C.L.R. James and Grace C. Lee, with Cornelius Castoriadis (writing as Pierre Chaulieu)
Republished in 2005 by the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company
with a new Introduction by John H. Bracey
The book's opening paragraphs give a sense of its agenda:
The whole world today lives in the shadow of state power. This state power is an ever-present self-perpetuating body over and above society. It transforms the human personality into a mass of economic needs to be satisfied by decimal points of economic progress. It robs everyone of initiative and clogs the free development of society. This state power, by whatever name it is called, One-Party State or Welfare State, destroys all pretense of government by the people, of the people. All that remains is government for the people.
Against this monster, people all over the world, and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields, and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention. Sometimes their struggles are on a small personal scale. More effectively, they are the actions of groups, formal or informal, but always unofficial, organized around their work and their place of work. Always the aim is to regain control over their own conditions of life and their relations with one another. Their strivings,, their struggles, their methods have few chroniclers. They themselves are constantly attempting various forms of organization, uncertain of where the struggle is going to end. Nevertheless, they are imbued with one fundamental certainty, that they have to destroy the continuously mounting bureaucratic mass or be themselves destroyed by it.
...
Facing Reality was inspired by and focused on the Hungarian worker's revolution of 1956, as a real-life, successful, albeit short-lived, example of "The Government of Worker's Councils." The text also describes worker revolts in the United States (wildcat strikes), Russia, France and Great Britain. It includes a negative assessment (by Castoriadis) of the historical role of Marxist organizations, and the "blindness and failure of the vanguard," and concludes with an interesting section entitled "What To Do And How To Do It." This section uses various reports from factory-floors in England, the United States, and elsewhere, to depict the "actually existing" socialism created by workers in the local struggles. The argument is that socialism concists of the worker's determination and ability to "control their own labor by common agreement and to discipline those who depart from the cooperation that modern production demands" (113). The basic conflict is between (1) a "mode of production based on the capital-labor relation, the relation of a drill sergeant and privates," and (2) "'production by freely associated men...consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan' (quoting marx). The "first fundamental task" of the "Marxist organization" is to simply record the existence of examples of "socialism" throughout modern industry, and to "counterpose the existing formations of the new socialist society against the clumsy, tyrannical, bureaucratic monstrosisites which claim that modern society can only live if governed by them." The authors then offer suggestions on the goals and techniques for setting up a newspaper/publishing company to "recognize and record" the actually-existing socialism. Where the revolution will break out is "utterly unpredictable" but those who wish to help it along will best serve the Revolution by training themselves "to recognize that the new society exists and to record the facts of its existence" (168).
