Syndicalism
Demagogues
are the worst enemies of the working class, wrote Lenin.
These Generic Courses are designed for self-organised Freirean
study circles, meeting on a regular weekly basis without an outside lecturer.
So there is a main text for each week. This week, our main text has been “Worker Solidarity and Unions” from MIA,
combined with Procedure of Meetings, based on Wal Hannington’s “Mr Chairman”. An introduction to these
texts was sent out under the heading “Vanguard”.
As well as a main text each week, there is usually one, or
more than one, supporting text, which may be regarded as supplementary,
alternative, or additional reading. This week the supporting text to this
discussion of the workers’ mass organisations and their necessary counterpart,
the revolutionary Party, is made up of extracts from Lenin’s “What is to be Done?”
(download linked below)
Workerism
In this book Lenin was concerned to oppose what he called
“economism”, which is also called “syndicalism” and in South Africa in the past
and still up to now, “workerism”.
Lenin was concerned to show (following the publication of
Eduard Bernstein’s gradualist “Evolutionary Socialism”
and Rosa Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution?”)
that a revolutionary transformation of society was not possible without a
revolutionary political party of the working class. Trade union organisation of
the working class was never going to be sufficient.
In the process Lenin was moved to denounce demagogy in the
severest terms (see the quote above, which is taken from the text that we are
using today). One reason that Lenin denounced demagogues so emphatically is
because they misrepresent themselves as being “left” or revolutionary, when in
fact they are “right”, and in particular gradualist, reformist and
class-collaborationist.
Worker’s Control?
Sometimes syndicalism arrives at a point where it proposes,
demagogically, “worker’s control” under capitalism. Marx and Lenin both
denounced such tomfoolery – see, for example, Marx’s “Critique of the
Gotha Programme”
Lenin showed that the worker’s political party, the
communist party, remains a “must-have”. To achieve its goals the working class
must combine in a vast association of the whole nation; whereas the syndicalism
of individual factories or isolated mines is nothing more than a reversion to
petty-bourgeois consciousness, in conditions where such petty-bourgeois
behaviour is hopelessly subordinated to a bourgeois market that it cannot
possibly control.
How will they sell their products, unless on the terms of
the Imperialists? This is why we say that demagogy is nothing but the class
enemy’s message, dressed up and re-sold in fake-revolutionary clothes.
Demagogues will even be found denouncing the real revolutionaries as fakes!
When in doubt about such things, it helps to study. Lenin is
a good person to study, because he was good at telling the difference between
genuine things, and fakes. Especially, Lenin opposed syndicalism, workerism,
gradualism, reformism and economism, all of which still exist today.
What is to be Done? is the book where Lenin most clearly
differentiated the reformist mass organisations from the vanguard political
party of the working class, the communist party. The downloadable file contains
the most directly relevant passages.
Please download and read this text via the
following link:
Further reading:
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