
The last examples in Europe were May 68 in France, the “May rampant” Italian, 1974-1975 in Portugal… We can argue whether the situation was truly revolutionary or to what extent. These are, in any case, experiences in which we have seen people, as they say, learn more in a few days than in years and years of speeches, training schools, etc. There is an acceleration of awareness.
Rhythms, self-organization, majority conquest and internationalism
First of all, therefore, any conception of revolutionary strategy must start from the idea that there are rhythms in the class struggle, there are accelerations, there are ebbs, but above all there are periods of crisis in which the relations of force can be radically transformed and really place in the order of the day the possibility of transforming the world or at least of transforming society.
Second fundamental idea (these are very general ideas): in all the revolutionary experiences, victorious or defeated, that we can revisit in the 1920th or 1921th centuries, from the Paris Commune to the Carnation Revolution or the experience of Popular Unity in Chile, in In all situations of more or less revolutionary crisis, forms of dual power arise, that is, bodies of power external to existing institutions. These were the factory councils in Italy in 1923-1971, the soviets in Russia, the workers' councils in Germany in 1973, the industrial cordons and communal commands (that is, neighborhood associations) in Chile in 1975-XNUMX, the from factory occupation residents to the Setúbal assembly in Portugal in XNUMX.
Therefore, every intense situation of class struggle gives rise to what we call self-organization bodies, of democratic organization proper to the population and workers, which oppose their legitimacy to existing institutions. This does not mean absolute opposition. Throughout 1917, the Bolsheviks combined the demand for a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage with the development of the soviets. There is a transfer of legitimacy from one body to another that is by no means automatic. It is necessary to demonstrate in practice that the organs of popular power are more effective in a crisis, they are more democratic and more legitimate than bourgeois institutions. But there is no real revolutionary situation without the appearance of at least elements of what we call dual power or dual power.
Finally, the third element is the idea of conquering the majority as a condition for revolution. What distinguishes a revolution from a putsch or a coup d'état is to be a majority movement of the population. It is necessary to take literally the idea that the emancipation of the workers is the work of the workers themselves, and that, however determined and courageous the revolutionary militants may be, they do not carry out the revolution in the place of the majority of the population.
This was the whole debate of the first congresses of the Communist International, particularly of the third and fourth, after the disaster of what was called the "March action" of 1921 in Germany, an action effectively putschist (coup leader), minority (on the scale of Germany at the time, that is, with hundreds of thousands of people). This opened a debate in the Communist International with regard to those who believed they could copy the Russian revolution in a simple way, saying to them: but be careful, it is necessary to win the majority, not in the electoral sense – it is not about being legalistic, saying that as long as we do not if you have a majority in parliament, you can't do anything – but that of majority legitimacy among the masses, which is a different idea.
Those of you who can read - and it is always useful to re-read - the History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky, you will see how attentive he is to this, even to the slightest movement in cities, in local elections (etc.), understood as an index of what matures as a possibility among the masses. The conquest of the majority became the problem in the Communist International from the third congress of 1921 and gave rise to the notions of a united front, of transitory demands and, later, with Gramsci in particular, of hegemony. That is, it is about conquering hegemony.
The revolution is not simply the confrontation between capital and labor in the company, but it is also the ability of the proletariat to demonstrate that another society is possible and that it is the main force to build it. This demonstration takes place in part before the seizure of power, otherwise it is a leap into the void, it is a pole vault without impulse or a coup or a blow. putsch. Therefore, the ideas of transitional and united front demands are useful tools for winning the majority.
Transitional claims may seem elementary. In France, we are very happy with Olivier Besancenot's campaign, but, frankly, a minimum wage [“smic” – minimum salary of croissant] of 1.500 euros and a better distribution of wealth are not very revolutionary slogans. A few years ago they would have even seemed very reformist. They seem radical today because reformists no longer even do that work. Slogans do not have a magical virtue, they are not valid in themselves, but in a given situation, as a starting point for an awareness. While it is said today that you cannot live decently in a country like France with less than 1.500 euros a month, we see an answer that we are not realistic: if wages rise, capital will flee. This poses a new problem: how to prevent capital from fleeing? It is therefore necessary to attack financial speculation, attack property... The right to housing poses the problem of land and real estate ownership...
So, these are watchwords that, at a given moment, crystallize the problems that can be understood and that can be a lever for the mobilization of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, from which a demonstration can be made. pedagogical, progressive, in action and not just in discourse, of what the logic of the capitalist system is and why even such elementary and legitimate claims clash head-on with the logic of the system.
This debate may seem elementary to you today. But, in the debates of the Communist International, those who wanted to copy the Russian revolution immediately proposed the slogan of arming the proletariat... Yes, of course, if we want to resist the enemy, we have to achieve that. But, before getting there, it is first necessary to have a whole awareness that starts from the most elementary demands: the sliding scale of wages, the division of working time, etc. These things, which are commonplace to us, were far from acquired. They were the subject of very violent and long-lasting debates in the Communist International.
Around these claims, which are experienced as necessary and vital by most people, we propose the broadest unity of all who are willing to seriously struggle for them. This is why transitional claims are linked to the united front problem. We know very well that the reformists will not go all the way. We know well that they will give in to blackmail and that if capital issues them an ultimatum, they will capitulate. But, on the other hand, the path taken so far will have a pedagogical demonstration value in the eyes of those who really want to fight to the end for vital needs, for cultural needs, for the rights to life, health, education, housing... And , from that, we can move forward.
Finally, the fourth element: because we do not think that the revolution can result in a more egalitarian society in a single country, surrounded by the world market, from the beginning we have been concerned with building international power relations. The fact of building an international movement – an International if possible, but also networks, the European anti-capitalist left, meetings of the revolutionary left in Latin America, etc. – is part of the program. Again, it's not a technical instrument. It is the practical translation of a political vision regarding the international dimension of the revolution.
Strategic assumptions not models
In the twelve minutes I should have left, I would like to address two last points.
First, we are asked if we have a model of society. We have no model of society. One cannot, at the same time, say that the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves and assume that we have in our luggage the plans with the dimensions of the future city, etc. On the other hand, what we have is the memory of a century of experiences of struggles, revolutions, victories and defeats that we can carry, transmit and not erase. What we have is not a model of society, but hypotheses for a revolutionary strategy.
For developed capitalist countries, where wage earners constitute the vast majority of the active population, we work with the idea of an insurrectionary general strike. For some, this may seem like a XNUMXth century idea, maybe XNUMXth century, but it does not mean that the revolution will necessarily take the form of a perfect general strike, a general strike with armed strike pickets and that it would be insurrectionary. But it means that our work is organized in this perspective, that through struggles and local strikes, regional and sectoral strikes, we try to familiarize workers with the idea of a general strike. This is very important, because in a crisis situation it is what can spontaneously allow for a mass reaction in this sense.
In Chile, at the time of Pinochet's coup d'état in September 1973, President Allende, who still had the radio, did not call for a general strike. If there had been methodical and systematic work in this direction, it would have been possible to have a spontaneous general strike with occupation of factories, which perhaps would not have prevented the coup d'état, but would have made it at least much more difficult. And a fight that is lost fighting always recovers faster than a fight that is lost without fighting. This is almost a general rule of all twentieth century experiences. Working with the idea of a general strike is not proclaiming it permanently, but making the idea mature, so that it becomes almost a reflection of the response of the salaried world in the face of employer aggression, a coup d'état or anti-democratic repression. .
The July 1936 uprising in Catalonia and Spain against the coup d'état would hardly have been imaginable without previous work, without the experience of Asturias in 1934, without the work of the POUM and the anarchists, etc. Working with a general strike perspective means proclaiming it foolishly and abstractly, but seeking to appropriate all the experiences that already create habits, familiarize and cultivate reflexes in the workers' movement. The insurrection is not necessarily the October insurrection, lyrically reviewed by Eisenstein's film – however splendid it is – but it can be very simple things: the self-defence of a picket line, work in the army, soldiers' committees. when there is a recruiting army based on compulsory military service in France or Portugal (etc.): it is everything that disorganizes the forces of repression of the bourgeoisie. These are, therefore, the guiding threads that allow us to establish a link between everyday struggles, even the most modest ones, and the goal we pursue.
Today, many comrades, in Italy, France and I believe a little elsewhere, insist on the need for organizations independent of social-liberal, social-democratic parties, etc. But why want independent organizations? Because we seek another goal, because we have an idea of where we want to go. We know that participating in a bourgeois government on the side of the Social Democrats – we could perhaps win a small reform – moves us away from the goal instead of bringing us closer to it. For that adds to the confusion and does not clear it up. Evidently, if we do not adopt the criterion of knowing which objective we want to move towards and of not having a definitive answer, but at least an idea about how to get there, then we are shaken by the slightest tactical situation, by the slightest electoral disappointment, for the smallest defeat.
To build in duration, you need to have a precise idea. Probably the revolution will surprise us. The revolutions to come will never be the simple repetition of past revolutions, simply because societies are no longer the same. I often repeat that we are a bit like the situation of the military: they learn in war schools from past battles, but the new battles are never the same. This is why it is said that the military is always behind in a war. And we always run the risk of being lagging behind a revolution. Even the most revolutionary are surprised. The Bolsheviks, despite their reputation, were divided when the time came for the October insurrection. No revolutionary organization is a steel, monolithic party… The final test will come when the occasion presents itself.
the party question
The last point I would like to address is the question of the party. This is not a technical issue: we have a strategy and we have built a tool for it. The party question is precisely part of the strategic question. Trying to imagine a strategy without a party is like a military man who would have letters from a staff and war plans in his luggage, but who would not have troops or an army. There is only really strategy if there is, at the same time, the force that carries it, embodies it and translates it into everyday life, into practice, etc. This is the whole difference between the idea of the party in the great social-democratic parties before 1914 and in Lenin. Today Lenin is not very popular. Even on the radical left he appears as authoritarian, etc… I believe that there is a great injustice in this, but this is not today's topic.
How did Lenin change and revolutionize the idea of a party? For the great social-democratic parties, the task was essentially pedagogical, an educator's task, based on the conception of a kind of spontaneous logic of the mass movement and the party providing ideas, with very interesting schools. To borrow the formula of a famous social-democratic leader from before 1914, the party must not prepare for a revolution. Lenin's idea is the complete opposite: the party must not be content with accompanying and clarifying the experience of the masses; he must take initiatives, provide objectives for struggles, propose slogans that correspond to a situation and, at a given moment, be able to guide action.
To summarize in a formula: the idea that prevailed in the Second International, in its great era, was that of a pedagogical or educational party. Starting with Lenin and in the Third International, the idea is that of a strategist party, a party that organizes struggles by proposing their objectives, and that can, moreover, organize and limit defeats, preparing withdrawal when necessary. There is a famous episode: a defeat, as it was a defeat suffered by the workers of Petrograd and Moscow in July 1917, could have been final if there had not been a party to organize the withdrawal and regain the initiative. Therefore, the party is not just any tool. It is inseparable from the program and the objective that we have set.
Anyway, and this is perhaps the last word I'll say about the party, we have one more thing to consider. It is not, for us, simply a party of struggle, of combat, of action. It is a democratic, pluralist party. Sometimes with us this is a defect, there are excesses, mania for tendencies, etc. Sometimes it is useful, sometimes it is less... But, on the other hand, despite the inconveniences, we value it a lot because pluralism in the organization means that we do not hold a definitive truth and that there is a permanent exchange between the party that we want to build and the experiences of the mass movement.
And as these experiences are diverse, this diversity can be translated at one time or another also in the form of currents in our own ranks. And there is another reason: if we are in favor of a pluralist society, if we consider that there is the possibility of a plurality of parties, and even of a plurality of parties claiming socialism, if this is one of the consequences drawn from the experience of Stalinism, so it is necessary that, in a certain way, we develop democracy in our own organizations, in our youth organizations, in our sections of the International, but also in the practice that we try to carry out in the unions and associations.
From now on, because this is effective for struggles, because unity does not work without democracy, because if we want to build broad fronts against Sarkozy or against anyone else, it is necessary that at the same time the different visions of the world can be recognized in it. Therefore, democracy is a condition and not an obstacle to unity. And it is also a democratic culture that will serve the future, because bureaucracy and bureaucratization are not just Stalinism.
Some imagine that the question is settled with Stalinism. No! What produces bureaucracy is not the party or, as some say today, the “party form”. It is the social division of labor, it is inequality. Trade union organizations and associative organizations are no less bureaucratic than parties. They are often even more so because material interests are involved. Non-governmental organizations [NGOs] in the third world, which live on grants from the Ford Foundation or the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, are also largely bureaucratized and sometimes corrupt. It is not the form of organization that creates bureaucracy. The roots of bureaucracy lie in the division of labor between intellectual and manual work, in inequality in free time, etc. Therefore, democracy both in society and in our organizations is the only weapon we have.
Today this is even more important (and I will end with this). People have a view that a party is a brigade, that it's military, it's discipline, it's authority, it's the loss of your individuality… I think exactly the opposite. Nowadays, you are not free alone, you are not a genius alone. We become like this in our individuality, but in an organization of collective struggle. And if we take recent political experiences, parties, with all their inconveniences, with their risks of bureaucratization – including our small parties – are, despite everything, the best way to resist much worse forms of bureaucratization and corruption for money. We are in a society where money is everywhere and corrupts everything. How to resist it? It's not for morals. It is a collective resistance to the power of money.
We are increasingly faced with the power of the media, and sometimes it is the same. But the media tend to dispossess social organizations and revolutionary organizations of their own words and their own spokespersons. There is a mechanism for co-opting political staff by the media. It is the television networks that decide: this one has a good head, this one receives the light well, that one is quite nice… They manufacture it. We want to preserve control of our word and our spokespersons. We don't believe in a supreme savior or miraculous individuals. We know that what we do is the result of collective experience and thinking. This is a lesson in responsibility and humility. The importance of the media in our societies takes people away from responsibility.
Many people defend a completely eccentric idea on television and a week later they change without ever explaining themselves, without ever being accountable for what they said. Our spokesmen Francisco Louçã in Portugal, Olivier Besancenot in France or Franco Turigliatto in Italy are responsible, as they say, before hundreds and thousands of militants. They are not individuals who speak according to their whims or emotions of the moment. They speak on behalf of a collectivity and have responsibilities towards the militants who mandated them. This is, for us, proof of democracy. And, contrary to what people say, political parties as we conceive them – not the large electoral apparatuses – constitute the best precisely democratic resistance to a world that is very undemocratic… and they are one of the links, one of the pieces, of what what we mean by revolutionary strategy.
*Daniel Bensaïd (1946-2010) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes – Saint-Denis) and leader of the IV International – Unified Secretariat. Author, among others books of Marx, Instruction Manual (Boitempo).
Record of the formation course given in July 2007 by Daniel Bensaïd at the IV International Youth Camp in Barbastas (France).
Translation: Pedro barbosa.
Original available at Daniel Bensaïd website.
The A Terra é Redonda website exists thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
Click here and find how