1. Socialism: Management of Society by the Workers

One fact, because of its direct and indirect consequences, has dominated human history in the twentieth century: The working class carried through a revolution in Russia in 1917. Far from leading to socialism, however, the revolution finally resulted in the coming to power of a new exploiting class: the bureaucracy. Why, and how, did this happen?[1]

In 1917 the Russian proletariat mobilized itself to destroy the power of the Czar and of the capitalists and to put an end to exploitation. It took up arms and organized itself in factory committees and soviets to conduct this struggle. But when, after a long civil war, the remnants of the old regime had been cleared away, economic and political power were once more found to be concentrated in the hands of a new group of leaders, centered around the Bolshevik party. The proletariat did not take over the management of the new society — which is another way of saying that the working class did not itself become the ruling class. From that moment on, it could only once again resume its position as an exploited class. The degeneration of the Russian revolution was nothing other than the return to a position of supremacy of a specific and restricted social stratum.

The various factors that led to this degeneration all have, when it comes down to it, the same underlying significance. The proletariat did not take on the direction of the revolution and of the society that emerged from it. From the very beginning, it was the Bolshevik party that strove to wield complete power over the country, and very quickly it succeeded in doing so. The Party constituted itself based on the idea that it provided a natural leadership for the proletariat and was the expression of its historical interests. But the ideas and attitudes of the Bolshevik party could never have prevailed had not the working class itself, in its great majority, shared them and had it not tended to see the party as a necessary organ of its power. And so the organs that ought to have expressed the political supremacy of the toiling masses, the soviets, were rapidly transformed into appendages of Bolshevik power.

And yet, even if this development had not occurred in the political sphere, nothing fundamental would have changed, for the revolution did not bring about any profound change in the real relations of production. With the private owners expropriated or exiled, the Bolshevik state entrusted the running of enterprises to managers nominated by itself, and it fought the few attempts made by workers to seize control of the management of production. But those who are masters of production are, in the last analysis, masters of policy and society. A new group of industrial and economic leaders rapidly developed, which, fusing with the leadership of the Party and of the State, constituted a new ruling class.[2]

The basic lesson of the experience of the Russian revolution is therefore that it is not enough for the proletariat to destroy the governmental and economic domination of the bourgeoisie. It can only achieve the objective of its revolution if it builds up its own power in every sphere. If the direction of production, of the economy, and of the “State” again becomes the function of a particular category of individuals, inevitably the exploitation and oppression of workers will return. With these, the permanent crisis that divides contemporary society will arise again, for it owes its origin to the conflict at the point of production between directors and executants.

Socialism is not and cannot be anything other than the management of production, the economy, and society by the workers. This idea has from the very beginning constituted the central thesis of Socialisme ou Barbarie. The Hungarian revolution has since provided a striking confirmation of it.[3]

The Autonomy of the Proletariat

The idea of workers’ management of production and society implies that power in post-revolutionary society will be solely and directly in the hands of the workers’ mass organs (the councils). There can be no question of special organs of any sort — for example, political parties — taking on the functions of governance and the exercise of power. But this idea is not a simple “constitutional” proposition. It necessitates a reconsideration of all the theoretical and practical problems facing the revolutionary movement.

It would indeed be nonsense to talk of workers’ management if workers were incapable of it and thereby incapable of generating new principles for the organization and orientation of social life. Revolution and, even more, the construction of a socialist society presuppose that the organized mass of workers have become capable of managing the whole of society’s activities without intermediaries — and therefore that they have become capable of directing themselves in all respects and in a permanent fashion. Socialist revolution can only be the outcome of autonomous activity on the part of the proletariat, “autonomous” signifying “self-directing” and “responsible only to itself.”

This question must not be confused with the question of the technical capacity of the proletariat to manage production.[4] The proletariat consists of all exploited wage earners and salaried employes. It is the collective producer. Technical knowledge has long ceased to be the monopoly of a few individuals. Today it is diffused among a mass of office and lab workers who are daily submitted to a greater and greater division of labor and who receive salaries only slightly higher than those of manual workers. Technician-bosses are just as superfluous as foremen in production. They are not great irreplaceable engineers but bureaucrats who direct and “organize” (i.e., disorganize) the work of the mass of salaried technicians. Together the exploited workers in factories and offices possess in themselves all the technical skills known to humanity today. For the proletariat in power, the question of the “technical” orientation of production will therefore not be a technical question at all, but rather a political question of the unity of workers on the shop floor and in offices, of cooperation between them, and of collective management of production. And, in the same way, the proletariat will be faced with political questions in every sphere including the problems of its own organization, of the proper balance between centralization and decentralization, of the general orientation of production and society, of relations with other social groups (the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie), of international relations, etc.

Socialism, therefore, presupposes a high degree of social and political consciousness among the proletariat. It cannot arise out of a mere revolt against exploitation but only from the capacity of the proletariat to extract from itself positive answers to the immense problems involved in the reconstruction of modern society. No one — no individual, group, or party — can be delegated this consciousness “on behalf of” the proletarian class or in its stead. It is not only that a substitution of this sort would inevitably lead to the formation of a new group of rulers and would rapidly return society to “all the old rubbish.” It is because it is impossible for a particular group to take on such tasks, since these tasks are on a scale that humanity and humanity alone is capable of dealing with. Within a system of exploitation, such problems can be solved by a minority of leaders (or rather they could in the past be solved that way). The crisis of modern regimes shows that the direction of society is a task that is henceforth beyond the capacity of any particular category. This is infinitely more true for the problems that the socialist reconstruction of society will pose and that cannot be solved or even be correctly posed without the deployment of the creative activity of the immense majority of individuals. For the real meaning of this reconstruction is, strictly speaking, that everything must be reexamined and refashioned: machines, factories, articles of consumption, houses, educational systems, political institutions, museums, ideas, and science itself — according to the needs of the workers and according to their view of things. Only they can be the judges of what these needs are and of the means of satisfying them. For even if on a particular point the experts have a “better” idea, such an idea will be worthless so long as those it should interest do not see the correctness or necessity of it. Any attempt to impose upon people solutions to the problems of their own lives, solutions they do not themselves approve of, automatically and immediately makes these solutions monstrously false ones.

The Development of the Proletariat toward Socialism

Is socialism, conceived in this way, a historically reasonable prospect? Is it a possibility that exists within modern society? Or is it just a dream? Is the proletariat just something to be exploited, a modern class of industrial slaves that periodically breaks out in fruitless revolts? Or do the conditions of its existence and struggle against capitalism lead it to develop a consciousness — i.e., an attitude, a mentality, ideas and ways of acting — whose content tends toward socialism?

The answers to these questions are to be found in the analysis of the real history of the proletariat, its life in production, its political movements, and its activity during periods of revolution. And this analysis in turn leads to the overthrow of traditional ideas about socialism, labor demands, and forms of organization.

First, the proletariat’s struggle against capitalism is neither solely one of “making demands” nor solely “political”; it begins at the point of production. It does not simply concern the redistribution of the social product or, at the other end of the scale, the general organization of society. From the outset, it opposes the fundamental reality of capitalism, the relations of production within the enterprise. The so-called rationalization of capitalist production is nothing but a web of contradictions. It consists in organizing work without the involvement of the workers, abolishing their human role — which is inherently absurd even from the point of view of productive efficiency. It aims untiringly at increasing their exploitation — which forces them to oppose it nonstop.

Far from being concerned only with wages, the workers’ struggle against this method of organization dominates every aspect and every moment of the life of the firm. First of all, the conflict between workers and management over wages cannot but have an immediate impact on every aspect of the organization of work.[5] In the next place, the workers, whatever their wage level, are led inevitably to oppose methods of production that lead to their daily, ever more intolerable dehumanization. This struggle does not and cannot remain purely negative, its aim is not simply to limit exploitation. Production must take place whatever happens, and the workers, at the same time as they are struggling against the norms and the coercive bureaucratic apparatus, maintain a work discipline and instaurate a system of cooperation opposed in spirit as well as in practice to the rules of organization of the factory. They thus take over certain aspects of the management of production at the same time as they establish in what they do new principles for the ordering of human relations in production; they oppose the capitalist morality of maximum individual gain and tend to replace it with a new morality of solidarity and equality.[6]

This struggle is not accidental, nor is it connected with a particular form of organization of capitalist production. Every time capitalism makes major changes in the techniques and methods of production in order to ward off this struggle, it rises up again. The workers’ tendencies toward self-management that this struggle brings out is universal both in range and depth. It exists in Russia as well as in the United States and in England as well as in France. Although the proletariat’s struggle inside production remains “hidden,” for it allows neither formal organization nor a formulated program nor overt action, its content can be found in the activity of the masses each time a revolutionary crisis shakes capitalist society. In every factory in the world workers fight nonstop against work norms; the abolition of norms was one of the most important demands of the Hungarian workers’ councils in 1956. Like the commune and the soviets, workers’ councils were constituted on the principle that the elected delegates were liable to recall. Shop stewards in English factories are always liable to recall by the workers who elected them, and they must give these workers regular accounts of their activities.

The socialist conception of society, born in the obscurity of the day-to-day lives of producers, bursts into broad daylight during the working-class revolutions that have marked the history of capitalism. Far from rising up simply against poverty and exploitation, in the course of these events the proletariat poses the problem of how to organize the whole of society in a new way and provides positive answers. The Commune of 1871, the soviets of 1905 and 1917, the factory committees in Russia in 1917–18, the factory councils in Germany in 1919–20, and the workers’ councils in Hungary in 1956 were organizations formed to combat the ruling class and its state and at the same time new forms of human organization based on principles radically opposed to those of bourgeois society. These creations of the proletariat were a practical refutation of the ideas that have dominated man’s political organization for centuries. They have shown the possibility of a centralized social organization that, instead of politically expropriating the population for the benefit of its “representatives,” on the contrary places these representatives under the permanent control of their electors and for the first time in modern history achieves democracy on the scale of society as a whole. In the same way, workers’ management of production, sought by the Russian factory committees in 1917, was achieved by the Spanish workers in 1936–37 and proclaimed by the Hungarian workers’ councils in 1956 as one of their basic objectives.

But the development of the proletariat toward socialism shows itself not only in factory life or during revolutions. From the beginning of its history, the proletariat has struggled against capitalism in an explicit way, that is to say, by forming political organizations. The tendency of the working class or of broad strata of workers to organize themselves in order to struggle in an overt and permanent fashion is a theme running through the whole of modern history. If this is not recognized, one is doomed to understand as little about the proletariat and socialism as if the commune or the councils were never known. For it shows that the proletariat has the need and at the same time the ability to argue the question of social organization as such not simply during a revolutionary explosion, but systematically and permanently; to go beyond the territory of its economic defense and to oppose bourgeois ideology with its own conception of society; to leave the confines of the workshop, the firm, and even the nation and argue the question of power on an international scale. It is in fact entirely false to say that the working class has created only economic and occupational associations (trade unions). In certain countries, such as Germany, the workers began by building a political movement, and the trade unions emanated from this. In the majority of other cases, as in the Latin countries and even in England, the trade unions themselves originally were by no means purely trade unions; their proclaimed aim was the abolition of the wages system. It is just as false to claim that the workers’ political organizations were the exclusive creation of intellectuals, as has been said, sometimes approvingly and sometimes disapprovingly. Even where intellectuals played a predominant role in their formation, these organizations could never have acquired any sort of reality if workers had not belonged to them in great numbers, sustained them with their experience, their activity, and often their blood, and if a large majority of the working class had not long seen their interests expressed in the programs of these organizations.

The Contradictory Character of the Proletariat’s Development

There is, therefore, an autonomous development of the proletariat toward socialism that originates in the workers’ struggle against the capitalist organization of production, finds expression in the formation of political organizations, and culminates in revolution. But this development is not the mechanical, automatic result of the objective conditions in which the proletariat lives, nor is it a biological evolution, an inevitable process of maturation that provides for its own development. It is a historical process and essentially a process of struggle. Workers are not born socialists, nor are they miraculously transformed into such merely by entering into a factory. They become, or more exactly they make themselves, socialists in the course of and out of their struggle against capitalism.

Nevertheless, we must see exactly what this struggle is, where it is fought, and what the true enemy is. The proletariat is not only fighting capitalism as a force outside itself. If it were just a question of the physical power of the exploiters, their State and their army, exploitative society would have been abolished long ago, for it possesses no power of its own beyond the work of those it exploits. It survives only insofar as it succeeds in making them accept their position. Its most formidable weapons are not those it uses intentionally, but those it is automatically provided with by the objective condition of the exploited class, by the way things are set up in present society, and by the way social relations are organized so as to perpetually recreate its own bases. The proletariat is not only systematically indoctrinated by the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy. More generally, it is severely deprived of culture. It is robbed of its own past, since it can know only what the ruling classes decide to let it see of its history and its past struggles. It is robbed of awareness of itself as a universal class as a result of the local, occupational, and national factors of isolation engendered by the present social structure — and of its present condition, since all the information media are under the control of the ruling classes.

In spite of its position as an exploited class, the proletariat struggles against these factors and makes up for them. It develops a systematic distrust of bourgeois indoctrination and undertakes a critique of its contents. It tends to absorb the culture from which it is cut off in a thousand ways at the same time as it creates the beginnings of a new culture. From a book-learned point of view, it is unaware of its own past, but it finds before it its essential results in the form of the conditions for its present action.

But by far the greatest obstacle in the way of the development of the proletariat is the perpetual rebirth of the spirit and reality of capitalism within the proletariat itself. The workers are not strangers to capitalism; they are born into a capitalist society, live in it, take part in it, and make it work. Capitalist ideas, norms, and attitudes tend constantly to invade their minds and as long as the present society lasts it will not be any different. The situation of the proletariat is absolutely contradictory, for at the same time that it gives birth to the elements of a new human organization and of a new culture it can never free itself entirely from the capitalist society in which it lives. The strongest hold of society is found mainly in the fields that are given the least thought; they are the time-honored habits, the “self-evident” axioms of bourgeois common sense that no one calls into question, inertia, and society’s systematically organized inhibition of people’s activity and creativity. During a revolution, capitalism may be defeated militarily and yet remain victorious if, in order to defeat it and under the pretext of “efficiency,” the revolutionary army or the production process is organized along capitalist lines (as was the case in Russia in 1918–21), for this “moral” victory for the old society soon will manage to transform itself into complete victory. The workers may score the enormous victory of building a revolutionary organization that expresses their aspirations — and immediately turn victory into defeat if they think that once the organization is built it remains only for them to have confidence in it for it to solve their problems.

The proletariat’s struggle against capitalism is, therefore, in its most important aspect, a struggle of the working class against itself, a struggle to free itself from what persists in it of the society it is combating. The history of the labor movement is the history of the development of the proletariat through this struggle, a development that has not been a continuous advance but an unequal and contradictory process of gaining and losing ground, containing entire periods of regression.[7]