‘Organ of Critique and Revolutionary Orientation’, published every three months, Socialisme ou Barbarie (which we shall abbreviate to SB) periodically re-proclaims the sensational discovery it made a dozen years ago, when it broke with Trotskyism: modern capitalism is entirely different from its predecessor; ‘traditional’ Marxism is therefore good for nothing but the dustbin. Many bourgeois share this view, without going so far as to set up an ‘organisation’. SB, for its part, feels itself called to the mission of convincing the proletarians of this. A highly dubious vocation: even if the thesis were true (if the bourgeois were right), how could it possibly incite a single proletarian to struggle? It is exactly the opposite!

In its February issue, SB therefore revisits its thesis for the hundredth time, in the form of an article entitled ‘Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne’ [in the English edition, ‘Modern Capitalism and Revolution’, tr. ed.] and signed by a certain P. Cardan. The whole sap of SB’s thought is condensed there in this sentence: ‘Finally, it is obvious (our emphasis) that the theoretical conceptions underlying revolutionary activity – and the very conception of what revolutionary theory is – will have to be changed radically’. ‘Finally’? Yes, for twelve years, SB has yearned to see Marxism definitively liquidated, banished, and wiped out down to the last trace: the international developments of the 20th Soviet Congress and the great Khrushchevite farce will ‘finally’ have satisfied it!

People ‘radical’ enough to radically transform Marxism; ‘revolutionary’ enough to revolutionise revolutionary theory – there have been a fair number of such people over the last hundred years, particularly when the proletariat was ‘politically apathetic’ and ‘caught up in a vast movement of privatisation’. This age-old experience makes it possible to formulate a ‘law’: if someone sets out to revise Marxism, it is because they have not understood a thing about it.

Their ignorance and incomprehension have always given the ‘revisers’ one major advantage: they easily triumph over a form of Marxism that they have fabricated solely for that purpose. Judge for yourselves! In his highly peculiar reconstruction of our doctrine, Cardan makes these three cardinal admissions:

1. He has read Karl Marx’s Capital (he’s still sweating from it: ‘It is monumental’): well, he didn’t see in it the class struggle. He doesn’t see the Bomb in the atomic treatise of social physics!
   
2. He has read the philosophical works of Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto, dozens or hundreds of Party theses and proclamations: well, he did not see in them ‘the action of men and classes’ but only an ‘objective dynamic’ and ‘natural laws’. Proletarian, when a cop kicks your ass, it is in the order of ‘nature’, since his boot follows a studiable trajectory: that is what Marx teaches. According to Cardan. As for all the ‘men’ of the past who propagated our doctrine as best they could, who militated for their class and fell by the thousand for the Revolution, he executes them contemptuously: all of them ‘crude’ and ‘schematic’, except, needless to say, the two at the Summit. Either one is a workerist, or one is not.
   
3. Though an enemy of ‘specialists’, above all in matters of proletarian politics (so which is it – has SB got it in for the ‘crude’ or for the ‘learned’?), Cardan knows, as everyone does, that in 1917 there was a certain Russian Revolution, and a certain Bolshevik Party which founded a certain Third International. He knows that this International had vowed to bring about revolution and socialism throughout the world, that instead of this there was a second imperialist massacre – and that Capital is still at large. In short, he has some grasp of the ‘natural’ history of the last forty years: well, no, in that regard, he really cannot discern in it any ‘terrible defeat’ of the proletarian class. Surprised by these words, which he kept hearing repeated by internationalists, he nevertheless delved into the subject. Country by country. ‘The poor man!’

Such are the sentiments of this innovator towards the emancipation movement of a class to which his arrogance, his intellectual laziness, his complete lack of revolutionary instinct render him utterly alien. Such is his understanding of Marxist economics, philosophy, and politics. And such are the three irremediable shortcomings that SB puts forward as points of departure for a discussion that is supposed to focus on the ‘problems of revolutionary politics in the present era’. Had you by any chance believed you were in a proletarian organisation, and did you wish to discuss revolutionary politics? A mistake, comrades! Here we are at the Sorbonne, and we ‘pose a problematic’; what you are being invited to do is to surrender to the great tide of ‘privatisation’ observable in ‘contemporary society’!

The journal does, admittedly, point out that Mr. Cardan’s depth of vision and his keen sense of history are not ‘necessarily shared by the entire SB group’. That is understandable. Nevertheless, everyone is invited to make their own contribution, however modest it may be: some a remnant of Trotskyism, others a hearty dose of existentialism, and still others a bottle of vintage Proudhon. The approach betrays those accustomed to surprise parties, and to tell the truth, one already suspected Cardan of never having leafed through his Marx except in haste, in the taxis of Paris by Night.

Such are the disoriented who meddle in ‘revolutionary orientation’.

A major problem therefore assails these gentlemen: capitalism today is no longer what it was a hundred years ago. They discover, with naïve astonishment, ‘modifications’, ‘new forms and facts’ which, in their view, require one to ‘modify Marxism’, whereas precisely, Marxism is the only thing to have predicted them! ⁽¹⁾ Yes, Marxism predicted and foretold the ineluctable concentration of Capital and the tendency towards State capitalism, with all its political and social implications and consequences; predicted and foretold the rise in mass consumption, the growth in the number of proletarians, but also that the automation of production, which plunges the bourgeois into both the delirium of pleasure and the throes of anguish. It predicted and foretold the extension of capitalism to the entire globe and the struggles of colonised peoples for independence! As for the ‘prolonged political apathy of the working class (which) seems to characterise modern capitalist society’, let our barbarians go and study the history of England in the second half of the last century, and whilst they are at it, what Engels had to say on the matter: they will see whether this is a ‘new development’!

Ignoring the history of the proletarian movement, and a hundred episodes of ‘political apathy’, SB also seeks to ignore Marxism’s old predictions about the future. And yet that future which it described is, in fact, our present. SB cannot see this, because it is the adept of an empirical bourgeois sociology which, by definition, denies any possibility of foreseeing the unfoldings of history. But the refusal to foresee and the inability to have an overall view of human development are one and the same thing. It is only natural that, trapped within its narrow-minded view, SB should discover ‘new problems’ every morning and, being a great theorist, should come up with a new theory each time. Valid for the space of a single morning, it will nevertheless bear a striking resemblance to all those that have been concocted in the same way throughout the course of history.

* * *

The whole of SB’s attack on Marxism falls within the general framework of the struggle of idealism against historical materialism. Cardan, for example, sees, on the one hand, ‘purely’ economic facts, such as capitalism’s productive orgy, and, on the other hand, ‘purely’ moral facts: dehumanisation, the alienation of man and of the producer. This gentleman, who hands out certificates of ‘traditional Marxism’, is completely oblivious to the fact that, for Marxism specifically, there is not, on one side, a material world governed by economic laws, and, on the other, a mental world governed by moral laws. He is unaware that ‘economic law’ and ‘alienation’ are for Marxism two aspects of the same thing: ‘Alienated labour and private property are synonymous’ (Marx, Paris Manuscripts). ‘Division of labour and private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to the product of the activity’ (Marx and Engels: The German Ideology). For Marxism, therefore, alienation – the concrete and lived relationship of the worker to their labour – has as its historical basis the domination of Capital and its laws of production. By severing alienation from this objective reality, SB is led to ‘explain’ it through what is merely a formal aspect of it: hierarchy. We shall return to this. But let us first consider how it deals with the ‘purely economic world’.

All the statements, theories, theses and studies; all the scholarly treatises and popular articles; the Khrushchevs and the Kennedys right down to the lowliest journalists – in short, all the filthy propaganda of Capital drums it into us all day long: capitalism brings well-being, capitalism can avoid crises, capitalism can develop harmoniously. This is the ‘common sense’ most widely shared in the world. What does the original SB do? It simply parrots it all.

Is it at least a ‘modern’ theory? Here is what Lenin wrote in 1908 in Marxism and Revisionism (already!): ‘attempts were made to influence the public by “new data on economic development” (...) It was said that crises had now become rarer and weaker, and that cartels and trusts would probably enable capital to eliminate them altogether. It was said that the “theory of collapse” (listen to this!) to which capitalism is heading was unsound, owing to the tendency of class antagonisms to become milder and less acute...’ This seems dedicated to SB and to its Cardan! Since 1908!

Capitalism, SB suddenly discovers, drives up mass consumption. But Marxism never claimed otherwise! The question is, consumption of what? Engels once characterised capitalism as the application of the most marvellous technical processes to the production of the most wretched rubbish: how accurately he predicted 1960!

What SB absolutely refuses to admit is that the surplus value/wage ratio rises constantly in line with productivity; that the producer produces ever more, but disposes of an ever smaller fraction of his product; in short, that, as Marx puts it, ‘even as his material condition improves, his social misery increases’. This is a very strange thing, for so-called revolutionaries! It seems as though they are keen to conceal the fact that deprivation is increasing even faster than consumption. And yet, it is quite clear that, above the threshold of physiological survival, misery and deprivation are not absolute but relative: relative to the needs created by this society, and to the distribution of wealth. This is what the ‘domination of the producer by his product’ means. And it is one aspect of that ‘alienation’ about which SB prattles all the more, the more thoroughly it has emptied it of all economic and social content.

But there is more: this improvement in its material conditions is not a gift that Capital bestows upon the proletariat. It must be wrested through struggle, and in the minds of the bourgeois and the reformists, it is the price of social peace ⁽²⁾. That is why capitalism consents to it (sometimes even pre-emptively) when it can. In this capacity, colonial exploitation plays a major part. The improvement in the material conditions of the proletariat, of which the bourgeois and reformists are so proud, has been paid for by the fact that two-thirds of humanity are starving: that is what Marxism has always maintained ⁽³⁾.

The relative stability of capitalist countries is due to the fact that they have, to some extent, succeeded in offloading the accumulation of misery whilst retaining the accumulation of wealth for themselves. This (which is nothing new, as can be seen in Engels’ writings on England) brings us to the famous question of the stabilisation of capitalism.

Here too, Cardan makes a cardinal discovery. The ruling classes are now said to have accumulated ‘class struggle experience’, making possible a ‘new capitalist policy’, the ‘recognition of the State’s overall responsibilities’, and thereby the possibility of controlling and directing the economy and eliminating crises; whereas ‘capitalist policy was once, for Marxists, synonymous with sheer impotence’. What? Impotence? For people like Cardan, perhaps, but for Marxists, never!

For Marxists, individual capitalists, as well as the capitalist State, have always pursued a powerful and effective policy, but in the interest of Capital. Marxism has never held that capitalism could not provisionally resolve its contradictions. Every day, ever since its inception, capitalism ‘resolves’ its contradictions in its own way. Its entire existence is nothing but the immediate resolution of immediate contradictions! But it always resolves them within the framework of capitalism, without touching the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, and this implies two things.

First, that it always resolves them in the manner of a debtor hounded by creditors, who borrows to pay off their debts, only to end up getting deeper and deeper into debt. The capitalist way of resolving difficulties always amounts to sweeping them under the carpet today, only for them to resurface ten times worse tomorrow. So long as the capitalist system is not smashed, there is no other way to resolve the ‘problems of the day’. This is the ‘secret’ behind capitalism’s extraordinary dynamism; this is why, in two centuries, it has had to overturn the entire globe, why it runs always forward, always faster ⁽⁴⁾.

On the other hand, capitalism cannot resolve its contradictions ‘gently’: war, massacres, and destruction are one of the ways of resolving the crisis. One wonders how people dare to speak of the stability of capitalism and the elimination of crises after this half-century: 1900–03 international crisis (that’s a long way back...); 1914–18: First World War; 1929–30: world crisis (PMF is still trembling at the memory); 1939–45: Second World War; the Russian Revolution in 1917; the anti-imperialist revolutions from 1945–? But all that is nothing: in Paris, for the past fifteen years there has been neither crisis, nor war, nor revolution. In Paris, a ‘new era’ has dawned for capitalism, of which SB furnishes us the ‘theory’. And they come telling us about ostriches!

In the face of these narrow views held by pedantic philistines, and in the face of the pretensions of the bourgeois, we uphold the ‘old’ Marxist thesis: the contradictions of capitalism are always ‘resolved’ in violent crises and cataclysms that shake the whole of society to its core. Capitalism can only overcome the difficulties of the present by creating even more serious difficulties for the future. Crises and upheavals are becoming increasingly violent, deeper, and more widespread. Old idealism, ‘new’ utopia.

Up to this point, SB has therefore done nothing but slavishly copy the bourgeois theorists, who go to incredible lengths to justify the idea that ‘tomorrow we’ll get a free haircut’, even as the price of a haircut rises every day. All renegades of Marxism have always acted in this way.

Now they are going to try to separate itself from them, because what is paradise for the latter is, for the former, the onset of hell. Only, since they began by cutting man off from the ‘economy’, they can do nothing but fall into idealist utopianism.

It would be wrong, moreover, to see this as the sole preserve of SB. Alongside the ‘conquering’ trend that extols the virtues of capitalism, there is always the utopian-idealist trend that constructs its novels along the following lines: ruled by Sages or Scientists, subject to a perfect yet inhuman Technology, Humanity has become an anthill, a Mechanism without a Soul. A Revolt, driven by Love, Faith, or some other Noble Sentiment, finally succeeds in destroying the Hierarchy and inaugurates the Golden Age of Fraternity.

You find that silly? And yet, despite all the cutting-edge Sorbonne jargon, there’s nothing else to be found in SB’s profound theses.

The particular form taken by SB’s social-utopia novel answers to the fact that its great theoretical discovery is the Bureaucracy ⁽⁵⁾. History has taken its course, but unfortunately, it is the history of a counter-revolution: the insidious annihilation of the proletarian and Bolshevik dictatorship and the victory of a ‘national socialism’ which meant the impetuous surge of modern Russian capitalism ⁽⁶⁾. But even cloaked in the guise of a ‘critique of an historical experience’, drivel is still drivel.

In reality, what we find in SB’s ‘doctrine’ is not bureaucracy, a thing well known for millennia, but Bureaucracy; not an aspect of a society responding to the general conditions which engendered that society, but that aspect transformed into an abstract structure, which is said to be its own cause and the cause of all social phenomena. If this is not idealism, what is?

The idea of Bureaucracy not only explains nothing, but precludes any explanation. If one wishes to understand a society, even a bureaucratic one, one must resort to the ‘old’ Marxist method: start from that society’s production, from the conditions both ‘physical’ and ‘human’ in which it produces ⁽⁷⁾. Now, however closely one combs through SB’s theses, one finds nothing but Bureaucracy: capitalism appears there only as a word, virtually in brackets: ‘the (capitalist) Bureaucracy’, and devoid of any meaning. It is difficult to give a citation of an absence, but we challenge anyone to find in Cardan a single passage where the capitalist character of society determines anything at all.

This spiriting away of capitalism implicitly leads to positing the Bureaucracy as free. If the law of value, money, the market, wages, profit – in short, all the categories of Capital – no longer have any significance whatsoever (or worse, no longer exist!), what, then, would actually prevent it from directing and organising things as it sees fit? ⁽⁸⁾. But be careful here. We are dealing with ‘dialecticians’: when bureaucracy is universal, there will be nothing but executants; who will be in charge? It cannot work, declares Cardan proudly: he has found the ‘fundamental contradiction’. Yes, but of what? By his spiriting away of Capitalism, he has freed Bureaucracy from everything, except, of course, the laws of nature. But since this spiriting away is purely imaginary, since Capitalism persists just as if SB had never existed, it is now transformed into a ‘natural given’ ⁽⁹⁾, which is indeed the most despicable way of presenting it as eternal. With this fine feat accomplished, all Marxist hopes of one day ridding ourselves of it vanish: nothing on earth or in the heavens, neither the ‘fundamental contradiction’, nor the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’, nor God the Father, will ever get it out of History again. This is what SB was driving at when they spoke of the need to ‘radically (oh so radically!) change the very conception of what revolutionary theory is’. A revolutionary theory, comrades, is a theory that demonstrates the impossibility of revolution. Dismal cretins!

We must set things back on their feet. It is the capitalist character of society, it is the laws of capitalist development, that have determined and continue to determine the history of ‘our’ society, including its growing bureaucratisation. The latter is due both to the division of labour and to the concentration and depersonalisation of Capital.

The director/executant opposition, fundamental for Cardan, is in reality only one aspect of alienated labour. Since, says Marx, the result of labour is alienation, the deprivation of the worker, his domination by his product, labour itself can only be alienation in act, the very act of alienation; it is forced, coerced labour, a dreary obligation, a means of subsisting, rather than being the free creative activity of man.

The growing bureaucratisation expresses the growing depersonalisation of Capital, which Marxism foresaw. At a time when everyone was revelling in the delights of individualism and private initiative, Marxism was able to see that the fundamental characteristic of Capital was not the fact that it belonged to Mr. So-and-so; it was able to see that the evolution of capitalism led necessarily to separating Capital from its ‘owner’, to transforming society as a whole more and more into a Joint-Stock Company, manager of an anonymous Capital. But it also showed that this transformation took place within the framework of capitalism, that it did not touch the laws of capitalism, and that, far from smoothing out the contradictions of capitalism, it could only exacerbate them ever further. The capitalist bureaucracy is not free: it must administer Capital; it cannot escape the laws of capitalism ⁽¹⁰⁾.

SB thus presents us with a free Bureaucracy. The only way to counter free oppression is through the free demand for Freedom: this is the source of their views on ‘revolutionary’ tactics and propaganda, their voluntarism, their activism, and their sentimentalism. From this perspective, in which everyone is morally free, where the revolutionary act (as they put it) is due to a moral conversion, the role of the vanguard is to stir up the proletariat’s will to fight through sermons and exhortations. And this ‘vanguard’ itself – how is it formed? SB’s answer to this question, practical if not theoretical, is: by describing the throes of proletarian life, by immersing militants in the workers’ (or Algerian!) condition to give them the immediate feeling of alienation. It goes so far that good souls go off to ‘work in factories’, not even, as the Trotskyists do, to ‘carry on agitation’, but in the manner of the Holy Spirit made Flesh to share in human suffering ⁽¹¹⁾.

It is from this com-passion that, according to SB, the revolutionary light should spring forth. And what do these would-be Prometheuses bring back? Old candle stubs. But it was inevitable: from the immediate feeling of alienation can spring only immediate demands, more or less theorised; by clinging to vile capitalist labour, by shutting oneself away in the factory, one ends up believing that it is within the factory that the key to all problems lies. Hardly surprising, then, that SB places the question of hierarchy at the forefront: the technocratic apparatus, the ‘rational’ bureaucracy, the ‘scientific’ administration, is the visible face, the means and the expression of the domination of man by Capital. Workers have always wanted to smash the foreman’s face in, the immediate representative of the dictatorship of Capital. But for us Marxists, the Party must understand – and its role is precisely to explain – that it is not enough simply to knock out the foreman or the boss.

The Party’s role is not to spur the proletariat into action by explaining to it just how miserable it is: either the proletariat knows this better than anyone else, or, if ‘life’ has not taught it this, no amount of rhetoric will be able to convince it. It is capitalism itself, and it alone, which, by making life more and more horrific in every respect, pushes the proletariat to action. The Party’s role is to know what must be done and to direct the proletariat’s action in the right direction.

The Party does not acquire this knowledge by participating in the alienation that crushes the worker, but, on the contrary, by breaking free from it. And if Cardan sees contradictions in Lenin, it is because he still reasons in mechanistic idealist terms. For Lenin is clear: communist consciousness is not produced directly by the immediate life of the proletariat; in the immediate life of the proletariat, capitalism reigns as absolute master; it is not by yielding to immediate conditions that one acquires communist consciousness, but by resisting, by breaking free from capitalist determinism. The fact that, under the iron heel of Capital, only a minority can thus gain a clear vision of human history, of the laws of capitalism and the tasks of the proletariat, shocks our advocates of Freedom. And with good reason!... For what is the result of SB’s proletarian ‘Passion’ and their in-depth analyses? What is their historical perspective, what is their programme?

Workers’ management. Full stop, that is all.

It is impossible to deduce from SB’s theories whether what is meant is the future society, a transitional stage, or something else. Vagueness is an age-old method of opportunism: the vaguer an idea, the easier it will be to add this to it or take that away from it, depending on the needs of the moment. It is up to us to see things clearly! Well, we shall show that this ‘workers’ management’ is either nothing but an empty, purely demagogic phrase, or the most repugnant prospect ever proposed to the proletariat.

All of SB’s subjectivism is laid bare in the very alternative they put forward: bureaucratic management or workers’ management. The only thing that interests them is knowing who is managing. What is managed is the very least of their concerns. Of course, since they have raised capitalism to the dignity of a natural given, it is a question that does not even arise! In fact, what they are proposing is that the proletariat should manage capitalist society itself: no more, no less.

This ‘workers’ management’ brings together two ideas. By positing alienation as a purely mental fact, SB eliminates it through a purely mental operation: once the proletariat freely decides to exploit itself, it will be free. It was simple; one only had to think of it!

And Cardan proceeds to mock the traditional Marxists who want to solve everything by ‘simply’ changing objective relations!

But this flight into the imaginary is so idiotic that even SB cannot think it through to its logical conclusion; they obscure it by mixing it with another idea, one inherited from the utopian socialists and the anarchists. It is the dream of a society in which each producer would have immediate disposal of their product. This dream is absurd. Capitalism has forever ruled out any possibility of its realisation, even if one were to transform it slightly by extending this immediate disposal to groups of greater or lesser size (enterprises, co-operatives, etc.): as long as the product is private property – that is to say, as long as men are deprived of immediate disposal of it – we inevitably end up with exchange, the market, and with it, inevitably, all the capitalist laws and all the capitalist shit ⁽¹²⁾.

Capitalism has transformed individual production into social production, thereby enabling a formidable development of the productive forces. But it has maintained private appropriation, and therein lies its fundamental contradiction. There can be no question of turning back, of renouncing the productive forces. We must move forward; we must ‘simply’ abolish appropriation. It is not individuals or groups, it is humanity as a whole that must be the subject of production and itself have immediate disposal over its product. Only at that moment, when every man will contribute freely (which does not mean anarchically) to human production, and will freely satisfy their needs (and first and foremost the need for productive activity), will the division of labour, exploitation, and alienation cease. This is what communist society will be ⁽¹³⁾.

But perhaps one might think that SB regards its ‘workers’ management’ merely as a means of realising that society? Let us give them the benefit of the doubt and see whether it is an adequate means.

What is, from a Marxist perspective, the historical task of the proletariat? To abolish appropriation, to destroy capitalist relations.

Now this task, so ‘simple’ for Cardan, is in reality so arduous that it demands the most violent dictatorship! Because the laws of capitalism are inscribed in all social relations, in production as well as in the mentality of men. Because, for entire classes, they are ‘natural laws’. Because the proletariat itself is so entangled in capitalist filth that it can only rid itself of it through a revolution ⁽¹⁴⁾. Because only a conscious and despotic intervention can shatter the ‘natural’ laws of capitalism, destroy mercantilism and prevent it from spontaneously re-emerging. The destruction of capitalism is a long and arduous task, which only the proletarian State, the Dictatorship of the proletariat directed by its conscious vanguard, the Party, can carry out successfully.

Even when presented to the proletariat as an immediate programme, ‘workers’ management’ is utter nonsense. For us Marxists, it is obvious, on the one hand, that communism can only be established across the entire globe and, on the other hand, that it is impossible for the seizure of power to take place simultaneously everywhere. What, then, is the immediate task of the proletariat that has seized power in one country or group of countries? (SB never speaks of the seizure of power, let alone, of course, the dictatorship of the proletariat). Such a proletarian State has a dual task. First of all, it must play its part in the international strategy of the proletariat. The seizure of power in one region gives a new impetus to the global class struggle. The proletarian State will do everything in its power to aid the revolutionary struggle of the world proletariat: depending on the circumstances, this aid ranges from ideological support to military support.

At the same time, and particularly during the ‘lulls’ in the global revolutionary struggle, the proletarian State must push the social transformation of the territories under its control as far as possible. But note: pushing social transformation as far as possible towards socialism does not mean the same thing in a country at the beginning of capitalist development as it does in a country with highly developed capitalism. In the former case, capitalism must be developed, in its most advanced form, State capitalism, and under the strict control of the proletarian State ⁽¹⁵⁾. In the other case, the destruction of capitalism must be begun immediately: abolish money; abolish the market, in both consumption and production; abolish useless production; radically reduce working hours; the proletarian State begins to direct production and consumption according to its needs (sometimes military ones, yes indeed!) and to abolish the very notion of profitability (that is to say, of profit); it directs the entirety of production, it begins to abolish the division into autonomous sectors and enterprises.

Faced with this programme, our so-called leftist philistines fly into a hysterical fit: it is beyond them. They fail to understand that capitalism must be built here and destroyed there. They do not understand that our ‘negation’ of capitalism is a post-capitalist negation, and not a pre-capitalist one ⁽¹⁶⁾. They, for their part, are ‘anti-capitalist’ everywhere and always, and everywhere and always in the abstract. They counter the effects of capitalism with a demand for Freedom, for immediate de-alienation. But this ‘generous’ demand has no concrete meaning in any situation. In every case, the only freedom it allows one to achieve is the freedom granted to the blind forces of Capital. In every case, it leads to giving free rein to capitalism, adorned with a new mask of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity. That is the real content of this cutting-edge ‘revolutionary’ politics!

* * *

We are living in dark times. The proletariat was beaten, not in 1958 by de Gaulle, as that imbecile Cardan believes, but in the 20s, by global capitalism. Since then, Capital and its henchmen have so thoroughly succeeded in stupefying the proletariat that almost no one knows any more what the Communist Revolution is and will be. Now Socialisme ou Barbarie presents itself as a ‘revolutionary’ current, as a ‘proletarian’ reaction to the betrayal that destroyed the Third International. Faced with what remains of it, with those traitorous parties which are increasingly and openly engaging in the outright defence of capitalism, SB’s anti-capitalism can create an illusion.

SB’s anti-capitalism is a petty-bourgeois anti-capitalism. SB is not a reaction against the degeneration and the betrayal: it is a consequence of the degeneration, the betrayal taken to its logical conclusion: the complete destruction of revolutionary theory and programme.

If SB fails to grasp the terrible defeat of the proletariat, it is because it itself is, in its entirety, nothing but an expression of that defeat. Even before a new global revolutionary battle takes shape, it has already capitulated across the board to petty-bourgeois ideology. Failing to realise that this is the worst defeat, the one with the most far-reaching consequences, and that it has already suffered this defeat, it seeks derisory guarantees against the possible defeats of tomorrow in the real class war. In the class war, no one ever enters with the certainty of being victorious, but whoever lays down their arms is defeated before the battle has even begun. Socialisme ou Barbarie has already laid down the arms of the Party, the International, and the proletarian dictatorship, setting a derisory ‘democracy’ against the forthcoming incarnations of the bureaucratic Idea. Having thus destroyed everything that constitutes the Party’s strength, it can do no more than establish an impotent and foolish round table in place of a proletarian party. In denouncing the ‘privatisation’ of the proletariat in society, it can only introduce it into revolutionary thought, thereby handing it over to presumptuous ignoramuses.

This sorry spectacle has been going on for twelve years now. Twelve years which, following the despicable period of the war, were bound to be poisoned by the triumphant bourgeoisie, lost to the proletarian class. It is to be hoped that this period is now drawing to a close. If so, young militants will turn away in disgust from this old coterie gone rancid, steeped in a sceptical and defeatist mindset, in the personalist practices of a long defeat: on such shifting sands, one can build nothing but fleeting personal fame. The Party of the future victory, especially if that victory is a long way off – and it is – can only be built upon a rock: the solid rock of communist theory and programme. Each political generation never wholly resembles those that preceded it; and it sometimes happens that it regresses rather than progresses: we know this only too well. But the communist programme itself does not change, because it is the dialectical and class negation of Capitalism, whose laws do not change.

And so, to continue the work of past revolutionary generations, and to lay claim to this immutable programme remains, today as yesterday, the only ‘innovative’ – the only revolutionary – politics.