AnarWiki/markdown/The_Malaise_on_the_Left_(Pamphlet).md

**The Malaise on the Left** is a 1974 pamphlet written by [Chris
Pallis](Chris_Pallis "wikilink") and published by
[Solidarity](Solidarity_\(UK\) "wikilink"). It criticises the left for
its moderation and emphasis on gradualism, and failure to recognise the
power of [recuperation](recuperation "wikilink").

## Transcript

Forget for a moment the scare campaigns of the recent elections: Scanlon
and Jones presented by the yellow press as proselytizers of red
revolution, Mr. Wilson in the garb of a latter-day
[Kerensky](Alexander_Kerensky "wikilink") opening the gates to
Bolshevism or worse, bank clerks freezing (*à la portugaise*) the funds
of fleeting fascists, the great fear of the bourgeoisie about a "mafia
of fanatical socialists" in control of the commanding heights ... of the
National Executive of the [Labour
Party](Labour_Party_\(UK\) "wikilink")\!

The reality is less lurid - and less encouraging. What we see around us
is a confident and aggressive movement, increasingly aware of the fact
that real power does not lie in Parliament, but profoundly divided as to
objectives, strategy and tactics and completely at sea as to values and
priorities. So divergent are its component strands that one has to ask,
quite bluntly, whether one can legitimately speak of a movement. Among
thinking socialists there is a deep malaise.

The purpose of this article is to explore the roots of this malaise, and
to show that they lie in the transformations of class society itself.
Over the last few decades - and in many different areas - established
society has itself brought about the number of the things that the
revolutionaries of yesterday were demanding. This has happened in
relation to economic attitudes, in relation to certain forms of social
organization, and in relation to various aspects of the personal and
sexual revolutions. When this adaptation in fact *benefits* established
society, it is legitimate to refer to it as "recuperation". This article
seeks to start a discussion on the limits of recuperation.

Recuperation, of course, is nothing new. What is perhaps new is the
extent to which most "revolutionaries" (whether they be demanding "more
nationalization", more "self-management" or "more personal freedom") are
unaware of the system's ability to absorb - and in the long run benefit
from - these forms of "dissent". Class society has a tremendous
resilience, a great capacity to cope with "subversion", to make icons of
its iconoclasts, to draw sustenance from those who would throttle it.
Revolutionaries must constantly be aware of this strength, otherwise
they will fail to see what is happening around them. If certain sacred
cows (or certain previous formulations, now found to be inadequate) have
to be sacrificed, we'd rather do the job ourselves.

### Recuperation of economic demands

Keynesian economic policies, once considered radical threats to
bourgeois society, are today widely accepted as essential to the
functioning of modern capitalism. The demands for nationalization of the
mines or railways, for national health insurance, for unemployment
benefit and for state pensions have been totally recuperated. Despite
occasional nostalgic (and largely irrelevant) glances into the past, no
Conservative politician, seeking to retain a shred of credibility, would
today advocate the return of the mines or of the railways to private
ownership - or the dismantling of the essential structure of the
"welfare" state. All socialists would agree, thus far.

But there is then a parting of the ways. We would claim that the
centralization of all the means of production in the hands of the state
- the most "radical" demand of the *Communist Manifesto* - has been
achieved in many parts of the world without any corresponding
enhancement in the areas of human freedom. In fact an exploiting
society, divided into order-givers and order-takers, functions far
better on this type of economic base, which eliminates many of the
irrationalities of laissez-faire capitalism. Whatever the human
aspirations of their rank and file, the ideologies and programmes of
Social Democratic, Communist, Trotskyist or Maoist groups in the West
provide the most articulate demands for this kind of social
organization. These groups are the midwives of State Capitalism. They
may differ as to tempo and as to tactics. They may argue about what they
consider to be (for others) the acceptable or unacceptable costs. But
their fundamental objective is the same - and is moreover in keeping
with the deepest requirements of Capital itself. *Pace* the ghosts of
Hayek and of Schumpeter, *pace* [Enoch Powell](Enoch_Powell "wikilink")
and Keith Joseph, the division of society into rulers and ruled will not
be abolished by the abolition of the "free market" or, for that matter,
by anything that Messrs. Wilson or Gollan (or the "theoreticians" of any
of the Marxist sects) may have in mind.

Moreover all over the Third World (from Sékou Touré's Guinea to North
Vietnam, from Iraq to Zanzibar) "Marxist-Leninist" ideas are today
influencing the birth and moulding the economic life of many developing
countries. All are ruthlessly exploitative societies, geared to the
rapid development of the productive forces. Today this is only possible
on the basis of intense primary accumulation, carried out on the backs
of the peasantry. Here again erstwhile revolutionary ideas are becoming
vehicles for new forms of enslavement.

To paraphrase Marx, it is not what men think they are doing that
matters. What matters is the objective result of their beliefs and
actions. Class society can well recuperate the economic demands of the
traditional left. It is not of fundamental importance, in this respect,
whether various ruling classes are fully aware of what is happening to
them. They clearly differ from one another in the degree of insight they
have achieved into their own long-term, historical interests. The more
far-sighted among them now accept the centralization of the means of
production in the hands of the State as the essential precondition for
the growth of the productive forces. For most Marxist socialists (and
for the bourgeoisie) this growth is *the* fundamental issue. This is
what unites them. This is where the bourgeois vision and the Marxist
vision coalesce. For both of them economic growth is what politics (and
ultimately what life itself) is all about. There are few other
dimensions to their thinking. For both of them the future is mainly
about "more of the same". And the rest? The rest is for "after the
revolution". At best, it will look after itself. At worst, if one speaks
to a traditional Marxist about such issues as women's liberation,
ecology, the "counter-culture", etc. one is denounced as a
"diversionist" in tones showing how deeply the work ethic, patriarchal
attitudes and value system of the existing society have permeated their
thinking.

### Recuperation of institutional forms

Sections of the left have fortunately gone far beyond the demands for
nationalization, planning, etc. In the wake of the Russian Revolution
small groups of "left" communists clearly foresaw the course of events
which this type of "socialism" would lead to. Slandered by Lenin,
denounced by the "orthodox" communists, they warned of what lay ahead:
the rule of the party would soon result in the emergence of a new ruling
class, based not on the private ownership of the means of production but
on a monopoly of decisional authority in all areas of economic,
political and social life. To the hegemony of the Party and to the
omniscience of its Central Committee the left communist counter-poised
the knowledge and power of an enlightened and autonomous working class.
They posited the institutional form this power would take: the Workers'
Councils. This was no genial blueprint for a new society sucked out of
the thumb of a Gorter or a [Pannekoek](Anton_Pannekoek "wikilink"). From
the [Paris Commune](Paris_Commune "wikilink") to the Russian Revolution
of 1917 the "council" form of organization had been the living
historical product of the class struggle itself. The warnings of these
earlier revolutionaries have been fully justified.

But their vision remains limited. Despite Pannekoek's interests in
science and philosophy, Rühle's interest in pedagogy, and Korsch's
stress on the need for a deep-going cultural critique, most of the
writings of the left communists centred on problems of work and of
production and distribution. They lived in a very different era from our
own, and had little of significance to say about what have become very
important areas of social life: bureaucratization, alienation in
consumption and leisure, authoritarian conditioning, the "youth revolt",
women's liberation, etc. Even some of their institutional proposals have
been partly overtaken by events.

The recuperation of the demand for working class power at the point of
production and for a society based on Workers' Councils has, for
instance, taken on a particularly sinister form. Confronted with the
bureaucratic monstrosity of Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia, yet
wishing to retain some credibility among their working class supporters,
various strands of Bolshevism have sought posthumously to rehabilitate
the concept of "workers' control". Although "workers' control" was only
referred to once in the documents of the first four congresses of the
Communist International it has recently become one of the Top Ten
Slogans. Between 1917 and 1921 all attempts by the working class to
assert real power over production - or to transcend the narrow role
allocated to it by the Party - were smashed by the Bolsheviks, after
first having been denounced as anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist
deviations. Today workers' control is presented as a sort of sugar
coating to the pill of nationalization of every Trotskyist or Leninist
micro-bureaucrat on the make. Those who strangled the viable infant are
now hawking the corpse around. The Institute for Workers' Control even
runs annual conferences, addressed and dominated by trade union
officials appointed for life. Those who are not prepared to allow
workers to control their own organizations here and now serenade sundry
simpletons with fanciful tunes as to their fate in the future.
Recuperation here is taking place amid incredible confusion.

For a long time the advocacy of genuine workers' control (or, as we
prefer to call it, [workers' self
management](Workers'_Self-Management "wikilink")) remained confined to
small groups of revolutionaries swimming against the great bureaucratic
tide. Following the [French events of May
1968](May_1968_Events_\(France\) "wikilink") the demand took on a new
reality and a new coherence. People began to see self-management as the
dominant theme (and Workers' Councils as the institutional form) of a
new society in which bureaucracy would be eliminated, and in which
ordinary people would at last achieve genuine power over many aspects of
their everyday life. But this again was to ignore the system's capacity
for integrating dissent and harnessing it to its own advantage.

Can the demand for self-management be geared to the requirements of
class society itself? An honest answer would be "yes, in some respects".
Yes, providing those operating the self-management still accepted the
values of the system. Yes, if it remained strictly localized. Yes,
provided it was eviscerated of all political content Car assembly plants
seeking to obtain the participation of the workers have been operating
for some time in the Volvo and Saab factories in Sweden. Under the "with
it" guise of enriching the workers' job, employers have continued to
enrich themselves. Groups of workers are allowed to manage their own
alienation. The powers-that-be seek to resuscitate the anaemic
institutions of existing society (increasingly abandoned by those
expected to make them function) with transfusions of "participation". No
wonder the slogan has been taken up by everyone from Gaullist deputies
to our own Liberals.

Revolutionaries are in some measures to blame for this confusion of form
and content. They have insufficiently warned against the dangers
inherent in any attempts at self-management with capitalism. And, in
relation to the future, they have insufficiently stressed the
limitations of the demand. Self-management and Workers' Councils are
means to liberation. They are not liberation itself. Many
revolutionaries have, moreover, tended to underestimate the complex
problems of society as a whole. These have to be considered in addition
to the problems of particular groups of workers. Our vision has never
been "the railways to the railwaymen, the dust to the dustmen". We are
not for self-managed insurance empires, for self-managed advertising
companies, for the self-managed production of nuclear weapons.

This is not to say that self-management will not be the dominant theme,
and the council probably the institutional form of any kind of socialist
society. But they are no more than that. Into those particular bottles
many wines can be poured. In contemporary society self-management could
very well develop on a reformist, racist, nationalistic or militaristic
basis. The historical precedents are here. Many Workers' Councils in
Germany - in December 1918, and again later on - voted to surrender
power to parliamentary institutions. Between 1930 and 1945 the vast
majority of the British and German people identified with their
respective rulers and mobilized themselves (or allowed themselves to be
mobilized) in the defence of interests that were not their own. Israeli
self-managed [kibbutzim](kibbutzim "wikilink") are vehicles for the
dissemination of [Zionist](Zionism "wikilink") ideology and for
implementing (anti-Arab) discrimination, i.e. anti-socialist policies.
In Northern Ireland, amid an "unparalleled explosion of
self-management", the self-activity of a civilian population recently
brought down a government ... in the name of sectarian and mystified
objectives. The lessons are clear. *Self-management*, *divorced from
socialist politics*, *is meaningless*.

### Recuperation of "proto-Marxist" demands

Confronted with the fact that established society has successfully
co-opted both the economic objectives and some of the institutional
prescriptions of those who wanted to challenge it, radicals have
responded in a numbers of ways.

One response has been to delve deeper into Marx. The 'communist project'
is redefined in proto-Marxist terms. We now have Marx *à la carte*. What
is stressed is not what was the historical reality of Marxism (even in
Marx's day) but a vision which, although valid, seldom went beyond the
realm of rhetoric. The Marx of "the proletarians have no Fatherland"
replaces the Marx of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 who supported
first Bismarck's armies, then - after Sedan - the forces of the Second
Empire. The Marx who denounced the slogan "a fair day's wage for a fair
day's work" (arguing instead for "the abolition of the wages system")
replaces the more prosaic Marx, manoeuvring among the Lucrafts and the
Maltman Barrys in the counsels of the First International. The Marx who
thundered that "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the
working class itself" erases the pathetic figure of the Marx of 1872,
cooking the last congress of the International (the only one he attended
in person), inventing non-existing delegations, shifting the venues of
future meetings to harass the supporters of the equally authoritarian
[Bakunin](Mikhail_Bakunin "wikilink").

But are even these proto-Marxist prescriptions adequate? Is the
"abolition of frontiers" any kind of guarantee as to the type of regime
that will hold sway over the new, frontierless expanse? Is the vision of
an exploitative society, fusing the techniques of domination of both
East and West, just a nightmare dreamed up by the writers of science
fiction? Is the abolition of the wage labour any guarantee against
exploitation and alienation? Were there not exploitative societies long
before wage labour appeared on the historical scene? Wage labour
underpins and reinforces hierarchies of power. Its abolition does not
necessarily abolish such hierarchies. Class society might even
recuperate demands of this kind.

### Recuperation of the "personal revolution"

Another response of those confronted with the tremendous recuperative
powers of established society has been a tendency to seek individual
emancipation, to create in the "here and now" microcosms of the
alternative society. Some advocates of this viewpoint see the growth of
social freedom as the by-product of the addition of one "free"
individual to another, rather like workers going to Ruskin College to
become "emancipated one by one". This type of revolt, as long as it is
conceived in purely individual terms, can readily be recuperated by
established society. Individual revolt, whether in clothing or in hair
styles, whether in food preferences or in musical tastes, whether in
sexual mores or in philosophical attitudes, readily becomes a commodity
to be frenetically exploited in the interests of Capital itself. (The
important book, *[The Failure of the Sexual
Revolution](The_Failure_of_the_Sexual_Revolution "wikilink")* by [George
Frankl](George_Frankl "wikilink"), deals with this theme.)

### The limits of recuperation

In *[The Irrational in Politics](The_Irrational_in_Politics "wikilink")*
we wrote that exploiting society would not be able to tolerate "the mass
development of critical, demystified, self-reliant, sexually
emancipated, autonomous, non-alienated persons, conscious of what they
want *and prepared to struggle for it*". We still hold this idea to be
basically correct. Its core - that one cannot conceive of any genuinely
liberatory movement without genuinely liberated individuals - seems
irrefutable. But our formulation was inadequate. We should have spoken
of individuals prepared *collectively* to struggle for what they wanted.
And we should have spoken more about the *objectives* of the struggle.
We should have described more clearly what the vision was, in our eyes
at least. The *socialist* transformation of society is not an automatic
process, or a reflex activity. It requires a sense of direction. There
may be many roads to the promised land but it can surely only help if
people know where they are going.

Let us take it for granted that meaningful activity needs to be
collective, that social transformation needs emancipated individuals,
and that the institutional framework of any new society will probably be
based, in part at least, on those forms which the struggle itself has
repeatedly thrown up at its moments of deepest insight and creativity.
What we now need to think about - and to discuss widely throughout the
libertarian left - is the *political content* of an activity that
*consciously* seeks both to avoid recuperation and to be relevant to the
conditions of today.

Are certain yardsticks necessary to define such an activity? I
personally think the answer is "yes" - with the proviso that the
definition must be seen as an ongoing process. Should revolutionaries
who share common objectives group together, first to discuss their
objectives and then to fight for them? Again I think the answer is
"yes". "Political inexistentialism" is only relevant if one thinks there
is some divine guidance ensuring that every struggle helps move society
in a socialist direction.

It is only if libertarians speak openly about these questions that they
will be able to present a credible alternative to the authoritarian
left. If socialism is the creation of forms of living that will enable
all - free from external constraints or internalized inhibitions - to
rise to their full stature, to fulfill themselves as human beings, to
enjoy themselves, to relate to one another without treading on anybody
(and this is as good a definition of socialism as any other) - we should
say so loud and clear. And we should not be afraid of criticizing any
activities - however "self-managed" - that lead in an opposite
direction. Socialism, after all, is about a specific way of socializing.
In this discussion we must not forget the economic prerequisites of what
we seek. Nor must we confuse them with the objective itself. Finally we
must not underestimate the forces we are up against, including the
recuperative powers of established society. An ongoing reassessment of
the degree to which one's former goals have been recuperated is the most
effective antidote to the malaise on the left, and the only possible
prescription for remaining a revolutionary.

## External Links

  - [The Malaise on the
    Left](https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1974/11/malaise.htm)
    at [marxists.org](marxists.org "wikilink")