Parerga and Paralipomena

Maurice Brinton: For Workers Power

I know I promised a review; please accept, instead, a trip down false memory lane:


I’m too young and fresh-faced to be able to recall Solidarity at the height of their powers and influence, back in the 60s and 70s. My first encounters with them must have been at anarchist bookfairs in London in the very early 80s, when I was studying sociology at the LSE and contemplating a move away from the Marxism I’d been drawn to by ‘A level’ sociology and my erstwhile mentor, the late Don Henry. I’d already had a series of negative experiences with the WRP detailed elsewhere on C&S, and it was beginning to come clear to me that the Marxist claim that the Communists’ and the proletariat’s interests were identical because they were not separated by differences in property ownership was undermined by both the history of the Russian Revolution and Marx’s own manoeuvrings in the International.

Nevertheless, the only anarchists I knew in those days were Crasstafarian pacifists, vegetarian animal rightists, and anti-work Situationists and Idlers—none of them exclusively middle- or working-class, but none of them either engaging with the problems of social organization, administration, and the distribution of work and resources that I, as a budding sociologist, thought were crucial to a legitimate critique of existing social arrangements. Thus, as you can imagine, in an ocean of black-clad dog-on-string neo-hippies, the group of middle-aged men in cardigans and slippers, smoking pipes in the corner of the room, held a fascination for me that I struggled to shake off.

“Who earth are they?” I asked some bloke on the Direct Action bookstall.

“Oh, that’s Solidarity. The libertarian socialists. Not strictly anarchists.”

Well, not anarchists in the prevailing sense of the time, and throughout this collection of Maurice Brinton’s writings, he carefully avoids referring to Solidarity as an anarchist organization. Personally, I’ve never seen this as a problem; if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc. What is most striking about this disinclination (something I mentioned en passant to Darren over at Inveresk Street in commenting on the SPGB’s review of the same book), is how typically it reflects Brinton’s reluctance to diverge from the positions of Cornelius Castoriadis, Solidarity’s ideological touchstone and one of the leading lights of Socialisme ou Barbarie. And, if anything, that is the most disappointing aspect of this book: There’s very little in here that can’t be found in the writings of Castoriadis. For sure, there are reviews of Castoriadis’s pseudonymous works in which Brinton says, “Of course, we don’t agree with everything he says,” but this is clearly a ‘collective we,’ signifying that while other members of Solidarity might disagree with Castoriadis, Brinton doesn’t. Indeed, he almost seems to tag along behind Castoriadis in such a way that you can practically map out parallel trajectories in their thought, right down to the adoption of psychoanalysis as a liberatory philosophy and the necessity of equalization of wages in a socialist society (now I think of it, THAT was one of the characterizing features other anarchists used to define Solidarity: “What do they believe in?” I asked. “Everyone should be paid the same wage,” would come the reply).

Those parallel trajectories, to be fair, cease their symmetry with the merger of Solidarity and Social Revolution, which clearly led to a diminution in Castoriadis’s influence. It is only after this merger that Brinton talks of the abolition of wage labour and the wageless society. Moreover, it’s only really at that point that Solidarity venture beyond the workerism that had set them apart from the rest of the anarchist movement—other than the anarcho-syndicalists, natch—and which had drawn me to them in the first place (never enough to join, mind you; the anarcho-syndicalists held greater appeal just because they did not fetishize any particular guru and because they were still offering a class-based analysis, in contrast to Solidarity’s rather vague notion of “order givers versus order takers”).

Thus, it’s possible to trace through Brinton’s writings the gradual emergence of a more sophisticated and broader understanding of the nature of social transformation, especially after the merger. It must have been dawning on a number of people that much of the baggage that came with class-based anarchism was beginning to look outdated, had lost not just its appeal to punters but also its explanatory power, all thanks to its by-then sclerotic adherence to economism (I even knew anarcho-syndicalists who defined anarchism as “Marxist economics plus anti-statist politics”); the Marxist infra/superstructure dichotomy they still used as a means of diagnosis and divination resulted in an attitude that I encountered on more than one occasion, namely, a sneering workerism that disregarded (as bourgeois moralism) noneconomic analyses of other power relationships in society, between men and women, say, parents and children, white and black, and between human beings and nature as a whole. Late on in this collection, Brinton quite rightly criticizes those anarchists who had failed to engage with the new Marxist thinkers like Habermas, Gorz, and Thompson, thinkers who had recognized that the left’s conception of what constituted revolutionary solutions to the problems posed by contemporary capitalism needed to be completely revised.

It took a very long time for people to change their minds. The most frequently repeated phrase in this book is Brinton’s observation that, “One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.” Generally, it’s Brinton’s challenge to the Trotskyist and Leninist left from which he, Castoriadis, and the rest of Solidarity came (whereas his most common objection to the anarchism of the 60s and 70s is its reluctance to theorize, its devotion to “actionism” in place of considered analysis). Fortunately, thanks to people like Brinton, the anarchist movement at least has responded, even if anarchism is still criticized by Marxists for being undertheorized. In my view, it’s contemporary anarchism’s willingness to “think on the run,” to theorize not opportunistically but accurately, that has enabled it to engage with real changes that have taken place over the past 40 years and to avoid placing a template over events in order to make reality conform to theory.

Everything else aside, this volume has the saving grace of containing Brinton’s essay “The Bolsheviks and Workers Control,” compulsory reading, in my view, for anyone on the left who seriously imagines that the concepts of ‘the vanguard party’ or ‘democratic centralism’ or ‘professional revolutionaries’ have anything to offer socialism. The Bolsheviks’ insistence, at various points during the revolution, that the factory committees be accountable to the trade unions and the trade unions to the Party, so that what might have been workers’ management deteriorated into workers’ control and then still further into the dictatorship of the Party, demonstrates the necessity of vigilance against strategies presenting themselves as progressive which at the same time take away from people control over their own lives (Interestingly, Brinton comments that he has no objection to centralization; what is important is how democratic the process of centralization is, an intriguing position given all his other insights throughout this book into the dangers of bureaucratic growth when the decision-making process is centralized. Co-ordination is a necessity, I accept, but the distancing of decision-making powers from the grass roots seems to be antithetical to the withering away of the state that even Marx envisaged).

In conclusion, then: There is ONE major change in my thinking that I can attribute unreservedly to Solidarity. The, at heart, very simple observation that ownership of the means of production is meaningless if ownership is just legalese; if, in practice, it does not mean control and management of the means of the production, it means the formation of a new class system. For what does it mean for me to own something if I can’t do with it what I want? If I don’t have control over it, how can I be said to own it? And this is where we came in: Solidarity confirmed for me the falsehood underlying the Marxist belief that because there are no differences in property relations between the Party and the proletariat, there can be no conflict of interest, a belief disproved by Marxism in practice.

The rest, as they say, is history.