795 lines
46 KiB
Plaintext
795 lines
46 KiB
Plaintext
======================
|
|
``Notes on Anarchism''
|
|
in
|
|
_For Reasons of State_
|
|
======================
|
|
Noam Chomsky, 1970
|
|
======================
|
|
|
|
Transcribed by rael@ll.mit.edu (Bill Lear)
|
|
|
|
A French writer, sympathetic to anarchism, wrote in the 1890s that
|
|
``anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything''---including,
|
|
he noted those whose acts are such that ``a mortal enemy of anarchism could
|
|
not have done better.''[1] There have been many styles of thought and
|
|
action that have been referred to as ``anarchist.'' It would be hopeless to
|
|
try to encompass all of these conflicting tendencies in some general theory
|
|
or ideology. And even if we proceed to extract from the history of
|
|
libertarian thought a living, evolving tradition, as Daniel Gu\'erin does
|
|
in _Anarchism_, it remains difficult to formulate its doctrines as a
|
|
specific and determinate theory of society and social change. The anarchist
|
|
historian Rudolph Rocker, who presents a systematic conception of the
|
|
development of anarchist thought towards anarchosyndicalism, along lines
|
|
that bear comparison to Gu\'erins work, puts the matter well when he writes
|
|
that anarchism is not
|
|
|
|
a fixed, self-enclosed social system but rather a definite trend
|
|
in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with
|
|
the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental
|
|
institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all
|
|
the individual and social forces in life. Even freedom is only a
|
|
relative, not an absolute concept, since it tends constantly to
|
|
become broader and to affect wider circles in more manifold ways.
|
|
For the anarchist, freedom is not an abstract philosophical
|
|
concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being
|
|
to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and
|
|
talents with which nature has endowed him, and turn them to
|
|
social account. The less this natural development of man is
|
|
influenced by ecclesiastical or political guardianship, the more
|
|
efficient and harmonious will human personality become, the more
|
|
will it become the measure of the intellectual culture of the
|
|
society in which it has grown.[2]
|
|
|
|
One might ask what value there is in studying a ``definite trend in the
|
|
historic development of mankind'' that does not articulate a specific and
|
|
detailed social theory. Indeed, many commentators dismiss anarchism as
|
|
utopian, formless, primitive, or otherwise incompatible with the realities
|
|
of a complex society. One might, however, argue rather differently: that at
|
|
every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of
|
|
authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been
|
|
justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic
|
|
development, but that now contribute to---rather than alleviate---material
|
|
and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change
|
|
fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and
|
|
unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend.
|
|
Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable
|
|
social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be
|
|
treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear
|
|
that ``human nature'' or ``the demands of efficiency'' or ``the complexity
|
|
of modern life'' requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic
|
|
rule.
|
|
Nevertheless, at a particular time there is every reason to develop,
|
|
insofar as our understanding permits, a specific realization of this
|
|
definite trend in the historic development of mankind, appropriate to the
|
|
tasks of the moment. For Rocker, ``the problem that is set for our time is
|
|
that of freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political
|
|
and social enslavement''; and the method is not the conquest and exercise
|
|
of state power, nor stultifying parliamentarianism, but rather ``to
|
|
reconstruct the economic life of the peoples from the ground up and build
|
|
it up in the spirit of Socialism.''
|
|
|
|
But only the producers themselves are fitted for this task, since
|
|
they are the only value-creating element in society out of which
|
|
a new future can arise. Theirs must be the task of freeing labor
|
|
from all the fetters which economic exploitation has fastened on
|
|
it, of freeing society from all the institutions and procedure of
|
|
political power, and of opening the way to an alliance of free
|
|
groups of men and women based on co-operative labor and a planned
|
|
administration of things in the interest of the community. To
|
|
prepare the toiling masses in the city and country for this great
|
|
goal and to bind them together as a militant force is the
|
|
objective of modern Anarcho-syndicalism, and in this its whole
|
|
purpose is exhausted. [P. 108]
|
|
|
|
As a socialist, Rocker would take for granted ``that the serious,
|
|
final, complete liberation of the workers is possible only upon one
|
|
condition: that of the appropriation of capital, that is, of raw material
|
|
and all the tools of labor, including land, by the whole body of the
|
|
workers.''[3] As an anarchosyndicalist, he insists, further, that the
|
|
workers' organizations create ``not only the ideas, but also the facts of
|
|
the future itself'' in the prerevolutionary period, that they embody in
|
|
themselves the structure of the future society---and he looks forward to a
|
|
social revolution that will dismantle the state apparatus as well as
|
|
expropriate the expropriators. ``What we put in place of the government is
|
|
industrial organization.''
|
|
|
|
Anarcho-syndicalists are convinced that a Socialist economic
|
|
order cannot be created by the decrees and statutes of a
|
|
government, but only by the solidaric collaboration of the
|
|
workers with hand and brain in each special branch of production;
|
|
that is, through the taking over of the management of all plants
|
|
by the producers themselves under such form that the separate
|
|
groups, plants, and branches of industry are independent members
|
|
of the general economic organism and systematically carry on
|
|
production and the distribution of the products in the interest
|
|
of the community on the basis of free mutual agreements. [p. 94]
|
|
|
|
Rocker was writing at a moment when such ideas had been put into
|
|
practice in a dramatic way in the Spanish Revolution. Just prior to the
|
|
outbreak of the revolution, the anarchosyndicalist economist Diego Abad de
|
|
Santillan had written:
|
|
|
|
...in facing the problem of social transformation, the Revolution
|
|
cannot consider the state as a medium, but must depend on the
|
|
organization of producers.
|
|
We have followed this norm and we find no need for the
|
|
hypothesis of a superior power to organized labor, in order to
|
|
establish a new order of things. We would thank anyone to point
|
|
out to us what function, if any, the State can have in an
|
|
economic organization, where private property has been abolished
|
|
and in which parasitism and special privilege have no place. The
|
|
suppression of the State cannot be a languid affair; it must be
|
|
the task of the Revolution to finish with the State. Either the
|
|
Revolution gives social wealth to the producers in which case the
|
|
producers organize themselves for due collective distribution and
|
|
the State has nothing to do; or the Revolution does not give
|
|
social wealth to the producers, in which case the Revolution has
|
|
been a lie and the State would continue.
|
|
Our federal council of economy is not a political power but
|
|
an economic and administrative regulating power. It receives its
|
|
orientation from below and operates in accordance with the
|
|
resolutions of the regional and national assemblies. It is a
|
|
liaison corps and nothing else.[4]
|
|
|
|
Engels, in a letter of 1883, expressed his disagreement with this
|
|
conception as follows:
|
|
|
|
The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the
|
|
proletarian revolution must _begin_ by doing away with the
|
|
political organization of the state....But to destroy it at such
|
|
a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which
|
|
the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power,
|
|
hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic
|
|
revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in
|
|
a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those
|
|
after the Paris commune.[5]
|
|
|
|
In contrast, the anarchists---most eloquently Bakunin---warned of the
|
|
dangers of the ``red bureaucracy,'' which would prove to be ``the most vile
|
|
and terrible lie that our century has created.''[6] The anarchosyndicalist
|
|
Fernand Pelloutier asked: ``Must even the transitory state to which we have
|
|
to submit necessarily and fatally be a collectivist jail? Can't it consist
|
|
in a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and
|
|
consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?''[7]
|
|
I do not pretend to know the answers to this question. But it seems
|
|
clear that unless there is, in some form, a positive answer, the chances
|
|
for a truly democratic revolution that will achieve the humanistic ideals
|
|
of the left are not great. Martin Buber put the problem succinctly when he
|
|
wrote: ``One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has
|
|
been turned into a club to put forth leaves.''[8] The question of conquest
|
|
or destruction of state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue
|
|
dividing him from Marx.[9] In one form or another, the problem has arisen
|
|
repeatedly in the century since, dividing ``libertarian'' from
|
|
``authoritarian'' socialists.
|
|
Despite Bakunin's warnings about the red bureaucracy, and their
|
|
fulfillment under Stalin's dictatorship, it would obviously be a gross
|
|
error in interpreting the debates of a century ago to rely on the claims of
|
|
contemporary social movements as to their historical origins. In
|
|
particular, it is perverse to regard Bolshevism as ``Marxism in practice.''
|
|
Rather, the left-wing critique of Bolshevism, taking account of the
|
|
historical circumstances surrounding the Russian Revolution, is far more to
|
|
the point.[10]
|
|
|
|
The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor movement opposed the
|
|
Leninists because they did not go far enough in exploiting the
|
|
Russian upheavals for strictly proletarian ends. They became
|
|
prisoners of their environment and used the international radical
|
|
movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which soon became
|
|
synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The
|
|
``bourgeois'' aspects of the Russian Revolution were now
|
|
discovered in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of
|
|
international social-democracy, differing from the latter only on
|
|
tactical issues.[11]
|
|
|
|
If one were to seek a single leading idea within the anarchist
|
|
tradition, it should, I believe, be that expressed by Bakunin when, in
|
|
writing on the Paris Commune, he identified himself as follows:
|
|
|
|
I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it as the unique
|
|
condition under which intelligence, dignity and human happiness
|
|
can develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty conceded,
|
|
measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in
|
|
reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some
|
|
founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic,
|
|
egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the School
|
|
of J.-J. Rousseau and other schools of bourgeois liberalism,
|
|
which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by
|
|
the State which limits the rights of each---an idea that leads
|
|
inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero. No, I
|
|
mean the only kind of liberty that is worthy of the name, liberty
|
|
that consists in the full development of all the material,
|
|
intellectual and moral powers that are latent in each person;
|
|
liberty that recognizes no restrictions other than those
|
|
determined by the laws of our own individual nature, which cannot
|
|
properly be regarded as restrictions since these laws are not
|
|
imposed by any outside legislator beside or above us, but are
|
|
immanent and inherent, forming the very basis of our material,
|
|
intellectual and moral being---they do not limit us but are the
|
|
real and immediate conditions of our freedom.[12]
|
|
|
|
These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in
|
|
Rousseau's _Discourse on Inequality_, Humboldt's _Limits of State Action_,
|
|
Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is
|
|
the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be
|
|
granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial
|
|
capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian
|
|
socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of
|
|
the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into
|
|
an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same
|
|
assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the
|
|
state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable.
|
|
This is clear, for example, from the classic work of Humboldt, _The Limits
|
|
of State Action_, which anticipated and perhaps inspired Mill. This classic
|
|
of liberal thought, completed in 1792, is in its essence profoundly, though
|
|
prematurely, anticapitalist. Its ideas must be attenuated beyond
|
|
recognition to be transmuted into an ideology of industrial capitalism.
|
|
Humboldt's vision of a society in which social fetters are replaced by
|
|
social bonds and labor is freely undertaken suggests the early Marx., with
|
|
his discussion of the ``alienation of labor when work is external to the
|
|
worker...not part of his nature...[so that] he does not fulfill himself in
|
|
his work but denies himself...[and is] physically exhausted and mentally
|
|
debased,'' alienated labor that ``casts some of the workers back into a
|
|
barbarous kind of work and turns others into machines,'' thus depriving man
|
|
of his ``species character'' of ``free conscious activity'' and
|
|
``productive life.'' Similarly, Marx conceives of ``a new type of human
|
|
being who _needs_ his fellow men....[The workers' association becomes] the
|
|
real constructive effort to create the social texture of future human
|
|
relations.''[13] It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed
|
|
to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper
|
|
assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free
|
|
association. On the same assumptions, capitalist relations of production,
|
|
wage labor, competitiveness, the ideology of ``possessive
|
|
individualism''---all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman.
|
|
Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the
|
|
liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.
|
|
Rudolf Rocker describes modern anarchism as ``the confluence of the
|
|
two great currents which during and since the French revolution have found
|
|
such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe:
|
|
Socialism and Liberalism.'' The classical liberal ideals, he argues, were
|
|
wrecked on the realities of capitalist economic forms. Anarchism is
|
|
necessarily anticapitalist in that it ``opposes the exploitation of man by
|
|
man.'' But anarchism also opposes ``the dominion of man over man.'' It
|
|
insists that ``_socialism will be free or it will not be at all_. In its
|
|
recognition of this lies the genuine and profound justification for the
|
|
existence of anarchism.''[14] From this point of view, anarchism may be
|
|
regarded as the libertarian wing of socialism. It is in this spirit that
|
|
Daniel Gu\'erin has approached the study of anarchism in _Anarchism_ and
|
|
other works.[15] Gu\'erin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that ``every
|
|
anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an
|
|
anarchist.'' Similarly Bakunin, in his ``anarchist manifesto'' of 1865, the
|
|
program of his projected international revolutionary fraternity, laid down
|
|
the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist.
|
|
A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of
|
|
production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as
|
|
incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and
|
|
under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward
|
|
to a society in which labor will ``become not only a means of life, but
|
|
also the highest want in life,''[16] an impossibility when the worker is
|
|
driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: ``no form
|
|
of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious that another, can do
|
|
away with the misery of wage-labor itself.''[17] A consistent anarchist
|
|
must oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying specialization
|
|
of labor that takes place when the means for developing production
|
|
|
|
mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him
|
|
to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such
|
|
a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from
|
|
him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very
|
|
proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it
|
|
as an independent power...[18]
|
|
|
|
Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but
|
|
rather as a feature of capitalist relations of production. The society of
|
|
the future must be concerned to ``replace the detail-worker of
|
|
today...reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed
|
|
individual, fit for a variety of labours...to whom the different social
|
|
functions...are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural
|
|
powers.''[19] The prerequisite is the abolition of capital and wage labor
|
|
as social categories (not to speak of the industrial armies of the ``labor
|
|
state'' or the various modern forms of totalitarianism since capitalism).
|
|
The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a specialized tool
|
|
of production, might in principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with
|
|
the proper development and use of technology, but not under the conditions
|
|
of autocratic control of production by those who make man an instrument to
|
|
serve their ends, overlooking his individual purposes, in Humboldt's
|
|
phrase.
|
|
Anarchosyndicalists sought, even under capitalism, to create ``free
|
|
associations of free producers'' that would engage in militant struggle and
|
|
prepare to take over the organization of production on a democratic basis.
|
|
These associations would serve as ``a practical school of anarchism.''[20]
|
|
If private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon's often
|
|
quoted phrase, merely a form of ``theft''---``the exploitation of the weak
|
|
by the strong''[21]---control of production by a state bureaucracy, no
|
|
matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions
|
|
under which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in
|
|
life. Both, then, must be overcome.
|
|
In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the
|
|
means of production,, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle
|
|
to bring about ``the third and last emancipatory phase of history,'' the
|
|
first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners
|
|
out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act
|
|
of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and
|
|
voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).[22] The imminent
|
|
danger to ``civilization'' was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848:
|
|
|
|
As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of
|
|
many other rights, it was easily defended---or rather it was not
|
|
attacked; it was then the citadel of society while all the other
|
|
rights were its outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack
|
|
and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail it. but
|
|
today, when the right of property is regarded as the last
|
|
undestroyed remnant of the aristocratic world, when it alone is
|
|
left standing, the sole privilege in an equalized society, it is
|
|
a different matter. Consider what is happening in the hearts of
|
|
the working-classes, although I admit they are quiet as yet. It
|
|
is true that they are less inflamed than formerly by political
|
|
passions properly speaking; but do you not see that their
|
|
passions, far from being political, have become social? Do you
|
|
not see that, little by little, ideas and opinions are spreading
|
|
amongst them which aim not merely at removing such and such laws,
|
|
such a ministry or such a government, but at breaking up the very
|
|
foundations of society itself?[23]
|
|
|
|
The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceeded
|
|
|
|
to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes,
|
|
gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property
|
|
which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed
|
|
at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make
|
|
individual property a truth by transforming the means of
|
|
production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving
|
|
and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and
|
|
associated labor.[24]
|
|
|
|
The Commune, of course, was drowned in blood. The nature of the
|
|
``civilization'' that the workers of Paris sought to overcome in their
|
|
attack on ``the very foundations of society itself'' was revealed, once
|
|
again, when the troops of the Versailles government reconquered Paris from
|
|
its population. As Marx wrote, bitterly but accurately:
|
|
|
|
The civilization and justice of bourgeois order comes out in its
|
|
lurid light whenever the slaves and drudges of that order rise
|
|
against their masters. Then this civilization and justice stand
|
|
forth as undisguised savagery and lawless revenge...the infernal
|
|
deeds of the soldiery reflect the innate spirit of that
|
|
civilization of which they are the mercenary vindicators....The
|
|
bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the
|
|
wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at
|
|
the destruction of brick and mortar. [_Ibid_., pp. 74, 77]
|
|
|
|
Despite the violent destruction of the Commune, Bakunin wrote that
|
|
Paris opens a new era, ``that of the definitive and complete emancipation
|
|
of the popular masses and their future true solidarity, across and despite
|
|
state boundaries...the next revolution of man, international in solidarity,
|
|
will be the resurrection of Paris''---a revolution that the world still
|
|
awaits.
|
|
The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist
|
|
of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized
|
|
labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of
|
|
workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not
|
|
exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. He
|
|
will, in short, oppose
|
|
|
|
the organization of production by the Government. It means
|
|
State-socialism, the command of the State officials over
|
|
production and the command of managers, scientists,
|
|
shop-officials in the shop....The goal of the working class is
|
|
liberation from exploitation. This goal is not reached and cannot
|
|
be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting
|
|
itself for the bourgeoisie. It is only realized by the workers
|
|
themselves being master over production.
|
|
|
|
These remarks are taken from ``Five Theses on the Class Struggle'' by the
|
|
left-wing Marxist Anton Pannekoek, one of the outstanding left theorists of
|
|
the council communist movement. And in fact, radical Marxism merges with
|
|
anarchist currents.
|
|
As a further illustration, consider the following characterization of
|
|
``revolutionary Socialism'':
|
|
|
|
The revolutionary Socialist denies that State ownership can end
|
|
in anything other than a bureaucratic despotism. We have seen why
|
|
the State cannot democratically control industry. Industry can
|
|
only be democratically owned and controlled by the workers
|
|
electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative
|
|
committees. Socialism will be fundamentally an industrial system;
|
|
its constituencies will be of an industrial character. Thus those
|
|
carrying on the social activities and industries of society will
|
|
be directly represented in the local and central councils of
|
|
social administration. In this way the powers of such delegates
|
|
will flow upwards from those carrying on the work and conversant
|
|
with the needs of the community. When the central administrative
|
|
industrial committee meets it will represent every phase of
|
|
social activity. Hence the capitalist political or geographical
|
|
state will be replaced by the industrial administrative committee
|
|
of Socialism. The transition from the one social system to the
|
|
other will be the _social revolution._ The political State
|
|
throughout history has meant the government _of men_ by ruling
|
|
classes; the Republic of Socialism will be the government _of
|
|
industry_ administered on behalf of the whole community. The
|
|
former meant the economic and political subjection of the many;
|
|
the latter will mean the economic freedom of all---it will be,
|
|
therefore, a true democracy.
|
|
|
|
This programmatic statement appears in William Paul's _The State, its
|
|
Origins and Functions_, written in early 1917---shortly before Lenin's
|
|
_State and Revolution_, perhaps his most libertarian work (see note 9).
|
|
Paul was a member of the Marxist-De Leonist Socialist Labor Party and later
|
|
one of the founders of the British Communist Party.[25] His critique of
|
|
state socialism resembles the libertarian doctrine of the anarchists in its
|
|
principle that since state ownership and management will lead to
|
|
bureaucratic despotism, the social revolution must replace it by the
|
|
industrial organization of society with direct workers' control. Many
|
|
similar statements can be cited.
|
|
What is far more important is that these ideas have been realized in
|
|
spontaneous revolutionary action, for example in Germany and Italy after
|
|
World War I and in Spain (not only in the agricultural countryside, but
|
|
also in industrial Barcelona) in 1936. One might argue that some form of
|
|
council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an
|
|
industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy
|
|
is severely limited when the industrial system is controlled by any form of
|
|
autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers and technocrats, a
|
|
``vanguard'' party, or a state bureaucracy. Under these conditions of
|
|
authoritarian domination the classical libertarian ideals developed further
|
|
by Marx and Bakunin and all true revolutionaries cannot be realized; man
|
|
will not be free to develop his own potentialities to their fullest, and
|
|
the producer will remain ``a fragment of a human being,'' degraded, a tool
|
|
in the productive process directed from above.
|
|
The phrase ``spontaneous revolutionary action'' can be misleading. The
|
|
anarchosyndicalists, at least, took very seriously Bakunin's remark that
|
|
the workers' organizations must create ``not only the ideas but also the
|
|
facts of the future itself'' in the prerevolutionary period. The
|
|
accomplishments of the popular revolution in Spain, in particular, were
|
|
based on the patient work of many years of organization and education, one
|
|
component of a long tradition of commitment and militancy. The resolutions
|
|
of the Madrid Congress of June 1931 and the Saragossa Congress in May 1936
|
|
foreshadowed in many ways the acts of the revolution, as did the somewhat
|
|
different ideas sketched by Santillan (see note 4) in his fairly specific
|
|
account of the social and economic organization to be instituted by the
|
|
revolution. Gu\'erin writes ``The Spanish revolution was relatively mature
|
|
in the minds of libertarian thinkers, as in the popular consciousness.''
|
|
And workers' organizations existed with the structure, the experience, and
|
|
the understanding to undertake the task of social reconstruction when, with
|
|
the Franco coup, the turmoil of early 1936 exploded into social revolution.
|
|
In his introduction to a collection of documents on collectivization in
|
|
Spain, the anarchist Augustin Souchy writes:
|
|
|
|
For many years, the anarchists and the syndicalists of Spain
|
|
considered their supreme task to be the social transformation of
|
|
the society. In their assemblies of Syndicates and groups, in
|
|
their journals, their brochures and books, the problem of the
|
|
social revolution was discussed incessantly and in a systematic
|
|
fashion.[26]
|
|
|
|
All of this lies behind the spontaneous achievements, the constructive work
|
|
of the Spanish Revolution.
|
|
The ideas of libertarian socialism, in the sense described, have been
|
|
submerged in the industrial societies of the past half-century. The
|
|
dominant ideologies have been those of state socialism or state capitalism
|
|
(of increasingly militarized character in the United States, for reasons
|
|
that are not obscure).[27] But there has been a rekindling of interest in
|
|
the past few years. The theses I quoted by Anton Pannekoek were taken from
|
|
a recent pamphlet of a radical French workers' group (_Informations
|
|
Correspondance Ouvri\`ere_). The remarks by William Paul on revolutionary
|
|
socialism are cited in a paper by Walter Kendall given at the National
|
|
Conference on Workers' Control in Sheffield, England, in March 1969. The
|
|
workers' control movement has become a significant force in England in the
|
|
past few years. It has organized several conferences and has produced a
|
|
substantial pamphlet literature, and counts among its active adherents
|
|
representatives of some of the most important trade unions. The Amalgamated
|
|
Engineering and Foundryworkers' Union, for example, has adopted, as
|
|
official policy, the program of nationalization of basic industries under
|
|
``workers' control at all levels.''[28] On the Continent, there are similar
|
|
developments. May 1968 of course accelerated the growing interest in
|
|
council communism and related ideas in France and Germany, as it did in
|
|
England.
|
|
Given the highly conservative cast of our highly ideological society,
|
|
it is not too surprising that the United States has been relatively
|
|
untouched by these developments. But that too may change. The erosion of
|
|
cold-war mythology at least makes it possible to raise these questions in
|
|
fairly broad circles. If the present wave of repression can be beaten back,
|
|
if the left can overcome its more suicidal tendencies and build upon what
|
|
has been accomplished in the past decade, then the problem of how to
|
|
organize industrial society on truly democratic lines, with democratic
|
|
control in the workplace and in the community, should become a dominant
|
|
intellectual issue for those who are alive to the problems of contemporary
|
|
society, and, as a mass movement for libertarian socialism develops,
|
|
speculation should proceed to action.
|
|
In his manifesto of 1865, Bakunin predicted that one element in the
|
|
social revolution will be ``that intelligent and truly noble part of youth
|
|
which, though belonging by birth to the privileged classes, in its generous
|
|
convictions and ardent aspirations, adopts the cause of the people.''
|
|
Perhaps in the rise of the student movement of the 1960s one sees steps
|
|
towards a fulfillment of this prophecy.
|
|
Daniel Gu\'erin has undertaken what he has described as a ``process of
|
|
rehabilitation'' of anarchism. He argues, convincingly I believe, that
|
|
``the constructive ideas of anarchism retain their vitality, that they may,
|
|
when re-examined and sifted, assist contemporary socialist thought to
|
|
undertake a new departure...[and] contribute to enriching Marxism.''[29]
|
|
>From the ``broad back'' of anarchism he has selected for more intensive
|
|
scrutiny those ideas and actions that can be described as libertarian
|
|
socialist. This is natural and proper. This framework accommodates the
|
|
major anarchist spokesmen as well as the mass actions that have been
|
|
animated by anarchist sentiments and ideals. Gu\'erin is concerned not only
|
|
with anarchist thought but also with the spontaneous actions of popular
|
|
revolutionary struggle. He is concerned with social as well as intellectual
|
|
creativity. Furthermore, he attempts to draw from the constructive
|
|
achievements of the past lessons that will enrich the theory of social
|
|
liberation. For those who wish not only to understand the world, but also
|
|
to change it, this is the proper way to study the history of anarchism.
|
|
Gu\'erin describes the anarchism of the nineteenth century as
|
|
essentially doctrinal, while the twentieth century, for the anarchists, has
|
|
been a time of ``revolutionary practice.''[30] _Anarchism_ reflects that
|
|
judgment. His interpretation of anarchism consciously points toward the
|
|
future. Arthur Rosenberg once pointed out that popular revolutions
|
|
characteristically seek to replace ``a feudal or centralized authority
|
|
ruling by force'' with some form of communal system which ``implies the
|
|
destruction and disappearance of the old form of State.'' Such a system
|
|
will be either socialist or an ``extreme form of democracy...[which is] the
|
|
preliminary condition for Socialism inasmuch as Socialism can only be
|
|
realized in a world enjoying the highest possible measure of individual
|
|
freedom.'' This ideal, he notes, was common to Marx and the anarchists.[31]
|
|
This natural struggle for liberation runs counter to the prevailing
|
|
tendency towards centralization in economic and political life.
|
|
A century ago Marx wrote that the workers of Paris ``felt there was
|
|
but one alternative---the Commune, or the empire---under whatever name it
|
|
might reappear.''
|
|
|
|
The empire had ruined them economically by the havoc it made of
|
|
public wealth, by the wholesale financial swindling it fostered,
|
|
by the props it lent to the artificially accelerated
|
|
centralization of capital, and the concomitant expropriation of
|
|
their own ranks. It had suppressed them politically, it had
|
|
shocked them morally by its orgies, it had insulted their
|
|
Voltairianism by handing over the education of their children to
|
|
the _fr\`eres Ignorantins_, it had revolted their national
|
|
feeling as Frenchmen by precipitating them headlong into a war
|
|
which left only one equivalent for the ruins it made---the
|
|
disappearance of the empire.[32]
|
|
|
|
The miserable Second Empire ``was the only form of government possible at a
|
|
time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not
|
|
yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation.''
|
|
It is not very difficult to rephrase these remarks so that they become
|
|
appropriate to the imperial systems of 1970. The problem of ``freeing man
|
|
>from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social
|
|
enslavement'' remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, the
|
|
doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism will
|
|
serve as an inspiration and guide.
|
|
|
|
|
|
**********************************NOTES************************************
|
|
|
|
|
|
This essay is a revised version of the introduction to Daniel
|
|
Gu\'erin's _Anarchism: From Theory to Practice_. In a slightly
|
|
different version, it appeared in the _New York Review of Books_, May
|
|
21, 1970.
|
|
|
|
[1] Octave Mirbeau, quoted in James Joll, _The Anarchists_, pp.
|
|
145--6.
|
|
|
|
[2] Rudolf Rocker, _Anarchosyndicalism_, p. 31.
|
|
|
|
[3] Cited by Rocker, _ibid_., p. 77. This quotation and that in the
|
|
next sentence are from Michael Bakunin, ``The Program of the
|
|
Alliance,'' in Sam Dolgoff, ed. and trans., _Bakunin on Anarchy_, p.
|
|
255.
|
|
|
|
[4] Diego Abad de Santillan, _After the Revolution_, p. 86. In the
|
|
last chapter, written several months after the revolution had begun,
|
|
he expresses his dissatisfaction with what had so far been achieved
|
|
along these lines. On the accomplishments of the social revolution in
|
|
Spain, see my _American Power and the New Mandarins_, chap. 1, and
|
|
references cited there; the important study by Brou\'e and T\'emime
|
|
has since been translated into English. Several other important
|
|
studies have appeared since, in particular: Frank Mintz,
|
|
_L'Autogestion dans l'Espagne r\'evolutionaire_ (Paris: Editions
|
|
B\'elibaste, 1971); C\'esar M. Lorenzo, _Les Anarchistes espagnols et
|
|
le pouvoir, 1868--1969_ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Gaston
|
|
Leval, _Espagne libertaire, 1936--1939: L'Oeuvre constructive de la
|
|
R\'evolution espagnole_ (Paris: Editions du Cercle, 1971). See also
|
|
Vernon Richards, _Lessons of the Spanish Revolution_, enlarged 1972
|
|
edition.
|
|
|
|
[5] Cited by Robert C. Tucker, _The Marxian Revolutionary Idea_, in
|
|
his discussion of Marxism and anarchism.
|
|
|
|
[6] Bakunin, in a letter to Herzen and Ogareff, 1866. Cited by Daniel
|
|
Gu\'erin, _Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire_, p. 119.
|
|
|
|
[7] Fernand Pelloutier, cited in Joll, _Anarchists_. The source is
|
|
``L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers,'' _Les Temps nouveaux_,
|
|
1895. The full text appears in Daniel Gu\'erin, ed., _Ni Dieu, ni
|
|
Ma\^itre_, an excellent historical anthology of anarchism.
|
|
|
|
[8] Martin Buber, _Paths in Utopia_, p. 127.
|
|
|
|
[9] ``No state, however democratic,'' Bakunin wrote, ``not even the
|
|
reddest republic---can ever give the people what they really want,
|
|
i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own
|
|
affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence
|
|
from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State
|
|
concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses
|
|
from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals,
|
|
who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than
|
|
do the people themselves....'' ``But the people will feel no better
|
|
if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled `the
|
|
people's stick' '' (_Statism and Anarchy_ [1873], in Dolgoff,
|
|
_Bakunin on Anarchy_, p. 338)---``the people's stick'' being the
|
|
democratic Republic.
|
|
|
|
Marx, of course, saw the matter differently.
|
|
|
|
For discussion of the impact of the Paris Commune on this
|
|
dispute, see Daniel Gu\'erin's comments in _Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_;
|
|
these also appear, slightly extended, in his _Pour un marxisme
|
|
libertaire_. See also note 24.
|
|
|
|
[10] On Lenin's ``intellectual deviation'' to the left during 1917,
|
|
see Robert Vincent Daniels, ``The State and Revolution: a Case Study
|
|
in the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology,'' _American
|
|
Slavic and East European Review_, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).
|
|
|
|
[11] Paul Mattick, _Marx and Keynes_, p. 295.
|
|
|
|
[12] Michael Bakunin, ``La Commune de Paris et la notion de
|
|
l'\'etat,'' reprinted in Gu\'erin, _Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_. Bakunin's
|
|
final remark on the laws of individual nature as the condition of
|
|
freedom can be compared to the creative thought developed in the
|
|
rationalist and romantic traditions. See my _Cartesian Linguistics_
|
|
and _Language and Mind_.
|
|
|
|
[13] Shlomo Avineri, _The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx_,
|
|
p. 142, referring to comments in _The Holy Family_. Avineri states
|
|
that within the socialist movement only the Israeli _kibbutzim_
|
|
``have perceived that the modes and forms of present social
|
|
organization will determine the structure of future society.'' This,
|
|
however, was a characteristic position of anarchosyndicalism, as
|
|
noted earlier.
|
|
|
|
[14] Rocker, _Anarchosyndicalism_, p. 28.
|
|
|
|
[15] See Gu\'erin's works cited earlier.
|
|
|
|
[16] Karl Marx, _Critique of the Gotha Programme_.
|
|
|
|
[17] Karl Marx, _Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen \"Okonomie_,
|
|
cited by Mattick, _Marx and Keynes_, p. 306. In this connection, see
|
|
also Mattick's essay ``Workers' Control,'' in Priscilla Long, ed.,
|
|
_The New Left_; and Avineri, _Social and Political Thought of Marx_.
|
|
|
|
[18] Karl Marx, _Capital_, quoted by Robert Tucker, who rightly
|
|
emphasizes that Marx sees the revolutionary more as a ``frustrated
|
|
producer'' than a ``dissatisfied consumer'' (_The Marxian
|
|
Revolutionary Idea_). This more radical critique of capitalist
|
|
relations of production is a direct outgrowth of the libertarian
|
|
thought of the Enlightenment.
|
|
|
|
[19] Marx, _Capital_, cited by Avineri, _Social and Political Thought
|
|
of Marx_, p. 83.
|
|
|
|
[20] Pelloutier, ``L'Anarchisme.''
|
|
|
|
[21] ``Qu'est-ce que la propri\'et\'e?'' The phrase ``property is
|
|
theft'' displeased Marx, who saw in its use a logical problem, theft
|
|
presupposing the legitimate existence of property. See Avineri,
|
|
_Social and Political Thought of Marx_.
|
|
|
|
[22] Cited in Buber's _Paths in Utopia_, p. 19.
|
|
|
|
[23] Cited in J. Hampden Jackson, _Marx, Proudhon and European
|
|
Socialism_, p. 60.
|
|
|
|
[24] Karl Marx, _The Civil War in France_, p. 24. Avineri observes
|
|
that this and other comments of Marx about the Commune refer
|
|
pointedly to intentions and plans. As Marx made plain elsewhere, his
|
|
considered assessment was more critical than in this address.
|
|
|
|
[25] For some background, see Walter Kendall, _The Revolutionary
|
|
Movement in Britain_.
|
|
|
|
[26] _Collectivisations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la R\'evolution
|
|
espagnole_, p. 8.
|
|
|
|
[27] For discussion, see Mattick, _Marx and Keynes_, and Michael
|
|
Kidron, _Western Capitalism Since the War_. See also discussion and
|
|
references cited in my _At War With Asia_, chap. 1, pp. 23--6.
|
|
|
|
[28] See Hugh Scanlon, _The Way Forward for Workers' Control_.
|
|
Scanlon is the president of the AEF, one of Britain's largest trade
|
|
unions.
|
|
|
|
The institute was established as a result of the sixth
|
|
Conference on Workers' Control, March 1968, and serves as a center
|
|
for disseminating information and encouraging research.
|
|
|
|
[29] Gu\'erin, _Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_, introduction.
|
|
|
|
[30] _Ibid._
|
|
|
|
[31] Arthur Rosenberg, _A History of Bolshevism_, p. 88.
|
|
|
|
[32] Marx, _Civil War in France_, pp. 62--3.
|
|
|
|
|
|
*******************************BIBLIOGRAPHY********************************
|
|
|
|
|
|
Avineri, Shlomo. _The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx_.
|
|
London: Cambridge University Press, 1968.
|
|
|
|
Bakunin, Michael. _Bakunin on Anarchy_. Edited and translated by Sam
|
|
Dolgoff. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.
|
|
|
|
Buber, Martin. _Paths in Utopia_. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
|
|
|
|
Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
|
|
|
|
------. _American Power and the New Mandarins_. New York: Pantheon
|
|
Books, 1969.
|
|
|
|
------. _At War with Asia_. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970.
|
|
|
|
_Collectivisations: L'Oeuvre constructive de la R\'evolution
|
|
espagnole_. 2nd ed. Toulouse: Editions C.N.T., 1965. First edition,
|
|
Barcelona, 1937.
|
|
|
|
Daniels, Robert Vincent. ``The State and Revolution: a Case Study in
|
|
the Genesis and Transformation of Communist Ideology.'' _American
|
|
Slavic and East European Review_, vol. 12, no. 1 (1953).
|
|
|
|
Gu\'erin, Daniel. _Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire_. Paris:
|
|
Librairie Marcel Rivi\`ere, 1959.
|
|
|
|
------. _Anarchism: From Theory to Practice_, translated by Mary
|
|
Klopper. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.
|
|
|
|
------. _Pour un marxisme libertaire_. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1969.
|
|
|
|
------, ed. _Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_. Lausanne: La Cit\'e Editeur, n.d.
|
|
|
|
Jackson, J. Hampden. _Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism_. New
|
|
York: Collier Books, 1962.
|
|
|
|
Joll, James. _The Anarchists_. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.
|
|
|
|
Kendall, Walter. _The Revolutionary Movement in Britain_ 1900--1921.
|
|
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969.
|
|
|
|
Kidron, Michael _Western Capitalism Since the War_. London:
|
|
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.
|
|
|
|
Mattick, Paul. _Marx and Keynes: The Limits of Mixed Economy_.
|
|
Extending Horizons Series. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.
|
|
|
|
------. ``Workers' Control.'' In _The New Left: A Collection of
|
|
Essays_, edited by Priscilla Long. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969.
|
|
|
|
Marx, Karl. _The Civil War in France_, 1871. New York: International
|
|
Publishers, 1941.
|
|
|
|
Pelloutier, Fernand. ``L'Anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers.'' _Les
|
|
Temps nouveaux_, 1895. Reprinted in _Ni Dieu, ni Ma\^itre_, edited by
|
|
Daniel Gu\'erin. Lausanne: La Cit\'e Editeur, n.d.
|
|
|
|
Richards, Vernon. _Lessons of the Spanish Revolution_ (1936--1939).
|
|
Enlarged ed. London: Freedom Press, 1972.
|
|
|
|
Rocker, Rudolf. _Anarchosyndicalism_. London: Secker & Warburg, 1938.
|
|
|
|
Rosenberg, Arthur. _A History of Bolshevism from Marx to the First
|
|
Five Years' Plan_. Translated by Ian F. Morrow. New York: Russell &
|
|
Russell, 1965.
|
|
|
|
Santillan, Diego Abad de. _After the Revolution_. New York: Greenberg
|
|
Publishers, 1937.
|
|
|
|
Scanlon, Hugh. _The Way Forward for Workers' Control_. Institute for
|
|
Workers' Control Pamphlet Series, no. 1, Nottingham, England, 1968.
|
|
|
|
Tucker, Robert C. _The Marxian Revolutionary Idea_. New York: W. W.
|
|
Norton & Co., 1969.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|