II

THE PROLETARIAT AND ITS LEADERSHIP1

The ideas that we submit to the peers of Socialisme ou Barbarie and to the readers
of the publication constitute only a contribution to the study of the problem of
revolutionary leadership.* Not in the least do we claim to provide an original theory that
could be juxtaposed with, for example, the Leninist theory of organization. It will become
clear that we instead critique the very idea of the leadership theory and attempt to show
that on this distinct matter—that of the conventions of struggle and organization—the
proletariat is its own theory. It is significant that the majority of Leftist groups, regardless
of their disagreements and their level of ideological maturity, agree on the need to build a
party of the proletariat. A standard critique, when it is made, focuses on the role and the
nature of this party (taking as its subject, for example, the Bolsheviks’ method of
organization); but the idea as a postulate of revolution does not come under scrutiny [hors
de cause]. In my opinion, it is no less important that the vanguard tends to turn away
from this postulate; none of the revolutionary manifestations after the Liberation
Movement (we must, of course, keep in mind their profoundly erroneous policies) have
had the effect of either galvanizing the creation of a party or strengthening the small
existing party—the Italian Communist Party. The antipathy of the most able workers
towards the creation of a new party is evident. Is this aversion only a minor aspect of the
working-class demoralization or does it have a more profound significance? At the very
least, it merits further examination in order to prove whether an alarming dogmatism—
which does not allow the question to be posed in its full scope—exists. Perhaps, in an era
in which it is practically impossible to form a party and in which the differences on such
a topic are ostensibly inconsequential, an emphasis on this problem might seem artificial.
This would, however, be a failure to understand that the problem of the revolutionary
leadership is not one problem among many, but implicates the very idea of the proletariat.
Moreover, this is what occurred to me when, after being charged by the journal with
preparing a text on the proletariat and its vanguard, I inevitably felt compelled to connect
my analysis to a conception of leadership.

Without delving into the specific details of this first text, without preoccupying
ourselves at present either with demonstrating the validity of the concept of a proletariat
[concept de prolétariat] or with describing its historical progression, let us nevertheless
enumerate some essential points which undergird our present interpretation:

1
“Socialisme ou Barbarie,” no. 10 (July-August 1952).
*
Apart from his role as longtime contributor to the journal, Claude Lefort was
instrumental in founding the libertarian socialist publication Socialisme ou Barbarie. As
will become clear in this essay, Lefort became uncomfortable with the organizationalist
tendencies of the group and left in 1958 to form Informations et Liaison Ouvrières
(Translator’s Note).
I. Preliminary Remarks on the Nature of the Proletariat

(1) The proletariat has an economical definition and its most general features
are ordered with respect to this definition. Yet this definition includes a unique history;
even as the proletariat is reduced to its role as producer, it is nevertheless engaged in a
transformation, which only its disappearance will be able to interrupt. All the shifts that
occur in its mode of work have ramifications for the proletariat’s constituents, its
concentration, its composition, and, ultimately, its behavior.

(2) Outraged by the sole fact that it is an exploited class forced, as a result of
its status as a wage-earning stratum, into a permanent struggle against capitalism (all the
while defending its workforce’s importance to the market), the proletariat is revolutionary
by the nature of its work, which confers upon it a universal and rational conception of
society. History shows that political consciousness is not belatedly acquired through local
and restricted protest struggles, that, from the very beginning, it is inseparable from a
particular group’s situation within society. The development of the proletariat must be
considered in its entirety, as a maturing of this revolutionary consciousness, representing
the effort of a class both to forge unity by conquering its divisions and to assert its social
supremacy.

(3) The constitution of the working-class movement, which translates as both

the organization and differentiation of the class, becomes intelligible only when brought
into relation with its economic evolution; however, it is not mechanically determined by
this evolution. The shifts affecting the proletariat in its number, structure, and mode of
work assume a meaning only insofar as the class subjectively assimilates these changes
and translates them into its opposition to exploitation. This is to say that there is no
objective factor that guarantees progress to the proletariat. When the bourgeoisie was
already establishing and developing an economic power within feudal society, the
proletariat could progress only through consciousness, which it gleaned from its role in
society; it could progress only through an understanding of its nature and its historical
tasks.

(4) The proletariat’s ability to organize in the face of exploitation and to

discover new forms of struggle is the direct expression of its historical maturity. The
manner in which the diverse elements of this class arrange themselves, that is, the
concrete relations these elements preserve—relations which are, in one sense, already
fixed by the types of assemblies adopted (whether trade unions, parties, soviets, etc…),
and, in another sense, revealed inside these groupings under a more perceptible form (the
leading-executing relations within the party or trade union)—indicate the proletariat’s
true level of maturity much more than do the ideas or platforms of its parties.

(5) Thus, the history of the proletariat consists of experience, which must be
understood as auto-organizational progress. In every period, this class poses the problems
that indict its exploited condition and, at the same time, all its past experience. The
present increase in the unification of exploited society and its past of struggle—which
produced the working-class bureaucratization whose apotheosis is Stalinism—constitute
an essential moment of the proletarian experience. Whereas this experience took place
(until the current era) under the auspices of an immediate struggle against the bourgeoisie
and the simple removal of capitalist property, it now consists in an overall questioning of
exploitation and of the positive form of working-class power.

II. The Critique of the Notion of Revolutionary Parties: They Attach Themselves to
an Era of Proletarian History That Has Already Been Eclipsed.

We wish to isolate this essential idea from the rest of our brief analysis: the
proletariat can succeed in instituting its power only by continually progressing towards
the realization of its goals, only by organizing itself and differentiating itself. This
implies no position on the established form that its leadership must assume. That the
necessity of the party cannot be called into question without, at the same time, calling
into question the Marxist conception of the proletariat seems an erroneous assertion. It is
significant that Marx was able to assert [ait pu affirmer] in the Manifesto that the
communists could not constitute a party separate from the proletariat; equally significant
is the fact that Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, although agreeing on the importance of the
party’s role, were each able to attribute to it [aient pu lui attribuer] an entirely different
substance, the idea of which vanguard members, although linking themselves to
Marxism, actually rejected. The party is not a permanent attribute of the proletariat but an
instrument forged by it for the sole purpose of facilitating its class struggle in an
established era of its history.

The following is thus a question that we must pose: to what proletarian necessity
does the structuring [constitution] of a party correspond? Is its function surpassed or not?
For members of the working classes, it is a matter of overcoming the dispersion of its
struggles, and, at the same time, coordinating and directing them towards a unique goal:
the destruction of the bourgeoisie. This class realizes itself through its necessity both to
assert its permanent and essential objectives, which go beyond the personal interests of
certain of its outliers [couches], and to direct a well-considered and concerted movement.
Ideologically, the party signifies the proletariat’s effort to envision [penser] its struggle in
a global context. Structurally, it signifies the selection of a part of the vanguard, which
forms a body relatively alien to the proletariat, functioning according to its own laws and
posing as the leadership of the proletariat. The structure [constitution] of the party
expresses the historical experience that formed the proletariat—its unequal development,
its (physical and ideological) dispersal, its low level of education and sophistication, its
extreme inferiority in relation to the bourgeoisie’s system of combat; ultimately, the
proletariat was formed as a necessary consequence of its dependence on its superiors. In
addition, the party is centralized, disciplined, and separated from the proletariat; it
authoritatively presents itself as the leadership of the class and endorses revolutionary
missions; in a certain sense, it plays the part that the proletariat, conscious all the while of
the party’s inability to realize these revolutionary missions, anticipates it will. In fact, this
requirement of a revolutionary corps, a group which does (in the place of the proletariat)
what the class itself cannot do, corresponds to an abstract conception of the revolution.
The stress is placed on the necessity of struggling against capitalism, toppling the
bourgeoisie, abolishing private property. It is revolution, not proletarian power, which is
the objective. The essence of the matter thus resides in the efficacy of the immediate
struggle, which initiates the call to action of a strictly organized minority on which one
can rely for combat leadership.

In such conditions, it is logical that the party should construct and develop itself
effectively according to a process partially alien to the proletariat’s mode of action. The
proletariat needs their leadership framed as a body relatively external to the class and, in
reality, this body establishes itself and comports itself as such.

First, it is a fact that the elaboration of the party’s platform, like the initiative for
its constitution [constitution], is the work of non-proletarian elements escaping
nonetheless from the exploitation that prevails in the process of production. It is most
often the work of petite-bourgeoisie intellectuals who, thanks to their education and
lifestyle, are capable of totally devoting themselves to the theoretical preparation and the
practice of the revolution. It is also a fact that the party especially appreciates these non-
proletarian elements while making no long-term place, so to speak, within its cadres for
the workers. In his Stalin, Trotsky (like Souvarine) indicates that the worker participation
in the 1st Social-Democratic Congress was nonexistent (as little participation existed
among the Bolsheviks as among the Mensheviks). Trotsky harshly describes the behavior
of the first Bolshevik cadres, the members of which he calls “comitards” and we would
call bureaucrats; these figures, he recounts, convinced the workers of their inability to
lead and bound them to obedience. Even when the working-class composition of the
party became more pronounced, the supremacy of the non-proletarian elements persisted.
The revolutionary militant is conceived of in such an exclusionary manner that the
worker is necessarily confined to his practical tasks within the organization or he is
cleaved from the masses in order to become a person in charge.

The critique of the Bolshevik party should not be bottomed on a critique of the
Leninist conception of the party—as has too often been the case in the Socialisme ou
Barbarie association—but on a historical critique of the proletariat. The errors of What is
to be done?, before being the errors of Lenin, were in fact the expression of traits of the
proletarian consciousness at a given stage of its development. The essence of the matter
is that the proletariat conceives of its leadership as a body separated from it, a body
charged with leading it through revolution. It is because this leadership is in fact
provided from outside the class that the conception of, for example, the “professional
revolutionary,” who only expresses the separation of party and class, is made clear.
Lenin’s idea that the masses act according to an unconscious process, that they cannot
overcome the trade-unionist struggle by themselves, and that their consciousness must be
brought about from the outside, does not in itself give an opening to the critique that is
directed at Lenin. For if it is true that the proletariat in itself carries a socialist
consciousness from the very beginning, it is equally certain that, in this period, this
consciousness is abstract (that it is only consciousness of the necessity of toppling the
bourgeoisie), that it does not have an effective content and awaits the determination of
this content by elements exterior to the class. These certainties are precisely what make
Lenin’s theory possible. In itself, his theory is only a sign; his theory is of little
consequence if one believes Trotsky in his Stalin when he states that Lenin later revisited
his error. Moreover, it is significant that Trotsky—who rightly asserts that the proletariat
has an instinctive tendency to rebuild society on socialist foundations—arrived at the
same conception of the party as Lenin: that the 4th International had been formed without
the participation of the proletariat and imposed on it as its leadership. It is just as
significant that, for Trotsky, there never was a crisis of the working-class movement but
only a crisis of revolutionary leadership; in other words, he regarded the leadership of the
proletariat as the problem of the revolution.

Thus, it is misguided to attack the theory of the professional revolutionary as if it

were absolutely necessary for democratic centralism, when the traits in question only
followed logically from the party’s existence as a constituted body.

III. There Is Only One Form of Proletarian Power

If the party is defined as the most complete expression of the proletariat, its
conscious or most conscious leadership, it is necessary that the party tend towards stifling
all of the proletariat’s other modes of expression and that it subordinate itself to all other
forms of power. It was not an accident that in 1905 the Bolshevik Party regarded the
soviet formed in Petrograd as useless and intimated to it an order to disband [lui intime
d’ordre de se dissoudre]. Nor was it an accident that in 1917 the party dominated the
soviets and reduced their role to one of fiction. This was not the fruit of some
Machiavellian outlook on the part of the leaders either. If the party withheld the truth,
then it is logical that it would tend to impose it; if the party functioned as the proletariat’s
leadership before the revolution, it is logical that it would continue to comport itself as
such after it. Finally, it is logical that the proletariat would bow before the party—even if
this class sensed in the revolution the necessity of amassing its total power—since it
experienced the exigency of a leadership far removed from it, a leadership that carried
out orders under one command.

Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of the Bolshevik Party expresses the vanguard’s

anxious reaction in the face of the division of the working class; it does not indict the
existence of the party, which meets an imperative requirement for the proletariat; in this
era, such a questioning can express itself only in an abstract position, that of anarchism,
which denies the necessity of taking historical development into account. Luxemburg, by
critiquing the extreme traits that give rise to the separation of party and class in
Bolshevism, indicates only that the justness of the party can never replace the experience
of the masses (“history has shown the errors committed by a truly revolutionary workers’
movement to be infinitely more fecund and more precious than the infallibility of the best
Central Committee”—Marxisme contre dictature); she shows, on the other hand, that the
proletariat suffers a permanent danger when a group of petite-bourgeoisie intellectuals
reduces the role of the proletariat to that of raw material. If opportunism, she states in a
response to Lenin, is defined by the tendency to paralyze the autonomous revolutionary
movement of the working class and transform it into an instrument of the ambitions of
intellectuals, we must recognize that in the initial phases of the workers’ movement, this
end can be more easily attained not by decentralization but by a centralization, which
would place this movement of still uncouth proletarians in the hands of the intellectual
leaders of the Central Committee.

Luxemburg’s position is infinitely precious because it bespeaks a sense of

revolutionary reality that is more keen than what one finds in Lenin. Yet we cannot say
that one of these two positions is the truth. They both express an authentic tendency of
the revolutionary vanguard: to create the revolution, whatever the mode of association
[organisation], and to organize itself around this end—above all, to reflect the
revolutionary character of the proletariat in the organization and not to separate itself
from the masses. We can overcome the opposition between Lenin and Rosa only by
connecting it to a historically established period and then levying the critique of this
period.

This is possible only when history itself bears it out: when, for example, the
overtly counter-revolutionary character of the party was revealed after 1917, when the
working class could reflect its experience and conceive of its nature (which radically
differentiates it from every other class), when it appeared that the contradiction did not
reside in the rigor of centralism but in the very fact of the party and that the proletariat
could alienate itself in no form of stable and structured representation without this
representation becoming autonomous [s’autonomise]. Until then, the proletariat attained
consciousness of itself only in its struggle against the bourgeoisie and, through the very
conception of this struggle, it was subjected to the pressure of exploitative society. The
class required the party because it was necessary to posit an unshakable unity of
leadership against the State, against the consolidation of the exploiters’ power. But the
failure of this unity teaches the proletariat that it cannot divide itself or alienate itself in
stable forms of representation, as the bourgeoisie did. The bourgeoisie can do this only
because it possesses an economic nature in relation to which the political parties are only
super-structures. Yet, as we have said, the proletariat is anything but objective [il n’est
rien d’objectif]; it is a class that defines itself only as experience, a class for which the
economic and the political no longer inhabit separate spheres. This is precisely what
creates its revolutionary character, but also what denotes its extreme vulnerability. It must
fulfill its historical tasks together as one entire class, and it cannot entrust its interests to a
part far removed from the whole, that is, a party that has no interests separate from those
of the management [la gestion] of society.

Shying away from this essential critique, the Socialisme ou Barbarie Group
remains mired in points of detail. The Group states that it is crucial to avoid the formation
of professional revolutionaries, that it is necessary to advocate the abolition of the
opposition between leaders and performers [executants] inside the party, as if these
intentions were effectual and the party’s meaning accessible and removed from its
structure. The Group recommends that the party not behave like an instrument of power.
Yet Lenin claimed this as the party’s function less frequently than anyone else—indeed,
he never did. In practice, the party behaves as the sole form of power, but this is not a
focus of its platform. If one conceives of the party as the most valid creation of the
proletariat, as its completed expression (this is the theory of Socialisme ou Barbarie), if
one thinks that the party should be the figurehead of the proletariat before, during, and
after the revolution, then it is all too clear that the party is the only form of power. The
party will tolerate other forms of representation of the class only through tactical
maneuvering (such as giving the proletariat time to assimilate the truths of the party
through experience). The soviets, for example, were to be regarded by the party as
auxiliaries, but still less valid than the party in their social expression, as less capable of
obtaining a cohesion and an ideological homogeneity, as the theater for all the trends of
the working-class movement. Thus, the inescapable conclusion is that the party tends to
impose itself as the sole leadership and to eliminate the soviets, as was the case in 1917.

The Group, in spite of its analysis of the bureaucracy, establishes nothing on the
most perceptible revolutionary terrain—that of the forms of proletarian struggle. Thus,
we can say that the Group falls far behind the vanguard, which does not levy the critique
of Lenin but instead that of a historical period. If the vanguard rejects the party idea now
with the same obstinacy that it insisted on it in the past, it is because this idea has no
meaning in the present era. Moreover, it is impossible to assert, on the one hand, that the
vanguard progressed radically towards full comprehension of its historical tasks, that it
apprehended for the first time the truth of exploitation in all its forms and no longer just
in the restricted form of private property, that it focused its attention on the positive form
of proletarian power and no longer on the immediate tasks of toppling the bourgeoisie,
and to maintain, at the same time, that this vanguard was regressing due to its experience
of organization.

We can by no means know whether the proletariat had the ability to overcome the
power of exploitation in their era. The alienation inherent in its work, its exclusion from
the institutions of learning, and the inequality of its development are all traits that would
seem, to the modern eye, to hinder this overcoming; yet the constitution of a workers’
bureaucracy attaining consciousness of its own objectives and the antagonism that it
developed towards the bourgeoisie thwarted its own struggle and shackled the proletariat
to other exploiters. Nevertheless, the unification of the proletariat did not cease to be
continued in parallel with the concentration of capitalism, and underlying it was an
experience of struggles that created the conditions of a new perception of its tasks. Thus,
I think that the proletariat can inaugurate a revolutionary struggle only by manifesting its
historical consciousness from the very beginning. This means that in the very stage of its
vanguard’s regrouping, the proletariat will announce its final objective; in other words, it
will bring about this objective by prefiguring the future form of its power.

The vanguard will undoubtedly be brought about by the logic of its struggle
against the concentrated power of the exploiter, by gathering under a minority form
before the revolution; but it would be sterile to call such a regrouping a party, for it would
not even have the same function as a party. In the first place, this regrouping will be able
to take place only spontaneously, in the course of the struggle and within the process of
production, not in response to a non-proletarian group enacting a political platform. In the
second place (and more fundamentally), it will, from the very beginning, aim towards
another end, but only in order to enable a working-class power. It will be formed not as
an historical leadership but solely as an instrument of revolution, not as a body
functioning according to its own laws but as a purely situational and provisional
detachment from the proletariat. From the very beginning, its goal can only be that of
abolishing itself within the representative power of the working class.

Indeed, I assert that there can only be one sole power of this class: its
representative power. To assert that such a power is inaccessible without the help of the
party, specifically because it represents the ensemble of their inclinations—as well as, of
course, the opportunistic and bureaucratic inclinations of revolutionaries—is tantamount
to saying that the working class is incapable of assuring itself of its historical role and
that it must be protected from itself by a specialized revolutionary body. In essence, this
would be to reintroduce and take up the major thesis of bureaucratism [bureaucratisme],
against which we have been arguing.

IV. The Situation of the Vanguard and the Role of a Revolutionary Group

The first conditions of the modern experience have been laid bare by the failure of
the Russian Revolution. Yet this experience was first perceptible only under an abstract
form and for a tiny proletarian minority. The deterioration of Bolshevism only became
clear with the emergence of bureaucratic expansion. The vanguard cannot benefit from
partial instruction [tirer d’enseignement partiel] concerning the problem of its
organization before receiving a total education [tirer un enseignement total] concerning
the evolution of society, the true nature of its exploitation. The form in which it envisions
the power of the class is perceived progressively only in opposition to the form in which
the power of the bureaucracy realizes itself. The universality of the proletariat’s tasks is
revealed only when exploitation appears bearing its statist character and its universal
significance. This is why the last war only provoked a new realization of consciousness:
the economic regime that seemed bound to the U.S.S.R. was extended to another part of
the world, thus exposing its historical trend, and the Stalinist parties of occidental Europe
revealed their exploitative nature in the process of production. In this era, only a fraction
of the proletariat had acquired total consciousness of the bureaucracy (a fact born out
through examples such as the committees of struggle, which were formed on an anti-
bureaucratic base). The development of the U.S.A.—U.S.S.R. antagonism, the course of
the war, the mutation of every working-class struggle to the advantage of these two
imperialisms, the incompetence with which the proletariat finds itself acting in a
revolutionary manner (without this action having an immediate worldwide impact); all
these factors conflicted and still conflict with an autonomous manifestation of the
proletariat. In the same way, they conflict with a regrouping of the vanguard, for there is
no real separation between the two. The vanguard can take action only when the
conditions objectively enable the total struggle of the proletariat. It is no less true that the
vanguard has considerably enriched the proletariat’s experience: the very grounds that
preclude it from taking action indicate its maturity.

Thus, it is not only erroneous but also impossible to constitute an organization of

this kind in the topical period. History refutes these illusory edifices that call themselves
revolutionary leadership by periodically undermining [ébranlant] them. The group
Socialisme ou Barbarie has not escaped this treatment. It is only by understanding what
the situation and tasks of the vanguard are and what relation must unite them to it that a
group of revolutionaries can shape and develop itself. Such a group can offer its services
only for the purposes of expressing to the vanguard what is (by itself) in the form of
experience and implicit knowledge, that is, for the purposes of clarifying the current
economic and social problems. In no way can it set a goal for itself to provide the
vanguard with a plan of action to follow, and still less with an organization to rejoin.

Original Translation ©Christopher Eby