Letter: Sharing the same aims? (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sharing the same aims?

Dear Editors,

I have been reading the Socialist Standard for a while now, and find myself in agreement with many of your views. I have taken a recent interest in anarchism, and I am curious as to where you would part ideological company with anarchists. Anarchism would appear to share your disdain for the state, and for the idea of vanguards to lead the plebs and tell them what to think. I would also agree with you in rejecting leaders. Do your differences go back to those between Marx and Proudhon or Bakunin? Can anarchists and socialists work together today?

John Hubbard

Sheffield

Reply:

There are anarchists and anarchists. Some share our aim of a classless, stateless society of common ownership and popular participation where the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" will apply and where money will be redundant. This is the view put forward, in the past, by such anarchists as Kropotkin, Rudolf Rocker and Alexander Berkman and. today, by Murray Bookchin.

Other anarchists do not share this aim. The 19th century French anarchist Proudhon, for instance, didn't. He was implacably opposed to common ownership and stood for a free market economy of small-scale producers. Another 19th century anarchist, Max Stirner, preached extreme individualism; to this day his followers argue that democracy is a tyranny as it involves an individual having to accept majority decisions they might not agree with. Bakunin was a joke, a typical romantic revolutionary forever hatching conspiracies and trying to stage immediate armed risings against the state. Then there are religiously-inspired anarchists. such as Tolstoy, and purely philosophical armchair anarchists, and reformist anarchists who limit themselves to seeking to extend the realm of individual intellectual and sexual freedom within capitalism. There are lifestyle anarchists, who put two fingers up to the rest of society, including the working class, and (less now than at one time) the anarchist bomb-throwers and terrorists.

We have nothing in common with any of these, but what about those anarchists who are in favour of socialism (as we prefer to call it) or communism (as they call it)?

The main differences between us and them is over how to get to a classless, stateless, moneyless society. We favour majority democratic action on the grounds that the establishment of a society based on voluntary co-operation and popular participation has to involve such co-operation and participation (i.e. democratic methods) and say that when such a majority comes into being it can use existing political institutions (the ballot box and parliament) to establish a socialist/ communist society. They are opposed to this, but are not able to offer a viable alternative (the anarcho-communists pose a spontaneous mass popular upsurge, the anarcho-syndicalists a general strike and mass factory occupations—both of which ignore the state and the need to at least neutralise it before trying to change society from capitalism).

Can we work with them? Well, if they can abandon their prejudice against democratic political action via elections, we invite them to join us in campaigning for a classless, stateless. moneyless society.

Editors.