Odyssey through revisionism

 

The first revisionists?

I admit that I never heard about the Communist Workers Group (Marxist-Leninist) before a frequent commentator on this blog pointed out their erstwhile existence. The CWG was a small Marxist-Leninist group in the United States, apparently led by a man named Tom Clark, which published a magazine named “Forward”. The group existed between 1975 and 1978. A similar group existed in Canada, the Organization of Communist Workers (Marxist-Leninist). I assume they dissolved at approximately the same time. A previously unpublished work by Clark, “The State and Counter-Revolution” (written during the 1980´s), can be accessed on the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA). Clark himself passed away in 2010.

While not Maoist in the strict sense, the CWG originally supported China and Albania, while regarding the post-Stalin Soviet Union as “revisionist”. Later, the CWG would condemn the Communist Parties of China and Albania as “revisionist”, too. At some point, the CWG realized that the roots of this revisionism goes all the way back to Stalin himself. After all, it was the Stalinists who launched the Popular Front strategy at the 1935 congress of the Communist International. Had the CWG stopped here, they would have developed in a direction similar to, say, the Marxist-Leninist Party (MLP), which tried to develop a kind of de-Stalinized version of Marxism-Leninism. Perhaps uniquely among anti-revisionist Communist groups, however, the CWG went further. 

Clark and his co-thinkers eventually reached the conclusion that Marx, Engels and Lenin had been “revisionists”! Except, of course, that no “revision” was involved at all, since Marxism had been petty-bourgeois and middle class from the start. Clark seems to have ended up as a kind of anarchist or Council Communist, although he never uses those terms. What makes the evolution of CWG intriguing is that they reached their conclusion by consistently applying the same logic which made them break with China and Albania. Discovering striking similarities between the ideas of Marx/Engels/Lenin and later Communists, they naturally drew the conclusion that the entire Marxist movement had been “revisionist” from its inception.

One clue to the mystery of the CWG could be that they strongly emphasized the class basis of revisionism, while also making a direct connection between the old revisionism (Bernstein and reformist Social Democracy) and the new (which was ostensibly Communist). The social basis for both seems to have been privileged middle class sectors. But Marx, Engels and Lenin also believed that “the socialist intelligentsia” could play a positive role in the revolutionary struggle, indeed Lenin gave them a central role by claiming that revolutionary socialist consciousness could only come to the working class *from without*, from middle class intellectuals. Since Lenin believed in a vanguard party, what does this tell us about the class basis of said party and its leadership? Indeed, what does it tell us about the class character of the Soviet state, including the early Soviet state? 

In contrast to other Marxist-Leninists, the CWG also stressed that the revolutionary workers´ state must consist of directly elected soviets, an armed workers´ militia, and so on. This clearly wasn´t the case with the “revisionist” regimes, but nor was it the case with early Soviet Russia. If Marx, Engels and Lenin (or pre-1935 Stalin, for that matter) are analyzed bearing these principles in mind, they all fall short. Marx, Engels and Lenin often took positions that could be seen as “popular frontism”, “democratism”, peaceful road to socialism, united fronts with the petty bourgeoisie or with parties dominated by the middle class, and so on. Even pure or classical Marxism is a bottomless pit of revisionist deviations. 

Clark believed that Marx, Engels and Lenin supported the Paris Commune and the soviets for purely tactical reasons, and that their real perspective was either taking over the existing state through parliament, or a revolution for the benefit of the middle class. Lenin´s approach to the soviets struck Clark as parliamentarian, as if the soviets were a kind of workers´ parliaments in which the Bolsheviks peacefully competed for majority influence. Clark even questioned whether the Commune and the soviets were properly proletarian. Certain sections of the middle class might actually prefer a Commune-style state with radical democracy, cheap government, lower taxes, no standing army, and so on. The Paris Commune in Clark´s opinion had a leadership dominated by middle class elements, and so did the soviets in 1917 until shortly before the October revolution. Thus, not even a call for soviets is working class revolutionary in and of itself.

What non-Marxists would call “really existing socialism” is a third system discovered by the petty bourgeoisie or middle class, neither capitalist nor properly socialist. This third system places the middle class in command and hence enables it to survive. Marxism is simply the ideology of this particular middle class striving. Clark apparently predicted that the third system would eventually devolve into capitalism, and regarded the events of 1989-91 as confirmation of his view. Still, China seems to be a better confirmation of his theory, since the Chinese combine “capitalism” with a strong middle class-dominated state regulating it.

But what was the CWG´s or Clark´s alternative to Marxism-Revisionism, to coin a phrase? They “should” have become anarchists or Council Communists, but never actually adopted an alternative ideology to Marxism. However, I think it´s safe to say that Clark´s perspective has a family likeness to certain forms of anarchism and ultraleftism. The working class should struggle in the workplace and on the streets for its own material interests, independent of any middle class intellectuals, who will simply try and capture the movement and derail it. This is true even of proletarianized middle class elements, whose real goal is to create a system that will enable them to regain their privileges. The labor union apparatus is a case in point, but so is any revolution led by declassed strata of this type. 

However, it seems Clark coupled this crypto-anarchist perspective with a strong pessimism. The working class, due precisely to its material position in production, is a *weak* class. It´s easy pray to middle class demagogues. The CWG was a very “theory-heavy” group, and I get the impression that Clark never broke with this perspective. He wasn´t a pure spontaneist, rather he seems to believe that no true revolution is possible without the correct theory being adopted by the proletariat. But very few workers are capable of doing the research necessary to develop such a theory. Even the advanced workers therefore become dependent on theory already developed by others. And who are these others? Why, the Marxist middle class intellectuals, of course!

It´s almost as if the proletariat is doomed to be dominated by the “petty bourgeois” intelligentsia. But if so, Lenin was in a sense right: revolutionary consciousness can only come to the workers “from without”. And that means the working class is *materially incapable* of making a revolution in its own interest. The workers are doomed to forever be the fifth wheel under the middle class popular frontist bandwagon. They are not a revolutionary class. Clark never draws these conclusions, but they seem to be the logical next step. (Insert comment on George Orwell´s “1984” here.) 

What political conclusions follow from this? Ironically, the most obvious possible conclusion is that advanced workers should *support* the middle class reformers (or in extreme cases the middle class revolutionaries) as the lesser evil to unbridled capitalism. The radical rejection of revisionism leads straight to embracing it through a different route. The other conclusion is the one drawn by French Marxist Jacque Camatte when he lost faith in working class revolution (and modern civilization itself): take to the hills (the Cevennes in Camatte´s case) and form a survivalist commune. I admit that I´m vacillating between these two alternative options myself! 

Which helps to explain my interest in this rather obscure topic. The CWG´s political odyssey has a kind of family likeness to my own meandering perturbations…