Solan

In the reading group, I mentioned in passing that I was frustrated by endotes inattentiveness to anti-colonial struggles. Basically, they identify two revolutionary waves 20th century Europe, just after WW1 and the 1968-1977 years, as the cycles of struggle that informs their work the most. They don’t claim these waves (or their reading of them) as an exhaustive account of proletarian struggle, but they nevertheless choose to center these two cycles to near-total exclusion of other events. They do mention, in passing, the experiences of 36 as well, but in no great detail. As I will discuss later, it’s really just a rhetorical afterthought. They also mention, in a footote, anti-colonial struggles, but only to say that these have been susceptible to authoritarian socialist ideas because of the latter’s capacity to turn peasants into workers by means of terror, or something to that effect, it’s not much to go on. Given that anti-colonial struggles had a massive impact on their two favourite revolutionary cycles in Europe, this seems like a shortcoming.

I am going to write a bit about these two revolutionary moments, not because I am trying to be pedantic about the details, but rather because I think paying attention to these struggles would help overcome (or at least unsettle) the central theoretical problem that seems to plague the endotes group (or the councilists etc that they are writing about). The central theoretical framing in their historical overview is a pretty sharp divide between spontaneous proletarian action on the one hand, and the tragicomic twatting around of small communist groups on the other. The former is crisp and clear: it takes place at the site of production itself, is undertaken by those directly involve din response to the objective material conditions undergirding the situation. It is not taken on the basis on the ideas of those involved, it is somehow pure, uncomplicated, authentic:

“what to do from the ‘inside’ is immediately apparent, the possibilities defined by the workers’ positions, their role in the enterprise, the enterprise’s place in the economy, their relations with those they work with, etc”

Again, its unclear if this is endotes take, or if they are presenting someone else’s ideas (in this case Sam Moss’s). But this sentence is word soup. I don’t think anyone who is involved in a workplace struggle would say that what to do is “immediately apparent”, that just makes no sense, its insanely complicated even in tiny workplaces, in part for the very reasons they cite as rendering the situation transparent.

On the other end of the spectrum from the spontaneous proletarian action is the “willed group”, people with communist politics who want to get involved in struggles because the ideas they hold lead them to ascribe a great deal of significance to them:

“What one can do from the ‘outside’ is usually not much, unless it is an activity requested by those directly involved”

This is a big “unless”: in my experience a group of committed “activists” engaging in a workplace struggle they are not directly involved in can be cringe and awkward, but it can be a massive help as well if done with even a little good sense: the modest but significant gains of the base unions in the UK are predicated on this model.

So anyway, there’s a contrast between effective and meaningful but very rare “spontaneity” on the one hand and more or less ineffective, semi-compulsive larping on the other hand. The two historical revolutionary cycles both present outbursts of spontaneity, which is then recuperated and dissipated by the goofy machinations of the various organisations and groups. In this way, they trace a fairly coherent narrative: the german social democrats crush the Spartacist uprising because the proletarian spontaneity destabilises their willed organisation; the bureaucracy preserves itself by destroying the movement. Pretty much the same thing happens in Spain, where the anarchist leadership takes ministerial posts and advocates unity with the republic, causing their membership to be destroyed by PCE reaction. And then it happens again in the 60′s and 70′s, as communist parties and trade union confederations in France and Italy unite with the bourgeoisie to wreck the revolutionary movement there.

So basically, there is this pretty sharp divide between spontaneous and willed action that seems to sit at the heart of their political tradition as they describe it. I think this frame of analysis is fundamentally flawed on two levels: it is a very simplistic analysis of the events they do discuss at some length, but also the events and perspectives that they don’t really include in the narrative would actually be really helpful in overcoming this issue.

To start with the anti-colonial struggles. First of all, in both revolutionary cycles they describe, anti-colonial politics played a major part in shaping the conditions  that led to the revolts: both cycles of struggle were accompanied by major upheavals in colonial territories. Particularly in the second cycle, anti-colonial struggles really shaped participants political imaginary, from the vietcong, FLN, the MPLA’s impact on the revolution in Portugal, right up to the use of indigenous and Black Power imagery by Italian radicals in the late 1970s. In Britain as well the Black uprisings starting around 1976 were a major manifestation of the cycle of class struggle here, and were even extensively theorised as such by people like Stuart Hall.

Anyway, these struggles represent a challenge for the spontaneous-willed dyad that Endnotes is working with. There is first of all the problem of uneven development, of various degrees of integration into capitalism by insurgent colonised peoples. There is always a dense tapestry of radical traditions and imaginaries involved in this; one can’t imagine these insurgents, even spontaneous acts like burning a cane field, as existing outside of a complex political inaginary (though I don’t really think one can imagine German workers in 1920 in this state either to be fair). There is a sort of similar thread in Gramsci and also in Mouffe and Laclau’s discussion of the working class movement in the Hapsburg state: basically, in the multi ethnic Hapsburg empire there were so many different traditions of struggle and so many different cultures and languages, as well as so many different modes of production coexisting that social democrats had to work to position themselves as the central articulation of a huge diversity of struggles, instead of directing a single proletarian struggle.

The question for the intellectuals involved in these struggles has often been a mission to draw on and develop these political imaginaries. Sylvia Wynter, who was involved in the struggle for Jamaican independence and the movement for socialism in Guyana, speaks of the anticolonial struggle in jamaica in terms that are kind of similar, but also really different, from endnotes. She discusses the clash within the independence movement between colonial elites (which she associates with the People’s National Party) who conceptualised independence as Jamaica entering the community of nations by building a national state, ie adopting and extending the political logic of the state (which is by nature imperial), with the grassroots movement of wildcat strikes and rural uprisings who she argues were drawing on an indigenising tradition of resistance. For Wynter, this political imaginary is the substance from which an alternative society could be built, as opposed to disciplining them into a nation state. The paradox here, which I don’t exactly recall where I read it, is that the nascent post-colonial state needs to both achieve maximum political distance from the receding colonial state (and, by correlation, maximum proximity to resistance movement) at the same time as it needs to adopt its political authority: it needs to achieve a repressive apparatus clothed in the trappings of the resistance movement that brought it to power. 

The classic iteration of this is the colonial tragedy of Haiti. The Haitian movement managed to defeat French colonialism, but the leadership quickly set about expanding military discipline and the plantation economy, both as an exigency of national defence (and raising funds to pay the huge indemnity France was demanding) but also, to an extent, because of a conceptualisation of the nation built on colonial/imperial ideals. The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris casts this dynamic between leadership and grassroots in anti-colonial struggles in slightly mystical terms: everyone carries a little bit of everything around in them, even unawares: the colonised need to be particularly sensitive and attentive to the psyche of the coloniser, because they are very likely to share many of these beliefs and structures of feeling themselves.

All in all, the tradition of radical anti-colonial writing is very, very concerned with the contradiction between popular movements in revolt (often informed by radical traditions that are not reducible to Marxist categories of interpretation) and “willed groups” keen to impose their version of order on the situation. But the problem is framed in very different terms. For one thing, there is no spontaneity as such: mass action is understood as the outpouring of popular beliefs and the expression of embodied cultures of resistance. The leftcom tradition, as far as I can tell, has little interest in the sources of proletarian spontaneity: it’s kind of a “natural” expression of the frictions in the accumulation of capital. On the other hand, for anti-colonial writers, the texture and detail of this mass action, generally informed by non-capitalist political imaginaries in a violent dialectic with the imposition of capitalism, is exactly the most important resource for building the new world. I think part of the reason why Europe in 1918 and 1968 are the leftcom’s  preferred frame of reference is because these are perhaps more easily understood as pure proletarian somehow, because all the “noise” of culture and politics can be pushed to the background more easily, though I still think it’s a shoddy analysis even of those events.

This kind of points to a big issue I have with a lot of Marxist thought, is that it really seems to take little interest in the actual thoughts of working class people in revolt. It gets extra frustrating sometimes: like Rosa Luxemburg writing about the 1905 revolt in Russia as workers spontaneously revolting and spontaneously forming councils: these workers were really into anarchism! That was their beliefs, that was what was informing their decisions. They had ideas! These ideas informed their actions! In many cases, they got these ideas from other workers who were putting in loads of leg work to agitate for them. But because there were no Marxists involved (at that time), Luxemburg (who I generally like) is like: look at the workers go! next time we’ll be along for the ride to guide them properly, but this spontaneity is pretty sick, the anarchists have got it all wrong.

I am not just salty about this because anarchism, but it’s also a total lack of interest in working class people’s own ideas, because ideas are something intellectuals have. Luxemburg does argue for a party to provide ideas to the masses, and the endnotes lot I guess argue that they shouldn’t, but neither seems to take much interest in the living political imaginaries that play a major part in revolts, relegating thinking and imagining to something that actual workers don’t really do. I would really recommend the essay “The Misadventures of Critical Thought” by Jacques Ranciere for a succinct statement of this. Or, if you have a lot of time, check out Proletarian Nights, its really dope.

Now I don’t think this is necessarily true of endnotes, but I don’t know how else to interpret the contradiction between spontaneity and willed groups: the massive problem I have is not really with their criticism of willed groups (though I have other issues with that) but the category of spontaneity in this framework seems to be just this weird black box that one cannot make sense of (except I guess by a kind of historical determinism?)