Nasser Paydar
The struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle in all spheres of social life. In all spheres of life, workers are confronted with capital, with its exploitation, with its state, with its political order and its restrictions and regulations, with the civil institutions of its domination and with all the conditions of its profit, production and reproduction. In all spheres, they endure the hardships and hardships of existence or the consequences of the existence of this system. In all these spheres, they are forced to fight against it. The struggle for higher wages and improved working conditions, the struggle for greater social welfare, the campaign against dictatorship and the suppression and killing of freedoms, the fight against sexual, ethnic and racial discrimination, the protest against child labour and environmental pollution and the war-making of capital or many other campaigns are all continuous and organic spheres of the general class war of the working masses against the capitalist system. What is vital for the proletariat is that the social force be present in all these spheres. In all these spheres, it plays the role of an irreconcilable anti-capitalist warrior. All these forms of struggle should be linked to the common axis of the war against capital and against the basis of wage slavery, and finally, in all these fields, they should be opposed to the strategic reformist aspirations of various social and class forces. The transformation of each of these centres into a canter of appeasement and submission to the bourgeoisie, in any form, in any guise, with any vehicle and under any banner, is in any case a departure from the real front of the anti-capitalist struggle of the working class. From the very beginning of the work of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, a large section of Russian Social-Democrats, composed of bourgeois liberalism and labour reformism, demanded, within the framework of the customs and traditions of the day, that the labour movement bury itself as deeply as possible in the cemetery of right-wing syndicalist reformism. Who first raised this issue, where and with what formulation, is not at all our subject, and addressing it does not solve the problem. The struggle against this approach was important and vital for the labour movement, and any kind of undermining of it was considered a step in the dissolution of the class struggle of the working masses in the framework of syndicalist and social democratic reformism. Lenin apparently takes this path, but how? From what perspective and with what approach? He called this group the Economists, and the basis of his argument was that they view everything through the lens of the economic struggle. They despise the political campaign of the proletariat against the tsarist autocracy and the monarchy, or the lack of political freedoms and the existence of social oppression. They replace economic demands and the improvement of living conditions and working conditions with disputes or the intersection of wars and conflicts, and in this process, they dismantle the bulwark of the proletariat’s class struggle. Lenin explored the axis of deviation of the group in question in giving importance to the economic struggle and not giving importance to the political struggle or pursuing politics apart from economics and the like. What he does not pay attention to here is from which real class perspective the economy, politics or any other field of struggle and protest is pursued, what the revolutionary proletariat’s anti-wage labour speech is in each of these areas and what the reformists whom he calls economists do with each of these areas and what terrible delusions they put before the workers. Lenin does not pay attention to any of these issues in his criticism against this right-wing reformist movement. In this critique, he does not depart from the bastion of the socialist, anti-wage labour, and Marxian approach. Instead of putting his finger on the root, he clings to the branches and leaves; instead of criticizing the real social democratic framework of strategies, he belittles the economic struggle of the working masses. Instead of railing against syndicalism, he introduces a category called “Economism.” Instead of criticizing the reactionary social democracy and reformism narrative of the class consciousness of the proletariat as Marxian, he replaces it with another false social democratic narrative. Instead of explaining the conscious anti-wage labour existence of the working class, he digs up the source of this consciousness in the grooves of the brains of the intellectuals of the upper classes!! Instead of presenting the attempt of right-wing reformism to lead the proletariat astray in the wilderness of reformism as an anti-wage labour critique, it hangs it on the crutch of petty labour. Finally, instead of a socialist critique of right-wing syndicalist reformism, all it does is replace this form of reformism with another type of reformism, with a militant anti-regime, supra-class, and bourgeois democracy-seeking reformism. The book “What is to be Done by Lenin” is a detailed narration here of the insertions. The clear class consciousness of the proletariat is a clear Marxian anatomy of this class of history, society, the capitalist system, the criticism of this society, the criticism of the entire existing objectivity and the extension of these criticisms to the practice of the class struggle of the day. Social democracy and syndicalism cast a shadow on all of these, they should be made the target of clear Marxian criticism, instead of this, Lenin sets out to pursue the smallness and the greatness of considering the economic struggle of the workers important and not knowing it!! He takes the path of expressing class consciousness in a different way, assigning the address of this consciousness to the source of consciousness and knowledge of the intellectual elite of the upper and wealthy classes and resorting to some other miseducation. For example, he claims that “economic concessions are the cheapest of all things for the state and are the most economical. Because by this means the government hopes to win the confidence of the working masses, and that is why we Social Democrats must in no way, absolutely in no way, entertain the idea that economic reforms are more precious to us, that we especially consider these reforms important. (What is to be done?)
It seems unlikely that Lenin really believed that the workers’ struggle for higher wages, healthcare, education, and social welfare was so despicable!! But this is not the subject of our discussion for the moment. There are other very important points to ponder in relation to this part of his writing. The first question is whether the capitalists of the world, especially in a society like Russia at that time, were as open-minded towards the workers as Lenin claims?! They really had no hesitation in increasing wages, improving their standard of living, and providing them with welfare facilities, and they were very generous in these areas!! If this was the case, then from where in the sky did all this poverty, hunger, misery, and disease of the 10 million working masses of Russia at that time come down?!! Isn’t it true that today, in conditions where the rate of exploitation has risen to the galaxies and every worker in the world contributes a mountain of capital and profit to the capitalists every day, every breath they take is shot for a higher price of their labour power, and every day they start a bloodbath to slaughter even more of this low price of their labour power? So how is it that the Tsarist government seems to have seen improving the living conditions of the working class as a very profitable task?!!
Let us pose the second and more important question. Workers should definitely not be fooled by the economic reforms of the bourgeoisie but is it right to be fooled by political reforms?!! If not, then what is all this fuss about the anti-democratic regime, a twisted version of the regime, to consolidate the foundations of bourgeois rule and strengthen the foundation of capitalism?!! Why is the democratic revolution vital for the workers to ensure the fastest, widest, freest and most complete growth of capitalism, but their struggle to improve their livelihood and social well-being is contemptible!! It may be said that the overthrow of tyranny is the opening of the door to freedoms that pave the way for the anti-capitalist struggle. This may be true, but what kind of paving of the way for the anti-capitalist struggle is this, which is supposed to fully realize the rule of the bourgeoisie as a class for the first time and guarantee the complete and total dominance of capitalism in its most advanced European, not Asian, form!! How can one be both a “shark and a broad beard”!! The fact is that workers should not be fooled by bourgeois economic reforms, that’s all there is to it, but they should equally not be fooled by bourgeois political reforms, even if these reforms come out of the barrel of a gun. Let’s move on to the most important and vital point of all. What Lenin has completely overlooked here is that the discussion is not essentially about comparing the economic and political struggle of the working class, despising one and preferring the other, the harmlessness of the former and the harmfulness of the latter for the bourgeoisie, and the like. This discussion is fundamentally wrong. The real point is that all these forms of struggle must be organized in the anti-wage labour trench, and each of them must be a vast and devastating campaign against capitalism. The workers must and can make both their economic and their daily political struggles a field of attack on the lifeblood of capitalism. The opposite is also completely true, that in all these areas they must hang themselves on destructive reformist solutions. A disaster that has been plaguing the international labour movement for decades, and right and left reformism have played the greatest role in imposing it on the working class, and, coincidentally, most of the orientations and strategies recommended by Lenin himself are also in this direction. If the working masses of the world, instead of clinging to union reformism, instead of tying themselves to a party beyond themselves and crawling in the wilderness of a democratic anti-class regime, organize themselves in a soviet and anti-capitalist manner, if the real activists of the labour movement strive in this direction and to realize this goal, then in all areas and against every form of injustice and oppression, they will challenge the existence of wage slavery. The working masses, which can rely on their organized class power of the soviet to demand the allocation of the maximum social product of their annual labour to improving their standard of living and social welfare, can demand free health, treatment, education, transportation and kindergartens and to remove all of these from the sphere of buying and selling, can pursue these demands within the context of a campaign with a clear socialist horizon and the abolition of wage labour, why shouldn’t they do this?!! Why should the progressive activist of the working class, instead of trying to prepare such a workers’ campaign in the field of economic struggle, set the tone for the humiliation of this struggle and promote its worthlessness?!! Why should everything be summarized in the anti-regime struggle and lock the top and bottom of this struggle to the foundations of the further expansion of capitalism?!! The fact is that the political war and struggle that Lenin praised so much ultimately not only did not solve any of the proletariat’s problems, but it also made the path of its anti-capitalist struggle more and more complicated. The political campaign of the working class, like its economic struggle, must and can be a campaign against the basis of wage slavery, but this can only be achieved when the labour movement, in its daily practice and ongoing struggles, targets the foundation of legality and legality based on wage labour, and questions the agreements, contracts, and legal frameworks that capital has set up as a weapon to protect its own valorisation process and political rule. Instead of referring to these laws and contracts, it should bring its own anti-wage labour class narrative of rights, freedom, and civilization, political order, customs, traditions, and culture into the arena of conflict. Without challenging its current class struggle in every area with radical class alternatives and without linking all these areas to the horizon of the abolition of wage labour, the proletariat will certainly become a prisoner of reformism. The solution for the labour movement is not to replace economic reformism with political reformism, even militant, and in this substitution, completely derail the class struggle from the real track of the struggle against capitalism. On the contrary, it must seek everywhere and, in all areas, the real path of a broad soviet and anti-wage labour campaign and persist in following this path.