In the matter of organisation this, then, is the dilemma of the radical. In order to do something of social significance, actions must be organised. Organised actions, however, turn into capitalistic channels. It seems that in order to do something now, one can do only the wrong thing and in order to avoid false steps, one should undertake none at all. The political mind of the radical is destined to be miserable; it is aware of its utopianism and it experiences nothing but failures. In mere self-defence, the radical stresses spontaneity always, unless he is a mystic, with the secretly-held thought that he is talking nonsense.¹

As has been dealt with elsewhere, the conception of revolution as “communisation” with which Endnotes has identified itself is a product of the second revolutionary wave of the twentieth century.² Specifically, it develops in France in the years after the most famous event of that wave — May ‘68. It emerged in response to the struggles of the period and the attempts to make sense of this wave of struggles and how revolution and communism were being posed in a new way. One of the central ways in which revolution seemed to be posed differently was around what had been known as “the question of organisation”.

From 1917 to 1968

It seemed, at one time, that “what was to be done” was obvious. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were large groups within the working class that claimed to be for revolution and communism; there was an international workers movement with mass organisations — unions and parties — adhering at least nominally to revolutionary ideologies such as the Kautsky/Lenin social democratic idea of revolution, or a syndicalist or anarcho-syndicalist one. To be a communist or revolutionary seemed to amount to joining such organisations or at least being part of a movement that these organisations did much to define.

However, in the revolutionary wave that ended WWI, and in further situations where revolutionary rupture seemed to be possible, these organisations were not merely defeated in their attempt to deliver the socialism or anarchism that was taken to be their goals. Rather, when put to the test, they seemed to actively betray or suppress the “revolution”. The parties of the Second International overwhelmingly supported the first world war and the dominant party of that International — the Social Democratic Party of Germany — then employed proto-fascists to drown the German Revolution in blood. The Third International imagined itself as refounding “revolutionary Marxism” but soon showed itself to be subordinated to the internal policies of the Bolsheviks in Russia who became engaged in a “primitive socialist accumulation” whose main difference from the ordinary capitalist variety that it copied was the terror and rapidity with which it turned peasants into proletarians.³ In Spain, the anarchist leadership of the CNT/FAI joined a republican government, and when anarchist workers resisted that government’s Stalinist-led police attack on them, the anarchist leaders told them the barricades must be torn down.⁴ The very groups that distinguished themselves from the rest of the class as its revolutionary component, and which might at times have played a revolutionary part, also took active counter-revolutionary roles.

One reaction in the subsequent period was to cast the issue as one of betrayal. New groups were formed identifying with a view on the earlier history, an understanding of where things went wrong, and of what lessons have been learnt or which leader or tendency was right. In the wave of struggles in the sixties and seventies, such groups grew somewhat in numbers. However, their attempts to replace the main reformist organisations, and to play the heroic role they imagined their preferred ancestors had done in an earlier period, were unsuccessful. While in the previous period “revolutionary” organisations of the working class had displayed a tendency for unity, Trotskyist and Maoist efforts in the latter period often mostly displayed a tendency towards fragmentation, competition, sect-like existence, and often a disappearance or re-absorption into the social democratic politics they nominally tried to replace. An alternative to the organisational and party fetishism of these groups was the perspective of autonomy and council communism.

The re-emergence and re-eclipse of council communism

For many who came together on the streets and in the occupations of ‘68, a dominant perspective was the rejection of “party communism”, whether of the official communist variety or that of the Trotskyists and Maoists, in favour of autonomous action by the workers themselves and the idea of “All Power to the Workers Councils!”. The alternative to organisations like the French Communist Party (PCF) and the trade unions, which opposed themselves to the May movement, was seen to be not a new revolutionary organisation but instead working class self-organisation and autonomy, with the revolution seen as the formation of councils and, by means of them, the management of society by the workers themselves.⁵

May ‘68 seemed to vindicate a “council communist” alternative to the failure of the Russian Revolution.⁶ Contrary to the accounts of betrayal offered by Trotskyism, Maoism, and anarchism, and their linked response of forming new organisations, council communism appeared to provide a more theoretically plausible explanation of what had gone wrong with the workers’ movement and “communism” in the twentieth century. Trotskyism held up the advocate of militarisation of labour and suppressor of Kronstadt as a libertarian or democratic alternative to Stalin, “anti-revisionist” Maoism saw through the Russian lie only to replace it with the Chinese lie, and classical anarchism blamed the failure of Spanish anarchism on the betrayal of its beautiful idea by its leaders. The council communist account of the thwarting of workers’ autonomy and self-organisation seemed to reach a deeper level of explanation. It was not one or the other leader that was the problem, but the whole phenomenon of reliance on leadership and bureaucratic organisation which could be contrasted to workers’ self-activity and autonomous organisation. This conception suggests a struggle within the class between its own capacities and will to organise its struggles and its tendency to put its trust in something outside itself.

The reappearance of the ideas of council communism in ’68 might seem surprising. Council communism as an organised tendency with roots in the German revolution had more or less ceased to exist by the end of WW2.⁷ However, in the post-war period and especially after the re-emergence of councils in Hungary in 1956, there had emerged groups on the edge of the workers’ movement — dissident Trotskyists, anarchists, operaismo/autonomists, “anti-authoritarian” and “libertarian” socialists etc. — who, in opposition to the official workers’ organisations, took up aspects of council communist critique and especially the perspective of workers’ autonomy. In France, the recovery of this perspective had been particularly influential through the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (SouB).⁸ Thus by the late sixties, a council communist reading of the failure of the Russian Revolution and the workers’ movement generally, and its attempt to articulate an anti-Bolshevik communism, had a widespread influence. There was a fit between the anti-bureaucratic and anti-authoritarian spirit of the revolts of that time and the tenets of council communist critique. In particular, the reactionary role played by the unions and official communist parties — and workers’ opposition to it — seemed to support a notion of an autonomous workers’ struggle separate from these organisational forms. Additionally, although council communism and many of these new tendencies held essentially workerist perspectives, it was possible to some extent to adapt the problematic of autonomy as a means of understanding some of the new struggles inside and outside of production — in the revolt of youth and the counter-cultural movements of the time, in struggles around race, gender, sexuality, etc. — struggles which the primary workers’ organisations were often indifferent or hostile to, but which a new generation was attracted to.⁹ The perspective of autonomy thus spoke to the general libertarian or anti-authoritarian mood of large parts of the movements of the time, in which the revolution was seen not as the management of society by a new power but the achievement of autonomy in all areas of life.

But if there was widespread agreement that the ideas of “workers’ self-activity” and “all power to the workers’ councils” represented an alternative to the Leninist dreams of the small Maoist and Trotskyist group(uscules), there was disagreement on what this meant in terms of activity. Here it is useful to contrast the proper “councilism” represented in ‘68 by the group Informations et Correspondances Ouvrières (ICO)¹⁰ with the understanding of the more famous Situationist International (SI). The perspectives of both these groups had some influence on the situation. While the former was characterised by a deep scepticism about the importance of “revolutionaries” and incredulity about the narratives they tell about their importance, the latter was known for the significance it attributed to the revolutionary movement and itself as its most advanced component.

The Councilism of ICO

The councilist current represented in ‘68 by ICO and continued to this day by the group Echanges et Mouvement starts from a recognition that the question “what we should do” which would-be revolutionary groups pose themselves, is generally a function of their position “outside” a workplace or other situations of struggle.¹¹ Feeling a need to engage with those directly involved in struggle, especially “the workers”, the would-be revolutionary will try to influence with leaflets or papers offering, if not explicitly, “leadership”, then at least “advice” and “lessons”. Or, perhaps, recognising the failure of such external intervention, the most militant may try to insert themselves into the situation by going into the factories or wherever the action is expected to be. The “councilist” refuses the desire for such a “role of revolutionaries”. Beyond any immediate activity in their own place of work, councilists largely circulate information and analyses, seeing themselves as simply trying to understand “what people actually do and the real meaning of these actions”.¹²

This scepticism about the importance of “revolutionaries” and their political “intervention” in these struggles has a strong plausibility when it comes to workplace struggles. It is certainly the case that in such conflicts the distinction between those inside and outside the workplace is usually fundamental. What to do from the “inside” is immediately apparent, the possibilities defined by the workers’ positions, their roles in the enterprise, the enterprise’s place in the economy, their relations with those they work with, etc. By comparison to this, what one can do effectively from “outside” is usually not much, unless it is an activity requested by those directly involved.

The collecting and analysis of information about struggles can be a very involving militant activity,¹³ but to limit one’s activity to this role is unattractive for most politicos and “would-be-revolutionaries”. An oft-repeated claim has been that the councilist position implies being passive spectators of the class struggle and a mere mailbox for the class.¹⁴ Most of those drawn to the idea of revolution tend to assert that there must be something more for “us” to do. The councilist will argue that those who think this “councilist” role is too limited are usually impervious to the poor results of their attempts to “do something more”, to play a revolutionary role. As Henri Simon argues, the form of existence of the “willed group”, its organisation around a shared set of ideas rather than the shared situation from which spontaneous organisation arises, leads to certain determined kinds of action: “more often than not a limited collectivity speaks to and acts towards a larger one, in a direction which is inevitably that of people who ‘know’ (or think they know) towards those ‘who do not know’ (or know imperfectly) and who must be persuaded”.¹⁵

By contrast, what is needed for the councilist is to learn from those struggles and to resist temptations to offer advice or direction. The latter is seen “as an elitist concept created by those who seek to use and dominate workers’ struggles”.¹⁶

With the last line we see that a realistic sobriety and justified scepticism about the pretensions of willed groups¹⁷ slips into something else — the view that such groups and their “unwanted interventions” are a major obstacle to the autonomous development of the struggle. From the councilist perspective the mentality of the “willed group”, this sense of a determinant role, is normally of little consequence, but in times of struggle it is seen to have a detrimental effect. Such groups are seen to relate to the spontaneous organisation as an object, at best perhaps going along with the movement while “trying to bend” it “towards its own ideology and objectives”. One senses here an inversion: the revolutionaries whose sense of their necessity and importance is seen as mistaken, are nonetheless granted a powerful role, that of recuperating and fucking up the struggles that would otherwise go further.¹⁸

The SI

This fear of doing something in relation to the class was strongly criticised by another group active in May ‘68, the Situationist International (SI), who wrote:

for these workers, ‘doing something’ has automatically become a shameful inclination to substitute oneself for ‘the worker’ — for a sort of pure, being-in-himself worker who, by definition, would exist only in his own factory, where for example the Stalinists would force him to keep silent, and where ICO would have to wait for all the workers to purely liberate themselves on the spot (otherwise wouldn’t they risk substituting themselves for this still mute real worker?). Such an ideological acceptance of dispersion defies the essential need whose vital urgency was felt by so many workers in May: the need for coordination and communication of struggles and ideas, starting from bases of free encounter outside their union-policed factories.¹⁹

Indeed as the SI’s argument continues, there is something self-contradictory and metaphysical in the councilist line of reasoning, for surely even the limited activity of the few dozen members of ICO producing and sharing their analyses with other workers is a form of “substitution” of their ideas for those that the passive workers reading them would otherwise spontaneously have had!

The SI combined a perspective of “all power to the councils” with no small sense of the importance of the revolutionary movement and of themselves as its most advanced part.²⁰ Most commentators on the SI have failed to pick up on how their own understanding of themselves as an organisation was central to the strengths and the limitations of the theory they produced.²¹ As Roland Simon argues, the lack of modesty in the SI’s ideas about the importance of the role of revolutionaries and the revolutionary organisation is connected to the novel content that the SI assigned to the workers’ councils and thus to a way in which the SI made a fundamental advance on other groups of the time.²²

In notions like the critique of the poverty of everyday life and the rejection of work, the SI were in touch with a different quality of the revolutionary wave they were immersed in compared to those earlier in the century. In keeping with this different character, the SI argued that the councils would have to adopt a new content, based not on the management of work and the existing world but the abolition of the former (“in the usual present day sense”²³ ) and the never-ending radical transformation of the latter.²⁴ The contradiction in the SI between its slogans — “All Power to the Workers’ Councils!” and “Never Work!”²⁵ — is not an absolute contradiction, but a site of the productive tension in their outlook.

It is thus wrong to see the SI as simply taking over the limits of SouB who had identified socialism with workers’ self-management. The SI, as Roland Simon writes: “never conceived of communism as workers managing production, the pseudo-control of workers of their alienation’, communism is always posited as the construction of the human community through the abolition of exchange, of the commodity, of the division of society into classes, it is posited in its content rather than as a form of management”. But, as he continues, “in order to reach this point, the SI remains a prisoner of the theoretical necessity of positing a moment in which the proletariat becomes its own object, a moment in its liberation, which explains the great importance of the form of the Council as being this existence for itself of the proletariat, this existence as subject-object, the proletarian class of consciousness as a form.”²⁶

It is in this need for workers, through the councils, to realise this new revolutionary content of the abolition of work, to become the “class of consciousness”, that a fundamental role for revolutionaries and revolutionary organisation is implied. This high demand placed on the workers and the organisational form through which they become subject is paralleled with an absolutely high demand on the revolutionary organisation in the period before this is achieved. The SI rejected out of hand the model that most revolutionary organisations adopt: the proselytising and recruitment of naïve members who are then taught the party line. Instead, they demanded from prospective members an autonomous and full integration of the theory and a level of “practical truth”,²⁷ namely a coherence of their practical behaviour with the theory.²⁸

The SI would never claim to have produced this total critique from their own heads. While their advanced position in detecting the nature of the new upsurge can be linked with their roots in the avant-garde (itself a product of the last revolutionary wave), they also derived their theory from the signs they recognised in new struggles against alienation: from Asturian miners to the rioters of Watts and more generally the youth rebellions seen across the western world.²⁹ The task of the revolutionary organisation was to grasp what was going on, what was being prefigured in the revolts that were taking place within a unitary revolutionary theory, and to communicate it to those seeking clarification.

In their Minimum Definition of Revolutionary Organisations, while they write of the need for the revolutionary organisation to dissolve itself in its moment of victory, that victory will be the realisation of its total critique by the masses themselves in the councils.³⁰ If there is to be a coming together of the total or integral critique with the forms of spontaneous organisation, then that total critique must itself come into existence, and the vehicle for this is the voluntary willed organisation. In the year before ‘68, Debord, Khayati, and Vienet declared that the present task of the SI is to, “work, on an international level, for the reappearance of certain basic elements of a modern-day revolutionary critique. The activity of the SI is a moment which we do not mistake for a goal: the workers must organize themselves, they will achieve emancipation through their own efforts, etc.”³¹

There was an important match between the SI’s perspectives and what happened in the ‘68 period, particularly with students and young people. May ‘68 was the high point for the SI, and there was certainly a widespread impact of their analyses in the student and youth side of the movement, with situationist graffiti being one of the most memorable aspects of the revolt. Nevertheless, they were faced with the fact that their theory did not combine with the action of the workers who, contra their fantasy, did not come close to setting up workers’ councils.

The attitude to and later problems that the SI had with their own organisation are related to the role that they saw for theory. As Roland Simon points out, the SI replaced a dialectic of productive forces leading to communism with a dialectic of “theory — organisation — consciousness”. If it is the council that is to provide the practical conditions for this consciousness, the theory that prefigures this consciousness must itself come to be, and it does so through the spreading of revolutionary critique in which voluntary organisation or revolutionary movement (and not just the SI) play a part.

This need for the coming together of totalising revolutionary critique which, on the one hand, would be worked on and spread by groups and individuals within a relatively small milieu and, on the other, by a spontaneous upsurge from the masses themselves, is the task that the SI confronted itself with and on which it ultimately fell down.

Thus, though the SI had predicted and helped prepare the grounds for the events of ‘68 better than any other group, its hopes for the formation of councils that would have a radically different content failed to materialise.³² The internal struggles which the SI fell into in the aftermath of ‘68, and their forlorn hope for a “Strasbourg of the factories”,³³ was an expression of the impasse of their underlying model of theory, organisation and consciousness.

The Citroën Action Committee at Censier

The different conceptions of what to do held by ICO and SI in ‘68 can be seen in the Citroën Action Committee at Censier. In the second half of May, as strikes began to spread, worker-student action committees formed throughout France that attempted to support the movement. Those who wanted revolution came together based on their perception of tasks that needed to be done in relation to the movement.³⁴ Roger Gregoire and Fredy Perlman argue that such worker-student committees were a spontaneous recovery of the kind of creative social activity from below that characterised previous revolutionary upsurges like the Paris Commune. They describe their involvement in the Workers-Students Action Committee of Citroën, one of many such committees based in the occupied Censier centre of the University of Paris. Composed largely of people who had met in the street battles of the previous days, it came together in response to the Citroën factories forming a strike committee and calling for an indefinite strike. Perlman and Gregoire describe the kind of leaflets produced and actions taken: the way they confronted the issue of the division between immigrant and native French workers (from whom the union militants were drawn); the way the factory’s union-run strike committee found the action committee useful in bringing about an occupation of the factory but then shut it out; and the connection they made to groups of non-union workers in the factories.³⁵

The committee was autonomous in the sense that it did not recognize the legitimacy of any “higher” body or any external “authority”. Anyone was able to participate equally in a daily meeting where projects were thought up and actions planned in response to the ever-changing situation. The direction taken by the committee indicated that whatever the political orientations of participants before May, the orientation which prevailed during the events was more or less a councilist one comprised of workers’ assemblies and workers’ self-activity.

In terms of Henri Simon’s distinction between willed and spontaneous organisation, such committees were a spontaneous group where, to a significant extent, the participants left behind their previous allegiances in an orientation to the changing needs of the situation. However, it also had qualities of a willed group because a main purpose of the Censier committee was to speak and act towards the wider movement, and to the workers in the factories in particular.³⁶

What is striking about Perlman and Gregoire’s account — and of particular interest to us — is their self-criticism. In unfavourably comparing the worker-student committees they were involved in to the March 22 Movement,³⁷ Perlman and Gregoire say that for those who gathered at Censier, being revolutionary meant participating in something whose dynamic was elsewhere. Rather than understanding themselves as a concrete group of individuals proceeding by the elimination of concrete obstacles, capable of taking the initiative, they rather trapped themselves in a position of wishing to follow the “spontaneous” activity of an abstractly imagined group: “the workers themselves”. As they argue, the concrete group of which they were part (the worker-student committee), while subjectively feeling ready to make a choice for revolution, looked to some other group than themselves to trigger this situation.³⁸ In this they were perhaps like the overwhelming majority of those participating in the ‘68 movement.

Perlman and Gregoire describe the emblematic moment when a march of ten thousand militants confronted CGT stewards at the entrance to the Renault Billancourt factory,³⁹ which had been occupied the day before by its workers. It would have been easy to climb into the plant, but the marchers allowed themselves to be turned back. A vast crowd, who thought they were for the revolution and who had recently fought the real cops of the CRS, were nonetheless turned back by a small number of union cops.⁴⁰ This was due, for Perlman and Gregoire, to a certain way of relating to the “workers”.

If the “Leninist” notion was that workers must be advised on what to do, and Leninists suggested their parties as an alternative leadership to the PCF/CGT, the ultra-left or councilist notion, in contrast, was that they had to wait for the workers to do it by themselves. They failed to see themselves as capable of creating a situation that would force such a choice. What this meant practically is that they left the initiative to the union bureaucrats.

Perlman and Gregoire suggest that the more radical ultra-left or councilist “direction” offered by people at Censier was simply a different discourse in which the Trotskyist and Maoist calls for a “revolutionary party” and “nationalisation” was replaced by calls for “workers’ self-organisation” and “socialisation of production”. They write:

[E]loquent speeches were not accompanied by eloquent actions, because the speaker did not regard himself as deprived; it was “the workers” who were deprived, and consequently “only the workers” could act. The speaker called on workers to have a conviction which the speaker didn’t have; he called on workers to translate words into actions, but his own “action” consisted only of words.⁴¹

And, as they say of the Billancourt confrontation:

[T]here were clearly very few “revolutionaries” in the march or inside the factory; there were very few people who felt that whatever was inside that plant was theirs. ... [T]here was apparently no one inside or outside the factory who regarded it as social property. One who knows it’s social property doesn’t accept a bureaucrat blocking the door. People in that march had varied pretexts for doing nothing. “Such action is premature; it’s adventuristic! the plant isn’t social property yet”. Of course the CGT bureaucrats agreed with this reasoning, a reasoning which completely undermines any “right” the workers might have to strike. And ten thousand militants, [...] blandly accepted the authority of the union toughs who guarded the factory gates.⁴²

In taking up Perlman and Gregoire’s self-critique here, the point is not that Billancourt was the great “if only” moment when all could have been different if a different action or consciousness had prevailed. If the crowd outside Billancourt had acted in a different way, this would have had an impact. But what happened, happened for specific reasons, contingent on the overall situation of the crowd, including their sense of themselves and what revolution involved.

The ideology of “the workers themselves” — the notion that only the workers can do something — was one limit to the activity of many participants in ‘68. The idea that revolution is self-organisation, and that the “self” here is not whoever we are but “the workers themselves” was an objective feature of the situation. This conception of the revolution was not a mere idea that could contingently have been replaced with another, but a product of the whole cycle of struggles leading up to it. What Perlman and Gregoire’s text indicates is that some of the more lucid participants were starting to question this conception. While the idea that “workers and students must meet and dialogue” was fairly prevalent, their text poses the issue differently. It suggests: why not take the factory? Not to restart production (it was a car factory after all), but to deny it to the enemy, and yes, at the risk of being called substitutionist, to try to push the situation forward.

The distinction between inside and outside which, in the normal course of events, is a fundamental one — with interventions by “revolutionaries” or “activists” usually failing — must be called into question in situations of intense class and social struggle. Factories, the means of production, reproduction, and communication, do not belong to their workers. Communist revolution requires an overcoming of the division of production by separate enterprises and of the separation between those who are inside and those who are outside of production. If this is now theoretically recognised as the problem that communism must overcome, in situations of intense class struggle, this can begin to be posed as a practical problem.

Was this really posed practically in ‘68? Clearly not. Would it be in the future? Whether in Argentina in 2001, Greece in 2008, Cairo in 2011, or the yellow vests in France recently, one of the pronounced aspects of more recent struggles has been that they occur on a social terrain where the inside/outside issue is posed differently than it was in ‘68. The events of May ‘68, which saw almost no looting despite the withdrawal of the police, belonged to an earlier cycle of struggle. Though more minoritarian than May ‘68, the recent yellow vest movement shows how different the times are.

What’s at stake in this question is the very meaning of the revolution and communism. If communist revolution is about workers self-managing production, then surely it is only workers who can do this (and in ’68, workers showed very little interest in this). But if revolution and communism is the overcoming of separation, then the very notion of worker and not-worker, my workplace and your workplace, is something to be challenged and overturned. As Perlman and Gregoire argue, those who displayed inactivity while waiting for the spontaneity of the workers appeared to reject the bureaucratic model of socialism but accepted its ontological premises:

Consequently, revolutionaries whose aim is to liberate daily life betray their project when they abdicate to passivity or impose themselves over it: the point is to wake the dead, to force the passive to choose between a conscious acceptance of constraint or a conscious affirmation of life.⁴³

To “force the passive to choose” is, of course, often how a minority of workers inside an enterprise initiate any wildcat strike — what Perlman and Gregoire suggest is that, in the right circumstances, that is what an active “outside” group can do as well.⁴⁴ In most cases, such an attempt would be derisory and would fail — and likely it would have in ‘68 — but this failure would be its critique, not the fact that something was done by one group in relation to another.

Reclaiming the Party?

An important figure in the post ‘68 debates was Gilles Dauvé. In “Leninism and the Ultra-Left”, Dauvé, while making some similar points to Perlman and Gregoire, goes further in trying to explicitly redeem the notion of the party.⁴⁵ Dauvé argued that the “councilist” position on organisation was a critique of “Leninism”⁴⁶ which was tied negatively to its object — a reaction rather than an overcoming. In particular, he argues that councilism, like anarchism, accepts the identification of party with the Leninist party. As a reaction to the historically counter-revolutionary role that the Bolsheviks came to take, the notion of a separate collectivity of revolutionaries or communists doing anything was seen as substitutionist and as threatening to dominate the class. What this misses for Dauvé is that there is a different conception of the party to be found in Marx based on the distinction of the “historic” and “formal” party.

Marx had drawn this distinction in an 1860 letter to the poet Freilitgrath, who had been a member of the Communist League with Marx ten years before. Marx had been attempting to enlist Freiligrath’s support against slanderous claims being made by Carl Vogt about Marx and the Communist League, but Freiligrath declined to be involved, saying he was no longer a member of the party. Marx replied that he also no longer belongs to such a party because “the party… in this wholly ephemeral sense, ceased to exist for me 8 years ago” when it disbanded at his urging:

Since 1852, then, I have known nothing of “party” in the sense implied in your letter. Whereas you are a poet, I am a critic and for me the experiences of 1849-52 were quite enough. The “League”, like the société des saisons in Paris and a hundred other societies, was simply an episode in the history of a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society. [...] I have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by “party” I meant a “League” that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense.⁴⁷

It is likely that Dauvé had become aware of this distinction made by Marx through the text “Origin and Function of the Party Form”.⁴⁸ In that work, Jacques Camatte and Roger Dangeville trace the evolution of “the party” and how it has been understood by Marx and those influenced by him. Starting with the sect phase of the Communist League of the 1840s, Camatte and Dangeville follow the changing meaning of the party through the First International and the Paris Commune, and then show how these notions were first developed and then betrayed in the Second and Third Internationals, and finally how the Italian Left stood in relation to this history.

The text argues that the party is not fundamentally about forms of organisation or bureaucratic rules, but is defined instead by its “programme, the prefiguration of communist society, of the liberated and conscious human species”.⁴⁹ The communist programme, in turn, was not a product of Marx or any other individual, but something born of the struggle of the proletariat against capital in which it tries to form a community to replace the atomisation of capitalist society, and it is only given expression, often rather imperfectly, by individuals and groups.⁵⁰ Marx and Engels had an intuition of the future society based on this struggle and their work was an attempt to describe its emergence and to defend it against bourgeois society.⁵¹ Thus, the text argues that, in its historic sense, the party is an “impersonal force above generations, it represents the human species, the human existence which has finally been found. It is the consciousness of the species”.⁵² Organisations which claim to be the party, whether in the present or the past, are at best formal groups that temporarily express this historic force, but which just as often fail to do so, or represent it for some time or degree before passing over to the side of the counter-revolution.

Dauvé argued that the historic/formal distinction turns the opposition of need for the party versus fear of the party into a false dilemma. Shorn of its Leninist associations, the party no longer posed a problem: the party was not something created and built by a process of recruitment and indoctrination — as in the practice of the bureaucratic sects — but rather a spontaneous product of capitalist society that could only really be seen to emerge in revolutionary periods. Capitalism produced people who tried in one way or another to understand and combat the situation they found themselves in. Dauvé felt we can call some such people revolutionaries⁵³ or communists, and suggested that, contra the councilist fears, they should not be worried about seeking theoretical coherence and acting collectively to propagate their understandings. He contends that “the revolutionary movement is an organic structure of which theory is an inseparable and indispensable element”. Those trying to articulate such theory, those trying to “express the whole meaning of what is going on” and make practical proposals, may in normal times have little effect. But in revolutionary periods, “[i]f the expression is right and the proposal appropriate, they are parts of the struggle of the proletariat and contribute to build the ‘party’ of the communist revolution”.⁵⁴

The councilist opposition between willed and spontaneous organisation is undermined by this kind of argument. If capitalist society gives rise spontaneously to forms of organised resistance, such as strikes and social movements, then the production of communists as a willed group is in its own way a spontaneous product. There are always minorities being produced who seek out others like themselves both during struggles and in periods when less is going on. Thus, for Dauvé, the councilist valorisation of the pole of spontaneity and their denigration of the willed alternative is unjustified. That the revolution in a fundamental sense comes from one pole does not mean that minorities at the other pole don’t play a role. Individuals drawn to ideas of revolution and communism who then form “willed groups” or relate to each other in some less formal way are as much a natural product of capitalist society as the “spontaneous” struggles and movements that arise from time to time. Such groups will be imperfect because they, too, are part of bourgeois society. Many will, like most of the sects in ‘68, play a poor role, but if they do manage to express something “communist” they are ephemeral expressions of a movement that emerges in and against capitalist society. Produced in revolutionary periods such as the one which Dauvé thought he was living through, the party was not built by an act of will, it was just the organisation of an emergent movement. As a member of the informal group Dauvé was part of puts it:

When the proletariat is not revolutionary, it does not exist, and revolutionaries can produce nothing with it; it isn’t they, who by playing the people’s educators can create the historic situation in which the proletariat becomes what it is, but the very development of modern society. When such a situation appears, revolutionaries of non-working class origin, those who for many reasons, find themselves “confined” within bourgeois society, unite themselves in the proletarian party, which spontaneously forms in order to solve the revolutionary tasks.⁵⁵ However, if this 1969 critique of councilism, which draws on the historic/formal party distinction, is indebted to “Origin and Function...”, by that time Camatte’s own position had moved on. Camatte was impressed by and open to the character of the new revolt in a way the formal “Bordigist” group he had been part of was not. In the same year as Dauvé’s intervention in ICO, Camatte with Collu produced a letter later published as On Organisation, which is, if anything, more critical of the “willed group” than the councilists. Their letter denounces the attempts by political groups to recruit from the revolutionaries that were produced by the period, and rejects the suggestion by some that the journal Invariance, in which they were both involved, should constitute itself as such a group.

On Organisation goes beyond the rejection of Leninism common to anarchists and councilists by identifying a tendency for any organisation, whatever ideology it may espouse, whether it uses the term party or not, to become a gang or racket. This tendency is a result of the rivalrous, competitive existence that the capitalist mode of production imposes on individual and collective subjectivities. Consider the way political groups relate to each other as they compete for members and try to keep the ones they have. If in earlier capitalism it had been possible for working class organisations to represent some sort of community against capital, in its period of real domination, capital shapes both individual and collective subjectivities.⁵⁶ In Camatte’s view, even the group he had been part of — which, by practicing anonymity and refusing democratic voting, had opposed bourgeois individualism, or the “sterile and pathological solitude of the Ego” — evolved into a gang, a collective form of that pathological ego in relation to the world.⁵⁷

Linking back to the arguments of Origin and Function, Camatte and Collu write:

Today the party can only be the historic party. Any formal movement is the reproduction of this society, and the proletariat is essentially outside of it. A group can in no way pretend to realize community without taking the place of the proletariat, which alone can do it. Such an attempt introduces a distortion that engenders theoretical ambiguity and practical hypocrisy. It is not enough to develop the critique of capital, nor even to affirm that there are no organizational links; it’s necessary to avoid reproducing the gang structure, since it is the spontaneous product of the society.⁵⁸

So if the idea of the party as a spontaneous product had seemed to Dauvé to cut through the fear of the party of the German/Dutch Left, Camatte warned that the gang structure and its mentality is also spontaneously produced by capitalist society.⁵⁹

In 1969, when On Organisation was written, Camatte and Collu argue for adopting the attitude they see Marx taking in his letter to Freiligrath. One should refuse to constitute any kind of group, and instead simply maintain a network of contacts with those who have appropriated or are in the process of appropriating theoretical knowledge. This appropriation would have to be an independent process without followerism and pedagogy because, “the party in its historical sense is not a school”. Thus rather than identifying with a group, the revolutionary can orientate to a theory: “a work that is in process and needs to be developed”.⁶⁰ Such theory is not dependent on a group or journal but is the expression of the class struggle.

However, in a note written in 1972, Camatte identifies weaknesses in and possible misinterpretations of On Organisation. He noted that he and Collu had been incorrect to take as a model a moment of Marx’s activity from a very different period of capitalism.⁶¹ He observed that their focus on theory risked being seen as an elitist conception of the development of the revolutionary movement bringing consciousness to the masses from outside. He suggested that the critique of organisation could become an anti-organisational position, a unique selling property with which to seduce and attract in a new process of racketization.⁶² It could be seen as a return to Stirner with each individual cultivating his or her own revolutionary subjectivity. As Camatte writes:

All political representation is a screen and therefore an obstacle to a fusion of forces. Since representation can occur on the individual as well as the group level, recourse to the former level would be, for us, a repetition of the past.⁶³

So many false paths!

Starting from an Italian Left position on the party, seemingly the opposite of the councilists, we see Camatte ending in a similar place with a rejection of the pretensions of the small organised group. There is an underlying continuity in that Camatte’s notion of the group becoming a gang or racket overlaps with the councilist view that the willed group will tend inevitably to be oriented to survival in capitalism.⁶⁴ Both put their faith in the spontaneous organisation that the class (or species for the later Camatte) is led to. In spontaneous organisation there is much room for a learning dynamic in which the identity and self-understanding of those involved is transformed. In the willed group there will be more of an investment in an identity (around a set of ideas) that leads to forms of behaviour to defend that identity. The willed group — even if such group emerges spontaneously in response to a revolutionary wave — has a tendency to stick around longer than it has a purpose, becoming dominated by the gang mentality or of being “pushed towards reformist or capitalist areas and forced to have a practice which is increasingly in contradiction with their avowed principles”.⁶⁵

To Camatte, this is a reason to avoid the group form entirely. A different way of responding to the tendencies he describes is to recognise that any “willed” collective undertaking, especially outside the excitement of a revolutionary moment, will have its identitarian gang dimension — the point is to be alert to it, name it when it shows itself, and try collectively to avoid or restrain it. Indeed, one might note that the longer such groups last, the more they risk falling into this structure, which suggests that groups should form for specific purposes and only continue as long as they think they are contributing to that purpose, and if that purpose is theory, then only so long as they feel they are contributing something useful.

A purpose that we have found takes our interest indeed to which we have found ourselves driven is communist theory, the thinking about capitalism and its overcoming. Our next section addresses how we think to do this.