Towards an understanding of Anarchism—An Essay in irony (1948)

From the October 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

The writer has recently undertaken an intensive study of the Anarchist philosophy, involving considerable reading and research, and now feels the time has come for him to put on paper the conclusions at which he has arrived. He does this not to parade his erudition before an admiring political world but because he believes the working class movement generally will benefit from what he has to say on this very difficult subject. Before, however, he proceeds to engrave, as it were, his ideas on the plaque of history, he wishes to give warning to the reader who may possess an intellect not immediately capable of assimilating the complex statement of the theoretical system which is to follow. It is this—do not be disheartened or downcast if at first you are unable fully to comprehend the inner meaning, or essence, or shall we say guts—for we are all workers together!—of the subject. The cost of understanding is great but the reward even greater.

It was only after many months of effort and much revisionary study that the writer was at last able to grasp the fundamental concept of anarchism, and there were times when he felt that the task was beyond him and that the labour movement would have to await the birth and maturing of a greater intellect than his. But ever before him, ever driving him on, was the consciousness of the need of the working class for someone to lay bare with crystal clarity the fundamental idea of anarchist philosophy. The acute reader will have observed that the writer has referred to fundamental “concept” and “idea” using in each case the singular noun. This he has done deliberately, for he believes the whole anarchist philosophy can be reduced, nay triumphantly acclaimed, to the single idea of trend-classification. His scientifically-inclined readers will know that perhaps the main task of science is to classify, or to use a colloquism, to sort out (this, of course, not in its aggressive sense).

What is to follow then is an attempt, the writer believes successful, to classify the main anarchist groups possessing independent trends. Further, the writer claims that an understanding of the complementary and distinguishing characteristics of these groups forms the theoretical basis of the understanding of anarchism.

At the time of writing the world anarchist movement is formed by 197 different philosophical trends or schools of thought, but the current shortage of paper prevents an analysis of all these schools, and in this article the writer will deal with a mere dozen or so. At this point another warning to the reader is necessary. Do not be misled by the similarity of names. An anarcho-communist, for instance, is not the same as a communist-anarchist. Actually they hate the sight of each other.

The main division in anarchist philosophy is that of Authoritarian and Libertarian, and it is this classification which is most used by the movement itself. It is a concept which, of course, can be extended beyond the field of politico/philosophical speculation. Mr. Barrett of Wimpole Street was, for instance, an authoritarian father, William Godwin a libertarian father.

An excellent example of this division can be found in a group in the Home Counties. This consists of eight members all of whom at one time or another have actively advocated or inclined towards every one of the 197 main philosophical trends. Half of this group are at present courting the sympathy of a group of Authoritarian Council-Communists who meet in a nearby air-raid shelter. The other half of the group achieve the adjectival distinction of libertarian by an as yet coquettish flirtation with a group of libertarian-un-Marxist-Socialists.

The groups divide on the issue of the theoretical approach to the question of poetry. The authoritarian group insisting that poetry should emphasise the communal basis of anarcho/syndicalism, revealing the social ego. The libertarian group counter this idea with an approach coming near to the Freudian id/ego/super-ego concept. Poetry they say should project the personal psyche into the social ego but should not be submerged by it. The reader will detect the libertarian emphasis on the freedom of the personality. At rock bottom then this problem of the role of the ego provides the main division in the anarchist movement.

An important group coming within, and to a certain extent sagging over the edge of the libertarian group-trend, is the philosophical-revolutionary-syndicalists. The origin of this group is somewhat obscure but is believed to have started as a breakaway movement from the egalitarian-revolutionary-syndicalists, who of course come within the authoritarian school. This group, the philosophical-revolutionary-syndicalists, pursue a tactic known as the dialectical creep, this being a process whereby the group gradually moves from one group to another pausing only to insinuate their philosophical-revolutionary-syndicalism into the concepts of the particular group in which they have settled. Their ubiquity brings upon them a certain disfavour in the movement generally and they are known as the creepers. And if the writer may be allowed a slight criticism, he feels that the efforts of this group would be more effective if its personnel were known to each other. Too often has he witnessed the tragic picture of two philosophical-revolutionary-syndicalists desperately trying to convert each other not knowing that they are of the same group.

Perhaps the least known of all anarchist groups arc the Epicurean/Federalists, the Epicurean aspect of their philosophy provides the libertarian motif, the Federalist the authoritarian. It is somewhat difficult to place, this group in a definite school since the balance between the two trends is not always maintained. Sometimes the authoritarian-element overwhelms the libertarian, and vice-versa. And whilst this is often very entertaining to its members, it is disturbing to the libertarian-council-communists and the authoritarian-council-communists, for they rely on the Epicurean/Federalists for a certain amount of ethico-politico support. The two factions never knowing which is to receive the support next.

The last group to come within the analytical purview of the writer is the Walden-wood choppers, these being the followers of that great American Anarchist, Henry David Thoreau. Briefly, they advocate a return to the woods, the ponds, and the trees. Their scorn of material comfort is legion and their annual conference (held, as a protest against bourgeois uniformity, every three years) in Epping Forest, provides a welcome sight to the jaded eyes of the brick-conditioned town-dweller.

The question of the wages system looms large in all anarchist theory, and it is precisely here that the reader can fully appreciate the liberty of ideas as expressed by the movement. Some of the groups oppose the wages system, others haven’t made up their minds, and a few just love it. It is this indifference to intellectual discipline, to theoretical unity, which cuts off the anarchist movement from all the non-emotional, materialistic concepts which constitute the basis of other social movements.

The writer recalls an incident more eloquent in its expression of the anarchist’s scorn of authoritarian agreement over principle than could be contained in a hundred books. The incident occurred after a conference convened by the South Hiding group of anti-statist/materialists to discuss the possibility of synthesising the vegetarian and anti-vivisectionalist trends which had arisen in their group. The writer met one of the attending members outside the conference hall and on enquiring as to the result of the meeting was informed that it had been a complete failure, reconciliation having been achieved.

In conclusion it remains for the writer but to express the hope that his herculean labours have not been in vain and that the worker-student will have gained some inkling and understanding of the complexities of the anarchist philosophy.

J. Lockwood

Who are the ‘Middle Class’? (2025)

"Man the barricades, Jerry."

From the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Autonomous Voice, a contributor to the Facebook site ‘A Global Group Where We Are Active Against Capitalism’, recently put up a 15-minute YouTube clip, entitled ‘The Middle Class: a Working Class Anarchist Perspective’. The speaker attempts to define and analyse what he refers to as ‘the intermediate position’ in capitalist society’ held by ‘middle-class people, particularly those in professorial, managerial or small business roles’ (youtu.be/AZl55qEWILk). While his illustration points to the same ultimate goal as proposed by the Socialist Party, the analysis of how that can be achieved is very different.

In particular there are indications of a need for ‘violent uprising’ and of this needing to come from the ‘working class’, seen as those who do forms of manual work in society. This concept, outdated as it is, is still clung to by many, but it fails to appreciate that all those who need to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary and so remain dependent on their next wage or salary payment are in the same fundamental economic position. This means not only manual workers, tradespeople, nurses, service workers, etc., but also so-called middle-class workers such as teachers, administrators, engineers, medics, tech workers, and others, all those in fact who are often described as ‘professionals’. All these workers, whether considered working class or middle class, have a common interest that is diametrically opposed to that of the other small class of people in society (we would call them the capitalist class) who own enough wealth not to need to sell their energies in order to survive. And this is the case even if, as things stand, the vast majority of wage and salary earners of all descriptions fail to perceive their subjugation to the system they are tied to.

So while ‘Autonomous Voice’ is quite correct in stating that the role of many ‘professionals’ is ‘to administer the system of exploitation and keep it running smoothly’ and that they have an attitude of complicity towards that system, he is quite wrong to suggest that this somehow takes them out of the game and that they are not themselves exploited and entirely dependent upon the ups and downs of the economic forces of capitalism. True, they – or many of them – may have conventional, indeed docile, attitudes towards capitalist society and the way it works and may seem to be, as the video puts it, ‘a buffer preventing radical change’. But the same also applies to the vast majority of those the video sees as members of the ‘working class’. All in fact are locked into the wages system and have to live with the insecurity of the monthly pay slip.

So while we would agree with the need for the kind of society advocated by this video, it confuses and derails the argument by suggesting that some workers have different interests to others. Whatever their line of work, all workers scramble to sell their energies under conditions of duress, and are usually denied the ability to control how they work and whether that work – and pay – will continue. There is a global division between the vast majority, who need to sell their energies for a wage or salary, and the tiny minority that choose to buy those energies. In the end all members of that vast majority have the same class interest – to establish a wageless, money-free society that the Socialist Party exists to campaign for and that will provide the means for all to live free and autonomous lives.

Currently very few wage and salary earners are contemplating being part of any such movement. Yet, it is the only way to transcend the capitalist system that dominates all our lives, and it can be readily voted into being if enough of us want it. It will provide a means whereby democratic associations of women and men will be able to organise on the basis of voluntary work and have free access to whatever goods and services they need, because the whole society will then collectively own and control all the resources that provide these. People will no longer have to do jobs they do not enjoy – or even hate – just because they need money. They will be able to do work they want to do and enjoy. People will cooperate to do the work that makes society function and they will make decisions democratically – in their workplaces, local communities, regions and, if circumstances require, globally. Above all there will be no more top-down control, no leaders or governments, and no more money controlling people’s lives. Only when this happens will we have a society where the freedom to develop and express our needs and potential is equal for all kinds of workers and where the material needs of all are satisfied.

Howard Moss

Anarchism: No State, No Market by Howard Moss (1986)

Blogger's Note: 

The article below by Socialist Party member and regular Socialist Standard writer, Howard Moss, first appeared in the 1986 Freedom Press anthology, Freedom: A Hundred Years 1886-1986, which, as the title suggests, was a special book published by Freedom Press to mark its centenary. I remember buying the anthology in Freedom Bookshop in Aldgate in the early 1990s, and it was a surprise at the time to see Howard's name within its pages — I perhaps applied my hostility clause a bit too literally back in the day — but it's a good piece of succinct writing and, I think in its own way, its general point overlaps with Rubel and Crump's book, Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, which was originally published around about the same time period.

According to bookfinder.com, the cheapest secondhand copy of the anthology would set you back forty dollars today, so it's good to know that a PDF of the book is available over at LibCom. It's worth checking out, not just for Howard's article, but for its history of early British anarchism, the biographical sketches of forgotten Anarchist activists over the decades, and articles from such anarchist 'names' as Colin Ward, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, Crass, Nicolas Walter, Donald Rooum and Vernon Richards. As an added bonus, it also features a cartoon by longstanding Socialist Standard cartoonist, Peter Rigg, in his Kronstadt Kids period.

Anarchism: No State, No Market

What do anarchists want? It’s a difficult one. Perhaps an easier one along the same lines would be ‘What do anarchists have in common?’ And for me the answer to this one was summed up by Donald Rooum in the May 1986 Freedom through the words of his cartoon creation Wildcat: ‘You get rid of governments by convincing people to withdraw support’. Yes, that’s it, getting rid of governments, and of course getting rid of the thing they govern — the state. The next question, however, has got to be ‘What kind of a stateless society do we want?’ Even if we can’t be expected to give a blueprint, we can at least be expected to give some kind of idea of how things will be organised and the kind of life that will be possible in a society that doesn’t have the state to change it.

Let me say right away that, as I see it, there are two possible choices of the kind of stateless society. And the choices are simple ones. We either have a stateless society with a market or a stateless society without a market. If you’re an anarchist who doesn’t envisage getting rid of the market, then automatically, whether you realise it or not, you’re talking about keeping buying and selling, trade, money, banks, financial institutions, and so on — in other words all the paraphernalia of capitalism, even if it’s capitalism without the state. And there are people, anarcho-capitalists they call themselves, who argue precisely for this kind of arrangement. They want an entirely free-market world, without national frontiers, with a single world currency and where private ownership extends to everything imaginable and the ethos, even more than now, is unbridled competition. Freedom dealt with them (not very well, in my opinion) in October 1984 (Vol 45 No 10) and later referred to them as a ‘squalid bunch’. I doubt whether many readers of Freedom would want to be associated with them either. But the rub is that, unless as an anarchist you advocate not just the abolition of the state but also the abolition of the market system, then logically you can’t escape being an ‘anarcho-capitalist’. Because as long as you’ve still got the market or an exchange society of any kind, then you’ve still got some form of capitalism, or at any rate some form of property society.

Now I know most anarchists would say, if it were put to them, that they don’t want the market system or the exchange economy that goes with it. But how often do they explicitly express this point of view? And how often is it explicitly expressed in anarchist literature? In my experience, very rarely. And this is a pity, because one of the greatest difficulties in putting anarchist views across is reaction from people along the lines ‘You’ve got nothing practical to replace the present system with?’ or ‘An anarchist society would be chaos’. Yet if we stressed not just the stateless but also the marketless nature of anarchism, we’d be making anarchist views that much easier for people to grasp and not react to like that, because we’d be putting across the idea that it’s the market that’s chaos in the way it arbitrarily dictates how much we shall or shall not have, what work we shall or shall not do, the kind of lives we shall or shall not live. And as a logical converse to that, we’d be offering a society in which, instead of competing among one another in a system of privately owned wealth, we could all work together to provide for our needs using the commonly owned resources of the earth. If we did this, we’d not only be putting across the idea that human needs and human worth shouldn’t be measured by money and profit but also advocating a practical alternative in which that wouldn’t happen.

I’ll raise a few hackles now by saying that, having reached this point, we’re pretty close to what some people would understand by ‘socialism’. Not the ‘socialism’ of the Labour Party, or Russia, or China, or the left-wing groups, but the socialism of ‘from each according to ability to each according to need’ and ‘the abolition of the wages system’. These of course are things Marx said (though he did not originate the sayings) and we’ve got to reject a hell of a lot of other things Marx said, but should we have to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Why should’t we accept that those ideas provide a sound basis (as I see it, the only basis) for a truly free society?

It may or may not come as a surprise now if I say that I consider myself a socialist, but when people say to me (as they often do) ‘Isn’t what you’re talking about anarchism?’, I say ‘Yes, as long as by anarchism you mean not just a society organised without a state but also one organised without a market’. That is after all the only road to freedom — isn’t it?

Howard Moss

Reflections on elections (2002)

Book Review from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism by Janet Biehl (Black Rose books 1997)

Murray Bookchin is one contemporary thinker and writer who comes close to us on a number of key points. He stands for a democratic society of common ownership where there’d be no production for profit, no working for wages and no money and where the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” would apply, even if he doesn’t call this socialism (though he might if you got him into a corner).

There are differences of course. For instance, whereas we still see the working class (in the broad sense of everyone obliged by economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary) as the agent of the revolutionary change from capitalism to such a society, Bookchin has come to the conclusion that the agent is the municipality or rather a federation of municipalities that have come to practise direct democracy (town meetings, citizens’ assemblies, etc).

Bookchin himself is a wordy writer, but fortunately his views have been well summarised by Janet Biehl in The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism. Although he now prefers to call himself a “social ecologist” or a “libertarian municipalist” he still regards himself as an anarchist. Despite this – and this of course brings him closer to us than to classical anarchists – he envisages both participating in local elections and a future society having a written constitution that would provide for, among other things, majority decision-making:

“It is highly unlikely, when libertarian municipalists demand that existing municipal governments surrender their powers to citizens’ assemblies, that those governments will accede. Libertarian municipalists should therefore run for local elective office themselves, so that ultimately they can change the city charter to create fully empowered citizens’ assemblies at the expense of the State.”

An anarchist who believes in contesting elections is indeed a rarity. In fact, many anarchists would regard this as a contradiction in terms and would, on this ground, deny that Bookchin really is an anarchist.

The standard anarchist argument against the revolutionary movement contesting elections, local as well as national, is that this inevitably leads to it becoming reformist; revolutionary MPs and local councillors, whatever may have been their original intention, end up merely administering capitalism at local or national level. This, they claim, can be seen from the history of, first, the European Social Democratic parties which once claimed to be Marxist and, more recently, of Green parties which said, as in Germany, that they were only going into parliament to use it as a tribune from which to proclaim the need for an ecological society. When, however, it comes to explaining why this happens they fall back on the lame explanation of “power corrupts”.

We can agree that this is what happened to these parties but offer an alternative explanation: that such parties went off the rails because they advocated reforms of capitalism and not just its abolition. The originally Marxist Social Democratic parties had in addition to the “maximum” programme of socialism what they called a “minimum programme” of immediate reforms to capitalism. What happened, we contend, is that they attracted votes on the basis of their miniumum, not their maximum, programme, i.e. reformist votes, and so became the prisoners of these voters. In parliament, and later in office, they found themselves with no freedom of action other than to compromise with capitalism. Had they been the mandated delegates of those who voted for them (rather than leaders) this could be expressed by saying that they had no mandate for socialism, only to try to reform capitalism. It was not a case of being corrupted by the mere fact of going into national parliaments but was due to the basis on which they went there and how this restricted what they could do. In short, it is not power as such that corrupts. It is power obtained on the basis of followers voting for leaders to implement reforms that, if you want to put it that way, “corrupts”.

Bookchin accepts the classic anarchist argument as far as participating in national elections is concerned. As Biehl argues for him:

“If history, from ancient times to the present, has demonstrated anything, it is the implacable fact that State power is corruptive: that an individual who takes State office is inexorably refashioned by that office into a creature of the State, regardless of his or her idealistic intentions.”

His answer, as to how to prevent a revolutionary movement that contests elections going reformist, is that it should not contest national elections but should restrict itself to contesting local ones. Apparently power only corrupts beyond the local level. The trouble is that his mistaken explanation as to why the old European Social Democratic parties went off the rails – corruption through mere participation in state institutions – leads him to propose the same tactics, even if at local level only, that in our view led to these parties becoming openly reformist.

In his view, at this stage contesting elections can essentially only be an exercise in political education, of getting ideas across. We can go along with that. In fact it is why we contest elections today knowing perfectly well that we have no chance of getting elected. But then Bookchin and Biehl say:

“The electoral platform should consist of a series of demands that represent the aims for which the group is fighting – above all the radical democratization of the municipal government through the creation of citizens’ assemblies. But it is not enough merely to call for direct democracy; the platform should offer the steps by which that goal can be met. Indeed, it should make a series of clearly specified immediate demands, then place them in a radical context by tying them to the longer-term goal of fundamentally transforming society. For libertarian municipalism is a revolutionary movement, not a reformist movement, and it aims not to reform the existing system but to replace it with a liberatory one. In programmatic terms these immediate and long-term goals can be called respectively minimum and maximum demands. Minimum demands are those that are immediately realizable within the existing system; they are specific and concrete. Maximum demands, by contrast, are more general; they comprise the rational society that the group hopes ultimately to achieve.”

Exactly the same division of their programme into a maximum and miniumum one as the old Social Democratic parties, and which led to their downfall.

On at least one occasion Bookchin has put his money where his mouth is and put up candidates at local level – in Burlington, Vermont, in the US in 1989. The electoral programme of the “Burlington Greens” is reproduced as an appendix to Biehl’s book. The programme begins by denouncing the grow-or-die nature of capitalism (referred to as the market economy) but, without even stating the full alternative (the so-called “maximum programme”), rapidly moves on listing some “stepping stones” to where they want to go:

“A community-controlled municipal financial resources and low-interest loans for the purchase and repair of homes and for the initiation of innovative ecological housing projects for low-income groups. 

Bond issues and changes in local tax structures to provide for as much housing for the need and elderly as is necessary. A direct network between farmers and consumers to foster local agriculture. Municipal acquisition of open land to be held in public trust for recreation, gardening, and parks. Municipally controlled cooperatives to develop and implement alternative technologies and to produce quality goods in accord with Vermont’s reputation for craftmanship.”

We can only describe this as a common-or-garden reformist programme.

So, although we share with Bookchin the view that revolutionaries should contest elections, we part company very rapidly when it comes to the programme on which to do so. While we advocate only socialism and nothing but (the so-called “maximum programme”, if you like) Bookchin wants to seek a mandate on the basis of a programme of reforms of capitalism. In our view, this would lead to pure and simple reformism. People would vote for the immediate reforms of capitalism not the maximum programme of replacing it, and any “libertarian municipalist” elected to office would find themselves the prisoners of their reform-minded voters and would end up participating in the government of capitalism at local level, just like the other Greens Bookchin and Biehl criticise.

In any event, Bookchin is being inconsistent in advocating contesting local elections but not national ones and has provided no explanation as to why power at national level corrupts while power at local level doesn’t, especially as local councils are part of the state’s administrative structure and local councillors and mayors are little more than elected state functionnaries.

Actually, we agree with Bookchin that power at local level doesn’t have to corrupt. It is possible to envisage a movement at local level (as he does) that would be based on delegate democracy, where those elected to the local council would be the mandated delegates of those who voted for them, being accountable to them and subject to recall if they failed to carry out their mandate. But we go further. We can’t see anything to prevent this applying to elected representatives of the revolutionary movement above local level too: why couldn’t (in the US context) State congress members also be subject to such democratic control? And why not federal congress members too?

Because Bookchin does not believe this to be possible he proposes an unnecessarily dangerous strategy for getting rid of capitalism: confrontation with the state. He envisages that when sufficient municipalities have been won over to the cause of “libertarian municipalism” they should take on the capitalist state, defying it, refusing to implement its decrees and even forming local citizens’ militias to defend themselves if necessary (decidely, Bookchin’s Trotskyist past is coming back to haunt him in his old age). Given that for such a scenario to succeed a majority of the population would have to support “liberatarian municipalism”, all this would be unnecessary. Being a majority they could use their votes not just to win control of municipalities but of States, regions and provinces and the national state itself.

At the very minimum this would prevent the forces at the disposal of the central state from being used against the local councils. But, more positively – since there is no reason to suppose that power necessarily corrupts – it would provide a framework for a less disruptive, more orderly transition from capitalism to a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society of common ownership and democratic control.

Bookchin’s attempted distinction between local and central state level does not hold water. If power doesn’t corrupt at local level – as it doesn’t have to, if organised on the basis of mandated and recallable delegates – then it won’t automatically at state level either. On the other hand, if, as we contend, “a reform programme corrupts” it will do so just as much at local as at central state level.

Bookchin’s formula of only contesting local, but not national, elections on a reform programme is not the right one for avoiding reformism. The correct formula is contesting elections at national and local level but only on the basis of delegates being given an imperative mandate for the sole purpose of carrying through the formalities involved in winding up capitalism.

Adam Buick

How RTS neglects need for democratic control (2000)

Reclaim the Streets’ spoof paper Maybe.
Who made the decisions?

From the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reclaim the Streets’ neglect of the need for democratic accountability just leads to the tyranny of structurelessness.

For the Mayday event in London, Reclaim the Streets, the shadowy group which organised it—shadowy because it doesn’t appear to be an open organisation with democratic structures—produced a spoof edition of the free daily paper Metro which they called Maybe. In it they set out their ideas. Some are not bad, others are mistaken and yet others are, frankly, pathetic (such as the ostensibly serious idea that “guerrilla gardening”, or clandestinely growing food in public parks and railway embankments, is somehow subversive of capitalism).

The front page article “KEN PULLS OUT” (reproduced here) is very clever. We’d have liked someone to have written it for us. There would not be too much we would disagree with in another article “Ecology and the Social City” which contrasts life in cities today under capitalism with what life in a “free city” could be like once the global market system and nation-states have been ended.

And we can go along with the following criticism of the passivity that capitalism encourages:

“We are forced to spectate by capitalism. We watch TV, movies, news, celebrities—the ‘other’ in the ‘other’s world’ in which we do not feel threatened or truly involved. We are encouraged to vote, be it for governments, councils or mayors, to ask them to represent us, to decide for us. We have no connection with the production of our daily needs, of our food, clothes. We have become so accustomed to assuming the position of spectator in our own lives, that active participation in events has become like a muscle atrophied through lack of use.”

And with the following assessment of the wasted 20th century:

“20th century history is a tragic lesson in the dangers of trusting ‘anti-capitalist’ politicians or of just being against one aspect of capitalism, like ‘globalisation’, rather than for a complete transformation of society.”

Obviously, we can’t be anything but pleased if such ideas are growing. But how does RTS see capitalism being ended? By what they call “direct action”. This is an anarchist catch-phrase but it means different things to different anarchists. To those anarchists who believe in organisation (and, contradictory as it may seem, some do, the anarcho-syndicalists for instance) it is meant to convey the idea that any action that any group of people take to try to improve their lot should be under their direct control. We don’t have any objection to this idea—in fact, it’s the form of organisation we have always urged workers to adopt for waging the struggle against employers for better wages and working conditions—only we call it “democratic self-organisation” (and, contrary to all anarchists, don’t see why it can’t, and shouldn’t, be extended to embrace organisation on the political field to win control of the state with a view to dismantling it).

RTS, however, are not in the tradition of anarchists who believe in organisation. They openly describe themselves as a “dis-organisation”:

“Reclaim the Streets is non-hierarchical, spontaneous and self-organised. We have no leaders, no committee, no board of directors, no spokespeople. There is no centralised unit for decision-making, strategic planning and production of ideology. There is no membership and no formalised commitment. There is no master-plan, and no predefined agenda.

The direct action movement is an organic network of people taking responsibility for their own lives, expressed through local interventions, chaotic global connections and friendships. Reclaim the Streets spontaneously and temporarily emerges from a shared dissatisfaction with the way our lives are run for us, with the rat-race and a society based on exclusion and enclosure, profit and control. As a dis-organisation, RTS is mobile and furtive. It is there when people decide to intervene in public spaces, evoking the utopia of a better society.”

For such anti-organisation anarchists, “direct action” means the supposedly spontaneous action of small groups acting on their own initiative without being answerable to anybody. Thus, when they use the word “self-organisation” they don’t mean the same thing as people like us, namely, structured, democratic organisation, certainly without leaders, but not without some central decision-making unit such as a conference of mandated delegates nor without elected committees to plan and co-ordinate particular spheres of activity. Nowhere in Maybe does the word “democratic” occur, neither in relation to how capitalism is to be ended, nor as to how anti-capitalists should organise today, nor even when describing the sort of society to replace capitalism. This is clearly deliberate and will reflect the fact that RTS rejects the idea of democratic control because this involves formal rules and permanent structures which they will see as bureaucratic restraints on the freedom of autonomous activists to act as they please.

Informal elites

This is the “ideology of structurelessness” so brilliantly dissected by the American feminist, Jo Freeman, in 1970 in her essay on The Tyranny of Structurelessness. In the Women’s Liberation movement of that time the same emphasis was placed “on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main focus of the movement” as RTS does today. Freeman showed that there was in fact no such thing as a structureless group, only formally and informally structured groups:

“Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion . . . This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful and as deceptive, as to aim at an ‘objective’ news story, ‘value-free’ social science or a ‘free’ economy. A ‘laissez faire’ group is about as realistic as a ‘laissez faire’ society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can easily be established because the idea of structurelessness does not prevent the formation of informal structures, but only formal ones . . . Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power . . .

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision making must be open and available to everyone and this can only happen if they are formalized . . . A structured group always has a formal structure, and may also have an informal one. An unstructured group always has an informal, or covert, structure. It is this informal structure, particularly in unstructured groups, which forms the basis for elites . . . When informal elites are combined with a myth of structurelessness, there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious . . . [I]nformal structures have no obligation to be responsible to the group at large. Their power was not given to them; it cannot be taken away. Their influence is not based on what they do for the group; therefore they cannot be directly influenced by the group.”

This suggests some embarrassing questions for RTS. OK, perhaps it has “no committee”, “no centralised unit for decision-making”, but there must be some process by which decisions are made. Who decided that the theme of the Mayday event in London should be the joke idea of “guerrilla gardening”? Who decided to publish Maybe? Who organised its production? Who collected the money to pay for it? Who authorised its expenditure? Clearly, there must be individuals or a group of individuals who did make these decisions, but as there is no formal structure they are in practice answerable to no one. They will be an unaccountable, self-appointed group of activists. Whoever they are, they will be, as Freeman pointed out, an informal élite, de facto leaders making decisions, in RTS’s own word, in a “furtive” way.

In preaching that we don’t need formal decision-making rules and structures RTS are propagating a dangerous illusion, dangerous because it opens the door to groups of discontented people being manipulated by some self-appointed and non-accountable elite or vanguard. We insist that, on the contrary, “self-organisation” is only possible as democratic self-organisation, involving formal rules and structures, precisely to prevent the emergence of unaccountable elites.

We’re not talking about the sort of structures advocated and practised by Leninist organisations such as the SWP, where the rules and structures are designed to enshrine control by a self-perpetuating elite (in the SWP, as in other Leninist organisations, supreme decision-making power rests in the hands of a central committee which is self-perpetuating in that it is elected as a slate—whose composition is chosen by the outgoing committee).

We are talking about structures that place decision-making power in the hands of the group as a whole, along the lines of the seven “principles of democratic structuring” listed by Freeman: 

• Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks by democratic procedures.
• Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to all those who selected them.
• Distribution of authority among as many people as reasonably possible.
• Rotation of tasks among individuals.
• Allocation of tasks along rational criteria.
• Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible.
• Equal access to resources needed by the group.

This in fact is more or less the basis on which we, as a smallish revolutionary organisation, have always organised ourselves. It is also the basis on which we have always advocated that the mass movement to replace capitalism by (as the front page article in Maybe describes it) “a stateless, moneyless society where goods [are] produced not to make profits but simply because people needed them” should organise itself—a democratic self-organised mass movement of people who want and understand such a society (we call it socialism, but which people can call what they like). An anti-capitalist movement organised and co-ordinating its activities on this basis need have no fear, contrary to what all varieties of anarchist claim, of contesting elections to win control of political power from the supporters of capitalism who currently control it and who use it to maintain the economic power and privileges of the capitalist class.

In fact, the anarchists’ advocacy of either taking on the State head-on by “direct action” against it or by trying to ignore it and proceed as if it didn’t exist is foolish in the extreme. It increases the chances of violence. This is even more so when the anarchists concerned also reject, as RTS does, the idea even of organising on a permanent basis with decision-making conferences, accountable delegates, voting, reporting back and, yes, binding decisions.

A supposedly spontaneous, unorganised anti-capitalist revolution such as advocated by RTS would only end in disaster out of which either the present rulers would succeed in reasserting their control or a new set of rulers would profit from the chaos to seize power. If we are going to get rid of capitalism the majority is going to have to organise itself to do so—in a permanent organisation with a democratic structure.

Adam Buick

The irrational in anarchism (1998)

Pamphlet Review from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent pamphlet traces a link between back-to-nature anarchists and far-right ideas. How true is this?

Flawed, fascinating and suggestive, Luther Blissett’s Anarchist Integralism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Apres-Garde is not quite “anarchism exposed”, as the back-cover blurb suggests, though it does attempt to trace some extreme right-wing and fascist tendencies in anarchism. The basic, somewhat more measured, position of the text is set out right from the start, on page three:

“While the majority of modernists and anarchists have never adhered to full blown mystical fascism, certain strands of anarchism embrace far-Right individualism, while yet others promote ideologies of integral nationalism.”

Blissett’s target is not anarchism as such (though he is quite sceptical about anarchism in general) so much as the Green Anarchist Network and, almost by the way, the journal Anarchist Studies; though there are salient points about anarchist anti-state fetishism along the way. It is pointed out, for example, that the state is not “the source of all social power”:

” . . . capitalist social relations are anchored in economic institutions which can and do function independently of the state. Capital reproduces itself not only within nation states but across nation states”.

Anarchist gurus

The strains of fascism, nationalism and racism that are apparently (and, to this reader at least, shockingly) found running through anarchism are represented in the first instance by anarchist gurus such as Bakunin (according to Blissett, a rabid anti-semite), Proudhon (an anti-semite and nationalist) and Kropotkin (an anti-semite, nationalist and anarcho-aristocrat). In terms of the anarchist grass-roots, Blissett points to those such as the “French and Italian syndicalists who became fascists”. The trouble is that the text, which includes plentiful, and fully referenced, quotations to support its contentions concerning Bakunin and the others, is not so adept at tracing such tendencies through to contemporary anarchism. There is a rather snide swipe at Noam Chomsky (who is on the editorial board of Anarchist Studies) for supporting free speech for fascists (his position being much the same on this issue as ours); there is reference to the support of anarcho-primitivists for fascist terrorism (more on this below); there is a connection made between anarchism and fascism via a joint link to modernist aesthetics.

In this last instance, far too much is taken as read and requires unpacking; the link between anarchism and aesthetics is not sufficiently explained or even established beyond stating that under capitalism power is aestheticised and that anarchism is structurally tied to capitalism. This is a sheer banality and the same could certainly be said about the movement for socialism, pre-revolution. Also, the notion of the aesthetic is too all-subsuming. Wide varieties and differences of aesthetic experience are collapsed under fairly crass generalisations, even within the more specific but still fairly wide rubric “modernism”.

It’s true that fascism, despite the hatred of the Nazis for modernist painting and sculpture, made extensive use of certain types of modernist design and architecture, and the Italian Futurists were early recruits to fascism, as were the poet Ezra Pound and the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis; but some modernist writers and artists such as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso were anti-fascist, while some such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon proclaimed that they were socialists. And, as the poet and critic Drew Milne has pointed out in the modernist journal Parataxis, “the most important modernist manifesto is Marx’s Communist Manifesto“. Even then, a simple list of modernist for-and-against fascism over-simplifies matters. It can be argued that the very forms of modernist aesthetics necessarily subvert fascist ideologies, whatever the intentions and beliefs of the artist.

Pseudo-mystical moronism

Regarding anarcho-primitivists, an article entitled “The Irrationalists”, which appeared in the Anarchist Lancaster Bomber # 7, is cited by Blissett. In this article, the author declares himself in favour of the “95 percent solution” in which a “Circle of Guilt (CoG) for what is happening” is proposed which includes virtually everybody:

“Activists adopting the 95 percent solution would have no difficulty over a subway sarin attack, city wide water supply contamination or a biological warfare attack on a fast food restaurant. Such activities see subway commuters or fast food customers as of no value and no loss to the moral universe.”

The article goes on to express support for (among other terrorists) the extreme right-wing and racist Oklahoma bombers. Such rhetoric reveals an astounding level of arrogance and pseudo-mystical moronism in claiming the authority for wholesale slaughter from some so-called “moral universe”. Morality is a human concept, and one heavily bound up with bourgeois ideology; the notion that it can be used first of all to set levels of so-called “guilt” (which is not the same as responsibility) for “what is happening” (whatever that may be—everything, presumably) and then as the reason for killing the greater part of humanity, is pathetic.

As for commuters and fast food customers being of no value—no value to what? To whom? To anarcho-primitivists or to the universe, possibly. If the latter, then in what sense can the universe be said to give a toss either way? And for that matter, what use are the anarcho-primitivists to an indifferent universe? If the former, then it needs to be asked whether or not the anarcho-primitivists are of any use to anybody else and, should the reply be negative, whether we might not just get rid of them, by the force of their own logic.

But does any of this make them fascist? Idiotics, certainly, and psychopathic quite possibly, but not necessarily fascist as such, despite their support for the Oklahoma bombers and the right-wing American militias. Such support can be seen as being a simple (in every sense) liking for extreme violence and general mayhem. There is, however, an ideological connection between anarcho-primitivism and fascism that Blissett apparently fails to recognise. This lies in what may best be described a nostalgia for a way of life (rural, close to the soil, “in tune” with nature, “innocent”) that never really existed. There is a hatred of the contemporary world (which we obviously recognise as being in a hell of a mess, but infinitely preferable to spending your life grubbing around in mud and shit for a few edible roots in the middle of a rainstorm) and a fear of the future—the only future these ideologies, whether anarcho-primitivists or fascist, can countenance is one which involves a childish attempt to flee into a mythical golden age that is located in the past.

For fascists or course, this nostalgia extends to the notion of the volk and the “purity” of the volk, an ideology which inevitably becomes tied up with racism and nationalism. This volkishness can also be found amongst the more extreme margins of the Green movement, including Green Anarchy and the anarcho-primitivists. Blisset is perhaps not overstating the matter too far when he refers to such groups as “eco-fascist”, even if he doesn’t entirely explain the reasons for doing so.

There are also a couple of mentions in this pamphlet for the Anarchist Communist Federation, one a perfectly correct but irrelevant (in this context) attack on one ACF writer for failing to understand Trotskyism, the other concerning the ACF’s links to Green Anarchist: “Anarcho-communists such as the ACF do themselves no favours by collaborating with far-Right reactionaries like Green Anarchist or looking to Bakunin for inspiration.”

Jonathan Clay

Letters: Trade unions (2009)

Letters to the Editors from the March 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trade unions

Dear Editors

With reference to the Socialist Standard (50 Years Ago, February) referring to February 1959 showing Trades Unions in Maoist China were in practice organs of the State, Trotskyists in the SWP and other Trotskyists argue for unions to have power and rights. Yet when Trotsky was Lenin’s right-hand man he argued for the banning of unions to represent workers’ interests on the grounds it was not necessary in a workers state: instead they should express the state’s viewpoint to workers. He advocated forced labour and military discipline to be attached to labour units. Hitler and Mussolini had similar ideas.

Please assure that even under socialism and communism you would recognise free powerful Trades Unions to advance workers’ and other people’s rights as a Fundamental Human Right.

Andrew Harvey, 

Carlisle.

Reply: 

We can’t give you the assurance you ask for since trade unions, as organisations to negotiate with employers over the price and conditions of use of the commodity labour-power that their members are obliged to sell to get a living, will not exist in socialism. Neither will employers, nor wages. Instead, production will be under democratic control on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production. No doubt there will be workplace bodies – which will be free and powerful – to ensure this democratic control but these will not be trade unions.

We hope you don’t think we’re Trotskyists. We are not but have always opposed Leninism and its 57 varieties including Trotskyism. We agree with you in denouncing Trotsky’s attitude towards trade unions when he was a member of the state-capitalist Bolshevik government of Russia in the early 1920s – Editors.

Kropotkin

Dear Editors

I much appreciated DP’s review of my Kropotkin pamphlet (January Socialist Standard). Of course Kropotkin, like myself, was clearly able to distinguish between Marx’s advocacy of parliamentary government (State socialism) and Lenin’s vanguardist approach.

What is important to recognise, however, lost on DP, is that Kropotkin and the anarchists repudiated both Marxist politics and Bolshevism and other anarchists (libertarian socialists) opposed Marxist State socialism – clearly spelled out in Iain McKay’s recent An Anarchist FAQ (AK Press, 2008) and other pamphlets by the Anarchist Federation.

Brian Morris, 

Lewes, Sussex,

Reply: 

We would argue that Marx was not an advocate of “parliamentary government” but of the abolition of the state. As he wrote in The German Ideology “[The proletarians] find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State”. It is unfortunate that after so-called “Marxism” became the official ideology of the ruling class in Russia his anti-state sentiments have been downplayed or distorted. “State socialism” is a contradiction in terms and was never used by Marx.

In all essentials, we would say the theories of Kropotkin are closer to those of Marx than are some others from the Anarchist tradition; the difference is one of means and not ends – a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless common ownership society. However what it is more important, as we hope you’ll agree, is not what Marx or Kropotkin said or meant to say, but how we can improve our current theoretical understanding by studying their works and criticising them in the light of later developments and our experience of the present. – Editors.

The politics of Class War (1992)

From the October 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

What are we to make of the Class War Federation? According to the tabloids, who have not been slow to recognise this growing group within British politics over the past decade. Class War (CW) comprises a collection of wild-eyed revolutionary hooligans; the walking, swearing seeds of civilised destruction. But then, when have the booze-soaked brains of Sun and Daily Mail journalists ever come up with a valid definition of what a revolutionary is?

Many on the Left dismiss CW as a gang of loudmouthed lumpenproles whose entire existence is dedicated to gratuitous violence and offensively-stated propaganda. Some police and politicians imagine that behind every urban riot and act of vandalism there are CW organisers in the wings ticking off a list of targets. Others dismiss Class War as a prolier than thou version of Private Eye: satire for those who get their kicks out of wounded cops and dead aristocrats. Whatever worth there is in these analyses, there can be little doubt that plenty of people are talking about Class War, both the newspaper and the federation.

Our analysis will ignore the question of style. Revolutionaries are not identified by image or affectation, but by what they stand for and what they do. Our purpose is to examine and criticise the politics not the pose.

Areas of clarity
Class War understand more about what a socialist society will be like than any of the pseudo-socialists on the Left. We quote from their book Unfinished Business, the Politics of Class War (from which all the other quotes come):

  There will be no need to work for a capitalist to survive. The revolution will mean us clocking off wage slavery for good . . . [A]fter the revolution we can and will survive without (money]. Money will not be replaced by something with a different name that does the same thing such as bartering, coupons, tokens, etc. . . . Just by its existence, money is a measure of the failure of society to organise the production and distribution of goods for the benefit of all; IT HAS TO GO . . . We seek to do away with artificial boundaries and borders. The world will not be divided into countries or States . . .There will be no limitations on travel.

A wageless, moneyless, stateless world society is not a bad start as far as revolutionary vision goes. But ideals are cheap. How does CW do on some of the other basic revolutionary tests so regularly failed by the Left?

On several, they do pretty well. For example, the Left’s long-running sick love affair with the capitalist Labour Party has been one of the enduring comi-tragedies of the twentieth century. Not so CW:

  "At times we have no choice anyway but to fightback . . . This is where the role of the British Left is crucial to the ruling class. As long as they can divert us into stupid campaigns like getting Labour elected, the ruling class are safe”. 

Again, how often do we find leftists romanticising the role of the trade unions, seeing them as bodies of immense working-class struggle? Whilst socialists understand the need for unions as defensive combinations of our class (in which many of us are active) we are well aware that bodies committed to fighting for crumbs will do little to abolish the wages system. CW argues, correctly, that the unions are crucial to the role of "regulation stability and control . . .  In advanced capitalist countries like the UK. capitalism cannot function without the help of the unions".

CW opposes Leninism and those sects which stand for “taking control of the State with a vanguard party on behalf of the working class”. CW avoids falling into the trap of leftists who patronise feminists who are seeking women’s liberation without socialism:

  The objectives of equality for women can only be achieved as part of a wider social revolution . . . The idea of ‘wages for housework’ is an illusion. We believe the only real solution to low pay and no pay for women is the removal of capitalism.

That much-loved concept of the pseudo-socialist, the state that will live on into the new socialist society, is rejected by CW: “We see no transitory workers* State . . . as the Left does, we have learnt the lessons of history". Finally, CW seems to understand clearly the role of mass culture as a means of feeding workers with capitalist ideology, and, unlike many leftists, they are firm in their rejection of religion: “Once you believe in divine beings or forces above humankind with superior power over our lives then you give up the right to control your own life yourself".

These areas of clarity are refreshing contrasts to the usual trash of left-wing thinking, and puts in question the popular claim that CW is just a bunch of noisy but vacuous graffiti kids. Unfortunately, in with the positive points are a load of major negatives—illusions, misconceptions, follies. We urge the supporters of the Class war Federation to think about these seriously.

How many classes?
This is no academic question, although for years it has been a key area of attention for the pseudo-intellectual sociologists. They are concerned to classify people in accordance with the market needs of a consumer-commerce society. That is why they break up the working class into an upper and lower section (often several sections) and are committed to the false view that there exists a middle class.

Our definition of class is clear: there are those who need to work and those who don’t. There are us workers who must try to sell our mental and physical energies in return for a wage, salary or giro cheque, and there are capitalist parasites who live off the proceeds of our work by receiving rent, interest and profit. The profit of the capitalists comes from the legalised robbery of the workers. We give them everything they have. They live in privilege and luxury out of our productive efforts. There can be no common interest between the class of exploiters and the class which is exploited: our class, the overwhelming majority. Willingly or otherwise, the antagonism between robber and robbed takes the form of a constant class conflict. The only way to end the class war is for our side to win. We must throw the very small minority who own the means of wealth production off of our backs. We are many, they are few.

We would expect an organisation called Class War to agree with all this. And at one point in their manifesto they do: “Struggle is inevitable because society is divided into two opposing camps, the working class and the ruling class, who are fundamentally at odds in this world” (our emphasis). But, aside from this accidental clarity, CW’s analysis of class is hopelessly confused and should be abandoned sooner rather than later. In chapter 3 on “Class" they claim that there are three classes under capitalism: ruling, middle and working. They claim that the ruling class in Britain comprises 5 percent of the population—which is probably much larger than the real size of the capitalist minority. They then claim that “the middle class" comprises 20 percent of the population and includes doctors (but not nurses, who are listed as workers), social workers, researchers, teachers and small employers.
The reasoning behind this false division is that the middle class are those with more power than the workers. In fact, this power which people in the middle class think they have is illusory. There are those who imagine that a “good” accent or a college degree or a job with a monthly salary puts them in a higher class. Look around the dole offices and see how wrong they are: these are just the deluded workers who are being hit, especially in the South East, now that the recession is cutting into welfare services, banking and insurance and other so-called safe jobs.

The myth of the middle class was invented by sociologists who saw themselves as being an intellectual vanguard for such a class, and CW has fallen into the trap of accepting their self-deceit. But there are practical questions which CW had better face up to. In the event of a working-class revolution, are we to assume that millions of teachers and social workers—or, put more clearly, people given a salary to teach infants to read or paid a wage to work in old people's homes or centres for the mentally handicapped—will be regarded as part of the non-working-class enemy? Are we to assume that a nurse with a posh accent or a bank clerk who plays golf at the weekend (both defined as working-class by CW) will be inherently more revolutionary than a junior doctor working sixty-plus hours a week for a pittance or a newsagent who employs a couple of part- time staff? We suggest that CW’s ridiculous class analysis is based upon a romanticised view of the workers as horny-handed sons of toil who wear cloth caps and drop their aitches and a large dose of sociological nonsense based upon middle-class guilt.

What is a revolution?
There are two areas of disagreement here. Firstly, CW throws out the democratic baby with the parliamentary bathwater. Secondly, having rejected a democratic road to the new world society they commit themselves to a policy of foolhardy violence.

As to democratic change, there is a long-standing confusion on this issue which requires serious debate amongst those who seriously seek a new system of society. For us the democratic principle is paramount. There can be no socialism without a majority who want and understand it. Only a socialist majority can enact the revolution. Democracy is not merely a strategic appendage to the thought of the Socialist Party, but it is inseparable from our aim: a truly democratic society. Unless those who seek to establish socialism do so as knowing participants in their emancipation, the outcome cannot be socialism, as it is bound to be the case that those who followed others into any new system would remain followers within it. Democratic change—which means a majority who are conscious and not willing to be passive— is a prerequisite for revolution.

In different parts of the world conscious socialist majorities will express their mandate for the new social system in different ways. In Britain workers have the vote.The vast majority use it now to elect leaders to run capitalism. They are not forced to do so; workers are deceived into wasting their votes on the continuation of their class slavery. Used by revolutionary workers the vote would be the most orderly and peaceful method of giving a mandate for socialism.

CW rejects this, but we see their objection as more based upon anarchist dogma than experience. They say that “as it exists, democracy is most definitely an illusion. It fools us into thinking we can change things through the vote". They argue that instead we should elect workers’ councils or soviets with instantly recallable delegates. The Socialist Party has no dogmatic objection to workers expressing their will through such bodies—why should we? But we warn CW that these bodies can become just as anti-democratic and leader-controlled as parliaments have been if those doing the voting for them are not politically conscious. The soviets in Russia in 1917 were used by the Bolshevik leaders as a means of getting a grip on the malleable workers in them; soviet power became party power.

Parliaments with instantly recallable and democratically elected and accountable delegates sent to outlaw capitalist property rights will make perfectly useful revolutionary bodies. And they can be won now, simply by having a majority of workers using the vote as a revolutionary weapon. CW is just wrong when it claims that "the condition for us to have a right to vote in this competition is that all the candidates are on the bosses’ side". We do live in an undemocratic society and the bosses do have millions to spend on their rotten candidates, and their laws do make it very hard for us to stand against them, but we can and we have. Imagine if we revolutionary socialists had enough candidates to stand in every constituency—if we could win one in ten of the votes cast—if workers started to realise that there is a real political opposition. Could the ruling class ban us at that stage in our growth? Let them try and see how much faster we would grow.

We realise that there are long-standing anarchistic sentiments which make the case for the majority vote seem unappealing. So the debate on this matter must go on, particularly amongst people who agree on the aim of a classless, wageless, moneyless global society. But in the meantime CW is committed to a case for revolution which rejects democracy. They say that “a revolution is not ‘democratic’ in the sense that there might be a majority of our class involved”. From there on in CW’s entire revolutionary strategy is useless.

Who needs violence?
What they seem to envisage is a growing minority of workers rioting, creating no-go areas, entering into violent conflicts with the police and army and eventually bringing about a civil war. They “see violence as necessary and inescapable”. Of course, in a minority revolution violence would be inescapable—and the ruling class, backed by the most sophisticated weaponry and well- trained and paid military force, would rout the insurrectionaries. There is nothing romantic about such a prospect. Look at how the Serbs are currently dealing with the Bosnians and then imagine what would happen if a civil war, fought between an army with NATO-type equipment and a well-tooled gang of glorified rioters, was ever to be fought in the name of working-class revolution.

At times CW glibly glorifies violence, such as in a rather sick passage in Unfinished Business where they recount an occasion in the Spanish Civil War when peasants shot the local nuns and priests and then dug up the bodies of previously dead clergy in order to shoot bullets through them too. “This brilliant piece of working class propaganda sets very well the tone for dealing with religion”, comments CW. But what about dealing with the teachers and the social workers and the greengrocers and the other so-called middle class enemies who must be defeated? Shooting people, even if they are of the most confused and ideologically unpleasant kind, has nothing to do with revolution and is, in fact, a recipe for the rule of bullies and psychopaths.

CW proposes the setting up of no-go areas administered by vigilante-type workers’ militias. You cannot run an army democratically. On the contrary military organisations are notoriously authoritarian. Living on a council estate where thuggish police hassle young workers and blacks is bad news, but the way out is not to create new cops who will, as CW might put it, “sort out their own”. Workers in Ireland who have been on the receiving end of so-called paramilitary justice will be the first to warn against new self-policing squads.

CW warns of “the dangers of these forces becoming detached from our class and becoming a new power in themselves”. The only safeguard against this is to close the doors of the revolutionary movement to those who think with their fists and are happiest when they are playing authoritarian militarist roles. We don’t need them, In a majority revolution the capitalist minority will be likely to cave in peacefully, but even if they do not they could easily be dealt with by the socialist majority.

The basic prerequisite for a socialist revolution is widespread working-class self-education. The Left, who have contempt for workers’ intelligence, have always been against this. They are just officers looking for infantry. The Class War Federation seems to be still at a stage where it is willing to debate and to learn. To that end we challenge them, as workers to workers, to enter the process of public scrutiny and discussion of their ideas and ours.

Steve Coleman

No Gods, No Masters? – Pagan Anarchism (2017)

From the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 29 September 2016, one user of the website ‘revleft’ introduced themselves as follows: ‘I’ve struggled to find information on different political theories that wasn’t heavily academic and inaccessible to me as someone with cognitive disabilities and neurodivergencies that otherwise make it *really hard* to understand a lot of the leftist “sub-groups” I guess I’ll call them? Ideologies? Only the Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer and the Gods and Radicals website in general has actually made any of this accessible to me so far’.

The ‘Gods and Radicals’ website (godsandradicals.org) publishes the twice-yearly publication Beautiful Resistance and published the Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer in 2015, written by Alley Valkyrie (Nightingale Public Advocacy Collection, respectexistence.org) and Rhyd Wildermuth (paganarch.com, Managing Editor at Gods and Radicals):

  ‘Once, humans made contracts with the land and the gods for sovereignty. Take too much and the land revolted with famine or pestilence. … We Pagans are trying to re-enchant the world, to bring back the magic of the forests and the mountains. We are trying to hear and revere the wild places, the sacred forgotten places, the spirits of ocean and rivers and lakes. And yet Capitalism is always poisoning these places because it considers nothing sacred except profit, nothing holy except wealth.’
‘Grand programs and one-size-fits-all solutions don’t work… One answer cannot possibly fit every single one of the almost 8 billion people sharing this planet with us. Anyone who does come up with that answer should probably be shot on sight, as they’re pretty likely gonna start shooting people themselves pretty soon. Besides, ‘one-answer’ sounds a lot like ‘one-god,’ and we Pagans have lots of reason to be rue [sic] that one-god trend.’

The Primer goes on to urge the reader to ‘Build Community’, ‘Make Common Cause’, ‘Invest in Each Other, Divest from Capitalism’, ‘Consume Less, Create More’ and ‘Resist Often and Everywhere’. This ‘political theory’ wasn’t clear or ‘accessible’ and although this is only a 32 page e-zine, various other ‘pagan anarchist’ websites weren’t either. Not even the description of the book titled Pagan Anarchism (2016), by Christopher Scott Thomas could help;

  ‘Witches who poison bosses and landlords. Slave revolts instigated by a god of ecstasy. Eviction notices issued in the name of land spirits and Faerie queens. A ghostly general leading loom-breakers. Elves who destroy factories. Were these all merely myths, they’d still be more true than the superstitions upholding Empire and Capital. Yet they’re not myths, but our own history: the history of uprisings, of a fierce magic and a revolutionary current woven throughout the threads of Paganism and anarchism.’

This is a fantasy and not one likely to be welcomed by anarchists (or even some ‘pagans’ judging by comments online). Three quotes by Marx are included in the Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer, but Marx and socialists have always rejected superstition including ‘paganism’. Marx called this rejection of superstition part of ‘materialism’. As Marx wrote: ‘The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.’

The preface to the German Ideology reads ‘… men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.’

Religious superstition doesn’t have to be monotheistic, ostensibly apolitical, Abrahamic or even an organised religion to be opposed by socialists as a barrier to socialism. This includes ‘pagan anarchism’.

DJW

Proper Gander: From The UN To Anarchism (2017)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years, the BBC has developed an interesting sideline in polemics: broadcasters like Adam Curtis, Dominic Sandbrook and Simon Amstell have appeared on our screens presenting their original interpretations of society’s changing cultural and economic trends. Refreshing as it is to see thoughtful critiques of capitalism on the telly, alternatives are rarely discussed. So, it’s a nice surprise to see an anarchist get an hour of screen time to make his case, in Accidental Anarchist: Life Without Government, part of BBC4’s Storyville strand, as well as in one of Newsnight’s video podcasts.

Why this particular anarchist has been able to get his views on the Beeb is the career path which led to his viewpoint. Carne Ross began work in the government’s Foreign Office in 1989, with the optimism that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between 1998 and 2002 he was the UK state’s expert on Iraq at the UN Security Council, where he negotiated on issues such as weapons inspections and sanctions, and took pride in being a ‘ferocious negotiator’. Ross says that the effect the economic sanctions on Iraq had on the Iraqi people was just ‘paper suffering’ to the UN because of its distance from those affected. Noticing the divide between governments and the majority led him to doubt the whole system’s effectiveness. His trust in the state was finally lost after the death of Dr David Kelly, the expert on biological warfare and UN weapons inspector who, according to Ross ‘was driven to suicide by the disgraceful campaign of vilification by [Tony] Blair’s officials after he was revealed as the source of a BBC story that the Number Ten ‘dossier’ alleging the threat from Iraq had been considerably exaggerated’ (www.carneross.com). Ross resigned his job in the Foreign Office in 2004 after giving then-secret evidence to the inquiry into the Iraq war. He told it that at no time did the government judge that Iraq held ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which posed a threat to the UK, despite what we were told. He says that the public was lied to over the reasons for going to war, and this is ‘the worst thing any government can possibly do’. He now feels ashamed of how he acted in his previous life.

Ross’ journey to anarchism is unexpected because he’s managed to change his mindset away from the acceptance of the system which is encouraged and needed by those working at that level for the state. His role allowed him to see first-hand how governments act, so in a way he was better placed than many to see the system’s faults. Far from being the ‘accidental’ anarchist of the show’s title, he has thought about what he’s experienced and reached a perfectly reasonable interpretation.

Ross tells us that he grew up to believe the economy works like a machine, complicated but understandable, and now believes that society is too complex to fully comprehend, let alone control. He even finds a government minister – Rory Stewart OBE – who admits that politicians don’t have nearly as much power over our economic and political system as most people assume. Because of this, Ross argues, our framework of leadership isn’t tenable. Instead, he says, ‘No-one should have power over another. People should govern themselves’ (LINK).

As proof that self-organisation can work better for everyone, Ross gives some examples of where people have worked together in a more equitable and effective way. Members of Occupy New York used their experience in planning and organising to co-ordinate aid for victims of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy more efficiently than the government’s efforts. And in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, the community arranged support for survivors quicker than the state. It shouldn’t take a disaster to make people come together, although other attempts at greater co-operation and self-organisation have developed in difficult circumstances. Rojava, an area of northern Syria, is run according to the political ideology of Abdullah Ocalan, a leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who was inspired by anarchist Murray Bookchin. While hierarchies still exist there, people living in Rojava are able to directly contribute to decisions affecting their community, and there is more gender equality and less sectarianism than elsewhere in the region.

According to Ross, the peak of anarchism was in 1930s Spain, before it was crushed by Stalin’s forces and Franco’s fascists won the Spanish Civil War. He says that anarchist ideals live on there now, such as in the town of Marinaleda in Andalucia, where the populace occupied land and buildings and established a farming co-operative with many municipal tasks organised together. Of course, these and any other examples have to work within capitalism. Ross doesn’t seem to see this as much of a setback, and cites ‘worker owned co-operatives like John Lewis’ (ibid) and the Brazilian city of Porto Allegre, where the population has had input into funding decisions which improved public services, as examples of where ideals of self-organisation have flourished. While he’s surely overstating how radical John Lewis and the other examples are, he’s more on the ball when he adds wryly that the shabbier a group’s assembly room is, the more democratic it will be.

Ross favours a ‘gentle revolution [which] should begin with direct democracy’ (ibid) in workplaces and the community. This would involve worker-run groups, which could then join up to manage larger-scale projects. He suggests that these groups would be more legitimate than politicians, and therefore would replace them. Whether governments would allow themselves to be shunted out in this way isn’t considered here. As Ross worked within the state, he should realise it won’t just offer to relinquish its power. The same applies to corporations: how realistic is it for co-operatives to out-perform them without adopting more cut-throat strategies to remain competitive? Unfortunately, the programme doesn’t go into detail about how far Ross thinks his examples of self-organisation can go towards replacing capitalism itself. However, they demonstrate that people can work together co-operatively and equally, and this is certainly a step towards revolution.

Mike Foster

‘A Very Short Introduction To . . . Anarchism’ (2007)

Book Review from the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anarchism, A Very Short Introduction, by Colin Ward. Oxford University Press. £6.99.

This is a reminder of what anarchists in Britain used to be like before the 1980s when a new breed, borrowing vanguardist tactics from the trotskyists, appeared calling themselves “class struggle anarchists”. Ward puts the case for a pacifist, reformist anarchism, concerned with gradually breaking down authoritarian attitudes in education, sex, the family, prisons, censorship and with promoting decentralization and voluntary self-help even within capitalism.

Adam Buick