We would like to thank comrade Luke Pickrell for considering our article relevant enough to write a response. This gives us the opportunity to contribute our bit to the interesting debates that the DSA is conducting around the slogan of ‘conquering democracy’ in the US. We would also like to clear up a number of misunderstandings that could make mutual understanding difficult. After reading Luke’s correspondence we realize that much of his criticism may be due to a lack of context about our collective, our goals and our style of work. We apologize in advance for not having explained this from the outset to save confusion.
CibCom is an interdisciplinary collective not aligned with any party (something like a “think-tank”) that aims to get the broadest possible spectrum of revolutionary socialists to reflect on the problems that arose in the workers’ experiences of the 20th century and on how we could overcome them, given the current technological development. This includes a wide variety of currents with different positions on the nature of the “transitional program”: classical Leninists, Maoists, councilists, Trotskyists, anarcho-syndicalists, etc. It is not possible to find a single document, where we, as a collective, state that “no transition period will exist because post-revolutionary society is immediately communist”, basically because, for now, this issue is not on our collective agenda. However, the mistake consists in considering that, because we do not take a position on this, we believe that the issue is unimportant, or that we do not believe a transitional period exists. Between one and the other there is a logical leap that seems to us unjustified, which is made in the text by assumption. A great majority of our members, in fact, do believe that some kind of transitional period, not fully socialist yet necessary to entrench workers’ power, is inevitable, but they develop these questions and approaches in their parties or in their organizations. In other words, no one among us doubts that the “electoral road” to socialism is a dead end, instead recognizing that the revolutionary rupture with the bourgeois state, requires a diversity of tactics according to the context and that we respect a plurality of opinions on the subject. Until further notice, we yield the floor on the details of this topic to other types of organizations.
That on the one hand, but there is more: Even stating the above, this does not mean that CibCom is a simple “book club” without any political projection or that we do not intend to influence revolutionary organizations. The collective presents an organic organization because, in spite of giving space to diversity, we investigate matters of transversal interest for the majority of the socialist “families”: calculation-in-kind, the computerization of economic planning, econophysics, etc. It is possible to contribute to the cause of the Revolution without falling into the common arrogance of believing that the collective itself is the spearhead or the vanguard of the Revolution. Our contribution is modest but concrete: we investigate the viability and economic-institutional “consistency” of communism in our days, which requires making visible historical problems and trying to draw lines of flight from them, without setting doctrine in stone. What does this mean? Well, in the concrete case we are dealing with; i.e. the debates on whether genuine democracy is “representative” or, on the contrary, it is inevitably direct, it means not so much that we consider that absolutely all forms of “representation” should be avoided in any phase of the revolution, but to make us aware that elections seem to present a dangerous tendency -one which is historically undeniable- towards bureaucratization and the formation of implicit (and not so implicit) aristocracies, and that this can put the development of the revolution at risk if they are not mitigated. Furthermore, we propose a possible solution to mitigate this issue: to maximize the use of plebiscites and sortition, since these directly counteract the process of demobilization of the governed and the corruption of rulers caused by making election of representatives the only binding procedure of participation. This proposal may be liked more or less. It may be considered adequate for some areas and not for others (this is for example the case of Moshe Machover and his brilliant article Collective Decision-Making and Supervision in a Communist Society). Other mechanisms may even be proposed, and this would be of great interest to us. But what certainly seems to us a mistake is that we socialists pretend that these problems have not happened again and again, slipping the “blame” for this to a supposed “ill will” of the party leaders or another similar reason, and stumble again on the same stone.
Comrade Luke states: “Lenin’s political life after 1917 was a tortuous search for a form of democracy superior to bourgeois parliamentarism. Eventually, he concluded [Lenin personally?] that Soviet influence would have to be rolled back because the system was not suitable for the dystopian conditions of post-revolution and civil-war Russia. Given our ruling classes’ immense arsenal and proclivity for wonton violence, conditions in the United States would likely be as tough as those in Russia – if not worse”. What does this mean? If “Soviet democracy” was closed down by the harsh conditions of war and we recognize that future revolutions will meet a similar fate, are we assuming from the outset that democracy is nothing more than a rhetorical flourish, impossible in practice? The distinction between “advisable” and “inadvisable” moments does not help to clarify anything because it seems to imply that social drifts depend on particular decisions, when the real question is the material conditions of possibility of democracy itself, even in difficult contexts.
Comrade Luke proposes the use of “the democratic republic […] to keep any necessary bureaucrats accountable as we expand democracy to the realm of property and transition toward a communist future”. However, there is little elaboration on what this exactly means, beyond defining the democratic republic as “the state form of the political rule of the working class, in which the masses are in a position to finally win the battle for complete democracy by using the state to strengthen its position in the continuing class struggle and incrementally socialize property.”. How would this take place? By eliminating the use of things like referenda as political weapons or mobilization techniques, Comrade Luke is disarming us and not giving us an alternative.
In the history of humankind, great social events almost never happen because of sole individual wills. There is no reason in thinking a group of experts would take better decisions than the citizens affected by, e. g., climate change -even in a situation where these individuals aren’t free producers-, like Lex Kravetsky argues (we will publish an article detailing this issue soon). A materialist analysis allows us to explain that the preservation of monetary calculation in the USSR or of forms of mercantile competition in Yugoslavia, led to uncontrollable social problems independently of the good will of planners or cooperativists. In the same way, practically all the countries of the so-called “real socialism” preserved and extolled some form of elections, giving place to legal clauses that pretended to assure their neatness, giving place to recall, accountability, etc. However, none of these experiences proved that these clauses served to avoid the aforementioned tendencies of ossification. Why did all this happen? How could we do to try to prevent it from happening again? We have provided one solution, and if we could get more comrades to provide developed answers to these questions all this controversy will have been worthwhile.
Without self-criticism, we will not be able to defend ourselves from those who accuse us of authoritarianism and it will be difficult to get our class excited again.
Comradely greetings,
The CibCom Team.
