For more than ten years, the former left-wing socialist D. Guérin has set himself the task of demonstrating ‘the relevance of anarchism’. His latest work, ‘Ni Dieu ni Maître’ (‘Neither God nor Master’), is a response to this grand design, as he explained in an interview granted to ‘TEP Magazine’ and published in the July-August 1966 issue of ‘Le Monde Libertaire’.

A doctrine of artisans committed to Jacobin principles, but disillusioned that the Great Revolution had ushered in the reign of the bourgeoisie rather than that of Liberty, anarchism has lost some of its historical relevance as small-scale production gave way to large-scale industry and small producers to the compact masses of the proletariat. As for its theoretical relevance, it had already been lost by the time it was realised that the task imposed on humanity by the inadequacy of the bourgeois revolution was not to ‘truly realise’ the latter’s promises to the popular strata (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and Democracy), but to prepare an infinitely more radical revolution, that of the Proletariat. This dates back to 1848, that is to say, to the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. How, in the very heart of the 20th century, when the proletariat has grown tremendously in absolute number and thus in potential force, and when the dictatorship of Capital has become more oppressive and intolerable than ever, could anarchism possibly become ‘relevant’ again? This is something no mind with the least pretension to being scientific could conceive. But contemporary social literature has long since ‘freed’ itself from the imperatives of science, obeying only those of success, whether monetisable or not; so much so that a talented publicist such as D. Guérin has no qualms whatsoever about proposing... a return to Jacobin-style radicalism as the surest means of sweeping away the bourgeois society of the imperialist epoch. Is not today’s ‘vanguard’ made up precisely of those who are least daunted by the worst theoretical absurdities? Ridicule, it seems, does not kill there...

‘The relevance of anarchism’, D. Guérin tells us, stems from two contemporary political developments: the Afro-Asian revolution and de-Stalinisation. This assertion is worth no more and no less than that of a Christian who, observing a religious revival, might exclaim: the misfortunes of the Age, the infinite distress of the Creature in the modern world demonstrate the relevance of religion. Religion lost its theoretical ‘relevance’ irrevocably from the very first blows of bourgeois rationalism and the ‘philosophical revolution’. Nevertheless, the social disasters of the 20th century (wars, aborted revolutionary threats and counter-revolutions) have, in fact, restored much of its influence. This merely ‘demonstrates’ that when the species is struck in its very flesh, its consciousness becomes clouded, and that the effects of the greatest ‘revolutions of thought’ are easily overshadowed by those of the slightest material and social disorder. Thus, the ‘misfortunes of the age’ are indeed capable of rekindling aspirations for the hereafter which ‘Reason’ might have imagined it had definitively destroyed; but it is also in this way that a counter-revolution such as Stalin’s and the brilliance with which the anti-colonial revolution shone in a prostrate world, have been able to rekindle, in certain milieux, the aspirations to Freedom and Democracy, the scientific inadequacy and non-proletarian nature of which Marxism demonstrated a century ago. That this ‘climate’ promises D. Guérin handsome bookshop success is possible. But the ‘relevance of anarchism’ can have no other meaning than the ‘relevance of religion’: it is the relevance of theoretical regression, of obscurantism, of revolutionary impotence and of disarray.

In response to the first question on ‘the present-day value of anarchism’, Guérin replies in the interview cited above (our emphasis): ‘Anarchism remains relevant on two levels: firstly, it denounced, with a truly prophetic gift, the future evils of an authoritarian, dictatorial socialism founded on an all-powerful State; secondly, it has contrasted this type of socialism with another, libertarian, resting on inverse notions, driven from the bottom up rather than from the top down, appealing to the creative initiative of the individual, to the spontaneous participation of the masses’. Responding subsequently to the question of ‘elements of anarchism that could be utilised in the construction of a socialist society’, Guérin states: ‘First of all, anarchism, since Proudhon, has championed workers’ association, which nowadays is called self-management’. ‘Self-management’, he continues, ‘is workers’ democracy in the factory. The worker takes on a dual role: he is both a producer confined to his speciality and a co-manager of the enterprise. He thus ceases to be alienated. He also ceases to be a wage-earner. He receives his share of the enterprise’s profits’.

Guérin then evokes the Russian Revolution, comparing it to the Spanish Revolution and briefly touching upon elements that are classic in the anarchist critique of Bolshevism (Makhno and the suppression of Kronstadt). These are points we have already addressed here and which we shall have no hesitation in returning to. For the moment, it will suffice to critique Guérin’s central idea, already summarised above and which he himself articulates very tellingly: ‘Thus, long before Stalin’s reign, ordinary people were already denouncing, in letters of fire, the monopolising of the October Revolution by a State communism’.

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Guérin says somewhere that ‘anarchism values the individual’. A short sentence that immediately brings us to the heart of the matter. Which individual does anarchism seek to value? The individual of today? The individual of bourgeois society, the one who – whatever class they may belong to – bears the scars of a society driven by obscure and barbaric forces? Or the individual of tomorrow’s society, whose behaviour the proletarian, at certain times and under certain conditions, anticipates?

The Proudhonist conception to which Guérin refers is based on the glorification of the first of these two types of individual. Why is this so? Quite simply because the behaviour and psychology of individuals are determined by the social relations within which they operate, and because the workers’ association leaves entirely intact the currently existing social relations, the capitalist relations. The Proudhonist conception respects the exchange of products of equivalent value; yet it is precisely this exchange which, when applied to the commodity of labour-power, provides the capitalist with a surplus, a surplus value which he subsequently transforms into capital. This conception likewise allows the productive structure organised around enterprises to remain in place; yet it is this structure, and not the existence of its legal owner, that constitutes the cornerstone of bourgeois production.

D. Guérin is perfectly entitled to regard the concept of self-management as the legitimate heir to Proudhon’s conception: simply another word to express the same thing. But precisely for this reason, what he is not entitled to do is to deduce that, through self-management, the worker is emancipated and ceases to be a wage-earner. Wage alienation is the result of determinate relations of production. Not only does any change in the individuals who manage these relations in no way alter their substance, but capitalism has also developed on the basis of a continual renewal of this managerial personnel.

Rather than a theoretical demonstration, a simple glance at various ongoing experiments might show that self-management not only preserves the major antagonistic categories of capitalism – wage labour and profit – but also fails to substantially alter the physical quantities of products which, in indisputably capitalist countries, are transformed either into means of subsistence or into means of production.

D. Guérin says that the sharing of the enterprise’s profits makes the alienation of workers disappear. ‘Profit’, in Marx’s terminology, is profit of enterprise, the excess of money which, after deduction of production costs, remains the property of the enterprise. Whether it is the Boss or the Board of Directors, what then does company management do with this profit? It is quite clear that those individuals who are part of this management or hold any form of ownership interest in the company do not consume it in its entirety. They take from it only a relatively small portion for their personal consumption; the rest they transform into new means of production (new facilities, technical improvements, machinery, etc.). One would have to be as foolish as the C.G.T. pontiffs and their editors at ‘La Vie Ouvrière’ to let it be believed that they do this solely out of ambition, a desire for prestige, an insatiable appetite for proletarian sweat, and so on... The enterprise – all enterprises, regardless of who their managers may be – is subject to this harsh dilemma: expand or decline, dominate or be eliminated; for that is the law of capitalism.

Profit of enterprise is therefore divided into two parts: one which is consumed, the other which is accumulated, invested, transformed into new means of production, exchanged for new labour power intended to produce further profit, which profit will in turn become capital, and so on, in accordance with the diabolical rule of the capitalist mode of production. To put the ‘self-management’ arguments into perspective, one need only ask a single question: of these two fractions of profit, which one exploits, oppresses, and alienates the wage-earning labour force? Clearly, it is the second, the accumulated portion of profit. Is it this portion that the advocates of self-management intend to share amongst the workers? Absolutely not. And this is for the excellent reason that, without the reinvestment of this fraction of profit which serves to expand production, the enterprise would succumb to competition: not only would it make no profits to share out, but it could not survive for long.

This is not ‘pure theory’. In this post-war period, so rich in political transformations, we have several examples of the ‘managerial’ wandering of socialism, as if History, before giving the revolutionary proletariat another chance, were amusing itself by allowing it to experience, with all the time and means required, the various wrong turns that the failure of its first historical attempt forces it to take. Of these experiences, that of Yugoslav self-management is not the least instructive. In several articles, we have shown, figures in hand, that in that country the ‘distribution of profits’ amongst workers took place only after all the deductions necessary for the renewal and improvement of the production cycle had been made, and that the rate of investment prescribed for each enterprise as an imperative necessity was, as a percentage, of the same order of magnitude as that of enterprises in Western capitalist countries. Therefore, in the best-case scenario, what the self-managed enterprise can ‘share’ amongst the workers is the fraction of profit which, in a traditional capitalist enterprise, goes towards the boss’s personal consumption or is distributed in the form of dividends amongst the shareholders. It must be conceded that this is not of a kind to transform the workers’ material conditions appreciably.

But this is only the economic aspect of the issue. When it comes to the ‘elimination of alienation’, the ideological aspect is far more important. Self-management is a model that is quite suitable for underdeveloped countries where State power has emerged under the fraudulent guise of a national ‘socialism’. The aim is to accumulate capital – a great deal of it, and quickly. What must be obtained is not only the wage-earner’s forced commitment to the productive task, but also their voluntary, ‘spontaneous’ commitment (there you have the famous ‘creative initiative’!). In self-managed enterprises, the workers, now with a stake in increasing profits, will redouble their efforts, their punctuality, their sacrifices, since, they will think, they are doing it for themselves and not for the boss. They will be all the more defenceless in the face of the superhuman demands of these bourgeoisies or proto-bourgeoisies who, once cowardly and spineless in the face of imperialism, are all the more ferocious towards their own proletariat. Ultimately, the ideal of self-management, if judged on its own merits, is to call on wage-earners to enthusiastically submit to the demands of the impersonal accumulation of capital, and even to anticipate them.

Remove the boss and the exploited will know well enough how to organise production in their own best interests; there you have the alpha and omega of managerial socialism. The trouble is that the boss is the instrument and not the master of the economic laws of capitalism, and this hybrid figure who would split into a ‘producer confined to his speciality’ and a ‘co-manager of the enterprise’ has only ever emerged in very specific places and circumstances: only where he had to make up for the absence of individual capital holders and, at the price of his own sweat and misery, carry out a capitalist accumulation which historical circumstances and geographical conditions did not permit in its classical form, that is to say, through the existence and development of a genuine bourgeois class.

In this regard, the fundamental error of all the Guérins of the world is to wildly overestimate the possibilities of consciousness and will when it comes to the domination of the productive forces. On this point, we, who are readily labelled ‘dogmatists’ or ‘revolutionary dreamers’, are in reality characterised by great, realistic prudence. The history of the Russian Revolution has taught us that will and initiative can develop in an unprecedented, colossal, and unexpected manner, without, however, managing to break the iron circle of economic laws, the precise dimensions of which – the supreme test of consciousness – we must determine. We are far, certainly, from expressing the slightest scepticism regarding the capacity for adaptation, creation, and initiative of the exploited classes once they have risen to lead society. We have confidence in them; we rely on them for the realisation of socialism. But we know that their blossoming is subordinated to one imperative condition: the prior destruction of capitalist relations of production. Now, the supreme authority of bourgeois relations of production is the capitalist State; their destruction is first and foremost a political matter, a question of power.

You, anarchists or those with anarchist leanings, libertarians, federalists, etc., feel free to chat to your heart’s content about ‘authority’, dismissing it with a stroke of the pen and sparing yourselves the need to comment on the social nature of authority, the existence of which will be essential to prevent the offensive return of the bourgeois classes once beaten. For you, coercion and violence are moral issues rather than economic factors conditioning the abolition of social privileges. That is why you concern yourselves not with classes, that is to say with social groups whose interests are bound up with the conservation or destruction of determinate forms of production, but with individuals who simply need to be let loose in freedom: as if any possible freedom, in a society that has not yet eradicated from its habits and psychology the now centuries-old imprint of capitalism, did not spontaneously entail the manifestation of those habits and that psychology.

In reality, there is only one class whose interests, both immediate as well as historical, do not conflict with the socialist transformation of society: the proletariat. Undoubtedly, a greater or lesser proportion of the other classes will come to terms with this transformation once it is a fait accompli; otherwise, socialism would be impossible. But this will happen well after the revolutionary victory of the proletariat, and in step with the very rhythm of the socialist transformation of social relations: for these are classes fundamentally hostile to those ‘despotic inroads’ of proletarian power which condition this transformation. With all due respect to D. Guérin, the proletarian revolution, in Marxist theory, is nonetheless a revolution from below. ‘Above’ and ‘below’, in this context, are not formal categories, the most demagogic of which is that which confines itself to offering workers part or all of what, today, constitutes the privilege of the ruling classes alone. ‘Above’ and ‘below’ are social categories. If the socialist revolution, according to Marx, is a revolution from below, it is because it generalises to the whole of society what is currently the exclusive condition of the wage-earning classes: no reserves, no property. These de facto deprivations, which make the present misery of the proletariat, will make the happiness of the whole society of tomorrow. It was to Proudhon, in particular, that Marx taught – albeit unsuccessfully, it is true – some rudiments of this dialectic: what is today the evil that society reserves for a single class will, in the future, be the good that saves society from its most shameful slavery: the slavery of value, of money, of wage labour.

The revolutionary mission of the proletariat stems from this single fact, that it is the decomposition of all classes and that it can therefore only emancipate itself by abolishing, for the whole of society, the privileges which the ruling classes have successively handed down to one another throughout the course of History. Now it is quite true that, in our own time, and because the European communist revolution failed while the parties that were supposed to lead it have failed in their mission, capitalism has succeeded in giving a large number of proletarians the illusion of a real participation in the privileges of the privileged classes. Although this illusion is bound to persist until the great historical crisis now in preparation, there is nevertheless a powerful bond attaching even the most ‘aristocratised’ proletariats to their fundamental class condition: the material condition of wage labour. It is the disappearance of this ultimate and fundamental bond that the proponents of ‘self-management’ claim to theorise in the name of a fraudulent socialism.

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In his autobiography ‘Front populaire, révolution manquée’, Guérin recounts having been treated roughly by Trotsky on several occasions. The present theoretical regression proves that Trotsky was probably not even harsh enough!

On the ruins of the Russian Revolution, democratic demagoguery was able to run riot, and did not hesitate to do so, even amongst the anarchists. The October Revolution was centralist and not federalist; founded on the dictatorship of the proletariat and not on democracy; ‘authoritarian’, therefore, and not libertarian. Lenin was its initiator. Stalin, chronologically, its continuator. It is easy to deduce from this that the methods of the former paved the way for the crimes of the latter. This was the classic argument of the old socialist traitors, of the Kautskys, Blums and Paul Faures, to name but a few. But it is, even more so, a mystification of History, and one which many sincere revolutionaries, revolted by the nefarious work of Stalinism, have not escaped. However disparaging the supposition may be, we are compelled to think that Guérin, like a good number of Trotskyists or Trotsky-sympathisers, failed to grasp the significance of the Russian counter-revolution because he did not understand the conditions upon which the October Revolution depended.

Between the existence of a dictatorial centralist revolutionary State and the emergence of a ruling stratum which he conveniently terms ‘bureaucracy’, Guérin establishes a cause-and-effect relationship: the ‘bureaucrats’ have nicked the revolution from the ‘people’! It seemed to us, in our materialist candour, that the events of the last Russian decade – notably the steady decline in the influence of civil servants in favour of company directors – were sufficiently eloquent, at least in the eyes of informed specialists, to demonstrate that the Russian bureaucracy, if indeed there is such a thing, has not acted in its own interests but, quite the contrary, has been merely the provisional instrument for the accumulation of capital in that country. D. Guérin, however, forces us to repeat points that have been made here a hundred times over.

The proletarian State born from the October Revolution had to assume a dual task, one that was contradictory and which, in the long run, could not indefinitely withstand the contradiction it entailed. On the one hand, as a stronghold and bridgehead for the world revolution, it had to retain power in order to furnish that revolution with all possible material and moral aid. On the other hand, it had to tackle the tasks of sustaining and managing the Russian economy in a country where the extent of military destruction and the state of backwardness urgently demanded a re-accumulation of capital. However, this re-accumulation could have only two outcomes, closely determined by the fate of the European revolution, and of the German revolution in particular. Either communism triumphed, at least in the latter country, and the accumulation of capital in Russia would be limited to the immediate requirements of a transitional situation, with economic and technical aid from a communist Germany helping the Soviet power to shorten the stages necessary for the realisation of the economic premises of socialism in Russia. Or, with the European proletariat being beaten, Russia was left to its own resources and its own problems; the accumulation of capital followed its national path and reshaped a State in its own image, that is to say, a capitalist State, obeying the iron laws of the mercantile economy and lacking only an authentic bourgeoisie, whose subterranean maturation the Khrushchevite clique later pointed out, and of which the famous Liberman is today the most picturesque spokesman.

We will not tell D. Guérin anything new in saying that the German communist revolution did not take place, and that Russia, under the banner of ‘socialism in one country’, followed the second of the two paths set out above. But we would ask him to kindly bear in mind, before lumping Lenin and Stalin together, that this second outcome only came about after a bloody political counter-revolution, of which Stalin was the vulgar emblem but which, in reality, had its majority supporters throughout the Third International: it is to this counter-revolution, and to it alone, that all the misdeeds which Guérin pins on ‘authoritarian socialism’ must be imputed. Between Lenin and Stalin flows the river of blood of tens of thousands of communists massacred or exterminated in the camps. Between the original positions of the Third International and the compilation of nonsense and lies that constituted the Stalinist and post-Stalinist catechism lie the capitulation of thousands of renegade leaders and officials, the rabble of remote-controlled ‘self-criticisms’ and rigged trials, the advent of a whole generation of political morons who earned their stripes only by insulting and slandering the revolutionaries who remained unyielding. Between these two phases there was, in a word, a whole chapter of history unfolding under the influence of the proletariat’s defeat and under the sign of falsification, treachery, and the degeneration of international communism. To speak of this, as Guérin does, as if it were one and the same thing, is not merely to make a mistake; it is to deliberately trample upon all the victims of the Stalinist counter-revolution and, in particular, Trotsky, whom Guérin prides himself on having been a friend of!

But since the author of ‘Neither God nor Master’ wishes to disregard these details of politics and history in order to soar at the level of general economic principles, let us conclude by returning to that ground. In a certain sense, the problems that self-management claims to resolve were indeed tackled by the Bolshevik regime. But self-management simply disregards existing capitalist categories, whereas the Bolshevik regime had to confront them consciously. In fact, ‘self-management socialism’ accepts coexistence with money, commodities, and profits! As for the Bolshevik regime, it had to not only tolerate them but also develop them, on pain of seeing the Russian economy suffocate. (Let us note in passing that if a proletarian regime confined to a single country and, what is more, to a backward country must, prior to any socialist measure, undertake a certain accumulation of capital, it is just as well that it does so under the most adequate technical conditions, that is to say, in centralist and not federalist fashion). Insofar as self-management has emerged in certain countries, it has done so under economic conditions bearing certain similarities with the Russia of 1917: technical backwardness or ‘underdevelopment’. But it is instructive to draw a parallel between the two policies of which the accumulation of capital in the Russia of October and in the young states currently ‘self-managed’ respectively forms part.

Self-management and ‘authoritarian socialism’ are both led, as we have said, to manipulate capitalist categories. The whole difference lies in the fact that the former conception, both in its precursor Proudhon and among its present-day adherents, believes it has destroyed the social consequences of the existence of these categories at the very moment when it ensures their permanence, whereas the latter, with a clarity of vision which in Lenin is luminous, ruthless to the point of becoming scathing (cf. his various letters to Soviet officials), knows, on the contrary, that it has been working with the enemy’s weapon and sets a time limit for its use, beyond which all the gains of the revolution would be lost: without proletarian power in Germany, he said, no socialism is possible in Russia. When one gives consciousness and will all the importance that Guérin confers on them, when one relies on them first and foremost, one must grasp them where they can manifest themselves. Unlike modern followers of Proudhon who ‘do’ capitalism without realising it, Lenin, for his part, was perfectly aware that Soviet Russia had not yet broken free from the economic ruts of capitalism, that none of the measures taken by the Bolshevik regime regarding production and exchange helped to free it from them, and that, on the contrary, those very measures, in the event of the failure of the European communist revolution, could only thrust the U.S.S.R. back into the fold of global capitalism. He knew this and he said so. Thus, whilst fiercely criticising the far-reaching political and social effects of these obligatory concessions to the laws of capital, he gazed with impatience and anxiety towards the one horizon beyond which, in the event of a proletarian political victory, those laws could be immediately abolished. That horizon was that of the European communist revolution, from which the Stalinist counter-revolution turned away by accomplishing the greatest political mystification of the century, that of the possibility of socialism in one country, and a backward one at that.

Guérin has either forgotten this or is ignoring it. Since he claims to pass judgement all the same on what he calls ‘authoritarian socialism’, and which is in fact nothing but the one scientific socialism, let him at least take the trouble to examine by what forms of economic organisation Stalinist Russia turned its back on Lenin’s vision; let him set aside for a moment his cherished criteria of authority, freedom, democracy, or totalitarianism; let him plunge into the economic transformation that accompanied the triumph of the nefarious formula of ‘socialism in one country’. With a little patience and objectivity, he will discover that there is a connection between his cherished self-management and Stalin’s kolkhoz system that will surprise him: in the kolkhoz, too, it was claimed that capitalism was being abolished by making the producer share in profit of enterprise; in the kolkhoz, too, they boasted of having established socialism in the countryside whilst preserving mercantile exchange and structure; finally, and throughout Stalinist Russia as a whole, it was asserted that will and consciousness sufficed to transform the exchange relations that create capital. In short, under the rod of the bloodthirsty master, they strayed from Marx and moved closer to Proudhon. D. Guérin might well take offence: this, he would say, was merely a counterfeit of self-management, since the individuals within it were not free. But if self-management can be counterfeited, implemented under tyrannies such as those of Tito or Castro, who have little to envy of Stalin in terms of ‘authority’; if it can be implemented only halfway, a quarter or a tenth of the way, it is precisely because it is not socialism: it concerns itself only with that fraction of profit which has not been accumulated. Scientific socialism claims the right to dispose of the entire product; that is why it is centralist, ‘authoritarian’. Marxist socialism admits neither half-measures nor ‘counterfeits’. It is a case of take it or leave it: either ‘freedom’ and the maintenance of capitalist categories, or their destruction but then, necessarily, the dictatorship of the dispossessed classes. Managing the enterprise and sharing its profits is to perpetuate capitalism. This can very well be done under the banner of freedom, since it is always under this deceptive emblem that the exploitation of the wage-earning labour force has been most effectively carried out. But this has nothing to do with the emancipation of the proletariat and socialism.