For the latest episode of our series on Actually Existing Socialism, Christian, Rudy, Donald, and Connor join forces for a discussion on the Yugoslav self-management in its different iterations. We use Darko Suvin’s Splendor, Misery and Possibilities: An X-Ray of Socialist Yugoslavia as a background to outline an exploration of the successive reforms where self-management was first brought in as a response to the failures of the command economy to take advantage of plebian creativity, and how slowly the market and decentralizations became a magic bullet for solving all problems, a fetish which caused the arising of significant inefficiencies, consumerist culture, and inequalities both between republics and between workers and managers in the factories. We analyze why successive waves of marketization were supported, and how this led to the formations of new classes that would eventually disintegrate Yugoslavia.
Other Sources:
Yugoslav Marxists
B. Horvat, “Towards a Theory of a Planned Economy”
B. Kidric, “Some Theoretical Questions of the New Economic System”
E. Kardelj, “Directions of the Development of the Political System of Socialist Self-Administration”
Other Marxists
E. Mandel, “Self-Management: Dangers and Possibilities”
E. Hoxha, “Yugoslav “Self-Administration” – Capitalist Theory and Practice”
Academic
D. Granick, “Enterprise Guidance in Eastern Europe: A Comparison of Four Socialist Economies”
P. H. Patterson, “Bought & Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia“
Translation and introduction by Rida Vaquas. The original text in German can be found here.
Gerd Arntz, Strike, 1936
Anton Pannekoek is well-known as one of the principal theorists of council communism, a man who broke from both the traditions of Kautskyist social democracy as well as Bolshevism. By 1935, this break had crystallized into a clear attitude against the party as an instrument for working-class liberation: “a party is an organization that aims to lead and control the working class.”1 However, Pannekoek was very much a child of orthodox Second International Social Democracy, and a self-described pupil of Karl Kautsky, just as much as Lenin was. By presenting a translation of this short text, I hope to emphasize the Social Democratic inheritance of Pannekoek and the continuities of council communism with radical readings of Karl Kautsky.
The essay ‘The Propertied and the Propertyless’ was originally published in the SPD paper Leipziger Volkszeitung and eventually compiled as one of seven essays in a pamphlet Der Kampf der Arbeiter (The Struggle of Workers) in 1907. Much of Pannekoek’s early career in German Social Democracy resulted from his close friendship with Kautsky. After the German authorities prevented Pannekoek from taking up his position at the SPD Party School, it was Kautsky who found him alternative positions, including writing a weekly column for socialist newspapers. Kautsky’s aid hence embedded him into the German socialist movement and Pannekoek eventually moved to Bremen, where he was part of ordinary party life.
It would be wrong to construe this as simply a close personal friendship: Kautsky and Pannekoek shared a political outlook about the world. Both were representatives of the last great generation of scientific socialism. This was not ‘scientific’ in the sense of a vulgar determinism in which one keeps vigil for the final set of statistics that make revolution inevitable, but scientific in that it posited hypotheses and demanded proofs, one had to show their working when they claimed to solve the formula of social change. An amusing article in the SPD’s satirical magazine Der Wahre Jacob in 1912 aptly illustrated their affinity in approach, even when their conclusions differed. In an imaginary debate about fashion, Kautsky writes a beautiful chapter about the “genesis of trousers” in the emergence of humanity, ending with the proposition that had Adam had trousers, he may not have bitten into the fatal apple. Pannekoek, who had witnessed the conversations with Kautsky, reproaches Kautsky for having overestimated the role of trousers as a Marxist.2
This exchange mirrored the real split between Kautsky and Pannekoek that first became public in 1911-12 (one may note that Pannekoek split with Kautsky somewhat later than Rosa Luxemburg did) in a debate in Die Neue Zeit about mass action, in light of the 1911 strikes in England. Kautsky outlined a perspective in which the development of capitalism causes the emergence of mass actions by periodically creating conditions of extended unemployment, taxation pressure, inflation, and war.3 However, the development of the organized proletarian masses, through the institutions of Social-Democracy and the trade unions, changed the character of mass actions to ensure both that defeat is not a disaster and that victories are enjoyed by the proletariat, and not exploited by a faction of the enemy. Yet Kautsky’s case against embracing spontaneous mass actions as a tactical principle is simple: they are completely unpredictable and hence nothing can be said about what is to be done when they arise in advance, the party can only ensure that it is not caught off guard by them, by building up its own understanding of state and society and power.
What marks Pannekoek’s response to this analysis is his own disappointment with a great master of Marxism. In his view, although no one had proven the significance of Marxist theory as much as Kautsky did in his historical writing, in this instance Kautsky had “left the Marxist tools at home” and hence obtained no result.4 For Pannekoek, contemporary mass action differentiated itself from the mass actions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because the class who carried it out had changed: from bourgeois to proletarian. The distinction between the unorganized and organized is irrelevant, as many of the unorganized are capable of the same proletarian discipline and solidarity through the conditions of their work. In Pannekoek’s most cutting perspective, Kautsky “is not doing himself justice” in claiming he is unable to ascribe a particular political character to the masses when he has successfully done so for parliamentary politics.
It becomes clear that Pannekoek’s first critiques of Kautsky’s Marxism emerged from wanting to push it beyond its limits and seek to apply it to new scenarios. Pannekoek’s ultimate conclusion in 1912 was that the party must instigate revolutionary action at the right moment, not when the masses can simply no longer be held back, but when the conditions mean that large-scale actions by the masses have a chance of success. Only later disillusionments turned him away from the party form altogether. There is much merit in Pannekoek’s objection to Kautsky that one has not determined very much at all if the determination is that the masses are unpredictable. Yet it was clear that Pannekoek’s own formulas didn’t hold up in the light: the masses by no means tend towards radicalism in all cases, and there has been no guarantee that they would rise against war. In their final parting of ways, both Kautsky and Pannekoek sought a more rigorous application of a Marxist framework they shared from each other.
This translation demonstrates the analytical clarity that this Marxist framework had to offer at its strongest.
The political struggle that the socialist working class leads and of which every election campaign is an episode is not in the first instance a struggle about particular political institutions and legal demands, but instead a universal struggle between the propertied and propertyless class. To understand it correctly, it is necessary to take a close look at the combatants, the causes, and the aims of this struggle.
According to this classification of both of the parties in conflict, it may appear that the ownership of money or income is the basis for class division. This is how it’s often understood by our bourgeois opponents. They take income or assets statistics in their hands, draw a few lines that separate the low from the middle incomes and the middle from the high incomes, and believe that they’ve obtained an insight into the class relations of the present-day. Even more comically, they do this when they present a statistic from the Middle Ages or the eighteenth century and from this prove that there were proportionately just as many low, middle and high incomes at the time as there are now and with this they believe they have refuted the concentration of capital, the demise of the middle class and the escalation of class contradictions.
These poor jokers, who want to demonstrate away the obvious facts of the great social upheaval in this way, clearly don’t have the faintest idea of what a social class actually is. A class is not a group of people that have the same size of income, it is instead a group of people who fulfill a particular function economically in social production. We say ‘economically’ so that you don’t fall for the idea that the technical side of work is understood as the social function. A weaver and a typographer professionally have a different function, technically their work is varied, but economically they are both waged workers and belong to the same class.
In the manifold diversity of the social production process it is no wonder that a colorful picture of the most diverse social classes appeals to the eye. In industry, capitalist employers stand against waged workers; from this universal fundamental relationship, different class relationships are built up, according to the scale of the industry. The independent craftsman concurs with the capitalists that he is an independent businessman, but he employs no waged workers. And the small masters of artisanal small enterprises, just like shopkeepers, are even described in colloquial language as separate from the large-scale capitalists, as the middle class. Their difference consists in the smaller number of workers and the smaller amount of capital, without it being possible to identify firm boundaries between the two groups. In large industry, a group of overseers and technical work managers slide in between the capitalists and the workers. The high technical and scientific demands placed on today’s large and giant conglomerates have called into being a class of private technical and scientific officials that form the ‘intelligentsia’ alongside similar and equally-placed public officials. Economically they belong to wage workers as even they sell their labor power—a special intellectual labor power trained by long studies and better paid—for wages. The higher level of wages, i.e. their very different living standards, again separates them from workers. At the same time, the development of large industry has effected a separation between the industrial entrepreneur, who lives off profits, and the owners of money, who live off interests, through the vast amounts of capital that it demands. In the stock company, a paid official even steps into the role of the employer, the director. The double function of the capitalist, to direct production and to pocket the surplus-value, has been divided between two types of people. However, all finance capitalists cannot be lumped together, just like all industrial capitalists. According to their size, a differentiation persists like in the world of fish in the sea: the big devour the little. A little rentier is as much a finance capitalist as a member of high finance, but to these stock market wolves he is a stock market lamb as it were and hence his social role is another one.
If we now take a look at agriculture, we find the same gradations, even if not in exactly the same way, as in industry. Only a class is added here, because the landowners, through their monopoly, can extract a ground rent from the yield of agriculture without playing any active role.You have dwarf peasants, small farmers, medium and large farmers and farmworkers. Here the hybrid and transitional forms are emerging that confuse the picture of social classes to an untrained eye. The agricultural workers often have a small plot of land, while owners of smaller plots of land, too small to live off, seek additional income as agricultural or even industrial workers. They are hence simultaneously independent landlords and wage workers. In the home industry we find supposedly independent craftsmen that are totally dependent, body and soul, upon capitalist businessmen. That the legal form of waged service doesn’t suffice to ascertain class is shown by the numerous transitions from the paid director to the worker, via subdirector, head of department, chief engineer, technician, draughtsman, supervisor. Here one will often be at a loss to define precisely, in the gradual transitions, which class distinctions one must accept and where their boundaries lie.
So social life offers a colorful picture of the most diverse classes whose functions, and hence interests, directly show sharp contradictions and enormous differences and even gradual transitions. Isn’t this picture a resounding refutation of our assertion that only two classes stand against each other in the social struggle? And doesn’t a look at the varied functions of classes immediately show that the definition of two groups, only according to their assets is unscientific and unsustainable— a fictitious assertion only for the purpose of demagogic sedition?
No. This definition is substantiated in the social order in its deepest essence. It emerges from the specific role that money plays since the advent of capitalism. All money has the characteristic of being able to work as capital, i.e. when the owner buys the means of production with it, rents workers, and sells the commodities they produced, it comes back in their hands as more money, as larger, as capital blessed by surplus-value. They do not even have to do it themselves, with the greatest pleasure others will take away the stress and worries of running a business and pay them part of the profit as interest for the use of their capital. Money has acquired the characteristic of bringing its owner interest through capitalism. Whoever has access to money can hence secure an income without any work.
This income comes from surplus-value which formed in the process of production. The working class brings into being vast quantities of value through their work; they only receive a part of it back as wages. The remainder is surplus-value which falls to the capitalists. This surplus value must be distributed amongst the different capitalists and groups of capitalists because they all live from it. The landowners demand their share, the businessmen and middlemen ask for their share, the directors and highly paid industrial managers take their piece, the finance capitalists obtain their interest or dividends. They fight amongst themselves about the distribution of surplus-value. The distribution is partly decided by economic laws and partly by political power balances. What matters to us here is the fact that all those who have money are thereby entitled to a certain extent to some of the surplus-value, provided of course that they do not hide it in an old stocking like the former misers. The surplus-value is created by the exploitation of the lower classes whose work produces that surplus; all those classes who share the surplus value among themselves together form a great society of exploitation, and everyone who has money is thereby, by the grace of Mammon, a shareholder in this excellent corporation.
This is the reason we can speak about a great class contradiction between the propertied and the propertyless. It is because these words are synonymous with the exploiting and the exploited classes. Whoever doesn’t own anything is forced to sell their labour-power to the owners of the means of production, i.e. indirectly to the owners of capital, in order to live. These capital owners give them a wage for long and hard work, which only suffices for a poor living standard, and the remainder of the worker’s produced value goes into their pockets. Whoever does not own anything must allow themselves to be exploited, the private ownership of the means of production cuts them off from any other way out. The situation remains mainly the same even when the worker owns a little bit of money, the interest of which forms a small subsidy to their wages. Even if they have money at the bank, they are still not exploiters. In this interest, they only gain a tiny little piece of the great mass of surplus-value which is squeezed out of the entire working class, and this little bit doesn’t even come into view next to the surplus-value they contribute to the total mass by their own wage labor. They increase surplus value and are exploited, they find themselves in the same situation as their comrades. And as a rule, they regard this money not as capital but as a saving fund by which they will meet their needs in the case of unemployment or accidents.
But as soon as the wealth exceeds a certain level, it enables the owner to live from exploitation instead of his own work, modestly if he is a small rentier or entrepreneur, lavishly if he is one of the rich. As much as there are class differences among these people, as much as they perform different active or passive functions in the exploitation process, as much as they still struggle with each other for their share of the spoils – the reason why their property is not always secure – they do have a common interest because they are all participants in the exploitation. In the great social opposition between exploiters and exploited, the size of the fortunes within the community of exploiters is not important. Equally, it follows from this discussion that we do not claim that society consists only of these two large groups. There is a layer between them, of which it is impossible to say whether it is closer to one or the other group, such as a peasant who exploits workers and are themselves exploited by the landlord, or a civil servant who receives a mediocre salary. How they will stand in the great political struggle can only be determined from a particular examination of their class situation. But for the greater masses of people and classes, in the vast political struggle their various specific social functions will stand behind the basic question of whether they belong to the propertied or the propertyless, that is, to the exploited or the exploited.
Revolution won’t follow a neat and clean schema, fitting easily into one stage or another, argues Tom Frome. Instead, revolution will be a long process, a process that cannot always be categorized with preconceived definitions. The ideal of revolutionary vision never fully survives contact with the messy and unpredictable realities of political change.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Is it possible for a single mind to fully fathom the transition from capitalism to communism? I can, without too much trouble, imagine a group of about twenty people doing something like communism, but if the size of the group grows much beyond that, I’m at a loss. What’s more, imagining the end goal is not the same as imagining the transition. How fast should we expect it to be? Expecting it to happen overnight is obviously unreasonable, but why? Is it only because we’re not sufficiently organized? Or does it have to do with the stickiness of the way the means of production are set up (what some people call ‘path dependence’)? Is it mainly a question of skills? Ideology? And, even if we can all agree that it’s going to take longer than a day, how much longer? A month? A decade?
The socialist revolution is taking much longer than most socialists expected. In many ways, it has not conformed to our (always rather cartoonish) idea of what socialism should look like. Lenin led us to believe that revolts in the colonized countries would lead to a crisis of capitalism in the imperial core. They have — just not as quickly as we had hoped. Trotsky talked about uneven and combined development and emphasized the international character of the revolution. He has been vindicated, of course, by the spread of socialism to many different countries over the last century in an uneven and combined manner. The socialist revolution currently sweeping the globe is not the clean and simple transition between nice self-contained stages that any one person could have anticipated, let alone planned. It’s gigantic, slow-moving, and hard to make out (the image of Leviathan comes to mind). It’s also queer as fuck.1
This queerness is baked into communism, defined variously as the ideal of a stateless, classless society or as the real movement abolishing present conditions. Communism can’t ever retreat fully into the ideal without a trace of guilty conscience (although recent authors have certainly tried), just as it can’t ever be fully at home on earth. It’s neither here nor there, neither philosophy nor politics, but instead something liminal, in-between — one could say it combines the philosopher’s disdain for politics and the politician’s impatience with philosophy.
The much-maligned ‘transitional stage’ shares in the same queerness, since it implies the simultaneity and admixture of (terribly real) capitalist and (too often ephemeral) communist forms of social reproduction. This results, naturally, in a proliferation of hard-to-categorize arrangements and nearly as many splits.2 Each socialist faction believes it has the ratio of ideal to real exactly right, that it alone knows how to sort these arrangements into socialist and non-, and that every other faction is mistaken, evil, or both. It hopes thereby to expel or contain the scandalous indeterminacy that characterizes communism as a whole. But these judgments are just some function of the life experiences of the group’s members. Whatever validity they have is situated and temporal – it can’t be expected to cover socialism, that is, the entire transition, a process spanning continents and epochs. We can’t apprehend this process at all except by way of gross generalization, or, in other words, violent abstraction.
There’s no problem with abstraction as long as it recognizes its one-sidedness. Abstraction presents things not as they are (that is, almost endlessly messy) but instead in a way that’s user-friendly, self-identical, and suitable for symbolic manipulation. This is vital in that it enables us to think and speak about things that concern us, even very big and complex things. Abstraction, though, is prone to erasing concrete differences. It’s also utterly free, in the sense that it’s not bound to any particular level of resolution, and here I have in mind particularly the scale of a single human life. When we speak about socialism, we’re speaking about something that is much bigger than the behavior or decisions of any one person. Whatever conclusions we draw at this macro level (say, regarding the value-form) cannot be translated in any straightforward way into practical lessons for individuals without paying very close attention to the jungle of mediating levels standing between the macro and the micro.3 This is rarely done. As a result of this failure (or at least owing to the same forces that cause it), we see a polarization between partisans of abstraction and partisans of commitment. Where the former speak in absolutes, the latter trade in apologetics.
It’s practically a tautology to say that whatever we do as a species will make use of both abstraction and commitment. What’s not obvious is where the golden mean between these two poles is to be found in any given situation. For all of us on the Left, the status quo is a world that’s far too committed to any number of outdated and inhumane practices. Dissolving these commitments is plainly one of our central goals. But this implies developing new commitments — to our comrades, to the new practices and institutions we aim to bring about, and to a socialist tradition comprising certain values and lessons, whatever we take these to be. At the same time, each of these things is indelibly marked by the past. Our comrades are products of class society. New institutions will inevitably have some kind of continuity with the ones they replace. And any tradition worth the name stretches back into an obscure (but definitely problematic) past.
There’s a millenarian tradition in socialism that has no problem saying “To hell with it, then!” Its most recent expression is the communization tendency around Endnotes and Théorie Communiste. Here we see die-hard partisanship of abstraction. It’s no surprise that these groups offer little to nothing in the way of revolutionary strategy. They even have an epithet for the bad kind of Marxism that used to strategize: “programmatism.” But a strategy is just a story about the future in which we achieve our goals. It’s a good strategy insofar as it is detailed and plausible, anticipates challenges we’re likely to face along the way, and provides entry points for individuals to get involved in carrying it out. The story is the necessary translation of an abstract analysis into an immediate cause. Without such a translation, abstraction has no purchase on the world.
The extremism of the partisans of abstraction has driven others into the opposed (but not opposite) partisanship of commitment, usually expressed as “upholding” anything that bears the slightest resemblance to socialism. Apart from being reactive and arguably parasitic on other people’s hard work, this form of partisanship (like that of abstraction) is effete, mainly serving to bolster its adherents’ moral standing in a certain kind of debate. Anti-imperialism in the developed countries, despite being full of the best intentions, has hardly any successes to its name. Apart from soldiers fragging their officers and the occasional act of industrial sabotage, it’s hard to even imagine what successful anti-imperialism in the core would look like. Commitment is vital, but a commitment that is exclusive to struggles elsewhere becomes automatic and uncritical (what is there to do but cheerlead?). It loses its room to move, to grow, to alter its environment and learn from that activity. Effective solidarity with others requires successful class war at home, and this requires more than just commitment. Only abstraction gives an idea transplantability. Without it, socialism can’t undergo the adaptations it needs to put down roots in new soil.
What do we gain from viewing the revolution as a long, queer process? Perhaps the most salutary effect is that it lets us stop arguing about whether any given state ‘is’ or ‘is not’ socialist. ‘Socialism’ names a global transition; a given state may take a leading role in this transition for a time, but we should expect any state, even one in the lead, to be advancing along some fronts while it regresses or stagnates on others (wouldn’t it be entirely too stagist to imagine otherwise?). The game of tallying up progressive vs. regressive features in order to cleanly demarcate socialist countries from capitalist ones can’t ever be brought to a satisfying close, precisely because socialism is just capitalism’s turning into something else, a process that is spread out over the human race in a constantly shifting (combined and uneven) mosaic. It’s unreasonable to think in terms of pure anything, to expect any given fight or institutional innovation to be the fight or the innovationthat, if everyone just got on board with it, would finally usher in communism. Instead, we should think in terms of roles — is x playing a progressive role in situation y? Trying to aggregate the answers to this question to arrive at an overall ‘socialism’ score is just as misguided as any other quantity purporting to capture quality.4
Another benefit of this approach is that it emphasizes a long-term strategic outlook. This is the flipside of one criticism that could be leveled at it: that it robs socialism of urgency. While the idea of a clear black-and-white victory achievable in our lifetimes is good at getting people moving, it tends to encourage short-term thinking. One expression of this is social democracy, which despairs of achieving radical change any time soon, and so puts off the question indefinitely. Another is insurrectionism, as with e.g. The Invisible Committee. The most elegant solution (And not coincidentally the cheapest, although not the most lucrative), though, is to be so impatient that only self-cultivation in this world will do the trick, and to turn one’s focus inward, away from politics, force, and compromise.
Beautiful-soul moralism can take the form of anarchism, left communism, or even call itself ‘non-ideological.’ By divesting entirely from any commitment except to a scattered collection of useful martyrs, this approach guarantees the believer will keep their tradition (such as it is) unblemished. Of the three approaches, it’s probably the last that has the most bile for those transitional (read: queer) measures that fall short of its strict ideal.
So excessive impatience is clearly a trap. But if we lose the sense of urgency that comes from the idea that global communism is attainable in our lifetimes, where else are we supposed to find it? Couldn’t I just slack off and let the long, queer revolution go on without me? Besides which, doesn’t climate change make a case for urgency? If we don’t achieve communism before it’s too late, we’re all boiled frogs, aren’t we?
A proper sense of urgency comes not from the abstraction ‘capitalism transitions into communism by way of socialism,’ but from commitments we make to each other, which are already at the right level of resolution (that of a human life) and require no translation. A good strategy, then, must make use of this fact instead of railing against it (as e.g. class reductionists do), while also encompassing the inhuman scale that abstraction opens up to us. As Brecht put it:
We must neglect nothing in our struggle against that lot. What they’re planning is nothing small, make no mistake about it. They’re planning for thirty thousand years ahead. Colossal things. Colossal crimes. They stop at nothing. They’re out to destroy everything. Every living cell contracts under its blows. That is why we too must think of everything.
The argument about climate change comes from an idealist perspective in which the revolution can simply hitch its wagon to an issue and be catapulted to stardom by the direness of that issue. This gets it precisely backward. The question of power decides which issues are on the docket, not the issues themselves. The reason there hasn’t been a meaningful response to climate change (except, arguably, in some of the countries calling themselves socialist) is that the Western Left, by and large, has been stuck doing triage for decades instead of building power. Since we’ve failed to organize methodically in a way that might conceivably put us in the driver’s seat, we have not been able to make dealing with climate change a priority. This doesn’t mean that climate change won’t affect politics — it will, and it’s going to be horrifying. Fascist lifeboat politics have already entered the mainstream. But just raising the hue and cry about this does hardly anything to slow it down, let alone reverse it. Climate change is a powerful incentive to get our shit together, not a deus ex machina — there’s no way to address it that lets us skip over having to organize the working class to seize state power.
But maybe we’ve moved too far in the direction of humility and patience to still affirm this seemingly outdated formula. What’s the point of seizing state power if you can’t be sure you’ll be able to do socialism with it? Doesn’t the whole ruptural strategy presuppose a certain clarity of purpose that we’ve already thrown out with the bathwater? Here the left communists and others who talk about ‘socialism from below’ can be helpful. If the transition from capitalism to communism depends not on a small, highly disciplined cadre, but instead on ordinary people collectively taking charge of their own affairs, this implies that those people will need to develop the habits and techniques of self-governance. This has two components. For one thing, it means appropriating for themselves the right to legitimate force, and ceasing to recognize pro-capitalist (state and non-state) violence as legitimate. At the same time, this is literally unthinkable in the context of a bourgeois state in full possession of its faculties. Only the failure and subversion of those states, culminating in their replacement by workers’ states, can create the necessary clearings for those myriad queer experiments to flourish into communism — these being, after all, the only basis on which it may ever be established.
