On Breaking from Bourgeois Legality

Due to the massive number of comments on my previous post, some of which were ignorant and even unprincipled, I think it is worth spending some time discussing what is meant by "breaking with bourgeois legality."  Apparently this concept was a stumbling block for more than a few readers, many of whom wanted to interpret this statement as an argument for ultra-leftist adventurism––as if I was demanding that students arm themselves, engage in illegal activities, and embark on poorly conceptualized militant schemes just for the sake of militancy.

And yet I have written quite a bit on what I mean by "breaking with bourgeois legality", though I haven't always used these words, and have been quite clear that I am not advocating an adventurist strategy.  I am not the kind of lifestyle anarchist who thinks that the correct strategy is to "drop out" of society (as if this even possible) and that all of the rights the working-class has won in bourgeois society should be rejected due to some need for political purity.  Indeed, I have examined what it means to use bourgeois rights in a non-bourgeois manner, or how to understand social reform in a non-reformist manner, and so when I speak of "breaking with bourgeois legality" I do not mean an empty-headed rejectionist approach that will lead to either sectarian and/or self-defeating behaviour.  (So no, clever internet pundits, the fact that I have a degree and a casualized job does not mean I am contradicting what is meant by "breaking with bourgeois legality"… By this logic, walking on a sidewalk or using the healthcare system would violate my political commitments––a rather senseless position to hold.)

Of course, perhaps the fact that I was discussing the problem of organizing within the boundaries of bourgeois legality in the context of the student movement was the problem.  It is one thing to speak of this approach to organizing in general, but quite another to focus it upon a context wherein (and this is another of my long-standing complaints) large swathes of the mainstream left have submerged themselves.  And the fact that some commenters complained that critiquing a bureaucratic student union was an attack on the movement in general demonstrates how the boundaries of bourgeois legality are further narrowed by the horizon of university activism.  Well I'm not a student anymore, many people I know aren't students, and I didn't even attend the conference mentioned in the previous post due to my lack of student status and the fact that I have a newborn child.  (But I do have years and years of experience as a student activist, and I know from this experience that the radical elements of the student movement haven't had anything to do with the CFS, and I take issue with some anonymous commenter raving about how they are the movement, that the movement is homogenous, and that it somehow looks like their student union wet-dream.  Please: I was one of many people building some aspects of the student movement years ago, part of a movement fighting to preserve gains that you now think I'm trying to destroy.  Some respect and institutional memory, please!)

So what do I mean by breaking with bourgeois legality if I do not mean some banal rejectionism?  In a word, I mean anti-revisionism.  That is, I mean rejecting a model of organizing that, regardless of how it veils itself, is primarily, and in the last instance, reformist.  I mean precisely what Rosa Luxemburg meant when she attacked Bernstein's revisionism.  I mean precisely what the worldwide anti-revisionist movement meant when it attacked Khrushchev's doctrine of "peaceful co-existence with capitalism."  And because this is what I mean, I also mean precisely what Luxemburg and the Chinese Communists under Mao meant when they argued for a return to revolution-centred model of communist organizing as a response to organizing that was primarily centred on social reformism dressed up in marxist clothes.  In this context, then, when I speak of breaking with bourgeois legality I also mean building a movement based on Lenin's understanding that there can only be a revolutionary movement if it is unified theoretically and practically; in order to even begin building such a movement, one needs to step outside of those institutions that are embedded within the bourgeois state where one's "comrades" will necessarily end up being people who are anything from liberal to reactionary––a problem Lenin discussed when he spoke of the limitations of "trade union consciousness"––and whose ideology is intrinsically connected not only to these embedded institutions but to the entire reformist approach.  As I argued in the above linked article, social democrats are more than willing to fight for reform without the help of communists––the masses deserve more from people who declare themselves anti-capitalist.

So when some of us speak of breaking with bourgeois legality, the break we mean at this point is a break from the social consciousness that cannot see past a style of organizing that is limited by bourgeois legality.  The goal for communists must be revolution, the overthrow of the bourgeois state, and this cannot be accomplished if we imagine we can develop the subjective factor of revolution (a revolutionary party) within a context that is not at all interested in revolution, i.e. within institutions and projects beholden to capitalism.  Breaking this social conciousness is the first step in moving towards the goal of communism, the necessity of revolution, and we we will never be able to finally break from the limits of the bourgeois order if we do not organize in the way that every revolutionary movement that has been even slightly successful has organized before us.  As it was put in Long Live Leninism:

"Lenin considered it of prime importance for the proletariat to establish its own genuinely revolutionary political party which completely breaks with opportunism, that is, a Communist party, if the proletarian revolution is to be carried through and the dictatorship of the proletariat established and consolidated.  This political party is armed with the Marxist theory of dialectical materialism and historical materialism.  Its programme is to organize the proletariat and all oppressed working people to carry on class struggle, to set up proletarian rule and passing through socialism to reach the final goal of communism.  This political party must identify itself with the masses and attach great importance to their creative initiative in the making of history; it must closely rely on the masses in revolution as well as in socialist and communist construction."

You cannot break with opportunism if your strategy is to embed yourself in liberal institutions in an effort to reform them.  Nor does any amount of revolutionary rhetoric, where reformism is disguised as principled marxist behaviour, make your practice otherwise.  As Lenin wrote in 1923 about the petty-bourgeois ideologues of the Second International, reformists are people "who are afraid to deviate from the bourgeoisie, let alone break with it, at the same time they disguise[…] their cowardice with the wildest rhetoric and braggarty."  And simply by quoting one text of Lenin's out of context (i.e. Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder), a text that was not really his most scientific (just because it was written in 1920 doesn't it make it more scientific than what he wrote earlier since age has never been a qualification for scientific veracity), is not enough to escape the charge of opportunism.  Bernstein and Kautsky, after all, appealed to passages in Marx and Engels to defend their opportunism––and I think it is fair to say that they knew their Marxist doctrine better than most of us (indeed, Kautsky was like the high pope of marxism at one time and was extremely influential on Lenin's theory)––but we know now that they were opportunists and renegades thanks to the efforts of Luxemburg, Lenin, and others.

But I will return to the problem of Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder at the end…

Returning to the previous post and the tempest-in-a-teacup it caused, it is worth focusing on what I was actually arguing rather than pretending, as some commenters seemed to be, that I was advocating de-certification campaigns or any such nonsense.  The point was to ignore the dominant bourgeois-embedded student union, to not waste communist energy trying to reform it, and instead do in the student movement what should be done in the overall revolutionary movement: organize in a manner that is unified according to communist ideology parallel to student unions so that a movement would emerge with a clear anti-capitalist and revolutionary line––a movement that was capable of fighting from its theoretically articulate position and even applying pressure on the student movement as a whole––because if you control the line then you control the struggle.

Apparently the entire notion of organizing in a way that every revolutionary movement that has done anything has organized according to (the Bolshevik Party under Lenin did this, the Communist Party of China under Mao did this, etc.) is now treated as "ultra-leftism" and "counter-revolutionary" by some people.  One commenter raved over and over, until I had to ban them for repeating their asinine and insulting comments and refusing to make an argument, that the fact that some people wanted to organize outside of student union structures was tantamount to "wrecking" the student movement and working for the Conservative government.  So in today's context, I suppose, the only thing we should do is act as social democrats, work to get the New Democratic Party into power, and then this will give us the "wiggle room" to reform our way to revolution?  Here the logic is clearly opportunist, precisely the revisionism that the world historical communist revolutions have rejected.

But opportunists will see anything that is not opportunist as "ultra-leftist" and, as a good old friend of mine pointed out long ago, now what is often called "ultra-leftist" in the current Canadian/US conjuncture is what would be considered anti-revisionist marxism in the time of Lenin and Luxemburg. It is possible that Bernstein imagined Luxemburg as an "ultra-leftist", though the terminology was less coherent at that time, since she stood to the left of his opportunist understanding of marxism.  Thus, it is both tragic and farcical that when some of us speak of a return to organizing revolution as it has been historically understood by revolutionary communists, other marxists mobilize the term "ultra-leftist" to defend their opportunism.  This isn't new: some marxist groups have been doing this for a long time––I can still recall those days when, after some people thought that we should not inform the police of a demonstration, a certain marxist group deemed any march that did not collaborate with policing "ultra-leftist" and made a big stink about this supposed "ultra-leftism"… And this was just an anti-war demonstration!

Now this opportunism of working within bourgeois limitations is being defended by an appeal to Lenin's Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder.  After all, since Lenin advocated an entryist tactic in 1920 in the context of a debate with British council communists, it must be a universal strategy of revolution for Lenin!  And so opportunism is again submerged by an appeal to the writings of an actual revolutionary.  Bernstein made similar appeals to Marx, going so far as to argue that what Marx wrote at the end of his life was more scientific than what he wrote earlier on and that he was even a "reformer" at the end of his life because, hey, he "admitted in 1872 that in countries like England it was possible to bring about the emancipation of the workers by peaceful means."  Sound similar to the way some people understand Lenin's 1920 analysis, in the context of England, and apply it to their practice? Again, history repeated as farce.  "We are all social reformers today," Bernstein goes on to write: "some in order to fortify present society [liberals], others in order to prepare the way for an easy and organic growth of a new cooperative society, based on common ownership of land and the means of production [communists]."  And this way of understanding communism as a "better" form of reformism––and thus somehow revolutionary––is still paradigmatic of revisionism today: we'll get into that capitalist institution and reform it better than liberals will!  Well, Luxemburg had something to say about this approach––and what she said was accepted by Lenin and every revolutionary up until today––and for those who haven't studied it because of their obsession with "ultra-leftism" I'd suggest looking it up before reading any further.

Moreover, aside from being written within the context of a particular (and not universal) debate, people who uphold Lenin's Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder as some strategic document for every concrete context tend to ignore why he was advocating entryism at the centres of capitalism.  And the why can be found in that text's fourth chapter where Lenin talks about the principle enemy being "opportunism" and ultra-leftism (or anarchism) being the "penalty for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement."  Here Lenin is speaking of the opportunism that, as he argued time and time again, was a default ideology at the centres of world capitalism, theorized as "the labour aristocracy" (and isn't it interesting that a lot of people who cite this text reject the theory of the labour aristocracy?) and that, in these contexts, since the working-class was "bought-off" by so-called "super-profits" and was thus complacent, an infantile and petty-bourgeois anarchism often emerged in response to the stagnancy of the general working-class movement.  This text, then, was concerned with figuring out how a working-class movement hampered by opportunism, because it was at the centre of imperialism, could conduct itself in order to survive––without suiciding through anarchist "infantilism".

So not only have the people who uphold this text as justification for non-revolutionary practice used it to tar every movement that attempts to build itself according to Leninist principles as "ultra-leftist", but they ignore the fact that it was put forward as a tactical suggestion for their inherent opportunism.  Indeed, they have turned what was meant to be a conviction of opportunism into a virtue!  At this point, Lenin could power all of their movements with the energy generated from his spinning grave.

In the end we need to ask why there is such a knee-jerk reaction to any and all proposals aimed at building revolutionary movements according to the principles of the Russian Revolution under Lenin and/or the Chinese Revolution under Mao.  Rather than try to learn from both the successes and failures of the past world historical revolutions, there is this desire to reinvent the wheel over and over and over again.  Not only to reinvent it as movementism, but to pretend that we're being Leninist when what we are actually advocating is a practice that almost killed the communist movement in Europe.  As Bernstein wrote gleefully in 1899:

"All the speeches of the [SPD's] representatives breathe reform.  […] [T]he social democrats [at that time the term meant communist––it wasn't until after Bernstein and Kautsky that it became a slur for welfare capitalist ideology] formed an alliance with the middle-class democracy for the municipal elections, and their example was followed in other Wurtemberg towns.  In the trade union movement one union after another proceeds to establish funds for out-of-work members, which practically means a giving up of the characteristics of a purely fighting coalition… Everywhere there is action for reform, action for social progress, action for the victory of democracy."

 But Bernstein imagined that all of this reform was tantamount to revolution when all it was doing was wrecking the movement in Germany and leading to collaboration with fascism.  Why?  Because opportunism refuses to break from bourgeois legality and, when crisis produces monolithic capitalism, bourgeois legality becomes fascism.  In this context, all this reformist promise that Bernstein celebrated in 1899, imagining that his revolutionary enemies in that version of the SPD would be vanquished by his logic, was dashed to pieces when the Freikorps murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht and Bernstein's SPD stood by, embedded as it was in bourgeois legality, and permitted these assassinations. And this is yet another reason some of us argue that we need to break––first consciously and eventually literally––from bourgeois legality and work to build an actually communist movement.