Excerpts from “Immanentizing the Eschaton” in Communist Struggle, Vol. 35, No. 3, Summer 1980.
Love thy enemy
We have now reached the one year anniversary of the Mitterand government’s “temporary state of national emergency”. Like all good state policy, what begins as exigency becomes an entrenched part of the state. The Entente has been on a war footing ever since, and with that comes the continual immiseration of the European proletariat.
This rupture brings new sites of resistance. The reactivation of the draft, to provide more cannon fodder to throw under the treads of Comintern tanks has sparked off months of insurrectionary activity against the enforcement arms of the state. The men from the Daily Mail are shocked that we are not enthusiastically taking the King’s shilling to die for our shitty jobs and crumbling apartments.
They say we’re soft and coddled children of our decadent age. On the contrary, we wholeheartedly agree with that great anthem, La Marseillaise : “Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé.” And when the first soldier of the 2nd Guards Tank Army reaches L’Arc de Triomphe, we at the executive committee of the Communist Workers Party will greet them with a kiss. Tongue, no tongue, their choice.
And while our brothers in the mainstream Communist party demure and shy away from the accusation that they are fifth columnists in love with the enemy, we disdain to conceal our views and hide behind liberal pacifism. We are on the eve of the most tremendous moment in all of human existence, the end of Man’s prehistory, the predatory stage of social development. Man’s authentic history, self-conscious and self-made, is finally beginning.
The abolition of property and money has long been a goal of the communist movement. Hitherto in the Communist bloc, Man had wrestled loose from the straitjacket of the value form, but still remained bound by the logic of capital. The revolutionary dictatorship centralised control of capital, ending the dissonance of capitalist anarchy by imposing a musical harmony to the rhythms of labor and production. This planned economy nonetheless remained at its core capitalist, still requiring labor-power to be valorised, even as the workers councils allocated most human needs unconditionally according to the common plan.
This harmony was never perfect, and the problems of circulation could never fully be conquered. Crisis still occurred, and the needs of capital to circulate and accumulate still constrained them, and subordinated labor to it.
No longer! The tyrant god has been slain and Man is now condemned to freedom. This moment has been compared in the bourgeois press to the “war communism” of the dark days of the Soviet Civil War, when the Bolshevik government sustained the republic of labor and virtue through harsh methods of terror and confiscation. But this war communism is not a euphemism for desperation; just as the culminating point of class struggle is the civil war, the culminating point of the world revolution is this authentic war communism.
Nor is this a new development in communist theory. It is coincidentally the fortieth anniversary of the theory of war communism.
War communism then and now
The conventional communism (if such a thing can be said to exist) that you learn in bourgeois school or the Pioneer League Youth (but we repeat ourselves!) is that there’s a series of discrete stages to the revolution. After the first overthrow of the bourgeoisie there’s a period of revolutionary transition, the dictatorship of the proletariat, where the working class now is in command and has built a state in its own image to advance the revolution. Then after an unspecified amount of time this situation withers away, and you reach the lower-stage of communism, often called socialism for convenience.
In socialism, there’s no money or property, but the birthmarks of class society still remain in rationing and some compulsion to labor. Then there is communism proper, where our social existence has transformed by abundance, and all rule of men has given way to the administration of things, and labor is no longer a burden but a source of life’s fulfillment.
There is really no reason why these categories have to be distinct, like flipping a lightswitch. One could just as easily bleed into the other.
This was the platform advanced by the Internationalist Fraction at the convocation of the V All-American Congress of Soviets in summer 1940. In contrast to the centre represented by the continuum from Browder-to-Reed-to-Foster1, who were measured and cautious about internationalising the military struggle and hoped to continue to drive a wedge between the liberal and fascist blocs, the re-eruption of the revolutionary wave presented for the Internationalists an opportunity to starve the beast of capital simultaneously everywhere.
This would not merely mean intensifying class struggle by providing leadership and resources for workers to begin immediate insurrection, whether for tactical concessions or as part of a conscious revolutionary strategy. It would also mean beginning to usher in the new world.
Paul Mattick, delegate from Chicagoland, and now candidate member of the WCP Politburo in the shifting political landscape after the Revolt of the Cadres, presented the “Draft programme for war communism” to the Central Executive Committee.
This draft programme contains much of the same content that we have been fixating on in our present:
- Conversion of all remaining private enterprise into state property
- Reform of the present trade union centric training and employment system into a self-organised reserve labor army.
- Universal labor obligation
- Abolition of money
- Rationing of goods by non-circulating labor vouchers
- Direct social provision of food, shelter, healthcare, and education, irrespective one’s ability to labor
The technological capacities have changed, but the political programme has remained steadfast. The guiding principles of industrial policy in the workers’ republic had already been progressively shifting from market-based indicative planning to direct material-energy accounting. Rather than try to entice, cajole, herd or threaten money into adhering to the plan, Mattick and the war communists proposed to complete the circuit and pull at last the core of the bourgeois mode of production out by the roots. Production would then be coordinated by the factory committees and workers’ soviets directly according to the needs of the revolutionary war effort and human sociability.
This proposal did receive serious interest from the workers’ soviets at every level. Howard Scott, a co-sponsor of the proposal, had conducted a pilot study a year prior in Minneapolis. For a one-month period the city soviet had agreed to suspend all cash and credit payments to trial a labor voucher program.
It should be noted that this program did cause short-term havoc in the Twin Cities. Many workers did follow along with the program in good faith. The city, in suspending usage and licensing fees for everything from parking to fishing, had a mixed record. The utilization of public infrastructure increased, and notably the decline in automobile use and the increased ridership on buses and urban rail pushed those systems closer to peak efficiency. On the other hand, the rationing of certain scarce goods did cause considerable turmoil.
The real chaos, though, happened on the cooperative/firm level. The pilot program did promise reimbursement for purchases made under the pilot program. But this, coupled with the short-term nature of the program, would spoil the results. Most consumer goods would be rationed according to the labor voucher system. The notion is simple enough; to apportion the now directly social products of labor, workers would be entitled to what they put into the social labor pool, minus deductions for the general infrastructure and the support of the non-laboring population. Every good represents a certain abstract labor time to turn it from its component raw materials into a finished product. So one hour’s worth of labor gives one hour’s worth of the products of labor.
This by its very nature equalizes the value of labor. Skilled and specialist labor, which had previously commanded a premium due to the time invested in acquiring such skills and the difficulty of it, would now be valued at the same level as any other labor. Such inequalities had been greatly reduced in the proletarian dictatorship, but had not been eliminated.
So when faced with this prospect, many would do what is always done when they don’t like the rules: they’d cheat. Work less, refuse to work, continue to demand cash payment for services, or attempt to buy/sell the non-circulating labor vouchers.
Scott had insisted that there be no legal punishment for such actions. There were many informants in the program whose job in the pilot was to simply monitor and record such efforts because the data would be useful either way.
The pilot program ended on 12 August 1939. The Tektology Commission’s final report noted marked increases in corruption and black market activity, which it attributed to the limited nature of the program. After all, the city’s integral part in the national economy meant that for the time being money would continue to circulate from outside. This parallel cash economy made it easier for city residents to mask their actions.
Controlling for that element was difficult, and post-program debriefs showed mixed enthusiasm. People who had voted for the proposal didn’t like that it had ended, but also didn’t appreciate the experience of being human guinea pigs. Workers who had voted against the program had more mixed views. Approximately one third were convinced, in spite of their reservations, that communism was possible within their lifetimes, and reported feeling liberated from fears about money and scarcity. The balance, disproportionately from the high income bracket and skilled services, reported demoralization.
These opinions did cut across party lines. As famed Marxist philosopher St. Augustine of Florida would say, “Oh Lord, give me communism, but not yet.” Everyone is equal in the workers’ state, but some are more equal than others. We hear it endlessly repeated by parson, teacher and politician, their mouths full of shit. But communists need not shy away from this fact.
While the prospect of achieving communist relations was given serious consideration in the CEC, war communism was not to be. The final report of the War Production Committee summarized the findings as “possible, but not recommended.” The disruption to production during the transitionary period was calculated to last for over a year. There was simply no groundwork laid to conduct such an ambitious plan from a standing start. The needs of the war would, and communism once again ducked behind the horizon.
The riddle of history
In the end, the proposal was withdrawn by unanimous consent. The votes were not there, and the authors of the war communism proposal agreed that it would do no good to put the Workers’ Party in a situation where it was “voting against communism” however reasonable the proposition might be.
Nonetheless, the image of communism, of a society no longer structured according to the circulation of wealth, remained a potent one. We have been critical of the record of the Third International over the years, but we do so as comrades not adversaries. It is easy, living in the world where the beast had been slain, where the advance of the international proletarian revolution has occurred frustratingly slowly, advancing inch-by-inch from its beacheads around the world, to wish that our forefathers had simply cut the Gordian knot. There is some justification behind the mainstream communists’ criticism of the ultraleft yearning to live in a communist post-millennium, where the tribulation and struggle is our past rather than our future.2
In a real sense the second guessings of the past of our movement reflect a real anxiety about our present and future. The World Revolutionary War advanced the global cause of proletarian emancipation more than any event before or since. But the apocalyptic war between capitalism and communism transformed mid-course into a showdown between fascist reaction and democracy, and this provided the respite necessary to preserve and stabilise the capitalist imperium.
The boys who strut around in their Safari costume, reading worn copies of Soldier of Fortune , and waxing nostalgic about the great Norman military tradition are the sort of utter buffoon that drives a man to murder. He lives in the world bequeathed to him by communist mercy, ignoring the years spent financing the fell beast of Nazism before his side arrived at the finish line and claimed victory; a victory not won by soldiers of the imperial metropole, but by the great mass of colonial soldiers who still remain a subaltern in the so-called Alliance of Free States.
Outside the pale of his constructed history, the sacrifices of the Red Army are never imagined. The Red Army killed more Nazi soldiers over the course of the war than served in the whole of the Franco-British military during the war. They endured such awful sacrifice to make it happen, and crushed the whole host of the Fascist war machine while our fathers and grandfathers struggled to take on the children and old men manning the Western Front.
It was an act of supreme mercy for a Red Army man to meet his British “comrade” on the Weser River and just stop there. How many sons and fathers and brothers had been felled by British steel sold at cost to Nazi Germany? They could have rolled over our finest, and they wouldn’t have stopped until they reached Lisbon.
In the present, our situation has been maintained by the hydrogen bomb, that ultimate weapon of counterrevolution. In contrast to the Red Army, which has always viewed the atomic weapon as another tactical weapon in its arsenal, the nuclear policy of the capitalists has always been premeditated mass murder as a “deterrent”.
Armageddon calls
We’ve been encamped outside the plains of Megiddo for just over a year now. There has been civil strife, insurrection, conflict and even war on every continent. These “limited wars” push us closer and closer to the precipice. The task for all class-conscious workers is to ask yourself “What can I do to help bring the apocalypse?”
The answers are simple. We burn our draft cards. We ransack the draft offices and destroy the records. If by any chance someone does manage to put you in a uniform, there are some lovely institutions we would love to acquaint you with (See our pamphlets “How to frag your officer,” “How to desert the army in six easy steps,” or “Handy phrase book for easy defecting in the colonial wars”).
You’re probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, I really do not want to die for these bastards, but won’t they just unleash the h-bombs if it comes to a shooting war in Europe?” These are valid fears. After all, they’ve made sure we never forget that we’ve grown up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. And the cornerstone of Franco-British and later German defense policy has been to channel Samson and pull the temple down around them should they lose.
But recent events have caused a reevaluation of this. When the lines in the sand continue to be crossed and still the button is not pushed, it could very well be that the men in charge, no longer confident in the mineshaft + concubine plan to repopulate the ruined Earth in their image, are not as insane as they would lead us to believe.
With the forces of the AFS now dispersed fighting hundred brushfire wars, a certain truth hits you like a double-decker bus-sized cruise missile: the forces of “freedom” are losing this quasi-world war.
God-willing, the struggles of rationing and war mobilisation will intensify the struggle, and the radical youth of Europe will not be scared away from revolutionary defeatism. The adventures of the Greens and their petit-bourgeois pacifism was amusing a year ago, but now the Communist Workers’ Party must clarify its stance once again now that the call for the “non-nuclear military” are being heard in Parliament. We are not anti-nuclear power. We are not even anti-nuclear weapon. In fact, we wish for more Kh-22 missiles in the FY1981 Defence Budget, one for each of Her Majesty’s aircraft carriers.3
And to our comrades in the Group of Forces in Germany: we continue to wait with bated breath for our romantic rendezvous in Paris, the City of Lights. Next year in London, nez-pas?
1. The author is positioning them politically from right to left, a reference that would be understood by most communists in-universe
2. In Christian eschatology, there are many competing interpretations, but one point of consensus is that after the Millenium (real or symbolic), there will be Last Judgment and the recreation of a New Heaven and New Earth.
3. The author is alluding to the sinking of the HMS Invincible carrier group by the Chilean Naval Air Arm during the Falklands campaign.
*[WPA]: Works Progress Administration
*[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation
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