Reflections Concerning Technocracy, National-Socialism, the U.S.S.R. And Certain Other Matters
Here are a few ideas, adventurous perhaps, certainly heretical, as compared with all the accepted orthodoxies, designed above all to make militants think.
We are living on a doctrine elaborated by a great man certainly, but a great man who died fifty years ago. He created a method; he applied it to the phenomena of his time; he could not apply it to the phenomena of our own time.
Pre-war militants felt the need to apply the Marxist method to the new form capitalism had assumed in their day. Lenin’s slender brochure on imperialism points to such a concern, for which the day-to-day preoccupations of militants left unfortunately little leisure.
As for ourselves, Marx represents for us, at best, a doctrine; far more often just a name that one hurls at the head of an opponent to pulverize him; almost never a method. Marxism cannot, however, remain something living except as a method of analysis, of which each generation makes use to define the essential phenomena of its own period. Now, it seems that our bodies alone are living in this prodigiously new period, which belies all previous forecasts, and that our minds continue to move, if not at the time of the first International, at any rate in the prewar period, at the time of the revolutionary C.G.T[1] and the Russian Bolshevik party. No one tries to define the present period. Trotsky has certainly said, and even repeated on several occasions, that, since 1914, capitalism has entered upon a new phase, that of its decline; but he has never found the time to say what he means by that exactly, nor on what he bases his assertion. One cannot reproach him for this, but it takes away all value from his statement. And no one, so far as I know, has gone any further.
Whoever accepts Lenin’s formula, “Without a revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement”, is compelled to accept also the fact that there is practically no revolutionary movement at the present time.
A little over two years ago a book which caused quite a stir came out in Germany, called The End of Capitalism; the author, Ferdinand Fried, belonged to that well-known review, Die Tat, which has for a long time advocated a State capitalism, a managed and closed economy, with a dictatorship resting on the twin supports of the trade unions and the national-socialist movement. Revolutionaries have scarcely paid any attention to Fried’s book, and have judged it to be second-rate; this is because they have mistakenly sought a coherent system in it, and the value of the book, considered simply as a document, has escaped them. The fundamental idea of the book is the power of the bureaucracy. It is no longer the possessors of the capital, the owners of the plant, who run a business; thanks to shareholding, such owners are very many, and the few big shareholders who control them are concerned above all with financial deals. Those who actually run the business—directors, engineers, technicians of every kind—are, with a few exceptions, not owners but salaried personnel; it is a bureaucracy. At the same time the power of the State, in all countries, has become more and more concentrated in the hands of a bureaucratic machine. Finally, the working-class movement is in the hands of a trade-union bureaucracy. “Nowadays we are practically speaking under the domination of the trade-union bureaucracy, the industrial bureaucracy and the State bureaucracy, and these three bureaucracies are so alike that any one of them could be put in place of another.” The conclusion is that one must organize a closed economy, managed by this triple bureaucracy united in one and the same machine. This is the very programme of fascism, with this difference, that fascism breaks up the trade-union machinery and creates trade unions placed directly under its control.
There has been a lot of talk in America recently about a new theory called “technocracy”. The idea, as the name itself suggests, was that of a new type of economy, which would no longer fluctuate at the mercy of competition, nor be—as socialism wants it to be—in the hands of the workers either, but would be managed by technicians invested with a sort of dictatorial power. The conditions of this new economy, the system of distribution, the currency based on the “unit of energy”—all these are but details. The essential thing was this idea, which has, so we are told, occupied the attention of all Americans for some time, of replacing the capitalist class by another ruling class, which would have been none other than that very industrial bureaucracy Fried refers to.
These absolutely new currents of thought, which are characteristic of the post-war period, and have developed with the present industrial crisis, should lead us to examine what has become nowadays of the process of industrial production. And we must recognize that the two economic categories established by Marx—capitalists and proletariat—are no longer sufficient to grasp the form of production. The capitalists have detached themselves more and more from production itself in order to devote themselves to economic warfare. The first oil king, Rockefeller, achieved his supremacy through a happy idea of an industrial description—the pipe-line; the second, Deterding, only became Rockefeller’s lucky rival thanks to deals on the Stock Exchange and financial manipulations. This order of succession is symbolic.
Whether as a caste or as a class, bureaucracy is a new factor in the social struggle. In the U.S.S.R., it has transformed the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship exercised by itself, and has since directed the revolutionary workers of the entire world. In Germany, on the other hand, it has allied itself with financial capital to exterminate the best of the workers. One can say that in neither case has it played an independent role; but, as long as feudalism lasted, the bourgeoisie, too, had to ally themselves with the oppressed classes against it, or with it against the oppressed classes. What is serious is that nowhere are the workers organized in an independent manner. The communists obey this Russian bureaucracy, just as incapable at the moment of playing a progressive part in the rest of the world as was the French bourgeoisie after Thermidor, when it had crushed those sans-culottes on whom it had relied for support. The “reformist” workers are in the hands of that trade-union bureaucracy which resembles the industrial and State bureaucracies as one drop of water does two other drops, and adheres mechanically to the State machine. The anarchists escape the bureaucratic hold only because they know nothing about action methodically organized. Faced with this situation, the controversial utterances of the oppositional communists, the revolutionary trade unionists, etc., seem at any rate to be singularly lacking in topical interest.
The communists accuse the social-democrats of being the “quartermaster-sergeants of fascism”, and they are absolutely right. They boast that they are a party capable of fighting fascism effectively, and they are unfortunately wrong. Confronted with the fascist menace, the one question that concerns militants is this. Is it possible to organize the workers in a given country without such organization secreting as it were a bureaucracy which immediately places the organization under a State machine, whether that of the country itself, or that of the U.S.S.R.?
The sinister comedy which social-democracy and the Communist International[2] have now been playing for so many months at the expense of the German proletariat shows that the question is urgent, and perhaps the only one that matters at the moment.
[1] Confédération Générale du Travail.
[2] The most fanatical communists ought to open their eyes before the call sent out by the Communist International on March 5th. For months and months past, the “oppositionals” have been insulted because they proclaimed the urgency of proposals for a single front at the top. At the beginning of February, the German communist party proudly, rejected, without even offering to negotiate, the “pact of non-aggression proposed by the social-democrats. On February 19th, the Socialist International proposed a single front unconditionally, and obtained no other answer than Thorez’s speech before the Central Committee against any single front at the top, against any suspension of the attacks directed against the social-democrats. Then came the burning of the Reichstag, the arrest of thousands of militants, the terror which outlawed social-democrats and communistsalike, and pushed the panic-stricken social-democrat leaders into the arms of Hitler (cf. Well’s letter), which made all propaganda and organization work almost impossible. And then, and then only, the Communist international, on March 5th, accepted, not only the proposal of February 19th, but even the “pact of non-aggression”! So there was no principle precluding such tactics? What was then to stop their being adopted in February, or even in January, or even before that, when the German proletariat could still take the offensive and fight with serious chances of success? Does not this delay amount to a betrayal?