No Resolve

Okay, so I admit it, I cracked. After nearly four months of self-denial, I gave in and bought a book, scuppering my New Year's resolution; it doesn't mean I'll be buying any more, of course (it doesn't give me the excuse for a book-buying bender).

You have to understand, it was a book I just had to buy.

This one.

For Workers' Power, by Maurice Brinton, edited by David Goodway.

It may seem obscurantist and a bizarre choice for a deal-breaker, even with myself, but Brinton was a major influence on Solidarity, was himself influenced by Castoriadis, and is cited as an influence by Michael Albert, who co-founded Z Maagazine.

Here's the blurb from AK Press's site:


"It is hard to conceive of anyone doing a better job than Goodway and AK Press at bringing Brinton's politics and whole milieu back into prime focus. Brinton had a big effect on me, years back, and I never saw half the materials presented here. Brinton was a contributor to the past half century's activism and sums many of its lessons most brilliantly. To ignore him is to practice self denial. Don't do it." [Michael Albert]


"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea..."

Reading the ideas of Maurice Brinton for the first time proves discomforting to most, and downright insufferable to many. The most prolific contributor to the British Solidarity Group (1961-1992), he sought to inspire a mass movement based on libertarian socialist politics. Attempting to blow away the bad air of the "Old" and "New" Left alike, Brinton used the past as a guide - but not an anchor - in his visionary writings.

With unrestrained passion, clarity and consistency, he examines the totality of revolutionary politics and flays the "revolutionaries" who obstruct their realization. Included here are Brinton's finest essays, pamphlets, eye-witness reportage and his most influential works - The Irrational in Politics and The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control."


Michael Albert has some interesting material over at Z Net, including a site devoted to Parecon, short for Participatory economics, "a type of economy proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalism. The underlying values are equity, solidarity, diversity, and participatory self management. The main institutions are workers and consumers councils utilizing self managed decision making, balanced job complexes, remuneration according to effort and sacrifice, and participatory planning."


It also features a collection of papers and discussions by Albert, including a debate with Alan Haass of the International Socialist Organization, in which Castoriadis's indirect influence is apparent:

"On the one hand, in orthodox variants, and in almost all its texts, the Labor Theory of Value misunderstands the determination of wages, prices, and profits in capitalist economies and turns activists’ thoughts away from seeing how the dynamics of the workplace and market are largely functions of bargaining power and social control, categories that the labor theory of value largely ignores. Likewise, orthodox Marxist crisis theory, in all its variants, distorts understanding of capitalist economies and anti-capitalist prospects by often seeing intrinsic collapse where no such prospect exists and by often orienting activists away from the importance of their own organizing as a far more promising basis for change."

Anyone who knows me will tell you what a pain in the arse I am when it comes to my objections to the Labour Theory of Value, but it needs to be repeated over and over again: It's a metaphysical abstraction, not an economic one, and as such it explains nothing.

Albert again, channeling old Cornelius:

"Leninism is a natural outgrowth of Marxism when employed by people in capitalist societies, and Marxism Leninism, far from being the "theory and strategy for the working class, is, instead, due to its focus, concepts, values, goals, organizational and tactical commitments, the theory and strategy of the coordinator class, not the working class. It employs coordinator class organizational and decision making logic and structure, and seeks coordinator class dominating economic aims."

This is an argument that seems a little dated now, but when I was hanging around the Trots at the start of the 80s, their sense of entitlement and superiority was nauseating. Marxism offers them that sense of entitlement: It is the (false)ideology of the foreman class, of supervisors, technicians, teachers, and "those who know better." Former Trots like Castoriadis, willing to embrace Anarchist Communism, have always seemed to me to offer a genuinely socialist alternative.

So now you understand: I just had to buy this book.