Cadre Theory
Notes on Organisation
By L. Luria
Beginning around the time of the gold system’s collapse (and unmistakably since 2008), monetary authorities have effectively operated as permanent crisis-managers, absorbing each successive economic convulsion so as to avert the form of crisis outlined by Marx, effectively inducing a world system whereby the destruction of failed investment and the purging of capital is rendered superfluous. The inevitable consequence of this policy of crisis-deferral is a condition of limitless stagnation, a system that has exhausted its inner dynamic yet is administratively forbidden from passing over, a seemingly inescapable order by which the substance of capitalism – competition, bankruptcy, the discipline of the market, and so on – persist in the same ceremonial manner by which the King of England presides over the contemporary bourgeois state in Britain. Under such a regime, the two great personae of the value relation – labour and capital – are mutually hollowed-out, neither able to perform their respective historical role: The bourgeois who can’t meaningfully fail and the worker who can’t meaningfully strike belong to a common condition, the antagonism they perform against one another – whether electorally or by way of the distributive squabbles of fiscal politics – constitutes a negotiation at the level of political form, an inherited dynamic without reference to the concrete determinations to which these conflicts once gave expression, all the while maintaining a comprehensible edifice by which to permit the continuity of politics in a manner commensurate with our historically-determined prejudices.
As discussed elsewhere, the consequences of the present order has meant that material political determination has contracted to a logistics-concentrated minority (liberally estimated to ~8% of the British workforce) occupying non-substitutable commodity circulation chokepoints, while the overwhelming social majority toil in conditions of virtual unemployment, waged by recycled revenues drawn against future claims on valorisation rather than presently realised surplus. The traditional conception of ‘the masses’ upheld by Britain’s socialists presumes that quantity itself holds in some or another way as the bearer of determination, a truism owing to the historical veracity of strategic endeavours like the general strike, as well as the former successes won by the mass party or by ‘popular front’ electoral blocs. While this traditional presumption still broadly holds for much of the ‘developing world’, for whom the productive proletariat coincides with the absolute demographic majority, in consumer-dominant post-industrial Britain the truistic association with ‘proletarian’ and ‘mass’ has been objectively severed, the withdrawal of indeterminate labour affording no qualitative interruption in the realisation of value at scale, thereby rendering such struggles politically inconsequential for the maximal ambitions of socialists, the aggregation of such indeterminate individuals into a ‘mass’ being non-constitutive of any meaningful strategic leverage from which a socialist politics might ground itself. The struggles of the indeterminate mass – wage claims within the redistributive circuit, welfare defence, left-wing electoral participation, and so on – are in effect negotiations within our given reality rather than themselves being constitutive of a fundamental, historical opposition to the given, and in this way they are concretely and historically reactionary in the most fundamental sense of the word.
The above diagnosis is not at all intended to denigrate the individuals who work in politically indeterminate jobs (I’m one of them), but merely to state plainly what the forms of work mean with regard to the political viability of contemporary socialism. Any political organisation premised on the recruitment, mobilisation, or representation of ‘the masses’ is invariably organised around an empty space, with the inevitable burnout and apathy besetting cadres devoted to this old form being a palpable symptom of Britain’s contemporary Marxist left. In our circumstances, the labour movement would do well to substitute, at least with regard to strategy, their focus on the point of production for the point of distribution, for the chokepoint wherein labour may actively ‘hold to ransom’ the circuit of valorisation, interrupt the path of the commodity at its salto mortale, as Marx calls it. Where the factory, workshop, mine, etc. once appeared to produce the socialist political Subject ‘spontaneously’ through the direct confrontation between labour and capital at the point of production, the post-industrial economy may produce an equivalent type of Subject only at the shrinking sites of real determination, at the point by which the largest mass of value is arrested. Everywhere else, ‘Subjectivity’ must be cultivated deliberately and not necessarily in direct relation to labour or the realisation of value; for any political campaign to attain meaningful public strength, it can’t remain a minority, but such a campaign for socialism today equally can’t afford to mystify its cadres by telling them that they, too, are ‘productive workers’ when any sober account of present circumstances or a cursory overview of the demographic distribution of socialists would tell them they very likely aren’t.
A conscious political organisation adequate to the present must then treat with suspicion the truism of mass-aggregation as its organising principle, address politics according to where the most damage can be inflicted not only as a strategic purport, but more fundamentally providing a theoretical treatment of the quantitative distinctions between strikes in different sectors, measurable according to macroeconomic effect, as themselves disclosing qualitative distinctions. Concretely, every form of labour should be assessed against a dual standard, being 1), its social necessity from the standpoint of capital, being its contribution to the reproduction of the present state of things, and 2), its political capacity from the standpoint of labour, being its power to interrupt that reproduction. These two measures will inevitably correlate in some sectors while diverging sharply in others; the systematic mapping of these correlations and divergences constitutes the proper analytical labour of a socialist organisation, against the demographic arithmetic of speculative mass-party organisation to which most socialists still hold as theoretically sacrosanct.
To make a brief detour, Alexandre Kojève writes in the ‘long footnote’ in Chapter 6 of his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel that the contemporary or ‘post-historical’ Man persists as a human in the real sense on the condition that he continues to detach form from content, opposing himself as a pure ‘form’ to himself and to others. Subjectivity, in other words, cannot arrive as a by-product of the economic given reality and where it exists at all, it does so as deliberate discipline, from the cultivation of one’s conscious critical distance. The route of return to Subjectivity remains open to any individual at any time, yet the viability of such a return taking on a ‘universal’ social character (i.e. a character which might meaningfully ‘satisfy’ the individual) will inevitably elude them so long as they remain a mere individual – in other words, so long as they remain ‘non-political’ in a concrete sense. Given that the coalition of labour-power sellers today lacks a common relation to production (in the orthodox Marxist sense), socialist organisations invariably hold such a group together morally rather than through any tangible concretely-grounded identity, purporting to a form of traditional subject-formation pursued and maintained according to inherited conceptions of ‘solidarity’ belonging to prior epochs, advanced today through the transmission of romantic, secondary forms of yesterday’s class composition. What passes for ‘class struggle politics’ is today defined by the injunction to ‘feel’ for the class rather than belong to it, or act for it, directly. The political organisation conceived as the institution for the cultivation of subjectivity, as a school of Subjects, its internal life (study, discipline, formation, the levelling of demands, the drafting of theory, and so on) is constitutive of the real political expression of socialism today; Party life is, in this sense, a kind of snobbery, ‘empty of all content’ given by the surrounding society, through which the cadre opposes themself as form to the present environment as content (in this pursuit, we shouldn’t be afraid of being called snobs or elitists, especially when the accusation comes from other socialists, if such a disposition affords the movement a greater chance of success in the execution of its maximal ambition).
Further to its corrosive effect on the ability for making sufficient assessments of class composition and political capacity, the moralism practiced in contemporary left politics also serves to degrade the individual, treating cadres as instruments of an aggregate, appealing to activists and supporters on the grounds of their capacity to serve as agents of traditionally-determined solidarity within one or another organisation’s rank-and-file. Any real capacity for social transformation, of revolutionary capacity, is inevitably eschewed for the rearing of base functionaries – for a Party or organisation which commits to the pursuit of socialism, which Marxists hold to be the principle that human energy must become an end in itself, that human individuals properly constituted and in recognition of their real constitution have the capacity to engender revolutionary transformations of society, the production of base functionaries is tantamount to a criminal denial of the human being’s capacity both as an individual and as a member of a definite class, tending to the extraction of useless toil, the cultivation of burnouts and, as the history of the labour movement continues to demonstrate, apathetic reactionaries, movementarian dogmatists, and whole host of other strange and morbid types.
If it’s the case that our contemporary economic order no longer produces Subjects in any ‘spontaneous’ manner, then the political organisation can be conceived against this, as an institution for the cultivation of Subjectivity itself, an organisation dedicated to the deliberate production of Subjects opposed to Objects (it could be reasonably argued that there never has been any ‘spontaneous’ Subject-formation, however this is beyond the scope of the present argument; maybe we’ll return to this at a later date). This strategy would effectively permit the formation of a group of socialists freed from hand-wringing about whether or not they have ‘organic links to the working-class’, open instead to set about pursuing industrial and political action in a conscious, considered, honest manner, both amongst the workers who occupy sites of real determination and amongst the mass of the virtually unemployed, all the while rearing a cadre-force worthy of articulating the exact demands by which the determinate element would be capable of attaining emancipation for both themselves and the toiling majority.
With regard to the above-mentioned inherited forms of solidarity we can see in trade unionism, by openly organising for the defence of a sectional wage-share, a significantly more honest political engagement than today’s pro-mass-party socialists. The pretense that the union is the embryo of a ‘universal’ emancipation which must rid itself of its partiality, its commitment to the membership first, is a tremendous error, one owing by and large to a narrow reading of Lenin’s critique of economism. Against this truism, it ought to be stressed that specifically in the partiality of workers struggles we ought to soberly contend that this is where the actual content of the contemporary ‘working-class’ and their potential for broader political expression resides. Through the persistence of militant trade unionism in light of the eclipse of corresponding mass-party socialist politics, this furrow does appear as the only one left to plough. For the determinate minority, economic self-interest and leverage have a real capacity to coincide, for instance the docker’s sectional claim which, while pursued for self-interested reasons, arrests the realisation of the whole great mass of value passing through their place of work. For this minority, all that needs doing from the standpoint of our politics is to make the unconscious arresting of the valorisation circuit into a conscious political strategy. This operation begins by proving the unity between their self-interest and the maximal political interest, and that begins by making clear without any shadow of a doubt that the present economic system, held up by the regime of administered credit, inevitably leads to degradations of living standards, proves fatal to the sustenance of these workers’ capacity to maintain the baseline means of subsistence to which they have become accustomed, to what I’ve referred to elsewhere as the double-determination of the ‘worker-citizen’.
For the indeterminate majority, their direct self interest is first realised in the demand for higher wages, much like it is for the minority, however given that their strike, which imposes no determinate (non-reabsorbable) cost, their ‘other desire’ must then be politically articulated and satisfied, which is the desire to work less hours. The reduction in labour time can only be realised by the formation of a government committed to the conversion of superfluous labour time into free disposable time; making the argument that this is desirable is not difficult at all, however making the argument that this is viable requires tremendous agitational and theoretical effort. From our perspective, this demand for shortening the working day, already gaining popularity in the social democrat think-tank circuit, presents the primary means of mobilisation for contemporary socialist politics amongst the majority. If a minimal programme is put to the mass that informs them of the economic viability of a progressive reduction in the working week, alongside a strategic programme for how such demands can be made with decisive and incontrovertible effect, the movement for socialism in Britain can finally stand with a straight back and prove itself worthy of ‘the tradition’ which otherwise invariably weighs on the brain like a nightmare.
From the clarified position of comprehending the quantitative macroeconomic effect of certain strikes as referring to a qualitative distinction between forms of work, the reconstitution of the whole ‘social policy’ of Marxism may begin from the ground up. If you like, this can be seen as equivalent to defaulting on debts or scrapping the Tsarist laws in Russia after the October Revolution – it isn’t for us to carry the burden of failure or find ourselves obliged to concede to prior forms, and we ought not be held down by tradition or inheritance should it prove objectively hostile to the pursuit of socialism in the present. Often ‘our’ greatest successes are what leads the movement to engender its most embarrassing failures, and a renegotiation on every level – beginning with suspicion regarding ‘the masses’ being a meaningful political category – would allow the labour movement, particularly the Marxists who believe themselves worthy of leading it, to approach their work with clear heads. The aim of this renegotiation would be determined by the pursuit of solidarity, but a form of solidarity based on the recognition of concrete determination rather than political inheritance: conditional, strategically grounded, theoretically and materially coherent, suspicious of all inherited forms, and so on. Again, we must define our approach according to both social necessity, from the standpoint of capital, and political capacity, from the standpoint of labour. A form of work might be seen as socially necessary with regard to the reproduction of the present state of affairs, whereas it’s proved totally useless from the standpoint of revolutionary effect (the vast majority of public sector strikes, for instance, fit the bill for social necessity coming into conflict with maximal political capacity). There will always be correlations and divergences in various forms of work according to this line of inquiry, and these ought to be brought to light for the sake of understanding why the labour movement should engage with certain struggles, and to what end these struggles might attain.
By pursuing this line of inquiry and refining political work by its findings, we may again contend with the ambition of our politics, to set in motion a process whereby “labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases,” recognising that “in the very nature of things [freedom] lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”
(Capital Vol. III, Ch 48. - my emphasis)