Introduction: Of Form and Content

“ALTHOUGH there have been times when problems of organisation stood in the forefront of debate (e.g. when the conditions of amalgamation were under discussion), it nevertheless remains true that theorists have paid less attention to such questions than to any others. The idea of the Communist Party, opposed and slandered by all opportunists, instinctively seized upon and made their own by the best revolutionary workers, has yet often been seen purely in technical terms rather than as one of the most important intellectual questions of the revolution.”

György Lukács, 1922.

Since Lukács published this lament about the neglect of organizational questions in 1922, as the opening paragraph of his essay “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation,” much has changed.

Anarchists, communists, and perhaps most interestingly communizers, autonomists, and other radical movements of recent decades have all placed organization at the center of their thinking. Yet this work has largely proceeded through critique of existing (historically especially Leninist) forms, or through the general lens of authority, rather than from the ground up. By returning to Lukács, I will attempt something different: to grasp at fundamental challenges facing any anti-capitalist organization, regardless of specific form, while not abandoning the proletarian project itself. In short, to map out some of the structural pressures that generate drift and failure even in the most promising projects, rather than simply railing against the external forces of Capital.

Central to this inquiry is the relationship between form and content, theory and practice. If these are truly as inseparable as the often repeated truisms about the necessity of a unity in theory and practice claim, then the internal life of revolutionary organization is not a technical afterthought, but a decisive theoretical problem.

Background

To understand internal failure modes of Marxist organizations, namely distortion and revisionism, we must analyze the underlying mechanisms that reproduce these failures. It should be made clear that revisionism, in this case, is not meant simply as a jeer against theoretical enemies, or a descriptor of the lineage of Bernstein, but as the institutionalization of distortion (self-deviation) from the historical interests of the class. This means moving beyond hand-waving explanations that attribute failure purely to external capitalist pressure, while also avoiding the voluntarist or ‘great man’ fallacies common to, among others, certain Trotskyist sects. In other words, we require an analysis that views working-class organizing as activity born from within, and existing through, capitalist relations. Such an analysis must examine the contradiction inherent in this proletarian double-position between these ‘birthmarks,’ and the socialist content the movement seeks to carry forward.

Pursuing such a path leads us to interact directly with the theory of reification, a radical expansion of Marx’s commodity fetishism into society at large, as developed by György Lukács in the 1920s. In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács demonstrates how social relations and human activities are converted under the domination of capital into thing-like forms that appear external to our person and wield real power over us. Human attributes and activities are transformed into measurable, abstract units governed by their own laws. In effect, our own activity turns into our dominator.

This process remains obscured because in our day-to-day we can only perceive the standalone ‘thing,’ rather than its underlying relational nature. To Lukács, this becomes the standard way a subject engages with reality in a bourgeois world and capitalist order, as the logic of capital, value and the commodity expands to ever more fields and aspects of life. It comes to seem natural that these abstract ‘things’ have inherent laws that both they and we must simply contemplate and obey. Our lives become segmented, measured, and controlled by the logic of Capital.

While the workplace is the primary arena for this dynamic, the process extends across all of advanced capitalist society. Ever more spheres of life come to be rationalized and reified.

Lukács himself saw the organized Leninist party as the way out of all of this, theorizing it as the very form of mediation between theory and practice. For Lukács, the Leninist party is an autonomous form of class consciousness serving the proletarian revolution, which itself presupposes a correct theory and represents the highest possibility of practice. Despite this, he also sharply pointed out the residual reified consciousness in each worker, which will continue to exist long after they join the work of the party, and which remains a constant issue. It then becomes pertinent to explore the implications of this reality, and determine the mechanisms that can cause a class party to fail in achieving this mediating function. In the worst case, it instead functions as the very battleground that both feeds and re/produces the split between theory and practice rather than administering its dissolution.

Organization

In analyzing the internal reality of life and activity under capitalism, and thus also life and activity inside Marxist organizations, we must necessarily begin with, and as, subjects who have experienced the alienation of their own activity and social relations as a natural state of affairs. Despite their possible political consciousness, individuals broadly remain the products of a system that makes them view the measurable particular as cleanly and naturally separable from the whole. Social reality is experienced as a world of separate and independent ‘things,’ each with its own seemingly natural laws. This encourages a contemplative stance of studying and calculating all these ‘things’ and their effects, rather than asking how they came about or whether they are necessary in the first place. Subjects are invited to adapt to the present order, so that even resistance easily takes the form of a struggle for better terms within it.

Building an anti-capitalist movement from within capitalism thus necessarily means constantly fighting the gravitational pull of the existing order and the ‘common sense’ that it gives birth to.

Further, for those socialized under capitalism, an immediate struggle for workers appears as a struggle for labour, which easily reduces to a struggle that re/produces bourgeois labour or the labour commodity, and takes that as its champion. This means organizing along the very laws and forms by which our value-producing activity is segmented in its shackled form. It becomes an organization and reproduction of that very sort of labour which is necessary for value to be produced, rather than an organization of labour against labour. Out of sheer practical necessity, the movement initially comes from, and in ‘ordinary’ times adapts to, the broader world and its logic, which entirely dictates its available resources, membership, and forms of existence.

In any such long-lasting organization or movement, real internal specialization and differentiation between members tends to emerge. This can manifest as divisions between theorists and organizational operatives, parliamentarians and street activists, party officials and trade unionists, and professional cadres and rank-and-file members; a sea of differing solidified positions and perspectives. Each position carries its own structural interests, in any given issue discovering differing points of convergence and conflict. Their disagreements and competing interests are based on real concrete issues, such as the allocation of often scarce resources, but on this level their battle-lines remain fluid, ever-shifting, and largely technical, and so relatively unproblematic. The problem then is not conflict as such, but a certain kind of it.

Theory and Practice

Out of this ‘sea’ of localized conflicts emerges many a fault line, but the one which we can consider primary for the purposes of this text, and arguably the most critical one, is the division between what can broadly be characterized as theory, and that which can broadly be characterized as practice. The reason I find this split especially illuminating is simple: it is the split within proletarian praxis, that very conscious unity of theory and action, that a revolutionary movement must overcome to truly become revolutionary.

Specialized positions of different sorts tend to gravitate toward either long-term ideological consistency or tactical, practical organizing and immediate action, to varying degrees. What is decisive is how the complex reality of organizational life is routinely reduced to, and frozen within, this dichotomy. If an institution organizes along bourgeois logic, it necessarily faces the challenge of all bourgeois politics: the fact that there can be bourgeois theory and bourgeois practice, but there is no such thing as a bourgeois praxis.

Just as commodity fetishism dictates social existence for those subject to reification, it takes on a proxy form in this dualism inside the very movement that tries to overthrow it.

The relationship and mediation between this ideological form, the perceived split between theory and practice, and real lived material reality operates on multiple levels:

1. Institutionally: The division into concrete structures, including distinct budgets, committees, publications, and formal roles.
2. Temporally: The temporal horizons of different roles differ significantly. Electoral cycles, collective bargaining rounds, workplace routines, and publication schedules operate according to different rhythms. This shapes how actors perceive time and action, what they count as politics, victory, or an appropriate level of abstraction. This is essentially the classic conflict of Kautsky and the Second International: the tension between the minimum and maximum programmes.
3. Epistemologically: Different roles accumulate distinct forms and definitions of knowledge. A theorist’s knowledge could be seen as valid by consistency, generality, and systematic coherence; whereas an organizer’s knowledge might be defined by efficiency, situational adaptability, and trust, among other things. These do not always easily translate to one another, creating distinct standards for what constitutes as important.

Communication across these divides then easily reinforces the impression that the distinction between them is natural and fixed. What counts as sufficient knowledge from one perspective can fail to register as such from another, deepening antagonisms and widening the rift ever further. What counts as sufficient action is similarly split. Once a dissonance between short-term and long-term goals arises, the stage for a conflict, ready to resolve in the direction of the already privileged pole, is set.

The split further naturalizes itself on two levels simultaneously: both sides of the divide begin to view their own partial domain as a self-contained whole, while viewing the other side as alien and disconnected from reality; the division itself comes to be seen as natural, rather than as the product of a historical process kept up via continuous reinforcement. Theory and practice are assumed to belong apart simply because they take place in different institutions and in different ways. In this way, types of reified positions persist not only as residual inherited trouble birthed from the class positions or consciousnesses of individuals, nor only due to the pressures of external society or due to differentiated economic positions (‘labour aristocracy’ etc.) of party members as Lukács anticipated, but also as products of the organization’s internal life itself.

There may be times when the formation of such a dualism does not immediately cause problems and drift, yet in a world of limited resources and never-ending challenges, a split into hardened and reified interests makes facing situations that escalate to open antagonism increasingly probable, even if the resolution of such situations remains formally open. The shared identity of ‘worker’ splits into competing camps, workers versus intelligentsia, or theory-conscious cadres versus union-conscious organizers. The specialization of labour, which on its own seemed somewhat mundane, takes on an antagonistic form when battle-lines are drawn along permanent reified categories.

The theoretical and material dimensions of the split are not separate causes and effects but two faces of the same process: real in their institutional and cognitive consequences, illusory in the false autonomy each imputes to the other.

Real Illusions

It should be stated once more that these partial interests are neither imaginary, nor the result of personal malice or wilful ignorance. In an immediate sense they are as real as anything we can imagine. They are, however, illusory in one specific sense: actors within a particular group come to view their immediate sub-group’s interest as the true, historical interest of the entire movement. In this way we could describe these partial interests as ‘real illusions,’ or ‘real illusory interests.’

The immediate interests of a particular sphere can clash with, and even replace, the movement’s overarching historical objectives. Pursuing these partial goals comes to feel natural and increasingly urgent, which further hardens the division whenever the opposing side’s objectives appear to conflict with the interests of one's own group, or in other words, with what seems to one to be the very historical mission of the movement.

Any given actor experiences this clash through their specific position. What institutions reward, what counts as success, and the immediate consequences of decisions all pressure actors toward choices that deepen the division, instead of resolving it.

A historical solution, one requiring a perspective with a view of the whole, can then appear sub-optimal from each partial viewpoint. Due to the immediate costs and benefits of a decision, an actor who believes their own partial interest to be the movement’s historical interest tends to act accordingly. After all, when operating on ‘common sense,’ there is little reason for one to purposefully choose a path that seems sub-optimal. It is merely the case that making seemingly sub-optimal choices time and time again becomes improbable without any mechanism to support it. The issue follows from actors navigating problems from their own structurally partial positions without intervention or struggle. In this way, the trap seems to construct itself.

Because each partial perspective mistakes itself for the whole, contradictions between the parts and the totality can initially go unnoticed. They may at first be dismissed as routine organizational friction, or factional disagreements, rather than recognized as a struggle by one partiality to dominate the whole.

Contradiction and Confrontation

Even when pressures force these contradictions into the open through crisis, they remain filtered through these partial perspectives and organs. They are presented simply as a contest across the naturalized fault line rather than the very transcendence of it, with the victorious side substituting the increasingly hidden interests of the class as a whole with its own. The choices presented to ‘common sense’ are either one partial perspective, the other, or a synthesized compromise that merely postpones the conflict without ever reaching the transcending perspective from which the interest of the whole is visible.

To list just some examples: reformists against hardliners in social democratic movements, Bordiga against Damen in the ICP, or, for a classic example, the struggle between the pre-war left of the SPD and the unions in Germany. In the latter case, antagonism culminated in the Mannheim agreement of 1906. There, the German workers’ movement split into the practical unionists who opposed the general strike in fear for their legality and cash flow, and those on the SPD’s left and centre calling for one as a necessity of revolutionary theory and situation, as well as for control over the unions. The result in this case was an agreement to parity, an effective veto power in favor of the ‘practical’ unionists, who could now prevent the left and more radical SPD membership from dragging the movement down such paths in the future.

Sedimentation and Revisionism

Problematically, this mechanism is self-reinforcing: every resolution between the sides consolidates the prevailing position institutionally and materially, increasing the likelihood that subsequent crises will be resolved in the same manner. To return to our previous example, the SPD has widely, with few exceptions, continued on that path since. This can be seen infamously in 1914, 1917, the revolution of 1918–19, and even in its travels toward the modern, decidedly non-Marxist, form it takes in the current day.

Over time, after an initial break and factional antagonism gets resolved in a given manner, different movements tend to deviate in structurally predictable directions, distorting their own role as the purported carrier of the historical interest of the class. On one hand there is a movement toward theoretical abstraction, as in the case of much of critical theory, or on the other toward practical immediacy, as in the cases of many social democratic movements, depending on which side initially holds greater weight and success. In the latter case the logic plays out, turning a Marxist project into a movement which fights to replenish and re/produce the working class’s labour-power more efficiently. In the former it is made impotent. This is what revisionism, in the sense used here, amounts to. It is not an isolated lapse, but a tendency in a direction that is structurally produced.

On ‘Iron Laws’

One could easily ask if this constructs a fatalistic loop, an inescapable natural law of organization itself, and such analysis only leads toward the very pessimistic and divorced contemplation that Lukács railed against. However, I suggest this is not the case.

Though on a surface level the formulation presented might resemble Michels’ “Iron Law,” the question at hand is somewhat different. Michels’ law is bourgeois in the sense developed above: it takes a historically produced pattern and presents it as a ‘thing’ with laws of its own.

Where Michels concerns himself with questions of authority and personal or group interest in the abstract, a Marxist critique of organization must ask why such a law has historically developed, and in the interest of whom. The organizational problem at hand is not merely a question of better or worse concentration and possible corruptive properties of power, but the reification of differentiated moments of collective activity into apparently autonomous interests, followed by the institutional solidifying of the resulting partialities into revisionism. In other words, practical activity and position build to a reified categorical split, which then feeds back into the activity that produced it, so that the split becomes at once result and driver.

Where Michels sees his bourgeois law as unbreakable iron, as a permanent and transhistorical corrupting force of power which cannot be done away with, leading him to fatalism, a Marxist critic must see a historical construction which only appears to us as immutable, until the movement to change all present things tears it apart.

Structures, Struggle and Agency

A ‘historical’ solution to any given problem is always possible (and is so at any given point in this presented chain, as far as a single moment can ever be isolated from the whole logically), but it functionally requires actors to bypass the structural pressures of their own positions and the habits shaped by reified social existence. A consistent solution requires more than luck or circumstance. It requires a movement formed through struggle, one that refuses to accommodate itself to bourgeois norms and forms of organization, which turns its critical gaze on itself as it does on the world outside.

The pull against this is structural, so the counterweight cannot simply be a better-informed member, but a form of organizational life and activity itself. Lukács himself assigned this role to the party as the mediating form between theory and practice. As he notes, this ‘mediation’ cannot simply be assumed to be a property even a relatively ‘conscious’ proletarian party possesses, or is even able to possess, by fiat. It is instead something that has to be won and re-won, not only against the externally inherited pressures of Capital, but if the argument here holds, also against the accumulated weight of past resolutions of conflicts internal to the organization itself, over and over again.

How exactly that is done is outside the scope of a single essay, but it is certainly where the core question of revolutionary organization lies.

Implications?

First and foremost, I have attempted to put forward a preliminary critique of the phenomena of organizational revisionism, and even then one from within a fairly specific framework. It is beyond reach here to offer new firm solutions, or even really to particularly affirm or deny young Lukács’ own support for the Leninist model. What we can now return to and restate with fuller content is the old truism about the necessity of a unity in theory and practice, which remains absolutely vital, with a deeper understanding of the difficulties in its realization. A return to such beginnings may seem somewhat deflating on the surface; yet while this formulation is widely accepted and “understood” on some fuzzy level among the left, we must strive to move from an abstract agreement around a slogan toward a more concrete understanding of this concept. It is necessary to develop a truly material understanding of this dual nature of the split between theory and practice as simultaneously both real and illusory, as contradictory in itself. The self-organization of the proletariat contains within itself both the possibility for transcendence and the reforging of its own shackles.

Only through this kind of organizational self-understanding can a class movement truly make sure that the consciousness developed through struggle is not simply (partial) consciousness of an external world and one’s relation to it, but instead consciousness that can reveal the totality of social relations, including those internal to the proletariat’s own organization within them.

To put it simply, a revolutionary organization cannot only be an expression of praxis, and something through which praxis is expressed. It must at the same time remain the object of such activity. In light of history, it seems that only a movement and class with such thorough self-understanding and unity could hope to not only grasp the possibility in its hands to topple the present state of things, but to at the same time overcome itself.