Nat Winn critiques the theories, philosophy, and politics of the Johnson-Forest Tendency.

*Raya Dunayevskaya, CLR James, and Grace Lee (Boggs) in the 1940s.*

We are at a moment when mainstream U.S. politics stand exposed, deadlocked, and amazingly de-legitimized among wide swathes of the population. Much attention has been paid to the delegitimization of the U.S. regime within the country’s radicalizing right-wing movement.

But, this same process has at the same time given rise to renewed discussions and hopes about finding a way to a radically different and liberated society. I welcome this, as I feel deeply part of that search for emancipation. Progressive politics has for far too long been plagued by an absence of dreams about post-capitalist society and of strategic visions for how we can get there.

I’d like to suggest some issues, methods, and early discussions that would move all this forward.

As part of these renewed revolutionary discussions, some progressive and revolutionary-minded people are raising philosophical questions. And that’s a very positive development — especially given the long history in our movement, and in the U.S. in particular, of undervaluing philosophy, and theory generally. For communist revolutionaries, philosophy is a tool for better understanding and changing the world. “Know things to change things.” It isn’t some academic sideline to help passively disengaged people critique real events from afar.

We need to understand the processes OF CHANGE. We need to understand the objective conditions that constrain or permit revolution. And we need to understand the dynamic creative role that CONSCIOUS people can play in accelerating radical social changes. And by conscious I mean those who are dedicated to a social practice that can create a radically liberated society.

Karl Marx famously argued that “Humans make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”¹

This makes an important claim about the role of ripening objective conditions in the eruption of revolutionary change. And, as such, raised a valuable polemic against utopian socialists who imagined they could found liberated societies independent of material conditions.

Unfortunately, since Marx, some Marxists have bent the stick in a one-sided way – and presented a view in which historical change emerges automatically from the base of objective social conditions. In some extreme forms, this has denigrated or ignored the creative dynamic role of the subjective forces (meaning the revolutionary people and their leaders).

For that reason, we find it important to reaffirm that Marx is also making the important claim that we humans creatively “make” social change. The rich revolutionary experience of the 20th Century confirms Marx’s profound (and profoundly dialectical) point about the interaction of conscious human agency and objective conditions. The organizational forms, programmatic strategies, symbols, complex policy choices, and long-term visions adopted by revolutionary movements all had and continue to have a huge impact on the outcome of social conflict. And they have dynamically reacted back upon and transformed the underlying objective conditions, including systems of ownership, modes of production, levels of productive forces, the ideas dominant within society, and much more.

In short, a long century of revolutionary experience should make us wary of mechanical and overly-deterministic philosophies that downgrade the dynamic role of consciously revolutionary forces that are organized, determined, and united around strategies and programs. We want such forces to be guided by a clear-sighted assessment of objective conditions, including both constraining obstacles and emerging opportunities.

But we need to critique theories that imagine socialist revolutions as something that just “happen” when objective conditions are ripe enough. These theories have produced winds of paralysis in the past. Some forces within the socialist movements have argued (over and over) that conditions weren’t ripe enough for socialist revolution, and even urged the people to create a kind of loyal opposition to capitalist politics while those conditions “ripened.”²

And at other moments, quite revolutionary figures misunderstood their own role in shaping events and leading the uprisings in ways that contributed to confusion and defeat.³

In short, we need to understand that revolutions are made. They don’t just happen. And in order for us to rise to our own responsibilities, revolutionaries need to prepare for future revolutionary openings – well before they actually exist. And we need to prepare ourselves and our organizations to actually lead powerful mass forces through many difficult choices, and through the long protracted road to communism.

That is our task, because, inevitably, within our new, primitive, emerging revolutionary movement, many different concepts and assumptions are contending. It is natural that, when people begin to think about radically transforming society, some envision a process defined by radical democratization. This is a view where we revolutionaries will help create a new system where the masses of people themselves, directly, decide what is to be done. It assumes that there is little need for established programs or trained leaders – because the people can simply organize themselves and can relatively easily determine what steps are in their interests and which steps are not. Such conceptions place great faith in spontaneity – organizational forms and ideas that emerge independent of conscious and trained communist leaderships.

One stream of thought that has recently gained some currency is the ideas of the Johnson-Forest Tendency – a relatively short-lived radical grouping that operated in the U.S. during the 1950s. This tendency promoted a revolutionary schema that relied on the “self-activity of the working class” under capitalism and then promoted “direct workers’ control” as the necessary condition for a future liberated society.

The Johnson-Forest Tendency promised that its ideas would lead to a radically democratic worker-controlled society. However, I suggest that Johnson-Forest Tendency embedded within these constructs an overestimation of spontaneity, entwined with the overestimation of the inevitably determinant character of historical necessity. And I believe this line of thought will lead us into a paralyzed dead end when it (and we) come into contact with reality.

This body of thought gave rise to a few small surviving political currents (such as News and Letters and Marxist Humanist Initiative), who have approached every event in the world as grist for their ongoing philosophical preoccupations.

Many Marxists before Lenin thought that revolutions just happened. Not that revolutionary upsurges had to be made (prepared, organized, led, unleashed, and sometimes diverted from their “natural” course). Lenin and then Mao Zedong recovered and pursued the active creative role of the subjective element (the communist movement) – and on that basis led the world’s two groundbreaking socialist revolutions – in Tsarist Russia and semi-feudal, semi-colonial China. If the blind, unconscious, underlying material changes in the economic base of human society are by themselves the determinant player in social change, then it becomes possible to believe that there is less and less for the subjective element to do but observe the flow and dive in occasionally as merely an enthusiastic participant.

Johnson and Forest created their theories based on an explicit resurrection of Hegel’s concepts of historical necessity – which are often called Hegel’s Dialectic (which we contrast to dialectics of the communist worldview). This article will proceed from explaining the teleological limits to their schema.⁴ Then we will examine political concepts that Johnson and Forest built on that teleological philosophical basis, including their theory of state capitalism, as well as their incorrect and exaggerated claims for the self-activity of the working class and direct workers’ control.

Who were Johnson and Forest?

R. Johnson was the pen name of Trinidadian socialist C.L.R. James and Freddie Forest that of Raya Dunayevskaya, a Russian activist who had briefly served as the Russian-language secretary of Leon Trotsky (then in exile in Mexico).

Forest and Johnson broke with Trotsky in 1939 – and together formed a “tendency” that argued that the Soviet Union had become an exploitative capitalist class society. The USSR would very soon face the massive Nazi invasion. In contrast to communists, who defended the Soviet Union as a precious base for socialist revolution, the Johnson-Forest Tendency argued against even “critical support” for the USSR.

If Trotskyism in 1940 was a small, fragmented, relatively insignificant, Euro-centric network dedicated to criticizing the Soviet Union, then it would be fair to say that the Johnson-Forest grouping was even smaller, even less impactful, and even more hostile to the Soviet Union that was fighting for its survival.

Over time, their collaboration evolved in its views. Their belief that the Soviet Revolution had failed allowed them to distance themselves from Lenin, and especially the vanguard party organization he pioneered. Instead, they turned toward a protracted preoccupation with the original works of Karl Marx. In addition, James was engaged in studying the oppression of African-descended people in the West Indies and United States – and was repelled by the indifference he had encountered in Trotskyist and post-Trotskyist currents.

Their study of philosophical notebooks by Marx and Lenin then led them even further back: To a deep engagement with the pre-Marxist philosopher Georg Hegel. Hegel’s philosophy, in the early 1800s, sought to understand the larger defining patterns of human history as a highly dynamic set of conflicts – the dialectical unity and struggle of opposites – which he believed were necessarily and inevitably driving human society toward an ultimate destination: the modernizing state of a unified capitalist Germany.

Marxist dialectics versus the Dialectic of Hegel

Marx’s early work builds on those dialectical features of Hegelian thought that he considered groundbreaking – while separating them from Hegelianism’s many politically conservative and mystical features.

Marx later described his own early borrowing from Hegel as a radical reworking of this dialectical idea:

The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.⁵

In the Marxist reworking, dialectics reveal the dynamic sources of change within the unity and struggle of opposites as driving the material processes of nature and society. Marx applied his dialectics to the development and change of human society – and revealed the potential for a classless communist society emerging from the great economic changes and class struggles within capitalist society.

By contrast, the JFT asserts that Marx’s dialectic corresponds almost exactly with Hegel’s. I don’t want to dwell on this point for too long. What is important is not whether Hegel and Marx’s dialectics were the same, but how well each corresponded with and explained real-world processes – and in particular, how Marx’s dialectics could serve as a guide to revolutionary action because of the ruptures that he introduced.

In Hegel’s dialectic, there is a process circling around a single contradiction. And as elaborated by JFT, this is superimposed onto the contradiction between labor and capital within the consciousness of the so-called “labor movement,” a formulation with which JFT elevates the trade union movement in a way that overshadows and essentially replaces the POLITICAL struggle over power between the international proletariat and the ruling capitalist classes.

The Hegelian dialectic progresses in a circular motion. In their view, the” labor movement” emerges in a struggle with capitalist society. It forms an organization. Bourgeois consciousness emerges within the trade union organizations. But then such limitations are negated and transcended through new revolutionary consciousness and new revolutionary forms that spontaneously emerged (self-movement). And then this pattern repeats itself until the fulfillment of the Absolute idea, embodied in determinate socialism.

A big rupture embodied in Marx’s dialectical method affects his handling of empirical relationships and facts. In his early writings, Marx critiqued Hegel for first developing a scheme of categories and proceeding to present social institutions such as the family, civil society, etc. in abstract a priori⁶ conformity with his scheme. In reality, as well as in Marxist theory, correct ideas emerge through a far more dynamic and dialectical process, where practice gives rise to theory, which in turn makes new practice possible, and through such new practice enables new refinement of theory.

In its one-sided importation of the Hegelian Dialectic, the JFT traps itself within exactly those flaws that modern communism has fought to overcome. JFT returns to Hegel, interprets Marx’s Capital, and the Grundrisse philosophical notes through THOSE eyes, and then proceeds to interpret real-world events through deeply flawed categories, schema, and assumptions (leading to deeply mistaken assessments we will explore around the global Comintern network of communist parties, the reactionary uprising in post-WW2 Hungary, and the CIO trade union organization in the United States).

Another area of methodological difference between Marx and Hegel that is relevant to our discussion is their contrasting notions of progress. Marx believed, in line with the zeitgeist of his time, that mankind was progressing steadily (even linearly). There is a tendency, so thought 19th century Europe, from lower to higher forms of human knowledge and society. While such a pattern did exist, a tendency is in fact, a pattern that exists in the real world often in complex interaction with other, countervailing tendencies. In fact, we have seen such opposite patterns within the twentieth century and also today. In Hegel’s conception of world spirit there is this notion of passing through stages in a circular motion toward the realization of the Absolute Idea. Hegel thought that had been reached in the form of constitutional monarchy, however, that is of much lesser concern to us.

The passage through these stages was inevitable. In fact, through the process of spiritualization, elite men would recognize that things they believed were constraints on their freedom were in actuality necessary features of freedom. (We will also ignore that this spiritualization, this actuality of freedom could only be realized by elite men. It is really not pertinent for this argument.) Marx broke with this (partially) and in doing so he necessarily broke with aspects of this notion of inevitability.

For Marx, capital was a pseudo-subject. It developed out of the unconscious activity of relations between individuals and different classes for the processes of production. When capital was transcended, capital as a self-moving subject would no longer exist. Marx saw that there was the potential for there to be conscious mastery over the production and reproduction of human needs. Thus it was possible that capital could be transcended by a new subject of freely associating producers. But that was not inevitable.

For JFT, Marxist methodology and logic are so indistinguishable from the Hegelian, that they sometimes crudely plug Marx’s “material labor” into the space taken up by “world spirit” in Hegel’s work, and that replacement enables them to proclaim, in a crudely Hegelian way, that material labor should be seen as the self-validating essence of humanity.⁷

In contrast to assertions by JFT, communist methodology contains radical ruptures from Hegel’s mystical and teleological schema. And those differences, already clear in Marx, have been further clarified and developed by post-Marx Marxists, especially Mao Zedong.

It is revealing that in key JFT texts, especially in regard to their ideas around workers’ self-activity and the necessity of direct worker rule, there is always an argument that things can only develop in one preordained way; the Hegelian notion that the stages real life passed through were, somehow, the only way things could have developed. If the Russian revolution ended in new forms of exploitation, then that was an outcome predestined by the objective conditions already present at the beginning.

This linear and teleological notion of the development of processes is one of the key problems of Hegelian dialectics that we should not resurrect.

Leninism and Spontaneity

This idea that human progress develops through fixed formal stages imposed by blind and anonymous “necessity” stands in sharp contrast to the modern communism developed by Lenin, whose thought is in conflict with the mechanical materialism of the Second International.⁸

By the time Johnson and Forest were engaged in politics, they were working in opposition to the Marxist-Leninists of their period – who had spent decades fighting to form vanguard revolutionary parties deeply rooted among the oppressed. Communists fought to prepare disciplined, sophisticated parties that could serve as a leading “general staff of the revolution.” They envisioned communist work as a struggle to divert the spontaneous trade union consciousness and activity of workers toward the larger political goals beyond the immediate conflict between workers and their direct employers. Leninism sought a revolutionary movement that would understand the self-emancipation of the working class as intimately bound up with the abolition of ALL oppression in society, and recognize that the spontaneous consciousness which arose separated from communist theory and politics couldn’t possibly lead to that much-needed abolition.

In contrast to Lenin, who argued that communists needed to actively divert spontaneous trade union politics toward class-conscious political activity, Johnson and Forest promoted an entwined overestimation of both necessity and spontaneity – which insisted that workers would inevitably generate revolutionary movement from their own direct experience. In fact, they insisted that this was the only way that emancipation could happen.

Such overestimation of spontaneity DOESN’T correspond with reality or help the communist movement rise to the heavy responsibilities and pressing creative demands that confront us. It is also an argument that lends itself towards paths of least resistance; “going with the flow” of reform struggles. In this view, there is no need for revolutionaries to deflect, divert, and intercede to establish a new attractive, communist political pole through living exposure, agitation, and propaganda. Sooner or later, it is asserted, the masses of people themselves will convert their spontaneous struggles into something revolutionary and epoch-changing.

If revolution can only come from such a natural “ripening” of consciousness among workers – through “self-movement” — well then, the tasks of communists shrink to virtually nothing. CLR James rejected the idea of an organized communist party by 1949. Meanwhile, Dunayevskaya (Forest) went on to found the Marxist-Humanist group “News and Letters,” which proved to be content with a passive observer status – where they treated life-and-death struggles against oppression mainly as raw material for their perpetually disengaged debates and commentary over Hegelian and early Marxist philosophy.

From the JFT perspective, the many REAL struggles of oppressed people for state power, socialism, and revolution, as well as their organizations, appeared as fatally flawed by volunteerism and substitutionism — in which communist organizations inevitably usurped power from the revolutionary workers by claiming to be their representatives.

In a troubling way, this tendency disparaged and misrepresented any real-world forward progress on the communist road, including all actual attempts at socialist revolution and socialist construction between 1955 and today. They argued that communists were imposing themselves and their programs on events when the only way to progress required leaving the workers alone to work out their “self-movement.”

And this explains the attraction of JFT theory for many. An overestimation of spontaneity is a very common misunderstanding that individuals new to radical politics have. Since, especially in the U.S., people often come to communist politics with a generally radical democratic bias, including the social democratic idea that socialism is somehow political democracy extended to economics. In addition, many new radicals have difficulty unraveling and refuting the heavy layers of anti-communist summations they encounter everywhere in bourgeois society. Armed with the logic of JFT, they can reject out of hand a complex century of communist revolution and experimentation as “Stalinism,” and bypass the difficult work of assembling an opposing communist counter-narrative about our own history.

Dialectics and Reality

I mentioned above that Hegel’s dialectic posited one single contradiction in processes and things. Hegel asserted that the movement of a thing from one stage to the next is like a balance or a symmetry. From quantity to quality to measure, or from identity to difference to opposition, and so on.

In the real world, there is no such simple symmetry. Contradictions are all uneven. One aspect of a contradiction dominates. A thing turns into its opposite and vice versa. There is a dis-symmetry. Our universe, our world, and our society are all very complex. The processes contain many intersecting, mutually influencing contradictions. We will get deeper into this when looking at the idea of “what is socialism?” and the JFT’s rejection of all existing socialist societies as inherently exploitative.

It is also true that capital (the relationship analyzed by Marx) is a complex process. It contains multiple contradictions, not just one. For instance, capitalism has a fundamental contradiction between socialized production and private appropriation. That fundamental contradiction has two forms of motion. The first is the anarchy of capitalism, where the rivalry between separate centers for the accumulation of profit creates the causes of crisis, waste, and reactionary war. The second is the class contradiction between the exploited working class and the ruling bourgeoisie.

By contrast, JFT focuses almost solely on the contradiction within what it calls “the labor movement,” meaning the existing trade union structures, and barely touches on anything else. In dealing with this one contradiction exclusively, JFT failed to take revolution seriously, regardless of their intentions.

Let us talk about the many contradictions that must be understood if we are to understand how we must get rid of capitalism. Of course, there is a relationship between proletarians and the capitalist class. There are contradictions between town and countryside, between industry and agriculture. There are contradictions among the people – including the contradiction between urban workers and peasants which was so important during the twentieth century. There are contradictions between men and women.⁹ There are contradictions between competing blocs of capital. This is the anarchy/organization contradiction – and it is in fact, the principally driving contradiction within capitalism, causing crisis, war, etc.

There are the contradictions of colonialism and imperialism — that arise when powerful developed capitalist countries dominate and exploit peoples all over the world.

How can it possibly be assumed that the resolution of the internal contradictions of industrial workers, or even of some broader notion of what constitutes the “working class”, could ever resolve everything we must deal with in order to get rid of capitalism? Where does the confrontation between the communist movement and the capitalist state fit into this? Can workers make a revolution, or lead the creation of a radically liberated new society, without broad dynamic alliances involving students, farmers, intellectuals, or artists? Not individuals from such groups, but whole blocs of such groups? How do we make use of the contradictions and antagonisms within the camp of our enemy?

We can’t understand all of these things within the framework of JFT’s narrow focus on the self-movement of the ”labor movement.” We must deal with multitudes of contradictions within the dynamic motion of the capital relation itself.

JFT’s denial of actually existing socialist society

The JFT theory of state capitalism takes categories from Hegel and Marx and tries to impose those categories on concrete situations without dealing with the complexity of reality itself. The theory puts forward the abolition of the law of value and the need for direct workers’ control as ideals. However, it lacks an explanation for how these goals are to be achieved and fails to demonstrate their viability for a project of liberation (in the case of direct workers’ control).

There is another problem in that when changes in the world situation emerge (for example, when colonial struggle emerges under the banner of communist or socialist revolution), JFT seeks to make these developments fit into their a priori categories. Thus when new developments with socialist experimentation in China emerged, none of the currents emerging from JFT were able to adequately sum it up. Part of the reason for this is the holding on to the principle of direct workers’ control as socialism.

JFT has no real notion of transition. According to their understanding of the notion of the development of the capital-labor relation, the working class develops within the relation of capital itself until consciousness develops to the point where the capital relation is torn asunder and the new socialist society emerges in its own totality through the form of workers councils or some type of direct worker control. In this conception revolutionary states that have emerged and attempted to build socialism, while at the same time acting as a base to support world revolution, cannot be considered socialist if workers at the point of production are not directly making decisions about what and how they are producing.

This conception fails to deal with a great many aspects of reality.

For one, the conception of the working class is reified. The working class does not reach a collective revolutionary consciousness in some kind of balanced and definite way. Instead, consciousness among workers and among different sections of people, in general, is very uneven. In revolutionary situations, people are filled with all kinds of illusions. There are illusions of nationalism, of racism, of sexism, feelings of revenge, illusions that now we’ll be able to get the old liberal leaders to finally listen to us, etc. By contrast, a viable communist movement is a fusion of the values and principles of the communist idea with a broad section of people throughout society, with the most oppressed sections of people at the core of that movement.

A victorious revolutionary movement has to deal with all kinds of problems. In all cases up until now, the victorious revolution has consolidated itself only in a small section of the planet. It is still surrounded by imperialist enemies. In order to survive and provide for the people in that territory, it is necessary to engage in trade and other forms of formal relations with capitalist nations. Within the territory itself, there has usually just been a civil war. There are many people and classes that don’t agree with the goals of a communist revolution. There are the expectations of farmers, intellectuals, and small business people (some friendly toward the revolution, some less so, others somewhere in between), who the revolution must develop connections with which involve greater and lesser acceleration toward communistic relations and economy.

Questions of national oppression, male domination, and the belief in property rights by middle-class people all must be navigated and transformed. These ideas along with the people in whose minds they belong cannot simply be liquidated as some would accuse communists of believing.

Importantly, solving these problems make the necessity of a state and of a transitory period between capitalism and communism (and the abolition of the state) more apparent.

Seen through this reasoning it is not right that the epoch of communist and revolutionary nationalist party lead revolutions should be defined as a capitalist or that the economies developing out of these revolutions were expressions of a higher form of capitalism. Instead, this era can be looked at as the first attempt in world history to build socialist societies and advance toward a communist world. As I said above, communists have learned a number of important lessons from these very bold attempts.

One lesson is that it is not possible to consolidate socialism in one country or a small number of countries. It is possible, however, to make a revolution and begin to develop a socialist economy in the area controlled by revolutionary peoples and leadership, while at the same time having these areas serve as a base for the support of the world revolution.

Because socialism cannot be consolidated in a small number of countries, and because revolutionary societies necessarily have to deal with a situation in which the majority of the world is dominated by imperialism (and even the contradictions in the home base are not fully worked out), socialism is transitory in its nature. This means it bears the mark of both the old capitalist society as well as the seeds of the new communist society.

These revolutionary bases are generally marked by a struggle over road. Revolutionaries must work to keep society on a road moving toward communism and struggle against forces in that society, as well as internationally, who want to reverse the gains of the revolution. Because of the transitory nature of society resulting from the simultaneous presence of features of the old society and seeds of the new, the economies of these bases have contradictory features. Therefore, in building a socialist society, nationalization and state planning are important components of restricting the law of value, along with changing the relations between people and creating a more equitable system of distribution.

Nationalization and state planning are not quick fixes, however, and in and of themselves don’t necessarily work to restrict the law of value. The ability to work the plan (through price fixes, production for use where possible, narrowing wage differentials) can only succeed if there is the proper political situation; that is, if the people in society are mobilized to carry out the plan and to keep it revolutionary. Politics must command the economy and if the people are not mobilized to carry it out, then there is a danger of the law of value becoming dominant and of society reverting back to capitalism.

This contradiction between capitalism and socialism gets expressed at the heights of society, in that due to the remnants of capitalism still present and the exaggerated influence of leaders of the revolutionary organization, expression of capitalist ideas and support for a capitalist road are expressed and carried out in practice under the leadership of a wing of the leadership that once supported the revolution but has become content with the way things are. These capitalist roaders must be fought by revolutionary leadership emanating from both revolutionary veterans and new revolutionary leaders developing out of the new situation, the new society, and its new contradictions. This struggle between roads goes through its own ebb and flow. At certain points, the Cultural Revolution being a prime example, this struggle sharpens and everything suddenly is up for grabs. This struggle continues and develops and can only be settled once and for all with the development of revolutionary victory on a world scale.¹⁰

These are some of the lessons that communists have learned from the struggles of the twentieth century. However, JFT’s theory of state capitalism obscures these lessons and negates the accumulated knowledge of the two great waves (anti-colonial struggles and revolution within socialism) of communist revolution in the twentieth century.

JFT notion of state capitalism

The JFT uses the Hegelian dialectic to develop a theory of the current stage of capitalism that they call state capitalism. Within this theory is a notion of a tendency referred to as Stalinism which includes the USSR itself, the Communist parties that supported the USSR and also trade union bureaucrats and organizations like the CIO and communist-controlled unions in Western Europe. JFT still uses the term Stalinism to describe tendencies with very diverse politics. In some parts of the contemporary tendency, there have even been attempts to make the argument that we are still in the same stage of state capitalism that we were allegedly in during the late 1940s and 1950s.

There are three basic assertions by the JFT in constructing their theory of state capitalism:

State capitalism is a description of the current phase of world capitalism and the class struggle. Capital had been tending toward centralization and state control according to this idea. State capitalism, as reflected by the USSR or by trade unions organizing the labor discipline of the Western democracies, is seen as a higher, more brutal stage of the development of world capital.
The Stalinists seek to take power for themselves in the name of the working class and thus represent a new form of labor bureaucracy within the working class movement. Without direct worker control, there is no socialism.
The law of value existed in the Soviet Union and thus it could not be socialist.

State capitalism as a world system, Stalinism, and lack of direct worker control

In State Capital and World Revolution, the JFT quotes Engels, Lenin, and Kautsky to demonstrate that Marxist theory always taught that there was a tendency to centralization in capital and this exacerbated its crisis. They track the development of Lenin’s work in Imperialism up until State and Revolution to assert that Lenin was working toward a theory of state capitalism that was subsequently suppressed by Stalin in order to hide the true nature of the USSR.

In Imperialism, Lenin speaks about only monopoly capitalism. However, after the war, Lenin observed the German use of state planning. He dug into some Engels which explained how, with the birth of trusts, the planlessness of capitalism starts to disappear. JFT cited some passages in State and Revolution where Lenin speaks of how WWI was accelerating the development of capitalism into imperialism and from “monopoly to nationalization.”

For the JFT, the point of this was to show that planning and nationalization were not specific to socialism but existed under the relation and dominance of capital. This was important to them because their main interlocutors in the Trotskyist Fourth International were influenced by the idea that planning and nationalization were not capitalist and thus there was a basis to support the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state.

JFT felt it was a key task of their analysis to break down the theoretical barriers between the Soviet Union and the rest of the world economy. They wanted to show that Soviet society operated under the same basic economic laws as the Western capitalist world.

One way they did this was to compare the role of the labor bureaucracies in the Western democracies to the methods of labor discipline in the Soviet Union. They compared the CIO in the United States to Stakhanovism, a movement in the Soviet Union that rewarded and popularized individual workers and factories in Soviet society for their enthusiasm and success in surpassing production goals. And they argued that the Soviet Union was driven by the goal for quantitative accumulation and reforms in the realm of consumption.

According to this argument, the CIO made deals with the capitalist that provided higher wages and benefits (the ability for higher worker consumption capacities) to workers while giving up control of the production floor itself. The capitalists were thus free through the expansion of production and piece work to push forward with their accumulation goals and to further discipline the shop floor in pursuit of such goals. JFT asserted that Stakhanovism, was understood as a sort of piecework. was essentially the same system and that Soviet leaders were driven by the same goals of accumulation and some increased consumption for the workers. JFT also revealed how communist parties who controlled national unions, such as those in France and Italy, made deals similar to the CIO in the United States.

Thus there is an analysis of state capitalism as a new phase of the labor-capital relation and the current of Stalinism as the new form of labor bureaucracy inside the labor movement itself.

This was tied to the notion that direct worker control of production equaled socialism and that its lack meant socialism did not exist. JFT asserts in State Capitalism… that the workers themselves are interested, not in increased wages, but in direct control of the production process. According to JFT the current crisis (1950) in the revolutionary movement is one of the “self-mobilization of the working class,” an issue we will tackle in the section below on working-class self-activity and direct worker control.

JFT goes on to present a theory of how Stalinism spread into the colonial world: Capital invested in colonial countries is not for industrial development but for military outposts in the struggle for world mastery. This exacerbates the tensions in the countryside and leads to continuous rebellion. The petty-bourgeoisie sides with the peasants in frustration with their own bourgeoisie and foreign capital and leads the peasant movement, becoming colonial representatives of Russian “centralized capital”. When they gain national independence they carry out transformations along the Russian state capitalist lines.

Law of Value

JFT’s theory of state capitalism is also predicated on the notion that the existence of the law of value in the Soviet Union is direct evidence of the conclusion that there can be no socialism there. The law of value holds that commodities are exchanged, on average, based on the amount of socially necessary labor power they embody.

The work of the Soviet political economist A. Leonteiv is the focus of the critique of Soviet political economy in both State Capitalism… and a paper by Raya Dunayevskaya (Forest) called Stalinists Falsify Marxism Anew. Teaching Marxism in the Soviet Union.

In Leonteiv’s work, it’s claimed that socialism has been fully consolidated in the Soviet Union. Although admitting that the law of value still operates, Leonteiv argues that the law of value does not play an exploitative role in the same way it does under a capitalist economy. Because there is state planning and the problem of consumption by the workers has been generally overcome, the law of value no longer operates under the same anarchic laws of accumulation. Leonteiv further argues that the law of value existed previous to capitalist society and thus was not particular to capitalism. It was not a contradiction, then, that the law of value had remained a part of socialist society.

JFT argues that, in making his arguments, Leonteiv reverses Marx’s own arguments in Capital and obscures the idea that Marx’s critique is a critique of the capital relation in its totality and the explanation of the historical development of this relation. They argue that the law of value can only develop as labor-power itself emerges as a commodity. Surplus value exists in a primitive form when communes can produce a surplus, though it only becomes fully developed with the emergence of capital as the dominant relation in society. Furthermore, JFT quotes Marx to the effect that commodities were meant to disappear under socialism and were not seen in any way in Marx’s vision of a socialist society. According to JFT, the presence of the law of value and its operation under the Soviet system is an indictment of the Soviet economy itself. It can only mean capitalism. But again, that is not how reality has shown itself to work.

Their theory of state capitalism is rooted in a worship of spontaneity, because it assumes that direct working-class control is both possible and necessary. And so, the absence of such mechanisms and practice is (for them) ipso facto evidence of exploitation. For JFT, the essence of capital is the alienation of labor; the extraction of surplus — and that is seen to be present when society no longer evidences direct mass democracy as its central mechanism.

So in all of the specific spheres one investigates (philosophy and Hegel, state capitalism, and even their outdated equating of “the labor movement” with the world-historic movement of the proletariat for communism) this worship of spontaneity seems like a common thread, a pre-existing set of assumptions that tie it all together.

Working Class Self-Activity

This idea of self-movement of the workers has a number of problems: 1) It doesn’t correspond to how socialist consciousness and the socialist movement actually emerge with the loyalty of a significant part of the oppressed 2) It seeks out a philosophical construct (from Hegel) that exaggerates the unfolding of necessity, while denigrating accident, contingency, AND the important dynamic and creative role of the subjective factor. The worship of spontaneity (at its extreme) holds that revolutions just “happen” when conditions are ripe and when the workers therefore “self-move.”

Both Lenin and Mao brought the dynamic role of human decisions into play — often to be criticized by others for “volunteerism,” as well as for believing they could accelerate the pace of events in a revolutionary epoch.

One sad part of the history of the JFT has been its sectarianism and hostility towards every actually existing emancipatory project in the world. Any movement that was led by a party was Stalinist. It sneered at the idea of united fronts, accusing any such thing as class collaborationist. It rejected student movements, anti-colonial struggles, and viewed the Cultural Revolution in China as a power struggle between totalitarian rivals in which, at a certain point, the workers developed some level of independence that was crushed.

All of reality, all really existing struggles had to fit into a priori⁶ categories. Any revolutionary movement had to be led by an autonomous working class. The goal must be the formation of workers’ councils and a society would be based on them. Reality, of course, would never oblige.

It is of note here that I am critiquing ideas exclusively since JFT has never developed a base among broad sections of the people (arguably with the exception of autonomist movements in Europe in which JFT theory had some influence).

JFT-influenced revolutionaries do provide examples of what they see as examples of the correctness of the Tendency’s theories shining through in reality. My own thinking is that these examples actually provide some of the practical refutations of JFT theory. Let’s look at two of these examples, the CIO in the 1950s and the Hungarian Rebellion of 1956.

In Facing Reality, a document formed partly out of a JFT split, CLR James and his colleagues cite both Hungary and the wildcat strikes in Detroit in defiance of a contract negotiated by the CIO as examples of the future form of revolutionary struggle.

A large part of the argument here is to show that workers are not satisfied with more benefits and a slightly improved standard of living. To James, the formation of the workers’ councils in Hungary and the resistance of Detroit workers to piece work and increases in production were evidence that the workers were not concerned with consumption and that what they really wanted was control of the factory floor. They wanted control of the production process. To James, and some modern revolutionaries highly influenced by James’ work, this question of control of the places of work is the question of socialism itself.

The reality of what is actually going on within these processes is not truly dealt with by James, et al. There is simply an assertion here of what Facing Reality wants to be true. For instance, the Hungarian rebellion as such was very contradictory. Workers may have taken over the factories. They may have created workers’ councils. And some may have seen these councils as a post-Soviet-controlled Hungary. It is hardly realistic to think, however, that these worker’s councils could have served as the answer to overcoming all of the unevenness of consciousness within Hungary itself.

What do I mean by this?

The workers’ councils, along with other sections of the people, chose a reformist path within the Communist Party (Nagy) to be the leader of a new Hungary, which would imply a rejection of the claim that workers were interested in direct control. Rather, it merely reveals that many were frustrated with the current regime and were ready to act, but also sought leadership in determining the forms a new Hungary would take.

It is also necessary to point out the diversity of ideas among the workers, students, and other people who rose up. Some were driven by revolutionary sentiments, but, in the main, this uprising was dominated by clerical, pro-Western and highly anti-communist politics. Many wanted a western-style democracy. Significant forces were looking for direct military intervention from the United States through the UN Security Council. People who rose up actually felt betrayed that the US did not invade to support them.

The point is that a reliance on working-class self-activity is insufficient to push forward revolution, particularly in a period of revolutionary crisis. We said above that a communist movement is the fusion of the communist idea and orientation, brought mainly from communist intellectuals from various classes, with the revolutionary people ready to die to change the society in which they live. This fusion produces waves of new leaders and consolidates communist organization. Communist organization is the highest expression of revolutionary consciousness. It synthesizes the sentiments of the most forward-thinking sections of the people and wields it into a common vision and a real fighting force deeply rooted among broader sections of the people. Without the development of this fusion between communists and a revolutionary people, the most advanced are lost in the chaos of the muddle of sentiments even and especially in moments of social crisis.

Working class self-activity can emerge and it can create extraordinary situations and nascent organization. However, without the fusion with a communist idea, the moment will fade away or the ruling class will regroup and crush the spontaneous movement. There is not an example in history where spontaneity on its own held out against capitalist rulers for longer than a few months. I urge our movement to learn from history.

The same can be said for the situation in Detroit, where there were working-class defying the mandates of Reuther and the CIO. Workers may have been dissatisfied with their contracts. They may have wanted more say with regard to speed-ups and increases in production in particular factories. But this does not necessarily imply revolutionary consciousness.

We all can agree that many of these workers held racist, sexist, and patriotic views. Many were solely motivated by an interest in bettering their own family’s situation. Most were not really concerned with getting rid of the army and police, white supremacy or making sure that their wives and daughters could lead a full life not controlled by their fathers and other patriarchal representatives. They rose up in righteous rebellion, true, but not with a revolution on their minds.

Don Hammerquist¹¹ (building on the thought of WEB DuBois) developed the conception of dual-consciousness many years ago. JFT-influenced revolutionaries are thus very familiar with the contradictions within the working class. However, I think reality goes even further than the notion of dual-consciousness. There is an unevenness of consciousness. There are workers, students, and intellectuals that develop a revolutionary consciousness that dominates their negative consciousness. They represent the seeds of communism even within capitalist society itself. They are a high expression of what needs to be brought together and synthesized into revolutionary organization, program, and strategy. And they are the link to sections of people who are not thinking about such things as of yet. Only when revolutionary consciousness, the higher aspirations of the people, are synthesized into organization and strategy does revolution stand a fighting chance.

Direct Workers Control

To get to communism we need a vision that is much broader than the idea of direct workers’ control. Surely, controlling one’s factory with other workers in that factory is not the highest aspiration we can conjure up when we think of a liberated society. Surely, there is more to the full development of human beings than such control.

Furthermore, in a complex society direct workers’ control can’t really work. Think about it a little bit.

A car has, literally, thousands of parts. Some of these parts can be made in-house, at the factory where the car is actually put together. The plant must also, however, use hundreds of vendors, other factories in which these parts are made. How can all the circulation that needs to take place between various factories in order to ensure that all the pieces get to where they need to go to produce the necessary numbers of finished products be decided at the level of each individual factory floor? Is this efficient?

What about the notion that this can be done is actually liberatory? Wouldn’t trying to decide a whole mess of problems at the level of the factory actually waste a whole lot of time for a worker to develop in various aspects of their life? What about leisure or intellectual pursuit? Do workers want to spend unnecessary time in meetings deciding all kinds of things that really can be decided more effectively through representation?

What about questions about protecting the ecology of our planet? Do such questions get put to referendum? What if a group of oil and gas workers doesn’t want to switch to green sources of fuel? Should they be allowed to keep producing because that is what their factory decided collectively?

What about the question of defense against capitalist countries? Can military secrets and surprise attacks be discussed and figured out in a public forum?

Obviously, I’m making the case that a revolutionary society needs to embrace a system of representation. I’m also suggesting that the idea of direct workers’ control is not necessarily liberatory.

There is a place for recall of representatives, for referendums, and for local decision making forms. In the main, however, liberation and communism needs to move through systems of representation. This would actually free up the capacity for the fuller development of individuals and allow for a real mutual flourishing; a move toward an actual society of freely associating human beings.

Concluding

Questions about direct democracy, the role of trained leaders, and how much revolutionaries can actually control in struggling to forge a path to communist-led revolution run deeper than the example of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. JFT serves, however, as a specific example of a wider tendency, particularly in the U.S., of an attraction to radical democracy. In other words, there is stress made on particular forms of how socialist society can be organized as if the given structure of society can solve the problems of the Stalin-era.

Here we face another contradiction. Communists must work within the context of the reality we are faced with. The road we are able to forge will depend a great deal on the polarizations in society that develop in a revolutionary situation. Objective conditions will impact how strong our forces are, how broad our base of support will be, how tenacious the anti-socialist resistance is, how isolated the revolution is internationally, how threatening outside military and covert operations are… and so on. And all of those things impact the political forms of the post-revolutionary society. The situation for communists acting in such an environment may be more or less favorable.

By this measure, we should not fool ourselves that the creation of public popular democratic forms of participation is a magic bullet against capitalist restoration. Accomplishing this obviously necessary flowering of mass participation is not simply a matter of breaking with our own dogma. The problem emerges from reality, from real-world contradictions of revolutionary class struggle and class alignments, not just from our own preconceptions or from the lingering power of Stalin-era dogmas.¹²

Again, our movement does need to continuously expand the base of people that are actively participating in the construction of a socialist society and struggling to stay on the road to communism. All along the tortuous road we walk there is the delicate dance that exists between the reality faced and our own conscious creative activity.

JFT’s ideas of direct democracy, direct workers control, and similar concepts that fret or scowl at the need for conscious leadership and intervention falter, in that they both overestimate the role of necessity and thus underestimate the importance of conscious human action. These theories lose their balance and lean too far on the side of determinism.

The complexity of the world we live in compels revolutionaries to examine all of the various contradictions that make up the reality in which we attempt to walk the communist road: forms of oppression, resistance to oppression, and the dynamic array of social relations and production relations. Reducing our vision to one that merely pits workers against bosses is way too narrow. It is necessary to be, as Lenin once called for, “tribunes of the people” understanding all the various social forces in society and how they are beaten down by imperialism and what our communist movement has to offer all of them.

Direct worker’s control is too narrow of a vision. There is more to being human than production and labor. Isn’t the point to develop more freedom and less necessity, for each human to reach their fullest potential? Direct worker’s control, even when there is a sense of the need for cooperation, turns each workplace into its own economic unit, and productivity and the need to get supplies and other inputs at more favorable costs vis-a-vis other workplaces becomes the most likely necessity, reproducing the relations of commodity production.

A more liberating vision involves producing to meet the needs of society as a whole utilizing both centralized planning and lots of local input. It means mobilizing society to carry out such a plan and educating society with the knowledge and the foresight that this plan is meant for the benefit of all. It means developing a new ethos and a new culture that has overcome isolation and atomization. We live for each other. We take care of one another. Some who were once fortunate may not have lots of stuff anymore, but there is enough stuff for everyone, and no one gets left out. This is a universalizing vision. Each workplace is not owned by those who work there but each workplace is producing for a larger societal objective, freeing up time for each person in society to live a fuller life.

This is a world that is consciously strived for. Humans must consciously create it. It will not emerge out of self-activity and spontaneity. If there are tendencies that point in the direction of such a world, there are also countervailing tendencies that pull the other way. It is a revolution that must be made by an ever-expanding group of militants. The future is not inevitable,- it is unwritten.

Revolutions are Made, They Don’t Just Happen: A Look into the Problems of the Johnson-Forest Tendency