Monopoly, consent, and illusions

....The Bourgeois Basis of Revisionism

Insofar as revolutionary consciousness is not prevalent among the workers, their consciousness is determined by the ideology of the ruling class. Objectively capitalism rules through the power of capital, its monopoly of the means of violence, and its control of all existing social institutions. But it prefers, when possible, to rule with the “consent” of the masses through the dominance of bourgeois ideology among the oppressed, fostering illusions and concealing its bloody essence. Nationalism, patriotism, racism and religion penetrate into the organizations of the workers, centrally through the agency of the petty-bourgeois “labor lieutenants”—the parasitic trade-union, social-democratic and Stalinist-derived bureaucracies based on the privileged upper strata of the working class. If not replaced by revolutionary leaderships, these reformists will allow the organizations of the workers to become impotent in the fight for the economic needs of the workers under conditions of bourgeois democracy or even allow these organizations to be destroyed by victorious fascism.

In his 1916 work on Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin laid out the material basis of the opportunism of the labor bureaucracy:

“The receipt of high monopoly profits by the capitalists in one of the numerous branches of industry, in one of the numerous countries, etc., makes it economically possible for them to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others. The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world increases this urge. And so there is created that bond between imperialism and opportunism.... The most dangerous of all in this respect are those [like the Menshevik, Martov] who do not wish to understand that the fight against imperialism is a sham and humbug unless it is inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism.”

The degeneration and capitulation of tendencies within the Marxist movement has been of especially critical value to the preservation of imperialist rule. Submission to the pressure of bourgeois society has repeatedly thrust nominally Marxist currents toward revisionism, the process of ruling out Marxism’s essential conclusion that the state is an instrument of class rule. Bernsteinian revisionism, Menshevism, Stalinism and its Maoist variant—all are illustrations of this process which constitutes a bridge to overtly reformist practices. Globally, besides the Stalinists and the Social Democrats, nationalists and the politically religious heavily work to derail working-class struggle.

Centrism is that programmatically heterogeneous and theoretically amorphous current in the workers movement that occupies numerous shadings in the political spectrum between Marxism and reformism, between revolutionary internationalism and opportunist social patriotism. As Trotsky noted in his 1934 article, “Centrism and the Fourth International”:

“For a revolutionary Marxist the struggle against reformism is now almost fully replaced by the struggle against centrism.... The struggle with hidden or masked opportunists must therefore be transferred chiefly to the sphere of practical conclusions from revolutionary requisites.”

In situations of sharp class struggle, the centrist pretenders who form part of the syphilitic chain maintaining bourgeois class rule become both more dangerous and more vulnerable to revolutionary exposure. The revolutionary Trotskyist vanguard will grow at the expense of our centrist opponents, or vice versa. The outcome of this confrontation between Marxism and centrism is a crucial factor in the success or failure of the revolution.

It is the unappealing reformist performance of social democracy and Stalinism that generated a revival of anarchism, an anti-Marxist ideology based on radical democratic idealism, which had been rendered moribund in the early years of this century by the revolutionary Marxism of the Bolsheviks. Similarly among unionists a revival of anti-political syndicalist moods is attributable to disgust with the behavior of all the old “socialist” parliamentarians; but this retreat to “pure” economic struggle only allows militant struggle to burn itself out without ever really challenging the reformist traitors....

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