libertarian left: ideas and history

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby 23 » Thu Apr 07, 2011 10:26 pm

I have a problem with the prevailing perception that the Greek origin of anarchy is without government.

I always thought that ἀναρχίᾱ (anarchíā) meant without ruler. Which is not necessarily the same as without government.

You can have a government that is not coercively authoritarian or intrusive... ergo not a ruling one.

A hub can serve a valuable function to its connected spokes in a wheel... providing the hub doesn't expect its spokes to serve it.

I am a strong advocate of decentralized self-management. And practiced it in many capacities at the workplace.

I think that it's important to point out, however, that anarchy should not necessarily include the absence of a government. The absence of a ruler is another story.
"Once you label me, you negate me." — Soren Kierkegaard
User avatar
23
 
Posts: 1548
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:57 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Fri Apr 08, 2011 8:14 am

reposting because it got stuck at the end of a long page five and in reply to 23's objection above. the answer's in there.

Errico Malatesta – Anarchy (1891)
One of Errico Malatesta‘s most influential writings was his 1891 pamphlet, Anarchy. In it, he sets forth the basic principles of anarchism. Space considerations prevented me from including these excerpts in Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. However, I was able to include Malatesta’s 1920 Anarchist Program, adopted by the Italian Anarchist Union at its Bologna Congress, setting forth Malatesta’s mature anarchist position (Selection 112).

ANARCHY


The word Anarchy comes from the Greek and its literal meaning is without government: the condition of a people who live without a constituted authority, without government.

Before such an organization had begun to be considered both possible and desirable by a whole school of thinkers and accepted as the objective of a party, which has now become one of the most important factors in the social struggles of our time, the word anarchy was universally used in the sense of disorder and confusion; and it is to this day used in that sense by the uninformed as well as by political opponents with an interest in distorting the truth.

We will not enter into a philological discussion, since the question is historical and not philological. The common interpretation of the word recognizes its true and etymological meaning; but it is a derivative of that meaning due to the prejudiced view that government was a necessary organ of social life, and that consequently a society without government would be at the mercy of disorder, and fluctuate between the unbridled arrogance of some, and the blind vengeance of others.

The existence of this prejudice and its influence on the public’s definition of the word anarchy, is easily explained. Man, like all living beings, adapts and accustoms himself to the conditions under which he lives, and passes on acquired habits. Thus, having being born and bred in bondage, when the descendants of a long line of slaves started to think, they believed that slavery was an essential condition of life, and freedom seemed impossible to them. Similarly, workers who for centuries were obliged, and therefore accustomed, to depend for work, that is bread, on the goodwill of the master, and to see their lives always at the mercy of the owners of the land and of capital, ended by believing that it is the master who feeds them, and ingenuously ask one how would it be possible to live if there were no masters.

In the same way, someone whose legs had been bound from birth but had managed nevertheless to walk as best he could, might attribute his ability to move to those very bonds which in fact serve only to weaken and paralyze the muscular energy of his legs.

If to the normal effects of habit is then added the kind of education offered by the master, the priest, the teacher, etc., who have a vested interest in preaching that the masters and the government are necessary; if one were to add the judge and the policeman who are at pains to reduce to silence those who might think differently and be tempted to propagate their ideas, then it will not be difficult to understand how the prejudiced view of the usefulness of, and the necessity for, the master and the government took root in the unsophisticated minds of the labouring masses.

Just imagine if the doctor were to expound to our fictional man with the bound legs a theory, cleverly illustrated with a thousand invented cases to prove that if his legs were freed he would be unable to walk and would not live, then that man would ferociously defend his bonds and consider as his enemy anyone who tried to remove them.

So, since it was thought that government was necessary and that without government there could only be disorder and confusion, it was natural and logical that anarchy, which means absence of government, should sound like absence of order.

Nor is the phenomenon without parallel in the history of words. In times and in countries where the people believed in the need for government by one man (monarchy), the word republic, which is government by many, was in fact used in the sense of disorder and confusion—and this meaning is still to be found in the popular language of almost all countries.

Change opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody: natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity.

Those who say therefore that the anarchists have badly chosen their name because it is wrongly interpreted by the masses and lends itself to wrong interpretations, are mistaken. The error does not come from the word but from the thing; and the difficulties anarchists face in their propaganda do not depend on the name they have taken, but on the fact that their concept clashes with all the public’s long established prejudices on the function of government, or the State as it is also called.

Before going on, it would be as well to make oneself clear on this word State, which in our opinion is the cause of the real misunderstanding.

Anarchists, including this writer, have used the word State, and still do, to mean the sum total of the political, legislative, judicial, military and financial institutions through which the management of their own affairs, the control over their personal behaviour, the responsibility for their personal safety, are taken away from the people and entrusted to others who, by usurpation or delegation, are vested with the powers to make the laws for everything and everybody, and to oblige the people to observe them, if need be, by the use of collective force.

In this sense the word State means government, or to put it another way, it is the impersonal, abstract expression of that state of affairs, personified by government: and therefore the terms abolition of the State, Society without the State, etc., describe exactly the concept which anarchists seek to express, of the destruction of all political order based on authority, and the creation of a society of free and equal members based on a harmony of interests and the voluntary participation of everybody in carrying out social responsibilities.

But the word has many other meanings, some of which lend themselves to misunderstanding, especially when used with people whose unhappy social situation has not given them the opportunity to accustom themselves to the subtle distinctions of scientific language, or worse still, when the word is used with political opponents who are in bad faith and who want to create confusion and not understanding.

Thus the word State is often used to describe a special kind of society, a particular human collectivity gathered together in a particular territory and making up what is called a social unit irrespective of the way the members of the said collectivity are grouped or of the state of relations between them. It is also used simply as a synonym for society. And because of these meanings given to the word State, opponents believe, or rather they pretend to believe, that anarchists mean to abolish every social bond, all collective work, and to condemn all men to living in a state of isolation, which is worse than living in conditions of savagery.

The word State is also used to mean the supreme administration of a country: the central power as opposed to the provincial or communal authority. And for this reason others believe that anarchists want a simple territorial decentralization with the governmental principle left intact, and they thus confuse anarchism with cantonalism and communalism.

Finally, State means the condition of being, a way of social life, etc. And therefore we say, for instance, that the economic state of the working class must be changed or that the anarchist state is the only social state based on the principle of solidarity, and other similar phrases which, coming from us who, in another context, talk of wanting to abolish the State can, at first hearing, seem fantastic or contradictory.

For these reasons we believe it would be better to use expressions such as abolition of the State as little as possible, substituting for it the clearer and more concrete term abolition of government.

Anyway, it is what we shall do in the course of this pamphlet.

We said that anarchy is society without government. But is the abolition of governments possible, desirable or foreseeable?

Let us see.

What is government? The metaphysical tendency [which is a disease of the mind in which Man, once having by a logical process abstracted an individual’s qualities, undergoes a kind of hallucination which makes him accept the abstraction for the real being], in spite of the blows it has suffered at the hands of positive science, still has a strong hold on the minds of people today, so much so that many look upon government as a moral institution with a number of given qualities of reason, justice, equity which are independent of the people who are in office. For them government, and in a more vague way, the State, is the abstract social power; it is the ever abstract representative of the general interest; it is the expression of the rights of all considered as the limits of the rights of each individual. And this way of conceiving of government is encouraged by the interested parties who are concerned that the principle of authority should be safeguarded and that it should always survive the shortcomings and the mistakes committed by those who follow one another in the exercise of power.

For us, government is made up of all the governors: and the governors—kings, presidents, ministers, deputies, etc.— are those who have the power to make laws regulating inter-human relations and to see that they are carried out; to levy taxes and to collect them; to impose military conscription; to judge and punish those who contravene the laws; to subject private contracts to rules, scrutiny and sanctions; to monopolize some branches of production and some public services or, if they so wish, all production and all public services; to promote or to hinder the exchange of goods; to wage war or make peace with the governors of other countries; to grant or withdraw privileges… and so on. In short, the governors are those who have the power, to a greater or lesser degree, to make use of the social power, that is of the physical, intellectual and economic power of the whole community, in order to oblige everybody to carry out their wishes. And this power, in our opinion, constitutes the principle of government, of authority.

But what reason is there for the existence of government? Why give up one’s personal liberty and initiative to a few individuals? Why give them this power to take over willy nilly the collective strength to use as they wish? Are they so exceptionally gifted as to be able to demonstrate with some show of reason their ability to replace the mass of the people and to safeguard the interests, all the interests, of everybody better than the interested parties themselves? Are they infallible and incorruptible to the point that one could, with some semblance of prudence, entrust the fate of each and all to their knowledge and to their goodness?

And even if men of infinite goodness and knowledge existed, and even supposing, what has never been observed in history, that governmental power were to rest in the hands of the most able and kindest among us, would government office add anything to their beneficial potential? Or would it instead paralyze and destroy it by reason of the necessity men in government have of dealing with so many matters which they do not understand, and above all of wasting their energy keeping themselves in power, their friends happy, and holding in check the malcontents as well as subduing the rebels?

Furthermore, however good or bad, knowledgeable or stupid the governors may be, who will appoint them to their exalted office? Do they impose themselves by right of conquest, war or revolution? But in that case what guarantee has the public that they will be inspired by the general good? Then it is a clear question of a coup d’etat and if the victims are dissatisfied the only recourse open to them is that of force to shake off the yoke. Are they selected from one particular class or party? In which case the interests and ideas of that class or party will certainly triumph, and the will and the interests of the others will be sacrificed. Are they elected by universal suffrage? But in that case the only criterion is in numbers, which certainly are proof neither of reason, justice nor ability. Those elected would be those most able to deceive the public; and the minority, which can well be the other half minus one, would be sacrificed. And all this without taking into account that experience has demonstrated the impossibility of devising an electoral machine where the successful candidates are at least the real representatives of the majority.

Many and varied are the theories with which some have sought to explain and justify the existence of government. Yet all are based on the prejudiced view, whether admitted or not, that men have conflicting interests, and that an external, higher, authority is needed to oblige one section of the people to respect the interests of the other, prescribing and imposing that rule of conduct by which opposing interests can best be resolved, and by which each individual will achieve the maximum satisfaction with the least possible sacrifice.

The Authoritarian theoreticians ask: if the interests, tendencies and aspirations of an individual are at odds with those of another or even those of society as a whole, who will have the right and the power to oblige each to respect the other’s interests? Who will be able to prevent an individual from violating the general will? They say that the freedom of each is limited by the freedom of others; but who will establish these limits and who will see to it that they are respected? The natural antagonisms of interests and temperament create the need for government and justify authority which is a moderating influence in the social struggle, and defines the limits of individual rights and duties.

This is the theory; but if theories are to be valid they must be based on facts and explain them—and one knows only too well that in social economy too often are theories invented to justify the facts, that is to defend privilege and make it palatable to those who are its victims. Let us instead look at the facts.

Throughout history, just as in our time, government is either the brutal, violent, arbitrary rule of the few over the many or it is an organized instrument to ensure that dominion and privilege will be in the hands of those who by force, by cunning, or by inheritance, have cornered all the means of life, first and foremost the land, which they make use of to keep the people in bondage and to make them work for their benefit.

There are two ways of oppressing men: either directly by brute force, by physical violence; or indirectly by denying them the means of life and thus reducing them to a state of surrender. The former is at the root of power, that is of political privilege; the latter was the origin of property, that is of economic privilege. Men can also be suppressed by working on their intelligence and their feelings, which constitutes religious or “universitarian” power; but just as the spirit does not exist except as the resultant of material forces, so a lie and the organisms set up to propagate it have no raison d’être except in so far as they are the result of political and economic privileges, and a means to defend and to consolidate them.

In sparsely populated primitive societies with uncomplicated social relations, in any situation which prevented the establishment of habits, customs of solidarity, or which destroyed existing ones and established the domination of man by man—the two powers, political and economic, were to be found in the same hands, which could even be those of a single man. Those who by force have defeated and intimidated others, dispose of the persons and the belongings of the defeated and oblige them to serve and to work for them and obey their will in all respects. They are at the same time the landowners, kings, judges and executioners.

But with the growth of society, with increasing needs, with more complex social relations, the continued existence of such a despotism became untenable. The rulers, for security reasons, for convenience and because of it being impossible to act otherwise, find themselves obliged on the one hand to have the support of a privileged class, that is of a number of individuals with a common interest in ruling, and on the other to leave it to each individual to fend for himself as best he can, reserving for themselves supreme rule, which is the right to exploit everybody as much as possible, and is the way to satisfy the vanity of those who want to give the orders. Thus, in the shadow of power, for its protection and support, often unbeknown to it, and for reasons beyond its control, private wealth, that is the owning class, is developed. And the latter, gradually concentrating in their hands the means of production, the real sources of life, agriculture, industry, barter, etc., end up by establishing their own power which, by reason of the superiority of its means, and the wide variety of interests that it embraces, always ends by more or less openly subjecting the political power, which is the government, and making it into its own gendarme.

This phenomenon has occurred many times in history. Whenever as a result of invasion or any military enterprise physical, brutal force has gained the upper hand in society, the conquerors have shown a tendency to concentrate government and property in their own hands. But always the government’s need to win the support of a powerful class, and the demands of production, the impossibility of controlling and directing everything, have resulted in the re-establishment of private property, the division of the two powers, and with it the dependence in fact of those who control force—governments—on those who control the very source of force-—the property-owners. The governor inevitably ends by becoming the owners’ gendarme.

But never has this phenomenon been more accentuated than in modern times. The development of production, the vast expansion of commerce, the immeasurable power assumed by money, and all the economic questions stemming from the discovery of America, from the invention of machines, etc., have guaranteed this supremacy to the capitalist class which, no longer content with enjoying the support of the government, demanded that government should arise from its own ranks. A government which owed its origin to the right of conquest (divine right as the kings and their priests called it), though subjected by existing circumstances to the capitalist class, went on maintaining a proud and contemptuous attitude towards its now wealthy former slaves, and had pretensions to independence of domination. That government was indeed the defender, the property owners’ gendarme, but the kind of gendarmes who think they are somebody, and behave in an arrogant manner towards the people they have to escort and defend, when they don’t rob or kill them at the next street corner; and the capitalist class got rid of it, or is in the process of so doing by means fair or foul, replacing it by a government of its own choosing, consisting of members of its own class, at all times under its control and specifically organized to defend that class against any possible demands by the disinherited. The modern Parliamentary system begins here.

Today, government, consisting of property owners and people dependent on them, is entirely at the disposal of the owners, so much so that the richest among them disdain to take part in it. Rothschild does not need to be either a Deputy or a Minister; it suffices that Deputies and Ministers take their orders from him.

In many countries workers nominally have a more or less important say in the election of the government. It is a concession made by the bourgeoisie, both to avail itself of popular support in its struggle against the monarchical and aristocratic power as well as to dissuade the people from thinking of emancipation by giving then the illusion of sovereignty. But whether the bourgeoisie foresaw it or not when they first gave the people the vote, the fact is that that right proved to be entirely derisory, and served only to consolidate the power of the bourgeoisie while giving the most active section of the working class false hopes of achieving power. Even with universal suffrage—and we could well say even more so with universal suffrage—the government remained the bourgeoisie’s servant and gendarme. For were it to be otherwise with the government hinting that it might take up a hostile attitude, or that democracy could ever be anything but a pretence to deceive the people, the bourgeoisie, feeling its interests threatened, would be quick to react, and would make use of all the influence and force at its disposal, by reason of its wealth, to recall the government to its proper place as the bourgeoisie’s gendarme.

The basic function of government everywhere in all times whatever title it adopts and whatever its origin and organization may be, is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, of defending the oppressors and the exploiters; and its principle, characteristic and indispensable, instruments are the police agent and the tax-collector, the soldier and the jailer—to whom must be invariably added the trader in lies, be he priest or schoolmaster, remunerated or protected by the government to enslave minds and make them docilely accept the yoke.

It is true that to these basic functions, to these essential organs of government, other functions, other organs have been added in the course of history. Let us even also admit that never or hardly ever has a government existed in any country with a degree of civilization which did not combine with its oppressive and plundering activities others which were useful or indispensable to social life. But this does not detract from the fact that government is by its nature oppressive and plundering, and that it is in origin and by its attitude, inevitably inclined to defend and strengthen the dominant class; indeed it confirms and aggravates the position.

In fact government takes the trouble to protect, more or less, the lives of citizens against direct and violent attack; it recognizes and legalizes a number of basic rights and duties as well as usages and customs without which social life would not be possible; it organizes and manages a number of public services, such as the post, roads, cleansing and refuse disposal, land improvement and conservation, etc.; it promotes orphanages and hospitals, and often it condescends to pose as the protector and benefactor of the poor and the weak. But it is enough to understand how and why it carries out these functions to find the practical evidence that whatever governments do is always motivated by the desire to dominate, and is always geared to defending, extending and perpetuating its privileges and those of the class of which it is both the representative and defender.

A government cannot maintain itself for long without hiding its true nature behind a pretence of general usefulness; it cannot impose respect for the lives of privileged people if it does not appear to demand respect for all human life; it cannot impose acceptance of the privileges of the few if it does not pretend to be the guardian of the rights of all. “The law”— says Kropotkin, and by which is meant those who have made the law, that is, the government—“has used Man’s social feelings to get passed not only the moral precepts which were acceptable to Man, but also orders which were useful only to the minority of exploiters against whom he would have rebelled.”

A government cannot want society to break up, for it would mean that it and the dominant class would be deprived of the sources of exploitation; nor can it leave society to maintain itself without official intervention, for then the people would soon realize that government serves only to defend the property owners who keep them in conditions of starvation, and they would hasten to rid themselves of both the government and the property owners.

Today, governments, faced with the pressing and threatening demands of the workers, show a tendency to arbitrate in the dealings between masters and workers; in this way they seek to sidetrack the workers’ movement and, with a few deceptive reforms, to prevent the poor from taking for themselves what is their due, that is a part of well-being equal to that enjoyed by others.

Furthermore, one must bear in mind that on the one hand the bourgeoisie (the property owners) are always at war among themselves and gobbling each other up and that on the other hand the government, though springing from the bourgeoisie and its servant and protector, tends, as with every servant and every protector, to achieve its own emancipation and to dominate whoever it protects. Thus the game of the swings, the manoeuvres, the concessions and withdrawals, the attempts to find allies among the people against the conservatives, and among the conservatives against the people, which is the science of the governors, and which blinds the ingenuous and the phlegmatic who always wait for salvation to come down to them from above.

Despite all this, the nature of government does not change. If it assumes the role of controller and guarantor of the rights and duties of everyone, it perverts the sentiment of justice; it qualifies as a crime and punishes every action which violates or threatens the privileges of the rulers and the property owners, and declares as just and legal the most outrageous exploitation of the poor, the slow and sustained material and moral assassination perpetrated by those who have, at the expense of those who have not. If it appoints itself as the administrator of public services, again, as always, it looks after the interests of the rulers and the property owners and does not attend to those of the working people except where it has to because the people agree to pay. If it assumes the role of teacher, it hampers the propagation of truth and tends to prepare the minds and the hearts of the young to become either ruthless tyrants or docile slaves, according to the class to which they belong. In the hands of government everything becomes a means for exploitation, everything becomes a policing institution, useful only for keeping the people in check.

And it had to be thus. For if human existence is a struggle between men, there must obviously be winners and losers, and government, which is the prize in the struggle and a means for guaranteeing to the victors the results of victory and for perpetuating them, will certainly never fall into the hands of those who lose, whether the struggle is based on physical force, is intellectual, or is in the field of economics. And those who have struggled to win, that is, to secure better conditions for themselves than others enjoy, and to win privileges and power, will certainly not use it to defend the rights of the vanquished and set limits on their own power as well as that of their friends and supporters.

The government, or as some call it, the justiciary State, as moderator in the social struggle and the impartial administrator of the public interest, is a lie—an illusion, an utopia never achieved and never to be realized.

If Man’s interests were really mutually antagonistic, if the struggle between men was indeed a basic essential law of human societies and if the liberty of the individual were to be limited by the liberty of others, then everyone would always seek to ensure that his interests prevailed, everyone would try to increase his own freedom at the expense of other people’s freedom, and one would have a government, not just because it would be more or less useful to all members of society to have one, but because the victors would want to make sure of the fruits of victory by thoroughly subjecting the vanquished, and so free themselves from the trouble of being permanently on the defensive, entrusting their defence to men specially trained as professional gendarmes. In that case mankind would be condemned to perish or be forever struggling between the tyranny of the victors and the rebellion of the vanquished.

But fortunately the future of mankind is a happier one because the law governing it is milder. This law is SOLIDARITY.


Man’s fundamental essential characteristics are the instinct of his own preservation, without which no living being could exist, and the instinct of the preservation of the species, without which no species could have developed and endured. He is naturally driven to defend his individual existence and well-being, as well as that of his offspring, against everything and everybody.

In nature living beings have two ways of surviving and of making life more pleasant. One is by individual struggle against the elements and against other individuals of the same or other species; the other is by mutual aid, by cooperation, which could also be described as association for the struggle against all natural factors antagonistic to the existence, the development and well-being of the associates.

Apart from considerations of space, there is no need to examine in the pages that follow the relative role in the evolution of the organic world played by these two principles: of struggle and of cooperation. It will suffice to state that so far as Man is concerned, cooperation (voluntary or compulsory) has become the only means towards progress, advancement and security; and that struggle—a relic of our ancestors—has not only proved useless in ensuring individual well-being, but also is harmful to everybody, victors and vanquished alike.

The accumulated and communicated experience of the generations taught men that by uniting with other men their individual safety and well-being were enhanced. Thus, as a result of the very struggle for existence waged against the natural environment and against individuals of the same species, a social feeling was developed in Man which completely transformed the conditions of his existence. And on the strength of this, Man was able to emerge from the animal state and rise to great power, and so lift himself above other animals that anti-materialist philosophers thought it necessary to invent an immaterial and immortal soul for him.

Many concurrent causes have contributed to the development of this social feeling which, starting from the animal basis of the instinct of preservation of the species (which is the social instinct limited to the natural family), has reached great heights both in intensity and in extent, so much so that it constitutes the very basis of man’s moral nature.

Man, though he had emerged from the lower order of animal life, was weak and unequipped to engage in individual struggle against the carnivorous beasts. But with a brain capable of great development, a vocal organ capable of expressing with a variety of sounds different cerebral vibrations, and with hands specially suitable for fashioning matter to his will, must have very soon felt the need for, and the advantages to be derived from, association; indeed one can say that he could only emerge from the animal state when he became a social being and acquired the use of language, which is at the same time a consequence of, and an important factor in, sociability.

The relatively small number of human beings, because it made the struggle for existence between men, even without association, less bitter, less prolonged, less necessary, must have greatly facilitated the development of feelings of sympathy, and allowed time to discover and appreciate the usefulness of mutual aid.

Finally, Man’s ability to modify his external environment and adapt it to his needs, which he acquired thanks to his original qualities applied in cooperation with a smaller or larger number of associates; the increasing number of demands which grow as the means of satisfying them grow and become needs; the division of labour which is the outcome of the systematic exploitation of nature to Man’s advantage, all these factors have resulted in social life becoming the necessary environment for Man, outside of which he cannot go on living, or if he does, he returns to the animal state.

And by the refinement of feelings with the growth of relations, and by customs impressed on the species through heredity over thousands of centuries, this need of a social life, of an exchange of thoughts and feelings, has become for mankind a way of being which is essential to our way of life, and has been transformed into sympathy, friendship, love, and goes on independently of the material advantages that association provides, so much so that in order to satisfy it one often faces all kinds of sufferings and even death.

In other words, the enormous advantages that accrue to men through association; the state of physical inferiority, in no way comparable to his intellectual superiority, in which he finds himself in relation to the animal kingdom if he remains isolated; the possibility for men to join with an ever growing number of individuals and in relationships ever more intimate and complex to the point where the association extends to all mankind and all aspects of life, and perhaps more than any thing, to the possibility for Man to produce, through work in cooperation with others, more than he needs for survival, and the affective sentiments that spring from all these—all have given to the human struggle for existence quite a different complexion from the struggle that is generally waged by other members of the animal kingdom.

Although we now know—and the findings of contemporary naturalists are daily providing us with new evidence—that cooperation has played and continues to play a most important role in the development of the organic world unsuspected by those who sought, quite irrelevantly anyway, to justify bourgeois rule with Darwinian theories, yet the gulf separating the struggle of man from that of the animal kingdom remains enormous, and in direct ratio to the distance between man and the other animals.

Other animals fight either individually or, more often, in small permanent or transitory groups against all nature including other individuals of the same species. The more social creatures among them, such as the ants, bees, etc., are loyal to all the individuals within the same ant or swarm, but are at war with or indifferent to other communities of the same species. Human struggle instead tends always to widen the association among men, their community of interests, and to develop the feeling of love of man for his fellows, of conquering and over coming the external forces of nature by humanity and for humanity. Every struggle aimed at gaining advantages independently of or at the expense of others, is contrary to the social nature of modern Man and tends to drive him back towards the animal state.

Solidarity, that is the harmony of interests and of feelings, the coming together of individuals for the well-being of all, and of all for the well-being of each, is the only environment in which Man can express his personality and achieve his optimum development and enjoy the greatest possible well-being. This is the goal towards which human evolution advances; it is the higher principle which resolves all existing antagonisms, that would otherwise be insoluble, and results in the freedom of each not being limited by, but complemented by—indeed finding the necessary raison d’être in—the freedom of others.


Michael Bakunin said that: “No individual can recognize his own humanity, and consequently realize it in his lifetime, if not by recognizing it in others and cooperating in its realization for others. No man can achieve his own emancipation without at the same time working for the emancipation of all men around him. My freedom is the freedom of all since I am not truly free in thought and in fact, except when my freedom and my rights are confirmed and approved in the freedom and rights of all men who are my equals.”

“It matters to me very much what other men are, because however independent I may appear to be or think I am, because of my social position, were I Pope, Czar, Emperor or even Prime Minister, I remain always the product of what the humblest among them are: if they are ignorant, poor, slaves, my existence is determined by their slavery. I, an enlightened or intelligent man, am for instance—in the event—rendered stupid by their stupidity; as a courageous man I am enslaved by their slavery; as a rich man I tremble before their poverty; as a privileged person I blanch at their justice. I who want to be free cannot be because all the men around me do not yet want to be free, and consequently they become tools of oppression against me.”

Solidarity is therefore the state of being in which Man attains the greatest degree of security and well-being; and therefore egoism itself, that is the exclusive consideration of one’s own interests impels Man and human society towards solidarity; or it would be better to say that egoism and altruism (concern for the interests of others) become fused into a single sentiment just as the interests of the individual and those of society coincide.

Yet Man could not in one leap pass from the animal state to the human state, from the brutish struggle between man and man to the joint struggle of all men united in comradeship against the outside forces of nature.

Guided by the advantages which association and the consequent division of labour offer, Man developed towards solidarity; but his development met with an obstacle which led him away from his goal and continues to do so to this day. Man discovered that he could, at least up to a certain point and for the material and basic needs which only then did he feel, achieve the advantages of cooperation by subjecting other men to his will instead of joining with them; and in view of the fact that the fierce and anti-social instincts inherited from his animal ancestry were still strong in him, he obliged the weakest to work for him, preferring domination to association. Perhaps too, in most cases, it was in exploiting the vanquished that Man learned for the first time to understand the advantages of association, the good that Man could derive from the support of his fellows.

Thus the realization of the usefulness of cooperation, which should have led to the triumph of solidarity in all human relations, instead gave rise to private property and government, that is to the exploitation of the labour of the whole community by a privileged minority.

It was still association and cooperation, outside which there is no possible human life; but it was a way of cooperation imposed and controlled by a few for their own personal interest.

From this fact has arisen the great contradiction, which fills the pages of human history, between the tendency to association and comradeship for the conquest and adaptation of the external world to Man’s needs and for the satisfaction of sentiments of affection—and the tendency to divide into many units separate and hostile as are the groupings determined by geographic and ethnographic conditions, as are the economic attitudes, as are those men who have succeeded in winning an advantage and want to make sure of it and add to it, as are those who hope to win a privilege, as are those who suffer by an injustice or a privilege and rebel and seek to make amends.

The principle of each for himself, which is the war of all against all, arose in the course of history to complicate, to sidetrack and paralyze the war of all against nature for the greatest well-being of mankind which can be completely successful only by being based on the principle of all for one and one for all.

Mankind has suffered great harm as a result of this intrusion of domination and exploitation in the midst of human association. But in spite of the terrible oppression to which the masses have been subjected, in spite of poverty, in spite of vice, crime and the degradation which poverty and slavery produce in the slaves and in the masters, in spite of accumulated antagonism, of wars of extermination, in spite of artificially created conflicting interests, the social instinct has survived and developed. Cooperation having always remained the essential condition for man to wage a successful war against external nature, it also remained the permanent cause for bringing men close together and for developing among them sentiments of sympathy. The very oppression of the masses created a feeling of comradeship among the oppressed; and it is only because of the more or less conscious and wide spread solidarity that existed among the oppressed that they were able to endure the oppression and that mankind survived the causes of death that crept into their midst.

Today the immense development of production, the growth of those requirements which can only be satisfied by the participation of large numbers of people in all countries, the means of communication, with travel becoming a commonplace, science, literature, businesses and even wars, all have drawn mankind into an ever tighter single body whose constituent parts, united among themselves, can only find fulfillment and freedom to develop through the well-being of the other constituent parts as well as of the whole.

The inhabitant of Naples is as concerned in the improvement to the living conditions of the people inhabiting the banks of the Ganges from whence cholera comes to him, as he is in the drainage of the fondaci of his own city. The well-being, the freedom and the future of a highlander lost among the gorges of the Appenines, are dependent not only on the conditions of prosperity or of poverty of the inhabitants of his village and on the general condition of the Italian people, but also on workers’ conditions in America or Australia, on the discovery made by a Swedish scientist, on the state of mind and material conditions of the Chinese, on there being war or peace in Africa; in other words on all the circumstances large and small which anywhere in the world are acting on a human being.

In present day conditions in society, this vast solidarity which joins together all men is for the most part unconscious, since it emerges spontaneously out of the friction between individual interests, whereas men are hardly if at all concerned with the general interest. And this is the clearest proof that solidarity is a natural law of mankind, which manifests itself and commands respect in spite of all the obstacles, and the dissensions created by society as at present constituted.

On the other hand the oppressed masses who have never completely resigned themselves to oppression and poverty, and who today more than ever show themselves thirsting for justice, freedom and well-being, are beginning to understand that they will not be able to achieve their emancipation except by union and solidarity with all the oppressed, with the exploited everywhere in the world. And they also understand that the indispensable condition for their emancipation which cannot be neglected is the possession of the means of production, of the land and of the instruments of labour, and therefore the abolition of private property. And science, the observation of social manifestations, indicates that this abolition of private property would be of great value even to the privileged minority, if only they were to want to give up their domineering attitude and work with everybody else for the common good.

So therefore—if the oppressed masses were to refuse to work for others, and were to take over the land and the instruments of work from the landowners, or were to want to use them on their own account or for their own benefit, that is the benefit of all, if they were to decide never again to put up with domination and brute force, nor with economic privilege, and if the sentiment of human solidarity, strengthened by a community of interests, were to have put an end to wars and colonialism—what justification would there be for the continued existence of government?

Once private property has been abolished, government which is its defender must disappear. If it were to survive it would tend always to re-establish a privileged and oppressing class in one guise or another.

And the abolition of government does not and cannot mean the breakdown of the social link. Quite the contrary, cooperation which today is imposed and directed to the benefit of a few, would be free, voluntary and directed to everybody’s interests; and therefore it would become that much more widespread and effective.

Social instinct, the sentiment of solidarity, would be developed to the highest degree; and every man would strive to do his best for everybody else, both to satisfy his intimate feelings as well as for his clearly understood interest.

From the free participation of all, by means of the spontaneous grouping of men according to their requirements and their sympathies, from the bottom to the top, from the simple to the complex, starting with the most urgent interests and arriving in the end at the most remote and most general, a social organization would emerge the function of which would be the greatest well-being and the greatest freedom for everybody, and would draw together the whole of mankind into a community of comradeship, and would be modified and improved according to changing circumstances and the lessons learned from experience.

This society of free people, this society of friends is Anarchy.

Note on the text: These excerpts are taken from Vernon Richards’ translation of Malatesta’s Anarchy, published by Freedom Press in 1974. Originally, I posted excerpts I found on the internet from an unidentified source (perhaps the original English translation which Richards’ was meant to replace). This other translation is often misidentified as the Richards translation. I think the Richards translation is better and will be posting the entire pamphlet as part of a Malatesta page that I am working on.

//http://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/errico-malatesta-anarchy-1891/


*

Malatesta’s Anarchy, Part 2
This is the second half of Vernon Richard’s 1974 Freedom Press translation of Malatesta‘s 1891 pamphlet, Anarchy. I posted the first half earlier.


Organ and function are inseparable terms. Take away from an organ its function and either the organ dies or the function is re-established. Put an army in a country in which there are neither reasons for, nor fear of, war, civil or external, and it will provoke war or, if it does not succeed in its intentions, it will collapse. A police force where there are no crimes to solve or criminals to apprehend will invent both, or cease to exist.

In France there has existed for centuries an institution, the louveterie, now incorporated in the Forestry Administration, the officials of which are entrusted with the task of destroying wolves and other harmful creatures. No one will be surprised to learn that it is just because this institution exists that there are still wolves in France and in exceptional winters they play havoc.

The public hardly worries about the wolves as there are the wolf-exterminators who are there to deal with them; and these certainly hunt the wolves but they do so intelligently, sparing the dens long enough for them to rear their young and so prevent the extermination of an interesting animal species. French peasants have in fact little confidence in these wolf-catchers and consider them more as wolf-preservers. And it is understandable: what would the “Lieutenants of the louveterie” do if there were no more wolves?

A government, that is a group of people entrusted with making the laws and empowered to use the collective power to oblige each individual to obey them, is already a privileged class and cut off from the people. As any constituted body would do, it will instinctively seek to extend its powers, to be beyond public control, to impose its own policies and to give priority to its special interests. Having been put in a privileged position, the government is already at odds with the people whose strength it disposes of.

In any case, even if a government wanted to, it could not please everybody, even if it did manage to please a few. It would have to defend itself against the malcontents, and would therefore need to get the support of one section of the people to do so. And then the old story of the privileged class which arises through the complicity of the government starts all over again and, in this instance, if it did not seize the land would certainly capture key posts, specially created, and would oppress and exploit no less than the capitalist class.

The rulers accustomed to giving orders, would not wish to be once more members of the public, and if they could not hold on to power they would at least make sure of securing privileged positions for when they must hand over power to others. They would use every means available to those in power to have their friends elected as the successors who would then in their turn support and protect them. And thus government would be passed to and fro in the same hands, and democracy, which is the alleged government of all, would end up as usual, in an oligarchy, which is the government of a few, the government of a class.

And what an all-powerful, oppressive, all-absorbing oligarchy must one be which has at its service, that has at its disposal, all social wealth, all public services, from food to the manufacture of matches, from the universities to the music-halls!

But let us even suppose that the government were not in any case a privileged class, and could survive without creating around itself a new privileged class, and remain the representative, the servant as it were, of the whole of society. And what useful purpose could this possibly serve? How and in what way would this increase the strength, the intelligence, the spirit of solidarity, the concern for the well-being of all and of future generations, which at any given time happen to exist in a given society?

It is always the old question of the bound man who having managed to live in spite of his bonds thinks he lives because of them. We are used to living under a government which takes over all that energy, intelligence and will which it can direct for its own ends; and it hinders, paralyzes and suppresses those who do not serve its purpose or are hostile—and we think that everything that is done in society is carried out thanks to the government, and that without the government there would no longer be any energy, intelligence or goodwill left in society. Thus (as we have already pointed out), the landowner who has seized the land gets others to work it for his profit, leaving the worker with the bare necessities so that he can and will want to go on working—and the enslaved worker imagines that he could not live without the master, as if the latter had created the land and the forces of nature.

What can government itself add to the moral and material forces that exist in society? Would it be a similar case to that of the God of the Bible who creates from nothing?

Since nothing is created in what is usually called the material world, so nothing is created in this more complicated form of the material world which is the social world. And so the rulers can only make use of the forces that exist in society—except for those great forces which governmental action paralyzes and destroys, and those rebel forces, and all that is wasted through conflicts; inevitably tremendous losses in such an artificial system. If they contribute something of their own they can only do so as men and not as rulers. And of those material and moral forces which remain at the disposal of the government, only a minute part is allowed to play a really useful role for society. The rest is either used up in repressive actions to keep the rebel forces in check or is otherwise diverted from its ends of the general good and used to benefit a few at the expense of the majority of the people.

Much has been said about the respective roles of individual initiative and social action in the life and progress of human societies, and by the usual tricks of the language of metaphysics, the issues have become so confused that in the end those who declared that everything is maintained and kept going in the human world thanks to individual initiative, appear as radicals. In fact this is a commonsense truth which is obvious the moment one tries to understand the significance of words. The real being is man, the individual. Society or the collectivity—and the State or government which claims to represent it—if it is not a hollow abstraction, must be made up of individuals. And it is in the organism of every individual that all thoughts and human actions inevitably have their origin, and from being individual they become collective thoughts and acts when they are or become accepted by many individuals. Social action, therefore, is neither the negation nor the complement of individual initiative, but is the resultant of initiatives, thoughts and actions of all individuals who make up society; a resultant which, all other things being equal, is greater or smaller depending on whether individual forces are directed to a common objective or are divided or antagonistic. And if instead, as do the authoritarians, one means government action when one talks of social action, then this is still the resultant of individual forces, but only of those individuals who form the government or who by reason of their position can influence the policy of the government.

Therefore in the age-long struggle between liberty and authority, or in other words between socialism and a class state, the question is not really one of changing the relationships between society and the individual; nor is it a question of increasing the independence of the individual at the expense of social interference or vice versa. But rather it is a question of preventing some individuals from oppressing others; of giving all individuals the same rights and the same means of action; and of replacing the initiative of the few, which inevitably results in the oppression of everybody else. It is after all a question of destroying once and for all the domination and exploitation of man by man, so that everyone can have a stake in the commonweal, and individual forces, instead of being destroyed or fighting among themselves or being cut off from each other, will find the possibility of complete fulfillment, and come together for the greater benefit of everybody.

Even if we pursue our hypothesis of the ideal government of the authoritarian socialists, it follows from what we have said that far from resulting in an increase in the productive, organizing and protective forces in society, it would greatly reduce them, limiting initiative to a few, and giving them the right to do everything without, of course, being able to provide them with the gift of being all-knowing.

Indeed, if you take out from the law and the entire activity of a government all that exists to defend the privileged minority and which represents the wishes of the latter themselves, what is left which is not the result of the action of everybody? Sismondi said that “the State is always a conservative power which legalizes, regularizes and organizes the victories of progress” (and history adds that it directs them for its own ends and that of the privileged class) “but never introduces them. These victories are always started down below, they are born in the heart of society, from individual thought which is then spread far and wide, becomes opinion, the majority, but in making its way it must always meet with and combat the powers-that-be, tradition, habit, privilege and error”.

Anyway, in order to understand how a society can live without government, one has only to observe in depth existing society, and one will see how in fact the greater part, the important part, of social life is discharged even today outside government intervention, and that government only interferes in order to exploit the masses, to defend the privileged minority, and moreover it finds itself sanctioning, quite ineffectually, all that has been done without its intervention, and often in spite of and even against it. Men work, barter, study, travel and follow to the best of their knowledge moral rules and those of well-being; they benefit from the advances made in science and the arts, have widespread relations among themselves—all without feeling the need for somebody to tell them how to behave. Indeed it is just those matters over which government has no control that work best, that give rise to less controversy and are resolved by general consent so that everybody feels happy as well as being useful.

Nor is the government specially needed for the large-scale enterprises and public services requiring the full-time employment of a large number of people from different countries and conditions. Thousands of these undertakings are, even today, the result of individual associations freely constituted, and are by common accord those that work best. Nor are we talking of capitalist associations, organized for the purpose of exploitation, however much they too demonstrate the potentialities and the power of a free association and how it can spread to include people from every country as well as vast and contrasting interests. But rather let us talk about those associations which, inspired by a love of one’s fellow beings, or by a passion for science, or more simply by the desire to enjoy oneself and to be applauded, are more representative of the groupings as they will be in a society in which, having abolished private property and the internecine struggle between men, everybody will find his interest in that of everybody else, and his greatest satisfaction in doing good and in pleasing others. Scientific Societies and Congresses, the international life-saving association, the Red Cross, the geographical societies, the workers’ organizations, the voluntary bodies that rush to help whenever there are great public disasters, are a few examples among many of the power of the spirit of association, which always manifests itself when it is a question of a need or an issue deeply felt, and the means are not lacking. If the voluntary association is not world-wide and does not embrace all the material and moral aspects of activity it is because of the obstacles put in its path by governments, by the dissensions created by private property, and the impotence and discouragement felt by most people as a result of the seizure of all wealth by a few.

For instance, the government takes over the responsibilities of the postal services, the railways and so on. But in what way does it help these services? When the people are enabled to enjoy them, and feel the need for these services, they think about organizing them, and the technicians don’t need a government licence to get to work. And the more the need is universal and urgent, the more volunteers will there be to carry it out. If the people had the power to deal with the problems of production and food supplies, oh! have no fear that they might just die of hunger waiting for a government to make the necessary laws to deal with the problem. If there had to be a government, it would still be obliged to wait until the people had organized everything, in order then to come along with laws to sanction and exploit what had already been done. It is demonstrated that private interest is the great incentive for all activities: well, when the interest of all will be that of each individual (and this would obviously be the case if private property did not exist) then everyone will act, and if we do things now which only interest a few, we will do them that much better and more intensively when they will be of interest to everybody. And it is difficult to understand why there should be people who believe that the carrying out and the normal functioning of public services vital to our daily lives would be more reliable if carried out under the instructions of a government rather than by the workers themselves who, by direct election or through agreements made with others, have chosen to do that kind of work and carry it out under the direct control of all the interested parties.

Of course in every large collective undertaking, a division of labour, technical management, administration, etc., is necessary. But authoritarians clumsily play on words to produce a raison d’être for government out of the very real need for the organization of work. Government, it is well to repeat it, is the concourse of individuals who have had, or have seized, the right and the means to make laws and to oblige people to obey; the administrator, the engineer, etc., instead are people who are appointed or assume the responsibility to carry out a particular job and do so. Government means the delegation of power, that is the abdication of initiative and sovereignty of all into the hands of a few; administration means the delegation of work, that is tasks given and received, free exchange of services based on free agreement. The governor is a privileged person since he has the right to command others and to make use of the efforts of others to make his ideas and his personal wishes prevail; the administrator, the technical director, etc., are workers like the rest, that is, of course, in a society in which everyone has equal means to develop and that all are or can be at the same time intellectual and manual workers, and that the only differences remaining between men are those which stem from the natural diversity of aptitudes, and that all jobs, all functions give an equal right to the enjoyment of social possibilities. Let one not confuse the function of government with that of an administration, for they are essentially different, and if today the two are often confused, it is only because of economic and political privilege.

But let us hasten to pass on to the functions for which government is considered, by all who are not anarchists, as quite indispensable: the internal and external defence of a society, that is to say war, the police and justice.

Once governments have been abolished and the social wealth has been put at the disposal of everybody, then all the antagonisms between people will soon disappear and war will no longer have a raison d’étre. We would add, furthermore, that in the present state of the world, when a revolution occurs in one country, if it does not have speedy repercussions elsewhere it will however meet with much sympathy everywhere, so much so that no government will dare to send its troops abroad for fear of having a revolutionary uprising on its own doorstep. But, by all means, let us admit that the governments of the still unemancipated countries were to want to, and could, attempt to reduce free people to a state of slavery once again. Would this people require a government to defend itself? To wage war men are needed who have the necessary geographical and mechanical knowledge, and above all large masses of the population willing to go and fight. A government can neither increase the abilities of the former nor the will and courage of the latter. And the experience of history teaches us that a people who really want to defend their own country are invincible; and in Italy everyone knows that before the corps of volunteers (anarchist formations) thrones topple, and regular armies composed of conscripts or mercenaries, disappear.

And what of the police and of justice? Many suppose that if there were no carabineers, policemen and judges, everyone would be free to kill, to ravish, to harm others as the mood took one; and that anarchists, in the name of their principles, would wish to see that strange liberty respected which violates and destroys the freedom and life of others. They seem almost to believe that after having brought down government and private property we would allow both to be quietly built up again, because of a respect for the freedom of those who might feel the need to be rulers and property owners… A truly curious way of interpreting our ideas! …of course it is easier to brush them off with a shrug of the shoulders than to take the trouble of confuting them.

The freedom we want, for ourselves and for others, is not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom which in practice is inevitably translated into the oppression of the wealthy; but it is real freedom, possible freedom, which is the conscious community of interests, voluntary solidarity. We proclaim the maxim DO AS YOU WISH, and with it we almost summarize our program, for we maintain—and it doesn’t take much to understand why—that in a harmonious society, in a society without government and without property, each one will WANT WHAT HE MUST DO.

But supposing that as a result of the kind of education received from present society, or for physical misfortune or for any other reason, someone were to want to do harm to us and to others, one can be sure that we would exert ourselves to prevent him from so doing with all the means at our disposal. Of course, because we know that man is the consequence of his own organism as well as of the cosmic and social environment in which he lives; because we do not confuse the inviolate right of defence with the claimed ridiculous right to punish; and since with the delinquent, that is with he who commits anti-social acts, we would not, to be sure, see the rebel slave, as happens with judges today, but the sick brother needing treatment, so would we not introduce hatred in the repression, and would make every effort not to go beyond the needs of defence, and would not think of avenging ourselves but of seeking to cure, redeem the unhappy person with all the means that science offered us. In any case, irrespective of the anarchists’ interpretation (who could, as happens with all theorists, lose sight of reality in pursuing a semblance of logic), it is certain that the people would not allow their well-being and their freedom to be attacked with impunity, and if the necessity arose, they would take measures to defend themselves against the anti-social tendencies of a few. But to do so, what purpose is served by people whose profession is the making of laws; while other people spend their lives seeking out and inventing law-breakers? When the people really disapprove of something and consider it harmful, they always manage to prevent it more successfully than do the professional legislators, police and judges. When in the course of insurrections the people have, however mistakenly, wanted private property to be respected, they did so in a way that an army of policemen could not.

Customs always follow the needs and feelings of the majority; and the less they are subject to the sanctions of law the more are they respected, for everyone can see and understand their use, and because the interested parties, having no illusions as to the protection offered by government, themselves see to it that they are respected. For a caravan travelling across the deserts of Africa the good management of water stocks is a matter of life and death for all; and in those circumstances water becomes a sacred thing and no one would think of wasting it. Conspirators depend on secrecy, and the secret is kept or abomination strikes whoever violates it. Gambling debts are not secured by law, and among gamblers whoever does not pay up is considered and considers himself dishonoured.

Is it perhaps because of the gendarmes that more people are not killed? In most of the villages in Italy the gendarmes are only seen from time to time; millions of people cross the mountains, and pass through the countryside far from the protecting eye of authority, such that one could strike them down without the slightest risk of punishment; yet they are no less safe than those who live in the most protected areas. And statistics show that the number of crimes is hardly affected by repressive measures, whereas it changes dramatically with changes in economic conditions and in the attitudes of public opinion.

Anyway, punitive laws are only concerned with exceptional, unusual occurrences. Daily life carries on beyond the reach of the codicil and is controlled, almost unconsciously, with the tacit and voluntary agreement of all, by a number of usages and customs which are much more important to social life than the Articles of the Penal Code, and better respected in spite of being completely free from any sanction other than the natural one of the disesteem in which those who violate them are held and the consequences that arise therefrom.

And when differences were to arise between men, would not arbitration voluntarily accepted, or pressure of public opinion, be perhaps more likely to establish where the right lies than through an irresponsible judiciary which has the right to adjudicate on everything and everybody and is inevitably incompetent and therefore unjust?


Since, generally speaking, government only exists to protect the privileged classes, so the police and the judiciary exist only to punish those crimes which are not so considered by the public and only harm the privileges of the government and of property-owners. There is nothing more pernicious for the real defence of society, for the defence of the well-being and freedom of all, than the setting up of these classes which exist on the pretext of defending everybody but become accustomed to consider every man as game to be caged, and strike at you without knowing why, by orders of a chief whose irresponsible, mercenary ruffians they are.

That’s all very well, some say, and anarchy may be a perfect form of human society, but we don’t want to take a leap in the dark. Tell us therefore in detail how your society will be organized. And there follows a whole series of questions, which are very interesting if we were involved in studying the problems that will impose themselves on the liberated society, but which are useless, or absurd, even ridiculous, if we are expected to provide definitive solutions. What methods will be used to teach children? How will production be organized? Will there still be large cities, or will the population be evenly distributed over the whole surface of the earth? And supposing all the inhabitants of Siberia should want to spend the winter in Nice? And if everyone were to want to eat partridge and drink wine from the Chianti district? And who will do a miner’s job or be a seaman? And who will empty the privies? And will sick people be treated at home or in hospital? And who will establish the railway timetable? And what will be done if an engine-driver has a stomach-ache while the train is moving? And so on to the point of assuming that we have all the knowledge and experience of the unknown future, and that in the name of anarchy, we should prescribe for future generations at what time they must go to bed, and on what days they must pare their corns.

If indeed our readers expect a reply from us to these questions, or at least to those which are really serious and important, which is more than our personal opinion at this particular moment, it means that we have failed in our attempt to explain to them what anarchism is about.

We are no more prophets than anyone else; and if we claimed to be able to give an official solution to all the problems that will arise in the course of the daily life of a future society, then what we meant by the abolition of government would be curious to say the least. For we would be declaring ourselves the government and would be prescribing, as do the religious legislators, a universal code for present and future generations. It is just as well that not having the stake or prisons with which to impose our bible, mankind would be free to laugh at us and at our pretensions with impunity!

We are very concerned with all the problems of social life, both in the interest of science, and because we reckon to see anarchy realized and to take part as best we can in the organization of the new society. Therefore we do have our solutions which, depending on the circumstances, appear to us either definitive or transitory—and but for space considerations we would say something on this here. But the fact that because today, with the evidence we have, we think in a certain way on a given problem does not mean that this is how it must be dealt with in the future. Who can foresee the activities which will grow when mankind is freed from poverty and oppression, when there will no longer be either slaves or masters, and when the struggle between peoples, and the hatred and bitterness that are engendered as a result, will no longer be an essential part of existence? Who can predict the progress in science and in the means of production, of communication and so on?

What is important is that a society should be brought into being in which the exploitation and domination of man by man is not possible; in which everybody has free access to the means of life, of development and of work, and that all can participate, as they wish and know how, in the organization of social life. In such a society obviously all will be done to best satisfy the needs of everybody within the framework of existing knowledge and conditions; and all will change for the better with the growth of knowledge and the means.

After all, a program which is concerned with the bases of the social structure, cannot do other than suggest a method. And it is the method which above all distinguishes between the parties and determines their historical importance. Apart from the method, they all talk of wanting the well-being of humanity and many really do; the parties disappear and with them all action organized and directed to a given end. Therefore one must consider anarchy above all as a method.

The methods from which the different non-anarchist parties expect, or say they do, the greatest good of one and all can be reduced to two, the authoritarian and the so-called liberal. The former entrusts to a few the management of social life and leads to the exploitation and oppression of the masses by the few. The latter relies on free individual enterprise and proclaims, if not the abolition, at least the reduction of governmental functions to an absolute minimum; but because it respects private property and is entirely based on the principle of each for himself and therefore of competition between men, the liberty it espouses is for the strong and for the property owners to oppress and exploit the weak, those who have nothing; and far from producing harmony, tends to increase even more the gap between rich and poor and it too leads to exploitation and domination, in other words, to authority. This second method, that is liberalism, is in theory a kind of anarchy without socialism, and therefore is simply a lie, for freedom is not possible without equality, and real anarchy cannot exist without solidarity, without socialism. The criticism liberals direct at government consists only of wanting to deprive it of some of its functions and to call on the capitalists to fight it out among themselves, but it cannot attack the repressive functions which are of its essence: for without the gendarme the property owner could not exist, indeed the government’s powers of repression must perforce increase as free competition results in more discord and inequality.

Anarchists offer a new method: that is free initiative of all and free compact when, private property having been abolished by revolutionary action, everybody has been put in a situation of equality to dispose of social wealth. This method, by not allowing access to the reconstitution of private property, must lead, via free association, to the complete victory of the principle of solidarity.

Viewed in this way, one sees how all the problems that are advanced in order to counter anarchist ideas are instead an argument in their favour, because only anarchy points the way along which they can find, by trial and error, that solution which best satisfies the dictates of science as well as the needs and wishes of everybody.

How will children be educated? We don’t know. So what will happen? Parents, pedagogues and all who are concerned with the future of the young generation will come together, will discuss, will agree or divide according to the views they hold, and will put into practice the methods which they think are the best. And with practice that method which in fact is the best, will in the end be adopted. And similarly with all problems which present themselves.

It follows from what we have said so far, that anarchy, as understood by the anarchists and as only they can interpret it, is based on socialism. Indeed were it not for those schools of socialism which artificially divide the natural unity of the social question, and only consider some aspects out of context, and were it not for the misunderstandings with which they seek to tangle the path to the social revolution, we could say straight out that anarchy is synonymous with socialism, for both stand for the abolition of the domination and exploitation of man by man, whether they are exercised at bayonet point or by a monopoly of the means of life.

Anarchy, in common with socialism, has as its basis, its point of departure, its essential environment, equality of conditions; its beacon is solidarity and freedom is its method. It is not perfection, it is not the absolute ideal which like the horizon recedes as fast as we approach it; but it is the way open to all progress and all improvements for the benefit of everybody.

Having established that anarchy is the only form of human society which leaves open the way to the achievement of the greatest good for mankind, since it alone destroys every class bent on keeping the masses oppressed and in poverty; having established that anarchy is possible and since, in fact, all it does is to free mankind from the government and obstacles against which it has always had to struggle in order to advance along its difficult road, authoritarians withdraw to their last ditches where they are reinforced by many who though they are passionate lovers of freedom and justice, fear freedom and cannot make up their minds to visualize a humanity which lives and progresses without guardians and without shepherds and, pressed by the truth, they pitifully ask that the matter should be put off for as long as possible.

This is the substance of the arguments that are put to us at this point in the discussion.

This society without government, which maintains itself by means of free and voluntary cooperation; this society which relies in everything on the spontaneous action of interests and which is entirely based on solidarity and love, is certainly a wonderful ideal, they say; but like all ideals it lives in the clouds. We find ourselves in a world which has always been divided into oppressors and oppressed; and if the former are full of the spirit of domination and have all the vices of tyrants, the latter are broken by servility and have the even worse vices that result from slavery. The feeling of solidarity is far from being dominant in contemporary society, and if it is true that men are and become always more united, it is equally true that what one sees increasingly, and which makes a deeper impression on human character, is the struggle for existence which each individual is waging daily against everybody else; it is competition which presses on everybody, workers and masters alike, and makes every man into an enemy in the eyes of his neighbour. How will these men, brought up in a society based on class and individual conflict, ever be able to change themselves suddenly and become capable of living in a society in which everyone will do as he wishes and must do, and without outside coercion and through the force of his own will, seek the welfare of others? With what single-mindedness, with what common sense would you entrust the fate of the revolution and of mankind to an ignorant mob, weakened by poverty, brainwashed by the priest, and which today will be blindly bloodthirsty, while tomorrow it will allow itself to be clumsily deceived by a rogue, or bow its head servilely under the heel of the first military dictator who dares to make himself master? Would it not be more prudent to advance towards the anarchist ideal by first passing through a democratic or socialist republic? Will there not be a need for a government of the best people to educate and to prepare the generations for things to come?

These objections also would not have a raison d’être if we had succeeded in making ourselves understood and in convincing readers with what we have already written; but in any case, even at the risk of repeating ourselves, it will be as well to answer them.

We are always faced with the prejudice that government is a new force that has emerged from no one knows where, which in itself adds something to the total forces and capacities of those individuals who constitute it and of those who obey it. Instead all that happens in the world is done by people; and government qua government, contributes nothing of its own apart from the tendency to convert everything into a monopoly for the benefit of a particular party or class, as well as offering resistance to every initiative which comes from outside its own clique.

To destroy authority, to abolish government, does not mean the destruction of individual and collective forces which operate in society, nor the influences which people mutually exert on each other; to do so would reduce humanity to being a mass of detached and inert atoms, which is an impossibility, but assuming it were possible, would result in the destruction of any form of society, the end of mankind. The abolition of authority means, the abolition of the monopoly of force and of influence; it means the abolition of that state of affairs for which social power, that is the combined forces of society, is made into the instrument of thought, the will and interests of a small number of individuals, who by means of the total social power, suppress, for their personal advantage and for their own ideas the freedom of the individual; it means destroying a way of social organization with which the future is burdened between one revolution and the next, for the benefit of those who have been the victors for a brief moment.

Michael Bakunin in an article published in 1872, after pointing out that the principal means of action of the International were the propagation of its ideas and the organization of the spontaneous action of its members on the masses, adds that:

“To whoever might claim that action so organized would be an assault on the freedom of the masses, an attempt to create a new authoritarian power, we would reply that he is nothing but a sophist and a fool. So much the worse for those who ignore the natural and social law of human solidarity, to the point of imagining that an absolute mutual independence of individuals and of the masses is something possible, or at least desirable. To wish it means to want the destruction of society, for the whole of social life is no other than this unceasing mutual dependence of individuals and masses. All individuals, even the most intelligent and the strongest, indeed above all the intelligent and strong, each at every moment in his life is at the same time its producer and its product. The very freedom of each individual is no other than the resultant, continually reproduced, of this mass of material, intellectual and moral influences exerted on him by all who surround him, by the society in the midst of which he is born, develops, and dies. To want to escape from this influence in the name of a transcendental, divine, freedom that is absolutely egoistic and sufficient unto itself, is the tendency of non-being. This much vaunted independence of the idealists and metaphysicians, and individual freedom thus conceived, are therefore nothingness.

“In nature, as in human society, which is no other than this same nature, all that lives, only lives on the supreme condition of intervening in the most positive manner, and as powerfully as its nature allows, in the lives of others. The abolition of this mutual influence would be death. And when we vindicate the freedom of the masses, we are by no means suggesting the abolition of any of the natural influences that individuals or groups of individuals exert on them; what we want is the abolition of influences which are artificial, privileged, legal, official.”

Obviously, in the present state of mankind, when the vast majority of people, oppressed by poverty and stupefied by superstition, stagnate in a state of humiliation, the fate of humanity depends on the action of a relatively small number of individuals; obviously it will not be possible suddenly to get people to raise themselves to the point where they feel the duty, indeed the pleasure from controlling their own actions in such a way that others will derive the maximum benefit therefrom. But if today the thinking and directing forces in society are few, it is not a reason for paralyzing yet more of them and of subjecting many others to a few of them. It is not a reason for organizing society in such a way that (thanks to the apathy that is the result of secured positions, thanks to birth, patronage, esprit de corps, and all the government machinery) the most lively forces and real ability end up by finding themselves outside the government and almost without influence on social life; and those that attain to government, finding themselves out of their environment, and being above all interested in remaining in power, lose all possibilities of acting and only serve as an obstacle to others.

Once this negative power that is government is abolished, society will be what it can be but all that it can be given the forces and abilities available at the time. If there are educated people who wish to spread knowledge they will organize the schools and make a special effort to persuade everybody of the usefulness and pleasure to be got from an education. And if there were no such people, or only a few, a government could not create them; all it could do would be what happens now, take the few that there are away from their rewarding work, and set them to drafting regulations which have to be imposed with policemen, and make intelligent and devoted teachers into political beings, that is useless parasites, all concerned with imposing their whims and with maintaining themselves in power.

If there are doctors and experts in public health, they will organize the health service. And if there were none, the government could not create them: all it could do would be to cast doubts on the abilities of existing doctors which a public, justifiably suspicious of all that is imposed from above, would seize upon to get rid of them.

If there are engineers, engine drivers and so on, they will organize the railways. And if there were none, once again, a government could not create them.

The revolution, by abolishing government and private property, will not create forces that do not exist; but it will leave the way open for the development of all available forces and talents, will destroy every class with an interest in keeping the masses in a state of brutishness, and will ensure that everyone will be able to act and to influence according to his abilities, his enthusiasm and his interests.

And this is the only way that the masses can raise themselves, for it is only through freedom that one educates oneself to be free, just as it is only by working that one can learn to work. A government, assuming it had no other disadvantages, would always have that of accustoming the governed to timidity, and of tending to become always more oppressive and of making itself ever more necessary.

Besides, if one wants a government which has to educate the masses and put them on the road to anarchy, one must also indicate what will be the background, and the way of forming this government.

Will it be the dictatorship of the best people? But who are the best? And who will recognize these qualities in them? The majority is generally attached to established prejudices, and has ideas and attitudes which have already been superseded by a better endowed minority; but among the thousand minorities all of which believe themselves to be right, and can all be right on some issues, by whom and with what criterion will the choice be made to put the social forces at the disposal of one of them when only the future can decide between the parties in conflict? If you take a hundred intelligent supporters of dictatorship, you will discover that each one of them believes that he should be if not the dictator himself, or one of them, at least very close to the dictatorship. So dictators would be those who, pursuing one course or another, succeed in imposing themselves; and in the present political climate, one can safely say that all their efforts would be employed in the struggle to defend themselves against the attacks of their enemies, conveniently forgetting any vague intentions of social education, assuming that they ever had such intentions.

Will it be instead a government elected by universal suffrage, and thus the more or less sincere expression of the wishes of the majority? But if you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they will know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing the election of a genius from the votes of a mass of fools? And what will happen to the minorities which are still the most intelligent, most active and radical part of a society?

In order to solve the social problem for the benefit of every- body there is only one means: to crush those who own social wealth by revolutionary action, and put everything at the disposal of everybody, and leave all the forces, the ability, and all the goodwill that exist among the people, free to act and to provide for the needs of all.

We struggle for anarchy, and for socialism, because we believe that anarchy and socialism must be realized immediately, that is to say that in the revolutionary act we must drive government away, abolish property and entrust public services, which in this context will include all social life, to the spontaneous, free, not official, not authorized efforts of all interested parties and of all willing helpers.

Of course there will be difficulties and drawbacks; but they will be resolved, and they will only be resolved in an anarchist way, by means, that is, of the direct intervention of the interested parties and by free agreements.

We do not know whether anarchy and socialism will triumph when the next revolution takes place; but there is no doubt that if the so-called programs of compromise triumph, it will be because on this occasion, we have been defeated, and never because we believed it useful to leave standing any part of the evil system under which mankind groans.

In any case we will have on events the kind of influence which will reflect our numerical strength, our energy, our intelligence and our intransigence. Even if we are defeated, our work will not have been useless, for the greater our resolve to achieve the implementation of our program in full, the less property, and less government will there be in the new society. And we will have performed a worthy task for, after all, human progress is measured by the extent government power and private property are reduced.

And if today we fall without compromising, we can be sure of victory tomorrow
.

//http://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/malatestas-anarchy-part-2/


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby 23 » Fri Apr 08, 2011 8:45 am

Thanks, vk.

Every time that I hear a young child tell his or her parent "you're not the boss of me" (which isn't often enough)...

I feel hope for the future.
"Once you label me, you negate me." — Soren Kierkegaard
User avatar
23
 
Posts: 1548
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:57 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Fri Apr 08, 2011 5:34 pm

23 wrote:Thanks, vk.

Every time that I hear a young child tell his or her parent "you're not the boss of me" (which isn't often enough)...

I feel hope for the future.


:basicsmile children schooling their parents on what it is to be a parent.



*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Sat Apr 09, 2011 12:18 am

23 wrote:Thanks, vk.

Every time that I hear a young child tell his or her parent "you're not the boss of me" (which isn't often enough)...

I feel hope for the future.


if only the parents remembered what the children know...

YOU'RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!
Sunday, 05 July 2009 04:49


[The following is a written adaption of a talk given by Larken Rose
in Philadelphia, in front of Independence Hall, on July 4th, 2009.]

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, in Philadelphia, a bunch of
guys got together and wrote a letter to their king. The letter was
very eloquent, and well thought out, but it basically boiled down
to this:

"Dear King George,

You're not the boss of us!

Sincerely,

A Bunch of Troublemakers"

That's essentially what the Declaration of Independence was: a
bunch of radicals declaring that they would no longer recognize the
right of their king to rule them, at all, ever again. They went on
to create a new boss, which turned into a new oppressor, but we'll
get to that in a moment. First, let's consider the essence of that
attitude: "You're not the boss of me!"

This July 4th, like every year, millions of Americans are
celebrating Independence Day with various parades, picnics,
fireworks, and so on. But how many of those people celebrating have
ever actually considered what the Declaration was actually about,
and what the colonists actually did? The colonists did not merely
beg the king to change his ways. In fact, the Declaration explains
how they had tried that, to no avail. Instead, the colonists were
doing something far more drastic.

In short, they committed treason. They broke the law. They
disobeyed their government. They were traitors, criminals and tax
cheats. The Boston Tea Party was not merely a tax protest, but open
lawlessness. Furthermore, truth be told, some of the colonists were
even cop-killers. At Lexington, when King George's "law enforcers"
told the colonists to lay down their guns, the colonists responded
with, "No, you're not the boss of us!" (Well, that was the meaning,
if not the exact verbiage.) And so we had "The Shot Heard 'Round
the World," widely regarded as the beginning of the American
Revolution.

Looking back now, we know the outcome. We know who eventually won,
and we don't mind cheering for the rebels. But make no mistake:
when you cheer for the founders of this country, you are cheering
for law-breakers and traitors. As well you should. But, for all the
flag-waving and celebrating that goes on every July 4th, do
Americans actually believe in what the colonists did? Do they
really believe in the attitude expressed in the Declaration of
Independence? Are they really still capable of supporting a mantra
of "You're not the boss of me!"?

In, short, no. Imagine the equivalent of what the colonists did so
many years ago, being done today. Imagine a group of people writing
a letter to the United States government, sending a letter to
Congress and to the President, saying that they would no longer pay
federal taxes, they would no longer obey federal laws, and that
they would resist--by force, if necessary--any attempt by federal
agents to enforce those laws. How would a group which did such
things be viewed today, by most Americans?

They would be viewed as nut-cases, scofflaws and terrorists,
despicable criminals and malcontents. They would be scorned as the
scum of the earth, despised by just about everyone who today
celebrates Independence Day.

How ironic.

So why the double standard? Why would the American public today
condemn the exact same attitudes and behaviors which they glorify
and praise in the context of the American Revolution? Quite simply,
it's because, for all the proud talk of "land of the free and home
of the brave," the spirit of resistance--the courage to say "You're
not the boss of us!"--has been trained out of the American people.

We have become a nation of wimps.

For years and years, in the churches and schools, on the news, in
the media, and from everywhere around us, we have been taught one
thing above all else: that obedience to authority is the highest
virtue, and that disobedience is the worst sin. As a result, even
most of those who now claim to be zealous advocates for individual
rights and personal liberty will almost always couch their
"demands" with disclaimers that, of course, their efforts for
justice will be done "within the system," and that they would never
advocate anything "illegal." They claim to be devout proponents of
freedom, and yet all they ever do is seek a political solution,
whether through lobbying of politicians, elections, or other
government-approved means.

Of course, government never approves of anything which might
actually endanger government power. As the bumper-sticker says, "If
voting made a difference, it would be illegal." And why should
civilized people assume that change must be done "legally" and
"within the system"? That is obviously NOT what the Declaration of
Independence was about. In fact, the Declaration states quite
plainly that when a government ceases to be a protector of
individual liberty, it is not only the right, but the DUTY of the
people to ALTER or ABOLISH that form of government. In other words,
when the government becomes an oppressor, instead of a protector--
as is obviously the case today--the people are morally obligated to
adopt an attitude of, "You're not the boss of us!"

So how many Americans are doing that? Almost none. Instead, even
the most vocal critics of corruption and injustice usually do
little more than banging their heads against a brick wall, begging,
in half a dozen different ways, for the tyrants to please be nicer
to us. (Meanwhile, they go to great lengths to distance themselves
from people like me, for fear of what the general public might
think of them. As a result, I believe the general public, and those
in government, view them pretty much as I view them: as harmless
and irrelevant conformists, destined to forever beg for freedom,
and never achieve it.)

Make no mistake, begging and whining is not what the Declaration of
Independence was about. It was about breaking the law, when the law
is unjust. It was about committing treason, when the rulers became
oppressive. It was about disobedience--civil disobedience, when
effective, and not-so-civil disobedience when necessary. It was
about open resistance, including violent resistance when called
for.

So where is that attitude today? Where is the candidate advocating
such a thing? Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams--where are
the modern equivalents? For all the whining about extremists, where
are those willing to openly resist injustice? Not only don't most
Americans believe in resisting tyranny, they feel extremely
uncomfortable just hearing others talk about it, even in abstract
terms (like this).

Maybe it's just that we're not quite at the level of oppression to
justify resistance. Is that it? Hardly. If two or three percent
taxation justified rebellion in 1776, why doesn't fifty percent
taxation justify it now? If a few puny excise taxes on tea and
pieces of paper justified it then, why don't the myriad of
unavoidable, crushing taxes at all levels, and the hordes of
callous, vindictive tax collectors justify it now? If the
relatively unusual cases of Redcoats abusing colonists justified it
then, why doesn't it justify it when American police see no problem
with randomly stopping, detaining, interrogating and searching
anyone they want, whenever they want, for any reason or no reason
at all?

Does anyone think Thomas Jefferson, if he were alive today, would
quietly allow himself to be strip-searched, and allow his
belongings to be rummaged through, by some brain-dead TSA thug?
Read the Fourth Amendment. They had a revolution over that sort of
thing. Does anyone think that Patrick Henry would take kindly to
being robbed blind to pay for whatever war-mongering the
politicians wanted to engage in this week? Read what the Founders
said about standing armies. They had a revolution over that sort of
thing. Think James Madison would go along with being disarmed, by
the various state and federal control freaks? Read the Second
Amendment. They had a revolution over that sort of thing. Think
George Washington would be happy to have both his earnings and
savings constantly looted by a parasite class, to pay for all
manner of wealth redistribution, political handouts and other
socialist garbage? Think Thomas Paine would gladly be extorted to
give all his money to some giant, failed corporation or some huge
international bank? Think the founders would have quietly gone
along with what this country has become today? Think they would
have done nothing more than vote, or whine?

Well, the founders are dead. And, unfortunately, so is their spirit
of resistance. In short, just about all of the flag-waving and
celebrating that happens every July 4th is nothing but empty
hypocrisy. How many Americans today can say, loudly and proudly,
like they mean it, "Give me liberty or give me death!"? Or, at
least, in the modern vernacular, "You're not the boss of me!"?
Anyone? In this nation that imagines itself to be the land of the
free and the home of the brave, where are those who dare to resist,
or even dare to talk about it? And I don't mean voting, or whining
to your congressman, or begging your masters to not whip you so
hard. I'm talking about resisting, refusing to obey.

America, where is your Independence Day pride now? Exactly what are
you proud of? I have a message for you, from a guy named Sam.
Samuel Adams, that is. Yeah, the beer guy. But he did a little more
for this country than make beer. Here is his message:

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of
servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home
from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and
lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon
you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

When's the last time you heard a modern so-called "statesman" say
something like that?

So what happened? When did Americans lose their ability to say,
"You're not the boss of me," and why? Yes, most people are scared,
and for good reason. With the capacity for violence of the current
police state, and the willingness of the politicians and their
thugs to crush anyone who threatens their power, everyone has to
choose his battles carefully, and decide for himself what he's
willing to risk, what is worth fighting for and what isn't.

That makes sense, but there is more to it than just fear. Because
not only won't most Americans resist, but they will condemn anyone
who does. If you do what the founders did, most people in this
country would call you a tax cheat, a malcontent, a criminal, a
traitor, even a terrorist. Why? Why do Americans now vehemently
condemn those who say and do exactly what the Founders did a couple
hundred years ago? When did our priorities and view of the world
change so drastically, and why?

I'll tell you why. Gradually, and very systematically, we have been
trained to measure our own worth, not by what we produce, not by
how we treat other people, but by how well we obey authority.
Consider the term, "law abiding taxpayer." How many people wear
that label as a badge of honor? "I am a law-abiding taxpayer!" When
they say that, they mean, "I'm a good person." But is that what it
really means?

Well, "law-abiding" just means that you do whatever the politicians
tell you to do. We speak with great reverence of this thing called
"the law," as if it is the decree of the gods, which no decent
human being would dare to disobey. But what is it really? It's
whatever the politicians decide to command you to do. Why on earth
would anyone think that obedience to a bunch of liars and crooks is
some profound moral obligation? Is there any reason for us to treat
with reverence such commands and demands? No rational reason, no.
The only reason we do it is because we have been trained to do it.

Some might point out that obeying the laws against theft and murder
is a good thing to do. Well, yes and no. It is good to refrain from
committing theft and murder, but it is NOT because "the law" says
so. It is because theft and murder are inherently wrong, as they
infringe upon the rights of others. And that was true before any
politician passed a "law" about it, and will be true even if they
"legalize" theft and murder (as every government has done, in the
name of "taxation" and "war"). What is right and wrong does not at
all depend upon what is "legal" or "illegal." And if you need
POLITICIANS to tell you what is right and what is wrong, you need
your head examined. Instead, you should judge the validity of so-
called "laws" by whether they match what is inherently right and
wrong. Thomas Jefferson put it this way:

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will
within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do
not add 'within the limits of the law,' because the law is often
but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of
the individual."

So why should anyone be proud of being "law-abiding," when all it
means is blindly obeying whatever arbitrary commands the parasite
class spews out this week? And pride in being a "taxpayer" is no
better, since all that phrase means is that you give the
politicians lots of money. When, exactly, did obeying politicians
and giving them money become the measure of whether you're a good
person?

Consider Nazi Germany. Were the law-abiding taxpayers in Nazi
Germany the good guys? No. By obeying the so-called "laws" of that
time, the majority allowed, or even assisted in, a nearly
incomprehensible level of evil. And by being "taxpayers," they
provided the funding for it. No, the good people in Germany were
the criminals and tax cheats, who refused to assist, even
passively, in the oppressions done in the name of "government."

The same is true under the regimes of Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot,
Castro--you can go right down the list (and it's a very long list).
Under every nasty regime in history, the obedient subjects, who
quietly did as they were told, the law-abiding taxpayers, were not
the good guys. The law-breakers and rebels, the so-called traitors
and terrorists, those were the good guys. How about in this
country, when slavery was legal? The cowards were the ones obeying
the law, while the good guys broke it.

How about here, today? Is it good to fund what the government is
doing? Do you have some moral obligation to give your "fair share"
of however many thousands of dollars, so Obama can give it to his
banker buddies? Is it noble to fund whatever war the politicians
decide to engage in this week? Do you like paying for the detention
and torture of people who haven't been convicted, or even charged
with any crime? (By the way, instead of doing away with that, Obama
just gave it a new name: preventative detention.) Is it some great
virtue to have helped to finance the police state growing up all
around you, on both the federal and state levels? In short, is
being a "law-abiding taxpayer" really something you should be proud
of, or is it something you should be ashamed of?

Over time we have forgotten a very important secret--a secret the
control freaks don't want you to know; a secret some of the
Founders hinted at, though even most of them didn't seem to fully
grasp it. Ready for it?

You own yourself.

You are not the property of the politicians, or anyone else. I own
me, and you own you. Each of you owns himself. Sounds simple
enough, right? And most people respond with, "Well duh, of course.
That's no secret. We knew that." But in reality most people don't
know that.

If you own yourself, would anyone have the right to take, without
your consent, the fruits of your labor? What you earn, with your
time and effort, does anyone have the right to take that from you
by force? Of course not, most will answer. Really? And what if they
call it "taxation"? "Oh, well, that's different." No, it isn't.

If you own yourself, would anyone have the right to force you to
pay rent for a house you already paid for, under threat of taking
your house away? Of course not. What if they call it "property
taxes"? Oh, that's different. No, it isn't. And you can go right
down the list: if you truly own yourself, the vast majority of so-
called "laws," at all levels, are absolutely illegitimate. As
Jefferson put it, ANY so-called "law" that infringes upon
individual liberty--which is dang near all of them--is inherently
bogus.

But let's take it one step further. If you own yourself--your life,
liberty and property--doesn't that imply that you have the right to
defend those things from any and all aggressors? Yes. What if the
aggressors call themselves "government" and call their attacks and
robberies "law" and "taxes"? You still have the right. Changing the
name of an act cannot make something bad into something good. And
if you have the right to defend your life, liberty and property
from all aggressors, it stands to reason that you have the right to
equip yourself to do so. In other words, you have the right to be
armed--the right to possess the equipment to exert whatever force
is necessary to repel any attempts to infringe upon your rights to
life, liberty and property.

I know it makes people uncomfortable (especially people who work
for the government) when I say the following: I want every sane,
adult American to have the ability to use force, including deadly
force, against government agents. I don't want people randomly
gunning down cops, but I do want the people to retain the ability
to forcibly resist their own government. The very concept bothers a
lot of people, but what is the alternative? The alternative is
something a lot scarier: that the people should NOT have the means
to resist their own government.

But, once again, even most people who claim to be vehemently pro-
freedom, don't like to talk about what that really means. Many "gun
rights" organizations, for example, go to great lengths to beg the
politicians to LET them remain armed. Why? At Lexington, when the
British troops told the colonists to lay down their weapons, what
was the response? Did the colonists say, "Awe, can't we keep them,
pretty please?"? No, they had a very different attitude, something
alone the lines of, "You're not the boss of us!"

If you own yourself--and this is a big one--it is not only your
right, but your most profound obligation as a human being, to judge
for yourself what is right and wrong, and to act accordingly. But
what if people claiming to be "authority" want to force you to do
something contrary to what you deem to be right? Do you have an
obligation to obey them, and ignore your own conscience? No. What
if their threats are called "legislation"? It makes no difference.

You are always, at all times, in every situation, obligated to do
what you deem right, no matter what so-called "government" and
"authority" and "law" have to say about it. And when the tyrants
and control freaks, authoritarian thugs and megalomaniacs, try to
tell you that are an evil, nasty, despicable criminal and traitor
for daring to think for yourself, you have a right and duty to
stand firm, and say, with confidence, "You are not the boss of me!"

http://www.larkenrose.com/blogs/tmds-bl ... of-me.html


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Mon Apr 11, 2011 1:32 am

An Inconvenient Truth - The Truth Shall Not Set Us Free
Submitted by Cognitive Dissonance on 04/10/2011 19:17 -0400


An Inconvenient Truth - The Truth Shall Not Set Us Free
By Cognitive Dissonance


There is a widely held belief among those who wish for ‘the truth’ to be exposed that once this is accomplished the insanity will begin to unravel and a new day will dawn. Unfortunately this belief is erroneous, delusional even, and by itself also a part of the insanity. The uncomfortable and extremely inconvenient truth is that ‘truth’, regardless of where it originates or whether it’s really truth or not, will never set us free because the official lies are not the ultimate source of our bondage. Instead the lies are just a small part of the overall control system, a system that relies upon our willing (some would say informed) consent not only to exist but to endure.

Hidden somewhere deep down inside any discussion of true and false statements by politicians, the Bureau of Lies and Statistics (BLS), psyops and disinformation programs, WikiLeaks or any other governmental, corporate or individual propaganda is a simple and fundamental truth that’s widely known but carefully ignored. We are being lied to by hundreds of entities about dozens of different subjects, all for the purpose of maintaining or increasing control and power over the masses. The truth of these fundamental lies is all around us and yet we are still not free.

The only way a relatively small nucleus of people can control a much larger population is through psychological manipulation regardless of whether it’s by way of brutality or baubles. Spending our days minimizing, dismissing or bargaining with these controlling lies is simply the process we use to avoid dealing with our own internal self deception. This is also a well understood and universal truth that is self evident, obvious even, to those who wish to honestly look. Yet it is denied as well.

We hide this fact from ourselves by differentiating between big and small lies, from their evil propaganda and our harmless little tales. And we always tell ourselves the ultimate controlling lie, that we don’t really ‘lie’ so much as we tell small fibs and half truths in order to feel better or to get through the day. We want to believe that we are different from ‘them’, that we know we aren’t really lying because we know ourselves and thus can’t lie. We all deceive ourselves into believing that to ourselves we are true.

The ugly truth is that we expend a tremendous amount of energy each day maintaining our extensive network of internal denial and self deception. The result is a mishmash of fact, fiction and fantasy we call our world view and the act of denial itself becomes such an integrated component of us that for the most part it’s seamless and nearly invisible. The control system enables our denial by feeding us a constant stream of ‘news’ and information that serves to reinforce this internal narrative while massaging our confirmation and normalcy biases.

Why do we need ‘proof’ of something that’s self evident, of something we know to be true? Exactly what sort of proof would satisfy us that we’re being systematically and consistently lied to? More to the point, what would we do once the perfect proof is offered that we would refrain from doing without it? So many of us fall into the trap of demanding specific and infallible proof before we’ll ever consider changing our beliefs, an almost impossible condition to meet and precisely why we require it. Others demand that the liars admit they are lying. What then? Do we forgive them for their past transgressions so we won’t need to confront them (or ourselves) the next time it happens?

What proof of truth (or falsity) do we need to receive in order to be absolutely certain? And will we ever receive enough proof to overcome our aversion to taking a stand and declaring that enough is enough? All of these questions are reasonable queries to ask, but we avoid them like the black plague because following them to their logical conclusion would sweep away all our self deceptions and delusions. Asking these questions, then candidly answering them, would force us to be honest with ourselves, an outcome we collectively and studiously avoid.

Clarity of Vision

Contrary to popular belief clarity of vision, which is what truth and proof is supposed to provide for us, is the last thing we want because clarity removes any remaining plausible deniability we might cling to in order to justify hiding within the faceless herd. Clarity compels action in the same manner that a clear and present danger compels action. If we don’t act once we finally have clarity, especially after demanding it for years, then we must confront our own lack of moral courage. In effect we either deal with this cognitive dissonance or we kick the can down the road and bury our denial in another layer of justification and rationalization.

For example, let’s say you’re startled awake at 3 AM by the apparent sound of someone breaking into your home. Are you going to roll over and fall back to sleep until you receive absolute “proof” of a break in or are you going to react to the information at hand no matter how limited it might be? While the answer might be obvious, the question is so simple it’s often dismissed as silly. I’m not talking about confronting the potential intruder, but simply acknowledging his or her presence instead of demanding more proof before rousting yourself from bed. Of course you’d acknowledge the potential break-in. Then you’d begin to react accordingly.

What it really comes down to is not whether we receive enough proof to act, but rather how close we perceive (or deny) the danger to be in order to overcome our reluctance to deal with whatever it is we are avoiding. The noise downstairs demands our immediate attention because it’s coming from within our home at a time of night when we’re most vulnerable. It’s hard to ignore this frightening situation. However as long as we can successfully deny proximity we can avoid the singularity of confrontation regardless of the actual circumstances.

And a skilful manipulator will encourage our denial using a variety of tools and methods. Consider that the Nazis took deliberate steps to enable the concentration camp inmates to remain in denial about their inevitable destruction. Most knew what was really going on, but the façade was convincing enough to enable just enough denial of proximity to keep the majority calm and under control. This was mutually beneficial for both parties involved, allowing the Nazi’s to use very few guards relative to the large number of inmates. Our master(s) benefit from our denial as well, thus they expend large amounts of energy to enable our denial rather than just forcing the issue.

It appears to me that those who are unaware of, or outright reject, their inner spiritual connection are more likely to engage in fantastical thinking and denial framing all in an effort to deny proximity. Let me make it clear here that I’m not talking about a God or religious entity, but more like a centering or recognition of our presence and purpose within the cosmos.

This ‘knowing’ helps us to maintain a realistic perspective and inner calm when others become deer in the headlights. Our masters are experts at frightening us with continuous fear based mental images of dangerous boogiemen while promising us that the danger will never be proximate to us as long as we do as we’re told. And we play along because doing so enables our own internal dishonesty.

In the case of the downstairs burglar it rapidly progesses well beyond clear and present danger and has morphed into red alert proximity since we’re trapped upstairs and can’t leave without descending the stairs and moving even closer to the very danger we’re trying to avoid. But the insanity coming out of Washington, Europe, Libya, Japan or wherever today’s madness is emanating from is somewhere way over there, meaning not proximate to us and thus easier to push aside and deny.

Learned Helplessness

Until that is the danger is proximate and can no longer be denied. Of course once the obvious can no longer be pushed aside the next step is to trot out another inconvenient truth redefined in the form of an excuse, that the problem is so big that we can’t do anything about it. Intellectually we declare we’re quadriplegics trapped in our own wheelchairs and unable to do anything about the situation. This self victimization is called learned helplessness and it’s an example of how we actively participate in our own impotence and subjugation. And its use is not restricted to the uneducated and poor. In fact it’s a highly refined intellectual tool of the educated and professional classes who twist our self victimization into superiority or entitlement impulses.

What we really want, what we so desperately seek, is for someone else to shoulder the personal and emotional risk that comes with taking responsibility. We definitely want the good outcome, just not the sweat, tears and pain that might also come with it. Our insistence that we know exactly what happened, the so-called truth, followed by our never ending demand for even more proof, is simply our psychological defense to any assault upon our carefully constructed world view that we are just helpless victims and powerless to do anything except to be the perfect injured party and take care of ourselves. This is also the perfect excuse to abandon any sense of obligation to neighbor or community.

The beauty of being the unfortunate victim, of being a planned and intentional failure even if that plan is on a subconscious level, is that this condition is easily accomplished and usually requires little to no active participation on our part. Thus our needed plausible deniability comes from doing nothing, which then reinforces our apathy and justifies our inaction. It just doesn’t get any better than this. All that’s left to do is to construct an intellectual shield stout enough to justify our inaction, child’s play after decades of personal experience shifting blame to the spouse, sibling, boogie man, politician, dog or boss. Our ego immediately takes over and skillfully massages our lying eyes and guilt feelings.

Lost to Ourselves

It’s important for the reader to understand that I’m not necessarily speaking of professional, career or even political failure when I address the concept of being a planned failure. Ultimately these are all artificial constructs, fantasy representations of our denied inner being, the outward manifestation of an ‘us’ we wish to project to those around us for a variety of reasons and purposes. Instead what I’m referring to is our inner being, our spiritual entity, our essence, that part of us that might be called the soul which only we answer to.

This unique sanctuary, our own safe haven or refuge we can flee to when we wish to engage in contemplation and reflection, can be the source of our inner strength and moral courage in the face of hostility or our pitiful failure to be a moral person and spiritual entity. Because we cannot hide from ourselves while visiting our inner being, for the patently self deceptive this is a place to avoid at all costs.

The external ‘us’ often has little connection to our true inner self unless it is deliberately pursued and sought after. Our inner being doesn’t come looking for you or me, but rather the other way around. I have found that the more superficial our outer skin is, the further away we are from connecting to our inner truth and meaning, often described as our centering, knowing or intuition.

The weaker the connection to our inner self the more desperate we become to believe the self validating lie that if only we knew what really happened with unerring proof it would expose our external tormentor (and keep our internal one hidden as well) thus forcing other people to finally act. Is it really surprising that someone who lacks moral courage and strength would try to find others to do his or her bidding?

We convince ourselves that with absolute proof of the official lies in hand the illusion would be unequivocally exposed, thus compelling ‘we the people’ (meaning ‘other’ people) to reject them and it. This is the lie we tell ourselves to remain hidden from ourselves and safely within the consensus herd which acts as an extremely poor substitute for our missing inner communication.

We wish to believe that simply knowing the truth will somehow displace the lie, similar to Archimedes splashing water over the sides of the tub as he settles in for his weekly soak. Somehow this absolves us from the obligation to act because "the truth" is now known and the liars will wither away in the bright disinfecting sunlight of truth, justice and the American way. The ugly truth is that a ‘truth’ (as well as a ‘lie’) has power only when it’s embraced, not simply because it exists. Since we don’t wish to embrace the inner truth, we must support the external lies in order to use them to feed our plausible deniability. While we might not fully understand this form of self deception our masters are well aware of it and skillfully use it against us.

Many truths lay abandoned on the side of the road for years, decades even, because their abandonment serves the needs of nearly everyone, not just the official liars, to ignore their own culpability. Once a truth is exposed the liars have no control over the truth except in their (our) ability to convince us to ignore or distort it. The spin doctor’s only purpose is to enable our own self deception. They don’t ‘hide’ the truth as much as they help convince us that it’s in our own best interest to ignore or distort it. You really don’t want to look in there, do you? The con man never forces the mark, but rather skillfully leverages the situation.

Seductive Submission

This entire process reminds me of the quintessential seduction scene in a Harlequin romance novel. The women is ‘taken’, seduced in the arms of someone who may or may not have her best interest at heart. Very little is said about her willingness to believe the lies and promises, of her own desire to suspend disbelief and accept the attractive lies, other than to present the supposedly mitigating factor that she’s emotionally overwhelmed and thus ‘not herself’. After all if you’re not yourself you certainly can’t be held responsible for anything your ‘self’ might do, right? Naturally no one wants to ask where we might find the ‘self’ if it’s not ‘here’.

She’s being told what she wants to hear and its music to her ears. The incredible natural high we receive when our egoic lies are confirmed by outside sources, conceits we actively solicit precisely because they induce that endorphin buzz, puts to shame any man made pharmacological magic created to date.

Of course this behavior isn’t restricted to the fairer sex. Males are just as accomplished at self medicating as the female side of the species. I guess surrendering to passionate desire (and greed) is justification for any transgression as long as the emotion is pure, intoxicating and oh so good. We wouldn’t let our children get away with a bullshit excuse like this yet it seems fine and dandy for the adults in the room.

This is a classic example of self victimization, but it’s diplomatically presented as a near innocent who is being intentionally harmed by a scheming evil doer who’s only after her lying labia lips. Notice that it’s rarely pointed out how the liar would never be in her arms in the first place without her willing consent and active participation. We hear about his ‘power’ over her, but very little about her willingness to submit and let someone else be responsible for her (in) actions.

Layers of self deception this deep can only occur when we are patently dishonest with ourselves, yet this type of behavior is glorified in far more ways than just romance novels. Nationalism is a perfect example of the process we use to allow ourselves to be controlled by others, to surrender to the herd mentality and any responsibility for our actions. We’re all familiar with the seductive urge and the invisible pull to engage in herd behavior where the anonymity of the crowd washes away any personal responsibility for ones actions.

There’s nothing more we need to know, no other proof needed, other than the certain knowledge that we are lied to on a daily basis. This is obvious and widely known, but rarely openly acknowledged. Our need to know the truth and our demand for unequivocal proof that it is the truth, proof that we often insist must come from a person of ‘authority’ (usually one of the authorities who told us the lie in the first place) is a reflection of our inner reluctance to remove the liars from our lives, starting within ourselves.

Doing so would require us to move out of our comfort zone and face who and what we really are, co-conspirators and dance partners rather than helpless soap bubbles blowing in the wind. Our masters know this and to further enable our self deception they constantly shrink our comfort zones, giving us all the more reason to remain safely huddled within our contracting world.

We say we want freedom yet true freedom is just as frightening to us as truth itself. For the most part we are kept animals and as distasteful as this may be to our sensitive egos we like it this way. Many years ago I overheard one woman tell another that “Children like it when we set boundaries and rules for them.” I agree. Very young children want, in fact need, to know they are safe in a world that is capricious and unfathomable.

So it makes sense that externally imposed rules and boundaries would give children an artificially implanted sense of order and predictability, at least until their own conditioning is complete and they can maintain their own illusion of personal safety through denial. The same applies to us as adults. We all want our freedom just as long as it comes with a reasonably clear set of rules that thankfully keeps us from straying to far into personal accountability and responsibility.

Love Your Captivity

While few among us would actually admit this we are trained to love our hamster wheels and for the most part we do. Or more accurately, we fear having no hamster wheel because then we would need to be self sufficient and personally responsible for all our actions in a world that has no overall order imposed upon us. That’s the key difference here because presently the prevailing attitude amongst us hamsters is quite simple. Just show me the maze, hand me the rule book and I’ll figure it out as I go along. Or at least I’ll survive long enough to feed and breed. This is of course a crass oversimplification of our social order, but you get the idea.

Because we allow ourselves to be seduced by the rules of a world that’s created for us we are easily manipulated by the controllers and the control system. It does this by making the rules……wait for it……wait for it……capricious and unfathomable if we don’t submit to the whip. By surrendering our inalienable right (and I submit our inner moral and spiritual duty) to be free and independent souls in return for a set of externally created and manipulated rules and conditions we condemn ourselves to a life of predictable infantile responses that are easily controlled.

The cognitive barriers that define our comfort zone and the lines we claim we don’t wish to be violated are all an illusion presented to us. And after sufficient assimilation they are perpetuated by us. They are thus easily modified by us each time the line is crossed by the liar, affording all of the liars plenty of wiggle room. “OK, I’ll give you one more chance. But don’t cross this line or next time you’re really gonna get it.” The inconvenient truth is that the battle isn’t with the external liars; it is with us and within us. And our external liars, our masters, unquestionably know this which is precisely why the insanity is escalating as they pile lies on top of more lies.

As this spinning top begins to wobble out of control and despite our protestations and demands for the truth, we really don’t want the lies to stop because if they do the day of our own internal reckoning will also be at hand. The definition of collective insanity is our willingness to be destroyed as a group so long as we are not judged as individuals. Or worse that we are not forced to judge ourselves. But even this we’ll deny knowing in order to maintain our plausible deniability. Thus we begin to understand the reason for the continued lying by all the parties involved, victims as well as the victimizers, and why I constantly describe the insanity at its most basic level as self induced.

We talk about financial moral hazard on Wall Street and within the Too Big To Fail (TBTF) banks as central to their escalating greed and corruption. And yet we all participate in a similar social moral hazard that fully enables our abusers. We’re trapped inside this insanity because to acknowledge it means dealing with a life time of denial. It’s so much easier to accept one more beating by our master rather than to come to terms with a lifetime of self abuse.

Presumed Informed Consent

Tragically, because we willingly participate in our own subjugation, regardless of whether it’s occurring on a conscious or subconscious level, the abusers see this as informed consent and the green light to continue the abuse. This is why they often tell us exactly how they’re going to abuse us long before doing so. In our role as victim we declare the abusers to be sociopaths and ourselves as virginal bleeders in order to shift blame and responsibility away from ourselves. It’s all part of the dance of denial and the abuser will accept the role of the heavy in exchange for his or her own rewards.

We may say we want the abuse to stop, but our verbal and non verbal communication says otherwise. How is this any different from the Harlequin woman saying “No, please stop” in the arms of her seducer while returning each kiss with passionate urgency? This is the unspoken communication between the abused and the abuser that is witness to and evidence of the real insanity of the dysfunctional relationship, regardless of whether it’s between husband and wife, nation and citizens or Ponzi and the world.

By the way I am in no way, shape or form justifying or condoning the abuser, rapist or thief simply because I’m explaining the process involved along with our own participation. My position is simple. If we can’t even honestly discuss our own weaknesses and foibles, we are well beyond self redemption. I often say that we are only as sick as our deepest darkest secrets and examining how much of our world is considered verboten and not to be discussed demonstrates this concept superbly.

We’ve all been in relationships where the dysfunctional discourse goes something like this. I won’t ask difficult questions of you if you won’t ask them of me. And I’m not talking about being sensitive to someone’s unsightly mole or dandruff, but rather avoiding a healthy discussion about our spouse’s basic character flaws in order to be spared our own undressing.

This is the fundamental basis for all dysfunctional relationships, including the present one between an intentionally self absorbed and distracted population and our enabling and manipulative masters. As long as we are given the choice between believing the lies and rejecting them, the vast majority will accept the lie rather than risk the perceived emotional and psychological harm of challenging our victimhood which supports our fantasy view of how the world works.

Because we don’t wish to undergo a rigorous self appraisal or emotional unveiling, we completely blow out of proportion the intellectual and emotional harm we will suffer if we do so. This serves the dual purpose of creating plausible deniability while feeding our inner victim. In this way we fulfill both roles of the dysfunctional relationship, that of the abuser and the abused. I call this process a familiar circle jerk with me, myself and I. Add anyone else and the room would become too crowded.

The master’s lies are a direct and personal challenge delivered to us on a daily basis and our controllers know that as long as their lies are not seriously confronted they are safe………and so are we. So they work very hard at keeping the lies from being contested, expertly using a variety of tools including ridicule to turn public opinion against truth. In reality it’s really not that hard to seduce us with lies when so very few of us really wish to hear the truth to begin with.

This explains perfectly the assault upon Assange and Wikileaks from all sides. He’s promoting himself as a truth speaker and thus challenging the lies not so much by what he’s exposing, but by the very fact that he exists. He is a danger to everyone, not just the official liars. If he is accepted as a truth speaker, we the people must then do something about the truths he speaks of. We definitely don’t wish to be forced to confront those who lie to us because then we would be required to openly admit we participated in the lying. This is why we want them to lie, to allow us to remain out of harm’s way. “Daddy, tell me another lie so that I can believe it’s the truth.”

True or False, it Doesn't Matter

Assaulting the truth messenger also removes the need to know if he’s a disinformation agent or a real truth speaker. What’s missed entirely in this discussion is that it doesn't matter if he is or is not a psyops operative. It's the message of ‘truth’ he's delivering that’s the source of our power, not the actual revelations. The powers that be don’t fear the truth; they fear people embracing the truth. Ultimately this is the secret to our inner peace and freedom. Understand that it is not the truth that will set us free because we can free ourselves at any time. The inconvenient truth is that perpetually seeking the truth while doing nothing about the ‘truths’ already established is the crutch we use to avoid facing the original lies that begin within.

When we have abandoned the willingness to honestly look within for truth, when we are complete strangers to ourselves and no longer posses the capacity to 'know' something without the need for external affirmation we then desperately turn to poor substitutes from corrupted external sources. This is why there’s an increasingly desperate need by the population at large to seek 'proof', 'truth' and 'facts’ which must always be secured from those who are widely considered to be 'authorities'. The only authoritative source worth consulting when seeking truth lay deep within us, unless of course we are also hopelessly corrupted.

Once we are completely lost within our own insane world of distortions, lies and self deception we become obsessed with finding ‘truth’ everywhere else in order to validate and sanctify ourselves so that we may continue to perpetuate our own lying. This infantile need for affirmation after we have lied to ourselves and to others is similar to the child who has just lied, then seeks confirmation from the authority figure that the child is still loved. Often the adult knows s/he was just lied to, but chooses to say nothing to prevent opening their own can of worms. This in effect makes the lie socially acceptable and further cements the bond between the two dysfunctional parties. It’s also how we teach our children the art of self deception.

The pathological liars and self deceivers we have become serves to compel us to continuously seek external affirmation that we are not a ‘bad’ liar, meaning socially unacceptable, precisely because we can’t provide that ‘proof’ internally. We can’t hide from our own lies since the one thing we always know is the source of them. As was so wonderfully illustrated in the movie ‘Inception’ we know where the root of the lie originates, thus we must dig ever deeper into our own insanity in order to bury our self deception. This in turn just compounds our raging dysfunction. Because everyone engages in this behavior, yet no one talks about it, everyone’s insanity is considered to be a normal part of human nature.

This is the pathology of our insanity and precisely why it must be vigorously dug out and then thoroughly rejected. A quick splash of paint or a rough wall papering will not suffice. If this is not done, ultimately we revert to worshiping Golden Truth Idols and false True Gods as saviors of our lost and abandoned souls. If we are honest in our desire to seek truth and we begin a fearless search within, we eventually come to realize that the external seeking of ‘truth’ is immaterial and all just part of the control system we gratefully embrace in order to hide from ourselves.



04-10-2011



Cognitive Dissonance

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/inconv ... et-us-free



*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Mon Apr 18, 2011 7:56 pm

*

Letter to The Red Menace #4

What Bakunin said

Red Menace:

Your issue discussing the Marx-Bakunin dispute complains that anarchists merely talk around Marxism, rather than getting down to Marx's actual words and intent. But you then violate this stricture yourselves by not actually facing what Bakunin himself said. I am hoping that you'll print these following quotes, so as to provide your readers with at least a slice of Bakunin's critique and social vision.


“The leaders of the Communist Party, namely Mr. Marx and his followers, will concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand. They will centralize all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production, and then divide the masses into two armies — industrial and agricultural — under the direct command of state engineers, who will constitute a new privileged scientific and political class.” 1873.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat... In reality it would be for the proletariat a barrack regime where the standardized mass of men and women workers would wake, sleep, work and live to the beat of a drum; for the clever and learned a privilege, of governing: and for the mercenary minded, attracted by the State Bank, a vast field of lucrative jobbery.” 1869.

“The programme of the International is very happily explicit: the emancipation of the workers can only be gained by the workers themselves. Is it not astonishing that Marx has believed it possible to graft on this never-the-less so precise declaration, which he publically drafted himself, his scientific socialism? That is to say, the organization of the government of the new society by socialistic scientists and professors - the worst of all despotic governments! 1872.

“No dictatorship can have any other aim but that of self-perpetuation and it can beget only slavery in the people tolerating it; freedom can be created only by freedom.” 1872.

“We who are Materialists and Determinists, just as much as Marx himself, we also recognize the inevitable linking of economic and political facts in history. We recognize, indeed, the necessity, the inevitable character of all events, but we do not bow before them indifferently and above all we are careful about praising them when, by their nature, they show themselves in flagrant opposition to the supreme end of history... the triumph of humanity... by the absolute free and spontaneous organization of economic and social solidarity as completely as possible between all human beings living on earth.

... The Marxists do not reject our program absolutely. They only reproach us with wanting to hasten, to outstrip, the slow march of history and to ignore the scientific law of successive evolutions. Having had the thoroughly German nerve to proclaim in their works consecrated to the philosophical analysis of the past that the bloody defeat of the insurgent peasants of Germany and the triumph of the despotic states in the sixteenth century constituted a great revolutionary progress, they today have the nerve to satisfy themselves with establishing a new despotism to the so-called profit of the urban workers and to the detriment of the toilers of the countryside...

... Mr. Engels, driven on by the same logic, in a letter addressed to one of our friends, Carlo Cafiera, was able to say, without the least irony, but on the contrary, very seriously, that Bismark as well as King Victor Emmanuel II had rendered immense services to the revolution, both of them having created political centralization in their respective countries. I urge the French allies and sympathizers of Mr. Marx to carefully examine how this Marxist concept is being applied in the International.” 1872.

“To support his programme of the conquest of political power, Marx has a very special theory which is, moreover, only a logical consequence of his whole system. The political condition of each country, says he, is always the faithful expression of its economic situation; to change the former it is only necessary to transform the latter. According to Marx, all the secret of historic evolution is there. He takes no account of other elements of history, such as the quite obvious reaction of political., juridical and religious institutions on the economic situation. He says: 'Poverty produces political slavery, the State.' But he does not allow this expression to be turned around to say, 'Political slavery, the State, reproduces in its turn, and maintains poverty as a condition of its own existence, so that, in order to destroy poverty, it is necessary to destroy the State!'” 1872.

Either one destroys the State or one must accept the vilest and most fearful lie of our century: the red bureaucracy.”

“Freedom without socialism is privilege and justice, and socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.”

In a subsequent letter I'd like to go into Bakunin's actual words on his programme for federative communalism and a world-wide federation and industrial parliament based on revolutionary industrial unions.

Gary Jewell
Delegate, IWW Defense Local 2

http://www.connexions.org/RedMenace/Doc ... Jewell.htm


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Sun Apr 24, 2011 10:38 am

23 wrote:I have a problem with the prevailing perception that the Greek origin of anarchy is without government.

I always thought that ἀναρχίᾱ (anarchíā) meant without ruler. Which is not necessarily the same as without government.

You can have a government that is not coercively authoritarian or intrusive... ergo not a ruling one.

A hub can serve a valuable function to its connected spokes in a wheel... providing the hub doesn't expect its spokes to serve it.

I am a strong advocate of decentralized self-management. And practiced it in many capacities at the workplace.

I think that it's important to point out, however, that anarchy should not necessarily include the absence of a government. The absence of a ruler is another story.


depends on what you mean by government.




Unequal Protection: Jefferson Versus the Corporate Aristocracy
Tuesday 19 April 2011
by: Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Thomas Jefferson. (Image: Gilbert Stuart / cliff1066™; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against.

— Samuel Webster, 1777


Although the first shots were fired in 1775 and the Declaration was signed in 1776, the war against a transnational corporation and the nation that used it to extract wealth from its colonies had just begun. These colonists, facing the biggest empire and military force in the world, fought for five more years—the war didn’t end until General Charles Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. Even then some resistance remained; the last loyalists and the British left New York starting in April 1782, and the treaty that formally ended the war was signed in Paris in September 1783.

The first form of government, the Articles of Confederation, was written in 1777 and endorsed by the states in 1781. It was subsequently replaced by our current Constitution, as has been documented in many books. In this chapter we take a look at the visions that motivated what Alexis de Tocqueville would later call America’s experiment with democracy in a republic. One of its most conspicuous features was the lack of vast wealth or any sort of corporation that resembled the East India Company—until the early 1800s.

The First Glimpses of a Powerful American Company

Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.

In fact, most of the Founders never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of George R. T. Hewes’s “ships of an enormous burthen” with “immense quantities” of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.

In a speech before the House of Representatives on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as the great staple of America. He added, “I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.”1

In a National Gazette article on March 3, 1792, Madison wrote,

The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself.2


The first large privately owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801 to 1809) and Madison (1809 to 1817) was the Second Bank of the United States. By 1830 the bank was one of the largest and most powerful private corporations and, to extend its own power, was even sponsoring its directors and agents as candidates for political office.

In President Andrew Jackson’s annual message to Congress on December 3, 1833, he explicitly demanded that the bank cease its political activities or receive a corporate death sentence—revocation of its corporate charter. He said, “In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions.”3

Jackson succeeded in forcing a withdrawal of all federal funds from the bank that year, putting it out of business. Its federal charter expired in 1836 and was revived only as a state bank authorized by the State of Pennsylvania. It went bankrupt in 1841.

Although thousands of federal, state, county, city, and community laws of the time restrained corporations vastly more than they are today, the presidents who followed Jackson continued to worry out loud about the implications if corporations expanded their power.

In the middle of the thirty-year struggle, on March 10, 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue:

With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable....they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered.4


Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren’t obvious to him when he was helping write the U.S. Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.

The Federalists versus the Democratic Republicans

Shortly after George Washington became the first president of the United States in 1789, his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, proposed that the federal government incorporate a national bank and assume state debts left over from the Revolutionary War. Congressman James Madison and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson saw this as an inappropriate role for the federal government, representing the potential concentration of too much money and power. (The Bill of Rights, with its Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states, wouldn’t be ratified for two more years.)

Also See Thom Hartmann's latest video, "The Daily Take: Thomas Jefferson's Three Greatest Fears":

The disagreement over the bank and assuming the states’ debt nearly tore apart the new government and led to the creation—by Hamilton, Washington, and Vice President John Adams (among others, including Thomas and Charles Pinckney, Rufus King, DeWitt Clinton, and John Jay)—of the Federallist Party.

Several factions arose in opposition to the Federalists, broadly referred to as the Anti-Federalists, including two groups who called themselves Democrats and Republicans. Jefferson pulled them together by 1794 into the Democratic Republican Party (which dropped the word Republican from its name in the early 1830s, today known as the Democratic Party, the world’s oldest and longest-lived political party), united in their opposition to the Federalists’ ideas of a strong central government that could grant the power to incorporate a national bank and bestow benefits to favored businesses through the use of tariffs and trade regulation.

During the Washington and Adams presidencies, however, the Federalists reigned, and Hamilton was successful in pushing through his programs for assuming state debts, creating a United States Bank and a network of bounties and tariffs to benefit emerging industries and businesses.

In 1794 independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton’s federal taxes on their product, calling them “unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.”5

The whiskey distillers tarred and feathered a tax collector and pulled together a local militia of seven thousand men. But President Washington issued two federal orders and sent in General Henry Lee, commanding militias from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. To demonstrate his authority as commander in chief, Washington rode at the head of the soldiers in their initial attack.

The Whiskey Rebellion was put down, and the power of the Federalists wasn’t questioned again until the election of 1800, which Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party won, in a contest referred to as the Second American Revolution or the Revolution of 1800.

In the election of 1804, the Federalists carried only Delaware, Connecticut, and part of Maryland against Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans; and by 1832, as the Industrial Revolution was taking hold of America, the Federalists were so marginalized that they ceased to exist as an organized party, being largely replaced by the short-lived Whigs, who were themselves replaced by today’s Republican Party, organized in the 1850s.

Jefferson and Natural Rights

Back in the earliest days of the United States, Jefferson didn’t anticipate the scope, meaning, and consequences of the Industrial Revolution that was just starting to gather steam in Europe about the time he was entering politics in the Virginia House of Burgesses. He distrusted letting companies have too much power, but he was focusing on the concept of “natural rights,” an idea that was at the core of the writings and the speeches of most of the Revolutionary-era generation, from Thomas Paine to Patrick Henry to Benjamin Franklin.

In Jefferson’s mind “the natural rights of man” were enjoyed by Jefferson’s ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson’s life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson’s birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.

Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1690, in his Second Treatise of Government, Locke put forth one of the most well-known definitions of the natural rights that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote, “All men by nature are equal...in that equal right that every man hath to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions...”

As to the role of government, Locke wrote, “Men being...by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living...in a secure enjoyment of their properties...”

This natural right was asserted by Jefferson first in his Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, in which he wrote, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” His first draft of the Declaration of Independence similarly declared, “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all Men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”6

Individuals asserted those natural rights in the form of a representative government that they controlled, and that same government also protected their natural rights from all the forces that in previous lands had dominated, enslaved, and taken advantage of them.

The Three Threats

Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America was quite straightforward. In its simplest form, he saw a society where people were first and institutions were second. In his day Jefferson saw three agencies that were threats to humans’ natural rights:

* Governments (particularly in the form of kingdoms and elite groups like the Federalists)

* Organized religions* (he rewrote the New Testament to take out all the “miracles” so that in The Jefferson Bible—which is still in print—Jesus became a proponent of natural rights and peace)

* Commercial monopolies and the “pseudo aristoi,” or pseudo aristocracy (in the form of extremely wealthy individuals and overly powerful corporations)


Instead he believed it was possible for people to live by self-government in a nation in which nobody controlled the people except the people themselves. He found evidence for this belief both in the cultures of Native Americans such as the Cherokee and the Iroquois Confederation, which he studied extensively; in the political experiments of the Greeks; and in histories that documented the lives of his own tribal ancestors in England and Wales.

Jefferson Considers Freedom against Monopolies a Basic Right

Once the Revolutionary War was over and the Constitution had been worked out and presented to the states for ratification, Jefferson turned his attention to what he and Madison felt was a terrible inadequacy in the new Constitution: it didn’t explicitly stipulate the natural rights of the new nation’s citizens, and it didn’t protect against the rise of new commercial monopolies like the East India Company.

On December 20, 1787, Jefferson wrote to James Madison about his concerns regarding the Constitution. He said bluntly that it was deficient in several areas:

I will now tell you what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly, and without the aid of sophism, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction of monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land, and not by the laws of nations.7


Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn’t be limited to America, Jefferson believed. “Let me add,” he summarized, “that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular; and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”

In 1788 Jefferson wrote about his concerns to several people. In a letter to Alexander Donald, on February 7, he defined the items that should be in a bill of rights. “By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil, which no honest government should decline.”8

Jefferson kept pushing for a law, written into the Constitution as an amendment, which would prevent companies from growing so large that they could dominate entire industries or have the power to influence the people’s government.

On February 12, 1788, he wrote to Mr. Dumas about his pleasure that the U.S. Constitution was about to be ratified, but he also expressed his concerns about what was missing from the Constitution. He was pushing hard for his own state to reject the Constitution if it didn’t protect people from the dangers he foresaw:

With respect to the new Government, nine or ten States will probably have accepted by the end of this month. The others may oppose it. Virginia, I think, will be of this number. Besides other objections of less moment, she [Virginia] will insist on annexing a bill of rights to the new Constitution, i.e. a bill wherein the Government shall declare that, 1. Religion shall be free; 2. Printing presses free; 3. Trials by jury preserved in all cases; 4. No monopolies in commerce; 5. No standing army. Upon receiving this bill of rights, she will probably depart from her other objections; and this bill is so much to the interest of all the States, that I presume they will offer it, and thus our Constitution be amended, and our Union closed by the end of the present year.9


By midsummer of 1788, things were moving along, and Jefferson was helping his close friend James Madison write the Bill of Rights. On the last day of July, he wrote to Madison,

I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine States. It is a good canvass, on which some strokes only want retouching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from north to south, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood, that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion, and monopolies.10


The following year, on March 13, he wrote to Francis Hopkinson about continuing objection to monopolies:

You say that I have been dished up to you as an anti-federalist, and ask me if it be just. My opinion was never worthy enough of notice to merit citing; but since you ask it, I will tell it to you. I am not a federalist....What I disapproved from the first moment also, was the want of a bill of rights, to guard liberty against the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government; that is to say, to secure freedom in religion, freedom of the press, freedom from monopolies, freedom from unlawful imprisonment, freedom from a permanent military, and a trial by jury, in all cases determinable by the laws of the land.11


All of Jefferson’s wishes, except two, would soon come true. But not all of his views were shared universally.

The Rise of an American Corporate Aristocracy

Years later, on October 28, 1813, Jefferson would write to John Adams about their earlier disagreements over whether a government should be run by the wealthy and powerful few (the pseudo-aristoi) or a group of the most wise and capable people (the “natural aristocracy”), elected from the larger class of all Americans, including working people:

The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy. On the question, what is the best provision, you and I differ; but we differ as rational friends, using the free exercise of our own reason, and mutually indulging its errors. You think it best to put the pseudo-aristoi into a separate chamber of legislation [the Senate], where they may be hindered from doing mischief by their coordinate branches, and where, also, they may be a protection to wealth against the agrarian and plundering enterprises of the majority of the people. I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil.12


Adams and the Federalists were wary of the common person (who Adams referred to as “the rabble”), and many subscribed to the Calvinist notion that wealth was a sign of certification or blessing from above and a certain minimum level of morality. Because the Senate of the United States was appointed by the states (not elected by the voters, until 1913) and made up entirely of wealthy men, it was mostly on the Federalist side. Jefferson and the Democratic Republicans disagreed strongly with the notion of a Senate composed of the wealthy and powerful.

“Mischief may be done negatively as well as positively,” Jefferson wrote to Adams in the next paragraph of that 1813 letter, still arguing for a directly elected Senate:

Of this, a cabal in the Senate of the United States has furnished many proofs. Nor do I believe them necessary to protect the wealthy; because enough of these will find their way into every branch of the legislation, to protect themselves....I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the really good and wise. In some instances, wealth may corrupt, and birth blind them; but not in sufficient degree to endanger the society.

Jefferson’s vision of a more egalitarian Senate—directly elected by the people instead of by state legislators—finally became law in 1913 with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, promoted by the Populist Movement and passed on a wave of public disgust with the corruption of the political process by giant corporations.

Almost all of Jefferson’s visions for a Bill of Rights—all except “freedom from monopolies in commerce” and his concern about a permanent army— were incorporated into the actual Bill of Rights, which James Madison shepherded through Congress and was ratified on December 15, 1791.

But the Federalists fought hard to keep “freedom from monopolies” out of the Constitution. And they won. The result was a boon for very large businesses in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which arguably brought our nation and much of the world many blessings.

But as we’ll see in the way things have unfolded, some of those same principles have also given unexpected influence to the very monopolies Jefferson had argued must be constrained from the beginning. The result has sometimes been the same kind of problem the Tea Party rebels had risked their lives to fight: a situation in which the government protects one competitor against all others and against the will of the people whose money is at stake—along with their freedom of choice.

As the country progressed through the early 1800s, corporations were generally constrained to act within reasonable civic boundaries. In the next chapter, we examine how Americans and their government viewed the role of corporations, up to the time of the Civil War and its subsequent amendments.

Notes:

The First Amendment protected citizens from the predations of churches by guaranteeing freedom of religion in a new nation that still had states and cities that demanded obedience to and weekly participation in state-recognized churches or religious doctrine. The Ninth Amendment was a direct and clear acknowledgement of Jefferson’s concept of the natural right of humans to hold all personal powers that they haven’t specifically and intentionally given to their government of their own free will. It reads, in its entirety, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, April 9, 1789, in James Madison, The Writings of James Madison, vol. 5., ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1900): 342–45.

James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, March 3, 1792, http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/?opt ... how.php%3F title=875&chapter=63884&layout=html&Itemid=27.

Andrew Jackson, fifth annual message to Congress, December 3, 1833, http://miller center.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3640.

James Madison to James K. Paulding, March 10, 1827, http://oll.libertyfund.org/ ?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1940&chapter=119324&layout= html&Itemid=27.

A statement by Albert Gallatin, who later became secretary of the Treasury after the Federalists lost power.

This early draft of the Declaration of Independence can be viewed at http://www.us history.org/declaration/document/rough.htm.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787, http://teachingamerican history.org/library/index.asp?document=306.

Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788, http://press-pubs.uchicago .edu/founders/documents/a7s12.html.

Thomas Jefferson to Mr. Dumas, February 12, 1788.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, July 31, 1788, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/ library/index.asp?document=998.

Thomas Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/ tj3/writings/brf/jefl75.htm.

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/ writings/brf/jefl223.htm.


http://www.truth-out.org/unequal-protec ... 1303196400


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby 23 » Sun Apr 24, 2011 11:04 am

I like what Samual Webster said, in your post above:

"Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against."

All kinds and degrees of oppression. Of which government can be, and often is, one.

As for Jefferson's strong advocacy of our natural rights, I'm opining that, like Webster, he was concerned about not having them be oppressed.

By whatever form the oppressor may take. Government often being a popular form.

The key distinction, to me, is not that all government is to be shunned. Only the oppressive forms.
"Once you label me, you negate me." — Soren Kierkegaard
User avatar
23
 
Posts: 1548
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:57 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Sat May 14, 2011 6:11 am

WOMEN, WORK, AND PROTEST IN THE EARLY LOWELL MILLS: "THE OPPRESSING HAND OF AVARICE WOULD ENSLAVE US"

by Thomas Dublin

from

Labor History 16 (1975): 99-116.
Carfax Publishing Limited
PO BOx 25
Abingdon Oxfordshire OX14 3UE
United Kingodm

In the years before 1850 the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts were a celebrated economic and cultural institution. Foreign visitors invariably included them on their American tours. Interest was prompted by the massive scale of these mills, the astonishing productivity of the power-driven machinery, and the fact that women comprised most of the workforce. Visitors were struck by the newness of both mills and city as well as by the culture of the female operatives. The scene stood in sharp contrast to the gloomy mill towns of the English industrial revolution.


Lowell was, in fact, an impressive accomplishment. In 1820 there had been no city at all--only a dozen family farms along the Merrimack River in East Chelmsford. In 1821, however, a group of Boston capitalists purchased land and water rights along the river and a nearby canal, and began to build a major textile manufacturing center. Opening two years later, the first factory employed Yankee women recruited from the nearby countryside. Additional mills were constructed until, by 1840, ten textile corporations with thirty-two mills valued at more then ten million dollars lined the banks of the river and nearby canals. (1) Adjacent to the mills were rows of company boarding houses and tenements which accommodated most of the 8,000 factory operatives.


As Lowell expanded and became the nation's largest textile manufacturing center, the experiences of women operatives changed as well. The increasing number of firms in Lowell and in other mill towns brought the pressure of competition. Overproduction became a problem and the prices of finished cloth decreased. The high profits of the early years declined and so, too, did conditions for the mill operatives. Wages were reduced and the pace of work within the mills was stepped up. Women operatives did not accept these changes without protest. In 1834 and 1836 they went on strike to protest wage cuts, and between 1843 and 1848 they mounted petition campaigns aimed at reducing the hours of labor in the mills.


These labor protests in early Lowell contribute to our understanding of the response of workers to the growth of industrial capitalism in the first half of the 19th century. They indicate the importance of values and attitudes dating back to an earlier period and also the transformation of these values in a new setting.


The major factor in the rise of a new consciousness among operatives in Lowell was the development of a close-knit community among women working in the mills. The structure of work and the nature of housing contributed to the growth of this community. The existence of community among woman, in turn, was an important element in the repeated labor protests of the period.


The organization of this paper derives from the logic of the above argument. It will examine the basis of community in the experiences of women operatives and then the contribution that the community of women made to the labor protests in these years as well as the nature of the new consciousness expressed by these protests.


The preconditions for the labor unrest in Lowell before 1850 may be found in the study of the daily worklife of its operatives. In their everyday, relatively conflict-free lives, mill women created the mutual bonds which made possible united action in times of crisis. The existence of a tight-knit community among them was the most important element in determining the collective, as opposed to individual, nature of this response.


Before examining the basis of community among women operatives in early Lowell, it may be helpful to indicate in what sense "community" is being used. The women are considered a "community" because of the development of bonds of mutual dependence among them. In this period they came to depend upon one another and upon the larger group of operatives in very important ways. Their experiences were not simply similar or parallel to one another, but were inextricably intertwined. Furthermore, they were conscious of the existence of community, expressing it very clearly in their writings and in labor protests. "Community" for them had objective and subjective dimensions and both were important in their experience of women in the mills.


The mutual dependence among women in early Lowell was rooted in the structure of mill work itself. Newcomers to the mills were particularly dependent on their fellow operatives, but even experienced hands relied on one another for considerable support.


New operatives generally found their first experiences difficult, even harrowing, though they may have already done considerable hand-spinning and weaving in their own homes. The initiation of one of them is described in fiction in the Lowell Offering:



The next morning she went to the Mill; and at first the sight of so many bands, and wheels, and springs in constant motion, was very frightful. She felt afraid to touch the loom, and she was almost sure she could never learn to weave...the shuttle flew out, and made a new bump on her head; and the first time she tried to spring the lathe, she broke out a quarter of the treads. (2)


While other accounts present a somewhat less difficult picture, most indicate that women only became proficient and felt satisfaction in their work after several months in the mills. (3)


The textile corporations made provisions to ease the adjustment of new operatives. Newcomers were not immediately expected to fit into the mill's regular work routine. They were at first assigned work as sparehands and were paid a daily wage independent of the quantity of work they turned out. As a sparehand, the newcomer worked with an experienced hand who instructed her in the intricacies of the job. The sparehand spelled her partner for short stretches of time, and occasionally took the place of an absentee. One woman described the learning process in a letter reprinted in the Offering:



Well I went into the mill, and was put to learn with a very patient girl. ... You cannot think how odd everything seems ... They set me threading shuttles, and tying weaver's knots, and such things, and now I have improved so that I can take care of one loom. I could take care of two if only I had eyes in the back part of my head ... (4)

After the passage of some weeks or months, when she could handle the normal complement of machinery--two looms for weavers during the 1830s--and when a regular operative departed, leaving an opening, the sparehand moved into a regular job.


Through this system of job training, the textile corporations contributed to the development of community among female operatives. During the most difficult period in an operative's career, the first months in the mill, she relied upon other women workers for training and support. And for every sparehand whose adjustment to mill work was aided in this process, there was an experienced operative whose work was also affected. Women were relating to one another during the work process and not simply tending their machinery. Given the high rate of turnover in the mill workforce, a large proportion of women operatives worked in pairs. At the Hamilton Company in July 1836, for example, more than a fifth of all females on the Company payroll were sparehands. (5) Consequently, over forty percent of the females employed there in this month worked with one another. Nor was this interaction surreptitious, carried out only when the overseer looked elsewhere; rather it was formally organized and sanctioned by the textile corporations themselves.


In addition to the integration of sparehands, informal sharing of work often went on among regular operatives. A woman would occasionally take off a half or full day from work either to enjoy a brief vacation or to recover from illness, and fellow operatives would each take an extra loom or side of spindles so that she might continue to earn wages during her absence. (6) Women were generally paid on a piece rate basis, their wages being determined by the total output of the machinery they tended during the payroll period. With friends helping out during her absence, making sure that her looms kept running, an operative could earn almost a full wage even though she was not physically present. Such informal work-sharing was another way in which mutual dependence developed among women operatives during their working hours.


Living conditions also contributed to the development of community among female operatives. Most women working in the Lowell mills of these years were housed in company boardinghouses. In July 1836, for example, more than 73 percent of females employed by the Hamilton Company resided in company housing adjacent to the mills. (7) Almost three-fourths of them, therefore, lived and worked with each other. Furthermore, the work schedule was such that women had little opportunity to interact with those not living in company dwellings. They worked, in these years, an average of 73 hours a week. Their work day ended at 7:00 or 7:30 pm, and in the hours between supper and the 10:00 pm curfew imposed by management on residents of company boardinghouses, there was little time to spend with friends living "off the corporation."


Women in the boardinghouses lived in close quarters, a factor that also played a role in the growth of community. A typical boarding house accommodated 25 young women, generally crowded four to eight in a bedroom. (8) There was little possibility of privacy within the dwelling, and pressure to conform to group standards was very strong (as will be discussed below). The community of operatives which developed in the mills, it follows, carried over into life at home as well.


The boardinghouse became a central institution in the lives of Lowell's female operatives in these years, but it was particularly important in the initial integration of newcomers into urban industrial life. Upon first leaving her rural home for work in Lowell, a woman entered a setting very different from anything she had previously known. One operative, writing in the Offering, described the feelings of a fictional character:


"... the first entrance into a factory boarding house seemed something dreadful. The room looked strange and comfortless, and the women cold and heartless; and when she sat down to the supper table, where among more than twenty girls, all but one were strangers, she could not eat a mouthfull." (9)


In the boardinghouse, the newcomer took the first steps in the process which transformed her from an "outsider" into an accepted member of the community of women operatives.


Recruitment of newcomers into the mills and their initial hiring were mediated through the boardinghouse system. Women generally did not travel to Lowell for the first time entirely on their own. They usually came because they knew someone--an older sister, cousin, or friend--who had already worked in Lowell. (10) The scene described above was a lonely one--but the newcomer did know at least one boarder among the twenty seated around the supper table. The Hamilton Company Register Books indicated that numerous pairs of operatives, having the same surname and coming from the same town in northern New England, lived in the same boardinghouses. (11) If the newcomer was not accompanied by a friend or relative, she was usually directed to "Number 20, Hamilton Company," or to a similar address of one of the other corporations where her acquaintance lived. Her first contact with fellow operatives generally came in the boardinghouses and not in the mills. Given the personal nature of recruitment in this period, therefore, newcomers usually had the company and support of a friend or relative in their first adjustment to Lowell.


Like recruitment, the initial hiring was a personal process. Once settled in the boardinghouse a newcomer had to find a job. She would generally go to the mills with her friend or with the boardinghouse keeper who would introduce her to an overseer in one of the rooms. If he had an opening, she might start work immediately. More likely, the overseer would know of an opening elsewhere in the mill, or would suggest that something would probably develop within a few days. In one story in the Offering, a newcomer worked on some quilts for her house keeper, thereby earning her board while she waited for a job opening. (12)


Upon entering the boardinghouse, the newcomer came under pressure to conform with the standards of the community of operatives. Stories in the Offering indicate that newcomers at first stood out from the group in terms of their speech and dress. Over time, they dropped the peculiar "twang" in their speech which so amused experienced hands. Similarly, they purchased clothing more in keeping with urban than rural styles. It was an unusual and strongwilled individual who could work and live among her fellow operatives and not conform, at least outwardly, to the customs and values of this larger community. (13)


The boardinghouses were the centers of social life for women operatives after their long days in the mills. There they ate their meals, rested, talked, sewed, wrote letters, read books and magazines. From among fellow workers and boarders they found friends who accompanied them to shops, to Lyceum lectures, to church and church-sponsored events. On Sundays or holidays, they often took walks along the canals or out into the nearby countryside. The community of women operatives, in sum, developed in a setting where women worked and lived together, 24 hours a day.


Given the all-pervasiveness of this community, one would expect it to exert strong pressures on those who did not conform to group standards. Such appears to have been the case. The community influenced newcomers to adopt its patterns of speech and dress as described above. In addition, it enforced an unwritten code of moral conduct. Henry Miles, a minister in Lowell, described the way in which the community pressured those who deviated from accepted moral conduct:



A girl, suspected of immoralities, or serious improprieties, at once loses caste. Her fellow boarders will at once leave the house, if the keeper does not dismiss the offender. In self-protection, therefore, the patron is obliged to put the offender away. Nor will her former companions walk with her, or work with her; till at length, finding herself everywhere talked about, and pointed at, and shunned, she is obliged to relieve her fellow-operatives of a presence which they feel brings disgrace. (14)

The power of the peer group described by Miles may seem extreme, but there is evidence in the writing of women operatives to corroborate his account. Such group pressure is illustrated by a story (in the Offering) in which operatives in a company boardinghouse begin to harbor suspicions about a fellow boarder, Hannah, who received repeated evening visits from a man whom she does not introduce to the other residents. Two boarders declare that they will leave if she is allowed to remain in the household. The house keeper finally informed Hannah that she must either depart or not see the man again. She does not accept the ultimatum, but is promptly discharged after the overseer is informed, by one of the boarders, about her conduct. And, only one of Hannah's former friends continues to remain on cordial terms. (15)


One should not conclude, however, that women always enforced a moral code agreeable to Lowell's clergy, or to the mill agents and overseers for that matter. After all, the kind of peer pressure imposed on Hannah could be brought to bear on women in 1834 and 1836 who on their own would not have protested wage cuts. It was much harder to go to work when one's roommates were marching about town, attending rallies, circulating strike petitions. Similarly, the 10-hour petitions of the 1840s were certainly aided by the fact of a tight-knit community of operatives living in a dense neighborhood of boardinghouses. To the extent that women could not have completely private lives in the boardinghouses, they probably had to conform to group norms, whether these involved speech, clothing, relations with men, or attitudes toward the 10-hour day. Group pressure to conform, so important to the community of women in early Lowell, played a significant role in the collective response of women to changing conditions in the mills.


In addition to the structure of work and housing in Lowell, a third factor, the homogeneity of the mill workforce, contributed to the development of community among female operatives. In this period the mill workforce was homogeneous in terms of sex, nativity, and age. Payroll and other records of the Hamilton Company reveal that more than 85 per cent of those employed in July 1836 were women and that over 96 percent were native-born. (16) Furthermore, over 80 percent of the female workforce was between the ages of 15 and 30 years old; and only 10 percent was under 15 or over 40. (17)


Workforce homogeneity takes on particular significance in the context of work structure and the nature of worker housing. These three factors combined meant that women operatives had little interaction with men during their daily lives. Men and women did not perform the same work in the mills, and generally did not even labor in the same rooms. Men worked in the picking and initial carding processes, in the repair shop, and on the watchforce, and filled all supervisory positions in the mills. Women held all sparehand and regular operative jobs in drawing, speeding, spinning, weaving, and dressing. A typical room in the mill employed 80 women tending machinery, with two men overseeing the work and two boys assisting them. Women had little contact with men other than their supervisors in the course of the working day. After work, women returned to their boardinghouses, where once again there were few men. Women, then, worked and lived in a predominantly female setting.


Ethnically, the workforce was also homogeneous. Immigrants formed only 3.4 percent of those employed at Hamilton in July 1836. In addition, they comprised only 3 percent of residents in Hamilton company housing. (18) The community of women operatives was composed of women of New England stock drawn from the hill-country farms surrounding Lowell. Consequently, when experienced hands made fun of the speech and dress of newcomers, it was understood that they, too, had been "rusty" or "rustic" upon first coming to Lowell. This common background was another element shared by women workers in early Lowell.


The work structure, the workers' housing, and workforce homogeneity were the major elements that contributed to the growth of community among Lowell's women operatives. To understand the larger implications of community, it is necessary to examine the labor protests of this period. For in these struggles, the new values and attitudes that developed in the community of women operatives are most visible.


II


In February 1834, 800 of Lowell's women operatives "turned-out" - went on strike - to protest a proposed reduction in their wages. They marched to numerous mills in an effort to induce others to join them; and, at an outdoor rally, they petitioned others to "discontinue their labors until terms of reconciliation are made." Their petition concluded:



Resolved, That we will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued...as they have been.
Resolved, That none of us will go back, unless they receive us all as one.

Resolved, That if any have not money enough to carry them home, they shall be supplied. (19)


The strike proved to be brief and failed to reverse the proposed wage reductions. Turning-out on a Friday, the striking women were paid their back wages on Saturday, and by the middle of the next week had returned to work or left town. Within a week of the turn-out, the mills were running near capacity. (20)


This first strike in Lowell is important not because it failed or succeeded, but simply because it took place. In an era in which women had to overcome opposition simply to work in the mills, it is remarkable that they would further overstep the accepted middle-class bounds of female propriety by participating in a public protest. The agents of the textile mills certainly considered the turn-out unfeminine. William Austin, agent of the Lawrence Company, described the operatives' procession as an "amizonian [sic] display." He wrote further, in a letter to his company treasurer in Boston: "This afternoon we have paid off several of these Amazons & presume that they will leave town on Monday." (21) The turn-out was particularly offensive to the agents because of the relationship they thought they had with their operatives. William Austin probably expressed the feelings of other agents when he wrote: "...notwithstanding the friendly and disinterested advice which has been on all proper occassions [sic] communicated to the girls of the Lawrence mills a spirit of evil omen ... has prevailed, and overcome the judgment and discretion of too many, and this morning a general turn-out from most of the rooms has been the consequence." (22)


Mill agents assumed an attitude of benevolent paternalism toward their female operatives, and found it particularly disturbing that the women paid such little heed to their advice. The strikers were not merely unfeminine, they were ungrateful as well.


Such attitudes not withstanding, women chose to turn-out. They did so for two principal reasons. First, the wage cuts undermined the sense of dignity and social equality which was an important element in their Yankee heritage. Second, these wage cuts were seen as an attack on their economic independence.


Certainly a prime motive for the strike was outrage at the social implications of the wage cuts. In a statement of principles accompanying the petition that was circulated among operatives, women expressed well the sense of themselves that prompted their protest of these wage cuts:


UNION IS POWER



Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we remain in possession of our unquestionable rights. We circulate this paper wishing to obtain the names of all who imbibe the spirit of our Patriotic Ancestors, who preferred privation to bondage, and parted with all that renders life desirable--and even life itself--to procure independence for their children. The oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us, and to gain their object, they gravely tell us of the pressure of the time, this we are already sensible of, and deplore it. If any are in want of assistance, the Ladies will be compassionate and assist them; but we prefer to have the disposing of our charities in our own hands; and as we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us; and remain daughters of freemen still. (23)


At several points in the proclamation the women drew on their Yankee heritage. Connecting their turn-out with the efforts of their "Patriotic Ancestors" to secure independence from England, they interpreted the wage cuts as an effort to "enslave" them -- to deprive them of the independent status as "daughters of freemen."


Though very general and rhetorical, the statement of these women does suggest their sense of self, of their own worth and dignity. Elsewhere, they expressed the conviction that they were the social equals of the overseers, indeed of the mill-owners themselves. (24) The wage cuts, however, struck at this assertion of social equality. These reductions made it clear that the operatives were subordinate to their employers, rather than equal partners in a contract binding on both parties. By turning-out, the women emphatically denied that they were subordinates; but by returning to work the next week, they demonstrated that in economic terms they were no match for their corporate superiors.


In point of fact, these Yankee operatives were subordinate in early Lowell's social and economic order, but they never consciously accepted this status. Their refusal to do so became evident whenever the mill owners attempted to exercise the power they possessed. This fundamental contradiction between the objective status of operatives and their consciousness of it was at the root of the 1834 turn-out and of subsequent labor protests in Lowell before 1850. The corporations could build mills, create thousands of jobs, and recruit women to fill them. Nevertheless, they bought only the workers' labor power, and then only for as long as these workers chose to stay. Women could always return to their rural homes, and they had a sense of their own worth and dignity, factors limiting the actions of management.


Women operatives viewed the wage cuts as a threat to their economic independence. This independence had two related dimensions. First, the women were self-supporting while they worked in the mills and, consequently, were independent of their families back home. Second, they were able to save out of their monthly earnings and could then leave the mills for the old homestead whenever they so desired. In effect, they were not totally dependent upon mill work. Their independence was based largely on the high level of wages in the mills.


They could support themselves and still save enough to return home periodically. The wage cuts threatened to deny them this outlet, substituting instead the prospect of total dependence on mill work. Small wonder, then, there was alarm that "the oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us." To be forced, out of economic necessity, to lifelong labor in the mills would have indeed seemed like slavery. (25) The Yankee operatives spoke directly to the fear of a dependency based on impoverishment when offering to assist any women workers who "have not money enough to carry them home." Wage reductions, however, offered only the prospect of a future dependence on mill employment. By striking, the women asserted their actual economic independence of the mills and their determination to remain "daughters of freemen still."


While the women's traditional conception of themselves as independent daughters of freemen played a major role in the turn-out, this factor acting alone would not necessarily have triggered the 1834 strike. It would have led women as individuals to quit work and return to their rural homes. But the turn-out was a collective protest. When it was announced that wage reductions were being considered, women began to hold meetings in the mills during meal breaks in order to assess tactical possibilities. Their turn-out began at one mill when the agent discharged a woman who had presided at such a meeting. Their procession through the streets passed by other mills, expressing a conscious effort to enlist as much support as possible for their cause. At a mass meeting, the women drew up a resolution which insisted that none be discharged for their participation in the turn-out. This strike, then, was a collective response to the proposed wage cuts -- made possible because women had come to form a "community" of operatives in the mill, rather than simply a group of individual workers. The existence of such a tight-knit community turned individual opposition of the wage cuts into a collective protest.


In October 1836 women again went on strike. This second turn-out was similar to the first in several respects. Its immediate cause was also a wage reduction; marches and a large outdoor rally were organized; again, like the earlier protest, the basic goal was not achieved; the corporations refused to restore wages; and operatives either left Lowell or returned to work at the new rates.


Despite these surface similarities between the turn-outs, there were some real differences. One involved scale: over 1,500 operatives turned out in 1836, compared to only 800 earlier. (26) Moreover, the second strike lasted much longer than the first. In 1834 operatives stayed out for only a few days; in 1836 the mills ran far below capacity for several months. Two weeks after the second turn-out began, a mill agent reported that only a fifth of the strikers had returned to work: "The rest manifest good spunk as they call it." (27) Several days later he described the impact of the continuing strike on operations in his mills: "we must be feeble for months to come as probably not less than 250 of our former scanty supply of help have left town." (28) These lines read in sharp contrast to the optimistic reports of agents following the turn-out in February 1834.


Differences between the two turn-outs were not limited to the increased scale and duration of the later one. Women displayed a much higher degree of organization in 1836 than earlier. To coordinate strike activities, they formed a Factory Girls' Association. According to one historian, membership in the short-lived association reached 2,500 at its height. (29) The larger organization among women was reflected in the tactics employed. Strikers, accordingto one mill agent, were able to halt production to a greater extent than numbers alone could explain; and, he complained, although some operatives were willing to work, "it has been impossible to give employment to many who remained." He attributed this difficulty to the strikers' "tactics:" - this was in many instances no doubt the result of calculation and contrivance. After the original turn-out they [the operatives] would assail a particular room -- as for instance, all the warpers, or all the warp spinners, or all the speeder and stretcher girls, and this would close the mill as effectually as if all the girls in the mill had left." (30)


Now giving more thought than they had in 1834 to the specific tactics of the turn-out, the women made a deliberate effort to shut down the mills in order to win their demands. They attempted to persuade less committed operatives, concentrating on those in crucial departments within the mill. Such tactics anticipated those of skilled mulespinners and loomfixers who went out on strike in the 1880s and 1890s.


In their organization of a Factory Girl's Association and in their efforts to shut down the mills, the female operatives revealed that they had been changed by their industrial experience. Increasingly, they acted not simply as "daughters of freemen" offended by the impositions of the textile corporations, but also as industrial workers intent on improving their position within the mills.


There was a decline in protest among women in the Lowell mills following these early strike defeats. During the 1837-43 depression, textile corporations twice reduced wages without evoking a collective response from operatives. (31) Because of the frequency of production cutbacks and lay-offs in these years, workers probably accepted the mill agents' contention that they had to reduce wages or close entirely. But with the return of prosperity and the expansion of production in the mid-1840s, there were renewal labor protests among women. Their actions paralleled those of working men and reflected fluctuations in the business cycle. Prosperity itself did not prompt turn-outs, but it evidently facilitated collective actions by women operatives.


In contrast to the protests of the previous decade, the struggles now were primarily political. Women did no turn-out in the 1840s; rather, they mounted annual petition campaigns calling on the state legislature to limit the hours of labor within the mills. These campaigns reached their height in 1845 and 1846, when 2,000 and 5,000 operatives respectively signed petitions. Unable to curb the wage cuts, or the speed-up and stretch-out imposed by mill owners, operatives sought to mitigate the consequences of these changes by reducing the length of the working day. Having been defeated earlier in economic struggles, they now sought to achieve their new goal through political action. The Ten Hour Movement, seen in these terms, was a logical outgrowth of the unsuccessful turn-outs of the previous decade. Like the earlier struggles, the Ten Hour Movement was an assertion of the dignity of operatives and an attempt to maintain that dignity under the changing conditions of industrial capitalism.


The growth of relatively permanent labor organizations and institutions among women was a distinguishing feature of the Ten Hour Movement of the 1840s. The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was organized in 1845 by women operatives. It became Lowell's leading organization over the next three years, organizing the city's female operatives and helping to set up branches in other mill towns. The Association was affiliated with the New England Workingmen's Association and sent delegates to its meetings. It acted in concert with similar male groups, and yet maintained its own autonomy. Women elected their own officers, held their own meetings, testified before a state legislative committee, and published a series of "Factory Tracts" that exposed conditions within the mills and argued for the 10-hour day.


An important educational and organizing tool of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was the Voice of Industry, a labor weekly published in Lowell between 1845 and 1848 by the New England Workingmen's Association. Female operatives were involved in every aspect of its publication and used the Voice to further the Ten Hour Movement among women. Their Association owned the press on which the Voice was printed. Sarah Bagley, the Association president, was a member of the three-person publishing committee of the Voice and for a time served as editor. Other women were employed by the paper as traveling editors. They wrote articles about the Ten Hour Movement in other mill towns, in an effort to give 10-hour supporters a sense of the larger cause of which they were a part. Furthermore, they raised money for the Voice and increased its circulation by selling subscriptions to the paper in their travels about New England. Finally, women used the Voice to appeal directly to their fellow operatives. They edited a separate "Female Department," which published letters and articles by and about women in the mills.


Another aspect of the Ten Hour Movement which distinguished it from the earlier labor struggle in Lowell was that it involved both men and women. At the same time that women in Lowell formed the Female Labor Reform Association, a male mechanics' and laborers' association was also organized. Both groups worked to secure the passage of legislation setting ten hours as the length of the working day. Both groups circulated petitions to this end and when the legislative committee came to Lowell to hear testimony, both men and women testified in favor of the 10-hour day. (32)


The two groups, then, worked together, and each made an important contribution to the movement in Lowell. Women had the numbers, comprising as they did over 80 percent of the mill workforce. Men, on the other had, had the votes, and since the Ten Hour Movement was a political struggle, they played a crucial part. After the state committee reported unfavorably on the 10-hour petitions, the Female Labor Reform Association denounced the committee chairman, a state representative from Lowell, as a corporation "tool." Working for his defeat at the polls, they did so successfully and then passed the following post-election resolution: "Resolved, That the members of this Association tender their grateful acknowledgments to the voters of Lowell, for consigning William Schouler to the obscurity he so justly deserves...." (33) Women took a more prominent part in the Ten Hour Movement in Lowell than did men, but they obviously remained dependent on male voters and legislators for the ultimate success of their movement.


Although coordinating their efforts with those of working men, women operatives organized independently within the Ten Hour Movement. For instance, in 1845 two important petitions were sent from Lowell to the state legislature. Almost 90 percent of the signers of one petition were females, and more than two-thirds of the signers of the second were males. (34) Clearly the separation of men and women in their daily lives was reflected in the Ten Hour petitions of these years.


The way in which the Ten Hour Movement was carried from Lowell to other mill towns also illustrated the independent organizing of women within the larger movement. For example, at a spirited meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire in December 1845 - one presided over by Lowell operatives - more than a thousand workers, two-thirds of them women, passed resolutions calling for the 10-hour day. Later, those in attendance divided along male-female lines, each meeting separately to set up parallel organizations. Sixty women joined the Manchester Female Labor Reform Association that evening, and by the following summer it claimed over 300 members. Female operatives met in company boardinghouses to involve new women in the movement. In their first year of organizing, Manchester workers obtained more than 4,000 signatures on 10-hour petitions. (35) While men and women were both active in the movement, they worked through separate institutional structures from the outset.


The division of men and women within the Ten Hour Movement also reflected their separate daily lives in Lowell and in other mill towns. To repeat, they held different jobs in the mills and had little contact apart from the formal, structure overseer-operative relation. Outside the mill, we have noted, women tended to live in female boardinghouses provided by the corporations and were isolated from men. Consequently, the experiences of women in these early mill towns were different from those of men, and in the course of their daily lives they came to form a close-knit community. It was logical that women's participation in the Ten Hour Movement mirrored this basic fact.


The women's Ten Hour Movement, like the earlier turn-outs, was based in part on the participants' sense of their own worth and dignity as daughters of freemen. At the same time, however, it also indicated the growth of a new consciousness. It reflected a mounting feeling of community among women operatives and a realization that their interests and those of their employers were not identical, that they had to rely on themselves and not on corporate benevolence to achieve a reduction in the hours of labor. One women, in an open letter to a state legislator, expressed this rejection of middle-class paternalism: "Bad as is the condition of so many women, it would be much worse if they had nothing but your boasted protection to rely upon; but they have at last learnt the lesson which a bitter experience teaches, that not to those who style themselves their "natural protectors" are they to look for the needful help, but to the strong and resolute of their own sex. (36) Such an attitude, underlying the self-organizing of women in the 10-hour petition campaigns, was clearly the product of the industrial experience in Lowell.


Both the early turn-outs and the Ten Hour Movement were, as noted above, in large measure dependent upon the existence of a close-knit community of women operatives. Such a community was based on the work structure, the nature of worker housing, and workforce homogeneity . Women were drawn together by the initial job training of newcomers; by the informal work-sharing among experienced hands; by living in company boardinghouses; by sharing religious, educational, and social activities in their leisure hours. Working and living in a new and alien setting, they came to rely upon one another for friendship and support. Understandably, a community feeling developed among them.


This evolving community as well as the common cultural traditions which Yankee women carried into Lowell were major elements that governed their response to changing mill conditions. The preindustrial tradition of independence and self-respect made them particularly sensitive to management labor policies. The sense of community enabled them to transform their individual opposition to wage cuts and to the increasing pace of work into public protest. In these labor struggles women operative expressed a new consciousness of their rights both as workers and as women. Such a consciousness, like the community of women itself, was one product of Lowell's Industrial Revolution.


The experiences of Lowell women before 1850 present a fascinating picture of the contradictory impact of industrial capitalism. Repeated labor protests reveal that female operatives felt the demands of mill employment to be oppressive. At the same time, however, the mills, provided women with work outside of the home and family, thereby offering them an unprecedented opportunity. That they came to challenge employer paternalism was a direct consequence of the increasing opportunities offered them in these years. The Lowell mills both exploited and liberated women in ways unknown to the preindustrial political economy.


Footnotes for "Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills"


1 Statistics of Lowell Manufactures, January 1, 1840. Broadside available in the Manuscripts Division, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.


2 Lowell Offering, I, 169.


3 Ibid., IV, 145-148, 169-172, 237-240, 257-259.


4 Offering, IV, p. 170.


5 These statistics are drawn from the author's dissertation, "Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Mass.", 1826-1860 (Columbia Univ., 1975).


6 Harriet Hanson Robinson, Loom and Spindle, Or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York, 1898), 91.


7 "Women at Work," Chapter 4. Statistics are based on linkage between company payrolls and register books of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company. The register books were alphabetically organized volumes in which operatives were signed into and out of the mills. They gave the nativity and local residence of operatives as well as additional data. For a detailed discussion of the linkage methods used, use the appendices of "Women at Work."


8 "Women at Work," Chapter 5. Statistics based on an analysis of federal manuscript census listings of Hamilton boardinghouses in 1830 and 1840.


9 Offering, I, 169.


10 Ibid., II, 145-155; I, 2-7, 74-78.


11 Hamilton Manufacturing Company Records, Volume 283, passim. This volume, along with all the other company records cited in this article, are located in the Manuscript Division of Baker Library, Harvard Business School.


12 Offering,IV, 145-148.


13 Ibid., I, 5; IV, 148.


14 Henry A. Miles, Lowell As It Was And As It Is (Lowell, 1845), 144-145.


15 Offering, IV, 14-23. Like so many of the stories in the Offering, this one has a dramatic reversal at its conclusion. We learn at the end that Hannah's visitor has been her brother, whose identity could not be revealed because he was afraid that the woman he was courting might learn that his sister was an operative.


16 These statistics are based on the linkage of payroll and register books of the Hamilton Company as were the data on residence presented above. See Chapter 4 and appendices of "Women at Work."


17 These data are based on an analysis of the age distribution of females residing in Hamilton Company boardinghouses as recorded in the Federal Manuscript Censuses of 1830 and 1840. See Chapter 4, "Women at Work."


18 Federal Manuscript Census of Lowell, 1830.


19 Boston Evening Transcript, February 18, 1834.


20 Lawrence Manufacturing Company Records, Correspondence, Vol. MAB-1, March 4 and March 9, 1834.


21 Ibid., February 15, 1834.


22 Ibid., February 14, 1834.


23 Boston Evening Transcript, February 18, 1834.


24 Harriet Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 72; Offering, February, 1841, p. 45. For an interesting account of conflict between an operative and an overseer, see Robinson, 57.


25 The wage cuts, in still another way, might have been seen as threatening to "enslave." Such decreases would be enacted by reductions in the piece rates paid women. If women were to maintain their overall earnings, given the wage cuts, they would have to speed up their work or accept additional machinery, both of which would result in making them work harder for the same pay. Opposition to the speed-up and the stretch-out was strong during the Ten Hour Movement in the 1840s, and although I have found no direct evidence, such feeling may have played a part in the turn-outs of the 1830s as well.


26 Harriet Robinson, p. 83; Boston Evening Transcripts, October 4 and 6, 1836.


27 Tremont-Suffolk Mills Records, unbound Letters, Volume FN-1, October 14, 1836.


28 Ibid., October 17, 1836.


29 Hannah Josephson, The Golden Treads: New England's Mill Girls and Magnates (New York, 1949), 238.


30 Tremont-Suffolk Mills Records, unbound Letters, Volume FN-1, October 10, 1836.


31 Hamilton Manufacturing Company Records, Volume 670, Correspondence of Treasurer, March 14, 1840; Lowell Advertiser, June 6, 1845 gives data on 1842 wage cuts.


32 Massachusetts House Document No. 50, 1845. Quoted in full in John R. Commons et al. A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, (Cleveland, 1910), III, 133-151.


33 Voice of Industry, November 28, 1845.


34 Based on author's examination of Ten Hour Petitions at Massachusetts States Archives, 1845, 1587/8 and 1587/9.


35 Voices of Industry, December 5 and 19, 1845, July 24, 1846, December 4, 1846, January 8, 1847.


36 Voice of Industry, March 13, 1846.

http://invention.smithsonian.org/center ... ublin.html


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Sat May 14, 2011 6:14 am

“We Call On You to Deliver Us From the Tyrant’s Chain”: Lowell Women Workers Campaign for a Ten Hour Workday

The burgeoning textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, brought increasing competition among the owners and declining conditions for the workers. In the 1830s the women working in the mills turned to economic protests and collective action; their “turn outs” or strikes proved unsuccessful in combating the wage cuts. In the 1840s mill workers turned to political organization as they mounted annual petition campaigns calling on the state legislature to limit the hours of labor within the mills. These campaigns reached their height in 1845 and 1846, when 2,000 and 5,000 operatives respectively signed petitions. to reduce the hours of labor in the mills. Women operatives organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1845. An important part of the campaign was their periodical The Voice of Industry. Another publication, Factory Tracts, was part of their effort to expose conditions in the mills and advocate a ten hour day. Male mechanics and other workers in industrial communities joined the Lowell women operatives' campaign.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Factory Tracts. Factory Life as it Is. By an Operative

INTRODUCTION.

PHILANTHROPISTS of the nineteenth century!—shall not the operatives of our country be permitted to speak for themselves? Shall they be compelled to listen in silence to [ ] who speak for gain, and are the mere echo of the will of the corporations? Shall the worthy laborer be awed into silence by wealth and power, and for fear of being deprived of the means of procuring his daily bread? Shall tyranny and cruel oppression be allowed to rived the chains of physical and mental slavery on the millions of our country who are the real producers of all its improvements and wealth, and they fear to speak out in noble self-defence? Shall they fear to appeal to the sympathies of the people, or the justice of this far-famed republican nation? God forbid!

Much has been written and spoken in woman’s behalf, especially in America; and yet a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude as degrading as unceasing toil can make it. I refer to the female operatives of New England—the free states of our union—the states where no colored slave can breathe the balmy air, and exist as such;—but yet there are those, a host of them, too, who are in fact nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word! Slaves to a system of labor which requires them to toil from five until seven o’clock, with one hour only to attend to the wants of nature, allowed—slaves to the will and requirements of the “powers that be,” however they may infringe on the rights or conflict with the feelings of the operative—slaves to ignorance—and how can it be otherwise? What time has the operative to bestow on moral, religious or intellectual culture? How can our country look for aught but ignorance and vice, under the existing state of things? When the whole system is exhausted by unremitting labor during twelve and thirteen hours per day, can any reasonable being expect that the mind will retain its vigor and energy? Impossible! Common sense will each every one the utter impossibility of improving the mind under these circumstances, however great the desire may be for knowledge.

Again, we hear much said on the subject of benevolence among the wealthy and so called, christian part of community. Have we not cause to question the sincerity of those who, while they talk benevolence in the parlor, compel their help to labor for a mean, paltry pittance in the kitchen? And while they manifest great concern for the souls of the heathen in distant lands, care nothing for the bodies and intellects of those within their own precincts? Shall we esteem men honest in their pretensions to piety and benevolence, who compel their help to labor on the Sabbath day or lose their situation? Have they made their regulations hold up to the world a large amount of piety, and a great desire that those in their employ shall be religious—so much so that they have made a corporation law, that “no one shall be retained in their employ who is not a constant attendant on public worship.” Will those who are obliged to hear the noise and confusion caused by some fifty or more men, with teams of oxen, and all the noise consequent on such occasions, together with splitting and blasting of rock, to their great annoyance while in their places of worship—will these be deceived by such hypocritical pretensions of piety, and love to the moral interests of the community in which they live? What is and must be, the tendency of such examples on those who are familiar with such violations of the day called the christian Sabbath, but to throw off all restraint, and make the Sabbath a pastime, or a day in which the weary operatives may attend to their own private business? Such examples have already produced such results, and the end is not yet.

As philanthropists and lovers of equal rights, we address our readers; and before we close this series of tracts, (which will consist of some three or four numbers,) we intend to give a fair exposition of the regulations of the “factory system,” its operations and abuses, the grand results of protection given to industry, including the low price paid for board and wages—the long hours for labor, with its effects on the health of the operatives, and some other "facts for the million, &c. &c.

An Operative.

...

SOME OF THE BEAUTIES OF OUR FACTORY SYSTEM—-OTHERWISE, LOWELL SLAVERY.

For the purpose of illustration, let us go with that light-hearted, joyous young girl who is about for the first time to leave the home of her childhood; that home around which clusters so many beautiful and holy associations, pleasant memories, and quiet joys; to leave, too, a mother’s cheerful smile, a father’s care and protection; and wend her way toward this famed “city of spindles,” this promised land of the imagination, in whose praise she has doubtless heard so much.

Let us trace her progress during her first year’s residence, and see whether she indeed realizes those golden prospects which have been held out to her. Follow her now as she enters that large gloomy looking building—she is in search of employment, and has been told that she might here obtain an eligible situation. She is sadly wearied with her journey, and withal somewhat annoyed by the noise, confusion, and strange faces all around her. So, after a brief conversation with the overseer, she concludes to accept the first situation which offers; and reserving to herself a sufficient portion of time in which to obtain the necessary rest after her unwonted exertions, and the gratification of a stranger’s curiosity regarding the place in which she is now to make her future home, she retires to her boarding house, to arrange matters as much to her mind as may be.

The intervening time passes rapidly away, and she soon finds herself once more within the confines of that close noisy apartment, and is forthwith installed in her new situation—first, however, premising that she has been sent to the Counting-room, and receives therefrom a Regulation paper, containing the rules by which she must be governed while in their employ; and lo! Here is the beginning of mischief; for in addition to the tyranous and oppressive rules which meet her astonished eyes, she finds herself compelled to remain for the space of twelve months in the very place she then occupies, however reasonable and just cause of complaint might be hers, or however strong the wish for dismission; thus, in fact, constituting herself a slave, a very slave to the caprices of him for whom she labors. Several incidents coming to the knowledge of the writer, might be somewhat interesting in this connection, as tending to show the prejudicial influence exerted upon the interests of the operative by this unjust requisition. The first is of a lady who has been engaged as an operative for a number of years, and recently entered a weaving room on the Massachusetts Corporation; the overseer having assured her previous to her entrance, that she should receive the sum of $2,25 per week, exclusive of board; which she finding it impossible to do, appealed to the Counting-room for a line enabling her to engage elsewhere, but it was peremptorily refused.

The next is of a more general bearing, concerning quite a number of individuals employed on the Lawrence Corporation, where the owners have recently erected and put in motion a new mill, at the same time stopping one of the old, in which said persons were employed. Now as they did not voluntarily leave their situations, but were discharged therefrom on account of suspension of operations by the company; they had an undoubted right to choose their own place of labor; and as the work in the new mill is vastly more laborious, and the wages less than can be obtained in many parts of the city, they signified their wish to go elsewhere, but are insolently told that they shall labor there or not at all: and will not be released until their year has expired, when if the can possibly find no further excuse for delay, they may deign to bestow upon them what is in common parlance termed, a “regular discharge;” thus enabling them to pass from one prison house to another. Concerning this precious document, it is only necessary to say, that it very precisely reminds one of that which the dealers in human flesh at the South are wont to give and receive as the transfer of one piece of property from one owner to another.

Now, reader, what think you? is not this the height of the beautiful? and are not we operatives an ungrateful set of creatures that we do not properly appreciate, and be highly thankful for such unparalleled generosity on the part of our employers!

But to return to our toiling Maiden,—the next beautiful feature which she discovers in this glorious system is, the long number of hours which she is obliged to spend in the above named close, unwholesome apartment. It is not enough, that like the poor peasant of Ireland, or the Russian serf who labors from sun to sun, but during one half of the year, she must still continue to toil on, long after Nature’s lamp has ceased to lend its aid—nor will even this suffice to satisfy the grasping avarice of her employer; for she is also through the winter months required to rise, partake of her morning meal, and be at her station in the mill, while the sun is yet sleeping behind the eastern hills; thus working on an average, at least twelve hours and three fourths per day, exclusive of the time allotted for her hasty meals, which is in winter simply one half hour at noon,—in the spring is allowed the same at morn, and during the summer is added 15 minutes to the half hour at noon. Then too, when she is at last released from her wearisome day’s toil, still may she not depart in peace. No! her footsteps must be dogged to see that they do not stray beyond the corporation limits, and she must, whether she will or no, be subjected to the manifold inconveniences of a large crowded boarding-house, where too, the price paid for her accommodation is so utterly insignificant, that it will not ensure to her the common comforts of life; she is obliged to sleep in a small comfortless, half ventilated apartment containing some half a dozen occupants each, but no matter, she is an operative—it is all well enough for her; there is no “abuse” about it; no, indeed; so think our employers,—but do we think so? time will show.

Here, too, comes up a case which strikingly illustrates the petty tyranny of the employer. A little girl, some 12 or 13 years of age, the daughter of a poor widow, dependent on her daily toil for a livelihood, worked on one of the Corporations, boarding with her mother; who dying left her to the care of an aunt, residing but a few steps from the Corporation—but the poor creature all unqualified as she was, to provide for her own wants, was compelled to leave her home and the motherly care bestowed upon her, and enter one of these same large crowded boarding-houses. We do but give the facts in this case and they need no comment for every one must see the utter heartlesness which prompted such conduct toward a mere child.

Reader will you pronounce this a mere fancy sketch, written for the sake of effect? It is not so. It is a real picture of “Factory life;” nor is it one half so bad as might truthfully and justly have been drawn. But it has been asked, and doubtless will be again, why, if these evils are so aggravating, have they been so long and so peacefully borne? Ah! and why have they? It is a question well worthy of our consideration, and we would call upon every operative in our city, aye, throughout the length and breadth of the land, to awake from the lethargy which has fallen upon them, and assert and maintain their rights. We will call upon you for action— united and immediate action. But, says one, let us wait till we are stronger. In the language of one of old, we ask, when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are reduced to the servile condition of the poor operatives of England? for verily we shall be and that right soon, if matters be suffered to remain as they are. Says another, how shall we act? we are but one amongst a thousand, what shall we do that our influence may be felt in this vast multitude? We answer, there is in this city an Association called the Female Labor Reform Association, having for its professed object, the amelioration of the condition of the operative. Enrolled upon its records are the names of five hundred members—come then, and add thereto five hundred or rather five thousand more, and in the strength of our united influence we will soon show these drivelling cotton lords, this mushroon aristocracy of New England, who so arrogantly aspire to lord it over God’s heritage, that our rights cannot be trampled upon with impunity; that we WILL not longer submit to that arbitrary power which has for the last ten years been so abundantly exercised over us.

One word ere we close, to the hardy independent yeomanry and mechanics, among the Granite Hills of New Hampshire, the woody forests of Maine, the cloud capped mountains of Vermont, and the busy, bustling towns of the old Bay State—ye! who have daughters and sisters toiling in these sickly prison-houses which are scattered far and wide over each of these States, we appeal to you for aid in this matter. Do you ask how that aid can be administered? We answer through the Ballot Box. Yes! if you have one spark of sympathy for our condition, carry it there, and see to it that you send to preside in the Councils of each Commonwealth, men who have hearts as well as heads, souls as well bodies; men who will watch zealously over the interests of the laborer in every department; who will protect him by the strong arm of the law from the encroachments of arbitrary power; who will see that he is not deprived of those rights and privileges which God and Nature have bestowed upon him—yes,

From every rolling river,

From mountain, vale and plain,

We call on you to deliver

Us, from the tyrant’s chain:

And shall we call in vain? we trust not. More anon. AMELIA.

Source: Factory Tracts. Factory Life As It Is, Number One, [(Lowell, MA, 1845)].

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6217


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Mon Jun 06, 2011 9:34 am

*

Terry Eagleton Yale Lectures on Faith and Fundamentalism: Is Belief In Richard Dawkins Necessary for Salvation?









. . Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism or neo-Platonism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled "Atheism," and might even now be contemplating another one marked "Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings"? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question suddenly broken out anew? Can one simply put it down to falling towers and fanatical Islamists?

I don't really think we can, at least not for the most part. Certainly Ditchkins's[1] disdain for religion did not sprout from the ruins of the World Trade Center. It is true that some of the debate took its cue from there -- an ominous fact, since intellectual debate is not at its finest when it springs from grief, hatred, hysteria, humiliation, and the urge for vengeance, along with some deep-seated racist fears and fantasies. 9/11, however, was not really about religion, any more than the thirty-year-long conflict in Northern Ireland was over papal infallibility. (It says much about Dawkins's obsession with religion that he subscribes in The God Delusion to the fallacy that the struggle in Northern Ireland was one over varieties of Christian belief.) Radical Islam generally understands exceedingly little about its own religious faith, and there is good evidence, as we have seen, to suggest that its actions are for the most part politically driven.

There are other reasons, too, to doubt this rather glib thesis. For one thing, Islamic fundamentalism confronts Western civilization not only with blood and fire, but with the contradiction between the West's own need to believe and its chronic incapacity to do so. The West now stands eyeball-to-eyeball with a full-blooded "metaphysical" foe for whom absolute truths and foundations pose no problem at all (would that they did!) -- and this at just the point when a Western civilization in the throes of late modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can. In post-Nietzschean spirit, it appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. All this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence.

It is not quite that, just as the West was in the act of abandoning grand narratives, a new one -- that of Islamist terror -- broke out to confound it. To put it that way misses the connection between the two events. It also makes the situation sound more ironic than it actually is. The much-trumpeted Death of History, meaning that capitalism is now the only game in town, reflects the arrogance of the West's project of global domination; and it is that aggressive project which has triggered a backlash in the form of radical Islam, thus disproving the thesis that history is over. In this sense, the very act of attempting to close history down has sprung it open again. It is not the first time this has happened. Assured since the fall of the Soviet bloc that it could proceed with impunity to pursue its own global interests, the West overreached itself, found itself confronting a freshly insurgent antagonist, and in doing so discredited the postmodern thesis that grand narratives were at an end. Just when ideologies in general seemed to have packed up for good, the declining global hegemony of the United States put them back on the agenda in the form of a peculiarly poisonous brand of neo-conservatism. A small cabal of fanatical dogmatists occupied the White House and proceeded to execute their well-laid plans for world sovereignty, like characters in some second-rate piece of science fiction. It was almost as bizarre as Scientologists taking over 10 Downing Street, or Da Vinci Code buffs patrolling the corridors of the Elysée Palace.

Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic. This makes it particularly flaccid and out of shape when its paucity of belief runs up against an excess of the stuff -- not only an external excess, but an internal one too, in the form of the various homegrown fundamentalisms. Modern market societies tend to be secular, relativist, pragmatic, and materialistic. They are this by virtue of what they do, not just of what they believe. As far as these attitudes go, they do not have much of a choice. The problem is that this cultural climate also tends to undermine the metaphysical values on which political authority in part depends. Capitalism can neither easily dispense with those metaphysical values nor take them all that seriously. As President Eisenhower once announced in Groucho Marx style: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief -- and I don't care what it is." Religious faith in this view is both vital and vacuous. God is ritually invoked on American political platforms, but it would not do to raise him in a committee meeting of the World Bank. It would be like appealing to the Platonic Forms or the World Spirit in choosing your wallpaper. . . .

As long as the populace get out of bed, roll into work, consume, pay their taxes, and refrain from beating up police officers, what goes on in their heads and hearts is for much of the time a strictly secondary affair. The authority of the system is for the most part sealed in practical, material ways, not by ideological faith. Belief is not what keeps the system ticking over, as it is what keeps the Salvation Army ticking over. This, too, is an advantage in "normal" times, since demanding too much belief from men and women can easily backfire. It is much less of a benefit in times of political tumult. . . .

A surfeit of belief is what agnostic, late-capitalist civilization itself has helped to spawn. This is not only because it has helped to create the conditions for fundamentalism. It is also because when reason becomes too dominative, calculative, and instrumental, it ends up as too shallow a soil for a reasonable kind of faith to flourish. As a result, faith lapses into the kind of irrationalism which theologians call fideism, turning its back on reason altogether. From there, it is an easy enough step to fanaticism. Rationalism and fideism are each other's mirror image. . . . Fundamentalism is among other things the faith of those driven into zealotry by a shallow technological rationality which sets all the great spiritual questions cynically to one side, and in doing so leaves those questions open to being monopolized by bigots.

Conversely, reason, as I have argued already, has to ground itself in something other than itself to be authentic as reason. If it grounds itself largely in material interests and political dominion, rather than in some kind of loving fidelity or peaceable community, faith and reason will spin apart from each other, becoming those bloodless caricatures of themselves known as fideism and rationalism. There is another sense, too, in which a paucity of faith leads to a surplus of it, which is simply that if the West really did have faith in a gospel of peace, justice, and fellowship, it would presumably not spend so much of its time burning Arab children to death, and thus would not have to worry quite so much about people crashing aircraft into nuclear reactors in the name of Allah. Nor would Muslims who knew something about their religious faith consider doing so. There can surely be no doubt that if these values really were to prevail, the world would be a great deal better off. Justice would be brought to bear on the conflict between Palestine and Israel. Humanity would regard itself as exercising stewardship rather than dominion over Nature. War would give way to peace. Forgiveness would mean among other things forgiving the crippling debts which burden poor nations. Mutual responsibility would oust selfish individualism. . . .



[1] Terry Eagleton's shorthand for Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Terry Eagleton is a former Thomas Warton Professor at Oxford University. He holds Distinguished Professorships at the University of Lancaster, the University of Notre Dame, and the National University of Ireland. He is a fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and the author of some fifty books of literary, cultural, and political criticism. The lectures shown in the videos above were delivered at Yale University on 1, 3, 8, and 10 April 2008 and later published in book form: Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale University Press, 2009). The text above is an excerpt from the lectures.


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Wed Jun 15, 2011 8:24 am

American Dream wrote:http://www.anarkismo.net/article/422

Making Anarchist Revolution Possible

By Arthur J. Miller


Introduction



This writing is not the product of any organization or philosophical tendency within anarchism. Though it is greatly influenced by organizations and different anarchist ideas, it is in fact only the viewpoint of one anarchist who seeks to answer the question of how an anarchist revolution could take place in our modern society.

Our world has grown far more complex than it was when the original texts of anarchism were written. The capitalist class has organized itself on an international level that seeks to bring under its control all lands upon the earth. The State as the protector of the capitalist class has grown stronger, with super States dominating weaker States by military and economic might. The people are being herded into cities of producers and localized self-sufficiency and indigenous sovereignty is slowly disappearing. The organizational form of this process can by viewed as the New World Order of Corporate Fascism.

It is becoming clear that the old ways of resistance are no longer able to adequately hold back the advances of the New World Order. The resistance to the New World Order is only able to react to some of the aspects of Corporate Fascism, and thus leaving many other aspects unchallenged. Since the resistance, at this time, cannot the challenge New World Order in its complete manifestation, it is also unable to create revolutionary change.

Reformism: The growth of the New World Order is accelerating at such a great speed that it is completely impossible to reform the present system into one that meets the needs of the people.

Social Democracy (electoral politics): Even if you could use the electoral system to make gains for the people, those small gains are not permanent because you must also engage in continuous struggle to protect those gains and that struggle alone creates road blocks to additional gains. First you must be able to have your gains enforced, then funded each year and protect your gains from being repelled. That makes it hard to produce further gains. The electoral process is dominated by the accumulation of political power. Political power once gained has as its first priority the continuation of its power. That means that it must struggle against all real or imaged threats to its power. Since political power is centralized power in the hands of a few in order to govern the many, the many must be controlled in order to govern them. Thus even the most progressive tendencies of political power become nothing more than a new ruling class.

Marxist-Leninism: The idea of a single vanguard party seizing control of the apparatus of the State and through a dictatorship creating a communist system has been one of the greatest historical mistakes ever made. It is the very nature of the State to centralize power within it and given that reality, no State will ever wither away its power, rather it will continue to seek to strengthen its centralized power. The State is the mechanism in which the few govern the many. And thus the direct interests of the governing few and the people who are governed have little in common and the interests of the many are a direct threat to the governing few. In order to protect itself from the threat of the many, the governing few, no matter who they are, must meet that threat by greater social control and suppression of the threat from the many. Thus, Marxist-Leninism can never evolve past its single party dictatorship.

One of the stated goals of Marxist-Leninism is to do away with capitalism and the capitalist class’s control of the State. But since Marxist-Leninism uses the institutions of the State it is unable to create permanent revolution because capitalism has the means of reestablishing itself by regaining control of the institutions of State power. This process has been seen clearly throughout the world, as one Marxist-Leninist controlled country after another one has fallen back into capitalism. Though Marx had the idea that socialism would evolve out of advanced capitalism, we are seeing throughout the world where Marxism advances the industrial devolvement of a country and rather than evolve into advanced socialism, it has evolved into advanced capitalism.

Given the realities of the New World Order and the failures of reformism, social democracy, and all forms of Marxism, we, in my view, must look in a different direction for solutions to the massive problems that we as a people and our planet earth face. Those solutions, I believe, will be found with the abolition of capitalism and the State, in other words they will be found in Anarchism.

Anarchism

The basic idea of Anarchism is that the people can live without capitalism and the State, through different forms of decentralized free association, self-management and mutual aid. Though Anarchists have been moved by a great sense of philosophical idealism, we cannot allow our idealism stand in our way of revolutionary process. For if we do our grand ideas become impossible to fulfill.

Idealism is important for it challenges us to struggle for greater things than now exist. But our idealism must be able to meet the revolutionary challenge of struggling against the New World Order, which does not function in our idealistic manner. The New World Order is an organized power that must be met by our organized power. When the organized power of the people is greater than the organized power of the ruling/capitalist class then by the means of our collective power we will be able to rid the world of the New World Order and replace it with an Anarchist society.

Idealism has been both Anarchists’ strength and weakness. Anarchist idealism has opened up our philosophy to many social possibilities without the drawbacks of rigid sectarian dogma. The weakness of Anarchist idealism lies within its ability to transform society when having to confront a ruling class that is so well-organized and entrenched.
When Anarchism is guided by its idealism alone by being a hodgepodge of ideas and based within the idea of autonomous localism it is unable muster the power that it takes to confront the well-organized New World Order in a revolutionary manner. What gains that are able to be make are lost to the forces of repression because it is unable to defend itself through the unity of action. In other words, Anarchists tend to go in so many different directions at the same time that it ends up going nowhere at all.

Our idealism must be flexible enough in order to develop in a practical manner in revolutionary struggle. On the other hand our practical application must be flexible enough so that our revolutionary struggle has the ability to give birth to an Anarchist society without it becoming just another form of social control by an elite few.

Some people say that we must not create a blueprint for revolution and our post-revolution society. To some degree that is correct, for both our revolution and our post-revolutionary society has to be flexible enough in order to adapt to the situations we find ourselves faced with. But with that said we also need unity of ideas and organization in order to progress to the point of making revolution possible. Also, if we have no means in place for the transformation of society and the fulfillment of needs, then even if we were able to defeat the ruling class, once the people’s needs go unfulfilled they will revert back under a new ruling class that has some means of fulfilling basic needs.

In my view, we should look upon building an Anarchist revolution as a building process. For the reasons stated above, that process, in my view, needs the following key elements:

1. Unity of ideas. We as a revolutionary movement need to be heading in the same direction or else we will dilute our ability to create revolutionary organization and direction.

2. Unity of tactics. If our revolutionary struggle is to have any real success, we need, in my view, to have a clear analysis of tactics. Our tactics need to be applied based upon what is effective in the situations in which we use them. One of the problems I have seen in the Anarchist movement is militancy of image over militancy of substance. Revolutionary militancy does not just act out an image of militancy, but rather it uses tactics that advances the process of building a revolution. Part of that involves day-to-day struggles, for revolutionary process is also a process of winning concessions from our enemies. Once the analysis of tactics makes clear which tactics will benefit the purpose they are being applied to, then we need to unite behind those tactics as a force of power. If we cannot do that then again we dilute our ability to succeed.

3. Unity of focus. It should be clear to us who the enemy is, capitalism, the State and such things as racism, sexism and all forms of domination, oppression and exploitation. Though it is natural for people to have disagreements over one thing or another, those disagreements should not be used to create struggles against each other. Our focus should be on the enemy and not on each other. In my view, the clearest statement of any side of a disagreement is made by whoever takes their ideas and makes them work. Factionalism only aids the enemy.

4. Proaction rather than reaction. Too often in our struggles folks just react to those things that they personally don’t like without a clear analysis of the effects of their actions on others, on our struggle and if their actions in fact serve the purposes that we are struggling for. Rather than just react to things, we need, in my view, to analyze the situation and act in a proactive manner that, not only deals with it based upon what can truly affect that situation in the way we wish, but also what will aid our purpose of building the revolutionary process. Often this will mean creating alternatives at the same time that we confront directly that which we feel we must confront.

5. Collective action. I am not speaking against individual action when it leads to collective action. One of the most famous examples of this was the individual action of Rosa Parks who was arrested for not giving up her seat to a white person on a bus. But what made her action so significant was that it led to the collective action of the bus boycott. But when individual action is not directly connected to the pulse of a collective group then it can lead to a reactionary backlash. This is often the case when people take actions with the thought that by making things worse for people that somehow they are going to react to that in a positive manner. In such a case, more often than not, the people will go along with the reactionary backlash and the struggle itself will suffer a set back. Our goal in the things that we do should be to provoke collective action for collective action is where the power to succeed exists.

6. Self and collective discipline. When I speak of discipline I am not speaking of a militaristic form of discipline that is forced from above onto those below. What I am speaking of is the self and collective discipline of doing that which needs to be done in any given situation. The struggle is very hard at times, that is why we call it a struggle. If we wish to succeed then we must be willing to have the discipline that it takes to do those things that are hard and sometimes even cause us to suffer. At times that even means personal struggle against burnout and depression. When it is hard, that is precisely the most important time to continue. If we are unwilling to do this then our work is a complete waste of time.
An Anarchist society will not come about just because we think it is a great idea. It will take a lot of hard work and personal and collective sacrifice. It will take a clear analysis of our enemy’s power and of the types of organization and tactics needed in order to develop greater power than our enemy, if we hope to succeed.

Direct Action

Anarchists believe that the best form of action is that taken by those directly affected by something and aimed directly at the cause of the problem, thus you have the term direct action. Even in the best of situations, forms of action in which people delegate to others to do that which they should do for themselves becomes ineffective in that process.

Direct action is not just a tactic; it is a way of life. It is the idea of social relations based upon those within the relations acting for themselves, which is the basic idea of Anarchism.

Direct action does not seek to reform the system, but rather seeks to win concessions from the system in day-to-day struggles as a means to building for a social revolution where the people directly seize the means of production and their communities and expropriate them from the capitalist system and the state.

Anarchist Federationism

There is a mistaken idea that anarchists do not believe in organization. Though it is true that some extreme individualists do reject organization, the majority of anarchists see the need of both organizations for the revolutionary process and for the post-anarchist society. The extreme individualist’s idea that somehow the people will rise up spontaneously, as individuals without organization, and do away with the State, is utterly absurd. This is a case of people’s fantasies overtaking all sense of reality. Some extreme individualists place their hopes for anarchy upon the idea that the State will collapse someday. While such a collapse may in time take place, but without anarchist alternatives in place the people would go through great suffering and out of such crisis a new authoritarian system would arise.

Most anarchists advocate a horizontal form of federation organization. This starts off with anarchist groups joining together in local federation, then regional federation and all the way to international federation. Each federation is based upon the common needs of those that make up the federation. This is not to say that such a form must be built in the beginning, for it maybe found that in some areas a regional federation is organized before the local federation because the local groups maybe spread out widely in a region and thus a regional federation is built first to give collective aid in order to build up the local areas in order to organize the local federation. Thus, anarchist federationism is flexible enough to be built upon needs rather than rigid ideology.

Anarchism will not come about just because we wish to dream it into existence. It will take deeper revolutionary acts of education, organization and action. Though most anarchists seek to organize around all human and environmental needs, the forms of those organizations would bring in people who are not specifically educated anarchists. Thus, anarchists have found the need to organize specific ideological anarchist federations in order to pursue anarchist strategies throughout the many social struggles. Also, in times of repression there is the need of collective defense of both anarchists and the general social struggle.

The anarchist federations, in my view, should not be a hodgepodge of anarchism. Rather, as I have already stated, it should be based upon unity of ideas, unity of tactics, and unity of collective action along with the discipline needed for effective organizing and action.

In times of repression the anarchist form of federationism makes it difficult for the anarchist movement to be suppressed because there is no center to target. Each area of federation can operate on its own if other areas of the federation are suppressed. And the reorganization process can begin even if a whole area of the federation is wiped out.

I believe that the local or regional federations should not be made up of just already organized anarchist groups. One of the problems with limiting a local or regional federation to just organized anarchist groups, is that it tends to isolate itself from outreach organizing. The anarchist local groups maybe affinity groups or collectives that don’t want to open themselves up to every anarchist that comes along for they may have purposes that don’t fit the needs of all anarchists. At times anarchists are good at getting out good educational material and showing themselves in other organizations and events. But once a person is convinced that anarchism is the way for them, it is hard for them to get started in anarchist activism if there is not some form of organization that is open for them to join. We should make being an active anarchist easy, not hard. Thus I believe that local and regional federations should have general recruiting groups that can be used for new anarchists and anarchists that don’t belong to any established anarchist group.

Anarcho-Syndicalism

Anarcho-Syndicalism originated out of the self-interest organization of workers into unions. But union organizing had its drawbacks, thus anarchists sought to change the direction of union organizing to include anarchist methods and goals.

Syndicalism is based upon the idea of organizing together those that are directly affected by something and instigating the self-management of those people, as in the organization of shop floor workers. It is a bit different than the idea of generalized organization where you have people not directly affected making decisions for those that are directly affected. In other words it is different from the idea of all people making the decisions for all people, thus creating a situation where a majority dominates minorities. And in some cases the minority could be those that are directly affected by the decision being made.

Syndicalism is the organization of syndicates (unions) of direct self-interest of those directly affected or having direct common concerns. The syndicates use the same federation form of organizing as do the anarchist federations. The group syndicate, the local syndicate, the regional syndicate and so on based upon the needs of those organized. Though syndicalism grew out of direct shop floor organizing, its methods can be applied to all forms of social relationships, needs, issues and common concerns. Thus by the general organization of syndicates we would be building our revolutionary power at the same time we are building our post-revolution society and still be able to fight the day to day struggles.

There are some anarchists that believe that syndicalism is fine for bringing about the revolution, but that once the revolution takes place the syndicates should dissolve themselves. I do not agree with this viewpoint. The transformation time after the revolution will mean the difference between a successful anarchist revolution or reverting back to authoritarian means. The first goal, in my view, of the transformation is fulfilling the needs of the people and not idealism. Once the needs of the people are fulfilled, then the syndicates should be flexible enough to evolve to the continuing needs of people and their desires. When a form of the syndicates are no longer needed they will no longer exist. That is based upon the fundamental function of the syndicates being based upon common needs and concerns through self-interest and self-managed organization, thus if there is no longer a need or if the need changes, or there is a desire for a different form of social organization, the syndicates would evolve.

Industrial Syndicalism

Industrial Syndicalism is based upon the idea that working people must organize their economic power in order to fight the day-to-day struggles against their bosses, while at the same time building their collective power in order to do away with the capitalist system.

The structural means of workplace syndicalism is rather simple. First it should be viewed as a horizontal form of organization, which begins with the shop floor of every organized workplace. The shop floor organization should include everyone in the workplace and not divide them up, as does the outdated trade unionism that organizes by trade rather than by job. The decisions affecting the shop floor need to be made on the shop floor.

Workplaces in the same industry, within a general location would organize together as a local industrial syndicate. And that same process would extend to regional industrial syndicates and continue out to international industrial syndicates.

All related industries would organize together into industrial syndicate departments. And these industrial syndicate departments would organize locally, regionally and internationally, as the need exists.

All local industrial syndicates would organize together into local industrial syndicate councils and then regional and international industrial syndicate councils.

Because the basic idea of the organization of the syndicates is the organization of needs, it maybe necessary for the industrial syndicates to take on additional forms of organization. The following are some examples:

1. Many workplaces are owned by large corporations. In the day-to-day struggles of workers it maybe needed to organize beyond just industrial syndicate forms of organization and to also organize together all workers that work for the same corporation. While still maintaining the industrial syndicates, the workers of a specific corporation would organize, let’s say IBM Workers Syndicate which again would be organized locally, regionally and internationally, so that in the time of a strike they could close down the complete corporation rather than just part of it.

2. Work area syndicates. It maybe found that an effective tactic in a business district maybe to form a syndicate, while still maintaining the industrial syndicates, of all the workers within that business district together into a syndicate. This way the whole business district could be struck at the same time. Also there is the case of ports where workers of different syndicates work, seafarers, longshoremen, truck drivers, railroad workers, those that provide services for the ships, and shipyard workers who repair the ships, would be organized together as a port syndicate. The area syndicate could be used to shut down the whole port as workers act together over all of their demands.

3. Trade syndicates. Though the most effective form of syndicates is industrial, still there are common concerns and needs of different trades. For example the trade of welders, they have in common such things as welding safety, the training of welders and in times of layoffs finding work in other industries that use welders.

4. Specific needs. This may be the needs of people in wheel chairs, or women or people of color wanting to open up industries that had denied them employment or whatever needs exist that workers have. Syndicalism is the organization of needs by those that have those needs; so specific needs syndicates should be an important part of the syndicalist structure.

5. Direct democracy. All decisions or election of officers are made by the directly agreed upon decision-making process of each syndicate. Each member of the syndicate should have an equal say in that process.

6. Officers. When anarchists elect officers it is the election of workers to do specific jobs and not an election of a political leadership. Within the syndicates the term of office is limited with the right of recall if necessary.

7. Assemblies. When two or more syndicates have a need to get together for one reason or another they call for an assembly. Some times assemblies run at predefined times, like once a year, or they maybe called for specific needs that have come up. Sometimes the assemblies are open to all members of the meeting syndicates, but other times that is not practical, so the syndicates elect delegates to assemblies.

8. Defense/solidarity committees. Each syndicate should have an organized defense/solidarity committee.

9. Industrial Environmental/Health/Safety Syndicates. The capitalist system has had an enormous negative impact on the environment and health and safety of workers. These issues cannot wait to be dealt with at some other time in the future. They must be viewed as an important component of all anarchism and syndicalist forms of organizing. Though there should be struggles outside of industry on these issues, the industrial syndicates have the role of struggling directly within industry to change industry in the direction of becoming earth, workplace and community safe and friendly. Thus, each syndicate should have an environmental. health/safety committee that are organized together as an Industrial Environmental/Health/Safety Syndicate, and again that syndicate needs to be organized locally, regionally and internationally.

How Could Industrial Syndicalism Work

Each shop floor industrial syndicate would draw up a list of their demands. Then a local assembly would be called and if needed, regional and international assemblies, depending upon the needs. These assemblies may be industrial, may be different syndicates of workers working for the same corporation, or area work syndicates or a combination of different forms of syndicates. At the assemblies the demands are combined together. The delegates at the assemblies are authorized to take a strike (or other such job actions) vote. If the vote is for a strike if the demands are not met, the syndicates go to the industrial syndicate councils to put a boycott on the shops that would be struck. Such a boycott would require that:

* No syndicalist workers would cross the picket lines.

* No syndicates would supply those shops with any
goods or services.

* No syndicates would do the work of striking workers,
even if the company moved the work to non-striking
shops.

* No syndicalist workers would ever handle scab goods.

* No syndicalist worker would even consume scab goods

The industrial syndicate councils would also organize support of the needs of the striking workers. Needs could include: food and rent money, defense if there is repression, picket line support, and direct action against the companies if needed.

Community Syndicalism


The working class does not just exist in workplaces, they also live in communities. And thus the organization of the working class needs to extend to their communities. It has also been found in the history of working class struggles that in day-to-day struggles and in revolution that well-organized industrial organizations and community organizations together add to the strength of the organized power of the working class.

Community Syndicalism would organize communities in the same way that Industrial Syndicalism organizes industry. That is, those that have a direct need organize together and continue that organization outwards as far as needed.

Unlike such things as cities councils or city government where you have people making decisions on things that they don’t have any direct interest in or experience with, community syndicalism organizes the direct democracy of those that have a direct interest or need.

How is a community defined? Those that live in a community do that. In a smaller town it could be the whole town. In cities it would be defined by neighborhoods.

What are some of the needs of a community? Housing, schools, roads, cultural centers, parks, food, sewage, power for heat and lights, physical needs like those people in wheelchairs, community mediation, medical, the environment, needs of people of color, needs of women, needs of youth, needs of older people and so on.

Sometimes the needs are temporary and sometimes they are permanent. Sometimes there could be permanent needs but the needs do not require a continuous functioning organization, and thus the syndicate of that need would only be functioning at times when necessary.

How long the need is organized would depend upon how long the need exists. When two or more community syndicates have a necessity to interact, an assembly would be called between the syndicates directly involved. When a need involves everyone in the community a general community assembly would be called.

The community syndicates would federate together within a city, region and internationally as the need exist. As there is a need, the federated syndicates would hold assemblies, or based on those in direct need of something, there could be a combination of syndicates meeting in assembly. If the need were of all, general assemblies would be held.

For example, lets say forces of the counter-revolutionaries are massing to march upon a liberated area, or some natural disaster has taken place. General assemblies of the syndicates maybe needed to deal with such problems.

How the community assemblies would function would be like the industrial assemblies. Some times they would be mass assemblies and sometimes they would be delegate assemblies.

How Community Syndicalism Could Work


In the day-to-day struggles before the revolution there would be complete solidarity within the syndicate. For example, if a landlord is unwilling to fix housing or is evicting tenants, a tenant rent strike could be called and all renters within the community would withhold their rent payments.

In some cases housing is owned by large corporations. Thus there could be a need for a pre-revolution housing or a tenants’ syndicate organized of all the tenants of that corporation for the purpose of collective direct action.

In the event of a direct action of any of the community syndicates, community syndicate assemblies would organize direct solidarity in action and helping with the needs of those in struggle.

When people are free of competition with each other and the bases of society is cooperation and the well-being of all, many conflicts within a community will be resolved by that alone. But given that there could be some conflicts between individuals, within syndicates, between syndicates, or between different communities, that cannot be resolved among the people directly involved, the dispute would be taken to the community mediation syndicate. First, those that may be directly involved in a dispute who are members of the community mediation syndicate would not partake in the work of that mediation, but would rather partake in the sides of the dispute. The purpose of the mediation is not to choose sides or determine winners or losers in a dispute, but rather to help direct a process in which a solution can be found that is fair to both sides, and to prevent the outburst of violent conflict where a dispute is settled by whomever has the greatest physical might.

Green Syndicalism

Though syndicates should be organized around all needs and issues, the organization around the environment has special importance. Capitalism and the State has had a devastating impact on our environment. In order to resist that continuing impact and to change society (industries and communities) to exist in balance with our environment and to clean-up messes and heal the wounds to our environment, we need an extended effort in that direction.

Already this writing has included environmental/health/safety committees with the Industrial Syndicates and environmental syndicates with community syndicalism, but the organization of environmental health, resistance and action, in my view, needs to be taken a step further. There needs to be a federation of environmental syndicalism. The component parts of the federation should include the organized syndicates of specific environmental needs, issues and action, which would specialize in the research of problems and the development of tactical action. For example there could be a Syndicate of Old Growth Forest Concerns, or a Syndicate of Rivers, Streams, Lakes and Wetlands Concerns.

How Green Syndicalism Could Work

The Federation of Environmental Syndicalism would be made of all syndicalist formations dealing with the environment. Lets say you have a specific environmental problem like water quality. An assembly would be held of the committees from industries, communities and the Syndicate of Rivers, Streams, Lakes and Wetlands Concerns. Together they would access the problem based upon the research, knowledge and concerns that would be combined from the different syndicates.

They may decide that further or ongoing research is needed and thus organize a committee of people from the different syndicates. They may decide that direct action is needed to confront and force the concessions of change in pre-revolution struggle. Such direct action then would be taken from within industry by the Industrial Syndicates, within communities by the Community Syndicates and from other needed places by the Environmental Syndicates. Since the impact of change could impact the workers in industries and communities, a part of the direct action process needs to include dealing with those impacts.


Social Syndicalism

Not all forms of oppression will be eliminated by a social revolution against capitalism and the State. Such things as sexism and racism, though their roots maybe found within capitalism and the State, have also become conditioned factors in society. Thus, just doing away with capitalism and the State will not in itself do away with all forms of oppression.

The idea of social syndicalism is to organize those people who are directly affected by different forms of oppression. For example, the social system of capitalism and the State groups people together by what they call race and oppresses them based on that grouping. Yes, class oppression is a part of that because those groupings based upon race are for the most part forced down to the lowest levels of class. And having a class of super-exploited people is a fundamental element of capitalism. So as the super-exploited class resists capitalism on an economic level, it must also organize and resist based upon the factor of race group oppression.

Part of the process of race group oppression is stripping those groups of any power over their lives, as individuals and as communities and by creating a bias (racism) against them within white classes. Like the organization of workers and communities, race oppression must be resisted and organized around by those directly affected by the means of self-determination and empowerment. Though I use the term social syndicalism, the form of self-organization should be determined by the oppressed themselves. Thus, there is the need of self-organization of the groupings of race oppression, their interconnections and allies within the general idea of all groupings of race oppression.

On top of the self-organization of these groups, there needs to be the dismantling of racism within the overall society. There is the economic racism within industry that the organization of oppressed groupings would struggle along side the industrial syndicates to overcome. There is the struggle within communities that should be handled in the same way.

Then there are some inherent problems. If you have a generalized community or city form of democracy, where all people decide upon all things, and if the people within the groupings of oppression by race, are a minority, then you have, in fact, people of color depending upon the goodwill of white people to see, understand and act upon their oppression, needs and concerns, and thus, you still have white supremacy. Hopefully over time and good revolutionary process society can eliminate the forms of oppression by race, but that can’t be done until the people of color have achieved their own empowerment first.

The above example should be applied to other social groupings of people who find the need to organize directly around their oppressions, needs and wants. Another example would be women organizing against sexism and patriarchy.

Social syndicalism advocates that social groups of people become empowered by organizing together in their own self-interest and use their organizations to interact with the other syndicates in order that their needs and concerns are addressed directly.

Sovereignty Syndicalism

Throughout the world there are groupings of people that are based upon traditional indigenous tribalism. As a matter of fact, all people have indigenous tribal roots. But the conquest by capitalism and the State, and the forms of conquest that capitalism evolved out of sought to destroy traditional indigenous tribalism, and in some cases did. Some forms of radical ideologies, even though they seek to change the system for themselves, do continue the process of oppression of traditional indigenous tribalism.

Since syndicalism is based upon the idea of people organizing in their direct self-interests, it recognizes the inherent right of the sovereignty of indigenous tribes. Rather than being another form of missionarism that seeks to impose its ways on others, syndicalism seeks to give solidarity support to the struggles, needs and wants of indigenous tribes, but only when requested. Interaction between the indigenous tribes and the different forms of syndicates would take place when needed and wanted, based upon common needs, cooperation and respect.

Synthesis of Syndicalism


One may look at all that I have written and think, isn’t that a bit much? How could we ever organize all that? And how could so many different syndicates function together?

First, the organization of the syndicates would take place upon what the people are willing to organize and are able to organize. As more people become directly involved in the syndicalist movement, more forms of syndicates could be organized. Since all the syndicates are connected, any form of syndicalist organizing directly advances the overall syndicalist movement.

How syndicates would work together depends on the need. In our day-to-day struggle with capitalism and the State it could look like this: Let’s say an industrial syndicates goes on strike. The other industrial syndicates would make sure that the striking workplace does not receive goods and services, that no goods from the striking workplace are handled and the work of the strikers are not done in another workplace. There could be an exception to the work of the strikers, for instance, if the workplace provides needed services to a community, the striking syndicate along with community syndicates may organize the continuation of those services in such a way as the capitalists do not profit from that work.

The industrial and community syndicates would work together to provide for the needs of the strikers. And all the syndicates would work together to give direct action support for the strikers. All this could be coordinated out of assemblies called for the purpose of providing the needs and direct action solidarity. This same means of functioning could be applied to community struggles, struggles around issues or in support of groupings of oppression or indigenous tribal struggles.

For example, let’s say that a multi-national mining corporation, with the help of the State, has gone on to tribal land for the purpose of energy development. The State has arrested some of the tribal people who have tried to resist and now they request the assistance of the syndicates. First, the defense/solidarity committees would give aid to those arrested and help build an offensive campaign to resist that oppression. That would be coordinated out of a defense/solidarity assembly. Next, an assembly could be called to coordinate direct resistance against the multi-national corporation and the State aiding it, and to provide for the needs of the resisters.

Out of that assembly a direct action plan would be created. The tribal organization may set up roadblocks on tribal land. The syndicates may set up roadblocks on the outside of the tribal land. The Industrial Syndicates may place a boycott on the multi-national corporation, so that no syndicalist workers are involved in the companies operation on tribal land, that no syndicalist workers provide any goods or services to that company, and that a consumer boycott is put into place. Then the syndicates could organization protests demonstrations as widely as possible.

In the functioning of providing needs the syndicates could function as follows. Let’s say the need is a road between communities. First, an assembly would be called between the two communities to define the need of a road. Then an assembly would be called of those that are directly affected by the road and building of the road. That would be the industrial syndicates of road builders, transportation workers who would use the road, and the community syndicates that have a need for the road. Let’s say that between the two communities there is tribal land, so the tribal organization would be included. Then if there were environmental concerns, (i.e. there are wetlands in that area). Perhaps there is a concern of bike riders; they would have their syndicate in the assembly, also. If the assembly should be open to all members of the syndicates involved or should be a delegate assembly would depend upon how large the draw of people would be.

Out of that assembly a basic plan that would address everyone’s needs and concerns would be drawn up. Then a council made up of representatives of the syndicates would work out a detailed plan and take that back to the assembly for approval, which may also include taking the detailed plan back to each syndicate before taking it to the assembly of syndicates.

This system of assemblies of syndicates would take place anytime there is an activity that deals with the needs or concerns of two or more syndicates. It could be something as simple as a syndicate of fiddlers who want to put on a fiddle festival. The fiddlers syndicate would meet with the syndicates in the community that they want it to take place in, the syndicate of the workers that maybe needed, the transportation workers syndicate for transportation needs, and so on, based upon what is needed. In such a case there maybe just a need for a delegate from each syndicate and not a mass assembly.

Revolutionary Process

Every struggle goes through a process, and the better we understand that process and give that process some direction the better off we will be, rather than just let the process direct us. History is not made up of individual isolated moments, but rather it is a continuously flowing evolution. Any moment in time is influenced to one degree or another by things that went on before that moment. Thus, the analysis of any struggle or event must take into consideration its influence on that which came after it.

Our revolutionary process, in my view, should be based on a flow of taking from the past that which we can learn from, advancing it in the present with new ideas and passing it along to the next generation for them to take it and advance as they can. This creates an evolution of revolutionary process.

Even what may seem to be a rather insignificant event may have influenced individuals or groups to go on to greater things. Even the most renowned activists had their starting points, and the same can be said of all activists. Base upon the experience gained in starting points, revolutionary activists then begin their individual revolutionary process. This makes the creation of starting points of activism essential to our movement.

In realizing this, the most important time of any event, is not the time before the event (the organizing of it), or the time of the event (a starting point for new activists), but rather the time after the event. That time is crucial for it is the follow-up of events that allows for the development of new activists into our movement. Without the follow-up of the starting points for new activists, we not only may lose people who could become activists, but also we could lose influencing the direction that new activists take.

The first most important factor in developing new activists is to make that beginning point easy for them to get involved in our movement. Sometimes anarchists tend to isolate themselves to the point that for a new person to get actively involved in the anarchist movement they must go through such a struggle that they burn out before they become committed to our movement.

Part of the reason for the high burnout of new activists is that many older activists expect everyone in the movement to be well educated on anarchism and issues, and at times they even get hostile when someone does not understand something and attack them as if their lack of understanding is an ideological point of view. We do not become knowledgeable anarchists at the point that we become interested in anarchism.

Education is a process.

Since our struggles are a resistance to oppression and exploitation, our educational process should not be of abstract theories alone. Our educational theoretical work needs to, in my view, relate directly to the experiences of oppression and exploitation of each activist. In order to do that activists need to be able to express their experiences.

The working class has come under the dominance of the intelligentsia. The books on the history of working class struggles and its ideas are almost exclusively written by the intelligentsia. This has created a situation where theory is held up on a pedestal and the direct experiences of our class, as explained by our class, has almost been driven into extinction. As such, the intelligentsia has become a ruling class over working class struggle. One of the first steps in our revolutionary process should be in seizing back the voice of the working class in its own education and the development of our ideas.

Our expressed experiences explain our needs and why we wish to build a better world and through that we create the ideas (theory) of how to proceed in dealing with our oppressions and creating a new world. With those ideas (theory) applied in practice, we then tap into the experience gained from that (what works and what does not work and how we can make it better in our process of change) and modify our ideas (theory), and that becomes our revolutionaryprocess.

That is why our experiences in being oppressed and the experiences with organizing around our oppression and balancing that with our ideas (theory) are so important. That is why busting out of the absolutist containment of theory alone, or blindly reacting to personal experience of oppressive conditions without the direction of ideas (theory) are both dead-end processes, but the balance of both leads us down the path of liberation.

Syndicalist Revolution

All the syndicates would have four main elements:

1. The organization of day-to-day struggles with oppression, capitalism, and the State.

2. The organized collective solidarity between the syndicates.

3. The organizational revolutionary power to do away with oppression, capitalism and the State.

4. The transformation of society from oppression, capitalism and the State to an anarchist society based upon the well-being of all.

When building our syndicates we are at the same time building all four elements.

Capitalism and the State are organized powers used to oppress and exploit us. Through syndicalist organizing we are organizing our collective power to defeat the organized power of the ruling class.

When the organized power of the people is greater than the organized power of the ruling class then our revolution would take place through a social general strike. That social general strike would be the complete refusal, in industries, communities and in all means, of cooperation with capitalism and the State, and of providing goods and services to capitalism and the State, along with the organized protection of our revolution. Capitalism and the State cannot exist without our cooperation with the ruling class. We feed them, we provide the services they need, our communities are controlled by our cooperation with them, we are everywhere, even in the homes of the ruling class. There is nowhere for them to run, we are everywhere, there is nowhere to hide, we are everywhere. We will starve the ruling class out of existence; let them eat their money and deeds of property.

Our revolution would not be centralized with an easy target to suppress; rather it will be spread out in all places.

Once we have seized our workplaces and communities we would then begin the transformation of society by dismantling forever the institutions of capitalism and the State, so that we will create permanent revolution for there will be nothing left for the ruling class or a new ruling class to ever seize control of. We would replace capitalism and the State with our anarcho-syndicalism organizations. This organization would have the flexibility to evolve down the road to more idealistic forms based upon a process of needs and desires.

In this way we are paving the road of our ideas through reality to our dreams.


thanks to AD.

*

adding this:

vanlose kid wrote:
Debtocracy: the samizdat of Greek debt

Made for just £7,000, a compelling film about Greek's financial crisis makes the case that the entire euro system was rotten from the start

Aditya Chakrabortty
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 June 2011 22.15 BST

One might not expect a butcher in rural Greece to recognise Costas Lapavitsas. He is, after all, an economist, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His research interests include the evolution and function of the Japanese financial system and his books include The Political Economy of Money and Finance – probably not staples of discussion among rural Greek butchers.

But when, just before Easter, the Lapavitsas went shopping for groceries in Kopanos ("A godforsaken village," apparently, "ugly as hell"), said butcher spotted his name. "I know of a Costas Lapavitsas," he said. "I have seen him in a video on the internet." On being told that video star and customer were one and the same, the butcher responded with more excitement than is desirable from someone wielding a cleaver: "Ah, Debtocracy!"

Lapavitsas does have a star turn in Debtocracy, a film whose success is as unlikely as the academic's celebrity. It's a documentary about the financial crisis that has struck Greece; the collapse of public finances; the €110bn loan from Europe and the International Monetary Fund; and the savage spending cuts to come.

Unlike other entries to the nascent credit-crunch movie genre, the film-makers do not go looking for guilty men and women. No Inside Job, this. Instead what you get is a polemic against the European system; an explanation of how Greece was always doomed to struggle against the likes of Germany. "So are we the black sheep of an all-successful Europe?" asks the voiceover. "Or has the system been ailing since its youth?"

Debtocracy makes a compelling case that the entire euro system was rotten from the start, with bankers in Frankfurt and Paris left with piles of surplus cash, and southern Europeans getting by on cheap loans. Made on a budget of €8,000 (£7,110) and with very little flashy camera work or fancy use of archive, this is still – I can confidently say, without delving too far into history – the best film of Marxian economic analysis yet produced.

Stuck up on a website and YouTube in early April, Debtocracy has garnered something close to a million views and has been broadcast on small Greek television channels, gradually building an audience. "At first, it was young Greeks with broadband connections," says Aris Chatzistefanou – who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Katerina Kitidi. "But then we heard stories of how small villages were screening it, and how old men in the countryside were asking their sons to download it on to DVDs." In the process, the film has become an artefact in the popular resistance to the austerity package imposed on Greece – and across southern Europe. In Portugal, the Left Bloc put on a showing of Debtocracy in a small cinema to launch its recent election campaign. The film was also scheduled to be screened to 4,000 protesters in Barcelona's Plaza Catalunya before the authorities broke up proceedings.

When I speak to Chatzistefanou, he is still recovering from showing his film in the central Syntagma square in Athens. The screening only got going at 2.30am "and then the audience wanted to discuss it. We still had 400 people arguing over the Greek financial crisis at five in the morning."

Timing has a lot to do with Debtocracy's success. Greece's economy has sunk deeper into crisis, buttressing the film's argument that the nation is being broken, not fixed, by the IMF and the eurozone. Yet the film's suggestion that Greeks should renegotiate, and refuse to pay some of its ruinous debts, still barely features in mainstream Greek politics or media. Which leaves one video on the internet to be passed around a swelling band of dissenters.

After returning from Kopanos to London, Lapavitsas received an email: "Greetings from the village!" began the butcher. "I just want to congratulate you on your film. When you come back we can have a proper discussion."

• See the film at: debtocracy.gr [DailyMotion version, youtube below]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jun ... cracy-film




*



vanlose kid wrote:*

"Debtocracy", the documentary posted just above is well worth watching. also it references Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein's "The Take" which is an uplifting piece of work on "doing something about it".

"The Take" is in nine youtube parts. am posting one and two here for those with an interest in the boring, woo-less and mundane part of our predicament. click on for the continuation.





a working model for taking back sovereignity and freedom (cf., "Debtocracy" for the meaning of the distinction.)

*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Thu Jun 16, 2011 10:48 am

*

the following set of posts are related to the question raised by Jeff in the Possibilism and Impossibilism thread.

the question is whether a detente policy of incremental change by way of socialist participation in some form of capitalist managed society with a social face (possibilism) is preferable and workable as opposed to a complete eradication of the capitalist system (impossibilism).

in the view of the authors and practicians below what is impossible is incrementalism (state-socialism).


Social Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism, the State and Leninism:
A Reply to the International Socialist Organization


by Tom Wetzel (Mar 12, 2009) (from my ZNet blog)

I was prompted to write this by Paul D'Amato's two recent articles in Socialist Worker criticizing anarchism (http://socialistworker.org/2009/02/27/r ... ruled-over), and (http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/06/m ... -the-state) but this will also give me the opportunity to provide an explanation of some basic social anarchist ideas. I take it that social or Left-anarchism and libertarian socialism are the same thing. Thus I use the phrases "social anarchism" and "libertarian socialism" interchangeably.

I believe there is, as Murray Bookchin said, an "unbridgeable chasm" between social anarchism and individualist or "lifestylist" forms of anarchism. Ideas often thought characteristic of anarchism, such as anti-organizational bias or an obsession for "consensus decision-making" are in fact features of individualist anarchism, not social anarchism.

Libertarian socialists would also agree there is an unbridgeable chasm between Leninism and libertarian socialism. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) is a Leninist organization in that it defends the political legacy of the Bolshevik party's role in the Russian revolution, looks to Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky for inspiration, and defends characteristic Leninist ideas such as the theory of a "vanguard party" to manage the transition to socialism, and the idea of building a hierarchical "proletarian state" in the period of social transformation away from capitalism.

D'Amato's criticisms of those who think of social change in terms of one's personal lifestyle choices make it clear he is taking aim at lifestyle or individualist anarchism. But D'Amato presents his criticisms as if they apply to anarchism in general. Leninist polemics have a long history of using individualist anarchism as a club to beat up on libertarian socialism...a kind of bait and switch fallacy. This method of argument would be analogous to me suggesting that there is no distinction between the form of Leninism advocated by the ISO and the despotic regime of Joseph Stalin. In fact I won't do this because I'm aware that the ISO has a long history of critiquing existing (and formerly existing) Communist systems. I would suggest that Paul D'Amato and the ISO need to offer the same courtesy to social anarchism, by not confusing it with hyper-individualism or lifestyleism.

Self-emancipation and Direct Democracy

Social anarchism is a socialist political viewpoint, and emerged originally as a tendency in the first International Working Men's Association (called the "First International") of the 1860s-70s. People like Anselmo Lorenzo and Michael Bakunin were prominent figures in that initial libertarian socialist current. Thus social anarchism or libertarian socialism — I use these phrases interchangeably — was a product of radical working class politics.

The libertarian socialists in the First International agreed with Marx that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves."

This slogan was first annunciated by Flora Tristan y Moscoso — a pioneer socialist-feminist of the 1830s-40s. Tristan made her living as a printer. She had originally been a follower of socialists like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, who advocated building alternative communities, and they relied on philanthropy from wealth people for funding — an approach that suffered from both paternalism and lack of realism. This was the approach that Engels later called "utopian socialism." By the early 1840s Tristan had repudiated utopian socialism. She came to the view that the working class could only rely on its own efforts. In 1843 she embarked on a nation-wide speaking tour to persuade French workers to form a national workers union, and her statement about working class self-emanipcation dates from that campaign.

Libertarian socialists in the First International thus agreed with Marx in rejecting the approach of the utopian socialists.

From the time of the First International to the 1930s, the main movement-building or mass organizing expression of social anarchism was in the labor movement...an approach to labor politics callled anarcho-syndicalism. Anarchosyndicalists take Flora Tristan's slogan about working class self-liberation quite literally. Anarchosyndicalists believe that the working class can liberate itself from structures of oppression and exploitation by developing, "from below," its own mass social movement based on a wide-spread solidarity in the course of struggles with the dominating classes.

That working class liberation develops out of the class struggle is thus an assumption shared by both Marxism and anarchosyndicalism — and most social anarchists. Through self-organization and their own collective action, working people people can develop a sense of having some collective power to change things, develop deeper insights into the nature of the system, and develop skills useful in advancing the struggle further. Through collective action and self-organization people can develop a greater sense of possibilities for change. The practical need for unity also helps in developing an understanding of the connections between captalism and things like racism and sexism and imperialism. A mass organization is also a site where radicals with ambitious ideas about social change can connect to the aspirations and grievances of of broader numbers of people.

The anarchosyndicalist advocacy of the direct democracy of worker assemblies comes from this idea of workers controlling and shaping — self-managing — their own collective struggles. This conception of a movement of workers "in union" with each other is opposed to bureaucratic business unionism, where a hierarchical structure of paid officials and staff becomes entrenched, and routine top-down bargaining narrows the issues and scope of the union's aims and diminishes the ability of the union to address the concerns of workers on and off the job. A paid union hierarchy who don't share the conditions of the job and often have incomes more akin to management are likely to "see management's point of view" and will tend to see direct struggle as a risk to the union they would rather avoid.

The point to direct democracy comes from the fact it is the opposite of top-down control. The six-month fight of the Barcelona bus drivers to reduce their work week from six to five days in 2007-2008 illustrates this.

The bureaucratic unions at the Barcelona transit authority — the social-democratic UGT and Communist-influenced Workers Commissions — had sold out the workers on this demand for a shorter workweek in 2005 by signing a contract without a well-advertised contract ratification meeting.

In the fall of 2007 the anarcho-syndicalist CGT (http://www.cgt.org.es), which has a large section among the bus drivers, was able to persuade another independent bus drivers union (Spain has a system of "competitive unionism" that allows multiple unions in a workplace) to join it in sponsoring an open workers assembly "independent of the trade unions," to discuss the issues and plan a course of action.

Workers welcomed the rank and file of the UGT and Workers Commissions to attend, but not the paid officials. The assembly elected a rank and file committee to coordinate the struggle and publish a free newspaper for people in the city to explain their struggle. Over a period of six months the assembly conducted three strikes of several days duration, various demonstrations and marches, and gained the participation of a majority of the workers. After the third strike, the Socialist Party politicians who control the city government and transit authority in Barcelona finally capitulated to the workers' demand.

The direct democracy of the workers assembly was crucial because it placed power over the struggle directly in the hands of the ranks, and gave bus drivers a real sense this was their movement. It gave them the power to decide if a management proposal was acceptable or not.

Direct democracy does not mean all decisions have to be made in meetings. It doesn't mean there can be no delegation of tasks. But the idea is to avoid the development of a bureaucracy that has its own interests apart from the workers. Thus in the CGT Transport Union there are no paid officials and there is term limits for the executive committees.

Anarchosyndicalists have almost never advocated "consensus decision-making" for the mass organizations they have helped to organize or participate it — and this is true of most social anarchists in general. The interminable meetings and difficulty coming to clear decisions in a reasonable time — invariably a feature of consensus decision-making in settings with large numbers of people — would not be effective for working class people who have limited amounts of free time and are often exhausted from work. It's particularly unlikely to work for working women who often have a "double day" — working for employers and also doing most housework for their families.

Part of the problem here, I think, is that people may confuse what works for a small, informal circle of like-minded friends and what is needed in a larger and more heterogeneous group of people. A small informal group of friends can make decisions through talking things out. But a social movement is not the same thing as a small group of like-minded friends.

Building consensus in a mass organization or movement is important. The more unified a movement is, the stronger it will be. This suggests that there does need to be an open discussion where people can air their views. But if discussion doesn't end disagreement, then libertarian socialists propose a vote, and the majority carries the decision. Thus it is majoritarian direct democracy that social anarchists advocate, not "consensus decision-making." D'Amato ignores this distinction between different concepts of direct democracy.

The problem with "consensus decision-making" is its requirement of complete unanimity, and opposition to voting. I agree with Paul D'Amato's criticism of consensus decision-making of the sort that existed in the '70s/'80s period in anti-nuke groups like the Livermore Action Group or the Clamshell Alliance. Howard Ryan's pamphlet "Blocking Progress" (http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/CX6187.htm) is good account of how destructive and elitist this was in the Livermore Action Group in the '80s. But consensus decision making in those groups did not have its origins in social anarchism, but in Quakers and other radical pacifists, radical feminists, and individualist anarchists. Jo Freeman's famous essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" was a critique of this approach to decision-making in radical feminist groups of that era.

Consensus decision-making tends to lead to minority rule and empowers people who are better at talking...who are usually more educated. In any movement there is always a minority who agrees with the original aims and character of an organization. So even if this is proven disfunctional from experience, the group can't evolve through learning from experience because changes can be blocked by small minorities. This is why consensus decision-making is essentially conservative.

Persons and Social Groups

Why is there this difference between individualist anarchism and social anarchism in the interpretation of direct democracy? I believe the explanation for this lines in a theoretical difference about the concept of the person.

Individualist anarchism was influenced by the classical liberal conception of the person as a kind of atom whose core personality or identity is separate from social groups. The idea of absolute personal autonomy, which is a feature of hyper-individualism, is built on this.

Individuals are viewed as prior to society because society and social groups are viewed as akin to associations that a person joins, such as a club or church or a union. This picture was influenced by the classical liberal concept of society being formed as a "social contract" among individuals. This is the source of individualist anarchist talk of society being based on "free agreement" or "voluntary association". Because the individual is conceived as an atom prior to society, the individual is seen as requiring an absolute autonomy apart from the social collectivity...and this is expressed in the requirement of unanimity in collective decisions that person participates in. The individual ego thus asserts its claim to veto the collectivity on its own. William Godwin expresses this thus: "There is but one power to which I can yield a heartfelt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictates of my own conscience."(1)

The individualist conception comes close to agreeing with Margaret Thatcher's slogan, "Society doesn't exist, only individuals exist." The individualist concept of the person is an assumption that individualist anarchism shares in common with right-wing "free market" "libertarianism".

But in fact society — and many social groups — are not like an association. When you're born into a particular social class, or a particular racial or ethnic group, or a family, or you're a particular sex raised in a particular gender system, this shapes who you become. Many of your abilities, expectations in life, tastes, way of talking and other things are shaped by being a part of a social group. Social groups become part of your identity. The social group is part of you. And this also means that people will often have a tendency to agree or sympathize with needs of a group they are a part of.

This view of the person as shaped by groups he or she is a part of is called the social concept of the person. The social concept of the person is another assumption shared in common by Marx and social anarchism.

Bakunin is expressing his agreement with this view of the person in this passage:

"Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not the vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it."(1) This doesn't mean each individual isn't also unique, with his or her own aspirations and ability to make up one's own mind.

It might help to contrast the social concept of the person with another view that I'll call the totalitarian concept of the person. This is a view that is very far out of fashion these days. But in the '20s and '30s, in both fascist and Stalinist rhetoric, there was a tendency to reduce the needs and interests and aspirations of the person to some larger entity such as a class, the nation or the state. The person was seen as a mere expression of some collectivity. The social concept of the person stands mid-way between the two extremes of individualism and totalitarianism, acknowledging both an individual and collective aspect to people.

Because our lives occur in various group contexts, there are always situations where our will will be limited by the wills of others, and by our obligations to others. Thus the slogan "refusing to be ruled over" (the title of one of D'Amato's articles) is ambiguous. It could express an opposition to being subordinate to bosses, to oppressive hierarchies...or it could express the idea of individual autonomy, of not being subject to any limitation by others. This second interpretation is the individualist anarchist idea of absolute individual autonomy. But a person is not oppressed simply because they lose a vote in a meeting.

Direct Democracy and Self-management

For anarchosyndicalism, self-management and direct democracy are aspects of both the strategy for social change and also part of the program for a self-managed socialist society. The direct self-activity and self-organization of the working class, in running their own struggles and mass organizations, "prefigures" a society where workers will directly govern their own work and the industries they work in. "Prefigurative politics" thus had its origins in the libertarian syndicalist wing of labor radicalism.

In the social anarchist view, self-managment is an innate human capacity and need. Humans have the ability to discuss among themselves, develop plans for what they want to achieve, for themselves and jointly with others, and have the ability to develop skills and tools and coordination needed to realize their purposes in real time. Self-management is part of the idea of "positive" freedom. The liberal concept of freedom as absence of external coercion or constraint, which is what right-wing "libertarians" mean by "freedom," is viewed by social anarchists as only part of what real freedom is. "Positive" freedom requires also that people have roughly equal access to the means to participate effectively in the spheres of decision-making that affect their lives.

We can think of self-management of industry as a layered or nested structure of spheres of decision-making. Where groups of people are mainly affected by some sphere of decision-making, there are assemblies there that institutionalize collective control. Some decisions affect an entire plant in a roughly equal way, and there are general assemblies of the whole plant to control those decisions. Other decisions affect mainly one department or a small work group, and they have their separate meetings. Some decisions affect only one person and that person gets to "call the shots" in that area. Collective self-management doesn't mean that all decisions are made in meetings or that delegation of tasks doesn't occur. The point to the direct democracy of the assemblies is that it acts as the control for collective self-management.

Nor is self-management simply equivalent to a system of formal democracy. Existing corporate capitalism generates hierarchies where expertise and decision-making authority is concentrated...hierarchies of managers and high-end professionals who work closely with them, such as engineers and lawyers. This hierarchy is part of how class oppression strips from workers their ability to control their lives. The ability of people to effectively participate in decisions that affect them requires also a change in the educational system and the design of work, so that conceptual and decision-making tasks in work are re-integrated with the physical doing of the work. Thus Kropotkin advocated "integration of labor": "A society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work."

But the point to the direct democracy of the assemblies is that they are needed as a replacement for the formal hierarchical power of dominating classes, the formal subordination of workers in social production.

I need to make three additional points about workers self-management of industry as this occurs in the thinking of most social anarchists.

First: The anarchosyndicalist view of workers self-management is that it arises in the transformation of society, out of the conflict between classes.

It's hard to see how an end to the oppression and exploitation of people as workers could come to an end except through a general takeover of the management of social production and distribution by the people who work in these industries. This doesn't mean, however, that anarchosyndicalism conceives of a socialized economy as the same as the existing economy, but with workers running the workplaces. Rather, the idea is that an entirely different logic of development would ensue, and the technologies used and mix of products and services would change.

The syndicalist strategy is different than the Proudhonian idea of forming worker cooperatives within the cracks of the present capitalist framework. Most social anarchists support altnernative institutions such as worker and housing cooperatives and social centers and so on, both because they are useful for the social movements at the present time, and because they illustrate that workers' management is an idea that works. However, forming cooperatives in the cracks of capitalism is not the same as the syndicalist strategy, which is rooted in the class struggle.(2)

Second: Most social anarchists and anarchosyndicalists do not advocate an ideal of workers self-management in the form of competing cooperatives in a market-driven economy, but as part of a socialized economy in which the land and means of production would be owned in common by the whole society. In 1936, during the Spanish revolution, the anarchosyndicalist theorist Diego Abad de Santillan wrote that the worker organizations controlling the various industries are not "proprietors" of the industries but are "only administrators at the service of the entire society."(3)

Third: Although most social anarchists still advocate workers self-management of industry as part of a larger program for social transformation and social empowerment, workers self-management of industry was not all there is to what anarchosyndicalism advocated historically for social transformation nor is it all that social anarchists advocate today, far from it.

The power of the dominating classes isn't limited to the workplaces, and struggles that affect working class people spread out in other areas of society -- struggles of tenants, for immigrant rights, against police brutality, and so on. To develop its power the working class needs to address the issues of the day and counter its own solutions to those of the dominating classes.

Also, struggles of working people are not just around class because working class people are women, immigrants, people of color. Various forms of oppression and exploitation overlap in a society built on a complex forms of structural inequality.

Thus the overwhelming focus on class oppression and exploitation, which was characteristic of both Marxism and social anarchism in the 19th century and early 1900s, has evolved into an understanding of oppression and exploitation as more multifaceted. The workplace is only one site of conflict and movement-building.

Thus, for example, in its response to the present global capitalist crisis, the CGT — the Spanish anarchosyndicalist union — proposes to tighten and deepen its relationships with the various social movements in Spain — women's groups, ecologists, the housing movement, immigrants rights, and so on. Thus they see the struggle against the elite imposing the costs of the crisis on the working class as built on the basis of a labor/social movement alliance.

The idea of self-emancipation applies in general to all oppressed and exploited people, and the various forms of oppression also generate forms of self-activity and movements in opposition. Thus the picture of the agent of social transformation becomes more complex, as it requires an alliance among the various oppressed and exploited groups, as they confront the power of the dominating classes. The framework for this conflict is a class framework, but the working class movement itself requires a mass alliance in the spirit of "An injury to one is the concern of all," if it is to have the unity and social strength to push aside extremely powerful and entrenched elites.

The Class Character of the State

D'Amato claims that Marxism aims at a stateless society in the future, and this is a fair statement of Marx's view.

But the disagreement between Leninism and social anarchism isn't over some statement about a far-off state of society but about the means to social change, and in particular the means to liberation of the mass of the people from oppression and exploitation.

The state, as Engels wrote, is a territorial power, "standing above society", equipped with an armed "public force" that is not simply "a self-acting armed organization of the people". Engels viewed the state as an institution of a dominating class: "As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which by its means becomes also the politically dominant class and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class."(4)

Thus far, the social anarchist current in the late 19th century who emerged out of the First International agreed with Engels on this view of the state. Thus Bakunin wrote:

"The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: the priesthood, the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and finally, after every other class has been exhausted, the bureaucratic class."

But if a state is separated from effective control of the mass of the people, how could there be a "proletarian state", as Leninists maintain?


Although extreme individualists also oppose the state, they do so far different reasons than social anarchists. Both Bakunin and Kropotkin were scornful of the opposition to the state by 19th century free market capitalist ideologues. They saw this as simply expressing the wish of the capitalist to avoid social constraints on profit making. Their talk of "freedom" was about the freedom of the capitalists to exploit the working class.

Social anarchists oppose the state for two main reasons: because it is an institution of class domination, and because it is a structure of hierarchical power, a structure of domination in its own right.

The characteristic feature of the modern state is its separation from effective control by the mass of the people. The state is built on hierarchical chain of command structures, similar to the private corporations, with a concentration of expertise and decision-making authority into a minority.

In corporate capitalism there is a social layer that is the systems' control bureaucracy. Their class position isn't based on capital ownership but on relative monopoly of decision-making authority and expertise in managing state agencies or corporations. If we wish to use Bakunin's language, We could call this the bureaucratic class, or, following Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, the coordinator class.

The state is an important locus of power for this class, as Bakunin pointed out.

Libertarian socialism historically has been open to a different conception of class from Marxism. Marx operated with a simple bipolar division of capitalist society into the capitalist class and working class, based on his analysis of exploitation in terms of the labor theory of value. Thus the capitalists are the class who pump their private wealth out of the labor of the working class.

But there are more forms of monopolization of economic resources than just ownership of means of production or money power in a context of a society where there are propertyless people to be exploited. The bureaucratic control layer in the system is based on a relative monopolization of decision-making authority and forms of expertise important to management, in both the private and public sectors.

(Nonetheless, not all social anarchists accept the three-class analysis of capitalism into capitalist, coordinator/bureaucratic and working classes. Some hold that the bureaucratic control layer are a part of the capitalist class. But this agrees with the majority social anarchist view that private ownership of wealth isn't the only basis of class domination and exploitation.)

Although defending the interests of dominating classes is an essential feature of the state, this isn't all there is to the state. Because the state acts to hold the existing social arrangement together, it also tends to support the various structures of inequality and oppression in the prevailing society. Here we can think of the ways the American state has supported forms of structural racism such as southern segregation or pursued the marginalization and expropriation of the native American Indian population. Or the race as well as class bias inherent in the current "War on Drugs" or the history of racist immigration policies.

Because the state must be able to govern and maintain social peace, it has also been the means through which popular protest and class struggle have gained concessions. This includes various limitations or restraints on private economic power such as the Pure Food and Drug Act, environmental protection, OSHA, etc. This also includes various systems of benefits...free public education, comprehensive health insurance (in affluent capitalist countries other than the USA), and other components of the "social wage"...affordable housing, public transit subsidies, welfare rights, and so on. The existence of systems of civil liberties and popular election... gains from previous eras of struggle...also place limits on capitalist control.

From a social anarchist point of view, the social wage and social services and civil liberties...as gains of past struggles...are things to be defended, through social movements independent of the state and political parties.

The Marxist bipolar class analysis tends to favor the view that class oppression is done away with if the means of production are made public property. Thus in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels advocated concentration of the means of production, distribution, communications and finance in the hands of the state.

But this view ignores the internal class structure of the state itself. In the Russian revolution the Bolsheviks adopted the rather Orwellian term "workers state" for the hierarchical Soviet state that emerged under Bolshevik Party auspices. The empirical reality was that ordinary workers lacked any effective means to control what that state did. The Bolsheviks described the Soviet state as a "workers state" on the basis of an apriori argument: Because the state was controlled by the Bolshevik party and the Bolshevik party represents the true interests of the working class, it is a "workers state."

D'Amato quotes Lenin to the effect that "temporary use must be made of the instruments, means and methods of the state power against the exploiters." Social anarchists disagree with this Leninist advocacy of a "proletarian state" — an "authoritarian state" as D'Amato calls it — during a period of transition to socialism. No such "state power" will have any tendency to "wither away" as Leninists assume. However, it doesn't follow that social anarchism is opposed to political power. Here it is necessary to distinguish the state and government or political governance.

We can think of the polity or governance system of a society as the institution that sets the basic rules and enforces those rules, and holds the society together as the ultimate arbiter of disputes.

From the social anarchist point of view, the state is only one type of polity or governance system. As Kropotkin wrote:

"The State has...been confused with government. As there can be no State without government, it is sometimes said that it is the absence of government, and not the abolition of the State, that should be the aim....However, the State implies quite a different idea to that of government. It...includes the existence of a power placed above society but also a territorial concentration and a concentration of many functions of the life of society in the hands of a few..."(5)

Most libertarian socialists agree that some sort of polity or system of self-government is necessary in society. Libertarian socialists believe it is possible for institutions of popular power — a form of polity built up from the direct democracy of assemblies in workplaces and neighborhoods — to replace the hierarchical state in a self-managed socialist society, or such a society in the process of being built, without the hierarchical state apparatus.

Marxists sometimes argue that if the working class creates a new polity to replace the state and uses this polity to engage in coercion, such as against armed attacks on the new social arrangement, this makes the new governance system necessarily a "state." But any polity or governance system enforces its rules, and needs to be able to use coercion, if necessary, against anti-social criminality. Even tribal societies in ancient times could some times use coercion against wayward individuals. The ability of a society to defend itself does not require a hierarchical state apparatus rather than a form of democratic self-governance under direct popular control.

A Tale of Two Soviets

To defend the view that the October 1917 revolution in Russia ushered in a period of "working class power," Leninist groups like the ISO often refer to the worker democracy expressed through the soviets, and the fact that government authority was transferred to the Congress of Soviets in the Russian revolution. But the main soviets in St. Petersburg (Petrograd) and Moscow were not effectively controlled by workers. The key St. Petersburg soviet was formed in February 1917 by a group of social-democratic intellectuals, including three members of the Duma (Russia's parliament), such as Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer. The soviet was formed top-down when these members of the "intelligentsia" constituted themselves as the soviet's executive committee and sent out a call for election of delegates. Power in the key big city soviets was concentrated in the executive committee where the real decisions were made. Some decisions were submitted to the assembled delegates for ratification, but the executive quickly came to treat the plenaries of delegates as just a rubber stamp. The meetings of the delegates tended to be just an open space for making speeches, not the real decision-making body.

As Pete Rachleff explains in "Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution6", the development of a strong independent shop committee movement in the Russian revolution arose partly due to the inability of workers to control either the soviets or the highly centralized Russian trade unions. The shop committees were elected by mass assemblies of workers in the workplaces, and the various workplace takeovers that happened in the 1917 revolution and into early 1918 were the product of this shop committee movement, not the soviets.(6)

The soviets set up in this highly top-down manner were established mainly by the Mensheviks, a social-democratic Marxist party. But when the Bolsheviks gained majorities in these soviets in the fall of 1917, they simply took over the same top-down structure. They didn't try to democratize these soviets. They were concerned about the use of the soviets as a base of party power...a trampoline to jump themselves into control of the state...not as centers of decision-making by the working class. Various steps taken by the Bolsheviks in the early months of their government power further weakened rank and file worker control. For example, a peasant based populist party, the Left Social Revolutionaries (Left SRs), emerged as the main political tendency supported by the peasantry. The Russian peasantry were 80 percent of the population. To prevent the Left SRs from gaining a majority in the Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks "packed" the congress with scores of representatives of union bureaucracies and other officials...thus violating the soviet principle of direct election of delegates by the rank and file.

Not all soviets were set up in the highly top-down fashion of the St. Petersburg soviet. Another key soviet in the Russian revolution was created in early March 1917 in Kronstadt, located on an island about 20 miles west of St. Petersburg. Kronstadt was (and still is) the home base of the Russian navy's Baltic fleet.

The Kronstadt soviet differed from the one in St. Petersburg in that the rank and file delegates were firmly in control. The deliberation in the plenaries of delegates was real as this was where the real decisions were made. Power was not centralized in the executive committee, which was there to ensure decisions of the soviet were carried out.

The Kronstadt soviet was grounded in a system of assemblies in all the workplaces and military units and warships in Kronstadt. The assemblies met weekly, and elected their own administrative committees. Workplace assemblies also directly managed their work...the running of the drydock, a sawmill, the island's electric power plant, factories making torpedos and dive equipment and so on. Unlike in St. Petersburg, there was no split between a shop committee movement, rooted in workplace meetings, and the soviet. Although they controlled their own work, the assemblies had to adhere to the rules decided by the soviet, but the assemblies also followed debates in the soviet and controlled their delegates, who were kept on a tight leash...they were elected for only 3-month terms.

In January 1918 the soviet dissolved the old city council in Kronstadt, took over all municipal functions, and also expropriated all buildings and businesses in Kronstadt....a move that was opposed by the Bolsheviks, who voted "no." The Bolsheviks lost this vote because they were a minority in Kronstadt throughout 1917 and into 1918.

The grassroots democracy in Kronstadt was protected by the political dominance of an alliance of two libertarian socialist tendencies... the Union of Social Revolutionaries-Maximalists (called "maximalists") and the Russian anarchosyndicalists. The maximalists and syndicalists generally worked together in an6 alliance in the Russian revolution...for example the syndicalist/ maximalist alliance was dominant in6 much of the Russian baker's union.

The libertarian socialists in Kronstadt viewed their form of grassroots government as a model for6 Russia...a model of governance they called a "Toiler's Republic." Because this was clearly a form of government and worker power, it thus refutes the Leninist claim that libertarian socialists are "against the working class taking political power."(7)

A variety of conservative and liberal historians say the October 1917 revolution was merely a "Bolshevik coup d'etat". This is not accurate. Kerensky's "provisional government" was never elected and was very unpopular by October 1917. The transfer of power to the Congress of Soviets was supported by the Left SRs, Left Mensheviks, syndicalists, maximalists, and most anarchists, as well as the Bolsheviks. The majority of the Russian population supported this move. Although the libertarian Left had criticisms of the top down soviets and trade unions, they supported the October revolution because they believed they would be able to continue to organize for their viewpoint within the workplaces, unions and soviets. They didn't anticipate the authoritarian direction of the regime that would begin to gather force in the spring of 1918.

The top down structure of the soviets reflected the fact that both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks tended to understand democracy as election of representatives to make decisions for you...a view they took over from pre-World War 1 social-democracy. The Bolsheviks never advocated for direct, participatory democracy as a means of working class social empowerment. This is closely related to the unwillingness of the Bolsheviks to advocate or support workers' self-management of industry.

Lenin's November 1917 decree for "workers control" did not advocate workers' management. The word "kontrol" in Russian has a weaker meaning that "control" in English. Lenin's "worker control" decree merely legalized practices of worker surveillance and restraint on management...vetos on hiring and firing, forcing management to "open the books" and so on. These were things the workers had already achieved through direct action.

After Lenin's decree was published, a regional organization of factory committees in St. Petersburg did advocate formation of a national congress of the factory committee movement to take over coordination and planning for the whole national economy. Isaac Deutscher explains what then happened:

"The Factory Committees attempted to form their own national organization, which was to secure their virtual economic dictatorship. The Bolsheviks now called upon the trade unions to render a special service to the nascent Soviet State and to discipline the Factory Committees. The unions came out firmly against the attempt of the Factory Committees to form a national organization of their own. They prevented the convocation of the planned All-Russian Congress of Factory Committees and demanded total subordination on the part of the Committees."(8)

This question was fought out at the first All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in January 1918. Only the syndicalist/maximalist alliance defended the idea of using the factory committee movement as a basis for worker management of the economy. They were defeated by the Bolshevik majority, who were supported on this point by the Mensheviks.

I have run into members of the ISO who insist that Lenin and Trotsky were advocates of workers' self-management. In fact the evidence says otherwise. The Bolshevik leaders worked consistently against direct worker management from October 1917 on. This whole story is laid out in well-researched detail in Maurice Brinton's book The Bolsheviks and Workers Control.

Lenin famously wrote in The State and Revolution that "every cook can govern" but that book has very little information about institutions that would enable the cooks to govern. He says little about economic management but points to the German post office as a model for socialism. Thus it seems that the all the cooks and other food service workers are not expected to govern their workplaces...not if the German post office is the model.

Marxist sociologist Sam Farber writes:

"After October...Lenin's perspective for the growing self-management movement in Russian factories never went beyond his...usual emphasis on accounting and inspection ["worker's control"]...The underlying cause here was not, as some have claimed that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were cynically manipulating the factory committees and that once the party leaders 'got power' they had no more use for them...The key problem was that Lenin and the mainstream of the Bolshevik Party, or for that matter the Mensheviks, paid little if any attention to the need for a transformation and democratization of the daily life of the working class on the shopfloor and community...For Lenin the central problem and concern continued to be the revolutionary transformation of the central state."(9)

What was innovative about the Bolshevik party's role in the Russian revolution is that through their capture of the state their followed a series of institutional moves and practices that led inexorably to the consolidation of a coordinator or bureaucratic class, and the continued oppression and exploitation of the working population.

Centralized state planning for the Soviet economy was begun in November 1917 with the creation of the Supreme Council of National Economy, which became the Soviet planning agency Gosplan in the late '20s. The people on this council were various Bolshevik party members and trade union officials and experts, all appointed from above.

By 1918 Lenin and Trotsky were beating the drum for the adoption of Taylorist methods in industry and "one-man management"...appointment of bosses from above. Appointment of bosses from above is consistent with the logic of central planning. The central planners will want to have people on site in workplaces that can ensure adherence to the plans handed down from above.

Even election of industry management boards by workers was intensely opposed by Lenin and Trotsky. A large faction of rank and file Bolshevik trade union members had proposed election of management boards in early 1921, after the end of the Russian civil war, and this was fought out at the March 1921 party congress. Trotsky argued against it, saying "the party's birth right to rule takes precedence over the passing whims of the worker democracy."

If the party's "right to rule" isn't based on the "worker democracy" where does it come from? I think here the concept of the "vanguard party" comes into play. If you view control by the "vanguard party" as essential for constructing socialism, then this can become a rationalization for abrogating worker democracy.

From the libertarian socialist view, what is essential for constructing authentic socialism is the direct social empowerment of the oppressed and exploited population. This falls directly out of the idea that the "emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves." How can this social empowerment happen if workers are still subordinate to a hierarchical managerial regime?

The idea of the "vanguard party" is that it concentrates certain key kinds of expertise...such as a correct Marxist theoretical understanding...and is to act as the manager of the process of change. This concept is a kind of meritocratic ideology, and seems quite consistent with the kind of concentration of decision-making authority and expertise characteristic of a coordinator class.

The activists in the mainstream of the Bolshevik Party may have been well-intended but often human actions have unintended consequences. The point here is to see the consequences of the institutional moves and decisions that fell out of of Bolshevik politics in that situation. This helps us to understand the real meaning of that politics.

I think an empowered coordinator elite is prefigured by various features of Leninism...hierarchical state authority, nationalization of the economy, centralized state planning, the ideology of the "vanguard party." The consolidation of dominant coordinator class through the Russian revolutionary process is best explained as the result of these assumptions in Leninist politics.

In The Case for Socialism, Alan Maass — an ISO writer — advocates "democratic planning." This is a vague phrase. Most libertarian socialists also advocate something that could be called "democratic planning." But is this to be a planning process that is controlled from below, starting in the workplace and neighborhood assemblies, or is to be central planning, planning through a statist hierarchy? Maass doesn't say, but his highlighting Bolshevik practice in the Russian revolution as a model suggests that "democratic planning" is a euphemism for statist central planning. Perhaps he would say this would be planning through a "democratic state." But what is "democratic"? Do working class people in the USA feel we're empowered because we can vote every few years for politicians who ignore our concerns? Democracy is a contested concept and the kind of "democracy" one has in mind is crucial.

Leninists seem to imagine that you can consolidate decision-making power in a state administrative layer and then expect that they will easily give up power later. But any group that acquires the position of a dominating class is likely to work to keep their power and privilege and to also develop an ideology to justify their position...and they can easily call it "socialism". We have the former Communist regimes to remind us of this.

Leninist Myths About the Spanish Revolution

D'Amato repeats the usual Trotskyist myth-making about the Friends of Durruti Group in the Spanish revolution who he describes as follows: "They were a group of revolutionary anarchists who became critical of the main anarchist trade union group, the CNT, for refusing to take state power even though they had control in the streets of some of Spain's biggest cities after a workers' uprising in 1936 had successfully thwarted a fascist coup, leaving the bourgeois government still clinging to power." Of course, the Spanish anarchosyndicalists would say they were not for "state power." But, again, this comes back to the point I made earlier, about how libertarian socialists advocate a form of political power that isn't a state.

The CNT (National Confederation of Labor) was Spain's largest union federation, a massive anarchosyndicalist organization with more than 2 million members.

Usually Trotskyists say that the anarchosyndicalists didn't believe in the working class acquiring political power at all. Thus Geoff Bailey, in the ISO's journal International Socialist Review, writes: "If the government were overthrown, however, it would have to be replaced by a workers' government led by the CNT-FAI. The anarchists believed such a state would be a dictatorship, a mortal blow to their antistatist principles."(10)

In fact the CNT did propose the creation of a working class government (as I will describe shortly). Moreover, as CNT historian Jose Peirats points out, it was always the view of the Spanish anarchosyndicalists that "all social power should be in the hands of the proletariat." The Friends of Durruti Group advocated the formation of a workers government, a "Revolutionary Junta." Trotskyists like D'Amato and Bailey see this as a break from the position of the CNT.

This is quite wrong. In fact the Friends of Durruti Group were advocating within the rank and file for a return to the official position of the CNT before it joined the Popular Front government in November 1936. From the time of the initial defeat of the army in July of 1936 through August there was an intense debate inside the CNT's unions in Catalonia on the way forward.

By August the Spanish Communist Party was beating the drum for the construction of a conventional hierarchical army...the sort of army Trotsky had put together in the spring of 1918 during the Russian revolution. The Communists had a two-stage strategy of revolution: first gain control of a rebuilt hierarchical army and police, and later use that to seize power and create a nationalized economy. In late August revolutionaries in the CNT unions in Catalonia developed a counter-strategy to head off the Communist Party plan. They got the CNT national union to agree to their plan at a national conference on September 3, 1936. So what was the September program of the anarchosyndicalists? They had been calling for a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the UGT for some time. In September the CNT's program consisted of essentially three pieces:

Replacement of the separate party and union militias with a unified people's militia controlled through a National Defense Council made up of CNT and UGT union delegates. This would replace the Republican central government. The parliament would be replaced by national and regional worker congresses. The Defense Council would not have power over the economy but would be limited to military, police and judicial functions.(11)
Direct management of all industries by the workers in a socialized economy. Seizure of the banks. Coordinated planning through the worker congresses.
Replacement of hierarchical municipal governments by "free municipalities", based on neighborhood and village assemblies, and delegate councils elected from the assemblies for larger towns and cities. The CNT proposal for a National Defense Council is the origin of the Friends of Durruti Group proposal which they sometimes called a "revolutionary junta." Junta is just the Spanish word meaning "council" — it doesn't have any authoritarian connotations in Spanish. The executive committees of CNT unions were called juntas.

The CNT's program for a self-managed socialist structure is based on what I would call the "dual governance" model. This is the idea that decision-making and popular self-management should be rooted in both the workplace and the community. The "free municipalities" were intended to be both the local governance body as well as the channel for consumer input, particularly around public goods like housing, education and health care. At the same time, there would also be worker assemblies in the workplaces and self-management of industries by the people who work in them.

Now it should be obvious that a structure that can make rules for the society and has enforcement powers is a polity or government. From the Spanish anarchist point of view, this would not be a state because of the direct control over the armed militia -- the main armed body in society — by the organized working class, and also because of the transfer of legislative power to the grassroots congresses and the direct worker management of the economy. The people's militia would be close to what Engels called a "self-acting armed body of the population."

A leading advocate of the National Defense Council program was Buenaventura Durruti, the most popular elected militia leader in Aragon. Durruti and others in the CNT had been advocating a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the UGT unions for several years. Geoff Bailey quotes Durruti on the workers' alliance this way:

"The alliance, to be revolutionary, must be genuinely working class. It must be the result of an agreement between the workers' organizations, and those alone. No party, however socialist it may be, can belong to the workers' alliance."

Then, Bailey interprets this as follows:

"Essentially the CNT's message was, 'We refuse to unite in struggle with workers who have yet to march under our banner."

Now, in fact this is the opposite of what the "workers alliance" proposal was about. It was, after all, a proposal for an alliance with the socialist UGT unions. And it's also true that the CNT proposal for a national defense council was a proposal for representation only of worker organizations, not political parties.

The character of the government they were proposing is clear if you look at what happened in Aragon, the one region where they did carry this out. In September of 1936 more than 400 collectivized villages formed a regional federation and held a congress where they elected an Aragon Regional Defense Council...essentially a workers' government. Initially all the elected representatives were members of the CNT, which had 80 percent of the union members in that region, but later some UGT members were added to the Council. Although the CNT was dominant in most of the collectivized villages, there were some villages where the UGT was the majority.

A prominent supporter of the CNT National Defense Council proposal at the time was Eduardo de Guzman, editor of the CNT's daily newspaper in Madrid, Castilla Libre. De Guzman described the proposal as "a proletarian government — total working-class democracy in which all sectors of the proletariat — but of the proletariat alone — would be represented."(12)

By excluding the Basque Nationalist Party and the Republican parties, the parties representing Spanish small business and the professional/managerial classes would be excluded from the government. The various Marxist parties would be represented through their working class members in the UGT union.

Another prominent supporter of the National Defense Council proposal was Liberto Callejas, managing editor of the CNT's big daily paper in Barcelona,Solidaridad Obrera. Most of the journalists on that paper supported this program, including a disabled journalist named Jaime Balius. Throughout September and October the writers at Solidaridad Obrera carried out a vigorous campaign in support of the National Defense Council proposal.

The main group the anarchosyndicalists were hoping to ally with were the left wing of the Socialist Party — the largest Marxist tendency in Spain to the left of the Communist Party. In the summer of 1936 the Left Socialists were in the leadership of the massive UGT farm workers union and controlled the national executive committee of the UGT union federation. In months leading up to the onset of the revolution in Spain in 1936, the Left Socialists had called for a "proletarian revolution" and a "workers' government."

There was already a strong alliance in the countryside between UGT and CNT farm worker unions. The UGT and CNT railway and public utility unions had jointly seized and expropriated the country's railway and utility systems.

At the beginning of September the leading figure among the Left Socialists, Largo Caballero, had just been made Prime Minister. The UGT union federation incorporated only slightly less than half the organized working class in Spain. Agreement of the UGT and the Prime Minister to the CNT proposal would have added greatly to its legitimacy. The two union federations together had the power to implement this change in the governance structure of Spain. Knowing that Caballero was something of a prima donna, the CNT proposed that Caballero be made President of the proposed revolutionary government.

But Caballero and the Left Socialist leadership of the UGT refused the CNT proposal. Caballero described the CNT proposal as a "leap outside the constitution." Caballero had been strongly warned against the proposal by the Soviet ambassador in Spain.

This created an internal crisis for the CNT in Catalonia. What would be their solution? According to Durruti's biographer, Abel Paz, Durruti proposed a strategy of the CNT unions taking power in the regions where the CNT was the majority — Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia (the east coast region of Spain). By creating facts on the ground, Durruti believed it was possible to force Caballero and the UGT to go along.

Many of the FAI activists among the rank and file leadership level of the CNT in Catalonia apparently began to waver. Perhaps some thought Durruti's strategy was too risky. Perhaps others thought being in control of the industries gave them enough power to pressure the government. Others were worried about being frozen out of government decisions that would affect their militias and expropriated industries.

Thus, the CNT union finally joined the Popular Front government in November. Because the CNT journalists Liberto Callejas and Jaime Balius were totally opposed to joining the Popular Front government, they were fired.

Callejas and Balius then decided on a strategy of appealing to the rank and file of the CNT, to re-assert the original anarcho-syndicalist program. This led them to help organize the Friends of Durruti Group in March 1937. Balius was the main theorist and writer for the Friends of Durruti.

Thus the Friends of Durruti group was not formed to abandon or break with the anarchosyndicalist program of the CNT, but to organize for its revival among the ranks of the union. The Friends' program had three planks:

• A National Defense Junta to run a unified militia.
• Worker self-management of industry
• Control of local governance by the "free municipalities."(13)

All of these planks were part of the national CNT program in September 1936.

It's worth noting that the CNT resisted going along with the strategy of uniting through the Popular Front government longer than any other Left tendency in Spain. The POUM — another Left Marxist group — was already part of the Popular Front government in Catalonia in July of 1936, the Communist Party were the strongest advocates for the Popular Front strategy, and the various Socialist Party factions were onboard the Popular Front by August 1936 at least. Thus the Marxist groups were actually the main backers of exactly the strategy that the ISO criticizes...rebuilding the Republican state through the Popular Front. If mistakes by anarchists in the Spanish revolution is an argument against anarchosyndicalism, why aren't mistakes of Marxists an argument against Marxism? In fact I would suggest that the orientation of Marxism to the politics of parties and elections best explains their agreement to a Popular Front alliance that favored retaining hierarchical state power and protection for the privileges and position of the Spanish "middle classes."

But my main point here is to show that the ISO is simply wrong when they say the anarchosyndicalists were not for working class political power in the Spanish revolution. Again, it's a question of what working class empowerment means. For libertarian socialists it does't mean a political party capturing control of a state, and then building up an administrative apparatus controlling the economy.

Bailey claims that anarchosyndicalist "apoliticism" meant they abandoned "political struggle." The word "apolitical" was used by some syndicalists to refer to the opposition to electoral politics and the politics of parties and states. It doesn't mean opposition to direct social governance by the people themselves or popular politicization or the politics of mass struggle. The revolutionary politics of the CNT was also a form of politics. Thus the label "apolitical" is misleading...and this is why social anarchists and anarchosyndicalists no longer use it.

The CNT unions were run through the direct democracy of worker assemblies, and elected committees of delegados (shop stewards). But the Spanish anarchists also emphasized capacitacion — building among ordinary people the skills and knowledge needed to participate effectively. Thus the Spanish anarchists also built a network of neighborhood social centers where a variety of activities took place — study groups, debates, cultural events, Mujeres Libres (the anarchist women's organizzation) groups, and so on. The Spanish anarchists were oriented to organizing in the community and around areas of consumption as well as in the workplace — as shown by the huge rent strike in Barcelona in 1931. The CNT's program of empowering residents of communities through the "free municipalities" falls out of this aspect of Spanish anarchosyndicalism.

If the anarchosyndicalists had merely organized the unions, various conservative or authoritarian or bureaucratic tendencies in the working class would tend to gain dominance in the unions over time. The libertarian socialists could only sustain their influence through popular education and politicization.

Bailey's article quotes various anarchists about "not wanting to create an anarchist dictatorship" as the explanation for not overthrowing the government. But this was a justification that was concocted later, after they had joined the Popular Front government. As a result of that action the CNT was criticized by anarchosyndicalists in other countries. It was only at this time that the CNT started talking about "not wanting to create a dictatorship". It was an after-the-fact justification tailored to appeal to anarchist sentiments.

Now, it's true that the CNT in Catalonia could have destroyed the regional Generalitat government of Catalonia in July, at the time of the defeat of the army takeover attempt. And in his memoir Joan Garcia Oliver...who argued in July 1936 for overthrowing the Generalitat...mentions that Federica Montseny argued that trying to carry out the CNT's libertarian socialist program right then would require an "anarchist dictatorship."

First of all, it should be pointed out that Montseny was a Stirnerite individualist whcih would be likely to prejudice her against any proposal of constructing a social governing power. Secondly, Garcia Oliver responded to her in the union debate at the time that a takeover of authority in the region by highly democratic mass union organizations with the backing of a majority of the working class cannot reasonably be called a "dictatorship." This debate took place before the widespread seizures of industry by Spain's workers, which strengthened the working class sense of potential power.

The debate was argued in front of a union regional plenary of over 500 delegates. At that moment the outcome of the initial struggle with the army was unclear. And anarchists opposed to overthrowing the Genreralitat appealed to fear and uncertainty. Friends of Durruti argued later that the success of these appeals to fear and doubt show insufficient preparation within the CNT movement in thinking about how to respond to this situation as well as lack of appreciation of the importance of taking advantage of opportunities. This may be true, but it doesn't show that their anarchosyndicalist ideology was the explanation of the failure. Nor did Friends of Durruti believe that it was even though they were critical of confusions in the thinking of some anarchists.

Moreover, by August Garcia Oliver and other revolutionaries in the CNT had worked out the National Defense Council proposal, which answered the "anarchist dictatorship" charge by proposing a government of the entire organized working class, not just the CNT.

Like most libertarian socialists nowadays, I think the CNT's failure to overthrow the Generalitat when it had the opportunity was a mistake. And it's quite possible that a number of the Spanish anarchosyndicalists were unclear in their thinking, or swayed by fears and risks. Thus the Friends of Durruti later criticized the CNT for being unable to work up the audacity to make the most of the opportunities. But, again, this doesn't show that anarchosyndicalism or libertarian socialism are opposed to political power, as the ISO maintains. The real issue is about the nature of political power, the state, and mass empowerment.

Nowadays there are those like John Holloway — a libertarian Marxist writer — who argue it is possible "to change the world without taking power." I think this is best understood as a reaction against the failure of various forms of statist socialism — both social-democracy and Leninism. But as long as power remains in the hands of the dominating classes, the majority of the population won't be free, but will continue to be dominated and exploited. It's hard to see how the self-emanicpation of the oppressed and exploited can take place except through gaining control over the decisions that affect them. And this needs to happen not only in workplaces but through figuring out a way to evolve goverance of public affairs from the hierarchical state to a form of popular power, directly controlled by the population. But precisely because liberation requires social empowerment of the majority, capturing the state isn't a plausible route as the state is the wrong kind of institution for popular self-management of public affairs. A different form of polity is needed.

comments to: tomwetzel@riseup.net

Notes

(1) Quoted in Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, 5-6.

(2) Marxists are often confused on this point. For example, in his new book Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright identifies the Proudhonian strategy as "the anarchist strategy."

(3) Abad Diego de Santillan, statement from December, 1936, appended to the 1937 addition of After the Revolution, 121.

(4) Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 229-230.

(5) Quoted in Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom, 97.

(6) http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/raclef.htm

(7) Israel Getzler's book Kronstadt, 1917-21 provides a detailed and concrete history of the Kronstadt soviet.

(8) Quoted in Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, 320.

(9) Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, 72.

(10) Geoff Bailey, "Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War", International Socialist Review, July-August 2002. Bailey's article contains many distortions and errors other than those I mention.

(11) The September 3 Defense Council proposal is discussed in Cesar M. Lorenzo, Los anarquistas y el poder.

(12) Interview with EduardSocial Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism, the State and Leninism:
A Reply to the International Socialist Organization

by Tom Wetzel (Mar 12, 2009) (from my ZNet blog)

I was prompted to write this by Paul D'Amato's two recent articles in Socialist Worker criticizing anarchism (http://socialistworker.org/2009/02/27/r ... ruled-over), and (http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/06/m ... -the-state) but this will also give me the opportunity to provide an explanation of some basic social anarchist ideas. I take it that social or Left-anarchism and libertarian socialism are the same thing. Thus I use the phrases "social anarchism" and "libertarian socialism" interchangeably.

I believe there is, as Murray Bookchin said, an "unbridgeable chasm" between social anarchism and individualist or "lifestylist" forms of anarchism. Ideas often thought characteristic of anarchism, such as anti-organizational bias or an obsession for "consensus decision-making" are in fact features of individualist anarchism, not social anarchism.

Libertarian socialists would also agree there is an unbridgeable chasm between Leninism and libertarian socialism. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) is a Leninist organization in that it defends the political legacy of the Bolshevik party's role in the Russian revolution, looks to Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky for inspiration, and defends characteristic Leninist ideas such as the theory of a "vanguard party" to manage the transition to socialism, and the idea of building a hierarchical "proletarian state" in the period of social transformation away from capitalism.

D'Amato's criticisms of those who think of social change in terms of one's personal lifestyle choices make it clear he is taking aim at lifestyle or individualist anarchism. But D'Amato presents his criticisms as if they apply to anarchism in general. Leninist polemics have a long history of using individualist anarchism as a club to beat up on libertarian socialism...a kind of bait and switch fallacy. This method of argument would be analogous to me suggesting that there is no distinction between the form of Leninism advocated by the ISO and the despotic regime of Joseph Stalin. In fact I won't do this because I'm aware that the ISO has a long history of critiquing existing (and formerly existing) Communist systems. I would suggest that Paul D'Amato and the ISO need to offer the same courtesy to social anarchism, by not confusing it with hyper-individualism or lifestyleism.
Self-emancipation and Direct Democracy

Social anarchism is a socialist political viewpoint, and emerged originally as a tendency in the first International Working Men's Association (called the "First International") of the 1860s-70s. People like Anselmo Lorenzo and Michael Bakunin were prominent figures in that initial libertarian socialist current. Thus social anarchism or libertarian socialism — I use these phrases interchangeably — was a product of radical working class politics.

The libertarian socialists in the First International agreed with Marx that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves."

This slogan was first annunciated by Flora Tristan y Moscoso — a pioneer socialist-feminist of the 1830s-40s. Tristan made her living as a printer. She had originally been a follower of socialists like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, who advocated building alternative communities, and they relied on philanthropy from wealth people for funding — an approach that suffered from both paternalism and lack of realism. This was the approach that Engels later called "utopian socialism." By the early 1840s Tristan had repudiated utopian socialism. She came to the view that the working class could only rely on its own efforts. In 1843 she embarked on a nation-wide speaking tour to persuade French workers to form a national workers union, and her statement about working class self-emanipcation dates from that campaign.

Libertarian socialists in the First International thus agreed with Marx in rejecting the approach of the utopian socialists.

From the time of the First International to the 1930s, the main movement-building or mass organizing expression of social anarchism was in the labor movement...an approach to labor politics callled anarcho-syndicalism. Anarchosyndicalists take Flora Tristan's slogan about working class self-liberation quite literally. Anarchosyndicalists believe that the working class can liberate itself from structures of oppression and exploitation by developing, "from below," its own mass social movement based on a wide-spread solidarity in the course of struggles with the dominating classes.

That working class liberation develops out of the class struggle is thus an assumption shared by both Marxism and anarchosyndicalism — and most social anarchists. Through self-organization and their own collective action, working people people can develop a sense of having some collective power to change things, develop deeper insights into the nature of the system, and develop skills useful in advancing the struggle further. Through collective action and self-organization people can develop a greater sense of possibilities for change. The practical need for unity also helps in developing an understanding of the connections between captalism and things like racism and sexism and imperialism. A mass organization is also a site where radicals with ambitious ideas about social change can connect to the aspirations and grievances of of broader numbers of people.

The anarchosyndicalist advocacy of the direct democracy of worker assemblies comes from this idea of workers controlling and shaping — self-managing — their own collective struggles. This conception of a movement of workers "in union" with each other is opposed to bureaucratic business unionism, where a hierarchical structure of paid officials and staff becomes entrenched, and routine top-down bargaining narrows the issues and scope of the union's aims and diminishes the ability of the union to address the concerns of workers on and off the job. A paid union hierarchy who don't share the conditions of the job and often have incomes more akin to management are likely to "see management's point of view" and will tend to see direct struggle as a risk to the union they would rather avoid.

The point to direct democracy comes from the fact it is the opposite of top-down control. The six-month fight of the Barcelona bus drivers to reduce their work week from six to five days in 2007-2008 illustrates this.

The bureaucratic unions at the Barcelona transit authority — the social-democratic UGT and Communist-influenced Workers Commissions — had sold out the workers on this demand for a shorter workweek in 2005 by signing a contract without a well-advertised contract ratification meeting.

In the fall of 2007 the anarcho-syndicalist CGT (http://www.cgt.org.es), which has a large section among the bus drivers, was able to persuade another independent bus drivers union (Spain has a system of "competitive unionism" that allows multiple unions in a workplace) to join it in sponsoring an open workers assembly "independent of the trade unions," to discuss the issues and plan a course of action.

Workers welcomed the rank and file of the UGT and Workers Commissions to attend, but not the paid officials. The assembly elected a rank and file committee to coordinate the struggle and publish a free newspaper for people in the city to explain their struggle. Over a period of six months the assembly conducted three strikes of several days duration, various demonstrations and marches, and gained the participation of a majority of the workers. After the third strike, the Socialist Party politicians who control the city government and transit authority in Barcelona finally capitulated to the workers' demand.

The direct democracy of the workers assembly was crucial because it placed power over the struggle directly in the hands of the ranks, and gave bus drivers a real sense this was their movement. It gave them the power to decide if a management proposal was acceptable or not.

Direct democracy does not mean all decisions have to be made in meetings. It doesn't mean there can be no delegation of tasks. But the idea is to avoid the development of a bureaucracy that has its own interests apart from the workers. Thus in the CGT Transport Union there are no paid officials and there is term limits for the executive committees.

Anarchosyndicalists have almost never advocated "consensus decision-making" for the mass organizations they have helped to organize or participate it — and this is true of most social anarchists in general. The interminable meetings and difficulty coming to clear decisions in a reasonable time — invariably a feature of consensus decision-making in settings with large numbers of people — would not be effective for working class people who have limited amounts of free time and are often exhausted from work. It's particularly unlikely to work for working women who often have a "double day" — working for employers and also doing most housework for their families.

Part of the problem here, I think, is that people may confuse what works for a small, informal circle of like-minded friends and what is needed in a larger and more heterogeneous group of people. A small informal group of friends can make decisions through talking things out. But a social movement is not the same thing as a small group of like-minded friends.

Building consensus in a mass organization or movement is important. The more unified a movement is, the stronger it will be. This suggests that there does need to be an open discussion where people can air their views. But if discussion doesn't end disagreement, then libertarian socialists propose a vote, and the majority carries the decision. Thus it is majoritarian direct democracy that social anarchists advocate, not "consensus decision-making." D'Amato ignores this distinction between different concepts of direct democracy.

The problem with "consensus decision-making" is its requirement of complete unanimity, and opposition to voting. I agree with Paul D'Amato's criticism of consensus decision-making of the sort that existed in the '70s/'80s period in anti-nuke groups like the Livermore Action Group or the Clamshell Alliance. Howard Ryan's pamphlet "Blocking Progress" (http://www.connexions.org/CxLibrary/CX6187.htm) is good account of how destructive and elitist this was in the Livermore Action Group in the '80s. But consensus decision making in those groups did not have its origins in social anarchism, but in Quakers and other radical pacifists, radical feminists, and individualist anarchists. Jo Freeman's famous essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" was a critique of this approach to decision-making in radical feminist groups of that era.

Consensus decision-making tends to lead to minority rule and empowers people who are better at talking...who are usually more educated. In any movement there is always a minority who agrees with the original aims and character of an organization. So even if this is proven disfunctional from experience, the group can't evolve through learning from experience because changes can be blocked by small minorities. This is why consensus decision-making is essentially conservative.
Persons and Social Groups

Why is there this difference between individualist anarchism and social anarchism in the interpretation of direct democracy? I believe the explanation for this lines in a theoretical difference about the concept of the person.

Individualist anarchism was influenced by the classical liberal conception of the person as a kind of atom whose core personality or identity is separate from social groups. The idea of absolute personal autonomy, which is a feature of hyper-individualism, is built on this.

Individuals are viewed as prior to society because society and social groups are viewed as akin to associations that a person joins, such as a club or church or a union. This picture was influenced by the classical liberal concept of society being formed as a "social contract" among individuals. This is the source of individualist anarchist talk of society being based on "free agreement" or "voluntary association". Because the individual is conceived as an atom prior to society, the individual is seen as requiring an absolute autonomy apart from the social collectivity...and this is expressed in the requirement of unanimity in collective decisions that person participates in. The individual ego thus asserts its claim to veto the collectivity on its own. William Godwin expresses this thus: "There is but one power to which I can yield a heartfelt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictates of my own conscience."(1)

The individualist conception comes close to agreeing with Margaret Thatcher's slogan, "Society doesn't exist, only individuals exist." The individualist concept of the person is an assumption that individualist anarchism shares in common with right-wing "free market" "libertarianism".

But in fact society — and many social groups — are not like an association. When you're born into a particular social class, or a particular racial or ethnic group, or a family, or you're a particular sex raised in a particular gender system, this shapes who you become. Many of your abilities, expectations in life, tastes, way of talking and other things are shaped by being a part of a social group. Social groups become part of your identity. The social group is part of you. And this also means that people will often have a tendency to agree or sympathize with needs of a group they are a part of.

This view of the person as shaped by groups he or she is a part of is called the social concept of the person. The social concept of the person is another assumption shared in common by Marx and social anarchism.

Bakunin is expressing his agreement with this view of the person in this passage:

"Even the most wretched individual of our present society could not exist and develop without the cumulative social efforts of countless generations. Thus the individual, his freedom and reason, are the products of society, and not the vice versa: society is not the product of individuals comprising it; and the higher, the more fully the individual is developed, the greater his freedom — and the more he is the product of society, the more does he receive from society and the greater his debt to it."(1) This doesn't mean each individual isn't also unique, with his or her own aspirations and ability to make up one's own mind.

It might help to contrast the social concept of the person with another view that I'll call the totalitarian concept of the person. This is a view that is very far out of fashion these days. But in the '20s and '30s, in both fascist and Stalinist rhetoric, there was a tendency to reduce the needs and interests and aspirations of the person to some larger entity such as a class, the nation or the state. The person was seen as a mere expression of some collectivity. The social concept of the person stands mid-way between the two extremes of individualism and totalitarianism, acknowledging both an individual and collective aspect to people.

Because our lives occur in various group contexts, there are always situations where our will will be limited by the wills of others, and by our obligations to others. Thus the slogan "refusing to be ruled over" (the title of one of D'Amato's articles) is ambiguous. It could express an opposition to being subordinate to bosses, to oppressive hierarchies...or it could express the idea of individual autonomy, of not being subject to any limitation by others. This second interpretation is the individualist anarchist idea of absolute individual autonomy. But a person is not oppressed simply because they lose a vote in a meeting.
Direct Democracy and Self-management

For anarchosyndicalism, self-management and direct democracy are aspects of both the strategy for social change and also part of the program for a self-managed socialist society. The direct self-activity and self-organization of the working class, in running their own struggles and mass organizations, "prefigures" a society where workers will directly govern their own work and the industries they work in. "Prefigurative politics" thus had its origins in the libertarian syndicalist wing of labor radicalism.

In the social anarchist view, self-managment is an innate human capacity and need. Humans have the ability to discuss among themselves, develop plans for what they want to achieve, for themselves and jointly with others, and have the ability to develop skills and tools and coordination needed to realize their purposes in real time. Self-management is part of the idea of "positive" freedom. The liberal concept of freedom as absence of external coercion or constraint, which is what right-wing "libertarians" mean by "freedom," is viewed by social anarchists as only part of what real freedom is. "Positive" freedom requires also that people have roughly equal access to the means to participate effectively in the spheres of decision-making that affect their lives.

We can think of self-management of industry as a layered or nested structure of spheres of decision-making. Where groups of people are mainly affected by some sphere of decision-making, there are assemblies there that institutionalize collective control. Some decisions affect an entire plant in a roughly equal way, and there are general assemblies of the whole plant to control those decisions. Other decisions affect mainly one department or a small work group, and they have their separate meetings. Some decisions affect only one person and that person gets to "call the shots" in that area. Collective self-management doesn't mean that all decisions are made in meetings or that delegation of tasks doesn't occur. The point to the direct democracy of the assemblies is that it acts as the control for collective self-management.

Nor is self-management simply equivalent to a system of formal democracy. Existing corporate capitalism generates hierarchies where expertise and decision-making authority is concentrated...hierarchies of managers and high-end professionals who work closely with them, such as engineers and lawyers. This hierarchy is part of how class oppression strips from workers their ability to control their lives. The ability of people to effectively participate in decisions that affect them requires also a change in the educational system and the design of work, so that conceptual and decision-making tasks in work are re-integrated with the physical doing of the work. Thus Kropotkin advocated "integration of labor": "A society where each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work."

But the point to the direct democracy of the assemblies is that they are needed as a replacement for the formal hierarchical power of dominating classes, the formal subordination of workers in social production.

I need to make three additional points about workers self-management of industry as this occurs in the thinking of most social anarchists.

First: The anarchosyndicalist view of workers self-management is that it arises in the transformation of society, out of the conflict between classes.

It's hard to see how an end to the oppression and exploitation of people as workers could come to an end except through a general takeover of the management of social production and distribution by the people who work in these industries. This doesn't mean, however, that anarchosyndicalism conceives of a socialized economy as the same as the existing economy, but with workers running the workplaces. Rather, the idea is that an entirely different logic of development would ensue, and the technologies used and mix of products and services would change.

The syndicalist strategy is different than the Proudhonian idea of forming worker cooperatives within the cracks of the present capitalist framework. Most social anarchists support altnernative institutions such as worker and housing cooperatives and social centers and so on, both because they are useful for the social movements at the present time, and because they illustrate that workers' management is an idea that works. However, forming cooperatives in the cracks of capitalism is not the same as the syndicalist strategy, which is rooted in the class struggle.(2)

Second: Most social anarchists and anarchosyndicalists do not advocate an ideal of workers self-management in the form of competing cooperatives in a market-driven economy, but as part of a socialized economy in which the land and means of production would be owned in common by the whole society. In 1936, during the Spanish revolution, the anarchosyndicalist theorist Diego Abad de Santillan wrote that the worker organizations controlling the various industries are not "proprietors" of the industries but are "only administrators at the service of the entire society."(3)

Third: Although most social anarchists still advocate workers self-management of industry as part of a larger program for social transformation and social empowerment, workers self-management of industry was not all there is to what anarchosyndicalism advocated historically for social transformation nor is it all that social anarchists advocate today, far from it.

The power of the dominating classes isn't limited to the workplaces, and struggles that affect working class people spread out in other areas of society -- struggles of tenants, for immigrant rights, against police brutality, and so on. To develop its power the working class needs to address the issues of the day and counter its own solutions to those of the dominating classes.

Also, struggles of working people are not just around class because working class people are women, immigrants, people of color. Various forms of oppression and exploitation overlap in a society built on a complex forms of structural inequality.

Thus the overwhelming focus on class oppression and exploitation, which was characteristic of both Marxism and social anarchism in the 19th century and early 1900s, has evolved into an understanding of oppression and exploitation as more multifaceted. The workplace is only one site of conflict and movement-building.

Thus, for example, in its response to the present global capitalist crisis, the CGT — the Spanish anarchosyndicalist union — proposes to tighten and deepen its relationships with the various social movements in Spain — women's groups, ecologists, the housing movement, immigrants rights, and so on. Thus they see the struggle against the elite imposing the costs of the crisis on the working class as built on the basis of a labor/social movement alliance.

The idea of self-emancipation applies in general to all oppressed and exploited people, and the various forms of oppression also generate forms of self-activity and movements in opposition. Thus the picture of the agent of social transformation becomes more complex, as it requires an alliance among the various oppressed and exploited groups, as they confront the power of the dominating classes. The framework for this conflict is a class framework, but the working class movement itself requires a mass alliance in the spirit of "An injury to one is the concern of all," if it is to have the unity and social strength to push aside extremely powerful and entrenched elites.
The Class Character of the State

D'Amato claims that Marxism aims at a stateless society in the future, and this is a fair statement of Marx's view.

But the disagreement between Leninism and social anarchism isn't over some statement about a far-off state of society but about the means to social change, and in particular the means to liberation of the mass of the people from oppression and exploitation.

The state, as Engels wrote, is a territorial power, "standing above society", equipped with an armed "public force" that is not simply "a self-acting armed organization of the people". Engels viewed the state as an institution of a dominating class: "As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which by its means becomes also the politically dominant class and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class."(4)

Thus far, the social anarchist current in the late 19th century who emerged out of the First International agreed with Engels on this view of the state. Thus Bakunin wrote:

"The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: the priesthood, the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and finally, after every other class has been exhausted, the bureaucratic class."

But if a state is separated from effective control of the mass of the people, how could there be a "proletarian state", as Leninists maintain?

Although extreme individualists also oppose the state, they do so far different reasons than social anarchists. Both Bakunin and Kropotkin were scornful of the opposition to the state by 19th century free market capitalist ideologues. They saw this as simply expressing the wish of the capitalist to avoid social constraints on profit making. Their talk of "freedom" was about the freedom of the capitalists to exploit the working class.

Social anarchists oppose the state for two main reasons: because it is an institution of class domination, and because it is a structure of hierarchical power, a structure of domination in its own right.

The characteristic feature of the modern state is its separation from effective control by the mass of the people. The state is built on hierarchical chain of command structures, similar to the private corporations, with a concentration of expertise and decision-making authority into a minority.

In corporate capitalism there is a social layer that is the systems' control bureaucracy. Their class position isn't based on capital ownership but on relative monopoly of decision-making authority and expertise in managing state agencies or corporations. If we wish to use Bakunin's language, We could call this the bureaucratic class, or, following Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, the coordinator class.

The state is an important locus of power for this class, as Bakunin pointed out.

Libertarian socialism historically has been open to a different conception of class from Marxism. Marx operated with a simple bipolar division of capitalist society into the capitalist class and working class, based on his analysis of exploitation in terms of the labor theory of value. Thus the capitalists are the class who pump their private wealth out of the labor of the working class.

But there are more forms of monopolization of economic resources than just ownership of means of production or money power in a context of a society where there are propertyless people to be exploited. The bureaucratic control layer in the system is based on a relative monopolization of decision-making authority and forms of expertise important to management, in both the private and public sectors.

(Nonetheless, not all social anarchists accept the three-class analysis of capitalism into capitalist, coordinator/bureaucratic and working classes. Some hold that the bureaucratic control layer are a part of the capitalist class. But this agrees with the majority social anarchist view that private ownership of wealth isn't the only basis of class domination and exploitation.)

Although defending the interests of dominating classes is an essential feature of the state, this isn't all there is to the state. Because the state acts to hold the existing social arrangement together, it also tends to support the various structures of inequality and oppression in the prevailing society. Here we can think of the ways the American state has supported forms of structural racism such as southern segregation or pursued the marginalization and expropriation of the native American Indian population. Or the race as well as class bias inherent in the current "War on Drugs" or the history of racist immigration policies.

Because the state must be able to govern and maintain social peace, it has also been the means through which popular protest and class struggle have gained concessions. This includes various limitations or restraints on private economic power such as the Pure Food and Drug Act, environmental protection, OSHA, etc. This also includes various systems of benefits...free public education, comprehensive health insurance (in affluent capitalist countries other than the USA), and other components of the "social wage"...affordable housing, public transit subsidies, welfare rights, and so on. The existence of systems of civil liberties and popular election... gains from previous eras of struggle...also place limits on capitalist control.

From a social anarchist point of view, the social wage and social services and civil liberties...as gains of past struggles...are things to be defended, through social movements independent of the state and political parties.

The Marxist bipolar class analysis tends to favor the view that class oppression is done away with if the means of production are made public property. Thus in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels advocated concentration of the means of production, distribution, communications and finance in the hands of the state.

But this view ignores the internal class structure of the state itself. In the Russian revolution the Bolsheviks adopted the rather Orwellian term "workers state" for the hierarchical Soviet state that emerged under Bolshevik Party auspices. The empirical reality was that ordinary workers lacked any effective means to control what that state did. The Bolsheviks described the Soviet state as a "workers state" on the basis of an apriori argument: Because the state was controlled by the Bolshevik party and the Bolshevik party represents the true interests of the working class, it is a "workers state."

D'Amato quotes Lenin to the effect that "temporary use must be made of the instruments, means and methods of the state power against the exploiters." Social anarchists disagree with this Leninist advocacy of a "proletarian state" — an "authoritarian state" as D'Amato calls it — during a period of transition to socialism. No such "state power" will have any tendency to "wither away" as Leninists assume. However, it doesn't follow that social anarchism is opposed to political power. Here it is necessary to distinguish the state and government or political governance.

We can think of the polity or governance system of a society as the institution that sets the basic rules and enforces those rules, and holds the society together as the ultimate arbiter of disputes.

From the social anarchist point of view, the state is only one type of polity or governance system. As Kropotkin wrote:

"The State has...been confused with government. As there can be no State without government, it is sometimes said that it is the absence of government, and not the abolition of the State, that should be the aim....However, the State implies quite a different idea to that of government. It...includes the existence of a power placed above society but also a territorial concentration and a concentration of many functions of the life of society in the hands of a few..."(5)

Most libertarian socialists agree that some sort of polity or system of self-government is necessary in society. Libertarian socialists believe it is possible for institutions of popular power — a form of polity built up from the direct democracy of assemblies in workplaces and neighborhoods — to replace the hierarchical state in a self-managed socialist society, or such a society in the process of being built, without the hierarchical state apparatus.

Marxists sometimes argue that if the working class creates a new polity to replace the state and uses this polity to engage in coercion, such as against armed attacks on the new social arrangement, this makes the new governance system necessarily a "state." But any polity or governance system enforces its rules, and needs to be able to use coercion, if necessary, against anti-social criminality. Even tribal societies in ancient times could some times use coercion against wayward individuals. The ability of a society to defend itself does not require a hierarchical state apparatus rather than a form of democratic self-governance under direct popular control.
A Tale of Two Soviets

To defend the view that the October 1917 revolution in Russia ushered in a period of "working class power," Leninist groups like the ISO often refer to the worker democracy expressed through the soviets, and the fact that government authority was transferred to the Congress of Soviets in the Russian revolution. But the main soviets in St. Petersburg (Petrograd) and Moscow were not effectively controlled by workers. The key St. Petersburg soviet was formed in February 1917 by a group of social-democratic intellectuals, including three members of the Duma (Russia's parliament), such as Alexander Kerensky, a lawyer. The soviet was formed top-down when these members of the "intelligentsia" constituted themselves as the soviet's executive committee and sent out a call for election of delegates. Power in the key big city soviets was concentrated in the executive committee where the real decisions were made. Some decisions were submitted to the assembled delegates for ratification, but the executive quickly came to treat the plenaries of delegates as just a rubber stamp. The meetings of the delegates tended to be just an open space for making speeches, not the real decision-making body.

As Pete Rachleff explains in "Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution6", the development of a strong independent shop committee movement in the Russian revolution arose partly due to the inability of workers to control either the soviets or the highly centralized Russian trade unions. The shop committees were elected by mass assemblies of workers in the workplaces, and the various workplace takeovers that happened in the 1917 revolution and into early 1918 were the product of this shop committee movement, not the soviets.(6)

The soviets set up in this highly top-down manner were established mainly by the Mensheviks, a social-democratic Marxist party. But when the Bolsheviks gained majorities in these soviets in the fall of 1917, they simply took over the same top-down structure. They didn't try to democratize these soviets. They were concerned about the use of the soviets as a base of party power...a trampoline to jump themselves into control of the state...not as centers of decision-making by the working class. Various steps taken by the Bolsheviks in the early months of their government power further weakened rank and file worker control. For example, a peasant based populist party, the Left Social Revolutionaries (Left SRs), emerged as the main political tendency supported by the peasantry. The Russian peasantry were 80 percent of the population. To prevent the Left SRs from gaining a majority in the Congress of Soviets, the Bolsheviks "packed" the congress with scores of representatives of union bureaucracies and other officials...thus violating the soviet principle of direct election of delegates by the rank and file.

Not all soviets were set up in the highly top-down fashion of the St. Petersburg soviet. Another key soviet in the Russian revolution was created in early March 1917 in Kronstadt, located on an island about 20 miles west of St. Petersburg. Kronstadt was (and still is) the home base of the Russian navy's Baltic fleet.

The Kronstadt soviet differed from the one in St. Petersburg in that the rank and file delegates were firmly in control. The deliberation in the plenaries of delegates was real as this was where the real decisions were made. Power was not centralized in the executive committee, which was there to ensure decisions of the soviet were carried out.

The Kronstadt soviet was grounded in a system of assemblies in all the workplaces and military units and warships in Kronstadt. The assemblies met weekly, and elected their own administrative committees. Workplace assemblies also directly managed their work...the running of the drydock, a sawmill, the island's electric power plant, factories making torpedos and dive equipment and so on. Unlike in St. Petersburg, there was no split between a shop committee movement, rooted in workplace meetings, and the soviet. Although they controlled their own work, the assemblies had to adhere to the rules decided by the soviet, but the assemblies also followed debates in the soviet and controlled their delegates, who were kept on a tight leash...they were elected for only 3-month terms.

In January 1918 the soviet dissolved the old city council in Kronstadt, took over all municipal functions, and also expropriated all buildings and businesses in Kronstadt....a move that was opposed by the Bolsheviks, who voted "no." The Bolsheviks lost this vote because they were a minority in Kronstadt throughout 1917 and into 1918.

The grassroots democracy in Kronstadt was protected by the political dominance of an alliance of two libertarian socialist tendencies... the Union of Social Revolutionaries-Maximalists (called "maximalists") and the Russian anarchosyndicalists. The maximalists and syndicalists generally worked together in an6 alliance in the Russian revolution...for example the syndicalist/ maximalist alliance was dominant in6 much of the Russian baker's union.

The libertarian socialists in Kronstadt viewed their form of grassroots government as a model for6 Russia...a model of governance they called a "Toiler's Republic." Because this was clearly a form of government and worker power, it thus refutes the Leninist claim that libertarian socialists are "against the working class taking political power."(7)

A variety of conservative and liberal historians say the October 1917 revolution was merely a "Bolshevik coup d'etat". This is not accurate. Kerensky's "provisional government" was never elected and was very unpopular by October 1917. The transfer of power to the Congress of Soviets was supported by the Left SRs, Left Mensheviks, syndicalists, maximalists, and most anarchists, as well as the Bolsheviks. The majority of the Russian population supported this move. Although the libertarian Left had criticisms of the top down soviets and trade unions, they supported the October revolution because they believed they would be able to continue to organize for their viewpoint within the workplaces, unions and soviets. They didn't anticipate the authoritarian direction of the regime that would begin to gather force in the spring of 1918.

The top down structure of the soviets reflected the fact that both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks tended to understand democracy as election of representatives to make decisions for you...a view they took over from pre-World War 1 social-democracy. The Bolsheviks never advocated for direct, participatory democracy as a means of working class social empowerment. This is closely related to the unwillingness of the Bolsheviks to advocate or support workers' self-management of industry.

Lenin's November 1917 decree for "workers control" did not advocate workers' management. The word "kontrol" in Russian has a weaker meaning that "control" in English. Lenin's "worker control" decree merely legalized practices of worker surveillance and restraint on management...vetos on hiring and firing, forcing management to "open the books" and so on. These were things the workers had already achieved through direct action.

After Lenin's decree was published, a regional organization of factory committees in St. Petersburg did advocate formation of a national congress of the factory committee movement to take over coordination and planning for the whole national economy. Isaac Deutscher explains what then happened:

"The Factory Committees attempted to form their own national organization, which was to secure their virtual economic dictatorship. The Bolsheviks now called upon the trade unions to render a special service to the nascent Soviet State and to discipline the Factory Committees. The unions came out firmly against the attempt of the Factory Committees to form a national organization of their own. They prevented the convocation of the planned All-Russian Congress of Factory Committees and demanded total subordination on the part of the Committees."(8)

This question was fought out at the first All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in January 1918. Only the syndicalist/maximalist alliance defended the idea of using the factory committee movement as a basis for worker management of the economy. They were defeated by the Bolshevik majority, who were supported on this point by the Mensheviks.

I have run into members of the ISO who insist that Lenin and Trotsky were advocates of workers' self-management. In fact the evidence says otherwise. The Bolshevik leaders worked consistently against direct worker management from October 1917 on. This whole story is laid out in well-researched detail in Maurice Brinton's book The Bolsheviks and Workers Control.

Lenin famously wrote in The State and Revolution that "every cook can govern" but that book has very little information about institutions that would enable the cooks to govern. He says little about economic management but points to the German post office as a model for socialism. Thus it seems that the all the cooks and other food service workers are not expected to govern their workplaces...not if the German post office is the model.

Marxist sociologist Sam Farber writes:

"After October...Lenin's perspective for the growing self-management movement in Russian factories never went beyond his...usual emphasis on accounting and inspection ["worker's control"]...The underlying cause here was not, as some have claimed that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were cynically manipulating the factory committees and that once the party leaders 'got power' they had no more use for them...The key problem was that Lenin and the mainstream of the Bolshevik Party, or for that matter the Mensheviks, paid little if any attention to the need for a transformation and democratization of the daily life of the working class on the shopfloor and community...For Lenin the central problem and concern continued to be the revolutionary transformation of the central state."(9)

What was innovative about the Bolshevik party's role in the Russian revolution is that through their capture of the state their followed a series of institutional moves and practices that led inexorably to the consolidation of a coordinator or bureaucratic class, and the continued oppression and exploitation of the working population.

Centralized state planning for the Soviet economy was begun in November 1917 with the creation of the Supreme Council of National Economy, which became the Soviet planning agency Gosplan in the late '20s. The people on this council were various Bolshevik party members and trade union officials and experts, all appointed from above.

By 1918 Lenin and Trotsky were beating the drum for the adoption of Taylorist methods in industry and "one-man management"...appointment of bosses from above. Appointment of bosses from above is consistent with the logic of central planning. The central planners will want to have people on site in workplaces that can ensure adherence to the plans handed down from above.

Even election of industry management boards by workers was intensely opposed by Lenin and Trotsky. A large faction of rank and file Bolshevik trade union members had proposed election of management boards in early 1921, after the end of the Russian civil war, and this was fought out at the March 1921 party congress. Trotsky argued against it, saying "the party's birth right to rule takes precedence over the passing whims of the worker democracy."

If the party's "right to rule" isn't based on the "worker democracy" where does it come from? I think here the concept of the "vanguard party" comes into play. If you view control by the "vanguard party" as essential for constructing socialism, then this can become a rationalization for abrogating worker democracy.

From the libertarian socialist view, what is essential for constructing authentic socialism is the direct social empowerment of the oppressed and exploited population. This falls directly out of the idea that the "emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves." How can this social empowerment happen if workers are still subordinate to a hierarchical managerial regime?

The idea of the "vanguard party" is that it concentrates certain key kinds of expertise...such as a correct Marxist theoretical understanding...and is to act as the manager of the process of change. This concept is a kind of meritocratic ideology, and seems quite consistent with the kind of concentration of decision-making authority and expertise characteristic of a coordinator class.

The activists in the mainstream of the Bolshevik Party may have been well-intended but often human actions have unintended consequences. The point here is to see the consequences of the institutional moves and decisions that fell out of of Bolshevik politics in that situation. This helps us to understand the real meaning of that politics.

I think an empowered coordinator elite is prefigured by various features of Leninism...hierarchical state authority, nationalization of the economy, centralized state planning, the ideology of the "vanguard party." The consolidation of dominant coordinator class through the Russian revolutionary process is best explained as the result of these assumptions in Leninist politics.

In The Case for Socialism, Alan Maass — an ISO writer — advocates "democratic planning." This is a vague phrase. Most libertarian socialists also advocate something that could be called "democratic planning." But is this to be a planning process that is controlled from below, starting in the workplace and neighborhood assemblies, or is to be central planning, planning through a statist hierarchy? Maass doesn't say, but his highlighting Bolshevik practice in the Russian revolution as a model suggests that "democratic planning" is a euphemism for statist central planning. Perhaps he would say this would be planning through a "democratic state." But what is "democratic"? Do working class people in the USA feel we're empowered because we can vote every few years for politicians who ignore our concerns? Democracy is a contested concept and the kind of "democracy" one has in mind is crucial.

Leninists seem to imagine that you can consolidate decision-making power in a state administrative layer and then expect that they will easily give up power later. But any group that acquires the position of a dominating class is likely to work to keep their power and privilege and to also develop an ideology to justify their position...and they can easily call it "socialism". We have the former Communist regimes to remind us of this.
Leninist Myths About the Spanish Revolution

D'Amato repeats the usual Trotskyist myth-making about the Friends of Durruti Group in the Spanish revolution who he describes as follows: "They were a group of revolutionary anarchists who became critical of the main anarchist trade union group, the CNT, for refusing to take state power even though they had control in the streets of some of Spain's biggest cities after a workers' uprising in 1936 had successfully thwarted a fascist coup, leaving the bourgeois government still clinging to power." Of course, the Spanish anarchosyndicalists would say they were not for "state power." But, again, this comes back to the point I made earlier, about how libertarian socialists advocate a form of political power that isn't a state.

The CNT (National Confederation of Labor) was Spain's largest union federation, a massive anarchosyndicalist organization with more than 2 million members.

Usually Trotskyists say that the anarchosyndicalists didn't believe in the working class acquiring political power at all. Thus Geoff Bailey, in the ISO's journal International Socialist Review, writes: "If the government were overthrown, however, it would have to be replaced by a workers' government led by the CNT-FAI. The anarchists believed such a state would be a dictatorship, a mortal blow to their antistatist principles."(10)

In fact the CNT did propose the creation of a working class government (as I will describe shortly). Moreover, as CNT historian Jose Peirats points out, it was always the view of the Spanish anarchosyndicalists that "all social power should be in the hands of the proletariat." The Friends of Durruti Group advocated the formation of a workers government, a "Revolutionary Junta." Trotskyists like D'Amato and Bailey see this as a break from the position of the CNT.

This is quite wrong. In fact the Friends of Durruti Group were advocating within the rank and file for a return to the official position of the CNT before it joined the Popular Front government in November 1936. From the time of the initial defeat of the army in July of 1936 through August there was an intense debate inside the CNT's unions in Catalonia on the way forward.

By August the Spanish Communist Party was beating the drum for the construction of a conventional hierarchical army...the sort of army Trotsky had put together in the spring of 1918 during the Russian revolution. The Communists had a two-stage strategy of revolution: first gain control of a rebuilt hierarchical army and police, and later use that to seize power and create a nationalized economy. In late August revolutionaries in the CNT unions in Catalonia developed a counter-strategy to head off the Communist Party plan. They got the CNT national union to agree to their plan at a national conference on September 3, 1936. So what was the September program of the anarchosyndicalists? They had been calling for a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the UGT for some time. In September the CNT's program consisted of essentially three pieces:

Replacement of the separate party and union militias with a unified people's militia controlled through a National Defense Council made up of CNT and UGT union delegates. This would replace the Republican central government. The parliament would be replaced by national and regional worker congresses. The Defense Council would not have power over the economy but would be limited to military, police and judicial functions.(11)
Direct management of all industries by the workers in a socialized economy. Seizure of the banks. Coordinated planning through the worker congresses.
Replacement of hierarchical municipal governments by "free municipalities", based on neighborhood and village assemblies, and delegate councils elected from the assemblies for larger towns and cities. The CNT proposal for a National Defense Council is the origin of the Friends of Durruti Group proposal which they sometimes called a "revolutionary junta." Junta is just the Spanish word meaning "council" — it doesn't have any authoritarian connotations in Spanish. The executive committees of CNT unions were called juntas.

The CNT's program for a self-managed socialist structure is based on what I would call the "dual governance" model. This is the idea that decision-making and popular self-management should be rooted in both the workplace and the community. The "free municipalities" were intended to be both the local governance body as well as the channel for consumer input, particularly around public goods like housing, education and health care. At the same time, there would also be worker assemblies in the workplaces and self-management of industries by the people who work in them.

Now it should be obvious that a structure that can make rules for the society and has enforcement powers is a polity or government. From the Spanish anarchist point of view, this would not be a state because of the direct control over the armed militia -- the main armed body in society — by the organized working class, and also because of the transfer of legislative power to the grassroots congresses and the direct worker management of the economy. The people's militia would be close to what Engels called a "self-acting armed body of the population."

A leading advocate of the National Defense Council program was Buenaventura Durruti, the most popular elected militia leader in Aragon. Durruti and others in the CNT had been advocating a "revolutionary workers alliance" with the UGT unions for several years. Geoff Bailey quotes Durruti on the workers' alliance this way:

"The alliance, to be revolutionary, must be genuinely working class. It must be the result of an agreement between the workers' organizations, and those alone. No party, however socialist it may be, can belong to the workers' alliance."

Then, Bailey interprets this as follows:

"Essentially the CNT's message was, 'We refuse to unite in struggle with workers who have yet to march under our banner."

Now, in fact this is the opposite of what the "workers alliance" proposal was about. It was, after all, a proposal for an alliance with the socialist UGT unions. And it's also true that the CNT proposal for a national defense council was a proposal for representation only of worker organizations, not political parties.

The character of the government they were proposing is clear if you look at what happened in Aragon, the one region where they did carry this out. In September of 1936 more than 400 collectivized villages formed a regional federation and held a congress where they elected an Aragon Regional Defense Council...essentially a workers' government. Initially all the elected representatives were members of the CNT, which had 80 percent of the union members in that region, but later some UGT members were added to the Council. Although the CNT was dominant in most of the collectivized villages, there were some villages where the UGT was the majority.

A prominent supporter of the CNT National Defense Council proposal at the time was Eduardo de Guzman, editor of the CNT's daily newspaper in Madrid, Castilla Libre. De Guzman described the proposal as "a proletarian government — total working-class democracy in which all sectors of the proletariat — but of the proletariat alone — would be represented."(12)

By excluding the Basque Nationalist Party and the Republican parties, the parties representing Spanish small business and the professional/managerial classes would be excluded from the government. The various Marxist parties would be represented through their working class members in the UGT union.

Another prominent supporter of the National Defense Council proposal was Liberto Callejas, managing editor of the CNT's big daily paper in Barcelona,Solidaridad Obrera. Most of the journalists on that paper supported this program, including a disabled journalist named Jaime Balius. Throughout September and October the writers at Solidaridad Obrera carried out a vigorous campaign in support of the National Defense Council proposal.

The main group the anarchosyndicalists were hoping to ally with were the left wing of the Socialist Party — the largest Marxist tendency in Spain to the left of the Communist Party. In the summer of 1936 the Left Socialists were in the leadership of the massive UGT farm workers union and controlled the national executive committee of the UGT union federation. In months leading up to the onset of the revolution in Spain in 1936, the Left Socialists had called for a "proletarian revolution" and a "workers' government."

There was already a strong alliance in the countryside between UGT and CNT farm worker unions. The UGT and CNT railway and public utility unions had jointly seized and expropriated the country's railway and utility systems.

At the beginning of September the leading figure among the Left Socialists, Largo Caballero, had just been made Prime Minister. The UGT union federation incorporated only slightly less than half the organized working class in Spain. Agreement of the UGT and the Prime Minister to the CNT proposal would have added greatly to its legitimacy. The two union federations together had the power to implement this change in the governance structure of Spain. Knowing that Caballero was something of a prima donna, the CNT proposed that Caballero be made President of the proposed revolutionary government.

But Caballero and the Left Socialist leadership of the UGT refused the CNT proposal. Caballero described the CNT proposal as a "leap outside the constitution." Caballero had been strongly warned against the proposal by the Soviet ambassador in Spain.

This created an internal crisis for the CNT in Catalonia. What would be their solution? According to Durruti's biographer, Abel Paz, Durruti proposed a strategy of the CNT unions taking power in the regions where the CNT was the majority — Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia (the east coast region of Spain). By creating facts on the ground, Durruti believed it was possible to force Caballero and the UGT to go along.

Many of the FAI activists among the rank and file leadership level of the CNT in Catalonia apparently began to waver. Perhaps some thought Durruti's strategy was too risky. Perhaps others thought being in control of the industries gave them enough power to pressure the government. Others were worried about being frozen out of government decisions that would affect their militias and expropriated industries.

Thus, the CNT union finally joined the Popular Front government in November. Because the CNT journalists Liberto Callejas and Jaime Balius were totally opposed to joining the Popular Front government, they were fired.

Callejas and Balius then decided on a strategy of appealing to the rank and file of the CNT, to re-assert the original anarcho-syndicalist program. This led them to help organize the Friends of Durruti Group in March 1937. Balius was the main theorist and writer for the Friends of Durruti.

Thus the Friends of Durruti group was not formed to abandon or break with the anarchosyndicalist program of the CNT, but to organize for its revival among the ranks of the union. The Friends' program had three planks:
A National Defense Junta to run a unified militia.
Worker self-management of industry
Control of local governance by the "free municipalities."(13)

All of these planks were part of the national CNT program in September 1936.

It's worth noting that the CNT resisted going along with the strategy of uniting through the Popular Front government longer than any other Left tendency in Spain. The POUM — another Left Marxist group — was already part of the Popular Front government in Catalonia in July of 1936, the Communist Party were the strongest advocates for the Popular Front strategy, and the various Socialist Party factions were onboard the Popular Front by August 1936 at least. Thus the Marxist groups were actually the main backers of exactly the strategy that the ISO criticizes...rebuilding the Republican state through the Popular Front. If mistakes by anarchists in the Spanish revolution is an argument against anarchosyndicalism, why aren't mistakes of Marxists an argument against Marxism? In fact I would suggest that the orientation of Marxism to the politics of parties and elections best explains their agreement to a Popular Front alliance that favored retaining hierarchical state power and protection for the privileges and position of the Spanish "middle classes."

But my main point here is to show that the ISO is simply wrong when they say the anarchosyndicalists were not for working class political power in the Spanish revolution. Again, it's a question of what working class empowerment means. For libertarian socialists it does't mean a political party capturing control of a state, and then building up an administrative apparatus controlling the economy.

Bailey claims that anarchosyndicalist "apoliticism" meant they abandoned "political struggle." The word "apolitical" was used by some syndicalists to refer to the opposition to electoral politics and the politics of parties and states. It doesn't mean opposition to direct social governance by the people themselves or popular politicization or the politics of mass struggle. The revolutionary politics of the CNT was also a form of politics. Thus the label "apolitical" is misleading...and this is why social anarchists and anarchosyndicalists no longer use it.

The CNT unions were run through the direct democracy of worker assemblies, and elected committees of delegados (shop stewards). But the Spanish anarchists also emphasized capacitacion — building among ordinary people the skills and knowledge needed to participate effectively. Thus the Spanish anarchists also built a network of neighborhood social centers where a variety of activities took place — study groups, debates, cultural events, Mujeres Libres (the anarchist women's organizzation) groups, and so on. The Spanish anarchists were oriented to organizing in the community and around areas of consumption as well as in the workplace — as shown by the huge rent strike in Barcelona in 1931. The CNT's program of empowering residents of communities through the "free municipalities" falls out of this aspect of Spanish anarchosyndicalism.

If the anarchosyndicalists had merely organized the unions, various conservative or authoritarian or bureaucratic tendencies in the working class would tend to gain dominance in the unions over time. The libertarian socialists could only sustain their influence through popular education and politicization.

Bailey's article quotes various anarchists about "not wanting to create an anarchist dictatorship" as the explanation for not overthrowing the government. But this was a justification that was concocted later, after they had joined the Popular Front government. As a result of that action the CNT was criticized by anarchosyndicalists in other countries. It was only at this time that the CNT started talking about "not wanting to create a dictatorship". It was an after-the-fact justification tailored to appeal to anarchist sentiments.

Now, it's true that the CNT in Catalonia could have destroyed the regional Generalitat government of Catalonia in July, at the time of the defeat of the army takeover attempt. And in his memoir Joan Garcia Oliver...who argued in July 1936 for overthrowing the Generalitat...mentions that Federica Montseny argued that trying to carry out the CNT's libertarian socialist program right then would require an "anarchist dictatorship."

First of all, it should be pointed out that Montseny was a Stirnerite individualist whcih would be likely to prejudice her against any proposal of constructing a social governing power. Secondly, Garcia Oliver responded to her in the union debate at the time that a takeover of authority in the region by highly democratic mass union organizations with the backing of a majority of the working class cannot reasonably be called a "dictatorship." This debate took place before the widespread seizures of industry by Spain's workers, which strengthened the working class sense of potential power.

The debate was argued in front of a union regional plenary of over 500 delegates. At that moment the outcome of the initial struggle with the army was unclear. And anarchists opposed to overthrowing the Genreralitat appealed to fear and uncertainty. Friends of Durruti argued later that the success of these appeals to fear and doubt show insufficient preparation within the CNT movement in thinking about how to respond to this situation as well as lack of appreciation of the importance of taking advantage of opportunities. This may be true, but it doesn't show that their anarchosyndicalist ideology was the explanation of the failure. Nor did Friends of Durruti believe that it was even though they were critical of confusions in the thinking of some anarchists.

Moreover, by August Garcia Oliver and other revolutionaries in the CNT had worked out the National Defense Council proposal, which answered the "anarchist dictatorship" charge by proposing a government of the entire organized working class, not just the CNT.

Like most libertarian socialists nowadays, I think the CNT's failure to overthrow the Generalitat when it had the opportunity was a mistake. And it's quite possible that a number of the Spanish anarchosyndicalists were unclear in their thinking, or swayed by fears and risks. Thus the Friends of Durruti later criticized the CNT for being unable to work up the audacity to make the most of the opportunities. But, again, this doesn't show that anarchosyndicalism or libertarian socialism are opposed to political power, as the ISO maintains. The real issue is about the nature of political power, the state, and mass empowerment.

Nowadays there are those like John Holloway — a libertarian Marxist writer — who argue it is possible "to change the world without taking power." I think this is best understood as a reaction against the failure of various forms of statist socialism — both social-democracy and Leninism. But as long as power remains in the hands of the dominating classes, the majority of the population won't be free, but will continue to be dominated and exploited. It's hard to see how the self-emanicpation of the oppressed and exploited can take place except through gaining control over the decisions that affect them. And this needs to happen not only in workplaces but through figuring out a way to evolve goverance of public affairs from the hierarchical state to a form of popular power, directly controlled by the population. But precisely because liberation requires social empowerment of the majority, capturing the state isn't a plausible route as the state is the wrong kind of institution for popular self-management of public affairs. A different form of polity is needed.

comments to: tomwetzel@riseup.net
Notes

(1) Quoted in Murray Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, 5-6.

(2) Marxists are often confused on this point. For example, in his new book Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright identifies the Proudhonian strategy as "the anarchist strategy."

(3) Abad Diego de Santillan, statement from December, 1936, appended to the 1937 addition of After the Revolution, 121.

(4) Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 229-230.

(5) Quoted in Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom, 97.

(6) http://www.geocities.com/~johngray/raclef.htm

(7) Israel Getzler's book Kronstadt, 1917-21 provides a detailed and concrete history of the Kronstadt soviet.

(8) Quoted in Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, 320.

(9) Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, 72.

(10) Geoff Bailey, "Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War", International Socialist Review, July-August 2002. Bailey's article contains many distortions and errors other than those I mention.

(11) The September 3 Defense Council proposal is discussed in Cesar M. Lorenzo, Los anarquistas y el poder.

(12) Interview with Eduardo de Guzmán, early 1970s, in Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain, 186 and 335-336.

(13) Towards a fresh revolution.

http://www.uncanny.net/~wetzel/socialan ... ninism.htm


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: libertarian left: ideas and history

Postby vanlose kid » Thu Jun 16, 2011 12:05 pm

*

the anarchist argument against state socialism.

H.1 Have anarchists always opposed state socialism?

Yes. Anarchists have always argued that real socialism cannot be created using a state. The basic core of the argument is simple. Socialism implies equality, yet the state signifies inequality - inequality in terms of power. As we argued in section B.2, anarchists consider one of the defining aspects of the state is its hierarchical nature. In other words, the delegation of power into the hands of a few. As such, it violates a core idea of socialism, namely social equality. Those who make up the governing bodies in a state have more power than those who have elected them (see section I.1).

It is with this perspective that anarchists have combated the idea of state socialism and Marxism (although we should stress that libertarian forms of Marxism, such as council communism, have strong similarities to anarchism). In the case of the Russian Revolution, the anarchists were amongst the first on the left to be suppressed by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, the history of Marxism is, in part, a history of its struggles against anarchists just as the history of anarchism is also, in part, a history of its struggle against the various forms of Marxism and its offshoots.

While both Stirner and Proudhon wrote many pages against the evils and contradictions of state socialism, anarchists have only really been fighting the Marxist form of state socialism since Bakunin. This is because, until the First International, Marx and Engels were relatively unknown socialist thinkers. Proudhon was aware of Marx (they had meant in France in the 1840s and had corresponded) but Marxism was unknown in France during his life time and so Proudhon did not directly argue against Marxism (he did, however, critique Louis Blanc and other French state socialists). Similarly, when Stirner wrote The Ego and Its Own Marxism did not exist bar a few works by Marx and Engels. Indeed, it could be argued that Marxism finally took shape after Marx and Engels had read Stirner's classic work and produced their notoriously inaccurate diatribe, The German Ideology, against him. However, like Proudhon, Stirner attacked other state socialists and communists.

Before discussing Bakunin's opposition and critique of Marxism in the next section, we should consider the thoughts of Stirner and Proudhon on state socialism. These critiques contain may important ideas and so are worth summarising. However, it is worth noting that when both Stirner and Proudhon were writing communist ideas were all authoritarian in nature. Libertarian communism only developed after Bakunin's death in 1876. This means that when Proudhon and Stirner were critiquing "communism" they were attacking a specific form of communism, the form which subordinated the individual to the community. Anarchist communists like Kropotkin and Malatesta also opposed such kinds of "communism." As Kropotkin put it, "before and in 1848" communism "was put forward in such a shape as to fully account for Proudhon's distrust as to its effect upon liberty. The old idea of Communism was the idea of monastic communities . . . The last vestiges of liberty and of individual energy would be destroyed, if humanity ever had to go through such a communism." [Act for Yourselves, p. 98] Of course, it may be likely that Stirner and Proudhon would have rejected libertarian communism as well, but bear in mind that not all forms of "communism" are identical.

For Stirner, the key issue was that communism (or socialism), like liberalism, looked to the "human" rather than the unique. "To be looked upon as a mere part, part of society," asserted Stirner, "the individual cannot bear - because he is more; his uniqueness puts from it this limited conception." As such, his protest against socialism was similar to his protest against liberalism (indeed, he drew attention to their similarity by calling it "social liberalism"). Stirner was aware that capitalism was not the great defender of freedom it was claimed to be by its supporters. "Restless acquisition," he argued, "does not let us take breath, take a calm enjoyment: we do not get the comfort of our possessions." Communism, by the "organisation of labour," can "bear its fruit" so that "we come to an agreement about human labours, that they may not, as under competition, claim all our time and toil." However, communism "is silent" over "for whom is time to be gained." He, in contrast, stresses that it is for the individual, "To take comfort in himself as the unique." [The Ego and Its Own, p. 265 and pp. 268-9] Thus state socialism does not recognise that the purpose of association is to free the individual and instead subjects the individual to a new tyranny:

"it is not another State (such as a 'people's State') that men aim at, but their union, uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing - A State exists even without my co-operation . . . the independent establishment of the State founds my lack of independence; its condition as a 'natural growth,' its organism, demands that my nature do not grow freely, but be cut to fit it." [Op. Cit., p. 224]


Similarly, Stirner argued that "Communism, by the abolition of all personal property, only presses me back still more into dependence on another, to wit, on the generality or collectivity" which is "a condition hindering my free movement, a sovereign power over me. Communism rightly revolts against the pressure that I experience from individual proprietors; but still more horrible is the might that it puts in the hands of the collectivity." [Op. Cit., p. 257] History has definitely confirmed this fear. By nationalising property, the various state socialist regimes turned the worker from a servant of the capitalist into a serf of the state. In contrast, communist-anarchists argue for free association and workers' self-management as the means of ensuring that socialised property does not turn into the denial of freedom rather than as a means of ensuring it. As such, Stirner's attack on what Marx termed "vulgar communism" is still important and finds echoes in communist-anarchist writings as well as the best works of Marx and his more libertarian followers (see section I.4 on how libertarian communism is not "silent" on these matters and incorporates Stirner's legitimate concerns and arguments).

Similar arguments to Stirner's can be found in Proudhon's works against the various schemes of state socialism that existed in France in the middle of the nineteenth century. He particularly attacked the ideas of Louis Blanc. Blanc, whose most famous book was Organisation du Travail (Organisation of Work, first published in 1840) argued that social ills resulted from competition and they could be solved by means of eliminating it via government initiated and financed reforms. More specifically, Blanc argued that it was "necessary to use the whole power of the state" to ensure the creation and success of workers' associations (or "social workshops"). Since that "which the proletarians lack to free themselves are the tools of labour," the government "must furnish them" with these. "The state," in short, "should place itself resolutely at the head of industry." [quoted by K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism, p. 139] Capitalists would be encouraged to invest money in these workshops, for which they would be guaranteed interest payments but the workers would keep the remaining profits generated by the workshops. Such state-initiated workshops would soon prove to be more efficient than privately owned industry and, by charging lower prices, force privately owned industry either out of business or to change into social workshops, so eliminating competition.

Proudhon objected to this scheme on many levels. He argued that Blanc's scheme appealed "to the state for its silent partnership; that is, he gets down on his knees before the capitalists and recognises the sovereignty of monopoly." Given that Proudhon saw the state as an instrument of the capitalist class, asking that state to abolish capitalism was illogical and impossible. Moreover, by getting the funds for the "social workshop" from capitalists, Blanc's scheme was hardly undermining their power. "Capital and power," Proudhon argued, "secondary organs of society, are always the gods whom socialism adores; if capital and power did not exist, it would invent them." [Property is Theft!, p. 215 and p. 217] He stressed the authoritarian nature of Blanc's scheme:

"M. Blanc is never tired of appealing to authority, and socialism loudly declares itself anarchistic; M. Blanc places power above society, and socialism tends to subordinate it to society; M. Blanc makes social life descend from above, and socialism maintains that it springs up and grows from below; M. Blanc runs after politics, and socialism is in quest of science. No more hypocrisy, let me say to M. Blanc: you desire neither Catholicism nor monarchy nor nobility, but you must have a God, a religion, a dictatorship, a censorship, a hierarchy, distinctions, and ranks. For my part, I deny your God, your authority, your sovereignty, your judicial State, and all your representative mystifications." [Op. Cit., p. 205]


Equally, Proudhon opposed the "top-down" nature of Blanc's ideas. As it was run by the state, the system of workshops would hardly be libertarian as "hierarchy would result from the elective principle . . . as in constitutional politics . . . Who will make the law? The government." Such a regime, Proudhon argued, would be unlikely to function well and the net result would be "all reforms ending, now in hierarchical corporation, now in State monopoly, or the tyranny of community." [Op. Cit., p. 21 and p. 207] This was because of the perspective of state socialists:

"As you cannot conceive of society without hierarchy, you have made yourselves the apostles of authority; worshippers of power, you think only of strengthening it and muzzling liberty; your favourite maxim is that the welfare of the people must be achieved in spite of the people; instead of proceeding to social reform by the extermination of power and politics, you insist on a reconstruction of power and politics." [Op. Cit., pp. 225-6]


Instead of reform from above, Proudhon stressed the need for working class people to organise themselves for their own liberation. As he put it, the "problem before the labouring classes . . . [is] not in capturing, but in subduing both power and monopoly, - that is, in generating from the bowels of the people, from the depths of labour, a greater authority, a more potent fact, which shall envelop capital and the state and subjugate them." For, "to combat and reduce power, to put it in its proper place in society, it is of no use to change the holders of power or introduce some variation into its workings: an agricultural and industrial combination must be found by means of which power, today the ruler of society, shall become its slave." This was because the state "finds itself inevitably enchained to capital and directed against the proletariat." Unsurprisingly, Proudhon stressed in 1848 that "the proletariat must emancipate itself without the help of the government." [Op. Cit., pp. 225-6 and p. 306] In addition, by guaranteeing interest payments, Blanc's scheme insured the continued exploitation of labour by capital and, of course, while opposing capitalist competition, Proudhon did not consider it wise to abolish all forms of the market.

Proudhon argued for a two-way approach to undermining capitalism from below: the creation of workers associations and the organisation of credit. By creating mutual banks, which provided credit at cost, workers could create associations to compete with capitalist firms, drive them out of business and so eliminate exploitation once and for all by workers' self-management. In this way, the working class would emancipate itself from capitalism and build a socialist society from below upwards by their own efforts and activities. Proudhon, as Marxist Paul Thomas notes, "believed fervently . . . in the salvation of working men, by their own efforts, through economic and social action alone . . . Proudhon advocated, and to a considerable extent inspired, the undercutting of this terrain [of the state] from without by means of autonomous working-class associations." [Karl Marx and the Anarchists, pp. 177-8] Rejecting violent revolution (as well as strikes as counter-productive), Proudhon argued for economic means to end economic exploitation and, as such, he saw anarchism as coming about by reform (unlike later social anarchists, who were generally revolutionaries and argued that capitalism cannot be reformed away and so supported strikes and other forms of collective working class direct action, struggle and combative organisation).

Unsurprisingly, Proudhon's ideas were shaped by the society he lived and agitated in. In the mid-nineteenth century, the bulk of the French working class were artisans and peasants and so such an approach reflected the social context in which it was proposed. With a predominance of small-scale industry, the notion of free credit provided by mutual banks as the means of securing working class people access to the means of production is theoretically feasible. It was this social context which informed Proudhon's ideas (see section H.2.3). He never failed to stress that association would be tyranny if imposed upon peasants and artisans (rather, he thought that associations would be freely embraced by these workers if they thought it was in their interests to do so). However, he did not ignore the rise of large-scale industry and explicitly proposed workers' associations (i.e., co-operatives) for those industries which objectively needed it (i.e. capitalist industry) and for those other toilers who desired it. The net effect was the same, though, namely to abolish wage labour.

It was this opposition to wage labour which drove Proudhon's critique of state socialism. He continually stressed that state ownership of the means of production was a danger to the liberty of the worker and simply the continuation of capitalism with the state as the new boss. As he put it in 1848, he "did not want to see the State confiscate the mines, canals and railways; that would add to monarchy, and more wage slavery. We want the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organised workers' associations . . . these associations [will] be models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the democratic social Republic." He contrasted workers' associations run by and for their members to those "subsidised, commanded and directed by the State," which would crush "all liberty and all wealth, precisely as the great limited companies are doing." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 62 and p. 105]

Marx, of course, had replied to Proudhon's work System of Economic Contradictions with his Poverty of Philosophy. However, Marx's work aroused little interest when published although Proudhon did carefully read and annotate his copy of it, claiming it to be "a libel" and a "tissue of abuse, calumny, falsification and plagiarism" (he even called Marx "the tapeworm of Socialism.") [quoted by Woodcock, Op. Cit., p. 102] Sadly, Proudhon did not reply publicly to Marx's work due to an acute family crisis and then the start of the 1848 revolution in France. However, given his views of Louis Blanc and other socialists who saw socialism being introduced after the seizing of state power, he would hardly have been supportive of Marx's ideas.

So while none of Proudhon's and Stirner's arguments were directly aimed at Marxism, their critiques are applicable to much of mainstream Marxism as this inherited many of the ideas of the state socialism they attacked. Much of their analysis was incorporated in the collectivist and communist ideas of the anarchists that followed them (some directly, as from Proudhon, some by co-incidence as Stirner's work was quickly forgotten and only had an impact on the anarchist movement when he was rediscovered in the 1890s). This can be seen from the fact that Proudhon's ideas on the management of production by workers' associations, opposition to nationalisation as state-capitalism and the need for action from below by working people themselves, all found their place in communist-anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism and in their critique of mainstream Marxism (such as social democracy) and Leninism. Echoes of these critiques can be found Bakunin's comments of 1868:

"I hate Communism because it is the negation of liberty and because for me humanity is unthinkable without liberty. I am not a Communist, because Communism concentrates and swallows up in itself for the benefit of the State all the forces of society, because it inevitably leads to the concentration of property in the hands of the State . . . I want to see society and collective or social property organised from below upwards, by way of free associations, not from above downwards, by means of any kind of authority whatsoever . . . That is the sense in which I am a Collectivist and not a Communist." [quoted by K.J. Kenafick, Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx, pp. 67-8]


It is with Bakunin that Marxism and Anarchism came into direct conflict as it was Bakunin who lead the struggle against Marx in the International Workingmen's Association between 1868 and 1872. It was in these exchanges that the two schools of socialism (the libertarian and the authoritarian) clarified themselves. With Bakunin, the anarchist critique of Marxism (and state socialism in general) starts to reach its mature form. We discuss Bakunin's critique in the next section.
H.1.1 What was Bakunin's critique of Marxism?

Bakunin and Marx famously clashed in the first International Working Men's Association between 1868 and 1872. This conflict helped clarify the anarchist opposition to the ideas of Marxism and can be considered as the first major theoretical analysis and critique of Marxism by anarchists. Later critiques followed, of course, particularly after the degeneration of Social Democracy into reformism and the failure of the Russian Revolution (both of which allowed the theoretical critiques to be enriched by empirical evidence) but the Bakunin/Marx conflict laid the ground for what came after. As such, an overview of Bakunin's critique is essential as anarchists continued to develop and expand upon it (particularly after the experiences of actual Marxist movements and revolutions confirmed it).

First, however, we must stress that Marx and Bakunin had many similar ideas. They both stressed the need for working people to organise themselves to overthrow capitalism by a social revolution. They argued for collective ownership of the means of production. They both constantly stressed that the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves. They differed, of course, in exactly how these common points should be implemented in practice. Both, moreover, had a tendency to misrepresent the opinions of the other on certain issues (particularly as their struggle reached its climax). Anarchists, unsurprisingly, argue Bakunin has been proved right by history, so confirming the key aspects of his critique of Marx.

So what was Bakunin's critique of Marxism? There are six main areas. Firstly, there is the question of current activity (i.e. whether the workers' movement should participate in "politics" and the nature of revolutionary working class organisation). Secondly, there is the issue of the form of the revolution (i.e. whether it should be a political then an economic one, or whether it should be both at the same time). Thirdly, there is the prediction that state socialism will be exploitative, replacing the capitalist class with the state bureaucracy. Fourthly, there is the issue of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Fifthly, there is the question of whether political power can be seized by the working class as a whole or whether it can only be exercised by a small minority. Sixthly, there was the issue of whether the revolution be centralised or decentralised in nature. We shall discuss each in turn.

On the issue of current struggle, the differences between Marx and Bakunin are clear. For Marx, the proletariat had to take part in bourgeois elections as an organised political party. As the resolution of the (gerrymandered) Hague Congress of First International put it: "In its struggle against the collective power of the propertied classes the proletariat cannot act as a class except by constituting itself a political party, distinct from and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes . . . The conquest of political power has therefore become the great duty of the working class." [Collected Works, vol. 23, p. 243]

This political party must stand for elections and win votes. As Marx argued in the preamble of the French Workers' Party, the workers must turn the franchise "from a means of deception . . . into an instrument of emancipation." This can be considered as part of the process outlined in the Communist Manifesto, where it was argued that the "immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties," namely the "conquest of political power by the proletariat," the "first step in the revolution by the working class" being "to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy." Engels later stressed (in 1895) that the "Communist Manifesto had already proclaimed the winning of universal suffrage, of democracy, as one of the first and most important tasks of the militant proletariat" and that German Social Democracy had showed workers of all countries "how to make use of universal suffrage." [Marx and Engels Reader, p. 566, p. 484, p. 490 and p. 565]

With this analysis in mind, Marxist influenced political parties have consistently argued for and taken part in election campaigns, seeking office as a means of spreading socialist ideas and as a means of pursuing the socialist revolution. The Social Democratic parties which were the first Marxist parties (and which developed under the watchful eyes of Marx and Engels) saw revolution in terms of winning a majority within Parliamentary elections and using this political power to abolish capitalism (once this was done, the state would "wither away" as classes would no longer exist). In effect, as we discuss in section H.3.10, these parties aimed to reproduce Marx's account of the forming of the Paris Commune on the level of the national Parliament.

Bakunin, in contrast, argued that while the communists "imagine they can attain their goal by the development and organisation of the political power of the working classes . . . aided by bourgeois radicalism" anarchists "believe they can succeed only through the development and organisation of the non-political or anti-political power of the working classes." The Communists "believe it necessary to organise the workers' forces in order to seize the political power of the State," while anarchists "organise for the purpose of destroying it." Bakunin saw this in terms of creating new organs of working class power in opposition to the state, organised "from the bottom up, by the free association or federation of workers, starting with the associations, then going on to the communes, the region, the nations, and, finally, culminating in a great international and universal federation." In other words, a system of workers' councils. As such, he constantly argued for workers, peasants and artisans to organise into unions and join the International Workingmen's Association, so becoming "a real force . . . which knows what to do and is therefore capable of guiding the revolution in the direction marked out by the aspirations of the people: a serious international organisation of workers' associations of all lands capable of replacing this departing world of states." [Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 262-3, p. 270 and p. 174] To Marx's argument that workers should organise politically (i.e., send their representations to Parliament) Bakunin realised that when "common workers" are sent "to Legislative Assemblies" the result is that the "worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into an atmosphere of purely bourgeois ideas, will in fact cease to be workers and, becoming Statesmen, they will become bourgeois . . . For men do not make their situations; on the contrary, men are made by them." [The Basic Bakunin, p. 108]

As far as history goes, the experience of Social Democracy confirmed Bakunin's analysis. A few years after Engels death in 1895, German Social Democracy was racked by the "revisionism" debate. This debate did not spring from the minds of a few leaders, isolated from the movement, but rather expressed developments within the movement itself. In effect, the revisionists wanted to adjust the party rhetoric to what the party was actually doing and so the battle against the revisionists basically represented a battle between what the party said it was doing and its actual practice. As one of the most distinguished historians of this period put it, the "distinction between the contenders remained largely a subjective one, a difference of ideas in the evaluation of reality rather than a difference in the realm of action." [C. Schorske, German Social Democracy, p. 38] By the start of the First World War, the Social Democrats had become so corrupted by their activities in bourgeois institutions they supported its state (and ruling class) and voted for war credits rather than denounce the war as Imperialist slaughter for profits. Clearly, Bakunin was proved right. (see also section J.2.6 for more discussion on the effect of electioneering on radical parties).

However, we must stress that because Bakunin rejected participating in bourgeois politics, it did not mean that he rejected "politics" or "political struggle" in general (see section J.2.10). Bakunin clearly advocated what would later be termed a syndicalist strategy (see section H.2.8). This union movement would be complemented by a specific anarchist organisation which would work within it to influence it towards anarchist aims by the "natural influence" of its members (see section J.3.7).

Comparing Bakunin and Marx, it is clear whom history has validated. Even that anti-anarchist Stalinist hack Eric Hobsbawn could not avoid admitting "the remarkable achievement of Spanish anarchism which was to create a working-class movement that remained genuinely revolutionary. Social democratic and . . . even communist trade unions have rarely been able to escape either schizophrenia [i.e., revolutionary rhetoric hiding reformist practice] or betrayal of their socialist convictions." [Revolutionaries, p. 104] This is probably the only accurate comment made in his various diatribes on anarchism but, of course, he did not allow the implications of his statement to bother his faith in Leninist ideology. So given the long history of reformism and betrayal of socialist principles by radicals utilising elections and political parties, it comes as no surprise that anarchists consider both Bakunin's critique and alternative to be confirmed by experience (section J.2 discusses direct action and electioneering).

Which brings us to the second issue, namely the nature of the revolution itself. For Bakunin, a revolution meant a social revolution from below. This involved both the abolition of the state and the expropriation of capital. In his words, "the revolution must set out from the first radically and totally to destroy the State." The "natural and necessary consequences" of which will be the "confiscation of all productive capital and means of production on behalf of workers' associations, who are to put them to collective use . . . the federative Alliance of all working men's associations . . . will constitute the Commune." There "can no longer be any successful political . . . revolution unless the political revolution is transformed into social revolution." [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 170 and p. 171]

Which, incidentally, disproves Engels' claims that Bakunin "does not regard capital . . . but the state as the main evil to be abolished" after which "capitalism will go to blazes of itself." [The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 728] This misrepresents Bakunin's position, as he always stressed that economic and political transformation "must be accomplished together and simultaneously." [The Basic Bakunin, p. 106] Given that Bakunin thought the state was the protector of capitalism, no economic change could be achieved until such time as it was abolished. This also meant that Bakunin considered a political revolution before an economic one to mean the continued slavery of the workers. As he argued, "[t]o win political freedom first can signify no other thing but to win this freedom only, leaving for the first days at least economic and social relations in the same old state, - that is, leaving the proprietors and capitalists with their insolent wealth, and the workers with their poverty." With capitalists' economic power intact, could the workers' political power remain strong? As such, "every political revolution taking place prior to and consequently without a social revolution must necessarily be a bourgeois revolution, and a bourgeois revolution can only be instrumental in bringing about bourgeois Socialism - that is, it is bound to end in a new, more hypocritical and more skilful, but no less oppressive, exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeois." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 294 and p. 289]

Did Marx and Engels hold this position? Apparently so. Discussing the Paris Commune, Marx noted that it was "the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour," and as the "political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery" the Commune was to "serve as a lever for uprooting the economic foundations upon which rests the existence of classes." Engels argued that the "proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the . . . means of production . . . into public property." In the Communist Manifesto they argued that "the first step in the revolution by the working class" is "rais[ing] the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy." The proletariat "will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class." [Op. Cit., p. 635, p. 717 and p. 490]

This is made even clearer in Engels' "Principles of Communism" (often considered as a draft of the Manifesto). That document stressed that it was not possible for "private property to be abolished at one stroke", arguing that "the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually." The revolution "will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. Direct in England, where the proletarians are already a majority of the people." "Democracy", Engels went on, "would be quite useless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means of carrying through further measures directly attacking private ownership." [Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 350] Decades later, when Marx discussed what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant, he argued (in reply to Bakunin's question of "over whom will the proletariat rule?") that it simply meant "that so long as other classes continue to exist, the capitalist class in particular, the proletariat fights it (for with the coming of the proletariat to power, its enemies will not yet have disappeared), it must use measures of force, hence governmental measures; if it itself still remains a class and the economic conditions on which the class struggle and the existence of classes have not yet disappeared, they must be forcibly removed or transformed, and the process of their transformation must be forcibly accelerated." [The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 542-3] Note, "capitalists," not "former capitalists," so implying that the members of the proletariat are, in fact, still proletarians after the "socialist" revolution and so still subject to wage slavery under economic masters. Which makes perfect sense, as otherwise the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" would be meaningless.

Then there is the issue of when the working class could seize political power. As Engels put it, the conflict "between bourgeoisie and proletariat can only be fought out in a republic" as this is "the form in which the struggle must be fought out." Workers would have to create a republic in countries without one (such as Germany at the time). [Marx and Engels, The Socialist Revolution, p. 264] Decades previously, Engels had argued that the "first, fundamental condition for the introduction of community of property is the political liberation of the proletariat through a democratic constitution." [Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 102] Thus the bourgeois revolution would come first, then the proletarian one. The Communist Manifesto had raised the possibility of a bourgeois revolution in Germany being "but a prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution." [Selected Writings, p. 63] Within two years, Marx and Engels argued that this was wrong, that a socialist revolution was not possible in Continental Europe for some time. Even in the 1880s, Engels was still arguing that a proletarian revolution was not immediately possible in Germany and the first results of any revolution would be a bourgeois republic within which the task of social democracy was to build its forces and influence.

Clearly, then, Marx and Engels considered the creation of a republic in a well developed capitalist economy as the basis for seizing of state power as the key event and, later, the expropriation of the expropriators would occur. Thus the economic power of the capitalists would remain, with the proletariat utilising political power to combat and reduce it. Anarchists argue that if the proletariat does not hold economic power, its political power would at best be insecure and would in fact degenerate. Would the capitalists just sit and wait while their economic power was gradually eliminated by political action? And what of the proletariat during this period? Will they patiently obey their bosses, continue to be oppressed and exploited by them until such time as the end of their "social slavery" has been worked out (and by whom)? Would they be happy to fight for a bourgeois republic first, then wait for an unspecified period of time before the party leadership proclaimed that the time was ripe to introduce socialism?

As the experience of the Russian Revolution showed, the position of Marx and Engels proved to be untenable. Bakunin's perspective was repeated by a Russian worker in 1906 when he expressed his impatience with Menshevik strategy:

"Here [the Mensheviks] . . . tells us that the workers' congress is the best means of assuring the independence of the proletariat in the bourgeois revolution; otherwise, we workers will play the role of cannon fodder in it. So I ask: what is the insurance for? Will we really make the bourgeois revolution? Is it possible that we will spill blood twice - once for the victory of the bourgeois revolution, and the time for the victory of our proletarian revolution? No, comrades, it is not to be found in the party programme [that this must be so]; but if we workers are to spill blood, then only once, for freedom and socialism." [quoted by Abraham Ascher, The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, p. 43]


In 1917, this lesson was well learned and the Russian workers initially followed Bakunin's path (mostly spontaneously and without significant influence by anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists). The Mensheviks repeated their mistakes of 1905 as they "proved unable to harness this revolutionary potential to any practical purpose. They were blinded by their rigid marxist formula of 'bourgeois revolution first, socialist revolution later' and tried to restrain the masses. They preached self-abnegation to them, told them to stand aside until such times as the bourgeoisie had built a solid capitalist system. This made no sense to workers and peasants - why should they renounce the power that was in their hands already?" Leading Menshevik Fedor Dan "admitted in 1946 that the Menshevik concept of the bourgeois revolution rested on 'illusions'" [Vera Broido, Lenin and the Mensheviks, p 14 and p. 15] Once Lenin returned to Russia, the Bolsheviks broke with this previously shared perspective and started to support and encourage the radicalisation of the workers and so managed to gain popular support. However, they did so partially and incompletely and, as a consequence, finally held back and so fatally undermined the revolution.

After the February revolution paralysed the state, the workers organised factory committees and raised the idea and practice of workers self-management of production. The Russian anarchists supported this movement whole-heartedly, arguing that it should be pushed as far as it would go. In contrast, Lenin argued for "workers' control over the capitalists." [The Lenin Anthology, p. 402] This was, unsurprisingly, the policy applied immediately after the Bolshevik seizure of power. However, as one Leninist writer admits, "[t]wo overwhelmingly powerful forces obliged the Bolsheviks to abandon this 'reformist' course." One was the start of the civil war, the other "was the fact that the capitalists used their remaining power to make the system unworkable. At the end of 1917 the All Russian Congress of employers declared that those 'factories in which the control is exercised by means of active interference in the administration will be closed.' The workers' natural response to the wave of lockouts which followed was to demand that their [sic!] state nationalise the factories." [John Rees, "In Defence of October", pp. 3-82, International Socialism, no. 52, p. 42] By July 1918, only one-fifth of nationalised firms had been done so by the state, the rest by local committees from below (which, incidentally, shows the unresponsiveness of centralised power). Clearly, the idea that a social revolution can come after a political was shown to be a failure - the capitalist class used its powers to disrupt the economic life of Russia.

Faced with the predictable opposition by capitalists to their system of "control" the Bolsheviks nationalised the means of production. Sadly, within the nationalised workplace the situation of the worker remained essentially unchanged. Lenin had been arguing for one-man management (appointed from above and armed with "dictatorial" powers) since late April 1918 (see section H.3.14). This aimed at replacing the capitalists with state appointed managers, not workers self-management. In fact, as we discuss in section H.6.2 the party leaders repeatedly overruled the factory committees' suggestions to build socialism based on their management of the economy in favour of centralised state control. Bakunin's fear of what would happen if a political revolution preceded a social one came true. The working class continued to be exploited and oppressed as before, first by the bourgeoisie and then by the new bourgeoisie of state appointed managers armed with all the powers of the old ones (plus a few more). Russia confirmed Bakunin's analysis that a revolution must immediately combine political and economic goals in order for it to be successful.

The experience of Bolshevik Russia also confirms Bakunin's prediction that state socialism would simply be state capitalism. As Bakunin stressed, the state "is the government from above downwards of an immense number of men [and women], very different from the point of view of the degree of their culture, the nature of the countries or localities that they inhabit, the occupations they follow, the interests and aspirations directing them - the State is the government of all these by one or another minority." The state "has always been the patrimony of some privileged class" and "when all other classes have exhausted themselves" it "becomes the patrimony of the bureaucratic class." The Marxist state "will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically" it will "also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and distribution of wealth." This will result in "a new class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!" Thus exploitation by a new bureaucratic class would be the only result when the state becomes "the sole proprietor" and "the only banker, capitalist, organiser, and director of all national labour, and the distributor of all its products." [Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 317-8, p. 318 and p. 217] Subsequent anarchists have tended to call such a regime state capitalism (see section H.3.13).

The Bolshevik leadership's rejection of the factory committees and their vision of socialism also confirmed Bakunin's fear that Marxism urges the people "not only not abolish the State, but, on the contrary, they must strengthen it and enlarge it, and turn it over to . . . the leaders of the Communist party . . . who will then liberate them in their own way." The economic regime imposed by the Bolsheviks, likewise, confirmed Bakunin critique as the state "control[led] all the commerce, industry, agriculture, and even science. The mass of the people will be divided into two armies, the agricultural and the industrial under the direct command of the state engineers, who will constitute the new privileged political-scientific class." Unsurprisingly, this new state-run economy was a disaster which, again, confirmed his warning that unless this minority "were endowed with omniscience, omnipresence, and the omnipotence which the theologians attribute to God, [it] could not possibly know and foresee the needs of its people, or satisfy with an even justice those needs which are most legitimate and pressing." [Op. Cit., p. 332, pp. 332-3 and p. 318]

Which brings us to the "dictatorship of the proletariat." While many Marxists basically use this term to describe the defence of the revolution and so argue that anarchists do not see the need for that, this is incorrect. Anarchists from Bakunin onwards have argued that a revolution would have to defend itself from counter revolution and yet we reject the concept totally (see section H.2.1 for a refutation of claims that anarchists think a revolution does not need defending). To understand why Bakunin rejected the concept, we must provide some historical context.

Anarchists in the nineteenth century rejected the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in part because the proletariat was a minority of working class people at the time. To argue for a dictatorship of the proletariat meant to argue for the dictatorship of a minority class, a class which excluded the majority of toiling people. When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, for example, over 80% of the population of France and Germany were peasants or artisans - what they termed the "petit-bourgeois". This meant that their claim that the "proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority" was simply not true. Rather, for Marx's life-time (and for many decades afterwards) the proletarian movement was like "[a]ll previous movements," namely "movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities." Not that Marx and Engels were unaware of this for they also noted that "[i]n countries like France" the peasants "constitute far more than half of the population." In 1875 Marx commented that "the majority of the 'toiling people' in Germany consists of peasants, and not of proletarians." He stressed elsewhere around the same time that "the peasant . . . forms a more of less considerable majority . . . in the countries of the West European continent." [The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 482, p. 493, p. 536 and p. 543]

Clearly, then, Marx and Engels vision of proletarian revolution was one which involved a minority dictating to the majority and so Bakunin rejected it. His opposition rested on the fact that a "dictatorship of the proletariat," at the time, actually meant a dictatorship by a minority of working people and so a "revolution" which excluded the majority of working people (i.e. artisans and peasants). As he argued in 1873:

"If the proletariat is to be the ruling class . . . then whom will it rule? There must be yet another proletariat which will be subject to this new rule, this new state. It may be the peasant rabble . . . which, finding itself on a lower cultural level, will probably be governed by the urban and factory proletariat." [Statism and Anarchy, pp. 177-8]


For Bakunin, to advocate the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in an environment where the vast majority of working people were peasants would be a disaster. It is only when we understand this social context that we can understand Bakunin's opposition to Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" - it would be a dictatorship of a minority class over the rest of the working population (he took it as a truism that the capitalist and landlord classes should be expropriated and stopped from destroying the revolution!). Bakunin continually stressed the need for a movement and revolution of all working class people (see section H.2.7) and that the peasants "will join cause with the city workers as soon as they become convinced that the latter do not pretend to impose their will or some political or social order invented by the cities for the greater happiness of the villages; they will join cause as soon as they are assured that the industrial workers will not take their lands away." For an "uprising by the proletariat alone would not be enough; with that we would have only a political revolution which would necessarily produce a natural and legitimate reaction on the part of the peasants, and that reaction, or merely the indifference of the peasants, would strangle the revolution of the cities." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 401 and p. 378]

This explains why the anarchists at the St. Imier Congress argued that "every political state can be nothing but organised domination for the benefit of one class, to the detriment of the masses, and that should the proletariat itself seize power, it would in turn become a new dominating and exploiting class." As the proletariat was a minority class at the time, their concerns can be understood. For anarchists then and now, a social revolution has to be truly popular and involve the majority of the population in order to succeed. Unsurprisingly, the congress stressed the role of the proletariat in the struggle for socialism, arguing that "the proletariat of all lands . . . must create the solidarity of revolutionary action . . . independently of and in opposition to all forms of bourgeois politics." Moreover, the aim of the workers' movement was "free organisations and federations . . . created by the spontaneous action of the proletariat itself, [that is, by] the trade bodies and the autonomous communes." [quoted in Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 438, p. 439 and p. 438]

Hence Bakunin's comment that "the designation of the proletariat, the world of the workers, as class rather than as mass" was "deeply antipathetic to us revolutionary anarchists who unconditionally advocate full popular emancipation." To do so, he argued, meant "[n]othing more or less than a new aristocracy, that of the urban and industrial workers, to the exclusion of the millions who make up the rural proletariat and who . . . will in effect become subjects of this great so-called popular State." [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pp. 253-4]

Again, the experiences of the Russian Revolution confirm Bakunin's worries. The Bolsheviks implemented the dictatorship of the city over the countryside, with disastrous results (see section H.6.2 for more details).

One last point on this subject. While anarchists reject the "dictatorship of the proletariat" we clearly do not reject the key role the proletariat must play in any social revolution (see section H.2.2 on why the Marxist assertion anarchists reject class struggle is false). We only reject the idea that the proletariat must dictate over other working people like peasants and artisans. We do not reject the need for working class people to defend a revolution, nor the need for them to expropriate the capitalist class nor for them to manage their own activities and so society.

Then there is the issue of whether, even if the proletariat does seize political power, whether the whole class can actually exercise it. Bakunin raised the obvious questions:

"For, even from the standpoint of that urban proletariat who are supposed to reap the sole reward of the seizure of political power, surely it is obvious that this power will never be anything but a sham? It is bound to be impossible for a few thousand, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands of men to wield that power effectively. It will have to be exercised by proxy, which means entrusting it to a group of men elected to represent and govern them, which in turn will unfailingly return them to all the deceit and subservience of representative or bourgeois rule. After a brief flash of liberty or orgiastic revolution, the citizens of the new State will wake up slaves, puppets and victims of a new group of ambitious men." [Op. Cit., pp. 254-5]


He repeated this argument: "What does it mean, 'the proletariat raised to a governing class?' Will the entire proletariat head the government? The Germans number about 40 million. Will all 40 millions be members of the government? The entire nation will rule, but no one will be ruled. Then there will be no government, no state; but if there is a state, there will also be those who are ruled, there will be slaves." Bakunin argued that Marxism resolves this dilemma "in a simple fashion. By popular government they mean government of the people by a small number of representatives elected by the people. So-called popular representatives and rulers of the state elected by the entire nation on the basis of universal suffrage - the last word of the Marxists, as well as the democratic school - is a lie behind which the despotism of a ruling minority is concealed, a lie all the more dangerous in that it represents itself as the expression of a sham popular will." [Statism and Anarchy, p. 178]

So where does Marx stand on this question. Clearly, the self-proclaimed followers of Marx support the idea of "socialist" governments (indeed, many, including Lenin and Trotsky, went so far as to argue that party dictatorship was essential for the success of a revolution - see next section). Marx, however, is less clear. He argued, in reply to Bakunin's question if all Germans would be members of the government, that "[c]ertainly, because the thing starts with the self-government of the township." However, he also commented that "[c]an it really be that in a trade union, for example, the entire union forms its executive committee," suggesting that there will be a division of labour between those who govern and those who obey in the Marxist system of socialism. [The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 545 and p. 544] Elsewhere he talks about "a socialist government" coming "to the helm in a country". [Collected Works, vol. 46, p. 66] As we discuss in section H.3.10, both Marx and Engels saw universal suffrage in a republic as expressing the political power of the working class.

So Bakunin's critique holds, as Marx clearly saw the "dictatorship of the proletariat" involving a socialist government having power. For Bakunin, like all anarchists, if a political party is the government, then clearly its leaders are in power, not the mass of working people they claim to represent. Anarchists have, from the beginning, argued that Marx made a grave mistake confusing working class power with the state. This is because the state is the means by which the management of people's affairs is taken from them and placed into the hands of a few. It signifies delegated power. As such, the so-called "workers' state" or "dictatorship of the proletariat" is a contradiction in terms. Instead of signifying the power of the working class to manage society it, in fact, signifies the opposite, namely the handing over of that power to a few party leaders at the top of a centralised structure. This is because "all State rule, all governments being by their very nature placed outside the people, must necessarily seek to subject it to customs and purposes entirely foreign to it. We therefore declare ourselves to be foes . . . of all State organisations as such, and believe that the people can be happy and free, when, organised from below upwards by means of its own autonomous and completely free associations, without the supervision of any guardians, it will create its own life." [Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 63] Hence Bakunin's constant arguments for a decentralised, federal system of workers councils organised from the bottom-up. Again, the transformation of the Bolshevik government into a dictatorship over the proletariat during the early stages of the Russian Revolution supports Bakunin's critique of Marxism.

Related to this issue is Bakunin's argument that Marxism created a privileged position for socialist intellectuals in both the current social movement and in the social revolution. This was because Marx stressed that his theory was a "scientific socialism" and, Bakunin argued, that implied "because thought, theory and science, at least in our times, are in the possession of very few, these few ought to be the leaders of social life" and they, not the masses, should organise the revolution "by the dictatorial powers of this learned minority, which presumes to express the will of the people." This would be "nothing but a despotic control of the populace by a new and not at all numerous aristocracy of real and pseudoscientists" and so there would "be a new [ruling] class, a new hierarchy of real and counterfeit scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!" Thus "every state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, through a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves." The Russian anarchist predicted that "the organisation and the rule of the new society by socialist savants" would be "the worse of all despotic governments!" [Bakunin on Anarchism, pp. 328-9, p. 331, p. 319, p. 338 and p. 295] History proved Bakunin right, with the Bolshevik regime being precisely that. As we discuss in section H.5, Lenin's vanguardism did produce such a result, with the argument that the party leadership knew the objective needs of working class people better than they themselves did being used to justify party dictatorship and the strict centralisation of social life in the hands of its leadership.

Which brings us to the last issue, namely whether the revolution will be decentralised or centralised. For Marx, the issue is somewhat confused by his support for the Paris Commune and its federalist programme (written, we must note, by a follower of Proudhon). However, in 1850, Marx stood for extreme centralisation of power, arguing that the workers "must not only strive for a single and indivisible German republic, but also within this republic for the most determined centralisation of power in the hands of the state authority." He argued that in a nation like Germany "where there are so many relics of the Middle Ages to be abolished" it "must under no circumstances be permitted that every village, every town and every province should put a new obstacle in the path of revolutionary activity, which can proceed with full force from the centre." He stressed that "[a]s in France in 1793 so today in Germany it is the task of the really revolutionary party to carry through the strictest centralisation." [The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 509-10] Lenin followed this aspect of Marx's ideas, arguing that "Marx was a centralist" and applying this perspective both in the party and once in power [The Essential Works of Lenin, p. 310]

Obviously, this issue dove-tails into the question of whether the whole class exercises power under the "dictatorship of the proletariat." In a centralised system, obviously, power has to be exercised by a few (as Marx's argument in 1850 showed). Centralism, by its very nature excludes the possibility of extensive participation in the decision making process. Moreover, the decisions reached by such a body could not reflect the real needs of society. In the words of Bakunin:

"What man, what group of individuals, no matter how great their genius, would dare to think themselves able to embrace and understand the plethora of interests, attitudes and activities so various in every country, every province, locality and profession." [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 240]


He stressed that "the revolution should be and should everywhere remain independent of the central point, which must be its expression and product - not its source, guide and cause . . . the awakening of all local passions and the awakening of spontaneous life at all points, must be well developed in order for the revolution to remain alive, real and powerful." Anarchists reject centralisation because it destroys the mass participation a revolution requires in order to succeed. Therefore we do "not accept, even in the process of revolutionary transition, either constituent assemblies, provisional governments or so-called revolutionary dictatorships; because we are convinced that revolution is only sincere, honest and real in the hands of the masses, and that when it is concentrated in those of a few ruling individuals it inevitably and immediately becomes reaction." Rather, the revolution "everywhere must be created by the people, and supreme control must always belong to the people organised into a free federation of agricultural and industrial associations . . . organised from the bottom upwards by means of revolutionary delegation." [Op. Cit., pp. 179-80, p. 237 and p. 172]

This, we must stress, does not imply isolation. Bakunin always emphasised the importance of federal organisation to co-ordinate struggle and defence of the revolution. As he put it, all revolutionary communes would need to federate in order "to organise the necessary common services and arrangements for production and exchange, to establish the charter of equality, the basis of all liberty - a charter utterly negative in character, defining what has to be abolished for ever rather than the positive forms of local life which can be created only by the living practice of each locality - and to organise common defence against the enemies of the Revolution." [Op. Cit., p. 179]

Ironically, it is a note by Engels to the 1885 edition of Marx's 1850 article which shows the fallacy of the standard Marxist position on centralisation and the validity of Bakunin's position. As Engels put it, "this passage is based on a misunderstanding" and it was now "a well known fact that throughout the whole [Great French] revolution . . . the whole administration of the departments, arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by the respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted with complete freedom within general state laws [and] that precisely this provincial and local self-government . . . became the most powerful lever of the revolution." [The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 510f] Marx's original comments imply the imposition of freedom by the centre on a population not desiring it (and how could the centre be representative of the majority in such a case?). Moreover, how could a revolution be truly social if it was not occurring in the grassroots across a country? Unsurprisingly, local autonomy has played a key role in every real revolution.

As such, Bakunin has been proved right. Centralism has always killed a revolution and, as he always argued, real socialism can only be worked from below, by the people of every village, town, and city. The problems facing the world or a revolution cannot be solved by a few people at the top issuing decrees. They can only be solved by the active participation of the mass of working class people, the kind of participation centralism and government by their nature exclude.

Given Marx's support for the federal ideas of the Paris Commune, it can be argued that Marxism is not committed to a policy of strict centralisation (although Lenin, of course, argued that Marx was a firm supporter of centralisation). What is true is, to quote Daniel Guérin, that Marx's comments on the Commune differ "noticeably from Marx's writings of before and after 1871" while Bakunin's were "in fact quite consistent with the lines he adopted in his earlier writings." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 167] Indeed, as Bakunin himself noted, while the Marxists "saw all their ideas upset by the uprising" of the Commune, they "found themselves compelled to take their hats off to it. They went even further, and proclaimed that its programme and purpose were their own, in face of the simplest logic and their own true sentiments." This modification of ideas by Marx in the light of the Commune was not limited just to federalism, he also praised its system of mandating recallable delegates. This was a position which Bakunin had been arguing for a number of years previously but which Marx had never advocated. In 1868, for example, Bakunin was talking about a "Revolutionary Communal Council" composed of "delegates . . . vested with plenary but accountable and removable mandates." [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 261 and pp. 170-1] As such, the Paris Commune was a striking confirmation of Bakunin's ideas on many levels, not Marx's (who adjusted his ideas to bring them in line with Bakunin's!).

Since Bakunin, anarchists have deepened this critique of Marxism and, with the experience of both Social-Democracy and Bolshevism, argue that he predicted key failures in Marx's ideas. Given that his followers, particularly Lenin and Trotsky, have emphasised (although, in many ways, changed them) the centralisation and "socialist government" aspects of Marx's thoughts, anarchists argue that Bakunin's critique is as relevant as ever. Real socialism can only come from below.

For more on Bakunin's critique of Marxism, Mark Leier's excellent biography of the Russian Anarchist (Bakunin: The Creative Passion) is worth consulting, as is Brian Morris's Bakunin: The Philosophy of Freedom. John Clark has two useful essays on this subject in his The Anarchist Moment while Richard B. Saltman's The Social and Political Thought of Michael Bakunin contains an excellent chapter on Bakunin and Marx. A good academic account can be found in Alvin W. Gouldner's "Marx's Last Battle: Bakunin and the First International" (Theory and Society, Vol. 11, No. 6) which is a revised and shortened version of a chapter of his Against Fragmentation: the Origins of Marxism and the Sociology of Intellectuals. Obviously, though, Bakunin's original writings should be the first starting point.
H.1.2 What are the key differences between Anarchists and Marxists?

There are, of course, important similarities between anarchism and Marxism. Both are socialist, oppose capitalism and the current state, support and encourage working class organisation and action and see class struggle as the means of creating a social revolution which will transform society into a new one. However, the differences between these socialist theories are equally important. In the words of Errico Malatesta:

"The important, fundamental dissension [between anarchists and Marxists] is [that] . . . [Marxist] socialists are authoritarians, anarchists are libertarians.

"Socialists want power . . . and once in power wish to impose their programme on the people. . . Anarchists instead maintain, that government cannot be other than harmful, and by its very nature it defends either an existing privileged class or creates a new one; and instead of inspiring to take the place of the existing government anarchists seek to destroy every organism which empowers some to impose their own ideas and interests on others, for they want to free the way for development towards better forms of human fellowship which will emerge from experience, by everyone being free and, having, of course, the economic means to make freedom possible as well as a reality." [Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, p. 142]


The other differences derive from this fundamental one. So while there are numerous ways in which anarchists and Marxists differ, their root lies in the question of power. Socialists seek power (in the name of the working class and usually hidden under rhetoric arguing that party and class power are the same). Anarchists seek to destroy hierarchical power in all its forms and ensure that everyone is free to manage their own affairs (both individually and collectively). From this comes the differences on the nature of a revolution, the way the working class movement should organise and the tactics it should apply and so on. A short list of these differences would include the question of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", the standing of revolutionaries in elections, centralisation versus federalism, the role and organisation of revolutionaries, whether socialism can only come "from below" or whether it is possible for it come "from below" and "from above" and a host of others (i.e. some of the differences we indicated in the last section during our discussion of Bakunin's critique of Marxism). Indeed, there are so many it is difficult to address them all here. As such, we can only concentrate on a few in this and the following sections.

One of the key issues is on the issue of confusing party power with popular power. The logic of the anarchist case is simple. In any system of hierarchical and centralised power (for example, in a state or governmental structure) then those at the top are in charge (i.e. are in positions of power). It is not "the people," nor "the proletariat," nor "the masses," it is those who make up the government who have and exercise real power. As Malatesta argued, government means "the delegation of power, that is the abdication of initiative and sovereignty of all into the hands of a few" and "if . . . , as do the authoritarians, one means government action when one talks of social action, then this is still the resultant of individual forces, but only of those individuals who form the government." [Anarchy, p. 40 and p. 36] Therefore, anarchists argue, the replacement of party power for working class power is inevitable because of the nature of the state. In the words of Murray Bookchin:

"Anarchist critics of Marx pointed out with considerable effect that any system of representation would become a statist interest in its own right, one that at best would work against the interests of the working classes (including the peasantry), and that at worst would be a dictatorial power as vicious as the worst bourgeois state machines. Indeed, with political power reinforced by economic power in the form of a nationalised economy, a 'workers' republic' might well prove to be a despotism (to use one of Bakunin's more favourite terms) of unparalleled oppression . . .

"Republican institutions, however much they are intended to express the interests of the workers, necessarily place policy-making in the hands of deputies and categorically do not constitute a 'proletariat organised as a ruling class.' If public policy, as distinguished from administrative activities, is not made by the people mobilised into assemblies and confederally co-ordinated by agents on a local, regional, and national basis, then a democracy in the precise sense of the term does not exist. The powers that people enjoy under such circumstances can be usurped without difficulty . . . [I]f the people are to acquire real power over their lives and society, they must establish - and in the past they have, for brief periods of time established - well-ordered institutions in which they themselves directly formulate the policies of their communities and, in the case of their regions, elect confederal functionaries, revocable and strictly controllable, who will execute them. Only in this sense can a class, especially one committed to the abolition of classes, be mobilised as a class to manage society." ["The Communist Manifesto: Insights and Problems", pp. 14-17, Black Flag, no. 226, pp. 16-7]


This is why anarchists stress direct democracy (self-management) in free federations of free associations. It is the only way to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people and is not turned into an alien power above them. Thus Marxist support for statist forms of organisation will inevitably undermine the liberatory nature of the revolution.

Thus the real meaning of a workers state is simply that the party has the real power, not the workers. That is the nature of a state. Marxist rhetoric tends to hide this reality. As an example, we can point to Lenin's comments in October, 1921. In an essay marking the fourth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin stated that the Soviet system "provides the maximum of democracy for the workers and peasants; at the same time, it marks a break with bourgeois democracy and the rise of a new, epoch-making type of democracy, namely, proletarian democracy, or the dictatorship of the proletariat." [Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 55] Yet Lenin's comments came just a few months after factions within the Communist Party had been banned and after the Kronstadt rebellion and a wave of strikes calling for free soviet elections had been repressed. It was written years after Lenin had asserted that "[w]hen we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party . . . we say, 'Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position . . .'" [Op. Cit., vol. 29, p. 535] And, of course, they had not shifted from that position! Clearly, the term "proletarian democracy" had a drastically different meaning to Lenin than to most people!

The identification of party power and working class power reaches its height (or, more correctly, depth) in the works of Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin, for example, argued that "the Communists' correct understanding of his tasks" lies in "correctly gauging the conditions and the moment when the vanguard of the proletariat can successfully assume power, when it will be able - during and after the seizure of power - to win adequate support from sufficiently broad strata of the working class and of the non-proletarian working masses, and when it is able thereafter to maintain, consolidate, and extend its rule by educating, training and attracting ever broader masses of the working people." Note, the vanguard (the party) seizes power, not the masses. Indeed, he stressed that the "mere presentation of the question - 'dictatorship of the party or dictatorship of the class: dictatorship (party) of the leaders or dictatorship (party) of the masses?' - testifies to most incredible and hopelessly muddled thinking" and "[t]o go so far . . . as to contrast, in general, the dictatorship of the masses with a dictatorship of the leaders is ridiculously absurd, and stupid." [The Lenin Anthology, p. 575, p. 567 and p. 568]

Lenin stressed this idea numerous times. For example, he argued that "the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised through an organisation embracing the whole of the class, because in all capitalist countries (and not only over here, in one of the most backward) the proletariat is still so divided, so degraded, and so corrupted in parts . . . that an organisation taking in the whole proletariat cannot directly exercise proletarian dictatorship. It can be exercised only by a vanguard . . . Such is the basic mechanism of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the essentials of transition from capitalism to communism . . . for the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised by a mass proletarian organisation." [Collected Works, vol. 32, p. 21] This position had become Communist orthodoxy both in Russia and internationally since early 1919. The American socialist John Reed, author of Ten Days that Shook the World, was a defender of "the value of centralisation" and "the dictatorship of a revolutionary minority" (noting that "the Communist Party is supreme in Russia"). [Shaking the World, p. 238] Similarly with the likes of Amedeo Bordiga, the first leader of the Communist Party in Italy.

Victor Serge, the ex-anarchist and enthusiastic convert to Bolshevism, argued this mainstream Bolshevik position until the mid-1930s. In 1919, it was a case that "dictatorship" was not some kind of "proletarian" dictatorship by the masses. He, like the leading Bolsheviks, explicitly argued against this. Yes, he wrote, "if we are looking at what should, that is at what ought to, be the case" but this "seems doubtful" in reality. "For it appears that by force of circumstances one group is obliged to impose itself on the others and to go ahead of them, breaking them if necessary, in order then to exercise exclusive dictatorship." The militants "leading the masses . . . cannot rely on the consciousness, the goodwill or the determination of those they have to deal with; for the masses who will follow them or surround them will be warped by the old regime, relatively uncultivated, often unaware, torn by feelings and instincts inherited from the past." So "revolutionaries will have to take on the dictatorship without delay." The experience of Russia "reveals an energetic and innovative minority which is compelled to make up for the deficiencies in the education of the backward masses by the use of compulsion." And so the party "is in a sense the nervous system of the class. Simultaneously the consciousness and the active, physical organisation of the dispersed forces of the proletariat, which are often ignorant of themselves and often remain latent or express themselves contradictorily." And what of the masses? What was their role? Serge was equally blunt. While the party is "supported by the entire working population," strangely enough, "it maintains its unique situation in dictatorial fashion" while the workers are "ehind" the communists, "sympathising instinctively with the party and carrying out the menial tasks required by the revolution." [Revolution in Danger, p. 106, p. 92, p. 115, p. 67, p. 66 and p. 6]

Such are the joys of socialist liberation. The party thinks for the worker while they carry out the "menial tasks" of the revolution. Like doing the work and following the orders - as in any class system.

Trotsky agreed with this lesson and in 1926 opined that the "dictatorship of the party does not contradict the dictatorship of the class either theoretically or practically; but is the expression of it, if the regime of workers' democracy is constantly developed more and more." [The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1926-27), p. 76] The obvious contradictions and absurdities of this assertion are all too plain. Needless to say, when defending the concept of "the dictatorship of the party" he linked it to Lenin (and so to Leninist orthodoxy):

"Of course, the foundation of our regime is the dictatorship of a class. But this in turn assumes . . . it is a class that has come to self-consciousness through its vanguard, which is to say, through the party. Without this, the dictatorship could not exist . . . Dictatorship is the most highly concentrated function of a class, and therefore the basic instrument of a dictatorship is a party. In the most fundamental aspects a class realises its dictatorship through a party. That is why Lenin spoke not only of the dictatorship of the class but also the dictatorship of the party and, in a certain sense, made them identical." [Op. Cit., pp. 75-6]

He repeated this position on party dictatorship into the late 1930s, long after it had resulted in the horrors of Stalinism:

"The revolutionary dictatorship of a proletarian party is for me not a thing that one can freely accept or reject: It is an objective necessity imposed upon us by the social realities - the class struggle, the heterogeneity of the revolutionary class, the necessity for a selected vanguard in order to assure the victory. The dictatorship of a party belongs to the barbarian prehistory as does the state itself, but we can not jump over this chapter, which can open (not at one stroke) genuine human history. . . The revolutionary party (vanguard) which renounces its own dictatorship surrenders the masses to the counter-revolution . . . Abstractly speaking, it would be very well if the party dictatorship could be replaced by the 'dictatorship' of the whole toiling people without any party, but this presupposes such a high level of political development among the masses that it can never be achieved under capitalist conditions. The reason for the revolution comes from the circumstance that capitalism does not permit the material and the moral development of the masses." [Writings of Leon Trotsky 1936-37, pp. 513-4]


Significantly, this was the year after his apparent (and much belated) embrace of soviet democracy in The Revolution Betrayed. Moreover, as we discuss in section H.3.8, he was just repeating the same arguments he had made while in power during the Russian Revolution. Nor was he the only one. Zinoviev, another leading Bolshevik, argued in 1920 along the same lines:

"soviet rule in Russia could not have been maintained for three years - not even three weeks - without the iron dictatorship of the Communist Party. Any class conscious worker must understand that the dictatorship of the working class can be achieved only by the dictatorship of its vanguard, i.e., by the Communist Party . . . All questions of economic reconstruction, military organisation, education, food supply - all these questions, on which the fate of the proletarian revolution depends absolutely, are decided in Russia before all other matters and mostly in the framework of the party organisations . . . Control by the party over soviet organs, over the trade unions, is the single durable guarantee that any measures taken will serve not special interests, but the interests of the entire proletariat." [quoted by Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets, pp. 239-40]


Three years later, at the Communist Party's congress, he made light of "comrades who think that the dictatorship of the party is a thing to be realised in practice but not spoken about." He went on to argue that what was needed was "a single powerful central committee which is leader of everything . . . in this is expressed the dictatorship of the party." The Congress itself resolved that "the dictatorship of the working class cannot be assured otherwise than in the form of a dictatorship of its leading vanguard, i.e., the Communist Party." [quoted by E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vol. 1, p. 236, pp. 236-7 and p. 237]

How these positions can be reconciled with workers' democracy, power or freedom is not explained. As such, the idea that Leninism (usually considered as mainstream Marxism) is inherently democratic or a supporter of power to the people is clearly flawed. Equally flawed are the attempts by Leninists to distance themselves from, and rationalise, these positions in terms of the "objective circumstances" (such as civil war) facing the Russian Revolution. As we discuss in section H.6, Bolshevik authoritarianism started before these problems began and continued long after they ended (in part because the policies pursued by the Bolshevik leadership had roots in their ideology and, as a result, that ideology itself played a key role in the failure of the revolution).

Ultimately, though, the leading lights of Bolshevism concluded from their experiences that the dictatorship of the proletariat could only be achieved by the dictatorship of the party and they generalised this position for all revolutions. Even in the prison camps in the late 1920s and early 1930s, "almost all the Trotskyists continued to consider that 'freedom of party' would be 'the end of the revolution.' 'Freedom to choose one's party - that is Menshevism,' was the Trotskyists' final verdict." [Ante Ciliga, The Russian Enigma, p. 280] While few Leninists today would subscribe to this position, the fact is when faced with the test of revolution the founders of their ideology not only practised the dictatorship of the party, they raised it to an ideological truism. Sadly, most modern day Trotskyists ignore this awkward fact in favour of inaccurate claims that Trotsky's Left Opposition "framed a policy along [the] lines" of "returning to genuine workers' democracy". [Chris Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, p. 19] In reality, as "Left Oppositionist" Victor Serge pointed out, "the greatest reach of boldness of the Left Opposition in the Bolshevik Party was to demand the restoration of inner-Party democracy, and it never dared dispute the theory of single-party government - by this time, it was too late." [The Serge-Trotsky Papers, p. 181]

Significantly, this position on party rule has its roots in the uneven political development within the working class (i.e. that the working class contains numerous political perspectives within it). As the party (according to Leninist theory) contains the most advanced ideas and (again according to Leninist theory) the working class cannot reach beyond a trade union consciousness by its own efforts, the party must take power to ensure that the masses do not make "mistakes" or "waver" (show "vacillation") during a revolution. From such a perspective to the position of party dictatorship is not far (and a journey that all the leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin and Trotsky did in fact take).

These arguments by leading Bolsheviks confirm Bakunin's fear that the Marxists aimed for "a tyranny of the minority over a majority in the name of the people - in the name of the stupidity of the many and the superior wisdom of the few." [Marxism, Freedom and the State, p. 63]

In contrast, anarchists argue that precisely because of political differences we need the fullest possible democracy and freedom to discuss issues and reach agreements. Only by discussion and self-activity can the political perspectives of those in struggle develop and change. In other words, the fact Bolshevism uses to justify its support for party power is the strongest argument against it. For anarchists, the idea of a revolutionary government is a contradiction. As Malatesta put it, "if you consider these worthy electors as unable to look after their own interests themselves, how is it that they will know how to choose for themselves the shepherds who must guide them? And how will they be able to solve this problem of social alchemy, of producing a genius from the votes of a mass of fools?" [Anarchy, pp. 53-4] As such, anarchists think that power should be in the hands of the masses themselves. Only freedom or the struggle for freedom can be the school of freedom. That means that, to quote Bakunin, "since it is the people which must make the revolution everywhere . . . the ultimate direction of it must at all times be vested in the people organised into a free federation of agricultural and industrial organisations . . . organised from the bottom up through revolutionary delegation." [No God, No Masters, vol. 1, pp. 155-6]

Clearly, then, the question of state/party power is one dividing anarchists and most Marxists. Again, though, we must stress that libertarian Marxists agree with anarchists on this subject and reject the whole idea that rule/dictatorship of a party equals the dictatorship of the working class. As such, the Marxist tradition as a whole does not confuse this issue, although the majority of it does. So not all Marxists are Leninists. A few (council communists, Situationists, and so on) are far closer to anarchism. They also reject the idea of party power/dictatorship and the use of elections and instead argue for direct action, the abolition of wage slavery by workers' self-management of production and so on. They represent the best in Marx's work and should not be lumped with the followers of Bolshevism. Sadly, they are in the minority.

Finally, we should indicate other important areas of difference as summarised by Lenin in his work The State and Revolution:

"The difference between the Marxists and the anarchists is this: 1) the former, while aiming at the complete abolition of the state, recognise that this aim can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution, as the result of the establishment of socialism which leads to the withering away of the state. The latter want to abolish the state completely overnight, failing to understand the conditions under which the state can be abolished 2) the former recognise that after the proletariat has conquered political power it must utterly destroy the old state machine and substitute for it a new one consisting of the organisation of armed workers, after the type of the Commune. The latter, while advocating the destruction of the state machine, have absolutely no idea of what the proletariat will put in its place and how it will use its revolutionary power; the anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat should utilise its state power, its revolutionary dictatorship; 3) the former demand that the proletariat be prepared for revolution by utilising the present state; the latter reject this." [Essential Works of Lenin, p. 358]


We will discuss each of these points in the next three sections. Point one will be discussed in section H.1.3, the second in section H.1.4 and the third and final one in section H.1.5.

[b]H.1.3 Why do anarchists wish to abolish the state "overnight"?


As indicated at the end of the last section, Lenin argued that while Marxists aimed "at the complete abolition of the state" they "recognise that this aim can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution" while anarchists "want to abolish the state completely overnight." This issue is usually summarised by Marxists arguing that a new state is required to replace the destroyed bourgeois one. This new state is called by Marxists "the dictatorship of the proletariat" or a workers' state. Anarchists reject this transitional state while Marxists embrace it. Indeed, according to Lenin "a Marxist is one who extends the acceptance of the class struggle to the acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat." [Essential Works of Lenin, p. 358 and p. 294]

So what does the "dictatorship of the proletariat" actually mean? Generally, Marxists seem to imply that this term simply means the defence of the revolution and so the anarchist rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat means, for Marxists, the denial of the need to defend a revolution. This particular straw man was used by Lenin in The State and Revolution when he quoted Marx's article "Indifference to Politics" to suggest that anarchists advocated workers "laying down their arms" after a successful revolution. Such a "laying down [of] their arms" would mean "abolishing the state" while keeping their arms "in order to crush the resistance of the bourgeoisie" would mean "giv[ing] the state a revolutionary and transitory form," so setting up "their revolutionary dictatorship in place of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." [Marx, quoted by Lenin, Op. Cit., p. 315]

That such an argument can be made, never mind repeated, suggests a lack of honesty. It assumes that the Marxist and Anarchist definitions of "the state" are identical. They are not. For anarchists the state, government, means "the delegation of power, that is the abdication of initiative and sovereignty of all into the hands of a few." [Malatesta, Anarchy, p. 41] For Marxists, the state is "an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another." [Lenin, Op. Cit., p. 274] That these definitions are in conflict is clear and unless this difference is made explicit, anarchist opposition to the "dictatorship of the proletariat" cannot be clearly understood.

Anarchists, of course, agree that the current state is the means by which the bourgeois class enforces its rule over society. In Bakunin's words, "the political state has no other mission but to protect the exploitation of the people by the economically privileged classes." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 221] "Throughout history, just as in our time, government is either the brutal, violent, arbitrary rule of the few over the many or it is an organised instrument to ensure that domination and privilege will be in the hands of those who . . . have cornered all the means of life." Under capitalism, as Malatesta succulently put, the state is "the bourgeoisie's servant and gendarme." [Op. Cit., p. 21 and p. 23] The reason why the state is marked by centralised power is due to its role as the protector of (minority) class rule. As such, a state cannot be anything but a defender of minority power as its centralised and hierarchical structure is designed for that purpose. If the working class really were running society, as Marxists claim they would be in the "dictatorship of the proletariat," then it would not be a state. As Bakunin put it: "Where all rule, there are no more ruled, and there is no State." [Op. Cit., p. 223]

The idea that anarchists, by rejecting the "dictatorship of the proletariat," also reject defending a revolution is false. We do not equate the "dictatorship of the proletariat" with the need to defend a revolution or expropriating the capitalist class, ending capitalism and building socialism. Anarchists from Bakunin onwards have taken both of these necessities for granted. As we discuss this particular Marxist straw man in section H.2.1, we will leave our comments on anarchist awareness of the need to defend a revolution at this.

Anarchists, then, do not reject defending a revolution and our opposition to the so-called "revolutionary" or "socialist" state is not based on this, regardless of what Marx and Lenin asserted. Rather, we argue that the state can and must be abolished "overnight" during a social revolution because any state, including the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat", is marked by hierarchical power and can only empower the few at the expense of the many. The state will not "wither away" as Marxists claim simply because it excludes, by its very nature, the active participation of the bulk of the population and ensures a new class division in society: those in power (the party) and those subject to it (the working class). Georges Fontenis sums up anarchist concerns on this issue:

"The formula 'dictatorship of the proletariat' has been used to mean many different things. If for no other reason it should be condemned as a cause of confusion. With Marx it can just as easily mean the centralised dictatorship of the party which claims to represent the proletariat as it can the federalist conception of the Commune.

"Can it mean the exercise of political power by the victorious working class? No, because the exercise of political power in the recognised sense of the term can only take place through the agency of an exclusive group practising a monopoly of power, separating itself from the class and oppressing it. And this is how the attempt to use a State apparatus can reduce the dictatorship of the proletariat to the dictatorship of the party over the masses.

"But if by dictatorship of the proletariat is understood collective and direct exercise of 'political power', this would mean the disappearance of 'political power' since its distinctive characteristics are supremacy, exclusivity and monopoly. It is no longer a question of exercising or seizing political power, it is about doing away with it all together!

"If by dictatorship is meant the domination of the majority by a minority, then it is not a question of giving power to the proletariat but to a party, a distinct political group. If by dictatorship is meant the domination of a minority by the majority (domination by the victorious proletariat of the remnants of a bourgeoisie that has been defeated as a class) then the setting up of dictatorship means nothing but the need for the majority to efficiently arrange for its defence its own social Organisation.

[...]

"The terms 'domination', 'dictatorship' and 'state' are as little appropriate as the expression 'taking power' for the revolutionary act of the seizure of the factories by the workers.

We reject then as inaccurate and causes of confusion the expressions 'dictatorship of the proletariat', 'taking political power', 'workers state', 'socialist state' and 'proletarian state'." [Manifesto of Libertarian Communism, pp. 22-3]


So anarchists argue that the state has to be abolished "overnight" simply because a state is marked by hierarchical power and the exclusion of the bulk of the population from the decision making process. It cannot be used to implement socialism simply because it is not designed that way. To extend and defend a revolution a state is not required. Indeed, it is a hindrance:

"The mistake of authoritarian communists in this connection is the belief that fighting and organising are impossible without submission to a government; and thus they regard anarchists . . . as the foes of all organisation and all co-ordinated struggle. We, on the other hand, maintain that not only are revolutionary struggle and revolutionary organisation possible outside and in spite of government interference but that, indeed, that is the only effective way to struggle and organise, for it has the active participation of all members of the collective unit, instead of their passively entrusting themselves to the authority of the supreme leaders.

"Any governing body is an impediment to the real organisation of the broad masses, the majority. Where a government exists, then the only really organised people are the minority who make up the government; and . . . if the masses do organise, they do so against it, outside it, or at the very least, independently of it. In ossifying into a government, the revolution as such would fall apart, on account of its awarding that government the monopoly of organisation and of the means of struggle." [Luigi Fabbri, "Anarchy and 'Scientific' Communism", pp. 13-49, The Poverty of Statism, Albert Meltzer (ed.), p. 27]
...

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secH1.html


*
"Teach them to think. Work against the government." – Wittgenstein.
User avatar
vanlose kid
 
Posts: 3182
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:44 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 40 guests