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http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/facing-reality-45-years-later-critical-dialogue-with-jamesleechaulieu/

Facing Reality 45 Years Later: Critical Dialogue with

James/Lee/Chaulieu
bthp

We do not come before the world and proclaim: Here is the truth! Down on your knees! We merely tell the world
why it struggles, and consciousness is something the world must acquire even if it does not want to.
Marx, Letter to Ruge, 1843
In 1958, Facing Reality was an important book, uncannily anticipatory of the historical period which would unfold
over the following 15 years. Its main assertions are still being debated. Even though I myself have serious doubts
about them, the following is written to provoke further debate. What I find most interesting in Facing Realityis not so
much the answers it offers as the questions it asks. Those questions revolve around the role of the revolutionary
Marxist party today.
James (Johnson) and Lee left the Socialist Workers Party ca. 1947, along with Raya Dunayevsyaka (Forest).
James was deported from the U.S. to Britain in 1953, but the Forest-Johnson tendency worked in Detroit until the
James-Raya split ca. 1957. The Johnsonite current was maintained thereafter in Detroit by Marty Glaberman (who
died a few months ago), and still influences in varying degrees groupings such as the Youngstown Impact circle and
the journal Race Traitor. Chaulieu, better known as Castoriadis and to a lesser extent as Cardan, was of course a
founder of Socialism or Barbarism (1948-1965).
Many aspects of this book are clearly out of date. One canreadily understand how, in 1958, revolutionaries could
draw such inspiration from the Hungarian Revolution (which was indeed inspiring), but almost 45 years later one
must ask what has happened since (including in Hungary!).The book was written at the height of the Cold War, i.e. in
the bipolar world which disappeared long ago. It is written in the shadow of bureaucracy, a term interchangeable
for James et al. with state capitalism, at a time when progressive statism, in its welfare, Stalinist and Third Worldist
forms, seemed omnipresent and permanent, a situation swept away over the past 25 years by the rise of neoliberalism. The book never relates state capitalism , or, in fact, any of the other phenomena discussed, to the
Marxian law of value. It is a pure product of the era which seemed to pose everything as a struggle between
bureaucracy and democracy, order-givers and order-takers. The book focuses almost exclusively (with the
exception of Hungary) on workers struggles and power on the shop floor, and is therefore (rightly) open to the
charge of workerism, an excessive point-of-production focus, with elements that seem at times almost syndicalist.
The examples offered of shop-floor power in the U.S., France and Britain were similarly swept away, or at the very
least greatly modified (to put it mildly), by the post-1970s capitalist counter-offensive.
These are, in my view, some of the books flaws. What are its strengths or at least some of the questions which, 45
years on, have not been settled by historical experience?
James et al. argue that the Bolshevik vanguard party was appropriate to the conditions of Russia from 1903 to
1923, presumably from the Bolshevik-Menshevik split to the end of Lenins political life. But, they argue further, after
the 1930s triumph of the one-party state in its welfare-statist, Stalinist and fascist forms, the transfer of this model to
the new situation, in Russia and in the West, was an anachronism. Stalinism, in their view, was symptomatic of the
ferocity with which the state had to suppress what the authors call the already-existing new society, and from this
they conclude that no vanguard party is any longer necessary for revolution. They see the Hungarian Revolution as
confirmation of this. For them, the Hungarian workers overthrew the Stalinist state with no vanguard party in sight,
and similarly fought very creatively against overwhelming odds against the subsequent Soviet invasion.

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Leaving aside the accuracy of this account (and there is no doubt much truth to it), James et al. do arrive at the
intriguing idea that the ferocity of state control in the post-1933 period 1) expresses the immediacy of revolution in
our epoch, i.e. the high level of general development present in todays working class which capital must suppress
and 2) is the collective experience that prepares a revolution beyond vanguardism. The authors (in contrast to many
others of the libertarian current) are quite right to say there was nothing spontaneous about Hungary, but that it
was prepared during years of discussions among workers in response to their experience of Stalinist planning.
Another (in my view) unique aspect of the book, again in contrast to so much libertarian theory, is its affirmation of
the idea of leadership, simultaneous with its rejection of reducing leadership to some formal vanguard grouping.
Most libertarian anti-vanguard formulations always immediately reduce any leaders to bureaucrats. What James
et al. reject is the FORMAL relationship of self-appointed vanguards to the historical experience of the class, much of
which the latter are incapable of recognizing. In their view (and here I fully agree with them) the leaders of different
struggles are not pre-selected by formal association in a vanguard organization, but from among those with the
particular talents and skills of leaders, adequate (or not) to the tasks of the real movement. A great strength of this
text, in my opinion, is that it avoids both the conventional libertarian rejection of leaders as a swear word, and at
the same time the formal understanding of leadership stemming from the conventional, incarnationist-body of Christ
concept of the Trotskyist milieu (from which the authors all emerged).
Those of us shaped by 1968 have lived through such a long and bleak historical period since then (without
precedent, in length, in the history of the movement since 1848) that the books description of the problems of
vanguardism acquires a ring of truth it would not have had, to many, in the 1968-1973 period, which seemed to be
an historical recovery of the vanguard concept, with the proliferation of sects claiming the mantle of Bolshevism
(proletarian Jesuits, as James et al. call them).
The singularity and exceptional interest of this textat least for me is four-fold: 1) the use, in very accessible and
not condescending language, of James et al.s reading of Hegel for revolutionary purposes, 2) the idea that the oneparty state which triumphed globally ca. 1933 (fascism- Stalinism- New Deal) obviates the Bolshevik model of the
party for present and future purposes, 3) the forecast that automation was posing every question for the working
class in a way unknown to earlier generations of Marxists. ( 4) will be dealt with momentarily.) Twenty-five years
before the concepts of Fordism and post-Fordism became fashionable, James et al. wrote: What is coming to an
end is the stage of mass production by assembly line workers. My own term for this new phase has been the
Grundrisse phase of capitalism, the phase in which scientific labor (resulting in, among other things, automation) is
directly appropriated by capital as a significant source of value. (Once again, value is striking in James et al.s text
by its total absence.)
Taken by themselves, these first three strands, however innovative at the time, are not absolutely unique to James
et al. What IS (as far as I know) unique, and what constitutes Johnsonism today, is the assertion that 4) the new
society is omnipresent in the daily relations of the working class, and that socialism consists in nothing more or less
than pushing aside all aspects of the official society that hold them back, up to the formation of a Republic of
Workers Councils.
This view of the new society being born and deepening itself every day focuses on what is possibly the unique
Johnsonite idea of the irrelevance of explicit, stated consciousness of workers (or of any other group) at a given
moment, when grasped in relationship to what the workers (and others) DO, even when (or particularly when) what
they do contradicts what they say. Paradigmatic for this formulation is Marty Glabermans experience of the 1943
Detroit auto wildcats against the no-strike pledge, carried out by workers who were often Roosevelt (and sometimes
even Wilkie) supporters, and who just before had even voted for the no-strike pledge at a UAW convention. James et
al., in their book, give many further examples of this relationship between explicit consciousness and class activity. I
will return to this central thesis after presenting the other main points of the book.
Taken together, these four strands do seem to point to a serious if not complete break with the practice of the
classical workers movement, a movement culminated in the worldwide upsurge of 1917-1927 (i.e. from the

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revolutionary upheaval at the end of World War I to the massacre of the Chinese working class in Canton and
Shanghai), the moment at which most of the cutting questions (the nature of Social Democracy, of Stalinism, of
unions, of national self-determination, of the united front) around which vanguards and sects today still define
themselves, acquired their definitive form.
If one wished to characterize the theoretical advance of the historical moment of the return of revolution in the West
in the 1960s, of the great advance in the understanding of Marx made possible on one hand by the struggles of that
period and by the unprecedented diffusion of the early (1840s) Marx, of the Grundrisse, of the Unpublished Sixth
Chapter of Capital, and (more recently) of Marxs study of the Russian peasant commune and of primitive societies,
one would be hard-pressed to summarize the advance more succinctly than in the term SELF-REFLEXIVITY. It is
impossible to underestimate the break this constitutes with the theory and practice of the classical workers
movement: one need only think of the poverty of Lenins first attempt at philosophy Materialism and EmpirioCriticism(1908). One great merit of the work of James et al. is their emphasis on the fact that we understand the past
in new ways from the struggles of the present, i.e. that we can see with fresh eyes the importance of the Levellers
in England , the Enrages in France and of American slaves in the U.S. civil war BECAUSE of events such as the
Hungarian Revolution, not to mention the upsurges of the sixties.
The 1960s revolt against bureaucracy (i.e. applied rationalism. so to speak) was the immediate social backdrop
to the recovery of self-reflexivity in Marxs outlook (as for example (!) his definition of capital as value valorizing
itself).
What does self-reflexivity mean? (This is my term; James et al. use the term self-movement). It is the key to the
break with the past; it refers to the specific self-development of human beings and above all of social classes in
struggle as arising from subjects acting on themselves. (This comes straight from Hegels an-und-fuer sich
consciousness and Marxs class for itself (the revolutionary class), contrasted with the class-in-itself, the dispersed
proletariat in its day-to-day existence as variable capital.) One could thus summarize the fundamental historical
break theorized by James et al.quite simply:
rationalism (acting on objects, Western thought from Descartes
to the early Lenin)

= vanguardism, elites organizing others

self-activity (subjects acting on themselves, the algebra of

revolution from Hegel to Marx)

= Republic of Workers Councils, selforganization of the class

It is no accident that every vanguardist grouping still in existence in the world today (primarily Trotskyists) displays
total indifference, when not outright philistine contempt, toward the 1950s and 1960s recovery of Hegel, the
1840s Marx, the Grundrisse, the Unpublished Sixth Chapter of vol. 1, etc, and continues this indifferentist attitude
even toward Lenins late discovery of Hegel (1914: No Marxist since Marx has understood Capital, presumably
including Lenin himself up to that point) and his post-1914 (Philosophical Notebooks) repudiation of the sophomoric,
reductionist, boiler-plate world view of the 1908 Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. For these groups, such
considerations are mere theory, at best an afterthought useful for placating a few intellectual contacts who, in
Lenins formulation, must be kept on a very short leash. The vanguardists are indifferentists on the question of
philosophy (while of course generally adhering to the most unashamed unspoken reductionism), as they are of
James et al.s assertion that philosophy must become proletarian, because they are stuck in the old world view,
sooner or later,of acting on objects, just like the rationalist tradition from the 16th to the 19th century, in the
framework of bourgeois thought and science, and continued by the classical workers movement from Lassalle to the
pre-1914 Lenin.
But let us continue with the four-fold singularities of James et al: the implications of the consolidation of the one
party state in the first third of the 20th century. Today, one billion people are living under a totalitarian state that a
few decades ago existed only in the scribblings of a few madmen. In the view of the authors, the great majority of
Marxists formed by the vanguard view were, by the 1950s, in state or proto-state apparatuses, ranging from the

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British Labour Party to the UAW (which James elsewhere once characterized as a one-party state in the wings).
It is a real act of historical imagination today to recall the mood in the classical workers movement (1840-1945)
when the great texts recovered in the 1950s and 1960s were known at best to a few specialists, when unabashed
Enlightenment materialism slightly warmed over into dialectical materialism was the daily fare of socialist
intellectuals and militants alike. A similar act of imagination is required to recall the (pre-1914) situation when AngloFrench liberal democratic capitalism still exercised real attraction for reformers and pre-Marxist would-be
revolutionaries living under monarchies, empires, autarchies, despotisms, landed oligarchies, and military
pronuncamientos, not to mention outright colonial and semi-colonial domination by Britain and France. In most of the
world middle-class people aspiring to serious change still looked to London and Paris for models, and read Voltaire,
Diderot, Bentham, Comte, Saint-Simon, Mill, Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Shaw and the Webbs for inspiration and guidance.
One should never forget how much a figure such as Edward Bernstein, who still figured as an orthodox Marxist
prior to the revisionist debate of 1898, admired English institutions and culture; extrapolating from that fact, one can
grasp to what extent mainstream German Social Democracy, the lynchpin of the classical workers movement, was a
substitute for an absent middle-class liberalism in German society. One should never forget that in countries such
as France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, as late as 1900, mass workers movements were still caught up in major
battles with the state and the Catholic church for secular education, that is for a bourgeois Enlightenment project,
and still had to expel (and in some cases, did not expel) Freemasonsthe ultimate top-down rationalist reformers
from their ranks.
From 1848 and particularly from 1871 and the Paris Commune onward, popularized Marxism of a sort was of
course undermining and going beyond Anglo-French Enlightenment thought and culture. But what was this
Marxism? It was mediated to the world largely by the Lassallean SPD, whose distinguishing characteristic was
precisely the separate elite body of professional organizers, (a notion quite foreign to Marx himself), organizing the
working class as rationalist thought organizes objects, and not accidentally propagating the original boiler-plate
reductionist Marxism that prompted Marx to exclaim I am not a Marxist! This current culminated in the Bolshevik
Party, whose adherence to this approach (despite the little-known late Lenin) was carried far into the 20th century
by Stalinism, Maoism and Trotskyism.
In other words, the Marxism that spread from Germany to Russia to the rest of the world after 1917 was largely a
warmed-over version of Enlightenment rationalist thought, in which the whole conceptual revolution of selforganization underlying the work of Hegel and Marx was totally obscured, lost and even (in Stalinism) calumnied.
This Marxism only began to be seriously undermined by the events and ferment of the 1950s and 1960s, yet more
than 30 years later the vanguardists have still not awakened to the implications of the conceptual revolution
undermining the epistemology which (however dimly they may be aware of it), pervades their approach to the
working class.
What James et al. have done, in other words, in contrast to almost any other text I am aware of, is provide a social
explanation, both in terms of the mutation of the state and of the productive forces, for the epistemological break
constituted by the recovery of self-reflexive self-movement through Hegel and the previously buried texts of Marx.
What is ultimately at stake in these shifts is the question of communication. Is it to be unilateral: here is the truth,
(which we the Marxists embody), down on your knees? Or is it to be two-way, between the Marxist organization
and the working class, i.e. what James et al. call the task of the former to recognize and record, as in Lenins 1905
recognition of the soviets? If James et al. are right, and there is in fact no longer any difference between theory and
practice, it must be the latter, putting the Marxist organization seemingly on a level playing field with the working
class as a whole.
What changed after the high point of influence of the Anglo-French liberal model, i.e. beginning ca. 1870 but above
all after 1914, was, by 1933, everywhere, what James et al. call the one-party state, Stalinist, fascist, or welfarestatist. This is the planning state (however little it actually planned), and the significance of this new state was that
it drove home to tens of millions of working people the ultimate social meaning of the old rationalism, of the

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administration of people as objects, the administration of people instead of the adminstration of things. The
worldwide dominance of this state after the 1930s was a vast generalization, but one also showing the limits, of the
old world view, with which almost all Marxism was still on a continuum.
Thus, James et al. argue, to take as a viable model a working-class vanguard developed under an autocratic state
where a kind of politics still in the orbit of the old rationalism could nonetheless be new and liberating, and to
transpose it to the rest of the world, where all of rationalisms possibilities have long since been extended far beyond
anything known in Tsarist Russia, and have decayed for all to see, is truly to be an anachronism.
Thus for the second of the four innovative strands of James et al.
The third is the question of automation. Perhaps nowhere does the dated quality of Facing Reality, its lack of
attention to the Marxist theory of value, come through as in this aspect of the book. The discussion assumes
automations relentless extension, in the framework of the welfare/one-party state, into the indefinite future, an
assumption the authors shared with any number of other 1950s/1960s treatments of the subject, from the Triple
Revolution theorists to Murray Bookchins post-scarcity anarchism. James et al. seem to completely forget (as did
virtually everyone else at the time) that without living labor capital does not exist, and that when capital is threatened
by expelling too much living labor from the production process, it must re-employ workers in labor-intensive
activities to continue its vampire relationship to living labor.
Nevertheless, the authors are correct in saying that automation, unlike any previous technological innovation, posed
for the first time in the history of capitalism, not the creation of vast numbers of new jobs but the permanent
elimination of vast numbers of jobs, and thus the question of the fate of the growing mass of permanently
unemployed. This, however, has worked itself out since 1958, through high-tech, nanotechnology, outsourcing,
kanben, de-industrialization, service sector MacJobs, Third World industrialization and globalization, in a way that
would be almost unrecognizable to James et al., writing at a time when it seemed self-evident to focus on shop-floor
struggles in the U.S., Britain and France (however inspired by Hungary). No reader today will have any difficulty
recognizing the pertinence of these lines from 1958:

Now, with automation, capitalism is robbing the majority of the population of the only role they have
been permitted.

When millions of young people have no idea whether they will ever have a job and lie in bed half the
day because they dont know what to do with themselves, that is a system committing suicide. (p. 26)

To tie these four strands together, we see that the old epistemology from the classical workers movement, badly
compromised with rationalism, was realized in the planning state which came into existence to manage masses of
workers on the assembly line, and that automation, which implies (for a socialist society) the emancipation of the
working class (and humanity) from such repetitive drudgery, also undermines the need for vanguards by posing the
possibility of a different kind of activity beyond the capitalist antagonism of work and leisure, one already present in
the new society of everyday relations in the working class. The latter is the meaning of Marxs idea that only with
communism does prehistory come to an end and actual human history begin.
These four strands1) the centrality of self-activity or self-movement from Hegel to Marx (and influencing the late
Lenin); 2) the realization of the rationalist world view in the one-party (planning) state after 1933, 3) the entirely
new situation opened up by the end of the assembly line through automation and 4) the new society which must be
freed from its containment by official society, and which the Marxist organization must recognize and recordare,
in my view, the truly radical (especially for the time) underpinnings of Facing Reality. It is all the more remarkable

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when one realizes how much of the subsequent 15 years Facing Reality anticipated in 1958, as in (to cite only one
particularly cogent example):

The French workers will move, and when they do, they will leave the French Communist Party
hanging in the air. (p. 156)

Obviously I am extrapolating the themes that hit me between the eyes, and neglecting the very rich discussion of the
total bankruptcy of official society since World War I, as in:

any elite must of necessity consciously falsify the information it gives to the massOfficial society
does not know and has no means of knowing or even of understanding the actual facts of its own
existence. (p. 96)

the brief, brilliant asides on the fate on art in this period, containing in one line a devastating critique (before the
letter) of the post-modern assault on the canon:

so it is that at this stage of our society art is either the contemporary abortions which rasp the nerves
and stimulate without satisfying; or it is a retreat to the accepted classics because they are being
used as a bomb shelter, whereas they were originally explosives (p. 85)

(one wishes to find one PoMo capable of acknowledging that the dead white male classics were once explosives).
Similarly anticipated in this book is the nearly world-wide wildcat movement up to 1973 (on which the authors were
drawing from direct experience in mid-1950s Britain, France and America); the resulting 1960s surge of interest in
councilism, workers councils and workers control; the worldwide impact of Hegel, the 1844 Manuscripts the
Grundrisse, the (then) Unpublished Sixth Chapter of vol. l; all the new histories of the classical workers movement
focusing on factory committees, workers councils and soviets in Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain; the rediscovery of
the council communists Pannekoek, Gorter and the KAPD; the histories of the bourgeois revolutions which
rediscover such currents as the Levellers (and Diggers, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men) and Enrages; the
Situationists critique of art; the international debate on Lenin, party and class in the 1968-1975 period; some of the
new history from below shifting the focus away from leaders, organizations and ideologies; the explosive
development of the black movement in the U.S., perhaps culminating in the League of Black Revolutionary Workers,
more or less exactly along the lines set down by James et al. ten years earlier. One can in the long run also judge a
book by the research program (meant here in the broadest sense of the term) it inspires, or at least anticipates. By
this criterion, Facing Reality must be recognized as being way ahead of its time.
But of course if we are interested in Facing Reality45 years after it was written, it can only be for what the book
might illuminate for our present and future, for the main real question (for non-antiquarians) of what is to be done. It
is here that James et al., whatever one might think of the merits of the book sketched above, enter the most
controversial terrain of the new conception of the Marxist organization in the new epoch of self-organization, the
one-party state, automation and the superannuation of vanguardism by the emergence of the new society in
everyday life.
Writing in 1958, the authors refer to 30 years of futility of the small Marxist organization (looking back to the 1928
definitive triumph of Stalinism in Russia) (at least by the Trotskyist timetable). We, in 2002, can say, effectively, 75
years (which is in no way to denigrate the explosion of the 1960s and early 1970s which gave many of us the

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eyes with which to read James et al. with interest today).

Who can honestly say there is not a great deal of truth in their description of the life of the sect, of small
organizations dressing up as big ones as the authors put it? Everyone who lived as a militant through the late 60s
and early 70s must recognize how the small vanguard groups were mainly tossed about like corks on a wave by the
major upheavals of the time, and could by no stretch of the imagination be said to have led them. This is
particularly true when we consider the wildcat movement in industry, in most major capitalist countries, from the
mid-1950s to 1973.
But since that wildcat, shop-floor movement is what is best theorized by the book, we might also ask, as we might
ask about the example of Hungary: WHAT WENT WRONG? What happened to all this wonderful self-activity? It is
there, I think, that the weaknesses of the book start to come more clearly into focus. For James et al. (as in much of
James other work, above all Notes on Dialectics (1948) the working class is portrayed as a tiger straining on a
leash, barely contained by official society, the latter led by working-class parties, and unions and union officials
(including American shop stewards) enforcing the contract.
At the risk of highest heresy, I might contrast Facing Realityto formulations in a text seemingly at the other end of
the spectrum (to be published shortly in English translation) on the question of party and class, by the Italian
Bordigist current, and most notably the Bordigist critique of Gramsci. It is not necessary to linger over the Bordigists
assertion that nothing of interest happens in the working class without the party. The nub of their critique of Gramsci,
above all on the question of workers councils in a capitalist framework, is that any oppositional force that becomes a
power, outside of the context of revolution, quickly becomes part of official society.
James et al. are of course not arguing for such reformism either. They cite the example of the Hungarian workers
councils, or the earlier Russian factory councils of 1917 (before the Bolsheviks pushed them aside in favor of the
unions). Neither James et al. nor the Bordigists are advocates of any gradualist conquest of power by the working
class; both currents see the revolution as happening whole, against all aspects of official society up to that point.
This, however, is where they radically part ways.
The Bordigists draw their force from a wholesale critique of immediatism, going back to Marxs polemic against
Proudhon in the Poverty of Philosophy (1847). They see immediatism (by which they meanwithout always saying
it explicitlyany working-class action not led by the vanguard party) in various currents that have arisen since Marx,
from the left and from the right, which express the situation of the working class IN THE INDIVIDUAL FACTORY,
or even at the point of production as a whole, what Marx (in vol. 1) called the sphere of immediate production. They
see this as a common thread uniting Proudhonian and Bakuninist anarchism (with the latters historic appeal to craft
workers desiring to control their own production process), Bernsteinian reformism (which did evolve into the German
works councils or Betriebsraete, officially recognized first in the Weimar Republic and then more thoroughly after
World War II), anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary syndicalism and syndicalism of the Sorelian direct- action variety
ca. 1900, 1920s German-Dutch councilism, and finally in the Socialism or Barbarism group in the post-1945 period
(of which one of the authors ofFacing Reality, Chaulieu/Castordiadis, was a major theoretician).None other than
Lenin observed, in the pre-1914 syndicalist revolt and strike wave of British workers against the Labour Party and its
unions, that reformism breeds syndicalism, and that the two are interdependent rejections of Marxism, and
specifically (by syndicalisms refusal of politics) of direct political confrontation with the capitalist state.
The Bordigists see this immediatist workplace-centered view of the working class (which, in either its reformist or
apparently radical guises, attacks Marxismby which the Bordigists also mean, of course, the partyfrom the right
or from the left), as a replication, within the workers movement, of the essence of capitalism itself, the alienation of
different groups of workers in the very capitalist category of the FIRM and the individual sector. The hell of
capitalism,, as the Bordigists put it, is the enterprise, not the fact that the enterprise has a boss.This means
(following Marxs vol. 1 presentation of capital largely from the viewpoint of the individual enterprise, i.e. the
immediate sphere of production) that it is the heteronomy of society flowing from its dispersion into a myriad of
competing enterprises which is one major aspect of capitalist alienation to be overcome. The ultimate drift of this

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immediatism is toward a conception of a republic of producers (as it was specifically advocated by many currents
of anarchism, syndicalism, etc.) controlling the immediate workplace. The Bordigists (rightly in my opinion) see this
flawed conception as a mystification of the existing working class at the point of production in the daily life of
capitalism as being already revolutionary or almost revolutionary. Such a view denies the radical BREAK by which
the point-of-production workers, along with the unemployed and others excluded from production, become the
CLASS-FOR-ITSELF, the class with radical chains, breaking with their status as producers in this or that firm and
posing themselves in society as a whole as the practical, universal embodiment of Man, (the only concrete
meaning such a word can have) as all-sided in their production as in their consumption as Marx put it in the
Grundrisse. The working class becomes revolutionary by shedding its fragmented status as a class-in-itself, i.e. a
class-for-capital, as it exists in the single factory or in the sum total of all factories, as mere negation, thereby
breaking up the alienated, capital-conditioned division of labor and posing itself as a total alternative power, a classfor-humanity. Or, to paraphrase Hegel,what initially loomed large in everyday consciousness has now receded to a
single trace.
I contend that most of the examples of the new society given in Facing Realityare stuck in immediatist
situations, even if the authors vision (e.g. Hungary) of the new societys ultimate triumph is indeed based on a
break and a totally alternative self-organization of the working class as the dominant force in society. (The latter is
indeed the meaning of their view that philosophy must become proletarian.) They agree with the Bordigists in
rejecting any power that becomes part of official society, but the two currents disagree drastically about the role of
the Marxist organization in bringing about this break.
The authors of Facing Reality would of course immediately point to the Hungarian Republic of Workers Councils as
the practical refutation of any charge of immediatism, as the latter precisely went beyond the individual factory or
all factories taken together to rule society as a whole, at least for 13 days. No one, and I least of all, would deny the
power of this experience, or of 1905 and 1917 in Russia, some of the insurrections (Germany, Italy) immediately
after World War I, of elements in Spain in 1936-37, or finally of May 1968 in France. All these experiences are
refutations of the tired, early Leninist assertion in What Is To Be Done? that by itself (i.e. without the party) the
working class cannot go beyond trade-unionist consciousness, which is still the belief of most vanguard groups
today. James et al. point out that

if the organization was the SUBJECT of history,the proletariat was the OBJECT. In this conception of
organization, in philophical terms, was the Universal. This conception of the organization is inherent
in the extreme views that Lenin expounded in What Is To Be Done? He repudiated them later, but not
with the force and thoroughness which were needed to prevent them from doing infinite mischief.
(pp. 93-94).

Nevertheless, when set against the great rollback of the working class just about everywhere since ca. 1973, one
must wonder just how effective the informal shop steward networks on the London docks (etc. etc.) were in fighting
it or even in slowing it down.
Nevertheless, Facing Reality is one of a handful of works produced in the years 1956-1973 which truly can be said
to have anticipated what was new in that period. The question confronting us, once again, is whether or not it has
anything to say to our own.
Serious economic crisis is nowhere in this book. A few derisive asides are made to mainstream debates over
inflation, the balance of payments, living standards, followed by (correct) assertions that the working class could
solve these problems in short order, once it has set up the Republic of Workers Councils. One wonders what James
et al. would have to say today about the unraveling of capitalism in the three core countries they discuss, about
entire de-industrialized regions, about millions of people trapped in minimum-wage no-future service jobs, 10-20%

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fall in real wages, a 10-20% increase in the work week, flexible hours eliminating overtime and even a predictable
work schedule, the demise of the big factory, the outsourcing of work even in core sectors such as auto which loom
so large in their analysis, the dispersion of remaining industry to non-union greenfield sites in the Sunbelt and out
of the country altogether to maquiladoras and export platforms around the world; the related breakup of big workingclass concentrations in the old industrial cities and the great dispersion of populations to suburbia and exurbia; three
and four minimum-wage job blue-collar families working at Wal-mart, call centers and the new casinos that have
replaced industry; the return of sweatshops, child labor and bonded labor (i.e. virtual slavery); the prison
construction boom and prison labor; Third World immigration and American (black and white) hostility to it; the
growing working-class sympathy for protectionism; devastated inner cities where all the factories closed 20 years
ago (South Central LA and Cincinnati being paradigmatic; wiping out whole swaths of the black working class that in
many places was at the forefront of the 1960s wildcat rebellion); the rise of far-right parties in Europe with a serious
working-class base organized around the issue of immigration. All this is a far cry from the mid-1950s era in which
the core industrial unions were negotiating ever-greater wage and benefit deals in an attempt to stop the shop-floor
rebellion against loss of control over the work process. And what did the authors wonderful new society do while
all this was going on, except undergo it? If the American workers in fact held all the cards in 1958, as the authors
say, they certainly threw away their hand over the next three decades. James et al. hardly imagined struggles of the
kind that characterized the post-1980 period, where every concession was not enough to keep companies from
shutting down Northeastern towns and cities. It is as if the capitalists had read Facing Reality as well, and had done
everything in their power to break up the immediate source of the problem, the big factory and the large urban
concentration of workers in factories.
But we have hardly exhausted the richness of James et al.s formulations about contemporary working-class life and
the tasks of the Marxist organization. That task is concisely summarized as:
to recognize and record the presence of the new society, which the authors think was already one of Lenins main
contributions in his recognition of the importance of the soviets (a breakthrough conceived in advanced by no
theoretician). The first condition, then, is to give the working class means of expressing itself (p. 94). While greatly
inferior to official society in resources and reach, the Marxist organization has the great advantage over its enemies
in its ability to see intertwined the decadence of official society and the socialist solution (p. 97). The invading
socialist society (to use another Jamesian formulation from another publication) is shown to be present in the way
in which workers deal with the concrete problems of production, constantly having to fight managements
interference. The authors do cite remarkable material such as the 1955 French wildcats (which were already
pushing the unions aside) and the informal groups in British longshore and textile which wielded more effective
power than either management or the unions. They show (in the British case) how the workers used Communists
strictly for their own ends and discarded them when they sensed manipulation; the authors argue, from the great
informality of the selection of leaders in real workers assemblies, that the question of leadership is a false problem
(p. 93) Their discussion of the issue of the relationship between electoral politics and direct action at the workplace
develops the key idea of the book: the connection between the workers strategy at any given moment, and the uses
they may or may not make of official societys political system. (these are of course developed with focus on the
French Communist Party, the British Labour Party and the American Democrats). They argue that vanguard groups
reach a low water-mark of sterility in endless sweating about how to relate to elections, and this flows from the
problem of small organizations dressing up as big ones. They argue that the great masses of people today have
ideas similar to those of the Marxist organization but in their own form; hence the need to recognize and record.
What the workers need from the Marxist organization is information about such breakthroughs of the new society
as the Russian factory councils of 1917, or the workers councils in Hungary and Poland in 1956. What they need,
beyond that, is access to the many aspects of contemporary culture and science which, in muted form, point to the
dead end of official society, and James et al. throw out the very important idea that only those who recognize the
central importance of what the great masses of people do in present and future history are capable of organizing
such knowledge.
How, in light of these formulations, do James et al. imagine the role of the Marxist organization, if it is not to act like a

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small political party, i.e. recruiting and training workers for the revolution as they would put it? Once again, such an
organization would attempt to recognize and record, as Lenin recognized the soviets as an unprecedented
practical innovation put on the scene by the working class and not by any party. (Of course, Lenin also did much
more than that, about which the authors do not have much to say.) It would attempt to give expression to the
tensions in the working class, as exemplified in Facing Realitys insistence on the crucial difference between what
workers say/think (i.e. voting for reformist parties) and what they do (seizing the factories, as in France after the
election of the Popular Front in 1936). If this book has one paramount polemical object, it is this zeroing in on the
vanguards preoccupation with stated political views and with the outward signs, to which their habit of mind and
way of life accustoms them, of political awareness. If the book has one paramount argument, it is an assessment of
how working people use elections, unions, bourgeois newspapers, and other forms of organization and
communication as parts of a broader overall struggle to push the new society to the limit and remove all obstacles
to its full triumph. I found most arresting the examples cited, from France in 1936 to Britain, France and the U.S. in
the mid-1950s, where workers (in James et al.s view) waged a struggle whose different dimensions confounded
the exclusive focus on explicit political consciousness as expressed in elections or party membership or what
newspapers the workers read.
The role of the Marxist organization, for James et al., is not to imagine itself as the nucleus of the party which will
sweep aside the Social Democrats and Stalinists as the Bolsheviks swept aside the Mensheviks (for in the authors
view the workers do not imagine the future in terms of a new political party); it is to give workers the information (sic)
they need to establish the Republic of Workers Councils. They insist that the workers writings from Hungary and
Poland in 1956 constitute some of the richest material in existence of the new society in action and say it shows the
poverty of the small Marxist parties that no one has translated and edited them for working-class readers.
To me, the key passage of the entire book is (p. 140):

What is the difference today between theory and practice, between theory for the intellectuals and
theory for the masses? There is none. As we have said earlier, in every department of modern
intellectual and scientific life immense discoveries have been made which tear to bits the
assumptions by which our society lives and point the way to a new society

We repeat: in all these scientific discoveries what is lacking is an integrating principle, some
comprehensive UNIVERSAL which will relate them to each other and to society and open out all their
possibilities. This integration will not come at any one time, nor will it be the work of one man or any
group of men. But this much is certain, that it can come only from men who have grasped the role of
the great masses of the people in the new society and understand that the people are today ready to
initiate the vast changes in society which the Hungarian workers initiated.The Marxist organizations
and the intellectuals in particular must understand that it is their task to make all this knowledge
available to the people in such terms as they can understand. This is not popularization. It has been
proved that the most difficult of social, political, artistic, and philosophical conceptions can be
presented to the people with simplicity and without vulgarization. But to do this demands mastery of
the subject and understanding of the people, of the terms of their own experiences. It is the second of
these which is so hard to come by. We have indicated the road.

In light of this, James et al.s vision of how this kind of Marxist organization acts differently from vanguards in their
conception of a newspaper by workers, not for workers is most instructive. One might concisely say that the
vanguards press still expresses the Kantian viewpoint of JUDGEMENT: it exposes and condemns the crimes of
official society, and it brings to bear the categorical imperative of workers must do this and must do that,

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culminating inevitably in the long laundry list of demands at the end of every article. The vanguard organization
substituted political theory and an internal political life for the human responses and sensitivities of its members to
ordinary people. It has now become very difficult for them to go back into the stream of the community. (p. 131).
The James et al. conception, by contrast, would seem an attempt to make the press embody the tensions of an
Hegelian dialectic, in which different workers viewpoints, expressing the stage we are in, are thrown into play
against one another, trying to capture as best as possible the tensions existing within the class and between what
workers say and what they as a class do; how the workers in Britain can vote (or not vote) Labour and on the
next day paralyze the docks by wildcats; how the French workers can vote for the Popular Front one day and occupy
the factories the next. Most interesting of all is the discussion of how such a press would function in the U.S., where
who fails on the Negro question is weak on all. (p. 152). James et al. argue for a newspapers in which white and
black workers would be encouraged to develop their views on the race question, and where

if a white worker or group of white workers after reading and contributing to the paper as a whole
finds that articles or letters expressing Negro aggressiveness on racial questions make the whole
paper offensive to him, that means that it is he who is putting his prejudices on the race question
before the interests of the class as a whole. He must be reasoned with, argued with, and if necessary
fought to a finish (p. 152).

One sees the great difference from the typical Trotskyist vanguard publication in the following formulation:

How is he to be reasoned with, argued with, and if necessary fought to a finish?

First by making it clear that his ideas, his reasons, his fears, his prejudices also have every right in
the paper. Every white worker who is in daily contact with Negroes know of their aggressiveness on
the race question. It is no secret to him. Further, apart from the fundamental conflict with
management, few questions occupy him so much. Whether he speaks about it or not, it is a hard
knot in his consciousness, as it is in the consciousness of every American today, a growing torment
which the American cannot rid himself of. A frank and free discussion in public of the various
difficulties as they arise is the surest way to prepare for that closer unity which comes from common
participation in great actions. (p. 153)

But almost immediately following this very provocative proposal for a different kind of working-class newspaper,
James et al. insert a throwaway line that contradicts everything else they have said, and which is never elaborated
again. In the midst of this idea of airing all the tensions in the class, informed by the recognition that the new society
exists and that it carries within itself much of the sores and diseases of the old, the authors write:

The Marxist organization will have to fight for its own positionthe Marxist organization may have to
carry on what for long periods may seem a losing battle. It will have to stand firm. (p. 154)

What is then this own position around which the Marxist organization will have to stand firm? Such a shift in focus
seems to jump off the page; it is never mentioned before or after in the text. Stand firm around what? Does the
Marxist organization then have something special to say that is NOT expressed by the conflicting viewpoints of
workers? And if this is a newspaper by workers, not for workers, just who is supposed to articulate this? And does

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this not constitute some theory different from the practice of the masses of people at some point?
What exactly in the modern conditions of the one-party state has obviated the formulations of the Communist
Manifesto?:

(the communists) are that section which pushes forward all the others; on the other hand,
theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding
the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

There seems to be a flagrant contradiction at the heart of the project proposed by James et al. On one hand, they
insist that the task of the Marxist organization is to recognize and record; it is to learn and not to teach; it is not to
recruit and train; it does not publish its press so much for its own growth as to put information at the disposal of the
working class so that workers can decide what to do. When the paper says what workers should do, it should be at
the initiative of some group of workers asking it to do so. On the other hand, almost surreptitiously in a couple of
lines, James et al. refer to the Marxist organization fighting for its own position and standing firm. So which is it?
For the entire book, the authors seem to argue that the Marxist organization should be providing ink and paper for a
newspaper by workers, not for workers (is this not a last flicker of vanguardism, for why cannot the workers
themselves think of putting out such a newspaper and getting their own ink and paper?)
I do not wish to build a whole case around a couple of formulations. One might indeed appreciate the broader
project of James et al. in which the task of Marxist intellectuals is to make materials available to workers so that they
can decide what to do.
They even say that such a role will continue under socialism for the intellectually inclined. But who are these
intellectually inclined in a society that has abolished (as the authors rightly propose) the separation between
education and production?
But this is sniping. It is secondary to the much larger question I want to raise about the approach of James et al.,
namely what happened to the new society in the 45 years of history since it was plausible to write about workers at
the point of production in Britain, France and the U.S. and their multi-layered strategy for following the lead of the
Hungarian workers and establishing the Republic of Workers Councils?
James et al. are talking about workers voting for reformist working-class parties. What about workers voting for
George Wallace and Ronald Reagan? What about workers voting for Jean- Marie LePen, Jorg Haider and half-adozen other contemporary far-right anti-immigrant parties in Europe? What about workers opposing immigration and
calling for protectionism, i.e. workers whose attitude might be charitably summarized as taking care of our own and
lay off someone else? Workers who vote for Californias Proposition 187, denying social services to illegal
immigrants?
James et al. are rooted in the period when the main enemy seemed to be welfare-statist and Stalinist parties and
trade unions trying to rein in the shop-floor rebellion, but what do their perspectives mean in the neo-liberal era in
which all those forces are greatly diminished, and the main enemy appears to many workers as poorer sections of
the working class from other countries, whether as immigrants or as overseas competitors? A significant number of
American workers today believe, or could be easily convinced, that Chinese workers and peasants shipping cheap
goods to the U.S. market and shutting down factories, or immigrating to the U.S. to work in sweatshops, are their
enemy. They think or could be convinced to think something similar about workers and peasants driven from the
Latin American countries devastated by decades of U.S. policy. What would James et al. or those who today further
their conceptions have to say in face of such dilemmas? If no workers stepped forward to critique such chauvinism,
would their Marxist organization fight for its position? And what would that position be? And would not having such
a position violate the very premise that the task is to recognize and record?

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James et al. nowhere say that one task of the Marxist organization is to unify the working class. That has been the
perspective of Marxists since the Communist Manifesto. Every development is to be judged according to the
question: does it help, or hinder, the unification of the working class? In the view of James et al. the working class is
already unified in the new society.
In 1934 in the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the Trotskyist forces around A.J. Muste intervened in a losing strike of auto
parts suppliers, in the depths of the depression, and said: to win this strike, and stop the scabs coming into the plant,
you must have a strategy to organize the unemployed. An Unemployed League helped the Auto-Lite workers fight
the National Guard, and part of the settlement of the strike was the hiring of some unemployed workers. The idea
that the Marxist organization would PROPOSE broadening the struggle to an isolated group of workers is nowhere
in Facing Reality; the authors assume that the class is already basically unified. In their universe, dockers in London
hear of a strike at an auto plant, write a brief note to them, and prepare to hot-cargo all cars, even those coming
from companies not on strike. In fact, when Thatcher came to power, Britain witnessed a series of working-class
defeats made possible in part by the inability of the new society to confront a new array of anti-worker legislation
against secondary pickets, legislation that was of course honored by the trade unions. Where was the new society
there? When Thatcher took on the miners, shutting down mines that were no longer profitable, and the miners were
stopped from using their old tactics by Scargill and the miners union leadership, where was the new society saying
that the task was not defending dying mines (however important it might be to defend miners jobs), but in
developing new sources of energy that did not require people to spend their working lives at the bottom of a mine
shaft?
James et al. say nothing about program. All of that, for them, will be obvious when the Republic of Workers Councils
is set up. And indeed one cornerstone of contemporary ideology is the alleged complexity of the world, in which
simple ideas of two basic classes in society do not take us very far. And it is certainly true that one major role of a
Marxist organization, once such a Republic of Workers Councils is established, would be to make material available
to workers enabling them to make decisions about all kinds of issues, complex or not.
But if workers, as James et al. say, have neither the time nor the inclination to study such issues of importance to the
workers movement, and Marxist organizations do, why shouldnt the Marxist organization do the same thing for
programmatic issues involved in getting from here to there as they do for recognizing and recording

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