Building the Revolution in Greece

The New Anarchism

Below I reproduce excerpts from a recent report at Truthout by Joshua Stephens on the constructive efforts by Greek anarchists to create alternatives to capitalism and the nation-state. The approaches they have been developing since the uprising in 2008 are similar to those proposed by Alexander Berkman based on his experiences during the Russian Revolution. Directly democratic popular assemblies formed the basis of the anarchist collectives during the Spanish Revolution, and were later championed by Murray Bookchin. Stephens refers to Colin Ward, whose ground breaking article on anarchism as a theory of organization is included in Volume Two of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Anarchist alternatives to capitalism and hierarchical organization are well documented in all three volumes of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, now on sale at AK Press.

Joshua Stephen’s on the situation in Greece:

“On the first day of the uprising, we smashed the police stations,” an anarchist in Thessaloniki told me last spring.  ”On the second, we smashed the banks.  On the third, there was nothing left to smash, and we were suddenly faced with the fact that we didn’t really know what to do.”  It seems to have been a widespread frustration.  The occupations of academic and political institutions that occurred amidst the uprising gave way to what are called Popular Assemblies in some 70 neighborhoods across Athens.

About half of these are still operating, composed of an often unlikely spectrum of participants.  Anarchists, local workers, even municipal employees and officeholders all collaborate off the political grid in democratically administering needs, redistributing available resources and bolstering existing struggles against both austerity and the steady creep of fascism.

Their strategy can be read in a short 1958 article by Colin Ward in the British anarchist journal Freedom, entitled “The Unwritten Handbook”:  ”The choice between libertarian and authoritarian solutions occurs every day and in every way, and the extent to which we choose, or accept…  or lack the imagination and inventiveness to discover alternatives to the authoritarian solutions to small problems is the extent to which we are their powerless victims in big affairs.”  When a round of austerity measures included a new and often unaffordable property tax in electricity bills, many Greeks saw their power abruptly cut.  Popular Assemblies began compiling lists of households without power, ranking them based on vulnerability (age, the presence of infants, etc.), and deploying qualified people to restore electricity, illegally.

On a cool April evening in the neighborhood of Peristeri, assembly participants debated models for localizing economic transactions through alternative currencies and non-monetary programs like time-banks.  Over drinks following a talk I gave last spring, the bulk of the questions from local anarchists known the world over for bravado and street warfare were about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, an overwhelmingly liberal phenomena back home, hardly considered political (much less radical).  In Greece, however, forging direct relationships with the agricultural sector amounts to a fuck-you to the International Monetary Fund and its threats of import cutoffs, issued to leverage passage of austerity measures.

During my few days on the ground in Athens this trip, I was invited to an anti-fascist march organized by the Popular Assemblies of south Athens.  It marked what felt like an expansion of their role into directly confronting Golden Dawn, where the state has proved either unwilling or unable to tread. ”If we don’t resist in every neighborhood, they will soon become our prisons” could be heard reverberating off the facades of buildings.

Counting by tens, I estimated roughly a thousand marching from the commercial plaza adjacent to the Dafni Metro, winding through a number of its various neighborhoods before reaching a former military installation occupied and renamed Asyrmatos Greek for “wireless,” referring to the towering antennas jutting out of what is now a sizable community garden and community-managed conservatory.

In the adjacent neighborhood of Aghios Dimitrios, where much of the march was organized, the Popular Assembly meets weekly in theatrical space of a local municipal building.  On the surface, it appears quite innocuous, as though it’s scheduled through an arrangement with the local government.  I was surprised to learn that each week’s meeting is a sort of micro-occupation; participants simply walk in and seize the space, with zero visible pushback from employees, and no police response.  ”In 2008 (during the uprising), we seized the building for a month,” one local told me.  ”So, I think that, for them, two hours a week is a bargain.”

The oldest Popular Assembly in Athens operates in the neighborhood of Petralona, the site of a recent, widely publicized murder of a Pakistani man at the hands of fascists.  When I visited with them last spring, they were opening a kitchen and cafe space for educating people about nutrition and food production, and operating an extensive calendar of peer-led health and mental health events, inspired in part by Mexico’s Zapatistas.  Today, they operate medical, dental and eye clinics in coordination with other Popular Assemblies, based on non-monetary mutual aid.

As we weaved through commercial corridors and narrow neighborhood  arteries last week, all of this seemed to be shifting from a sort of quiet mode of survival into an overt assertion of power.  Scattered action commanded the attention of onlookers.  Quarter-sheet fliers were tossed into open bus windows, open supermarkets and even into the day’s light breeze, scattering like ticker tape. Two masked young women darted out of the crowd periodically, spray-painting a stencil onto walls featuring a sort of close-up frontal image of a boy with his fist forward, reading “The sons of Adolf will receive a red and black punch” (a reference to the colors of the traditional anarchist flag).

The smell of fresh spray paint hung in the air, the fire to its smoke appearing on walls, the sides of buses, and a newly favorite target in the country’s crisis establishments set up to buy people’s gold.  These entrepreneurs are referred to as mavragoriters a termcoined during Greece’s years under Nazi occupation. “They were Greeks, usually friends of or sympathetic to the Nazis, and they took advantage of the crisis and the starvation that existed all over the country,” explained a young woman, who asked not to be named.  ”It reached a point where they were buying houses in exchange for two bottles of olive oil, or quantities of rice.”

The subtext of the young woman’s description seems the soul of the Popular Assemblies:  dignity.  She later pointed me to a communique posted at Indymedia Athens, in which anarchists in the city set about countering the neoliberal mantra heard around the country, and the ethics of the mavragoriters “No job is a shame.”  The Popular Assemblies appear to operate from the inverse that appears in the communique “Shame is not a job.” Surviving merely to revive histories of foreign occupation or homegrown fascism, for them, is a path without hope.

Joshua Stephens is a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies, and has been active in anti-capitalist, international solidarity and worker-cooperative movements across the last two decades.  He currently divides his time between the northeastern US and various parts of the Mediterranean.

Anarchist Demonstration in Athens

Kropotkin: Against Representation

Peter Kropotkin

In Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, I included excerpts from several essays in Kropotkin’s Words of a Rebel. I did not have room for Kropotkin’s essay on “Representative Government.” This is the second part of that essay to be posted here, focusing on his anarchist critique of political representation.

Representative Government Part 2

The faults of representative assemblies should not in fact astonish us if we reflect for just a moment on the manner in which they are recruited and in which they function.

Must I offer again the picture, so disgusting, so thoroughly repugnant, which we all know — the picture of what happens at elections? In bourgeois England and democratic Switzerland, in France as in the United States, in Germany as in the Argentine Republic, is not that sad comedy everywhere the same?

Must one tell how the agents and electoral committees contrive, canvass and carry out an election, making promises on all sides, political in meetings and personal to individuals: how they penetrate into homes, flattering the mother, the child, and if necessary caressing the asthmatic dog or cat of the “voter”? How they spread themselves around in the pubs and cafés, trying to convert the voters and entrap them in their discussions just as their counterparts in roguery try to involve them in the “three card trick”? How the candidate, making himself desirable, appears among his “dear voters” with a benevolent smile, a modest look and a cajoling voice, like an old vixen of a London landlady trying to capture a lodger with her sweet smile and angelic looks? Need we enumerate the lying — entirely lying — programmes, whether socialist-revolutionary or merely opportunist in orientation, in which the candidate himself believes no more than he believes the predictions of an Old Moore’s Almanac, yet which he defends with a spirit, a sonorous voice, a show of feeling, worthy of a clown or a wandering actor? It is no wonder that the popular theatre no longer limits itself to exhibiting Bertrand and Robert Macaire as simple rogues, Tartuffes or swindlers, but adds to these traditional types the representatives of the people, in quest of votes and pockets to pick.

Finally, must we talk about the cost of elections? Surely all the newspapers keep us well informed on this question. One has only to reproduce the expense lists of electoral agents, in which figure roasts of lamb, flannel waistcoats, and sedative waters sent by sympathetic candidates to the “dear children” of their voters. Need we also recall the cost of boiled potatoes and rotten eggs “to confound the opposing party” that occur in the electoral budgets of the United States, or the costs of libellous placards and “last minute tricks” that already play such an honourable role in our European elections.

$6 billion 2012 US election most expensive in history

Thus it is, and it cannot be otherwise so long as there are voters to give themselves masters. Think only of the workers, who are equal among themselves, taking it into their heads one day to pick rulers; it will be just the same as ever. Perhaps roast lamb will no longer be distributed, but praise and lies will, and there will be no shortage of rotten eggs! What better can people hope for when they are willing to put up their most sacred rights for auction?

What, in fact, is asked of voters? To find a man to whom they can confide the right to legislate on everything they cherish most: their rights, their children, and their work! So why be surprised when two or three thousand Robert Macaires turn up to compete for these royal rights? We are seeking a man to whom we can confide — in the company of others chosen in the same lottery — the right to ruin our sons when they are twenty-one, or even nineteen if that is more convenient, and to shut them up for three years — or even up to ten years — in the pestilential atmosphere of a barracks! And to let them be massacred when and where the rulers want to start a war which the county will be forced to carry on to the bitter end once it has been started.

Such rulers can close the universities at their will, and either force the parents to send their children to them or refuse entry. Like a new Louis XIV they can favour an industry or kill it if they prefer; sacrifice the North to the South or the South to the North; annex a province or give it away. They can dispose of something like three billion francs a year, which they snatch out of the mouths of the workers. They retain the royal prerogative of naming the executive power, a power which, however in agreement with parliament it may be, can at the same time be just as despotic and tyrannical as the former kings. For, while Louis XIV could command a few tens of thousands of officials, the new rulers can command hundreds of thousands; while, if the king could steal from the exchequer a few paltry bags of coins, the constitutional ministry of today can “honestly” pocket a few millions by a simple manoeuvre at the stock exchange.

It is astonishing to see what passions come into play, when there is a call for a master who can be invested with such powers! When Spain put its throne up for bids, it was not in the least surprising to see the brigands flocking in from every side. As long as this commerce in royal powers continues, nothing can ever be reformed; elections will be fairs at which vanities are traded for consciences.

Furthermore, even if one manages to reduce the power of the deputies, if one breaks power up by making each commune a State in miniature, everything will remain the same.

The question of true delegation versus representation can be better understood if one imagines a hundred or two hundred men, who meet each day in their work and share common concerns, who know each other thoroughly, who have discussed every aspect of the question that concerns them and have reached a decision. They then choose someone and send him to reach an agreement with other delegates of the same kind on this particular issue. On such an occasion the choice is made with full knowledge of the question, and everyone knows what is expected of his delegate. The delegate is not authorized to do more than explain to other delegates the considerations that have led his colleagues to their conclusion. Not being able to impose anything, he will seek an understanding and will return with a simple proposition which his mandatories can accept or refuse. This is what happens when true delegation comes into being; when the communes send their delegates to other communes, they need no other kind of mandate. This is how it is done already by meteorologists and statisticians in their international congresses, by the delegates of railway and postal administrations meeting from several countries.

But what is being asked nowadays of the voter? Ten, twenty, even a hundred thousand men, who do not know each other from Adam, who have never even seen each other and have certainly never met to discuss a common concern, are expected to agree on the choice of one man. Moreover, this man will not be mandated to explain a precise matter or to defend a resolution concerning a special affair. No, he will become an instant Jack of All Trades, expected to legislate on any subject, and his decision will become law. In such circumstances the nature of delegation is betrayed and it becomes an absurdity.

The omniscient being whom everyone is seeking nowadays does not exist. But suppose we can present an honest citizen of probity and good sense and a modicum of education. Is he the sort of man who will get elected? Obviously not. Hardly twenty people from his grammar school remember his excellent qualities. He has never sought the limelight, and he despises the means by which attention might be drawn to his name. He will never gather more than two hundred votes!

He will not even be nominated as a candidate, but instead they will choose a lawyer or a journalist, a glib speaker or scribbler who will carry into parliament the ways of the bar and the newspaper office, and will add himself to one of the herds that vote with the government and the opposition. Or perhaps it will be some merchant, anxious to get the title of M.P., who will not hesitate about spending ten thousand francs to gain a scrap of fame. And where life is notably democratic, as in the United States, where committees spring up constantly to counterbalance the influence of great fortunes, the worst type of all is elected, the professional politician, that abject being who these days has become the plague of the great Republic, the man who makes politics an industry, and practices it according to the methods of great industry — with display, pizzazz and corruption!

Change the electoral system however you like; establish the secret ballot; make elections in two stages, as in Switzerland, make all the modifications you can to apply the system with the greatest possible equality; arrange and rearrange the voting lists; the intrinsic faults of the institution will continue. Whoever manages to gather more than half the votes will always be a nonentity, a man without convictions but anxious to please everyone.

That is why, as Spencer has already remarked, parliaments are generally so badly composed. The members of parliament, he says in his Introduction, are always inferior to the average of people in the country, not only in terms of morality but also in terms of intelligence. An intelligent people always seems to demean itself in its choice of representatives, and betrays itself by choosing nobody better than the boobies who are supposed to act on its behalf. As for the honesty of the representatives, we know what that is worth. Merely read what is said about them by the ex-ministers who have known and understood them.

What a shame it is that there are no special trains to allow the electors to see their “Chamber” at work! They would soon be disgusted. The ancients used to make their slaves drunk to teach their children the evils of intoxication. Parisians, go to the Chamber and see your representatives at work so that you will become disgusted with representative government!

To this rabble of nonentities the people abandons all its rights, except that of dismissing them from time to time and naming others in their places. But since the new assembly, chosen by the same system and charged with the same mission, will be just as bad as the last, the great mass of the people end up losing interest in the comedy and restricting themselves to a bit of patching up here and there by accepting a few of the new candidates who thrust themselves forward.

But if the process of election is already marked with such constitutional and irredeemable faults, what is there to be said of the way parliament fulfils its mandate? Think for a moment, and you will see at once the insanity of the task you have imposed on it.

Your representative is expected to express an opinion, give a vote, on the whole infinitely various series of questions that surge up in that formidable machine — the centralized State.

He must vote the dog tax and the reform of university instruction, without ever having set foot in a university or having known a country dog. He must pronounce on the advantages of the Gras rifle and on the site to be chosen for the State stud farm. He will vote on phylloxera, on tobacco, on guano, on elementary education and on the sanitation of the cities; on Cochinchina and Guyana, on chimney pots and on the Paris Conservatory. Having never seen soldiers on parade, he will rearrange the army corps, and having never seen an Arab, he will make and remake the Muslim landholding laws in Algeria. He will protect sugar and sacrifice wheat. He will kill the vine, imagining he is protecting it; he will vote for reforestation against pasture, and protect the pastures against the forests. He will know all about railways. He will kill off a canal in favour of a railway without knowing in what part of France either of them may be. He will add new items to the Penal Code without ever having consulted it.

An omniscient and omnipotent Proteus, today soldier, tomorrow pig breeder, in turn banker, academician, sewer-cleaner, doctor, astronomer, drug manufacturer, currier and merchant, according to the Chamber’s orders of the day, he will never hesitate. Accustomed in his function of lawyer, journalist, or public orator to talking of things he knows nothing about, he will vote on all these questions, with the sole difference that in his newspaper he amused housemaids with his nonsense, and at the assizes he kept the sleepy judges and jurors awake with his voice, while in the Chamber his opinion becomes law for thirty or forty million people.

And since it is materially impossible to have his views on the thousand subjects on which his vote will make law, he will gossip with his seat mates, spend time in the bar, write letters to warm up the enthusiasm of his “dear voters,” while a minister reads a report crammed with figures put together for the occasion by his administrative assistant; and at the moment of voting he will declare himself for or against the report according to the nod of his party leader.

Thus a question of pigfood or soldier’s equipment will be merely a matter of parliamentary bickering between the two parties of the ministry and the opposition. They will not ask themselves whether the pigs really need more food or whether soldiers are already as overloaded as desert camels; the only question that interests them is whether an affirmative vote will profit their party. The parliamentary battle is carried out on the backs of the soldiers, the farmers, the industrial workers, in the interests of the ministry and the opposition.

Proudhon in 1848

Poor Proudhon, one can imagine his disappointment when he had the childlike naiveté, on entering the Assembly, to study profoundly each of the questions on the order of the day. He offered figures and ideas, but nobody listened to him. Parliamentary questions are all resolved well before the bills are presented by that very simple consideration: is it useful or harmful to our party? The scrutiny of votes is made; those submitted are registered and the abstentions are carefully noted. Speeches are made principally for the sake of effect; they are heard only if they have some artistic value or lead to scandal. Simple people imagine that Roumestand has aroused the Chamber by his eloquence, while Roumestand, after the sitting, works out with his friends how he can keep the promises he made to capture the vote. His eloquence was no more than a cantata for the occasion, composed and sung to amuse the gallery, and to maintain his own popularity by sonorous phrases.

“Capture the vote!” but who in fact are those whose votes are captured, so that the totals cause the parliamentary balance to lean one way or another? Who are those who overthrow and remake ministries and give the country a policy of reaction or of external adventurism, who decide between the ministry and the opposition?

They are those who have so justly been called “the toads in the marsh”! Those who have no opinion, those who sit always between two stools, who float between the two principal parties in the Chamber. It is precisely this group — fifty or so nonentities, people without convictions of any kind, who sway like a weather vane between the liberals and the conservatives, who allow themselves to be influenced by promises, places, flattery or panic; it is this little group of nobodies who, by giving or refusing their vote, decide all the business of the country. It is they who pass the laws or pigeonhole them. It is they who support or overthrow ministries and change the direction of policy. Fifty or so nonentities making the law of the country, that is what, in the last resort, the parliamentary regime has been reduced to.

It is inevitable that whatever may be the composition of a parliament, even if it is stuffed with stars of the first magnitude and men of integrity— the decision will belong to the toads in the marsh! Nothing in that can be changed so long as the majority makes the law.

After having briefly indicated the constitutional faults of representative assemblies, we should now show these assemblies at work. We should show that all of them, from the Convention to the Council of the Commune in 1871, from the English parliament to the Serbian Skoupchtchina, are plagued with incapacity; how their best laws — according to Buckle’s expression — have been no more than the repeals of preceding laws; how these laws had to be torn from their hands by the pikes of the people, by insurrectional means. That would be a tale to tell, but it would go beyond the limits of our review.

Besides, anyone who knows how to reason without being misled by the prejudices of our vicious educational system will find for himself enough examples in the history of representative government in our age. And he will understand that, whatever the representative body may be, whether it is composed of workers or the middle class — and even if it is wide open to social revolutionaries — it will retain all the faults of representative assemblies. These do not depend on individuals; they are inherent in the institution.

To dream of a workers’ State, governed by an elected assembly, is the most unhealthy of all the dreams that our authoritarian education inspires.

Just as one cannot have a good king, whether it is Rienzi or Alexander III, so one cannot have such a thing as a good parliament. The socialist future lies in a quite different direction; it will open to humanity new directions within the political order, in the same way as in the economic order.

Kropotkin: Representative Government

Well, Kropotkin’s 170th birthday has come and gone, and the world has not come to an end. In celebration of being able to continue celebrating Kropotkin’s and others’ birthdays, I am posting the first of two excerpts from Kropotkin’s essay on representative, or parliamentary, forms of government, from Kropotkin’s Words of a Rebel, which I was unable to include in Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. The continuing failings of representative government are well illustrated by recent elections in the United States and Egypt, where representative forms of government are still being used to deprive people of any effective control over their daily lives.

http://www.blackrosebooks.net

Representative Government

“The mission of the State,” we have been told in order to delude us, “is to protect the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, the working classes against the privileged classes.” We know how governments have fulfilled such missions; they have done the reverse. Faithful to its origin, representative government has always been the protector of privilege against those who set out to free themselves from it. Representative government in particular, with the connivance of the people, has organized the defence of the privileges of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie against the aristocracy on one side and the exploited on the other — showing itself modest, polite, well mannered toward the first, and ferocious towards the others. That is why even the slightest of laws protecting the worker, no matter how harmless it may be, can be wrung from a parliament only by an agitation that comes close to insurrection. Remember merely the struggles it was necessary to wage, the agitations to which people had to devote themselves, in order to obtain from the British Houses of Parliament, the Swiss Federal Council, the French Chambers, a few wretched laws limiting the hours of work! The first legislation of this kind, voted in England, was extorted only by putting barrels of powder under the machines in the factories.

Elsewhere, in countries where the aristocracy has not yet been destroyed by the revolution, the lords and the bourgeois get along marvellously together. “Grant me the right to legislate, m’lord, and I will mount guards around your castle!” — and he mounts the guard as long as he does not feel threatened.

It took forty years of agitation, which sometimes carried fire through the countryside, before the English parliament decided to guarantee to the farmer the benefit of improvements he made on land he held by lease.

As to the famous “land law” voted for Ireland, it was necessary, as Gladstone himself admitted, for the country to rise in a general insurrection, openly refusing to pay rents and defending themselves against evictions by boycott, fires and the killing of landlords before the bourgeois would vote the wretched law that purported to protect the hungry land against the lords who starved it.

But if it is a matter of protecting the interests of the capitalist, threatened by insurrection or even agitation, then representative government, that organ of capitalist domination, will turn savage. It attacks, and it does so with more confidence and baseness than any despot. The law against socialists in Germany is the equivalent of the edict of Nantes; and not even Catherine II after the peasant rising of Pugachev or Louis XVI after the wheat riots displayed such ferocity as the two “National Assemblies” of 1848 and 1871, whose members shouted: “Kill the wolves, the she-wolves and their cubs,” and unanimously, without a single opposing voice, rejoiced in their slaughter by soldiers drunken with blood! The anonymous beast with six hundred heads showed itself able to surpass Louis XI and Ivan the Terrible and their kind!

Executed Communards

It will be the same wherever there is a representative government, whether it is elected in the regular way or is imposed in the lurid light of an insurrection. Either economic equality will prevail in the nation and the free and equal citizens will no longer surrender their rights into anyone else’s hands, seeking out instead a new organization that will permit them to manage their own affairs; or, there will still be a minority who will dominate the masses on the economic level, and it is then that the masses must be watchful. Representatives elected by that minority will act appropriately. They will legislate to maintain their privileges and will act with violence and massacre against those who do not submit.

It is impossible for us to analyze at the present moment all the faults of representative government; that would take up whole volumes. In limiting ourselves entirely to what is essential, we can avoid the trap of pedantic classification. Yet there is still one fact that calls for discussion.

It is a strange fact indeed! Representative government had as its aim to put an end to personal government; it set out to place power in the hands of a class, and not of an individual. Yet it has always shown the tendency to revert to personal government and to submit itself to a single man.

The reason for this anomaly is quite simple. In fact, having armed the government with thousands of prerogatives which are still from the past; having confided to it the management of all matters that are important to a country, and given it a budget of billions, was it possible to confide to the mob in parliament the administration of such numberless concerns? Thus it was necessary to nominate an executive power — the ministry — which was invested with all these quasi-royal prerogatives. What a miserable authority, in fact, was that of Louis XIV, who boasted of being the State, in comparison with that of a constitutional chief minister in our day!

It is true that the Chamber could overturn such a minister — but for what reason? To name a successor who would be invested with the same powers and whom it would be forced, if it were consistent, to dismiss in a week? So it prefers to keep the man it has chosen until the country cries out loudly enough, and then it discards him to recall the man it has dismissed two years ago. It becomes a seesaw: Gladstone-Beaconsfield, Beaconsfield-Gladstone. And basically it changes nothing, for the country is always ruled by one man, the head of the cabinet.

But when the choice falls on a clever man who guarantees “order” — that is to say internal exploitation and external expansion — then the parliament submits to all his caprices and arms him with ever new powers. However much contempt he may show for the constitution, whatever the scandals of his government, they are accepted, and even if there are quibbles over details, he is given a free hand with everything of importance. Bismarck is a living example of this; Guizot, Pitt and Palmerston were such in preceding generations.

Bismarck directing the German Parliament

That is understandable: all government has a tendency to become personal since that is its origin and its essence. Whether the parliament is elected by property-owners or by universal suffrage, even if it is named only by workers and consists only of workers, it will always search for the man on whom it can unload the cares of government and to whom in turn it will submit. As long as we confide to a small group all the economic, political, military, financial and industrial prerogatives with which we arm them today, this small group will necessarily be inclined, like a detachment of soldiers on a campaign, to submit to a single chief.

This happens even in undisturbed times. But let a war blaze on the frontier, let a civil struggle start up in the interior, and then the first ambitious newcomer, the first clever adventurer, seizing control of the machine with a thousand ramifications which we call the administration, will be able to impose himself on the nation. The parliament will no more be capable of preventing him than five hundred men picked by chance in the street; on the contrary, it will paralyze the resistance. The two adventurers who carried the name of Bonaparte did not succeed by chance. As to the efficacy of the parliamentary debating society in resisting coups d’états, France knows something about this. Even in our day, was it the Chamber that saved France from MacMahon’s attempted coup? As we now know, it was the extra-parliamentary committees. Perhaps the example of England will be cited. But it should not boast too loudly of having retained its parliamentary institutions intact during the nineteenth century. It is true that it has managed throughout that century to avoid class warfare, but everything leads one to believe that it will break out there too, and that Parliament will not emerge intact from that struggle and will founder in one way or another during the march of the revolution.

If we want, at the time of the coming revolution, to leave the gates wide open to reaction, to monarchy perhaps, we have only to confide our affairs to a representative government, to a ministry armed with all the powers it possesses today. Reactionary dictatorship, first tinged with red, and then turning blue in proportion as it feels itself more securely in the saddle, will not be far behind. It will have at its direction all the instruments of domination; it will find them all at its service.

But even if it is the source of so much evil, does not the representative system at least render some services in the progressive and peaceful development of societies? Has it not perhaps contributed to the decentralization of power which has asserted itself in our century? Has it not perhaps helped to hinder wars? Has it not bowed to the exigencies of the moment and at times sacrificed certain antiquated institutions, so as to prevent civil war? Does it not offer at least certain guarantees, a hope of progress, of amelioration within the nation?

What a bitter irony is to be found in each of these questions and in so many others that nevertheless spring up as soon as one judges the institution! For all the history of our century is there to condemn it.

Robespierre – the original Jacobin

Faithful to the royalist tradition in its modern guise, which is Jacobinism, parliaments have done nothing other than to concentrate powers in the hands of the government. Bureaucracy carried to an extreme becomes the characteristic of representative government. Since the beginning of this century the talk is all of decentralization, of autonomy, and nothing is done but to centralize and kill the last vestiges of autonomy. Even Switzerland is suffering from this influence, and England submits to it. If it had not been for the resistance of manufacturers and merchants, we should today be in the position of having to ask permission in Paris to kill a cow in Brive-la-gaillarde. Everything falls more and more under the high hand of government. All that is left to us is the management of industry and commerce, of production and consumption, and the social democrats — blinded with authoritarian prejudices — already dream of the day when in the parliament of Berlin they can regulate manufacturing and consumption over the whole surface of Germany.

Has the representative system, which we are told is so pacific, saved us from wars? Never has there been so much extermination as under the representative system. The bourgeoisie needs to establish its domination over markets, and that domination is gained only at the expense of others, by shot and shell. Lawyers and journalists like to talk of military glory, and there is nobody more warlike than stay-at-home warriors.

But is it not true that parliaments lend themselves to the needs of the moment and are ready to modify institutions that are in decay? As in the days of the Convention it was necessary to put a knife to the throats of the Conventioneers to extort from them nothing more than agreements to faits accomplis, so today we have to stage a full insurrection to tear from the “representatives of the people” the smallest of reforms.

As to the improvement of the elected body, never has there been seen a generation of parliaments like that in our day. Like every institution in its decadence, they carry on while their condition gets worse. People used to talk of the corruption of parliaments in the days of Louis Philippe. Speak today to the few honest men who have wandered into these morasses and they will tell you: “ I am sick at heart with it all!” Parliamentarianism inspires only disgust in those who see it close at hand.

But is it really impossible to improve it? Would not a new element, the working class element, infuse it with new blood? Very well, let us analyze the constitution of representative assemblies, study their functioning, and we shall see that such dreams are as naive as the thought of marrying a king to a peasant girl in the hope of being given a succession of good little kings!

Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson

Kropotkin: Political Rights

In the lead up to Kropotkin’s 170th birthday on December 21st, I will be presenting some more selections from Words of a Rebel that I was unable to include in Volume One of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. The first selection, as topical today as when it was written, is on political rights, the most important of which can only be protected by people asserting them for themselves.

Political Rights

Each day, in a whole range of tones, the bourgeois press praises the value and the importance of our political liberties, of the “political rights of the citizen”: universal suffrage, free elections, freedom of the press and of meeting, etc.

“Since you have these freedoms,” they say to us, “what is the point of rebelling? Don’t the liberties you already possess assure the possibilities of all the reforms that may be necessary, without your needing to resort to the gun?” So, let us analyse, from our point of view what these famous “political liberties” are worth to the class that owns nothing, rules nobody, and has in fact very few rights and plenty of duties.

We are not asserting, as has sometimes been said, that political rights have no value for us. We know very well that since the days of serfdom and even since the last century, we have made a certain amount of progress; the man of the people is no longer the being deprived of all rights that he was in the past. The French peasant can no longer be flogged at the roadside, as he still is in Russia. In public places, outside his factory or workshop, the worker considers himself the equal of anyone, especially in the great cities. The French worker is no longer that being lacking in all human rights who in the past was treated by the aristocracy as a beast of burden. Thanks to the revolutions, thanks to the blood which the people shed, he has acquired certain personal rights whose value we have no desire to minimize.

But we know how to draw distinctions, and we assert that there are rights and rights. There are those that have a real value and those that do not, and whoever tries to confound them is only deceiving the people. Certain rights like, for example, the equality of the peasant and the squire in their personal relations, or the corporal inviolability of the person, have been won through great struggles, and are so dear to the people that they will rise up rather than allow them to be violated. But there are others, like universal suffrage, freedom of the press, etc., towards which the people have always remained lukewarm, because they know perfectly well that these rights, which have served so well to defend the ruling bourgeoisie against the encroachments of royal power and of the aristocracy, are no more than an instrument in the hands of the dominant classes to maintain their power over the people. These rights are not even real political rights, since they provide no safeguard for the mass of the people; and if we still decorate them with that pompous title it is because our political language is no more than a jargon elaborated by the ruling classes for their own use and in their own interests.

What, in fact, is a political right if it is not an instrument to safeguard the independence, the dignity and the freedom of those who do not yet have the power to impose on others a respect for that right? What is its use, if it is not an instrument of liberation for those who need to be freed? The Gambettas, the Bismarcks, the Gladstones need neither the freedom of the press nor the freedom of meeting, because they can write what they want, can meet whomsoever they wish, and profess whatever ideas they please; they are already liberated. They are free. If there is any need to guarantee anyone the right to speak and write, the freedom to gather together, it is surely to those who are not powerful enough to impose their will. Such in fact is the origin of all political rights.

But, looked at from this viewpoint, have the political rights we are talking of been created with an eye to those who alone need safeguards? Obviously not. Universal suffrage can sometimes and to a certain extent protect, without the need for a constant recourse to force in self-defence. It can serve to re-establish the equilibrium between two forces which struggle for power, without the rivals being forced to draw their swords on each other as they did in the past. But it can be no help if it is a matter of overthrowing or even limiting power, or of abolishing domination. Since it is such an excellent instrument for resolving in a peaceful manner any quarrels among the rulers, what use can it possibly be to the ruled?

Does not the history of universal suffrage tell us this? Whenever the bourgeoisie has feared that universal suffrage might become a weapon in the hands of the people that could be turned against the privileged, it has fought it stubbornly. But the day it was proved, in 1848, that universal suffrage held nothing to fear, and that one could rule the people with an iron rod by the use of universal suffrage, it was immediately accepted. Now the bourgeoisie itself has become its defender because it understands that here is a weapon adapted to sustain its domination, but absolutely harmless as a threat to its privileges.

It is the same with freedom of the press. What, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, has been the most conclusive argument in favour of freedom of the press? Its powerlessness. Yes, its powerlessness. M. de Girardin has written a whole book on this theme: the powerlessness of the press. “Formerly—he says—we burned witches because people had the stupidity to believe they were all-powerful; now people commit the same stupidity regarding the press, because they believe that it also is all-powerful. But it is nothing of the kind; it is as powerless as the witches of the middle ages. Hence, more persecutions of the press!” This is the contention that M. de Girardin offered in the past. And when the bourgeoisie discuss the freedom of the press among themselves, what arguments do they advance in its favour?

“Look at England, Switzerland and the United States,” they say. “In all of them the press is free and yet capitalist exploitation is better established in them than in any other country; its reign is more secure among them than anywhere else.” And they add, “What does it matter if dangerous doctrines are produced. Don’t we have all the means of stifling the voices of the journals that project them without even a recourse to violence? And even if one day, at a time of agitation, the revolutionary press becomes a dangerous weapon, so what? On that day it will be time enough to destroy it with a single blow on the most convenient pretext.”

As for the freedom of meeting, the same kind of reasoning holds. “Give complete freedom of meeting,” say the bourgeoisie. “It will do no harm to our privileges. What we have to fear are the secret societies, and public meetings are the best way of paralyzing them. But if, in a moment of excitement, public meetings should get out of hand, we would always have the means of suppressing them, since we hold the powers of government.”

“The inviolability of the dwelling? Of course! Write it into all the codes! Cry it from the rooftops!” say the knowing ones among the bourgeoisie. “We don’t want policemen coming to surprise us in our little nests.” But we will institute a secret service to keep an eye on suspects; we will people the country with police spies, make lists of dangerous people, and watch them closely. And if we smell out one day that anything is afoot, then we must set to vigorously, make a jest of inviolability, arrest people in their beds, search and ransack their homes! But above all we must do this boldly and if anyone protests too loudly, we must lock them up as well, and say to the rest, ‘What would you have us do, gentlemen? We must deal firmly with the situation!’ And we shall be applauded.”

“The privacy of correspondence? Say it everywhere, write and cry it out, that correspondence is inviolable. If the head of some village post office opens a letter out of curiosity, sack him at once and proclaim loudly that he is a monstrous criminal. Take good care that the little secrets we exchange with each other in our letters shall not be divulged. But if we get wind of some plot being hatched against our privileges, then let us not stand on ceremony; let us open everyone’s letters, allocate a thousand clerks to the task if necessary, and if someone takes it on himself to protest, let us say frankly, as an English minister did recently to the applause of parliament: ‘Yes, gentlemen, it is with a heavy heart and the deepest of distaste that we order letters to be opened, but it is entirely because the country (i.e. the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie) is in danger.”

This is what these so-called liberties can be reduced to. Freedom of press and of meeting, inviolability of the home and all the rest, are only respected if the people do not make use of them against the privileged classes. But the day the people begin to take advantage of them to undermine those privileges, then the so-called liberties will be cast overboard.

This is quite natural. Humanity retains only the rights it has won by hard struggle and is ready to defend at every moment, with arms in hand.

If men and women are not whipped in the streets of Paris, as they are in Odessa, it is because on the day a government dared to attempt this, the people would tear its agents to pieces. If an aristocrat can no longer make way for himself through the streets with the help of blows delivered right and left by the staves of his servants, it is because any of the servants who got such ideas into their heads would immediately be overpowered. If a degree of equality exists between the worker and his employer, at least in the streets and in public establishments, it is not because the worker’s rights are written into the law but because, thanks to revolutions in the past, he has a feeling of personal dignity that will not let him endure an offense from anyone.

Yet it is evident that in present-day society, divided as it is between masters and serfs, true liberty cannot exist; it will not exist so long as there are exploiters and slaves, governments and governed. At the same time it does not follow that, as we await the day when the anarchist revolution will sweep away all social distinctions, we wish to see the press muzzled, as in Germany, the right of meeting annulled, as in Russia, or the inviolability of the person reduced as it is in Turkey. Slaves of capital that we all are, we want to be able to write and publish whatever seems right to us, we want to be able to meet and organize as we please, precisely so that we can shake off the yoke of capital.

But it is high time we understood that we must not demand these rights through constitutional laws. We cannot go in search of our natural rights by way of a law, a scrap of paper that could be torn up at the least whim of the rulers. For it is only by transforming ourselves into a force, capable of imposing our will, that we shall succeed in making our rights respected.

Do you want to have freedom to speak and write whatever seems right to you? Do you want to have the liberty to meet and organize? It is not from a parliament that we seekers of freedom should ask permission, nor must we beg a law from the Senate. We must become an organized force, capable of showing our teeth every time anyone sets about restraining our rights of speech and meeting; we must be strong, and then we may be sure that nobody will dare dispute our right to speak, to write, to print what we write, and to meet together. The day we have been able to establish enough agreement among the exploited for them to come out in their millions into the streets and take up the defence of our rights, nobody will dare to dispute those rights, nor any others that we choose to demand. Then, and only then, shall we have truly gained such rights, for which we might plead to parliament for decades in vain. Then those rights will be guaranteed to us in a far more certain way than if they were merely written down on a bit of paper.

Freedoms are not given, they are taken.

Cyrille Gallion: Towards a New Anarcho-Syndicalism (2006)

The Anarcho-Syndicalist Revolution

Cyrille Gallion is a member of the French anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the Confederation Nationale du Travail (CNT-F). In the following excerpts, translated by Paul Sharkey, Gallion argues that contemporary anarcho-syndicalists must focus on popular self-organization and put their trust in direct or participatory democracy, a common theme in many of the selections I have included in Volume Three of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. I will be discussing these issues, together with Dimitri Rousopoulos and Davide Turcato, on November 20, 2012 at the downtown Central Public Library branch in Vancouver, at the book launch for Volume Three.

Occupy Wall Street General Assembly

Direct Democracy is Revolutionary

One does not sit around and wait for the revolution to arrive; one builds towards it!

In its current form (representative democracy), or in some other guise, capitalism  may collapse in a few years or linger for centuries. What comes next may be a system that humanity has already sampled or indeed something quite new. History has no meaning, no harm to those who prattle otherwise. Nothing is written, nothing is inevitable.

There have been many systems throughout history (feudalism, for one) that have teetered for one or two centuries before entrenching for a lasting period (a millennium).

Signing up for the duration without knowing what the future holds leads us to be voluntarists. So it is not a matter of preparing the “workers’ party” while we wait for capitalism to collapse, but rather of laying the groundwork for a different society within and without capitalism, regardless of whether the capitalist mode of production should endure or crumble. Should it endure, we have to rebuild from below the society that allowed it to gain a foothold. Should it crumble, it would be better if we were to lay the groundwork for a new society in advance. For spontaneity in the absence of a grassroots political culture and organization might bring with it the risk of our following an authoritarian route…

The righteous demand for justice now should go hand in hand with the construction of an enduring, underlying movement. Here again we must move beyond the tensions between revolutionary spontaneists for whom all things are achievable at once (spontaneists who forget that they have been or are such with decades of the workers’ movement behind them) and the Stalinist movements which reckon that we should all wait for our orders to arrive.

Representative “Democracy” is the Counter-Revolution

Supporters of a revolution, which is to say of a society freed of capitalism, are jaded at present. Especially those who were around for the past few decades. A time when, for many workers, the issue was not knowing whether a revolution needed making but when and how to go about making one…

Paradoxically, signing up for the long haul is the surest and fastest route. We have to take everything back to the start and ponder a body of actions and ideas that might build up to a genuine revolutionary movement. Besides the classic tools of trade unionism, there is a chance to build up a reservoir of thought that may crystallize a response to capitalism. We shouldn’t feel any sort of a complex when dealing with intellectuals, left or right. The federalist mode of operating magnifies our strength, for the networking of our ideas multiplies their strength. We reject the gulf between intellectuals and people, between party and trade union. We are all one and theory and practice are forever cross-fertilizing one another.

Anarcho-syndicalism should be profoundly popular and we must equip ourselves for this. Equipping ourselves means sparing a thought for the actual circulation of our publications, which seems obvious enough, but it applies also to searching for other ways of making propaganda.

Most of our propaganda originates with militants and is intelligible only to other militants. It is not enough for a tract to be distributed; it needs to be read as well. Our movement is still too focused upon the world of the militant and too heedful of what the militants from other organizations (or without organizations) are thinking, and not sufficiently alive to ways of genuinely communicating our ideas to the masses. The important point is to break out of the militant universe that has been arguing over the sex of angels ever since the siege of Constantinople.

True, this calls for effort of quite a different sort. Rather than disquisition about the finer points of the [anarchist] Synthesis and the Platform [of Libertarian Communists] for the consumption of anarchists, or about Trotsky’s part in Kronstadt for the benefit of Lutte Ouvrière members, or about the dangers posed by the National Front or indeed the treachery of the socialists, we must, as a matter of urgency, make ourselves intelligible to the majority of the population. The written word is extremely important and trade unionism must remain a schoolroom encouraging us all to read. But confining ourselves to the intellectual practice of the written word is elitist: acting as if everybody had ready access to the world of the written word equally so. The priority for the anarcho-syndicalist movement… is to target others for our ideas and actions by other means, starting with audio and video…

Among the classical formats of the revolutionary movement, there is this one: a small but ‘attuned’ number of people organize themselves into a group founded upon moral and ideological attitudes and then try to influence more broadly based movements or organizations. This is the outlook that spawned Stalinism and all its horrors. Moral beings end up sacrificing themselves or in countenancing everything in the name of efficacy. Efficacy: the word has been an excuse for all manner of criminality! True, efficacy is to be wished for, but one step at a time.

Alternatively, people organize on the basis of interests. Misconstrued short term interests lead to a corporatist trade unionism… But there is also such a thing as long-term self-interest.

We should not reject self-interest: it is a more peaceable course than the moralistic route. The moralistic route cannot be squared with libertarian thinking since it consists of seeking what is good for others, in spite of them.

This is how trade unionism should be, a congregation of individuals driven by their respective self-interest. We must have done with these notions of vanguards and active minorities who look upon themselves as the sole repositories of class consciousness. Anarcho-syndicalism, if we have to use big words, is the very opposite of this: it sees itself as a popular movement of regular people, not some clique of militants, not some “elite trade unionism”.

Anarcho-Syndicalism

On the other hand this is a trade unionism which is a vehicle for values that are part and parcel of it, values such as anti-clericalism, anti-militarism, feminism, these being the values of trade unionism rather than political values injected into trade unionism. Engagement with anti-militarism or ecology is a logical consequence of trade unionism.

The confusion arises from the fact that the political parties have made such activities their own and, above all, have sought to restrict the unions’ sphere of operations to straightforward wage claims. The political parties (whether they run for election or not) cannot countenance the existence of an organization that rejects the dividing line between individuals driven by a moral craving and those who band together on the basis of their interests. The fact remains that the best long term means of raising class consciousness, to use some grandiose terms, is actually for these two approaches, the moral and the interest-based, to be married.

The party political approach designed to cream off “the best elements” of the trade unions, or whatever movements and collectives, for the “nobler” organization is the most absurd, in that it belittles the political maturity (logos) of the “people”. A change of society is not achievable by violence from above and mind-sets cannot be altered by decree. An idea has to be widespread throughout society.

Awarding the party exclusive title to do the thinking renders the entire set-up precarious.  It is made up of normal people with their good points and shortcomings. One does not join a trade union on the basis of taking an exam on its thinking, but because it has something to offer us. Then again, a trade union is more than just a fight for wages; it is a culture, a collective school, embodying values which are held in esteem.

Democracy within the organization is a risk that has to be taken. An genuinely democratic organization has no taboos, no immutable rules. Certain revolutionaries (actually most of them), including the anti-authoritarians, libertarians and others among them, are democrats only up to a point. They aim to put “strait-jackets” on the organizations they build, failing to see that they are smuggling in a fundamental contradiction threatening the entire edifice right from the outset.

In a genuinely democratic trade union, every wage earner is free to join and partake in the life of his or her trade union, including tinkering with the means of the union and diverting it away from the initial goal the earliest members of the union set themselves.  Unless one takes this risk of democracy by, say, building immutable values into the union, then those values go unchampioned and are no longer pertinent but dead. Which is precisely what Simone Weil meant when she wrote that the trade unions were dead organizations!

The values that strike us as important, simply because they are imposed by the statutes of the trade union, require no further explanation and are in no danger of spreading. This is a paradox in which many revolutionary organizations (including – indeed, especially – the anarchist ones) are trapped.

Direct Action Against Capitalism

By contrast, in a free society there is no such imposition; these things are thrashed out. It is always an issue whether the values we champion ought to be defended in a democratic organization. Those values, which some would describe in a non-democratic context as ideology… are communist and anarchist values; in short, the values of the revolutionary movement. They have one meaning in the context of a democratic organization wherein they are up for argument and rebuttal, whereas they become ridiculous or dangerous if they are confined within a political party or trade union that lays down inflexible rules in order to defend them.

To conclude on this point, if some would rather stay inside a pure organization with specific rules, we ourselves would rather run the risk of having one day to leave the organization we are building. Freedom cannot be imposed, which is why a genuinely functioning democracy is rickety and risky, but it could hardly be otherwise.

Trade unionism in the proper sense is revolutionary… But it is the structure which is revolutionary, rather than its component members. Regular people are the ones who join trade unions and they are revolutionaries because of their self-organization, rather than being revolutionaries in the militant and personal sense of the term.

So let us roll up our sleeves and reflect upon the mistakes of the past, especially as they relate to revolutionary syndicalism, without thereby being prevented from experimenting, and let us leave it  to the union membership to deal with the logic of whatever needs they may encounter.

Cyrille Gallion

Power to the People: For Direct Action and Direct Democracy

Power to the People

Within the Paris Commune there were numerous groups which advocated and practiced direct action and direct democracy, pushing the Commune towards the social revolution. These sorts of ideas had been advocated by a variety of anarchists during the revolutions of 1848 (see Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One, Chapter 4), such as Proudhon, Dejacques, Pisacane and Coeurderoy, and were championed within the International by people like Bakunin, Varlin and the revolutionary collectivists associated with them.

The following excerpts are taken from a wall poster and newspaper article by the “Communal Club of the Third Arrondissement,” published at the beginning of April and May 1871 respectively. In the wall poster, the Club urges others to follow their example of taking direct action by using the churches as gathering places for the people. In the newspaper article, the Club emphasizes the need for the people to govern themselves directly, as had Proudhon and other anarchists. The idea that direct democracy is a kind of direct action was developed further by Murray Bookchin.

Anarcho-Syndicalism: For Direct Action and Direct Democracy

Wall Poster of the Communal Club of the Third Arrondissement

Citizens:

A great revolutionary act has just occurred: the population of the Third Arrondissement has at last taken possession—to serve the political education of the People—of a building that has until now served only the caste that is inherently hostile to any kind of progress.

The coming to power of the Commune has restored all their rights to the citizenry. It is for these citizens to exercise them both to serve the Commune and when necessary, to remind our delegates that their mandate is to save the Nation. This means that they should act energetically and temporarily leave aside much too great a respect for considerations of ‘legality’ — which in effect aids only the forces of reaction.

It is to you, citizens of all arrondissements, that we make this appeal.

Follow our example: open Communal clubs in all the churches. The priests can conduct services in the daytime and you can provide the people with political education in the evenings.

Govern Yourselves! Long Live the Commune!

The Communal Club, constituted at the beginning of May 1871, professes the following aims…

To fight the enemies of our communal rights, of our freedom and of the republic.

To uphold the rights of the people, to accomplish their political education, so that they may be able to govern themselves.

To recall our representatives to first principles, were they to stray from them, and to aid them in all their efforts to save the Republic.

But above all else, to insist on the sovereignty of the people; they must never renounce their right to supervise the actions of their representatives.

People, govern yourselves directly, through public meetings, through your press; bring pressure to bear on those who represent you; they will never go too far in the revolutionary direction.

If your representatives procrastinate or cease to move, push them forward, that we may reach the objective we are fighting for: the acquisition of our rights, the consolidation of the Republic and the victory of Justice.

Long live the Commune!

The Paris Commune

The Paris Commune and the First International

Prussian troops marching through Paris

By March 1871, German troops occupied France and what remained of the national government was dominated by rightwing, bourgeois and monarchist factions led by Adolphe Thiers, a notorious reactionary who had done battle with Proudhon during the 1848 French Revolution. On March 18, 1871, Thiers sent troops into Paris to seize artillery to prevent it from falling into the hands of the people. The attempt was quickly rebuffed, with the result that Thiers was forced to withdraw national government forces from Paris. This marked the beginning of the Paris Commune. The Central Committee of the National Guard, which was more of a popular militia than a government organization, quickly called for the election of a municipal government, the Commune of Paris. Many of the militants in the Paris sections of the International ran for office, issuing the following wall poster in support of their slate of working class candidates. But as the poster makes clear, the Paris Internationalists wanted the Commune to be an organ of popular self-management, not a conventional assembly of elected representatives.

19th century workshop

Notions of worker self-management had originated among working class French mutual aid societies and cooperatives in the 1830s and ’40s. Proudhon had helped articulate these concepts and tried to put them into practice during the French Revolution of 1848. Central to these conceptions of worker self-management is the concept of “worker democracy.” In contrast to parliamentary or representative democracy, worker democracy was direct, with the workers themselves making policy decisions in their own general assemblies. When necessary, in order to coordinate action and to work for common goals, delegates from each functional group would meet with delegates from the other groups, carrying with them “imperative mandates” stipulating the policies and actions that the base group had endorsed. These delegates were also subject to immediate recall if they failed to carry out the mandates that had been given to them. Proudhon and other advocates of worker democracy considered this form of direct, functionally based democracy to be the antithesis of representative government and incompatible with state power. As can be seen below, the majority of the Paris Internationalists were also anti-authoritarians, regarding the “principle of authority” as being profoundly incapable of dealing with social crises or bringing about the emancipation of the working class.

For Workers’ Self-Management & Direct Democracy

When the poster speaks of a “freely discussed social contract” providing the basis of a classless, egalitarian society, the reference is not to the “hypothetical” social contract of Rousseau and the Jacobins, which was meant to provide a justification for political authority, but the revolutionary social contract long advocated by Proudhon. As Proudhon put it in The Principle of Federation (1863), the revolutionary social contract “is more than a fiction; it is a positive and effective compact, which has actually been proposed, discussed, voted upon, and adopted, and which can properly be amended at the contracting parties’ will. Between the federal contract and that of Rousseau and 1793 [the Jacobin conception of the social contract] there is all the difference between a reality and a hypothesis” (Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One, Selection 18).

The Commune or Death

Workers:

A long series of setbacks and a catastrophe that could bring about the complete ruin of our country: this is the situation that France has been placed in by the governments which have dominated it.

Recent events [March 18, 1871] have demonstrated the strength of the people of Paris. We are convinced that a fraternal understanding will soon demonstrate their wisdom as well.

The principle of authority from hereon in is incapable of re-establishing order in the streets and getting factory work up and going again and this incapacity constitutes its negation.

The selfishness of vested interests has led to a state of general ruin and to social conflict. Liberty, equality and solidarity are needed if we are to achieve an order based on new foundations with the reorganization of labour being its first prerequisite.

Workers:

The independence of the Commune will mean a freely discussed social contract that will bring class conflict to an end and secure social equality.

We have demanded the emancipation of the working class and the elected Commune will ensure this, for it must provide all citizens with the means to defend their rights, to control effectively the actions of the representatives entrusted with the care of their interests, and to determine the gradual application of social reforms.

The autonomy of each Commune removes any trace of coercion from these demands and establishes the republic in its highest form.

Workers:

We have fought and have learned to suffer for our egalitarian principles. We cannot withdraw as long as we can help to lay the cornerstone of the new social structure.

What have we asked for?

The organization of credit, of exchange, and of production co-operatives in order to guarantee the worker the full value of his labour;

Free, lay, and complete education;

The rights to assemble, to organize and to a free press as well as the rights of the individual;

Municipal administration of police, armed forces, sanitation, statistics, etc.

We have been dupes of those who governed: allowing ourselves to be taken in while they slided, as required, from cajoling to suppressing the various factions whose mutual antagonism guaranteed their power.

Today the people of Paris are far-sighted. They reject this role of a child being directed by a preceptor, and in the municipal election [of March 26, 1871], resulting itself from the action of the people, they will remember that the principle that governs groups and associations is the same as that which should govern society. Therefore, just as they would reject any administration or president imposed by some power from without, they will reject any mayor or prefect imposed by a government that is foreign to their aspirations.

They will affirm their right—higher than the vote of an assembly—to remain masters in their own city and to constitute their municipal representation as they see fit, without seeking to impose it upon others.

We are convinced that on Sunday, March 26th, the people of Paris will consider it a matter of honour to vote for the Commune.

The Federated Council (Paris) of the International and the Federation of Trade Unions, March 23, 1871

Paris Commune: Appeal to the Workers

Anarchy and Democracy

Anarchy: Neither Dictatorship Nor Democracy

I have created a new page, Anarchy and Democracy: Bookchin, Malatesta and Fabbri, which consolidates three previous posts on anarchy and democracy by Murray Bookchin, Errico Malatesta and Luce Fabbri. With the overthrow of dictatorships in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt, Occupy movements everywhere, the continuing disaster of “unrepresentative” capitalist democracy and struggles for freedom across the globe, questions regarding what alternatives are available naturally come to the fore. Anarchy is one alternative that deserves more serious consideration. Anarchist ideas that retain their relevance today include workers’ self-management, libertarian socialism, voluntary association, federalism, decentralization and  direct democracy, ideas that are discussed in detail by a variety of writers in all three volumes of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas.

Malatesta: Democracy and Anarchy

Errico Malatesta

The most recent protests and military massacres in Egypt, in the midst of “democratic elections,” bring to mind the differences between democratic reforms and social revolution. In the following piece from 1924, Errico Malatesta, while agreeing that democracy is preferable to dictatorship, offers an anarchist critique of democracy, and explains why anarchy is better. As with Kropotkin in his 1919 Postscript to Words of a Rebel, Malatesta emphasizes that for the social revolution and anarchy to succeed, anarchists must offer practical solutions to the urgent problems that confront the people.

Democracy and Anarchy

The rampant dictatorial governments in Italy, Spain and Russia, which arouse such envy and longing among the more reactionary and timid parties across the world, are supplying dispossessed ‘democracy’ with a sort of new virginity. Thus we see the creatures of the old regimes, well-accustomed to the wicked art of politics, responsible for repression and massacres of working people, re-emerging — where they do not lack the courage — and presenting themselves as men of progress, seeking to capture the near future in the name of liberation. And, given the situation, they could even succeed.

There is something to be said for the criticisms made of democracy by dictatorial regimes, and the way they expose the vices and lies of democracy. And I remember that anarchist, Hermann Sandomirski, a Bolshevik fellow-traveller with whom we had bittersweet contact at the time of the Geneva conference, and who is now trying to couple Lenin with Bakunin, no less; I say I remember Sandomirski who, in order to defend the Russian regime, dragged out his Kropotkin to demonstrate that democracy is not the best imaginable form of social structure. His method of reasoning, as a Russian, put me in mind and I think I told him so — of the reasoning made by some of his compatriots when, in response to the indignation of the civilised world at the Tsar’s stripping, flogging and hanging of women, they argued that if men and women were to have equal rights they should also accept equal responsibilities. Those supporters of prison and the scaffold remembered the rights of women only when they could serve as a pretext for new outrages! Thus dictatorships oppose democratic governments only when they discover that there is a form of government which leaves even greater room for despotism and tyranny for those who manage to seize power.

For me there is no doubt that the worst of democracies is always preferable, if only from the educational point of view, than the best of dictatorships. Of course democracy, so-called government of the people, is a lie; but the lie always slightly binds the liar and limits the extent of his arbitrary power. Of course the ‘sovereign people’ is a clown of a sovereign, a slave with a papier-maché crown and sceptre. But to believe oneself free, even when one is not, is always better than to know oneself to be a slave, and to accept slavery as something just and inevitable.

Democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy: that is, government by the few to the advantage of a privileged class. But we can still fight it in the name of freedom and equality, unlike those who have replaced it or want to replace it with something worse.

We are not democrats for, among other reasons, democracy sooner or later leads to war and dictatorship. Just as we are not supporters of dictatorships, among other things, because dictatorship arouses a desire for democracy, provokes a return to democracy, and thus tends to perpetuate a vicious circle in which human society oscillates between open and brutal tyranny and a false and lying freedom.

So, we declare war on dictatorship and war on democracy. But what do we put in their place?

Not all democrats are like those described above — hypocrites who are more or less aware that in the name of the people they wish to dominate the people and exploit and oppress them.

There are many, especially among the young republicans, who have a serious belief in democracy and see it as the means of obtaining full and complete freedom of development for all. These are the young

people we should like to disabuse, persuade not to mistake an abstraction, ‘the people’, for the living reality, which is men and women with all their different needs, passions and often contradictory aspirations.

It is not the intention here to repeat our critique of the parliamentary system and all the means thought up to have deputies who really do represent the will of the people; a critique which, after fifty years of anarchist propaganda is at last accepted and even repeated by those writers who most affect to despise our ideas (e.g. Political Science by Senator Gaetano Mosca).

We will limit ourselves to inviting our young friends to use greater precision of language, in the conviction that once the phrases are dissected they themselves will see how vacuous they are.

‘Government of the people’ no, because this presupposes what could never happen — complete unanimity of will of all the individuals that make up the people.

It would be closer to the truth to say, ‘government of the majority of the people.’ This implies a minority that must either rebel or submit to the will of others.

But it is never the case that the representatives of the majority of the people are all of the same mind on all questions; it is therefore necessary to have recourse again to the majority system and thus we will get closer still to the truth with: ‘government of the majority of the elected by the majority of the electors.’

Which is already beginning to bear a strong resemblance to minority government.

Anarchists in London

And if one then takes into account the way in which elections are held, how the political parties and parliamentary groupings are formed and how laws are drawn up and voted and applied, it is easy to understand what has already been proved by universal historical experience: even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force. Therefore, those who really want ‘government of the people’ in the sense that each can assert his or her own will, ideas and needs, must ensure that no one, majority or minority, can rule over others; in other words, they must abolish government, meaning any coercive organisation, and replace it with the free organisation of those with common interests and aims.

This would be very simple if every group and individual could live in isolation and on their own, in their own way, supporting themselves independently of the rest, supplying their own material and moral needs.

But this is not possible, and if it were, it would not be desirable because it would mean the decline of humanity into barbarism and savagery.

If they are determined to defend their own autonomy, their own liberty, every individual or group must therefore understand the ties of solidarity that bind them to the rest of humanity, and possess a fairly developed sense of sympathy and love for their fellows, so as to know how voluntarily to make those sacrifices essential to life in a society that brings the greatest possible benefits on every given occasion.

But above all it must be made impossible for some to impose themselves on, and sponge off, the vast majority by material force.

Let us abolish the gendarme, the man armed in the service of the despot, and in one way or another we shall reach free agreement, because without such agreement, free or forced, it is not possible to live.

But even free agreement will always benefit most those who are intellectually and technically prepared. We therefore recommend to our friends and those who truly wish the good of all, to study the most urgent problems, those that will require a practical solution the very day that the people shake off the yoke that oppresses them.

Pensiero e Volontà, March 1924

(English translation by Gillian Fleming and Vernon Richards, from Errico Malatesta, The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles 1924-1931, Freedom Press, 1995).

Luce Fabbri: Transforming Democracy

With the overthrow of dictatorships in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt and the continuing struggle for freedom throughout the Middle East, as the “Arab Spring” carries on into the fall of 2011, questions regarding what alternatives are available naturally come to the fore. Anarchy is one alternative that deserves more serious consideration. Anarchist ideas that retain their relevance today include workers’ self-management, libertarian socialism, voluntary association, federalism, decentralization and  direct democracy, ideas that are discussed in detail by a variety of writers in all three volumes of Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Recently, I have been posting on my blog articles focusing on these topics to supplement the material included in the printed volumes of the Anarchism anthology.

Luce Fabbri (1908-2000) was an Italian born anarchist writer who spent most of her life in Uruguay, where her family eventually emigrated after being forced to flee Fascist Italy. Her father was the great anarchist critic of fascism and totalitarianism, Luigi Fabbri (Volume One, Selection 113). Luce Fabbri experienced dictatorship both in Italy and, for a time, Uruguay. In the following excerpts from her article, “More on the Matter of Democracy,” translated by Paul Sharkey, she argues that anarchy and democracy are not incompatible, but that anarchy represents a further step forward in the struggle for human liberation.

From Democracy to Anarchy

Anarchists are the eternal opposition: it will always be their task to combat governments and they must never consider mounting opposition from the governing heights. They are the vanquished of history as commonly understood and yet, with every added dose of freedom and fairness, they score little victories, but are never happy with that victory and are forever winding up in jail. Their ideal is forever “on the horizon” as [Eduardo] Colombo so pungently puts it in a recent article (“Anarchy is the horizon rather than the end of history”, in Volontá, 1982, No. 2, p. 98). And we know that the horizon is the immeasurable circumference of which we are the centre and which changes position the moment we change ours. Embracing this way of thinking about anarchism is the precondition for any realistic view of our position and our task in the changing times in which we do and are destined to live…

Democracy and anarchy are not mutually contradictory but the one represents an advance upon the other. In fact, there is no diametrical opposition between the rights of the majority upon which democracy is built and the free consent that is characteristic of libertarian solutions; the difference is, instead, a difference of degree, since we see the point as trying to manage conflicts through tolerance, acknowledgment of the rights of the minority and of individuals, federal coordination and freedom of initiative. But the obsession with avoiding the violent ascendancy of the minority is one that we all share. And the traditional democratic mentality in the broadest sense always represents a defence against that danger…

[D]emocracies are particularly vulnerable, precisely because they persist in having power as their organizing factor.  The telling factor in the initial defeat of Franco (which is to say, up until all the governments lined up, through action or omission, against the Spanish people) was the anarchists who naturally formed the backbone of popular spontaneity. They operated more or less well outside the parameters of democratic institutions, except at the point when CNT representatives took their places in the government, something they deemed necessary on account of the desperate needs of the war, but a move made in knowing contravention of their own principles and looked upon more as a defeat than as a victory. And, beyond the narrow parameters of democracy, they so successfully breathed life into their revolution that it took the combination of a totalitarian stab in the back plus the onslaught of Franco’s armies, abetted by half of Europe, plus the complicit indifference of the other half, for it to be crushed. But all of this was feasible thanks to the organizing, propaganda, idea and program-generating efforts (Congress of Zaragoza [Volume One, Selection 124]) made against a democratic backdrop prior to July 1936. And it all began that July 19th with the anarchists rallying to the defence of basic freedoms alongside all the other antifascist forces against the rebel army. For us, the advantage of democracy, however limited, is precisely the fact that defence of certain facets of it (against a totalitarian regime) does not imply indiscriminately buying into the whole package…

Those who figure that all State-based regimes… are substantially the same, look upon anyone prepared to draw distinctions and operate in accordance with them as espousing a reformist line, defined as a readiness to adapt to existing society, a retreat to superseded positions on the basis of a convenient, pragmatic approach to the “lesser evil“. Now, where I myself am concerned at any rate, this is anything but the case. It is a matter of occupying what spaces there are that are still free (and which must, with our help, be kept free) in order to nurture an overhaul that should start with ourselves and then radiate out from us, placing all problems on a new footing, breaking with the authority and violence which are characteristic of the world today. It is a matter of rediscovering that all men are brothers and equals, though not the same, that their lives are dependent on one another, that each one has his own personal world to defend: it is a matter of not recognizing the power (be it political or economic) of one man over another, in a context changing faster than the human mind can keep pace with. Man himself does not change as readily as he can change the things surrounding him, and in the turmoil a diffuse violence surfaces, ideas become confused and the unwary individual, fearing that there is worse to come, surrenders to the omnipotence of the State the way he once would have surrendered to the omnipotence of God. This is a slippery slope that leads to the abyss. In order to resist, one has to act and one has to be constructive: at the same time, one has to be familiar with this incandescent world, a participant in its lightning quick process of change, and one has to do so from as autonomous a position as possible. The situation is such as to require a new mind-set if the species is to survive, a mind-set that is not tied to traditional models. And, for a start, we have to break out of the vicious circle of violence that cries out for further violence and which is always authoritarian. In a society like this, that means embracing whatever there is in this world that is neither violent nor authoritarian and making that the starting point for a libertarian-inclined future by breathing a new spirit into it…

Now, the creative fight against the state has become a very complicated affair, due to the huge array of agencies hitched to the machinery of state which (however poorly) oversees social welfare, health care, meteorological services, the struggle against pollution, the distribution of power and drinking water supplies, the organization of transport services, postal services, telegraph communications, telephone services, radio and television services, schooling for all, retirement schemes… Socializing all of this without undue bureaucratization and ensuring that nothing falls into private hands, or, worse still, into the hands of agencies or parties that might use them in order to exercise power, is a difficult undertaking requiring not just the strength that flows from consensus and the power of numbers, but also proficiency in every one of those spheres (not to mention a good sprinkling of patience and tolerance, which goes without saying, but the Spanish revolution has shown these to be eminently revolutionary qualities). It involves an effort to decentralize along federal lines a mechanism with which one needs to be comprehensively familiar and that prior to the advent of any opportunity to tinker with it.

Now, decentralization of utilities, the struggle to have grassroots forces take them in hand, are feasible only in a democratic society and represent positive partial goals, even should these be “reformist”. And, let me say it again, they require specific competencies. Which brings us back to the theme of education again. One can only transform that with which one has a familiarity and the tools of transformation are becoming increasingly complex, so complex that the present generation is even now losing out in terms of affective life. Ignorance is no defence for us against what Alvin Toffler has termed “Futureshock“. Mankind can grapple with that only if it ceases being a mass and if every individual comes into his own and familiarizes himself with the world around him so that he can devise his own, individual response. And at present this can only be achieved through knowledge and conscious collaboration with his fellows. I figure that libertarian socialism (however little self-awareness and however much unselfconsciousness there may be) is the only thing that can occupy that ground today…

It is not exactly a matter of being a supporter of this or that state (East versus West, North against South, industrialized nations versus the Third World etc., etc.). It can happen, and in fact is a certainty, that, as someone once said, there is more of a revolutionary mind-set in Poland than in some democratic states. All I am saying is that among the demands made by [the Polish independent trade union movement] Solidarity in a struggle dear in terms of sweat and blood, there are many which are already extant, albeit imperfect and in peril, in countries more or less governed by democracy. It is to be desired that the yearning for socialism should not disappear from the struggle for freedom. Should it disappear, the fault will lie, not with democracy but with the totalitarian rule that has emblazoned a phony socialism on its banner, barring the way to genuine socialism. So it is not a matter of “playing the democratic card” and repeating [Alexander] Solzhenitsyn’s tragic mistake (albeit that Solzhenitsyn is no socialist). The point is, and I apologize for repeating myself here, not to defend a democratic system but rather to defend the fundamental freedoms existing within it from the assaults from totalitarian forces and, under their aegis, bolster all collective bodies not linked to the state or which are susceptible to a process of de-statification, decentralization in a libertarian and socialist sense (hence the focus I think there should be on cooperatives, for all their shortcomings, and my advocacy of participation in trade union activity at grassroots levels). More important still is creative activity in this sphere: urban communities, rural collectives, operationally coordinated neighbourhood groups, etc.

Plainly I will meet objections to the effect that we should not be relying on a mentality other than our own, but rather trying to turn it libertarian. Naturally we will never give up on our efforts at persuasion and we should never be slow to set an example (which carries more weight but is also harder to do). But — aside from the party political game and the powers-that-be — the democratic mind-set is, after all, not that far removed from our own. What divides us is the apocalyptical insurrectionism of one segment of our movement on the one hand, and, on the other, people’s faith in the traditions of representative democracy, essentially in the ballot-box, two hurdles that have been losing their impact (voting having lost much of its credibility).

In any event, since the essence of the libertarian mind-set is tolerance and since we represent a minority force, our relations with others are dictated by how much or how little affinity there is between us. So I believe that our starting-point and the focus of our efforts are located among the masses who regard themselves as democrats. We should aim to socialize and federalize democracy and turn it into a direct, socialist democracy. Surrender to the State does not come into it. Our role is to represent the anti-statist axis. Which is a difficult role to fill unless we get away from the simplistic view of the all or nothing, “pull it out by the roots!” approach, but it is worth the effort. It is an ongoing vocation that does not hold out the prospect of “total” victory, but is worthwhile for all that.

Revolution is a magical word, one of which we ought to be mistrustful, as we should be of all magic. But it is a cherished term not yet ready to be consigned to the archives. But we need to be careful about how it is used. And, above all, I think it should never be used as a synonym for “insurrection”. I count myself a revolutionary. But as I see it, revolution is thoroughgoing change in consciousnesses and in things. I think the big mistake is to think that it should necessarily happen first in the realm of things. Out of this latter belief comes the very significant role assigned in the revolution to the act of insurrection which readjusts the power relationships. Sometimes that insurrection fails to materialize and sometimes it comes later, after the change has taken place and the situation has reached a breaking point, triggering violent resistance from wounded interests and thereby rendering counter-violence inevitable. Thus the insurrectionist phase was not present in the Spanish revolution… it was the outcome of a reactionary, conservative insurrection. From which revolution ensued, it being ripe in people’s minds and indeed in the reconstruction plans of the CNT unions, which were the strongest ones.

In actual fact, no change is of any value and endures unless it is the product of a sufficiently widespread determination. The more widely shared the determination, the less violent and thus less authoritarian the change. Far from adapting to capitalist democracy, such a revolutionary determination wants to reach the deepest recesses and is not content with “reforms”… Let us take note — at the risk of stating the obvious — that… someone who does not reject power can achieve nothing in terms of the creative: he may win through the insurrection or the coup d’état, but he will lose the revolution by dint of the very exercise of power, and the more absolute his power, the more radically will he be defeated…

What is to become of socialism? It has a saviour role to fulfill in today’s world, but can only perform it through a freedom devoid of compromises with the State, which is to say, where independent trade unions and cooperatives can be organized that shift basic control of production and consumption into different hands. And here, by way of conclusion, let us return to the core argument of this essay as indicated by its title: democracy. The… [1956] Hungarian revolution was made in the name of factory councils, the agencies of a free trade unionism, and was crushed by a totalitarianism characterized by, among other things, state-controlled trade unionism. Where the right to strike is non-existent, where economic power and the police are in the same hands, all creative endeavour along socialist lines becomes desperately hard and the only thing possible is rebellion in order to secure that essential space which, albeit imperfectly and at the cost of much strife, survives in countries where basic freedoms have not been done away with. The fact is that only by moving onward can man save himself: but it is equally a fact that no forward movement is possible unless he manages to hold on to what he has achieved.

Revista Anarchica, No. 104 (1983)