Chapter 3 : A New Period Begins for the Labor Movement

3. A New Period Begins for the Labor Movement

Under what conditions can this situation change in the future? First, the experience of the preceding period will have to allow revolutionary militants and workers alike to become aware of the contradictory and, basically, reactionary elements in their own and the other’s conceptions and attitudes. Militants will have to overthrow these traditional ideas and come around to viewing revolutionary theory, program, politics, activity, and organization in a new way, in a socialist way. On the other hand, the proletariat will have to come around to seeing its struggle as an autonomous struggle and the revolutionary organization not as a leadership responsible for its fate but as one moment and one instrument in its struggle.

Do these conditions exist now? Is this overthrow of traditional ideas an effort of will, an inspiration, or a new, more correct theory? No, this overthrow is made possible from now on by one great objective fact, specifically, the bureaucratization of the labor movement. The action of the proletariat has produced a bureaucracy. This bureaucracy has become integrated into the system of exploitation. If the proletariat’s struggle against the bureaucracy continues, it will be turned not only against bureaucrats as persons but against bureaucracy as a system, as a type of social relationship, as a reality and an ideology corresponding to this reality.

This is an essential corollary to what was said earlier about the role of objective factors. There are no economic or other laws making bureaucratization henceforth impossible, but there is a development that has become objective, for society has become bureaucratized and so the proletariat’s struggle against this society can only be a struggle against bureaucracy. The destruction of bureaucracy is not “predestined,” just as the victory of the proletariat in its struggle is not “predestined” either. But the conditions for this victory are from now on satisfied by social reality, for awareness of the problems of bureaucracy no longer depends upon any theoretical arguments or upon any exceptional amount of lucidity; it can result from the daily experience of workers who encounter bureaucracy not as a potential threat in the distant future but as an enemy of flesh and bone, born of their very own activity.

Proletariat and Bureaucracy in the Present Period

The events of recent years show that the proletariat is gaining experience of bureaucratic organizations not as leadership groups that are “mistaken” or that “betray,” but in an infinitely more profound way.

Where these organizations are in power, as in Eastern Europe, the proletariat sees them of necessity as purely and simply the incarnation of the system of exploitation. When it manages to break the totalitarian yoke, its revolutionary struggle is not just directed against bureaucracy; it puts forward aims that express in positive terms the experience of bureaucratization. In 1953 the workers of East Berlin asked for a “metalworkers’ government” and later the Hungarian workers’ councils demanded workers’ management of production.[16]

In the majority of Western countries, the workers’ attitude toward bureaucratic organizations shows that they see them as foreign and alien institutions. In contrast to what was still happening at the end of the Second World War, in no industrialized country do workers still believe that “their” parties or trade unions are willing or able to bring about a fundamental change in their situation. They may “support” them by voting for them as a lesser evil; they may use them — this is often still the case as far as trade unions are concerned — as one uses a lawyer or the fire brigade. But rarely do they mobilize themselves for them or at their call, and never do they actively participate in them. Membership in trade unions may rise or fall, no one attends trade-union meetings. Parties can rely less and less on the active militancy of workers who are party members; they now function mainly through paid permanent staff made up of “left-wing” members of the petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals. In the eyes of the workers, these parties and trade unions are part of the established order — more or less rotten than the rest — but basically the same as them. When workers’ struggles erupt they often do so outside the bureaucratic organizations and sometimes directly against them.[17]

We therefore have entered a new phase in the development of the proletariat that can be dated, if you like, from 1953; this is the beginning of a historical period during which the proletariat will try to rid itself of the remnants of its creations of 1890 and 1917. Henceforth, when the workers put forward their own aims and seriously struggle to achieve them, they will be able to do so only outside, and most often in conflict with, bureaucratic organizations. This does not mean that the latter will disappear. For as long as the proletariat accepts the system of exploitation, organizations expressing this state of affairs will exist and will continue to serve as instruments for the integration of the proletariat into capitalist society. Without them, capitalist society can no longer possibly function. But because of this very fact, each struggle will tend to set the workers against these bureaucratized organizations; and if these struggles develop, new organizations will rise up from the proletariat itself, for sections of wage laborers, salaried workers, and intellectuals will feel the need to act in a systematic and permanent fashion to help the proletariat to achieve its new objectives.

The Need for a New Organization

If the working class is to enter a new phase of activity and development, immense practical and ideological needs will arise.

The proletariat will need organs that will allow it to express its experiences and opinions beyond the workshop and the office where the capitalist structure of society at present confines them and that will enable it to smash the bourgeois and bureaucratic monopoly over the means of expression. It will need information centers to tell it about what is happening among various groups of workers, within the ruling classes, in society in general, and in other countries. It will need organs for ideological struggle against capitalism and the bureaucracy capable of drawing out a positive socialist conception of the problems of society. It will feel the need for a socialist perspective to be defined, for the problems faced by a working class in power to be brought out and worked out, and for the experience of past revolutions to be drawn out and put at the disposal of present generations. It will need material means and instruments to carry out these tasks as well as interoccupational, interregional, and international liaisons to bring people and ideas together. It will need to attract office workers, technicians, and intellectuals into its camp and to integrate them into its struggle.

The working class cannot directly satisfy these needs itself except in a period of revolution. The working class can bring about a revolution “spontaneously,” make the most far-reaching demands, invent forms of struggle of incomparable effectiveness, and create organs to express its power. But the working class as such, in a totally undifferentiated state, will not, for example, produce a national workers’ newspaper, the absence of which is sorely felt today; it will be workers and militants who will produce it, and who will of necessity organize to produce it. It will not be the working class as a whole that spreads the news of a particular struggle fought in a particular place; if organized workers and militants don’t do it, then this example will be lost, for it will remain unknown. In periods of normalcy, the working class as such will not absorb within itself the technicians and intellectuals whom capitalist society tends to separate from the workers all their lives; and without this sort of integration a host of problems facing the revolutionary movement in a modern society will remain insoluble. Neither will the working class as such nor intellectuals as such solve the problem of how to carry on a continuous elabouration of revolutionary theory and ideology, for such a resolution can only come about through a fusion of the experience of workers and the positive elements of modern culture. Now, the only place in contemporary society in which this fusion can take place is a revolutionary organization.

To work toward satisfying these needs therefore necessarily implies building an organization as large, as strong, and as effective as possible. We believe this organization can exist only under two conditions.

The first condition is that the working class recognize it as an indispensable tool in its struggle. Without substantial support from the working class the organization could not develop for better or for worse. The phobia about bureaucratization certain people are developing at the moment fails to recognize a basic fact: There is very little room for a new bureaucracy, objectively (the existing bureaucracies satisfy the needs of the system of exploitation) as well as, and above all, in the consciousness of the proletariat. Or else, if the proletariat again allowed a bureaucratic organization to develop and once more fell under its hold, the conclusion would have to be that all the ideas on which we base ourselves are false, at any rate as far as the present historical period and probably as far as socialist prospects are concerned. For this would mean that the proletariat was incapable of establishing a socialist relationship with a political organization, that it cannot solve the problem of its relations with the sphere of ideology, with intellectuals, and with other social groups on a healthy and fruitful basis, and therefore, ultimately, that it would find the problem of the “State” an insoluble one.

But such an organization will only be recognized by the proletariat as an indispensable tool in its struggle if — and this is the second condition — it learns all the lessons of the previous historical period and if it puts itself at the level of the proletariat’s present experience and needs. Such an organization will be able to develop and indeed exist only if its activity, structure, ideas, and methods correspond to the anti-bureaucratic consciousness of the workers and express it and only if it is able to define revolutionary politics, theory, action, and work on new bases.

Revolutionary Politics

The end, and at the same time the means, of revolutionary politics is to contribute to the development of the consciousness of the proletariat in every sphere and especially where the obstacles to this development are greatest: with respect to the problem of society taken as a whole. But awareness is not recording and playing back, learning ideas brought in from the outside, or contemplating ready-made truths. It is activity, creation, the capacity to produce. It is therefore not a matter of “raising consciousness” through lessons, no matter how high the quality of the contents or of the teacher; it is rather to contribute to the development of the consciousness of the proletariat as a creative faculty.

Not only then is it not a question of revolutionary politics imposing itself on the proletariat or of manipulating it, but also it cannot be a question of preaching to the proletariat or of teaching it a “correct theory.” The task of revolutionary politics is to contribute to the formation of the consciousness of the proletariat by contributing those elements of which it is dispossessed. But the proletariat can come to exert control over these elements, and, what is more important, it can effectively integrate them into its own experience and therefore make something out of them, only if they are organically connected with it. This is completely the opposite of “simplification” or popularization, and implies rather a continual deepening of the questions asked. Revolutionary politics must constantly show how society’s most general problems are contained in the daily life and activity of the workers, and inversely, how the conflicts tearing apart their lives are, in the last analysis, of the same nature as those that divide society. It must show the connection between the solutions the workers offer to problems they face at work and those that are applicable to society as a whole. In short, it must extract the socialist content in what is constantly being created by the proletariat (whether it is a matter of a strike or of a revolution), formulate it coherently, propagate it, and show its universal import.

This is not to suggest that revolutionary politics is anything like a passive expression or reflection of working-class consciousness. This consciousness contains something of everything, both socialist elements and capitalist ones as we have shown at great length. There is Budapest and there are also large numbers of French workers who treat Algerians like bougnoules;[18] there are strikes against hierarchy and there are interunion jurisdictional disputes. Revolutionary politics can and must combat capitalism’s continuous penetration into the proletariat, for revolutionary politics is merely one aspect of the struggle of the working class against itself. It necessarily implies making a choice among the things the working class produces, asks for, and accepts. The basis for this choice is revolutionary ideology and theory.

Revolutionary Theory

The long-prevalent conception of revolutionary theory — the science of society and revolution, as elabourated by specialists and introduced into the proletariat by the party — is in direct contradiction to the very idea of a socialist revolution being the autonomous activity of the masses. But it is just as erroneous on the theoretical plane. There is no “proof” of the inevitable collapse of the system of exploitation.[19] There is even less “truth” in the possibility of socialism being established by a theoretical elabouration operating outside the concrete content created by the historic, everyday activity of the proletariat. The proletariat develops on its own toward socialism — otherwise there would be no prospect for socialism. The objective conditions for this development are given by capitalist society itself. But these conditions only establish the context and define the problems the proletariat will encounter in its struggle; they are a long way from determining the content of its answers to these problems. Its responses are a creation of the proletariat, for this class takes up the objective elements of the situation and at the same time transforms them, thereby opening up a previously unknown and unsuspected field of action and objective possibilities. The content of socialism is precisely this creative activity on the part of the masses that no theory ever could or ever will be able to anticipate. Marx could not have anticipated the commune (not as an event but as a form of social organization) nor Lenin the soviets, nor could either of them have anticipated worker’s management. Marx could only draw conclusions from and recognize the significance of the action of the Parisian proletariat during the Commune — and he merits the great distinction of having shattered his own previously held views to do so. But it would be just as false to say that once these conclusions have been reached, the theory possesses the truth and can rigidify it in formulations that will remain valid indefinitely. These formulations will be valid only until the next phase of activity by the masses, for each time they again enter into action the masses tend to go beyond their previous level of action, and thereby beyond the conclusions of previous theoretical elabourations.

Socialism is not a correct theory as opposed to false theories; it is the possibility of a new world rising out of the depths of society that will bring into question the very notion of “theory.” Socialism is not a correct idea. It is a project for the transformation of history. Its content is that those who half the time are the objects of history will become wholly its subjects — which would be inconceivable if the meaning of this transformation were possessed by a particular group of individuals.

Consequently, the conception of revolutionary theory must be changed. It must be modified, in the first place, with respect to the ultimate source for its ideas and principles — which can be nothing else but the historic as well as day-to-day experience and action of the proletariat. All of economic theory has to be reconstructed around what is contained in embryo in the tendency of workers toward equality in pay; the entire theory of production around the informal organization of workers in the factory; all of political theory around the principles embodied in the soviets and the councils. It is only with the help of these landmarks that theory can illuminate and make use of what is of revolutionary value among the general cultural creations of contemporary society.

The conception of theory must be modified, in the second place, with respect to both its objective and function. This cannot be to churn out the eternal truths of socialism, but to assist in the struggle for the liberation of the proletariat and humanity. This does not mean that theory is a utilitarian appendage of revolutionary struggle or that its value is to be measured by the degree of effectiveness of propaganda. Revolutionary theory is itself an essential moment in the struggle for socialism and is such to the degree that it contains the truth. Not speculative or contemplative truth, but truth bound up with practice, truth that casts light upon a project for the transformation of the world. Its function, then, is to state explicitly, and on every occasion, the meaning of the revolutionary venture and of the workers’ struggle; to shed light on the context in which this action is set, to situate the various elements in it and to provide an overall explanatory schema for understanding these elements and for relating them to each other; and to maintain the vital link between the past and the future of the movement. But above all, it is to elabourate the prospects for socialism. For revolutionary theory, the ultimate guarantor for the critique of capitalism and for the prospect of a new society is to be found in the activity of the proletariat, its opposition to established forms of social organization and its tendency to instaurate new relationships between people. But theory can and must bring out the truths that spring from this activity by showing their universal validity. It must show that the proletariat’s challenge to capitalist society expresses the deepest contradiction within that society; it must show the objective possibility of a socialist society. It therefore must define the socialist outlook as completely as possible at any given moment according to the experience and activity of the proletariat — and in return interpret this experience according to this outlook.

Indeed, the conception of theory must be modified with respect to the way it is elabourated. As an expression of what is universally valid in the experience of the proletariat and as a fusion of that experience with the revolutionary elements in contemporary culture, revolutionary theory cannot be elabourated, as was done in the past, by a particular stratum of intellectuals. It will have no value, no consistency with what it elsewhere proclaims to be its essential principles unless it is constantly being replenished, in practice, by the experience of the workers as it takes shape in their day-to-day lives. This implies a radical break with the practice of traditional organizations. The intellectuals’ monopoly over theory is not broken by the fact that a tiny group of workers are “educated” by the organization — and thus transformed into second-string intellectuals; on the contrary, this simply perpetuates the problem. The task the organization is up against in this sphere is to merge intellectuals with workers as workers as it is elabourating its views. This means that the questions asked, and the methods for discussing and working out these problems, must be changed so that it will be possible for the worker to take part. This is not a case of “the teacher making allowances,” but rather the primary condition to be fulfilled if revolutionary theory is to remain adequate to its principles, its object, and its content. There obviously cannot be equal participation on all subjects; the important thing is that there be equal participation on the basic ones. Now, for revolutionaries, the first change to bring about concerns the question of what is a basic subject. It is clear that workers could not participate as workers and on the basis of their experience in a discussion on the falling rate of profit. It so happens, as if by accident, that this problem is, strictly speaking, unimportant (even scientifically). More generally, nonparticipation in traditional organizations has gone along with a conception of revolutionary theory as a “science” that has no connection with people’s experiences except in its most remote consequences. What we are saying here leads us to adopt a diametrically opposed position; by definition, nothing can be of basic concern to revolutionary theory if there is no way of linking it up organically with the workers’ own experience. It is also obvious that this connection is not always simple and direct and that the experience involved here is not experience reduced to pure immediacy. The mystification that there is some kind of “spontaneous process” through which the worker can, through an effortless and magic operation, find everything he needs to make a socialist revolution in the here and now of his own experience is the exact counterpart to the bureaucratic mystification it is trying to combat, and it is just as dangerous.

These considerations show that it is vain to talk of revolutionary theory outside a revolutionary organization. Only an organization formed as a revolutionary workers’ organization, in which workers numerically predominate and dominate it on fundamental questions, and which creates broad avenues of exchange with the proletariat, thus allowing it to draw upon the widest possible experience of contemporary society — only an organization of this kind can produce a theory that will be anything other than the isolated work of specialists.

Revolutionary Action

The task of the organization is not just to arrive at a conception — the clearest possible — of the revolutionary struggle and then keep it to itself. This conception has no meaning unless it is a moment in this struggle; it has no value unless it can aid in the workers’ struggle and assist in the formation of their experience. These two aspects are inseparable. Unlike the intellectual, whose experiences are formed by reading, writing, and speculative thinking, workers can form their experiences only through their actions. The organization therefore can contribute to the formation of workers’ experience only if (a) it acts in an exemplary fashion, and (b) it helps the workers to act in an effective and fruitful way.

Unless it wants to renounce its existence completely, the organization cannot renounce acting, nor can it give up trying to influence actions and events in a particular direction. No form of action considered in itself can be ruled out in advance. These forms of action can only be judged by their effectiveness in achieving the aim of the organization — which continues to be the lasting development of the consciousness of the proletariat. These forms range from the publication of journals and pamphlets to the issuing of leaflets calling for such and such an action and the promulgation of slogans that in a given historic situation can allow a rapid crystallization of the awareness of the proletariat’s own aims and will to act. The organization can carry through this action coherently and consciously only if it has a point of view on the immediate as well as the historical problems confronting the working class and only if it defends this point of view before the working class — in other words, only if it acts according to a program that condenses and expresses the experience of the labor movement up to that point.

Three tasks facing the organization at present are highly urgent and require a more precise definition.

The first is to bring to expression the experience of the workers and to help them become aware of the awareness they already possess. Two enormous obstacles prevent workers from expressing themselves. The first is the material impossibility of expressing themselves as a result of the monopoly over the means of expression exercised by the bourgeoisie, the parties of the “Left,” and the trade unions. The revolutionary organization will have to put its organs at the disposal of workers, whether organized or not. But there is a second, even more formidable obstacle: Even when they are given the material means to express themselves, the workers do not do so. At the root of this attitude is found the idea constantly spawned [créée] by bourgeois society and encouraged by “working-class” organizations that what workers have to say does not really matter. The conviction that the “great” problems of society are unrelated to working-class experience, and that they belong to the field of specialists and leaders, is constantly taking root in the proletariat; in the last analysis, this conviction is the essential condition for the survival of the system of exploitation. It is the duty of the revolutionary organization to combat this, first, by its critique of present society, showing in particular the bankruptcy of this system and the inability of its leaders to solve their problems; and then and above all, by showing the positive importance of the workers’ experience and the answer this contains in embryo to the most general problems of society. It is only insofar as the idea is destroyed that what the workers have to say is insignificant, that workers will express themselves.

The second task of the organization is to place before the proletariat an overall conception of the problems of present-day society and, in particular, the problem of socialism. Workers find it hard to envision the possibility of workers’ management of society and see rather the degradation the idea of socialism has suffered through its bureaucratic caricatures. Taken together, these difficulties constitute the main obstacles in the way of revolutionary action on the part of the proletariat in this period of deep crisis in the social relationships of capitalism. It is for the organization to rearouse in the proletariat this awareness of the possibility of socialism; without it, revolutionary development will be infinitely more difficult.

The organization’s third task is to help the workers defend their immediate interests and position. As a result of the complete bureaucratization of trade unions in the great majority of cases and the inanity of any move aimed at replacing them by new and “improved” trade unions, today the revolutionary organization alone can take on an entire series of functions essential for the success and even the lodging of economic demands. These include the functions of inquiry, communication, and liaison; the basic material functions that go along with them; and finally, and especially, the functions involved in the systematic clarification and circulation of exemplary demands, organizational forms, and methods of conducting struggles that have been created by one or another category of workers. This action by the organization in no way denies the importance that autonomous, minority factions of militant workers in various companies might take on in the coming period. The action of such groupings cannot in the end be successful unless they manage to go beyond the narrow framework of the firm and expand onto the interoccupational and national levels; moreover, the organization can make a decisive contribution to the extension of their role. But what is most important, experience shows that such groupings will only remain passing phenomena unless they are animated by militants who are convinced of the necessity for permanent action and who, as a result of this conviction, link this action with problems that go beyond the situation of workers in their firm. These militants will find the organization an indispensable support for their action, and most often they will originate from this organization. In other words, the formation of minority factions within firms will most of the time be achieved as a result of the activity of the revolutionary organization.

The Structure of the Organization

In this sphere too, the organization’s inspiration can come only from the socialist structures created by the working class in the course of its history. It must let itself be guided by the principles on which the soviet and the factory council were founded, not copying such organizations literally, but adapting them to suit the conditions in which it is placed. This means:

1. That in deciding their own activities, grass-roots organs enjoy as much autonomy as is compatible with the general unity of action of the organization;

2. That direct democracy, i.e., collective decision making by all those involved, be applied wherever it is materially possible; and

3. That the central organs empowered to make decisions be composed of delegates elected from the grass-roots organs who are liable to recall at any time.

In other words, the principles of workers’ management must govern the operation and structure of the organization. Apart from them, there are only capitalist principles, which, as we have seen, can only result in the establishment of capitalist relationships.

In particular, it is the problem of the relationship between centralization and decentralization that the organization must resolve on the basis of the principles of workers’ management. The organization is a collective unit, in action and even in production; it therefore cannot exist without unity of action, and consequently all questions relating to the organization as a whole necessarily involve centralized decision making. “Centralized” does not mean that decisions are to be made by a central committee; on the contrary, they are to be made by the organization as a whole, either directly or through elected, recallable delegates, using the principle of majority vote. Furthermore, it is essential that within the framework of these central decisions, the grass-roots organs govern their own activities autonomously.

The confusion created by bureaucratic domination over the past thirty years has turned some people today against centralization as such (whether in a revolutionary organization or in a socialist society) and has led them to contrast it with democracy. Such an opposition is absurd. Feudalism was decentralized, and if Khrushchev’s Russia became decentralized it would not make it any more democratic. On the other hand, a factory council is centralization itself. Democracy is only a form of centralization; it means simply that the center is the totality of those who take part and that decisions are made by a majority of these participants and not by any authority apart from them. Bolshevik “democratic centralism” was not democratic centralism, as we saw earlier. In reality, it works by assigning decision-making functions to a minority of leaders. The proletariat has always been centralist. This is as true of its historical actions (the commune, soviets, workers’ councils) as of its current struggles. Likewise, it has been democratic, that is to say, a supporter of the rule of the majority. If the social origin of opposition to the majority principle is to be sought, it certainly will not be found in the working class.

Nevertheless, the problem of democracy in the organization concerns not only the form in which decisions are made but the entire process by which these decisions are arrived at. Democracy is meaningful only if those who are to make the decisions are able to do so in full knowledge of the relevant facts.[20] The problem of democracy, therefore, also embraces the problem of obtaining adequate information; but it does not involve only this, for it also includes the nature of the questions posed and the attitude of the participants toward these questions and toward the results of this or that decision. Finally, democracy is impossible without the active and permanent participation of all the members of the organization in its work and in its operation. Again, this participation does not and cannot result from the psychological peculiarities of militants, such as their force of character or their enthusiasm. It depends above all on the type of work the organization proposes to them and on the way in which this work is conceived and carried out. If the work they do reduces them to the role of executants of decisions actually made by others, their participation will be infinitesimal. Even if these decisions are implemented with great devotion, the degree of participation necessarily will be only a small fraction of what it is potentially. It is therefore the degree of opportunity afforded by the organization to each of its members to participate in the output of the organization as a creative member of the group and to use his own experience to exert control over this output that will allow one to measure the degree of democracy the organization has been able to attain.

Can we claim, therefore, to have solved all problems once and for all? Can we say now that we are immune from the modes of thought of established society and that we have found the “recipe” for the organization to avoid all bureaucratization and for the proletariat to avoid all mistakes and defeats? To suppose this would be to understand nothing at all of what has been said, and indeed, to expect a reply of this sort would be to understand nothing at all about the type of questions asked. The reply to those who ask for guarantees that a new organization will not become bureaucratized is this: “You are already completely bureaucratized yourselves, you are the ideal infantry of a new bureaucracy if you believe that by merely speculating about it, a theoretician will arrive at a plan that will eliminate the possibility of bureaucratization. The only guarantee against bureaucratization lies in your own thought and action — in your greatest possible participation and certainly not in your abstention.”

We have said for some years in this journal [Socialism or Barbarism] that revolutionary activity is caught in a crucial contradiction: It participates in the society it is trying to abolish. This is the same sort of contradictory position the proletariat itself is in under capitalism. It is nonsensical to look now for a theoretical solution to this contradiction. No such solution exists, for a theoretical solution to a real contradiction is an absurdity. This does not warrant abstention but rather struggle. The contradiction resolves itself partially at each stage of action, but only revolution can resolve it totally. It is partially resolved in practice when a revolutionary puts before workers ideas that allow them to organize and clarify their experience — and, when these workers use these ideas to go further, to give rise to new, positive contents of the struggle, and eventually to “educate the educator.” It is resolved in part when an organization proposes a form of struggle and this form is taken up, enriched, and broadened by the workers. It is resolved when genuine collective work becomes instaurated within the organization; when each person’s ideas and experiences are discussed by the others, and then surpassed, to be merged in a common aim and action; and when militants develop themselves through their participation in every aspect of the life and activity of the organization.

None of this is ever gained once and for all, but it is only along these lines that progress can be made. Whatever the form of the organization and its activity, effective participation by militants will always be a problem, an achievement that must be reconsolidated daily. The problem will not be solved by decreeing that there will be no organization — which comes down to accepting a role of no participation whatsoever, i.e., the exact equivalent of the complete bureaucratic solution. Nor can it be solved by constitutional rules or bylaws that would automatically guarantee maximum participation — for no such rules exist. There are simply rules that allow for participation and others that make it impossible. Whatever the contents of the organization’s revolutionary theory or program, however deep their connections with the experience and needs of the proletariat, there will always be the possibility, the certainty even, that at some point this theory and program will be outstripped by history, and there will always be the risk that those who have defended them up to that point will tend to make them into absolutes and try to subordinate and adapt the creations of living history to fit them. We can limit this risk and educate militants and, as a start, ourselves by the thought that the ultimate criterion of socialism lies in the people who struggle today and not in the resolutions voted on last year. But it can never be eliminated completely, and in any case it cannot be eliminated by eradicating theory and program, for this comes down to eliminating all rational action and to abandoning life in order to preserve bad reasons for living.

This contradictory situation has not been created by the revolutionary militant. It is imposed on him, as it is imposed on the proletariat, by capitalist society. What distinguishes the revolutionary militant from the bourgeois philosopher is that the former does not remain spellbound by the contradiction once he has become aware of it, but struggles to overcome it, not through solitary reflection or speculation, but through collective action. And to act is, in the first place, to get oneself organized.