First, a few new postings. First was a review of a book on Kropotkin, written a while ago and published in Anarchist Studies. I seem to have become a Kropotkin expert… Second, a write up of my recent Edinburgh talk on Anarchism, Syndicalism and Workers Councils (plus a pdf of the slides). I have other talks to write up and they are on my list of things to do. Third was a review of a interesting book on libertarian movements before and during the First World War. Fourth, another installment of Precursors of Syndicalism, on anarchist-communism (using Kropotkin as its exemplar). I also did a mini-release of An Anarchist FAQ, to mark the anniversary of the Spannish Revolution.
First, a few new postings. First was a review of a book on Kropotkin, written a while ago and published in Anarchist Studies. I seem to have become a Kropotkin expert… Second, a write up of my recent Edinburgh talk on Anarchism, Syndicalism and Workers Councils (plus a pdf of the slides). I have other talks to write up and they are on my list of things to do. Third was a review of a interesting book on libertarian movements before and during the First World War. Fourth, another installment of Precursors of Syndicalism, on anarchist-communism (using Kropotkin as its exemplar). I also did a mini-release of An Anarchist FAQ, to mark the anniversary of the Spannish Revolution.
Second, a few minor moans – there is a lot of big things to discuss, but time precludes it just now.
I came across this article via the Culture Wikipedia page, which has a shortened version of this quote in its Overview section:
“Investing all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, A.I. Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good.” (Chris Brown, “‘Special Circumstances’: Intervention by a Liberal Utopia”, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, vol. 30 No. 3 (2001): 625–626)
Seriously, a “liberal anarchy”? The Culture, as its it correctly indicates elsewhere in the article, is a communist-anarchist utopia – or Marx’s “final stage” of Communism, if you want to be all Marxist about it. Banks even made this point in “The State of the Art” when it is mentioned in passing that in 1977 Earth, the Soviet Union was the future (i.e., the Culture was a planned economy – but with the appropriate high-level of technology to make it work).
So it would be hard to find a more egregious reading of the source material – and it got published in what appears to be an academic journal! But, then, I remember reading way back an “Objectivist” (Randoid) wittering on about how the Culture was an example of Objectivist ideas in practice.
Clearly some people can read their own ideology into anything – perhaps I should not be too surprised, as propertarians can read individualist anarchists and conclude that they are just the same, bar “Austrian” economics… as if the latter does not gut what makes the individualist anarchists worth reading!
So the Culture was a Marxist utopia, reflecting the “higher stage” of communism – without a state. This is achieved by means of magic, sorry, by an extremely high level of technology which allowed a post-scarcity economy to be created (one of the many reasons I still prefer The Dispossessed, as this is grounded in technology which is feasible – that is, not much more advanced than now). Do not get me wrong, I enjoy the Culture books by the late, great Iain M. Banks and appreciate their appealing vision of a libertarian communist society but I’m well aware that it is based on technology we can imagine but cannot create (at least any time soon, if at all). He gets around the bureaucracy any actual central planning regime would require by means of super-computers and complete automation of production – that option is not available to us, assuming it could work (after all, use values require human evaluation at some point and how would super-computers be able to gather and process that information?). Still, enjoyable SF with a positive vision – just not a liberal one!
Talking of central planning, I’m currently revising the AFAQ appendix What caused the degeneration of the Russian Revolution? And about time, as this needs some work to it. This appendix was essentially the first draft of sections H.6.1 and H.6.3 and reflected the fact that, when it was written, section H was not finalised yet – indeed, that section was one of the most changed compared to its original plan. So I’m reading lots of Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist material again and it is amazing how weak it is. In terms of the British SWP, they really fail to mention how much of what they denounce as producing a new class system in 1928 was first raised and implemented by Lenin and Trotsky.
For example, what pro-Leninists like to portray as Stalinism had its roots in Lenin’s regime, as can be seen when neo-Trotskyists like the British SWP’s Peter Binns argue that Stalinism must be defined as “state capitalism” because of the “exploitation and powerlessness of the Russian working class”, created when it was “decreed” that “all managers’ orders” were — to quote a 1929 resolution of the Communist Party’s Central Committee — to be “unconditionally binding on his subordinate administrative staff and on all workers”. (“The Theory of State Capitalism”, pp. 73-98, Russia: From Workers’ State to State Capitalism, p. 75) Yet Lenin, in April 1918, was arguing for one-man management and “[o]bedience, and unquestioning obedience at that, during work to the one-man decisions of Soviet directors, of the dictators elected or appointed by Soviet institutions, vested with dictatorial powers.” His support for a new form of wage slavery involved granting state appointed “individual executives dictatorial powers (or ‘unlimited’ powers).” Large-scale industry (“the foundation of socialism”) required “thousands subordinating their will to the will of one,” and so the revolution “demands” that “the people unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of labour.” Lenin’s “superior forms of labour discipline” were simply hyper-developed capitalist forms. The role of workers in production was the same, but with a novel twist, namely “unquestioning obedience to the orders of individual representatives of the Soviet government during the work.” (Collected Works, vol. 27, p. 316, p. 267-9 and p. 271)
Given Lenin’s imposition of one-man management in early 1918, why was Bolshevism not also state-capitalist? Do social relationships change their nature dependent on who imposes them, whether it was Lenin or Stalin?
Then there is this. Trotsky in 1920:
“In point of fact, under Socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the State: for it will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune. None the less, the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.” (Terrorism and Communism, pp. 169-70)
Compare to Stalin in 1930:
“We are in favour of the withering away of the state, and at the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which represents the most powerful and mighty of all forms of the state which have existed up to the present day. The highest development of the power of the state, with the object of preparing the conditions of the withering away of the state: that is the Marxist formula. Is it ‘contradictory’? Yes, it is ‘contradictory.’ But this contradiction is a living thing and wholly reflects the Marxist dialectic.” (quoted by Alfred B. Evans Jr., Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology, p. 39)
Need I note that Trotsky also defended party dictatorship in that work? As he did throughout the 1920s and 1930s? And that he also defended one-man management? Which Binns proclaimed as being a core feature of Stalinism…
This needs to be stressed, as the notion of mainstream Marxism advocating workers’ management of production is a myth. One commentator notes that “[w]e socialists, on the other hand, think having a say in decisions at your workplace is a crucial part of democracy” – except Marx wrote next-to-nothing on this while we libertarians placed it at the core of their conception of socialism from Proudhon onwards… Unsurprisingly, then, that the Bolsheviks only came to pay lip-service to (a limited version of) workers control late in 1917 and then quickly dumped it once in power in favour of their traditional view of what socialism was? Then, this commentator wrote the following:
“I recommend my friend Rob Larson’s book Capitalism vs. Freedom for an excellent primer on the difference between the socialist and libertarian conceptions of freedom”
In spite of being aware of the genuine libertarian tradition:
“I have pointed out before that predictions about authoritarian “socialist” governments were not just made by people like Rudyard Kipling. They were also made by socialists like Mikhail Bakunin. The argument they made, and it is persuasive to me, is that the problem with authoritarian “socialist” governments is the authoritarianism rather than the socialism […] It is peculiar, if the socialism of Emma Goldman was inherently authoritarian, that she spent so much time denouncing the Soviet government for its restrictions on liberty. The only way to argue that all socialists are authoritarians is to ignore all the ones who aren’t.”
But, then, many Marxists seem to have a somewhat uninformed perspective on their ideology. One Marxist writes:
“As Marx wrote in the Manifesto, the state is a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”
Except, of course, Marx did not write that:
“The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
An important difference – after all, it implies that if socialists can seize the executive then they can manage other affairs… the executive of the modern state is elected by parliament, parliament was elected via a restricted ballot and so represented the whole bourgeoisie. If you “win the battle for democracy” (as the Manifesto put it), then Parliament is elected by the whole people and as the majority would eventually (in a few decades!) be proletarians, then the executive will become a committee… for the proletariat!
And there are plenty of quotes by Marx and Engels to suggest this was precisely their position – the Paris Commune just showing that the State machine (or “power”) had to be smashed rather than utilised, as pre-1871 Marx thought and the opportunist-wing of Social-Democracy concluded.
But then confusion over basic facts is hardly limited to Marxists. Here is Martin Kettle in the Guardian:
“Johnson’s domestic priorities, with their activism and big spending, are a world away from the anti-government libertarianism and economic liberalism that defined the Tory party from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron.”
The notion that Thatcher was “anti-government” is a joke. She placed more power into the hands of central government more than any previous government while imposing increased government regulation and intervention into the labour market (the anti-union laws). She happily funnelled tax-payers’ monies into the hands of the few, increasing indirect taxation to do so. Cameron continued this, making squatting a criminal office, more anti-union laws, more selling-off public assets cheap to the rich, etc. In short, re-directing state intervention – so it benefits the bourgeoisie more, the proletariat less – is hardly “libertarian”. As Benjamin Tucker noted as regards Herbert Spencer:
“It seems as if he had forgotten the teachings of his earlier writings, and had become a champion of the capitalistic class. It will be noticed that in these later articles, amid his multitudinous illustrations (of which he is as prodigal as ever) of the evils of legislation, he in every instance cites some law passed, ostensibly at least, to protect labour, alleviate suffering, or promote the people’s welfare. He demonstrates beyond dispute the lamentable failure in this direction. But never once does he call attention to the far more deadly and deep-seated evils growing out of the innumerable laws creating privilege and sustaining monopoly. You must not protect the weak against the strong, he seems to say, but freely supply all the weapons needed by the strong to oppress the weak.” (“The Sin of Herbert Spencer,” Instead of A Book, 370)
Not that Thatcher was ever radical at any stage in her career. Still, Thatcherism is dead – returning to the Victorian era simply produced all the problems of that time and, inevitably, the societal counter-measures it provoked (as argued in Polanyi’s The Great Transformation). With one major difference – the higher levels of centralisation imposed by Thatcher, the higher levels of state intervention against the labour movement, has hindered such alternatives.
And talking of that paper, we now reach the third and final thing I wanted to discuss – a piss-poor review of a book on anarchism which appeared in it recently.
For some reason the Guardian got someone who wrote a book entitled Why Marx Was Right which does not mention Bakunin to review a book on anarchism. It is as piss-poor as you would expect. It starts of badly:
“Even Ruth Kinna, in this sympathetic, impressively well-informed history of the movement, has to admit that it has had its fair share of bombers and assassins.”
Unlike most other political movements? Republicans, Marxists, Populists, etc. all “had its fair share of bombers and assassins.” Indeed, as Berkman noted long ago, “You see, then, that Anarchists have no monopoly of political violence. The number of such acts by Anarchists is infinitesimal as compared with those committed by persons of other political persuasions.” I guess it sets the stage, ensuring the reader has a negative introduction to the subject – Marxists, in general, having a vested interest in making readers avoid their main competitor within socialism…
It is not all bad, for example, this is right as regards Anarchism and Marxism:
“Nevertheless, the two creeds have a lot in common. Both believe in class struggle, the abolition of private property and the overthrow of the state. Both see the role of the state as defending private property, a view that you can also find in Cicero. Marx thinks that the state will eventually wither away, while anarchists believe in helping it on its way as soon as they can.”
This, I admit, is a step in the right direction – although the role of the state as defending private property can be found in Adam Smith as well. However, you would think that some mention would be made of Marxist States not withering away… but that would mean acknowledging the anarchist critique of Marxism (and State socialism in general) was right. He continues:
“Where the two camps really collide is on the question of power. Power for Marxists is in the service of material interests. It isn’t the last word. Anarchists agree about the material interests, but see power as more primary than that.”
Given the rise of class systems as a result of Marxists seizing power, we have a point. In terms of “power” being “more primary,” well, class-based economies are marked by power – under capitalism, the power of the boss over the wage-slave. As such, it is “more primary” as it underlying all social relations – including economic ones and so the basis for “material interests.”
In terms of “power” as political power, anarchists argue that this arose and evolved to defend economic class interests. As an instrument of minority class rule, it cannot be used by the many to create freedom. Instead, these structures would recreate a new class system – the bureaucracy would replace the boss. Which is indeed what happened – the State has interests of its own. It would have been good for our reviewer to note that the experience of Marxist revolutions bolsters this analysis, but then – as noted – he wrote a book about Marx being right which failed to mention Bakunin.
He almost gets it right by saying:
“Anarchism isn’t opposed to government as such, just to any form of it that isn’t self-government. For many, this includes democracy, which involves the tyranny of the majority over the individual.”
Replace “many” by “some” and this would be right. Most anarchist advocate self-management and recognise the need for the minority to go along with the majority. Only a few reject this – but, for some unfathomable reason, our reviewer goes like to concentrate on the few who make anarchism less appealing…
Then there is this:
“Marxists will work with liberal democracy, whereas anarchists won’t. For them, it is just a more kid-gloved kind of coercion.”
Presumably this is a reference to Marxists standing for election. Let us recall that Bakunin argued that when “common workers” are sent “to Legislative Assemblies” the result is that the “worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into an atmosphere of purely bourgeois ideas, will in fact cease to be workers and, becoming Statesmen, they will become bourgeois . . . For men do not make their situations; on the contrary, men are made by them.” (The Basic Bakunin, p. 108) In this he was right, so our reviewer is – like of many others – arguing like the past 150-odd years never happened. Anarchists, however, like to learn the lessons of history rather than seeking to repeat them.
He also inflicts this stupidity onto the reader:
“Yet no society can survive without coercion. There is nothing despotic about being made to drive on the left, or stopping your flatmate from playing the bagpipes all night. Rules can facilitate freedom as well as obstruct it: if everyone drives on the same side of the road, I’m less likely to end up in a wheelchair.”
This is confused, to say the least. Someone “playing bagpipes all night” is being anti-social – it is hardly “coercion” to stop others coercing you. The question is why you need a State (a centralised, hierarchical structure based on a few ruling the many) to stop your flatmate playing the bagpipes all night? Would you really call the police in the first instance?
It says a lot that our reviewer thinks that people are so anti-social that they cannot discuss amongst themselves within the same house their arrangements. Instead, they need to call in a third party – the State – which has far more power than them… and expect it not to abuse its power. George Barrett noted this well:
“What a strange question is this. It supposes that two people who meet on terms of equality and disagree could not be reasonable or just. But, on the other hand, it supposes that a third party, starting with an unfair advantage, and backed up by violence, will be the incarnation of justice itself. Commonsense should certainly warn us against such a supposition, and if we are lacking in this commodity, then we may learn the lesson by turning to the facts of life. There we see everywhere Authority standing by, and in the name of justice and fair play using its organised violence in order to take the lion’s share of the world’s wealth for the governmental class.”
Which is why I edited Our Masters are Helpless for Freedom Press, he addresses many such “objections” to anarchism in a clear and sensible manner.
In short, there is a difference between constraint and coercion. The former involves self-defence against anti-social acts, the latter involved actively violating the autonomy of others. So getting your anti-social flatmate to respect his neighbours is fine, but forcing others to pay for the State which arrests him for being an arsehole is coercion. And the point about coercion is that bodies which utilise it become independent of those whom it claims to serve – thus along with stopping the bagpipes, you have to pay for a regime which protects inequalities of wealth and power, which enriches the few at the expense of the many, regulates your activities, punishes you if you object, etc. But still, what are the many crimes of the State and the capitalism it defends compared to your flatmate playing his bagpipes at night?
As for driving on the wrong-side of the road, well, this rarely happens now (for obvious reasons) and having the State does not prevent it happening today. Would eliminating the State by a free federation of communes and unions make it more likely for more people to drive on the other side of the road? Doubtful in the extreme… Ultimately, having rules for road traffic is not coercion – it is an example of free agreement.
Which raises a question: if our reviewer is a Marxist, what does he think will happen under the higher-stage of communism? Will people, once the state has withered away, start to drive on the other side of the road and play bag-pipes all night? Now, either he thinks some mechanism will be in place to handle this (and so why cannot this be used by anarchists?) or he thinks the State will continue forever (and so Marx cannot have been right after all!).
It gets worse:
“The political state is indeed a source of lethal violence, but it also arranges for children to learn how to tie their shoelaces.”
So without the State children would not learn to tie their shoelaces? I have children – we taught our children to tie their own shoelaces…
The serious point here is that the State does provide useful services, like education. However, this does not mean that only the State can do so. Schools can be provided by communes and federations of communes, run by the teachers and other workers in association with families. Railways can be run by the railway unions in association with passenger groups. As Malatesta noted long ago:
“If it assumes the role of controller and guarantor of the rights and duties of everyone, it perverts the sentiment of justice; it qualifies as a crime and punishes every action which violates or threatens the privileges of the rulers and the property owners, and declares as just and legal the most outrageous exploitation of the poor, the slow and sustained material and moral assassination perpetrated by those who have, at the expense of those who have not. If it appoints itself as the administrator of public services, again, as always, it looks after the interests of the rulers and the property owners and does not attend to those of the working people except where it has to because the people agree to pay. If it assumes the role of teacher, it hampers the propagation of truth and tends to prepare the minds and the hearts of the young to become either ruthless tyrants or docile slaves, according to the class to which they belong. In the hands of government everything becomes a means for exploitation, everything becomes a policing institution, useful only for keeping the people in check.” (Anarchy)
In short, “it is essential that the workers, grouped according to the various branches of production, place themselves in a position that will insure the proper functioning of their social life — without the aid or need of capitalists or governments.” (Malatesta, Towards Anarchism). So getting rid of the State does not mean getting rid of the people who do the actual work to provide the services the State or capitalist firms do now: it means these people organising themselves to provide these services directly. Hence the anarchist arguments for expropriation, to get production into the hands of those who do the actual producing and so ensuring the services and products needed are available. The State is not needed to do that – and if the Russian Revolution is anything to go by, it can be a hinderance to that process:
“how paralysing was the effect of the bureaucratic red tape which delayed and often frustrated the most earnest and energetic efforts . . . Materials were very scarce and it was most difficult to procure them owing to the unbelievably centralized Bolshevik methods. Thus to get a pound of nails one had to file applications in about ten or fifteen bureaus; to secure some bed linen or ordinary dishes one wasted days.” (Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, 40)
Given the bureaucratic mess the State running production helped produce under the Bolsheviks, perhaps it is just as well that Lenin did not decree that teaching children to tie their shoe-laces fell within the remit of the so-called workers’ State. Still, it is shocking that a Marxist could utilise such an example but it does show the intellectual poverty of the times we live in. As does this statement:
“Not all power is repressive, nor all authority obnoxious. There is the authority of those who are seasoned in the struggle against patriarchy, which one would do well to respect. Telling someone something they need to know isn’t always ‘hierarchical’. Nor is knowledge, as some slightly wackier libertarians have maintained.”
If only we anarchists recognise this obvious point! Oh, right, we do. Here is Bakunin on this very subject from the early 1870s:
“Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism censure. I do not content myself with consulting authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.
“If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed upon me by no one, neither by men nor by God. Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.” (God and the State)
In other words, anarchists are well aware of the difference of being in authority and being an authority. After explaining to anarchists the necessity of a position we already held, our reviewer then states:
“Even so, anarchism has been among the most daring, imaginative political currents of the modern age, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the Occupy movement of 2011-12 (20,000 Parisians were slaughtered in the wake of the Commune, a fact that those appalled by the French revolutionary terror generally fail to recall) . . . it devoted itself instead to direct action, self-governing cooperatives, experiments in education, flexible networks and grass-roots organising. . . .Anarchists don’t like restrictive labels, including the word “anarchism”. Yet the term isn’t all that restrictive: as Kinna points out, it includes class-struggle anarchism, social anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, post-left anarchy, individualistic anarchism and quite a lot more”
And then he spends the remaining paragraphs on the anti-organisationalists and, of course, Stirner – while admitting “Philosophical egoism, however, has not had many takers in anarchist circles, as opposed to the common-or-garden variety”! So why go on about it then? Like the introduction, surely to make sure the reader is not tempted to find out more?
He then comes out this stupidity:
“What has been more popular is the view that human nature is inherently good but is corrupted by external powers. One of the many problems with this view is that power works as well as it does because we internalise it, so that to violate it would be to violate ourselves.”
As if anarchists actually believed that! Kropotkin, for example, argued that humans were able to be good and bad, social and anti-social – which trait predominated depended on many factors, both individual and social. While (hierarchical) power does corrupt (both those in power and those subject to it), it does not spring from external sources – it is part of our biological heritage. Anarchists argue that by fighting for freedom we change both the world and ourselves, creating both the internal and external conditions which ensure that our co-operative side flourishes and our anti-social side is reduced and constrained.
So it would be nice for our reviewer to actually find out what anarchists argue on this issue rather than attack a strawman of his own creation (I discuss this issue in the introduction to Kropotkin’s Modern Science and Anarchy, incidentally).
Finally, he is right to bemoan no biography of Edward Carpenter but as far as Michel Foucault goes, well, I’m not sure that he was “an anarchist at heart”. From what I can gather, he wrote in that heavy style beloved by certain philosophers to explain how “power” was everywhere and so could not be abolished. In other words, he confused power over with power to do, and so hierarchical structures with organisation.
So, a piss-poor review in which the reviewer expresses his ignorance of anarchism rather than engage with the ideas on offer. Now, I’ve not read the reviewed book yet but I find it hard to believe that Ruth Kinna has not covered most of the points the reviewer raised – after all, they are sadly all too commonplace. But what is shocking is the poverty of the review – which goes to show you that when it comes to Anarchism, Marxists do write some complete nonsense.
Until I blog again, be seeing you…