ABOLISH RESTAURANTS:

The folks over at the LibCom website have added yet another interesting text to their online library, perhaps the best such collection on the internet. Titled 'Abolish Restaurants' it is a study by the Prole.Info group, an American left communist group. The essay is present at the Prole.Info site in either a comic book or text format(see the above link or Molly's 'Online Libraries' section under links). The LibCom site presents the text version only.

Abolish Restaurants is a thorough and penetrating study of the restaurant industry, its history, economics and internal structure. It is also a description of the ways that restaurant workers fight back against their exploitation and how these fight-backs are both partially successful and often derailed. True to its left communist perspective it ends with the call for the abolition of the whole "industry" of restaurants, of where meals and service are bought and sold and are produced by wage labour exploited outside of "real life".

This essay is truly comprehensive and enlightening, and is well worth the read. A long one...the LibCom printout runs to 24 pages, and the comic book format available at Prole.Info is 13.4Mb in a pdf format. I'm not touching that last one. This essay is at its best in its insider description of the nuts and bolts of what it is like to work in a restaurant, putting flesh on the bare bones of economic description and showing the workers as real human beings in the complexity of their situation. It is weakest in the "what is to be done" category. The author reject unions, self-management and other meliorist ways that people use to improve their situation collectively. The only sort of self-organization that meets with their full approval is the informal and, of necessity, highly temporary work group. There is, of course, an abiding faith that somehow, some way, some time, some sort of class organization will arise spontaneously to sweep away all the conditions of capital and its wage labour. The details of such organization are, however, more than slightly vague resembling an ecstatic religious vision shorn of concrete detail/superstition and beautiful because of its abstraction. But a political program or a plan of action...no and definitely no.
A MOLLY GUIDE TO LEFT COMMUNISM:

Here Molly has to digress. Non-anarchists and even the vast majority of younger anarchists can easily be confused by some of the labels assigned to a given group or individual's political theory. The whole subject of the "left communist" trend, very much a minority amongst the libertarian left is especially confusing. One reviewer of the Prole.Info group called them "insurrectionists", something they are most definitely not. Let me try to elucidate the matter, hopefully without adding to the confusion.

First of all one has to ditch the classical idea of politics as made up of parties sitting on a linear left right continuum where the only "fuzzy points" are where one spot on the line merges into another to either side. This vision is hardly realistic in mainstream politics, and it is particularly misleading in describing sectarian politics. The proper metaphor is more one of a moving blob of cells, each connected to many others and shading into them by multiple pseudopods. A rather messy picture, but one that more accurately describes reality than the linear model. This model is highly complex, but nowhere near as complex as the reality it attempts to describe.

Left communists are part of a political current that at one time included the situationists. They are pretty well Marxists by definition, holding to the sort of economics put forward in Marx's 'Capital' and not just giving it lip service but actually applying it over and over to describe practically everything else they pay attention to. Their devotion to Marxist "philosophy" is less obvious, but may still often be observed in what they write. At the very least they never deny it. One might say that people like this are the last Marxists left in the world as they hold to and utilize Marxist economics in a fully consistent and comprehensive way that no Marxist government ever did and that very few Marxists who claim the label do today. They differ from the conventional Marxist familiar to anybody unlucky enough to suffer through classes in the social sciences by actually using Marxist economics rather than giving it lip service and also in rejecting Marxist politics, not just the examples of it present in Marxist parties, ruling or otherwise, but the speculations and actions of Marx himself that set the tone for what Marxism was later to develop into. No doubt they would claim that their politics are as truly Marxist as their economics are, but they would be on rather shaky ground in this claim. The situationists were an example of this sort of left-communism, using Marxist economic categories to describe other aspects of life far from the factory gate. Sometimes using them as metaphors that were stretched rather thin from the perspective of an outside observer.

In their rejection of the politics of Marx left communists typically reject not just the concept of the 'Party' but pretty well anything else in the way of organization. that can exist for a period of time in non-revolutionary situations. The sterility of this point of view is pretty obvious. What exactly do you do then besides wait for the revolution- a revolution that most (but not all) of the left communists believe will be brought about by the impersonal actions of the economy described by Marx ? What is left ? You publish pamphlets and magazines (and now websites). That is actually pretty well all that left communists do as left communists. Many (most ?) are also active in many other aspects of social struggle, but they do this while checking their beliefs at the meeting hall door. No doubt that everybody in the whole world compromises, but in no other sane political tendency is the contrast between the ideology and the reality so dramatic. You really have to travel into insanity, such as primitivism, to get a greater contrast.

Left communists of course often (usually?) recognize that they have backed themselves into a corner with their descriptions of reality and criticisms of other methods of action in the here and now. Thus it is that they gradually shade into other political tendencies that are close to them in either ideology or tactics. 'Councilism" , also known as "council communism", goes a bit beyond the purest left communists is that they posit that there has been an alternative, the 'Workers' Councils' that have been thrown up in various revolutionary situations over the past century and a half. They see themselves as propagandists for this form of organization even though it cannot exist in the present except under an unstable condition of dual power. In Molly's opinion the councilists' idealize this form of organization. It has been at its best and purest in situations where it sprang by an almost virgin birth in societies in which everyday workers' organizations devoted to resistance have been reduced to practical nonexistence. Hungary 1956 and Poland 1980 spring to mind. Examples of this type show an invariable trend towards naivety and making the sort of ideological compromises that end up destroying the movement by co-option to the state- if the councils are not defeated militarily first. In other revolutionary situations where the ordinary people have long standing traditions of socialist resistance and organization, even maintaining their organizational coherence underground the councils become the theatre of factional struggle. The Russian Revolution is a prime example of this as was the post WW1 strike movement in Italy. In the Spanish Revolution the organizational tradition was so strong that the councilist phase was virtually bypassed entirely, except perhaps in the federations of rural communes, as the various factions signed deals with each other and avoided the whole idea of elected delegates. Council communists are also generally Marxist in economics, but they are nowhere near as focused on it as pure left communists. Some groups that evolved out of this tradition such as Socialisme ou Barbarie in France or Solidarity in Britain pretty well abandoned all of Marxism, becoming more libertarian socialist than left communist. But this is another long story.

Travelling in other directions left communism fades into the sort of libertarian socialism held by groups generally described as 'De-Leonist'. For the uninitiated (99.99999999% of the world's population) this is a form of anti-state socialism that believes in building a political party that will capture the state and then as its first and only act abolish the state, turning its administrative functions over to federations of industrial unions and local communities. This plan of action was set forward by the American socialist Daniel DeLeon in the late 19th and early 20th century and had an early, but temporary, vogue in the IWW after its foundation in 1909. Don't ask me how this would work. I'm merely describing it. The party that DeLeon founded, the Socialist labour party is pretty well much a a dead letter and has been for decades. For as long as Molly has been an anarchist (over 35 years now) anything that she has seen the SLP do is more in the line of trying to tear itself apart over the fine print of statements that have a negative chance of ever reaching more than 100 people, let alone influencing anybody. The general idea that DeLeon advocated was taken up with more success by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, though this also reduced itself to a tiny rump by a belly button lint picking obsession with having the "correct theory". Any Deleonist party worthy of the name also obsesses with the purity of its Marxism, but hardly to the extent that regular left communists do. Nor with anywhere near the same level of creativity that left communists, free as their small groups are from sectarian infighting, are able to apply.

While the movement with the name has become a tiny sect the general ideas advanced by DeLeon live on, divorced from the Marxist theology that they were embedded in. The general idea of "capturing the state by elections to abolish the state" is probably more popular today than it ever was. Actually more popular than a consistent anarchism Molly is sad to admit. The idea of "libertarian municipalism" as formulated by Murray Bookchin and his collaborators is a variation on this, though it is more libertarian because it restricts it efforts of capture to the local municipality. The whole social democratic trend, whether with or without revolutionary rhetoric-such as in Venezuela today, that borrows from the anarchist toolbox the ideas of popular assembly socialism and self management is merely a reformulation of DeLeonism without the moral consistency of the founder. The theory is that self-management, both by workers and by communities can be promoted by state actions while at the same time offering positions of control to the state and party functionaries that are the directors of this process of liberation (old buzz word) or empowerment (new buzz word). Molly is not a Marxist, but if she was she would say that this is the sort of thing that the rhetorical phrase "contradiction" really and truly applies to.

Another direction that left communists lean towards when they actually want to do something is vanguardism. These are people who believe that it is both necessary and desirable to build a vanguard sect to push the inevitable revolution a little bit forward. Sort of Leninism without the state or at least without the stated goal of building the sort of dictatorship that the Bolsheviks built. Once more I merely describe, not justify. The primary exponent of this sort of plan today in the International Communist Current, though there are others. At its best this sort of cadre building idea shades towards the more extreme section of the neo-platformist current in anarchism. At its worst...well I'll leave that to your imagination. These sort of people have perhaps an equal attachment to exegesis from Das Capital as regular left communists do- hence their attraction to many in this milieu when they look for something to actually do. But they are hardly anywhere as creative or attentive to the details of ordinary workers' lives.

Then, of course, there are the "insurrectionists". These are really a current within contemporary anarchism. If they are Marxist at all it is merely for the "show off" factor of false erudition. These people share the left communist distrust of organization that goes beyond the immediate and informal, hence the confusion that sometimes exists in describing left communism as "insurrectionist". Where they differ is in their elitism. Taking their cue from a certain brain dead section of anarchist history, a tendency that was always a minority and has been rejected over the years as the movement grew, they believe that only "exemplary actions" are needed to propel some sort of spontaneous explosion from the people. A people that they usually express endless contempt for. These people are vanguardists without the party. They usually express sympathy for acts of terrorism, petty or otherwise. Despite all their faults, left communists exude an aura of sympathy for the ordinary person and their struggles. They see the germs of action for a new society in the actions of ordinary workers, not in the masochistic posturing of some militant elite. Even at their most strident they hardly ever exude the sort of amoralism that "insurrectionists" do. No...they don't have the Stalin in the soul.

So, left communism is a particular philosophical trend on the margins of anarchism today. It actually has a lot to say that is of great value. As should be apparent from the above Molly's own sympathies lie with those left communists who travelled through councilism to a non-Marxist libertarian socialism. This, however, may be only of historical and philosophical interest, not a question that has any practical consequences today. As I said above left communists usually leave their more extreme ideology at the door, and tend to be much more reliable comrades in struggle than adherents of many other views. Someone who has watched the development of anarchism in the USA over the past few decades may form the opinion that left communism, particularly in its situationist version, is responsible for some of the kookier and less savoury aspects of anarchism in that country. I disagree. Sure you can trace a path from situationism to neo-situationism to primitivism and thence to "post-leftist anarchism" or "post-anarchism" or whatever these people may adopt as the flavour of the day. But this is the same as saying that everything in Stalinism is contained in Marx or that syndicalism and socialism lead inevitably to fascism ala Mussolini. No...history is not that linear. Much depends on specific historical contexts in specific countries. Chance also has a role to play. Without situationism, primitivism in the USA would have found its natural home as a religious cult. But this ideology was developed in the USA under particular conditions such as the absence of a viable socialist or anarchist movement that actually could do something. It also had the fortune to gain the adherence of a tiny number of people of not great but relative ability. The first was necessity. The second was chance.

Well, this screed has certainly expanded and strayed far from the original news report. Never let it be said that Molly doesn't put her own spin on the news. I recognize that the above, long as it is, is incomplete and contains errors. It is merely the effort of one person who has had enough experience to judge to put some rather confusing terms into a comprehensible framework. As I said these terms fade into each other. They are not simple either/or categories, but they represent political positions that are at least "intellectually convenient" to separate as "poles of attraction in a chaotic landscape". Without this sort of effort at categorization there is nothing left but a big mental mush---and a practice that is informed by nothing more than fashion and personal pressure. Clarity is a virtue.