Let's Smash Up The Icons!

Whenever we state that the traditional formulas devised by Marx and Lenin, like those devised by Bakunin and Kropotkin, have now been overtaken by experience, we are not out to advance some third “over-arching conception” to replace the one that an effort has been made to erect upon the foundations of the above-named theoreticians. The legacy of Marxist communism has not – any more than that of anarchist communism – been offered historically as a rounded and closed system. Those two “-isms” are merely partial reflections of past experiences and traditions: their very emergence has come as a series of contradictions and contrasts with the practice of class struggle. So they cannot be either embraced or rejected en bloc, nor, above all, be arbitrarily replaced by a desk-bound ideological construct that would merely be the handiwork of individual whimsy.

Contrasting them or treating them both the same is a mind-game that ought to be left to dilettantes. Reconciling them or going beyond them using the intellectual resources available from an armchair or some rostrum, with no materials beyond some library or the pap of some lecturer, is to be included among the riskiest of ventures. In the end, contrasting them as “over-arching conceptions” either with each other or with who knows what “over-arching conception” immanent within and proper to the proletariat is tantamount to one’s making a stand on the same terrain as the inventors of the philosopher’s stone.

The only thing honestly to be said on the matter, is that in a class regime there is no room for an “over-arching conception” capable of articulating the truth about society and man. The ruling class is powerless when it comes to devising a harmonious and thoroughgoing interpretation of reality, as it is detached from reality by its very role as a slave-driving, parasitical class. The slave class is mired in ignorance and lacks any self-awareness. It enjoys no effective and distinct existence except when it stands up to its rulers and if it is called upon to conquer a truth of its own and the truth of the world, that can only come through the abolition of all privilege and all social ascendancy.

Those members of the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia that seek to lead the oppressed classes’ drive for emancipation often entertain the ambition of lording over them using the rallying-cry of this or that “world view” which is the offspring of their own philosophical megalomania. Sometimes it is a matter of a brand-new religion in which they are cast as both priests and mere believers. Other times, whilst clinging to a patent on a well-meaning skepticism or eclecticism, they set out to afford the masses access to esoteric formulas tailored to their psychology. The “heat-generating myths” designed to offer them the spectacle of their own intellectual powers, affords dilettantes the heroic pleasures of gladiator battles beloved of societies in decline. But they themselves are not believers in the accomplishment of the syndicalist, bolshevist, anarchist, Nazi or fascist ideal that they peddle, or rather, they regard it as just a lever designed to build their own aspirations on a more modest scale, plus the ideal of the social class from which they are drawn.

Proposing extreme, radical goals in order to accomplish much more down-to-earth social aims, as in the Reformation or the great bourgeois revolution, is the conventional route for political idealism. The role of the great thinkers of the bourgeoisie has long consisted of casting around on behalf of their class’s interests for the majestic disguise of some ferociously upsetting, radical “world view”. But the proletariat has no need of donning a disguise before it steps on to the stage: instead, its role is to tear away the masks. Behind the false Marxist beards or anarchistic hair-pieces that are on offer here and there as emblems of a revolutionary rallying cry, it is impossible to pick out one’s friends and one’s enemies. The horny-handed are always the least adept at fashioning the cardboard false noses which are alleged to be the identifying features of the people’s friends in such instances and the ability to quote from Marx on the matter is a device that suits lawyers better than it does pick-swingers. Besides, such a definition of the revolutionary elite is not ours. The elite is nothing more than the constantly recycled vanguard of the masses, the front rank of class fighters out to capture ever more outlying and widespread positions and horizons.

In the prosecution of class battles, the yardstick that enables us to distinguish friends and enemies is not the ideological uniform of their “world view”, nor the choice of ballot paper, nor the party rosette. It is the activity of individuals within their class organizations, their commitment to the workers’ cause, their loyalty to the deep-seated interest of the masses, their refusal to swap abolished privileges for brand-new social inequalities. In the proletarian camp, the task of innovating, of guiding the revolution through novel phases and the revolutionary idea in the direction of higher peaks is reserved for the most devoted servants rather than for the most learned theoreticians. It is through them, their quiet sacrifice and day-to-day example, that consciousness grabs hold of the masses and transfigures them and that the “clamour for the ideal” grows more defined and louder. New needs will always conjure up new tasks, fresh aspirations and brand-new cohorts of volunteers for the march forwards: and that as long as the men from the masses, the nameless heroes of labour and struggle can outrun the supermen, the deep-thinking politicians and the omniscient leaders. 

Puncturing the prestige of the big empty-heads of phoney science, and for a start, demonstrating of Karl Marx, Lenin, Kropotkin and anybody else that as men they were in fact the products of a class and a time, filled with all of the qualities and shortcomings of the common man, that is the task that faces us. What were they, these great figures? The comprehensive discoverers of effects and causes? Prophets whose every word should be treated as Gospel? Arbiters in matters philosophical or political? Paragons of “proletarian consciousness”? Suppliers of the recipes to be used to boil “the stew-pot of the future”? No, none of these. They themselves dismissed such claims, even though they were not always as severe as they might have been in discouraging their disciples from suggesting them. To their credit, they appreciated rather well the import and social reality of the proletarian struggles of their times and even cleared a path for them through their acerbic, powerful criticism of the illusions, false truths, philosophies and other ideological frauds by means of which the bourgeoisie blinds itself or blinds those it wants to see lose out. Embracing as a “proletarian world view” what the merciless criticism of those great cleaners spared only out of an oversight and venerating as some sort of sacred legacy the hurdles in front of which they halted, or rather, in front of which the revolutionary experience of their day and their country paused is a sad way of paying tribute to them. So what are we to say about the puerile and drunken cult by which their epigones and more or less rightful heirs, that heap of popular mini-idols, products of a sectarian fetishism, in which they are at once the saints, divinities and clergy of a soporific cult? Instead, it is around the issue of Marx versus Bakunin? Or other even pettier matters that the squabbles that pit sincerely revolutionary proletarians against one another, when they are wrong thinking of the class struggle in terms of this or that jargon consecrated by the scholastics of some school of thought; as if the differences between supporters of “dictatorship of the proletariat” and supporters of “doing away with the State” were more substance and ran deeper than the differences between exploiters and exploited, bosses and workers, masters and slaves, rulers and ruled … On both sides, there has been a readiness to seek alliance with the worst class enemies, ministers and ex-ministers, parliamentarians, shady journalists, professional rabble-rousers, literary poseurs, “star performers” from the bar, professional bureaucrats to be blithely ranked among the “Men of heart” or the “Friends of the USSR”. But on the other hand, insults, blows, shameful expulsions and sometimes even gunfire is reserved for activist proletarians who fall victim to the same reaction and fight for the same cause. Is it not high time that we asked what the differences are between these workers, ready to tear one another asunder on behalf of rival sects or organizations?  If it really boils down to issues vital to the emancipation of labouring humanity, or just to empty verbiage, proper nouns and pointless claims to hold a patent on the truth? The proletarian iconoclasts must have their say. 

Article signed AP [André Prudhommeaux: André Prunier was his other main nom de plume]

From La voix libertaire No 207/11 February 1933

 

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.