History is not a train that if you get off, you can get back on.
As I have explained to you, I hope briefly and clearly, so far Marxists no longer have a clear alternative plan for the form of the polity that would correspond to the socialist system desired by all of us wage-earners/employees.
The fact that people who have broken away from Marxism but want a post-capitalist classless socialist system also do not have an alternative political plan does not mean that Marxists can meet this socialist political need with their well-known authoritarian "recipes" which refer to an indefinite democracy of workers' and people's councils that cannot solve the question of a direct democratic and of course representative central political/institutional management of society.
The solution that Marxists of almost all trends continue to put forward in relation to this issue is "off the train" forever, unless they think they can repeat the authoritarian totalitarian model of the Soviet Union, authoritarian since there was Soviet power and not only after Lenin's death, as they falsely imagine.
The most intelligent Marxists, from the beginning, such as Gorter and Pannekoek and others, returning in a necessarily ultra-left way to the livelier spirit of Marx's own Marxism, virtually joined their voices with the alive, still alive and will always be alive, anarchism.
The anarchists, as well as the aforementioned ultra-left communist-marxists, demanded an automatic abolition of the central mechanisms of authority, and only the Marxist ultra-left communists continued to raise the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but in a way that referred to the very spirit of Marxism itself, but also in its connection with anarchist communism.
As Guy Debord put it in an intelligent and perhaps sophistic way, later, this dictatorship of the proletariat will be a "non-state dictatorship of the proletariat".
The bottom line is that on the decisive issue of the central representative institution of workers' democracy, all of them, clearly and unwaveringly the anarchists, rejected it by proposing a "from below" communist federalism, whether defined as directly democratic or defined beyond definition/determination of democracy.
In short, I disagree, still or forever (I don't know), with this trend, but I see it as the only trend that, continuing the historical communist/marxist and anarcho-communist tradition, consists ideologically of living and logically consistent principles .
In short, the anarchist-leaning Marxists/communists of the Gorter type and the anarchists/anarcho-communists are still "on the train of history", regardless of whether we think that their position does not answer, as it should, the crucial question of how the social whole of a socialist/classless society will be centrally managed.
I repeat, that I consider this anarcho-communist model of thought to be deficient in my opinion, but at least it is not governed by the dead authoritarian and completely dead-end visions moste of Marxists, always talking about the central issue of central institutions or the central institution of a socialist society.
Let us now see what all these impasses might have to do with a modern democratic revolution, such as the one that has begun to take place in Iran.
I will get straight to the heart of the matter.
Typicall Marxists are roughly divided into two general tendencies, the revisionist social-democratic or left-socialist tendency Marxists who, after the destruction of historical communism, tend to follow the highest form of bourgeois democracy (bourgeois democracy, parliamentary type with guaranteed relative separation of powers), and the revolutionary Marxists (of all mutually exclusive tendencies) who are more or less calling for a "better" iteration of the Soviet model, or at best a return to the Paris Commune of 1871, but with a more ' "Soviet sense" of this rebellion (there is still little life here, but life).
Apart from the fact that this proposition is outside of historical reality, at the very same moment it reactively suspends both different/competing (at the ideological and class level of reality), but living, alternative possibilities that a democratic revolution of our time contains.
What are these two possibilities?
I sketched one by talking about anarcho-communism (of our time).
Every real democratic revolution today, based on the historical ideological data as I have outlined them, necessarily contains an "anarcho-communist" content, marginally Marxist, mainly anarchist, anarcho-communist, possibly direct democratic content: democracy from below, direct democracy of assemblies and councils of workers and people, but with hostility that is radically directed not only against the state but also against all leaderships.
Here, at this level, the "classical" Marxists can only function by confusing and disorienting the revolutionary issues, carrying with them ideological a priori that create a bureaucratic ideological and political cancer in the youth but also in the working class, the immediate, the real, living working class.
They constantly ask the workers, the young men and women, to organize themselves into sects, into parties, into bureaucratic groups, while what they should be asking would be to revolt immediately, without inhibitions, without all-wise leaders and "knowers".
If now, we return to the other competitive alternative to the one we have described, in relation to a democratic revolution, that is to say, that which is related to a rather bourgeois-democratic side of a democratic revolution that has to do with the desired central representative institution (this limitation applies today , although normally they shouldn't), the "classical" Marxists have, as we said, nothing to propose but a re-cooked same autocratic Bonapartist version of "democracy", which by the way does not lead to any real socialism.
While on the contrary, anarchists, anarchist communists, ultra-left version of left communists tend to deny participation in the creation of a central democratic institution, but do not radically undermine it as almost all Marxist-Leninist (Trotskyist, Stalinist, and other) sects tend to do.
Ιωάννης Τζανάκος
