1. Introduction

The development of modern society and what has happened to the working class movement over the last 100 years (and, in particular, since 1917) have compelled us radically to revise most of the ideas on which that movement had been based.

Several decades have gone by since the Russian Revolution. From that revolution it is not socialism that emerged, but a new and monstrous form of exploiting society in which the bureaucracy replaced the private owners of capital and “the plan” took the place of the “free market.”

There are several basic ingredients for the revision we propose. The first is to assimilate the vast experience of the Russian revolution and of what happened to it. The next is to grasp the real significance of the Hungarian Workers’ Councils and other uprisings against the bureaucracy. But there are other ingredients to the proposed revision. A look at modern capitalism, and at the type of conflict it breeds, shows that throughout the world working people are faced with the same fundamental problems, often posed in surprisingly similar terms. These problems call for the same answer. This answer is socialism, a social system which is the very opposite both of the bureaucratic capitalism now installed in Russia, China and elsewhere – and of the type of capitalism now prevailing in the West.

The experience of bureaucratic capitalism allows us clearly to perceive what socialism is not and cannot be. A close look both at past proletarian uprisings and at the everyday life and struggles of the working class – both East and West – enables us to posit what socialism could be and should be. Basing ourselves on the experience of a century we can and must now define the positive content of socialism in a much fuller and more accurate way than could previous revolutionaries. In today’s vast ideological morass, people who call themselves socialists may be heard to assert that “they are no longer quite sure what the word means.” We hope to show that the very opposite is the case. Today, for the first time, one can begin to spell out in concrete and specific terms what socialism could really be like.

The task we are about to undertake does not only lead us to challenge many widely held ideas about socialism, many of which go back to Lenin and some to Marx. It also leads us to question widely held ideas about capitalism, about the way it works and about the real nature of its crises, ideas many of which have reached us (with or without distortion) from Marx himself. The two analyzes are complementary and, in fact, the one necessitates the other. One cannot understand the deepest essence of capitalism and its crises without a total conception of socialism. For socialism implies human autonomy, the conscious management by people of their own lives. Capitalism – both private and bureaucratic – is the ultimate negation of this autonomy, and its crises stem from the fact that the system necessarily creates this drive to autonomy, while simultaneously being compelled to suppress it.

The revision we propose did not of course start today. Various strands of the revolutionary movement – and a number of individual revolutionaries – have contributed to it over a period. In the very first issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie{5} we claimed that the fundamental division in contemporary societies was the division into order-givers (dirigeants) and order-takers (exécutants). We attempted to show how the working class’s own development would lead it to a socialist consciousness. We stated that socialism could only be the product of the autonomous action of the working class. We stressed that a socialist society implied the abolition of any separate stratum of order-givers and that it therefore implied power at the base and workers’ management of production.

But, in a sense, we ourselves have failed to develop our own ideas to the full. It would hardly be worth mentioning this fact were it not that it reflected – at its own level – the influence of factors which have dominated the evolution of revolutionary theory for a century, namely the enormous dead-weight of the ideology of exploiting society, the paralyzing legacy of traditional concepts and the difficulty of freeing oneself from inherited methods of thought.

In one sense, our revision consists of making more explicit and precise what has always been the deepest content of working class struggles – whether at their dramatic and culminating moments (revolution) or in the anonymity of working class life in the factory. In another sense, our revision consists in freeing revolutionary thought from the accumulated clinker of a century. We want to break the deforming prisms through which so many revolutionaries have become used to looking at the society around them.

Socialism aims at giving a meaning to the life and work of people; at enabling their freedom, their creativity and the most positive aspects of their personality to flourish; at creating organic links between the individual and those around him, and between the group and society; at overcoming the barriers between manual and mental work; at reconciling people with themselves and with nature. It thereby rejoins the most deeply felt aspirations of the working class in its daily struggles against capitalist alienation. These are not longings relating to some hazy and distant future. They are feelings and tendencies existing and manifesting themselves today, both in revolutionary struggles and in everyday life. To understand this is to understand that, for the worker, the final problem of history is an everyday problem.

To grasp this is also to perceive that socialism is not “nationalization” or “planning” or even an “increase in living standards.” It is to understand that the real crisis of capitalism is not due to “the anarchy of the market,” or to “overproduction” or to “the falling rate of profit.” Taken to their logical conclusion, and grasped in all their implications, these ideas alter one’s concepts of revolutionary theory, action and organization. They transform one’s vision of society and of the world.

Basic units 1