Theory and practice

Today there is no difference between theory and practice. The vanguard fanatics of every stripe, and they are as many as the stripes of a zebra, will no doubt view with Olympian scorn the proposal that the Marxist organization recognize as its specific function in this period the publication of a paper of the kind we have outlined. Ten years ago, in one of the landmarks of the long struggle to the present position, one group of its sponsors wrote as follows:

It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, beteen the intellectual occupations of the "educated" and the masses.

Three years later we developed this as follows:

All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate solutions--all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total planning is inseperable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men.

State capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the straglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution.

It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception.

Our project for a certain type of paper is not a brainwave. It is the result of a total philosophical conception and of pooling together trial and error in many countries. The theoretical question is therefore for us a practical question, and this practical question involves a specific re-examination and revaluation not merely of our past but of history itself. Here is the first practical example.

Many of those who are always so ready to give lectures and write long books about the Russian Revolution have doubtless found that in general the great masses of the workers were only abstractly interested. The reason lies not in the ignorance of the workers but in the ignorance of the teachers, their ignorance of the history that is past and the history that is present. The first national conference of Russian trade unions took place in the months between the March Revolution and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October. But even before the unions had held the conference, the workers in the big plants all over Russia had formed factory committees, a form of shop floor organization. These factory committees supported the Bolsheviks devotedly in their struggle for power, but they had ideas of their own. Even before the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, the factory committees had called a national conference and their aim was to take over completely the management of industry. They were before their time. They and their claims to manage industry were almost immediately suppressed by the Bolsheviks who preferred that power over production should be in the hands of unions. Thus, in the first great proletarian revolution in the world, shop floor organizations clashed violently with trade unions and were suppressed only after a bitter struggle. For well over thirty years this amazing anticipation of the future was ignored by Marxists. Only recentrly has it come to the notice of a few who recognize its significance for today.

What exactly happened, what were the consequences, and above all, why did it happen? What was the relation of the factory committees to the unions and to the Soviets? These are theoretical and historial questions of the most profound importance. But it is precisely questions of this type that occupy the minds of tens of millions of workers, not only in Europe but in the supposedly politically backward working class of the United States. American and other workers are not waiting for the revolution to solve this problem. They are faced with it now, every day. This is the problem the shop stewards have partially solved, tomorrow perhaps to tackle it in a new way. The Hungarian workers solved it triumphantly and built on it a government which commanded the allegiance of the whole nation. What is the dirrerence between this theory and this practice? None at all.

This is the theory that workers want. Experience has shown that they reject slogans and instructions of what to do. They know what to do. What they want are historical experiences which apply to their own problems and aims, not to abstractions like "the revolution." They do not listen to people who try to train them for the revolution. Workers are not trained to do historical research, the nature of their work does not permit them to do this. That is precisely what socialism will permit to those who wish it and then such history, particularly of mass movements, will be written as will make the theoreticians hide their heads in shame. This is not a passing brick. There is not a single book in English dealing with the factory committees in Russia. In one study, and very brief it is, of Russian Trade Unions, there are a few paragraphs on this nationwide resolution of the immature Russian proletariat of 1917 to take into its own hands the management of industry. From this book you cannot learn the simplest things, as for example whether these factory committees of Russia 1917 were elected on a factory-wide scale with slates representing the factory as a whole (American style) or whether they were elected department by department (as in the custom in England), if the slates were presented by political parties, etc. These are the things workers want to know. These are the things serious students of theory want to know. Here is an opportunity for some of these devoted Marxists to make themselves useful for once--the Russians (way back in 1927) published a study called Oktyabrskaya Revolutsiyai Fabzavkomy, the October Revolution and the Factory Committees. There are thousands upon thousands of workers and theoretically-minded intellectuals in every country who today have the experience and the need to understand an account of what happened and why. It raises every single fundamental problem of the Russian Revolution and the contemporary day-to-day struggle for socialism. This is theory and practice.

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Theory is the distillation of history and it is only by understanding the present that one is able to understand the past. With the working class and society at the stage where they are at present, all the great historical events and ideas of the past need to be rewritten. [...]

There is no need here to continue with the list. There will be other lists. But the lesson is plain. These are practical tasks for the Marxist organizations to perform. These are tasks which only they can perform. This is what the workers need from us. And this is what we need, to bring Marxist theory up to date and to fit ourselves for the task of listening to workers, to sensitize ourselves to catch the true significance and the overtones of their statements of their problems, their aims and aspirations. What is the difference today between theory and practice, between theory for the intellectuals and theory for the masses? There is none. As we have said earlier, in every department of modern intellectual and scientific life immense discoveries have been made which tear to bits the assumptions by which our society lives and point the way to a new society. Many workers know one or the other of these discoveries very well. The workers wish to know as much of this as they can and need to know. As some of us have written in the document of 1950 previously referred to: "...the whole development of the objective situation, demands the fully liberated historical creativeness of the masses, their sense and reason, a new and higher organization of labor, new social ties, associated humanity. That is the solution to the problems of production and to the problems of philosophy. Philosophy must become proletarian."

[Från Facing reality, s. 134-140.]